Wed Reading Meme or rather Wed Book Meme
Aug. 31st, 2016 06:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatStill re-reading books. But that doesn't mean I don't have stuff to talk about.
1. Books that are waiting to be read (Or stuck in your reading queue and waiting patiently for you to notice them.)
- The Devil in the White City: A Saga of Murder and Magic at the Fair That Changed America by Eric Larson - which has been highly rec'd by several people. Two guys were discussing how it was the best book (okay only book) that they'd read all summer. It's a non-fiction thriller about a cunning serial killer and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Apparently the cunning serial killer uses the fair to lure his victims to their deaths.
- Grunt by Mary Roach which is non-fiction novel about scientific discoveries made by the military.
Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries—panic, exhaustion, heat, noise—and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. Mary Roach dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. She visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. At Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, we learn how diarrhea can be a threat to national security. Roach samples caffeinated meat, sniffs an archival sample of a World War II stink bomb, and stays up all night with the crew tending the missiles on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee. She answers questions not found in any other book on the military: Why is DARPA interested in ducks? How is a wedding gown like a bomb suit? Why are shrimp more dangerous to sailors than sharks?
- Packing for Mars - the Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach - it's a non-fiction book about space travel, which is a bit helpful if you are writing a sci-fi novel that contains any space travel. And I sort of am.
- The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater which is a supernatural fantasy novel about a psychic girl helping a bunch of boys find a lost Welsh king. It intertwines Welsh folk legend with modern day supernatural horror, and teen angst. The writing style appealed to me -- I tried a sample. The New York Times Review sort of turned me off, but I no longer follow reviewer's advice. Been there done that one too many times. Let's face it, reading for the most part is a subjective sport. And a solitary one. While you can rec books to people, there's no telling they'll like them, or hate them. That's between the book and the individual reader, for the most part, the author doesn't even get a say in the affair. (The downside of this one - is one, it's part of a series (which means I have to buy all of them to get the whole story) although appears to be a short series with a definitive end, so yay! And two, it's young adult, which I don't appear to have a lot of patience for at the moment, so we shall see.
2. The problem with long-running serials, particularly serials that have chronic writer turn-over or keep changing writers periodically, is the character arcs don't make any sense. Actually very little makes sense. You sort of have to leave your brain at the office.
I checked out the Marvel Comics Daredevil character - and got confused halfway through the history recap. It made no sense. This is why:
Gerry Conway took over as writer with issue #72, and turned the series in a pulp science fiction direction..............
The writing and editing jobs went to Marv Wolfman with issue #124, which wrote the Black Widow out of the series and returned Daredevil to Hell's Kitchen. Wolfman promptly introduced the lively but emotionally fragile Heather Glenn to replace the Black Widow as Daredevil's love interest. Wolfman's 20-issue run included the introduction of one of Daredevil's most popular villains, Bullseye, and a story arc in which the Jester uses computer-generated images to hoodwink the mass media.
With issue #144, Jim Shooter became the writer and introduced Paladin in issue #150 (Jan. 1978).[24] Shooter had difficulty keeping up with the schedule, and the writing chores were shortly turned over to Roger McKenzie.
McKenzie's work on Daredevil reflected his background in horror comics, and the stories and even the character himself took on a much darker tone: Daredevil battled a personification of death, one of his archenemies was bifurcated by a tombstone, and a re-envisioning of Daredevil's origin showed him using stalker tactics to drive the Fixer to his fatal heart attack. McKenzie created chain-smoking Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich, who deduces Daredevil's secret identity over the course of issues #153–163, and had Daredevil using the criminal underworld of Hell's Kitchen as an information network, adding several small-time crooks to the supporting cast.
Halfway through his run, McKenzie was joined by penciler Frank Miller with issue #158 (May 1979).
Frank Miller disliked Roger McKenzie's scripts, so new editor Denny O'Neil fired McKenzie so that Miller could write the series. Frank Miller's antihero depiction of Daredevil proved to be the most popular take on the character. Cover of Daredevil #184 (July 1982). Art by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson.
