The Importance of Being Earnest

Valeria made a great observation in her recent review of Daggerheart:

TTRPGs have utterly failed to communicate how lighthearted this hobby is to outsiders. When I tell my coworkers that I play D&D, most of them are imagining […] a Lord of the Rings LARP mediated by complicated math. Therefore, most new converts to the hobby - intimidated by the serious game they imagine D&D to be - try to pull the game in a direction more comfortable to them. They play clowns and humanoid bears to protect themselves with a layer of detached irony. 

But the real irony is that this is the most popular way to engage with the game! The most beloved D&D stories are all absurd bits! So the same cycle keeps playing out at table after table. New players enter the hobby expecting D&D to be the butt of their jokes, realize everyone else is also doing bits, then become so emotionally invested in the joy the bits brought them that the game acquires genuine narrative weight.

This got me thinking about my own experiences—not so much my own early ones as a player (deadly earnest, I'm afraid; please pretend to be shocked) but the several times now I've seen other folks sit down at the table for the first time, and in particular my experiences with first-time GMs. I've thought about related questions a fair bit (like, what's a good first system for brand-new players, and what sort of adventures should I, as the GM, send them on?) but I'd never thought directly about what Valeria articulated. It struck a chord, obviously, and it helped me clarify something that's been bugging me lately.

I've been reading through a ton of Mothership stuff. As is tradition, I've gone way deeper than the group (which has for the time being moved on to Tales of Argosa anyway) ever needed. It's just fun! It's a great scene, there's a ton of creativity out there, there's a ton of diversity to what people are writing, and there's loads I'm looking forward to running. But there is a thread running through a lot of third-party Mothership material that I find a bit irksome: a tendency to get jarringly silly. Goofy names, obvious references to popular media, zany gags, all manner of unserious stuff that takes me out of the immersive space I'm building in my imagination.

The part that has bugged me, to be clear, is my own stuffy reaction. Am I a spoilsport? A killjoy? As we established above, TTRPGs are silly, and writing silly stuff is fun. Who am I to scoff at somebody else's silly fun? The sort of dork who approached his early experiences with D&D 3.5e and 4e in deadly earnest, of course. What suits me definitely isn't for everybody! And yet…

* * * 

This week, I also serendipitously happened across a video gently poking fun at director Robert Eggers for how disappointed he is by his much-lauded feature debut, The Witch, and how relentlessly negative he is about it on the film's commentary track. Punctiliousness about historical accuracy matters to Eggers to a degree that seems borderline pathological even to the sympathetic video creator.

For my part, I'm an admirer of Eggers, love The Witch, and am all for pathological devotion to historical accuracy in film. For me, The Witch stands in stark contrast to one of the recent films I've been most out of step with critics and other cinema dorks about, The Brutalist. I hated the latter for any number of reasons, but among the things that most immediately upset me, and then just continually galled me throughout its voluminous running time, was the film's sloppy disregard for historical accuracy. Any movie whose Holocaust-survivor protagonist emerges from Buchenwald with eight-pack abs has burned up all of my goodwill right from the jump, but this one also featured a slew of anachronistic dialogue and had very obviously been filmed in Central Europe (I correctly guessed Hungary during the intermission and have witnesses who can corroborate that!) despite being set in Pennsylvania. I used to live in Germany and spent some time in Poland and Hungary. I recognized the architecture, the trees, even the damn dirt. It quickly destroyed whatever ability to be immersed I had left after the abs.

In an interview clipped in that video above, my man Eggers says, “I didn't obsess over Puritan buttons just because I like buttons. I didn't obsess over the saw marks in the floorboards because I like saw marks. […] It's in the purpose of telling the story. It's about immersing you in the world. If you can't be actually transported to the 17th century, then you can't actually be transported into the mindset of these English Puritan Calvinist settlers, and if you can't do that, then you can't believe in the witch, and the whole movie just doesn't work. […] The more you let things slide, the more the whole thing doesn't work.” Now, it's certainly possible that you can set the bar too high; errors that are only in frame for a fraction of a second, things that only a subject-matter expert or a world-class pedant would recognize, it's probably fine to let them slide. (There are a couple King Hu movies set during the Song dynasty, which ended in 1279, where people have dried maize hanging in their homes despite the fact that maize didn't exist in China until after 1492; this only bothers me a little bit and has not diminished my adoration for Hu or his work.)

The thing is, though, that although nobody will ever notice any of the work that went into raising the bar higher than it needed to be, everybody's going to notice all of the work you didn't put in if you don't set it high enough. The bar depends on the audience, and it depends on the subject matter, but it's always there.

The immersiveness and tone of any roleplaying game depend on a lot of factors, and of course the overall composition of the group is an important one, but nothing is more important than the example the GM sets. Let's carve it in stone right here: My First Law of GMing is that the players will always take the game less seriously than the GM does. This is almost always true on a one-on-one basis (i.e., each individual player in your game will take it no more seriously than you do; nobody wants to out-nerd the boss nerd), but it is always true in the aggregate. I have never been in a game where the average player seriousness (or earnestness, or “buy-in”) was greater than the GM's, and I am 100% confident I never will be—at least not for long. If it ever happens for even a couple sessions in a row, the game probably falls apart.

As a filmmaker, if you're trying to immerse your audience, you want to err on the side of being too punctilious. As a GM, you're definitely trying to immerse your players, so you want to err on the side of being embarrassingly earnest. You can always tone it down! It's a lot easier to relax and let your players inject some silliness into the proceedings (which, again, they're almost always going to do) than it is to tighten things back up. Like a jury tainted by impermissible evidence even after it's been officially stricken from the record, players are probably going to stay in the silliest headspace they've been in even if you enjoin them with “Come on, guys, take this a little more seriously!” Start earnest and let things find their level. Be the straight man to the players' comedians.

