Ntuple Indemnity

Licensed fiction—or “media tie-in” novels, as I believe the accepted term is nowadays—is a touchy subject for me, or at the very least, a source of frustration. I’ve gone on the record as calling it “McFiction” every now and then. My first significant volume of writing on the Internet was probably my extensive participation in the pointless “canon” debates on the film forums at TheForce.net, a wretched hive of scum and villainy that I used to moderate about a decade ago. Don’t bother looking for me—I made my rounds there back in the period when I still ascribed to the adolescent norm of online pseudonymity—though you are quite free to imagine me exactly as I was: out on the patio with a blaster rifle on my lap, keeping the kids who read Star Wars books off my lawn.

To be perfectly fair, my aversion to tie-in novels, be they novelizations of films or spin-off series that seize a life of their own, was admittedly prejudicial in origin: how many, after all, had I actually read? Then again, I don’t need to sample every subspecies of gourmet tofu to verify that I just don’t like tofu; and likewise, I simply have better things to do than spend my precious reading time on something that I am predisposed to think of as systematically bad in the hopes that oh, maybe I’ll like this one.

Does this reduce to an argument from personal taste? Perhaps; but as longtime readers know, with me, nothing is ever just a matter of personal taste, and I take pride in being able to defend everything I enjoy without having to resort to the old standby of, “But it entertains me.” It is never enough to just be entertained: to be satisfied with so little is chiefly how we let society condition us to accept lower standards. We deserve better.

All the same, I am nothing if not open-minded. So if my readers would like to recommend a tie-in novel that they consider to be the pinnacle of the form, I will gladly feature it in a future instalment of the Wednesday Book Club. One rule: don’t pick Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire. (Everybody, for some reason, picks Heir to the Empire.) I’ve read it, and it sucks.

I’d also like to point out three items of interest I read earlier in the week: Forgotten Realms author Erik Scott de Bie’s spirited defence of game fiction, fantasy novelist Jim C. Hines’ confession of a prejudice against tie-ins that he would rather get over (with a follow-up post at SF Novelists), and Wired Magazine’s feature story on Star Wars continuity manager Leland Chee. For those interested, I also recommend this collection of articles (esp. Are Tie-In Writers Hacks?) published by the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, an advocacy group for, well, whatever it is they do.

In the true spirit of friendly debate, I decided to give the common pro-tie-in arguments serious consideration instead of shooting them from the hip—and then subsequently, shoot them from the hip. The way I see it, if I’m going to promulgate the stereotype that tie-in fiction is second-class, I’d better have a good excuse.

Continued »

This week’s selection: Ivanhoe (1819) by Walter Scott.

In brief: Somewhere halfway between Shakespeare and Tolkien resides this beautifully written romance of 12th-century derring-do, an exemplary specimen of literary nostalgia for some good old-fashioned English chivalry. Armed with a healthy measure of Norman-Saxon linguistic hostility, a critique of Christian anti-Semitism, and a bit of Robin Hood here and there, Ivanhoe is, in a word, ideal. While the novel loses its focus as the plot expands in scope, and at least one plot thread feels resolved by divine providence rather than moral action, Scott’s colourful supporting characters and sweeping historical reach keep the story alive at every turn.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Ivanhoe, keep reading below.)

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Isn’t it strange that we still refer to desktop backgrounds as wallpaper? Wallpaper doesn’t go on desks. Then again, the desktop metaphor has become such an integral element of user interface design that one hardly thinks about what it represents.

Nevertheless, I would like to draw your attention to the latest addition to the site: the Wallpaper Gallery, a selection of desktop backgrounds that I whipped up from my point-and-shoot travel photographs. I think they are rather good, though they’re nothing that would turn any heads next to the awesome creations at InterfaceLIFT. I only have them in widescreen for now, seeing as how my notebook has a 16:10 monitor, but I’ll get to cooking something for you fullscreen types soon enough.

This week’s selection: The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind (2006) by Marvin Minsky.

In brief: In The Emotion Machine, AI pioneer Marvin Minsky presents his theories on the “big-picture” questions pertaining to the human mind—emotions, consciousness, common sense—in plain English and easy-to-follow diagrams, but one wonders if he goes too far in distilling his ideas for a layman’s audience, at the cost of the specificity and rigour that readers from a more technical background may demand. Minsky’s most insightful philosophical premises appear as corollaries and implications, and beg for further development. Nevertheless, the book fulfills its purpose as an expressly non-technical overview of how one might develop models for decomposing higher-order thought into manageable representations.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Emotion Machine, keep reading below.)

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Before you read any further, observe these choice photographs of costumed Disneyland employees being arrested. They will set the tone.

I’ve noticed a bit of confusion in the air owing to the fact that cinemas are booking something called Star Wars: The Clone Wars this weekend. Lots of cinemas, actually—3,452 at last count, placing it on the order of a big summer release (and take special note of how I’m not going to call it a “film”). Well, the throngs of uninformed consumers out there are the primary audience at the multiplexes anyway, so you might as well cast a wide net.

The fact is, anyone who pays the least amount of attention to Star Wars (and if you aren’t, why would you watch this release?) is, or should be, fully aware that The Clone Wars is nothing more or less than a television pilot for a spin-off series that follows the footsteps of a long line of spin-off series, though the subject matter probably allows for more lightsabre duels and space battles than Droids or Ewoks did back in the ’80s. This might appeal to the individuals who will swallow anything as soon as you stick a Star Wars label on it—refer to your local bookshop’s “Science Fiction & Fantasy Series” shelf for details—but I’m not fooled for a second. I, for one, am quite aware that the seedy underworld of Star Wars spin-offs has historically produced nothing of value whatsoever, with the notable exceptions of Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic, Genndy Tartakovsky’s 2D Clone Wars vignettes, and a couple of choice LEGO sets.

I’m not even speaking to the quality of The Clone Wars, since I haven’t seen it: word has it that it’s dreadful, for all that other people’s opinions matter around here. The fact remains that there is no new Star Wars movie opening this weekend. The film series ended three years ago. Some would go so far as to argue that it ended twenty-five years ago, though they would be wrong.

When the dust settles and the inevitably anemic box office tally comes in, let it be a warning to anybody who thinks projecting television-quality material on underbooked screens confers some sort of legitimacy on the product. It doesn’t. Even Disney found this out years ago in the dying throes of the Eisner regime, when they tried to sneak the likes of Return to Never Land and The Jungle Book 2 under our noses. It confuses the market and dilutes the brand.

This is especially criminal where the Star Wars brand is concerned, because since the inception of the franchise, there has been an invisible line between the core product—the six Star Wars films—and the spin-off money farms of the comics, books, and video games. The existence of The Clone Wars is not news. What is news is the gumption of the folks at Warner Bros. (yes, Warner Bros., not 20th Century Fox) to fire the first salvo across the ceasefire line. It makes a mockery of the possibilities of cinema to remain above and beyond what television and direct-to-video have to offer. Then again, that’s standard practise now, isn’t it?