Miller continued the title in a similar vein to McKenzie. Resuming the drastic metamorphosis the previous writer had begun, Miller took the step of essentially ignoring all of Daredevil's continuity prior to his run on the series; on the occasions where older villains and supporting cast were used, their characterizations and history with Daredevil were reworked or overwritten. Most prominently, dedicated and loving father Jack Murdock was reimagined as a drunkard who physically abused his son Matt, entirely revising Daredevil's reasons for becoming a lawyer.
So basically, each time a new writer took over they did to the comic book what a lot of people do when they buy a new house - they gut it, redecorate, add new rooms, knock down walls, and build a second story. So that at the end of the day, the house is unrecognizable. It works fine for houses, not so much for stories.
Reminds me of some non-canonical fanfic writers -- they take the character, rip away half the stuff, create a new world around them, and basically at the end of the day have a new character. Why they can't just come up with a new character -- well, I guess the same question could be posed about why people can't just build a new house?
This is a bit headache inducing if you are a fan of long-running pulpy serials such as action hero comic books and daytime soap operas. If you are like me, you will undoubtedly spend half of your time scratching your head in dismay, and wondering why in the hell you've put up with the story for this long. Sucker for punishment? Story-masochist? God knows...
I don't know if Doctor Who is guilty of this? I think Star Trek managed to escape it, by being more episodic in nature than serialized and with a clearly defined world and rules. Actually,most sci-fi serials don't tend to do this, mainly because they either have the same writers or strict rules. That's how Star Wars escaped the problem. Lucas kept a fairly tight reign on it and when he sold it -- the new people stuck to the rule book.
There are serials out there that don't have this problem, but for the most part they have only one or two writers or a team of writers that have stuck with it throughout. The key is having the same writers, and a rule-book/character bible. Buffy the Vampire Slayer - the Television Serial stayed more or less on track -- same writers, and only seven seasons. But when it jumped to the comics, the continuity sort of jumped out the window and did the hokey pokey. Hence the reason, I gave up on the comics. It felt too much like non-canonical fanfic written for specific fans not me.
Super-hero action comics and daytime serials can run into the same problems. This happened recently with The X-men, in which they changed writers and the new writers basically flipped the entire verse and retconned everything. As a result, I gave up on the X-men again, not for the first time.
It's not that the writers are bad, necessarily, just that they appear to have no respect for continuity and have this desire to make it their own. In some cases this is a good thing - with Daredevil, I only read the Frank Miller version and that's the one Netflix chose to base a series upon. It was the most popular, not hard to understand why since the previous character sounded a little bit like a Spiderman rip-off and is a tad dated. This is where the Netflix series could work better than the comics -- that is if they don't change writers too often and when they do, the writers choose to stick to the character bible and don't just do whatever they please.
1. Books that are waiting to be read (Or stuck in your reading queue and waiting patiently for you to notice them.)
- The Devil in the White City: A Saga of Murder and Magic at the Fair That Changed America by Eric Larson - which has been highly rec'd by several people. Two guys were discussing how it was the best book (okay only book) that they'd read all summer. It's a non-fiction thriller about a cunning serial killer and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Apparently the cunning serial killer uses the fair to lure his victims to their deaths.
- Grunt by Mary Roach which is non-fiction novel about scientific discoveries made by the military.
Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries—panic, exhaustion, heat, noise—and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. Mary Roach dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. She visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. At Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, we learn how diarrhea can be a threat to national security. Roach samples caffeinated meat, sniffs an archival sample of a World War II stink bomb, and stays up all night with the crew tending the missiles on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee. She answers questions not found in any other book on the military: Why is DARPA interested in ducks? How is a wedding gown like a bomb suit? Why are shrimp more dangerous to sailors than sharks?
- Packing for Mars - the Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach - it's a non-fiction book about space travel, which is a bit helpful if you are writing a sci-fi novel that contains any space travel. And I sort of am.