By that same token, if you're writing TTRPG material intended for GMs to use, obviously they don't have to run it exactly as you write it and are welcome to revise it to make it more immersive, serious, earnest, or anything else for their table…but you might as well err on the side of earnestness, because it's a lot easier to make things more silly than less. Give your reader all the tools they need to play the most earnest, serious, humorless version of your material possible. They, and especially their players, will have no trouble finding humor at the table.

Alien: Heresy

Alien: Romulus does Alien 3

Sabrina and I saw Alien: Romulus on Wednesday. We prepared by watching all six of the previous films in the series (no, we didn’t bother with AvP) in the preceding six days. I had seen them all save Alien: Covenant before, but some not for 20 years or longer. Watching them all in a row gave me a newfound appreciation for some and inspired some flamin’ hot takes about others.

For all that the series is beloved, for all its immeasurable influence, most of the individual films haven’t been highly rated. The first two are widely—almost universally—regarded to be the best, and sometimes “the only good ones.” Are they? Let’s quickly review the other five.

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ALIEN 3

Although all four films from Alien 3 to Covenant have their haters, Alien 3 probably comes in for the most contempt, and it’s easy to see why. This film kills off two of Aliens’ protagonists before the curtain even rises, knocks off a third fairly early on, and finally dispatches Ripley herself in the end—not a recipe for fan enthusiasm. It went through a famously hellish development process, which is abundantly evident in the theatrical cut. Even setting aside the bold choice to kill off a bunch of beloved characters, it’s just not a good movie. The screenplay, hacked together from parts of better work that was deemed unfilmable (i.e., too expensive), is poorly paced, clumsily plotted, and largely (albeit not entirely) characterized by indistinguishable characters and unmemorable dialogue. The special effects are terrible, too—the crude CGI xenomorph doesn’t even look consistent from one scene to the next.

ALIEN RESURRECTION 

Resurrection too has its vocal detractors. People don’t like the campy extravagance of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s direction, the Joss Whedon script full of one-liners and zingers (essentially a dry run for his show Firefly), or the sinister Ripley clone who behaves little like the character they know and love. The script definitely has its rough (or just plain embarrassing) patches, but for the most part, this thing is a hoot. It shies away from suspense and leads hard on body horror, gross-out weirdness, and visual verve. And after two straight performances of strained, uncomfortable heterosexuality, Ripley finally gets back to being quietly gay. With robot Winona Ryder, no less!

PROMETHEUS 

Prometheus is probably the least common choice for “worst Alien movie” (except perhaps on the technicality that “it’s not really an Alien movie”), but for all its merits (and it has many—it’s a beautiful film), it is almost certainly the dumbest. Thanks to a truly awful screenplay by the ever-detestable Damon Lindelof and a few poor casting choices, the cast are not the least bit believable as a team of academics; they bumble along, making every possible wrong or stupid decision, while a convoluted story unfolds around them that tries to turn a bunch of ancient-aliens conspiracy goofiness into a grave, portentous fable about creation and mortality. None of it works, and the cowardly decision to have the Engineers just be big bald Dr. Manhattan types instead of elephant-headed giant ETs is a petty but particularly bitter disappointment for me.

ALIEN: COVENANT 

Covenant tries to square the circle of being a proper sequel to Prometheus and bringing the series back to its sci-fi horror roots, with mixed results. The screenplay, Lindelof-free, is much improved, but still saddled by many of the previous film’s poor choices, and once again features a whole mess of characters whose job it is to travel through space and explore alien planets yet who seem to have no idea how to do that safely. Taking a page from Alien 3, it dumps some of the previous installment’s ballast by unceremoniously murdering a main character offscreen. Michael Fassbender is an absolute treat, though.

ALIEN: ROMULUS 

Romulus, at the end of the day, is an Alien clip show. It has a ton of potential—great production design, wonderful practical effects, some very cool set pieces—but it is determined to cram every frame with Easter eggs and homages, and eventually pivots from homage to simply regurgitating iconic lines and images from the previous six films nonstop through its last half hour. The use of AI to recreate the late Ian Holm (and not even to reprise his role from Alien, but simply to portray a similar character) might be the single lowest point of the series. (For all that, it’s mostly enjoyable!)

* * *

So is my heretical take that Resurrection is good, actually? Well, yes, but it’s kind of a corollary to a much hotter take: Resurrection might be the second-best of the series, which means that Aliens isn’t. In fact, it’s one of the worst, and it’s guilty of almost everything that the subsequent sequels (and prequels) catch hell for. Take off your rose-colored Millennial nostalgia glasses, and let’s run down its list of sins. Aliens…