- The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater which is a supernatural fantasy novel about a psychic girl helping a bunch of boys find a lost Welsh king. It intertwines Welsh folk legend with modern day supernatural horror, and teen angst. The writing style appealed to me -- I tried a sample. The New York Times Review sort of turned me off, but I no longer follow reviewer's advice. Been there done that one too many times. Let's face it, reading for the most part is a subjective sport. And a solitary one. While you can rec books to people, there's no telling they'll like them, or hate them. That's between the book and the individual reader, for the most part, the author doesn't even get a say in the affair. (The downside of this one - is one, it's part of a series (which means I have to buy all of them to get the whole story) although appears to be a short series with a definitive end, so yay! And two, it's young adult, which I don't appear to have a lot of patience for at the moment, so we shall see.
2. The problem with long-running serials, particularly serials that have chronic writer turn-over or keep changing writers periodically, is the character arcs don't make any sense. Actually very little makes sense. You sort of have to leave your brain at the office.
I checked out the Marvel Comics Daredevil character - and got confused halfway through the history recap. It made no sense. This is why:
Gerry Conway took over as writer with issue #72, and turned the series in a pulp science fiction direction..............
The writing and editing jobs went to Marv Wolfman with issue #124, which wrote the Black Widow out of the series and returned Daredevil to Hell's Kitchen. Wolfman promptly introduced the lively but emotionally fragile Heather Glenn to replace the Black Widow as Daredevil's love interest. Wolfman's 20-issue run included the introduction of one of Daredevil's most popular villains, Bullseye, and a story arc in which the Jester uses computer-generated images to hoodwink the mass media.
With issue #144, Jim Shooter became the writer and introduced Paladin in issue #150 (Jan. 1978).[24] Shooter had difficulty keeping up with the schedule, and the writing chores were shortly turned over to Roger McKenzie.
McKenzie's work on Daredevil reflected his background in horror comics, and the stories and even the character himself took on a much darker tone: Daredevil battled a personification of death, one of his archenemies was bifurcated by a tombstone, and a re-envisioning of Daredevil's origin showed him using stalker tactics to drive the Fixer to his fatal heart attack. McKenzie created chain-smoking Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich, who deduces Daredevil's secret identity over the course of issues #153–163, and had Daredevil using the criminal underworld of Hell's Kitchen as an information network, adding several small-time crooks to the supporting cast.
Halfway through his run, McKenzie was joined by penciler Frank Miller with issue #158 (May 1979).
Frank Miller disliked Roger McKenzie's scripts, so new editor Denny O'Neil fired McKenzie so that Miller could write the series. Frank Miller's antihero depiction of Daredevil proved to be the most popular take on the character. Cover of Daredevil #184 (July 1982). Art by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson.
Miller continued the title in a similar vein to McKenzie. Resuming the drastic metamorphosis the previous writer had begun, Miller took the step of essentially ignoring all of Daredevil's continuity prior to his run on the series; on the occasions where older villains and supporting cast were used, their characterizations and history with Daredevil were reworked or overwritten. Most prominently, dedicated and loving father Jack Murdock was reimagined as a drunkard who physically abused his son Matt, entirely revising Daredevil's reasons for becoming a lawyer.
So basically, each time a new writer took over they did to the comic book what a lot of people do when they buy a new house - they gut it, redecorate, add new rooms, knock down walls, and build a second story. So that at the end of the day, the house is unrecognizable. It works fine for houses, not so much for stories.
Reminds me of some non-canonical fanfic writers -- they take the character, rip away half the stuff, create a new world around them, and basically at the end of the day have a new character. Why they can't just come up with a new character -- well, I guess the same question could be posed about why people can't just build a new house?
This is a bit headache inducing if you are a fan of long-running pulpy serials such as action hero comic books and daytime soap operas. If you are like me, you will undoubtedly spend half of your time scratching your head in dismay, and wondering why in the hell you've put up with the story for this long. Sucker for punishment? Story-masochist? God knows...
I don't know if Doctor Who is guilty of this? I think Star Trek managed to escape it, by being more episodic in nature than serialized and with a clearly defined world and rules. Actually,most sci-fi serials don't tend to do this, mainly because they either have the same writers or strict rules. That's how Star Wars escaped the problem. Lucas kept a fairly tight reign on it and when he sold it -- the new people stuck to the rule book.
There are serials out there that don't have this problem, but for the most part they have only one or two writers or a team of writers that have stuck with it throughout. The key is having the same writers, and a rule-book/character bible. Buffy the Vampire Slayer - the Television Serial stayed more or less on track -- same writers, and only seven seasons. But when it jumped to the comics, the continuity sort of jumped out the window and did the hokey pokey. Hence the reason, I gave up on the comics. It felt too much like non-canonical fanfic written for specific fans not me.
Super-hero action comics and daytime serials can run into the same problems. This happened recently with The X-men, in which they changed writers and the new writers basically flipped the entire verse and retconned everything. As a result, I gave up on the X-men again, not for the first time.
It's not that the writers are bad, necessarily, just that they appear to have no respect for continuity and have this desire to make it their own. In some cases this is a good thing - with Daredevil, I only read the Frank Miller version and that's the one Netflix chose to base a series upon. It was the most popular, not hard to understand why since the previous character sounded a little bit like a Spiderman rip-off and is a tad dated. This is where the Netflix series could work better than the comics -- that is if they don't change writers too often and when they do, the writers choose to stick to the character bible and don't just do whatever they please.
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no subject
Date: 2016-09-01 06:33 am (UTC)Both franchises do have some issues with consistency of worldbuilding, which is worse with Trek as it has one constituent setting, whereas Doctor Who has stories set in many different worlds, with much of the 1960s and 1970s having no attempt at consistent "world-building" at all.
no subject
Date: 2016-09-01 11:37 pm (UTC)Comic book continuity was never a big thing. One issue to the next often changed everything, because they were selling to kids who wouldn't care. Why a whole generation of adults grew up and didn't grow out of that stage I don't know. I wouldn't expect much continuity from the current comic book-to-movie fad. Maybe its the fan-fic factor. Fans want the story they want, no matter what came before, and how tortured a path it takes to get to their story. But it drives me nuts. ;o)
no subject
Date: 2016-09-02 01:40 am (UTC)Like you stated above, the companions kept changing. Doctor River Song, for example, is a character that can easily be forgotten or dismissed by the next writer, just by regenerated the Doctor. They even found a way around the rule that the Doctor could only regenerate 12 times -- I think the Time/Space travel bit provides an easy loop hole. Possbily a bit too easy? Star Trek and other sci-fi series have used the time travel loop hole to retcon plot lines or in the reboot of Star Trek - to create a new Star Trek Universe. (Which is one of the reasons that time travel irritates me in stories, too often the writers use as a way of re-writing the characters/world history and rules. Oh, I wrote my characters into a corner, I know, I'll have them go back in time and make it as if it never happened.)
You're right about Star Trek -- the more serialized versions of the series did run into continuity issues in regards to the world-building and to a degree certain characters. (I didn't really follow Worf's arc all that closely and only saw about half of DS9, so can't really comment on it.)
Babylon 5 was far tighter in plotting and character arcs than Star Trek DS9, in part because it had one main writer, who was a bit of a perfectionist in that regard. I think he had plotted out a good portion of the story and got screwed up by the network who attempted to cancel it before he was ready for it to end? Can't remember the specifics. But he is amongst the few television writers who plotted seasons ahead of schedule, the writers of Farscape did the same thing - and also ran into the problem of the network canceling their series halfway through filming. American Broadcast television really isn't set up for serialized, tightly written plot arcs. It's better suited for anthology/episodic shows with a short serialized arcs, that can either be abruptly canceled or continued forever and ever, with multiple writer abd casting turnovers. I think television burns out actors and writers - particularly serialized television.
Star Trek Next Generation was more episodic in nature and far easier to maintain continuity. You could watch episodes out of order, for the most part, and be fine. Same with the original Trek, which only really lasted three to four seasons.
Voyager wasn't really on long enough to have major problems. Both used time travel, like Doctor Who did, to get themselves out of sticky plot scenarios. Although, I rather liked Trek's take on time travel, it felt more realistic and less fantastical.