1. Rewrites the main character. Alien 3 especially gets shit for this (Resurrection gets more of a pass, I think, because it’s not meant to be exactly the same character); people don’t like meek, maudlin, suicidal prison-planet Ripley. But superheroic good mother Ripley is no less of a departure from the unsentimental, no-nonsense professional we met in Alien. The gloomy, beaten-down Ripley is relatable, at least, like the original Ripley just having a bad day at the office. This Ripley isn’t.
2. Undoes the ending of the previous film in order to shoehorn in an otherwise incompatible plot. No, it’s not as egregious as killing half of the characters offscreen or bringing one back from the dead, but it is pretty ridiculous that Aliens sends Ripley straight back to the planet she just escaped from, and without much in the way of motivation. Burke never satisfactorily explains why it’s important that she join the mission, and her choice is ultimately framed as the fulfillment of a self-evident need for her to face her fears. Big Reagan-era self-help energy here.
3. Departs from the tone and mood of the previous film. For some reason, Alien 3’s bleakness and Resurrection’s gonzo campiness come in for constant criticism, but Aliens gets a pass because “it’s an action movie, not a horror.” But it’s not just a shift of genre. Aliens is basically an R-rated children’s movie, complete with a plucky preteen deuteragonist who’s never in any real danger, a schmaltzy found-family narrative with intimations of a (hetero) romance, a raft of wisecracks and one-liners, and an improbably happy ending. None of it has aged well; the whole thing has a slightly camp quality (in contrast to Resurrection’s intentional campiness).
4. Dilutes the impact of the monster. This is a common problem in horror sequels, and Aliens commits all the usual sins: it multiples one implacable monster into a legion of uninteresting cannon fodder, making them individually fragile and disposable; it shows the monsters more, relying less on mystery and the viewer’s imagination; and it adds new types of monster, something that the prequels catch a lot of heat for but that started right here. Yeah, the queen is a cool design, but it proves to be a very slippery slope.
5. Drives the plot in order to tick various boxes rather than to follow a consistent internal logic. We want to go back to the planet and fight aliens, so we go back and fight aliens without a satisfactory justification. Gotta keep the characters on the surface—guess we’ll stick an alien in the dropship (never mind that none ever goes outside). We want another ending where an alien gets blown out an airlock, so we contrive to have the queen follow the characters up to orbit after a false ending. We need a bunch of fodder for gory kills, so the Marines show up under strength, with inadequate equipment and no knowledge of what they’re up against. Does Burke even want this mission to succeed?
6. Overstuffs the cast with forgettable, generic characters. We’ve got the green young officer, the grizzled NCO, the Latina stereotype (played by a white woman in brownface, no less), the aviator-wearing pilot, and…eight others? A couple of them come into focus eventually (hetero love interest, panicky whiner) but most are just meat. And yet they get names, they get screen time, they get dialogue. Instead of eight near-identical grunts with speaking parts, there should’ve been three dozen extras (because although the cast is too big, the deployment is bizarrely small, and perplexingly includes no crew for the ship itself).
7. Diminishes the environmental terror of the setting. We go right back to the same planet Ripley just left—an awe-inspiring wasteland of freezing temperatures, howling winds, and hellish precipitation, which humans could traverse only clumsily, in bulky spacesuits—and thanks to some hand-waved terraforming, everybody can now walk around without so much as a face mask. (Never mind that there are facehuggers afoot!)

And those are just the flaws it shares with its successors. What might be the worst thing about it—something that really sets it apart from the others—is how dated it feels. It spoils some of the groundbreaking gender progressiveness of Alien by pushing Ripley into a more archetypically feminine mold, making her both a mother figure and a heterosexual love interest to a male soldier. It traffics in the casual misogyny, racism, and homophobia of its benighted time, which is both embarrassing on its face (again: brownface!) and a pretty grievous failure of science fiction writing. The air of anachronism extends beyond the cracks about gay sex and illegal immigration, too. Why do the Colonial Marines have American flag patches on their uniforms? Why does most of their equipment look like vintage kit from the 20th century?

There’s also a more subtle but more sinister message in the soldiers being—behind their charmingly roguish exteriors—universally virtuous, brave, and admirable, and not at all complicit in the evil deeds of their slimy, untrustworthy, ignoble corporate taskmaster. Cameron had Vietnam in mind when he conceived the story, an allegorical tale of good soldiers thrown into harm’s way by corrupt leaders disconnected from reality and ignorant of the situation on the ground. Like an American clean Wehrmacht myth, it’s a cryptofascist revision of Vietnam history, of a piece with the lie that returning servicemen were spit on by hippies and antiwar protestors. But the very existence of the Colonial Marines is a poor choice, too, diluting and confusing the monolithic power of The Company. No longer is this a post-government hypercapitalist dystopia; now it’s just 1980s America in space.

* * *

It’s still fun! All of the sequels and prequels are fun in one way or another (and all have bits and pieces ripe to be plucked for a TTRPG campaign—expect to see their influence seep into lots of content on this blog in the coming months). Each is flawed, too, in many of the same ways: riddled with plot holes, stuffed with too many uninteresting characters, ignorant of quarantine protocols. None even comes close to matching the quality of the original Alien.

The seven films together do not form a coherent whole—and that’s fine. Down with canon, I say. Down with lore. Down with the franchise. Up with a diverse roster of filmmakers taking an iconic horror baddie for a spin and not worrying much about continuity or fan service. Speaking of which—isn’t it high time a female director helmed one of these things? Give Claire Denis an Alien film!

On Reviewing and Rating Things

John Fleck as Trent in Dead Mail

Last weekend, my girlfriend and I went to New Orleans for the Overlook Festival, our second horror film festival in the past eight months or so (she's a huge horror fan and film blogger). Saw nine films in four days, which is always fun, and got in a lot of good eating and drinking (despite me having fractured a premolar the day before leaving, whoops).

Highlights included Cuckoo, Dead Mail, and I Saw the TV Glow—each quite different from the others, but with one big strength in common: outstanding vibes. Fantastic sound and music, wonderful evocations of time and place. Moody, beautiful, and all quite moving. Each anchored by fantastic performances, too (Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens in Cuckoo; Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in I Saw the TV Glow; pretty much everybody in Dead Mail, although John Fleck really stands out—maybe the best of the whole festival).

At the other end of the scale, after having watched seven variously low-budget indie films, most of them foreign, Abigail was a shock to the system, and not in a good way. It took all of thirty seconds to register that it was going to be a very Hollywood experience, and not much longer than that for me to know that I wasn't going to like it. The film has problems, starting with the fact that its one good twist isn't; the entire marketing campaign has been built around the fact that Abigail is a vampire, something the characters don't learn until halfway through. The pacing isn't good. The kid is more annoying than scary. But there are some strong performances (including Dan Stevens again) and the effects are pretty great. It's not a good movie, but its most serious crime is just being a kind of movie, and particularly a school of character and dialogue writing (the Joss Whedon Marvel Cinematic Universe school, to be precise), that I can't stand.

How do I rate this stuff?

* * *

I got very into Letterboxd last year. I had started back in 2022, but at the beginning of 2023, in a resolute New Year's spirit, I decided that I wanted to write more—more of everything. A poem every day! A novel! Short stories! Essays! Book reviews! Film reviews! Most of this fell by the wayside; I wrote a few poems, made some haphazard progress on a couple different novels I've been drafting forever, and wrote a dozen short book reviews. Mostly I just wrote TTRPG stuff…and silly little movie reviews. Letterboxd stuck. I've written 136 reviews now—every film I've seen since January, 2023. (Most are short, and some just a single line, but a few are proper essays.)

So I've had to think a lot about how to rate films. Or really, I've just rated a lot of films, and of the course of the past fifteen months, I've had plenty of time to try to understand what my ratings meant, rationalize them a bit, try to develop some kind of consistent rubric going forward.

Letterboxd gives us two options: We can just “like” films or not, or we can give them star ratings. And of course we can use the star ratings however we want (only giving between one and three, for instance), but the fact that the vast majority of users employ the full range, from half a star to five, compels me to do the same.

It is interesting to think about the less-granular options, though. Heart or no heart is as simple as it gets. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Liked it, didn't. Add one more option, and we have, perhaps, “loved it, liked it, didn't like it,” or, if we're thinking less about our own simple enjoyment and more as critics of some sort—trying to predict whether others will like the work we're evaluating—we have a traffic light: go ahead, caution, and stop. Of course, “caution” contains multitudes. Is it flawed but enjoyable? Expertly made but soulless? Great only for fans of a particular subject or particular genre?

Maybe we add another option: Good, good but not for everybody, bad but some people might like it, bad. We could probably analyze the hell out of that approach, but we know we're going to end up with a ten-point, five-star system, so let's just jump ahead. Going to five options brings to mind an academic grading scale: A, B, C, D, and F. Excellent, good, average, poor, failure. And the fact that Letterboxd has a ten-point scale (from 0.5 to 5.0) but presents it as a five-point one is interesting. Five points: good. The ability to tweak them up and down a bit: fussy, maybe, but definitely tempting. We can still map them onto letter grades; we just fudge it a bit and say everything is either plus or minus. A+, A-, B+, B-, C+, C-, D+, D-, and two different shades of F: “just missed a D-” at one star and “may God have mercy on your soul” at half a star.

This feels pretty good to me. It does mean that reviews will tend to bunch up in the 3–4 range, but that's fine; thanks to word of mouth and our ability to guess what we're going to like from trailers and by drawing conclusions from directors' and actors' past work, we usually don't see a lot of stuff that we hate. Giving an enjoyable film one or two stars seems brutal. I admire Osita Nwanevu, boldly going out there and slapping three stars on everybody's sacred cows, but I don't think I can do it.

3.5 stars is a good movie. Can't complain. Didn't connect with me on a profound, personal level, but I enjoyed it all the way through. A notch or two below that, 3.0 and 2.5 are the middle of the scale, even if they won't be the middle of anybody's histogram (except Osita's). 3.0 is enjoyable but seriously flawed. Worth watching, on the whole, but missing something, or messed something up. Didn't stick the landing. 2.5 is just on the either side of that razor's edge: has a bunch of good qualities, but has enough flaws, or serious enough flaws, to just not be enjoyable in the end. Two stars was probably doomed from the jump, though it might have some charms: a terrible screenplay, an inept director, a stupid concept. Below two, we're in “I might walk out of the theater” territory (but for the fact that I stubbornly never do).

4.0 is really good. Unambitious but perfectly executed, or ambitious and flawed in fairly minor ways. Add an extra half star, and that's about as good as it gets. A masterpiece. Practically flawless. And then if I watch it again and, at the end of the second viewing, I'm thinking, “Yeah, I'm gonna watch that a third time (and a fourth, and a tenth),” that's our five-star gold standard. I'm trying to limit the number of five-star films, but it turns out I'm a pretty soft touch. I love movies! 4.0 is my most common rating; I've given more 4.5s than 3.0s (although if I go to enough festivals, that's bound to change).

So where did I land on my most recent festival faves? Four stars all around! And Abigail? Fuck it: 1.5 stars, which is probably half a star harsher than my rubric demands, but whatever, I get to call audibles sometimes, and I'm sick to death of “She's right behind me, isn't she?”-ass dialogue.

How to Name Things: A Case Against Conlangs

I've been thinking about constructed languages a bunch since reading Manvir Singh's excellent New Yorker piece about Dune and conlangs; I rewatched Dune: Part Two over the weekend, too. I had thoughts. And I'm always thinking about worldbuilding and names, always scribbling notes for my current Stars Without Number campaign, my Lore24 project, my myriad half-baked fantasy settings, etc. Might as well try to make all this thinking useful to somebody else!

* * *

I see four major approaches to naming fictional people, places, and things:

1. Use real names. This is not only (usually) the easiest approach, it's a necessary one for certain genres. If you're writing realistic fiction set in the present day, you need contemporary names. Same with any genre that uses the real world as a foundation; most characters in an urban fantasy story, for instance, will probably have contemporary real-world names. Near-future science fiction will use all, or almost all, real names for its human characters; you just need to pay attention to demographics a bit (more than a third of Earth's population is either Chinese or Indian—don't skimp on Chinese and Indian surnames without good reason).
   
   On that note, using real names does involve research sometimes. If you're writing historical fiction, you need to make sure your names are appropriate to the period and culture you're representing. But there's never a time real names should be off-limits. Far into the future, it's reasonable to have contemporary names, particularly heritable surnames, keep appearing. Even in secondary-world fiction, real names sometimes work well (look at Disco Elysium).
   
   
2. Derive new names from existing names or from other words. Change some letters. Chop a few names apart and scramble the syllables. Grab common nouns from foreign languages. Make names out of existing words that aren't proper nouns, or move proper nouns across categories (use a company's name for a person's last name, or a person's first name for a country).
   
   Some people look down on this approach, but it has strong precedents. George R. R. Martin does this a lot in A Song of Ice and Fire: Eddard, Tyrion, Myrcella, Roose. George Lucas did it in Star Wars, too: Greedo, Wedge Antilles, Skywalker, Sidious. Your choices can be informed by a knowledge of linguistics and history, à la Martin, or they can be totally arbitrary, à la Lucas. Sure, Lucas came up with some duds, but he hit on some real winners too. Darth Vader! Han Solo!
   
   
3. Give names in plain English (or whatever language you're writing in) and explain that they're literal translations from a source language that you either never describe or perhaps relegate, in the form of a few instructive examples, to a footnote or an appendix.
   
   
4. Create a whole de novo conlang and derive names from that. Better yet, create multiple conlangs and then imagine an entire fictional history involving various fictional cultures. Share loanwords among your languages. Chart the progression of your fictional languages through vowel shifts and state-mandated standardizations. Simulate everything!
   
   Many people are drawn to this approach because it's an enjoyable challenge in and of itself. (That was Tolkien's motivation, famously: “The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.”) But many others go down this path because it seems like the most “realistic” or “authentic” way to generate names. Some think of it as the sine qua non of good worldbuilding.
   
   (We might say that there's a fifth approach, which is “make it up de novo, but in an unsystematic way,” but I think that you can pretty much always sort those into #2, if they really are unsystematic, or #4 otherwise: Either they're trying, if only unconsciously, to imitate some existing word or word structure, or they're making such an effort not to resemble anything that already exists that they're essentially a conlang, if perhaps a rather shoddy one.)

But enough taxonomy. What I want to do here is stick up for the non-conlang approaches. They have a lot to recommend them, starting with the fact that whereas your audience has to learn every single syllable of any conlang you show them, they already have a world of associations with existing words—even single syllables resonate with them. Maul? Sidious? Those are bad guys. Solo? He's a cool lone wolf. Skywalker? Probably a great pilot. Voldemort? You only need to know the last syllable: His name means death. These examples are all at the unsubtle end of the spectrum, but you know what? They work.

Examples from ASOIAF or Disco Elysium are a bit less literal, but still take advantage of associations and resonances with the familiar. Eddard Stark? Basically Edward Strong. Regal. Old and very English, which in fantasy usually means “us,” the familiar. Evrart Claire? First name is a slight twist on Evrard. Second means clear or understandable, which is almost certainly going to be ironic. Both are extremely French, which, at this point in the game, we've established means “here,” the familiar. One of us. And your audience doesn't actually need to know any of the trivia or etymology to just know, to have a gut feeling about the name. It resonates.

The more familiar a name is, the more your audience will identify with it. If you have people and places in your story who go by familiar names, or whose names are given as translations into common English, the audience will recognize them as “us.” Those with unfamiliar names, especially ones that feature unusual orthography and are difficult to pronounce, the audience will “other,” identifying them as…well, “them.” You should bear this in mind just as a gut check when naming stuff (anything with glottal-stop apostrophes in it is going to seem totally foreign to most English-speaking audiences, something I wish more fantasy writers understood), but you can also put it to work for you more purposefully. You can give your audience a lot of information about a person or place with just a couple syllables, and with a whole network of associations from multiple names, you can quickly sketch out an elaborate cultural geography.

Tolkien gives us a textbook example of how to do this. The Mannish languages of Middle-Earth (i.e., those spoken in the Shire, in the Dale, in Rohan, etc.) have, as per #3 above, a “real” form (which he did not fully elaborate the way he did with Quenya and Sindarin, although he did give some examples), but they are “translated” into real-world languages. Westron, which is the language of our heroes the hobbits, is represented as modern English. Places like Rivendell, Brandywine, and Bag End, as well as people like Peregrin (or Pippin) and Merry, have “real” Westron names, but they are written as English in the stories. We know what “riven” means, we know what a “dell” is, we know “brandy,” “wine,” “peregrine,” and so forth. The Shire is familiar. It's home (and Rivendell is a safe, comfortable home away from home). The hobbits are “us.”

The farther we go from the Shire, the more foreign things become. Other Mannish languages are rendered as other Germanic languages: Rohanese (aka Rohirric) is Anglo-Saxon (i.e., Old English) and the language of the Dale is Old Norse. These are languages closely related to modern English, but not intelligible to English speakers. This tells us that these people are foreign to the hobbits, but with a fairly close cultural connection. The quasi-Welsh language of the grey elves suggests people more foreign than the Rohirrim, but still culturally connected to the Shire, whereas the quasi-Hebrew language of the dwarves and the quasi-Finnish language of the high elves are almost completely alien (English is distantly related to Welsh, but totally unrelated to Hebrew or Finnish—although of course Hebrew does suggest a spiritual connection, if not a direct cultural one; the dwarves may not be “us,” but they are like us). Tolkien uses our familiarity with real-world languages to establish a legible cultural geography. We don't need to be told that the high elves are more exotic to the hobbits than the grey elves are, and the grey elves in turn more exotic than the Rohirrim. We can just see it in the names.

Other fantasy and science fiction greats have used the same trick and similar ones. In Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books, people's “use names,” though ostensibly belonging to the fictional Hardic language, are almost always given as plain English words, often those of animals or trees: Sparrowhawk, Otter, Dragonfly, Alder, Beech, Gamble. (So are some place names, like Ten Alders and Easthill.) True names, magic spells, and other words in the Old Speech (the language of dragons and wizards) come from a conlang. This others them, sharply separating them from use names and giving them an air of mystery. If Le Guin had come up with an entire Hardic conlang and used it for all the use names and common place names, the distinction would have been lost. To the reader, all the words would seem equally foreign.

Le Guin also used language associations to subvert readers' racial expectations. Her Archipelagan protagonists are dark-haired, dark-eyed, and dark-skinned, quite unlike the typical protagonists of young-adult literature in the 1960s and 70s. The Kargs, on the other hand, are pale-skinned, blue-eyed, and often fair-haired—much more akin to the assumed default in midcentury America. But the Archipelagans' Hardic speech is represented as English, whereas Kargish is represented by fictional words with a distinctly non-English phonology and orthography. Language helps a white reader see the Kargs as foreign barbarians and the Archipelagans as “us,” even if that reader is unaccustomed to identifying with nonwhite people.

Gene Wolfe, in The Book of the New Sun, also uses the translation conceit, explaining that his tale of the far future involves many words that don't exist yet in our time. To “translate” them, he describes or names many people and things with real but obscure or archaic words: Ascians, hipparchs, nenuphars, Pelerines. As with Le Guin's Old Speech, this lends them an air of mystery, albeit one that in this case communicates not an exotic origin but an ancient, forgotten one, appropriate for a setting in which there's literally nothing new under the sun, even if nobody can remember much of what is past.

Conversely, if you create everything from scratch, you lose all of the cultural and linguistic associations that real (or real-ish) words offer. This definitely has its merits in certain cases. When you want to create extraterrestrials or interdimensional demons that are genuinely alien, beings for which your audience has no frame of reference whatsoever, it's the only way to go—if you want those ETs or demons to be named in their own language.

But you don't actually need to do that. It might not even be plausible! If your totally alien ETs aren't humanoids, what are the odds their words can even be pronounced by human tongues? You can call them by exonyms derived from human language, as with many classic SF aliens: arachnids, xenomorphs, prawns, the Thing, Jean Jacket, good old Martians. Before you drive yourself crazy trying to whip up a whole world's worth of realistic conlangs, consider that even after Tolkien did just that, he still walked things back for his stories and relied on English and other real-world languages for their associations and resonances.

Unsavory Patterns in Contemporary Science Fiction

It's me, hi / I'm the problem, it's me

 

1.

We lay our scene in an all-powerful empire of the far future. (We will soon understand that the empire, founded on and sustained by slavery, torture, mass murder, and stranger, even more heinous crimes, is irredeemably evil.) A longtime soldier of the empire embarks on a journey that will bring her into contact with a quasi-human outsider and various other plucky misfits, and their efforts merely to survive will eventually snowball, over the course of a trilogy of novels, into a plot to overthrow the empire.

Is it N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy? Is it Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire? Is it Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch? That's right: It's all three. (Well, okay, in the latter case, it's the quasi-human outsider who's the main character and who takes the disillusioned human soldier under her wing, but close enough.)

I liked all of these series, to be clear, enough to have read all nine books. There's a lot to enjoy in them. But I didn't love them. Each has its particular minor flaws, but the one flaw I can't get past in any of them is the one they all share: that overarching plot, which makes two changes (one trivial, one quite ugly) to a hoary old cliché.

The foundation is Star Wars, a trad hero's-journey tale that's been recapitulated a zillion times and remains part of the bedrock of young-adult science fiction and fantasy. (The Hunger Games and Red Rising are two popular YA series that follow this formula closely; there are myriad others I'm less familiar with.) Distancing the work from its YA cousins, the second of the two changes makes the conclusion more ambiguous. Instead of a tidy victory for the rebels, replacing the evil empire with its good twin, we get a state of uncertainty: civil war in Lee, civil war interrupted by uneasy peace in Leckie, and a post-apocalyptic tabula rasa in Jemisin.

The bigger change appears right at the start: The authors swap out their protagonist. Instead of an innocent young person from the imperial periphery, we follow a soldier who has been a more-or-less loyal servant of the empire for much of her life.

Now, all three authors are American. (Yes, the author is still dead, but context matters. All three series are American.) All three series debuted during the second Obama administration, when the American far right was ascendant; Lee and Jemisin concluded their trilogies under Trump, when an outright fascist future for the country suddenly seemed possible. All three authors are liberals, and all three bring a liberal lens to their work. Lee in particular concerns himself with the fate of liberal democracy, imagining it to be a forbidden idea in the distant, hyper-fascist future, and society's last and best hope for reform. Leckie doesn't bring democracy to the Radch, but does imagine liberal reforms: pacifism, an end to body-snatching technoslavery, etc. Jemisin's entire world is an implicit critique of extractive capitalism and indifference to environmental concerns.

Here's why that context matters, and why the change in protagonist is significant: Each book asks us to identify with a servant of empire, somebody spiritually if not literally situated in the imperial core, somebody deeply implicated (regardless of what misgivings they have) in the empire's crimes. Rather than an innocent victim from the periphery (a farm boy, a miner), we now have a protagonist who is at best a victim turned perpetrator. If we are Americans, and college-educated Americans at that—which a large, perhaps predominant part of the readership are, yours truly included—this act of identification isn't much of a stretch. We do live in a vast, cruel empire founded on slavery and genocide and sustained by brutal warfare, economic terrorism, and the despoilment of the planet. We are deeply implicated in the empire's crimes. The fantasy of tearing down the empire, or a corner of the empire, and beginning to build a better world is a powerful one.

Unfortunately, these stories have no idea what a better world than ours looks like; they can only imagine a worse one. In each far-future setting, the steps the protagonists take toward a nebulously better world are merely steps back toward 21st-century American liberalism. An end to technoslavery and ritual torture, an end to wars of blatant territorial expansion, the restoration of representative democracy, an end to wildly irresponsible geoengineering. Not only do they offer us nothing we don't, in principle, already have, but the means by which they imagine achieving this non-progress are inaccessible, impractical, or unacceptable for us: personal access to the elite of society and the liberal application of instrumental violence.

Few of us are acquainted with senators (or anyone of consequence). And sure, violence is fun in stories (make-believe violence is this blog's bread and butter, in fact), and violence sometimes gets things done in real life, too—I'm not a proponent of total nonviolence as a political strategy—but, at this juncture in American history, it can accomplish little more than gratifying and fattening the security apparatus and its far-right paramilitary adjuncts.

The analogy from our reality to a more luridly, baroquely evil one inadvertently permits us, even encourages us, to become complacent about conditions in our own society. If we lived in this world, if things were this bad, we would, like our plucky heroes, stand up and fight. But it's not that bad, so we don't have to. (Yet. Vote Blue!) Sure, we've got concentration camps at the border and a million people imprisoned without trial and we're aiding and abetting a couple of genocides overseas, but at least we're not literally torturing children in perpetuity to power our magical technology. (Which reminds me: Do we have time to delve into this atrocity? Alas, we do not. Some other time.)

These stories offer no solutions to our problems and no tools more subtle than a bomb. Instead, they lull us into quietism, assuring us that hey, things could always be a whole lot worse.

 

2.

This one's so ubiquitous that it features, incidentally, in two of the three trilogies discussed above (Lee and Leckie), and so boring that I don't have much to say about it. Everybody's thinking about “artificial intelligence” these days, yet nobody can imagine anything other than a humanoid robot. It's robots all the way down. Occasionally scary killer robots (Ex Machina, M3GAN) but usually loveable, just-like-us robots whom society unfairly discriminates against but our heroes recognize as equals (the aforementioned novels, Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series, The Creator—one of the worst works of science fiction I've ever encountered—Chappie, the list goes on).

We still have I, Robot. We have Blade Runner. We have Data from Star Trek. We have Neuromancer, for God's sake, which did more interesting things with AI four decades ago than anybody seems capable of today. We don't need a thousand new variations on robots, replicants, or androids, especially if they have absolutely nothing interesting to say and mostly serve as confusing, hamfisted metaphors for human prejudice. We don't need more robotic serial killers, either. (And we sure as shit don't need more Skynets.)

Everybody please just shut up about AI until we have something more interesting to say than “it's scary” or “we should be nice to it.” Thanks!

2023: Year of Culture

La Mer at the Boston Ballet

 

The Books I Most Enjoyed in 2023 (Only One of Which Was Actually Published That Year)

• A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1968 onward)

  I'm rereading my way through the big, beautiful 2018 omnibus edition. I originally read Tombs of Atuan first, when I was eleven, having found it on the little bookshelf in my sixth-grade classroom. It's not an exaggeration to say that it changed my life; it's been with me ever since, and it's still my favorite of these four. The others are richer than they were, though, coming back to them for the first time in a long time (I reread them a couple times as a teenager, and maybe in my early twenties, but it had been a good fifteen years at least). I appreciate the Taoist influence, especially in The Farthest Shore, a lot more than I did when I was younger.
  

• The Female Man (Joanna Russ, 1975)

  Anybody Samuel Delaney, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Gene Wolfe all counted in the inner circle of their most important and talented peers must be worth reading, even if she is mostly out of print now, right? No big twist here: Yes. She was brilliant. Bitter, hilarious, wildly creative. (And out of print no longer; the Library of America just published her collected works.)
  

• Teaching a Stone to Talk (Annie Dillard, 1982)

  Wonderful little essay collection. It was one of the first things I read in 2023, and “An Expedition to the Pole” and “Aces and Eights” in particular stuck with me all year.
  

• The Idiot (Elif Batuman, 2017)

  It's unsettling how effectively she conjures up the foggy, mercurial emotional and intellectual world of a teenager, the simultaneous fragility and stubbornness, the know-it-all idiocy.

• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tokarczuk, translated 2018)

  Uproarious, defiant, righteous, truly unique. Janina is an all-time great unreliable narrator. Probably the best thing I read all year.
  

• The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti (Meryle Secrest, 2019)

  Did the CIA assassinate Adriano Olivetti and Mario Tchou to prevent Olivetti from leapfrogging IBM and becoming the world’s most important computer company, thwart the sale of advanced technology to China, and let General Electric buy the now-distressed company for a song? Yes. They totally did.
  

• The Employees (Olga Ravn, trans. 2020)

  Foreign, in multiple senses, science fiction that follows almost none of the familiar rules of the genre. Kind of an anti–Blade Runner, setting humans and replicants alongside each other and then estranging the former rather than humanizing the latter.
  

• Matrix (Lauren Groff, 2021)

  Not-quite-historical fiction that builds an awesomely fully realized little corner of medieval Europe. Transportive, right from the first sentence.
  

• Mona (Pola Oloixarac, trans. 2021)

  Seems a witty, funny, dirty, and rather gentle satire of academia and the literary world but for the occasional surreal vision or half-remembered hint of something much more disturbing. The weirdness accelerates so smoothly and swiftly that, even though you can sort of see it coming, the climax hits you like a truck.
  

• A Man of Two Faces (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2023)

  Part memoir, part polemic, part history, part eulogy. Beautifully written.

The Book I Got Angriest About in 2023

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin, 2022)

  I'm torn, because I don't have any serious ill will toward the author (a little scolding will, maybe) and I think it's very easy to be negative (and have fun being catty about it) and much harder to, you know, write a whole fucking novel and send it out into the world to be ripped apart by jerks like me. My general policy is (or at least I know it should be) “If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all.”
  
  However, I have a lot to say about this one, most of which is negative and some of which actually feels important. Maybe I'll do a big post on it later and then delete the whole thing if this blog ever attains any kind of significant readership? For now I will say that although this novel is not alone among contemporary media in portraying the 1990s as a lost golden age, and it's not even alone in scrubbing all the rough edges off that benighted decade, the way it belatedly introduces to its plot racism, misogyny, homophobia, and every other form of bigotry it has bizarrely elided for hundreds of pages is uniquely dishonest and disturbing.

 

My Personal 2024 Oscars

• Best Picture: Past Lives

• Best Actor: Natalie Portman in May December

• Best Animated Feature: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

• Most Tasteless (Complimentary): Bottoms

• Best Frankenstein Retelling: Birth/Rebirth

• Best Scream Meets Sci-Fi Comedy Classic Mashup: Totally Killer

• Special Achievement in Odious Protagonists: Killers of the Flower Moon

• Special Achievement in ACAB: Only the Good Survive

• Biggest Success in Spite of Itself: Oppenheimer

• Best Cannibal and Best Mukbang: Cannibal Mukbang
  

Notable Older Films I Watched for the First Time in 2023

• The Color of Pomegranates

  I'm going to film a fifteen-hour-long adaptation of The Book of the New Sun in exactly this style.
  

• Picnic at Hanging Rock

  Indelible. I want to turn this into a TTRPG setting, somehow.
  

• Midnight Cowboy

  Incredibly fresh and powerful, despite have been referenced, imitated, homaged, and memed a thousand times over.
  

• The Handmaiden

  It's Picnic at Hanging Rock, but Korean. I will not be taking questions at this time.
  

• Videodrome

  With each passing news cycle, the New Flesh looks more and more appealing.

 

My Favorite Dumb Little Letterboxd Reviews I Wrote in 2023

• Abstract Expressionism Comedy Hour

• Somebody Studied Too Much Critical Theory

• An Actual Attempt to Do Film Criticism

 

My Favorite Series of Reviews I Found on Letterboxd in 2023

• This absolute queen watched Carol twenty-two times in a three-year period.

 

Most Embarrassing “Why Haven't I Been Listening to This for Years?” Musical Discovery

• Du Blonde

 

Best Unexpected Record Release by a Long-Beloved Artist

• Formentera II (Metric)

 

Best Contemporary Art Exhibition (Feat. Big New England Bias)

• Joseph Grigely: In What Way Wham? (MASS MoCA)

 

Best Not-Contemporary Art Exhibition (Feat. Even More Powerful New England Bias)

• Fashioned by Sargent (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

 

Ballet Bummer of the Year 2023

• La Mer (part of the "Our Journey" program at the Boston Ballet)

  Again, I don't want to be a jerk about it. Parts were cool, some great images (the siren rock, the light swinging through the depths), some lovely performances. My gripe is a very big, very broad one, and this dance performance just happened to exemplify it: The audience at the Boston Ballet, in the year of our Lord 2023, does not need to be convinced that global warming is happening, or that it's bad. Or that the oceans are in danger. Or that we need to change our relationship with Mother Earth. If there are people who still need to be convinced of these things, they're probably not going to the ballet, and they're probably not in Boston, and they're almost certainly not going to the ballet in Boston.
  
  What Boston Ballet-goers need is to be convinced that they are still culpable. That sorting their recycling and composting their food waste and driving their Prius and going to see eco-conscious Art doesn't absolve them of anything. That the same system that affords them wealth enough to go to the ballet and cultural instruction enough to appreciate it is the very thing killing the planet, poisoning the oceans, and blocking any effort to change our society or our values in a meaningful, enduring way. That change might discomfit them, but is nonetheless necessary. That they need to act, not just spectate and consume.