Roger Zelazny Casting Call: Dara

So, I was trying to think of actors to cast for the movie version of the Merlin books, but I was having no small amount of difficulty. Primarily it's because I perceive the characters as skewing younger than those in the Corwin Chronicles, and as I get older, I become less familiar with the younger actors out there.

However, I also realized that I had failed to cast Dara from the first books, and that's a rather conspicuous omission. What do you guys think of Keira Knightley in the role?

She stood about a dozen paces from me, a tail, slender girl with dark eyes and close-cropped brown hair. She wore a fencing jacket and held a rapier in her right hand, a mask in her left. She was looking at me and laughing. Her teeth were white, even and a trifle long; a band of freckles crossed her small nose and the upper portions of her well-tanned cheeks. There was that air of vitality about her which is attractive in ways different from mere comeliness. Especially, perhaps, when viewed from the vantage of many years. She saluted me with her blade. "En garde, Corwin!" she said.

She's young and pixieish, and very similar to how I imagine the young Dara.

End of Year Post - Calibration

This time of year always seems a little bit surreal to me. There's a fantasy setting called Exalted where, at the end of the year, there's a week called "Calibration" that falls outside the calender, where the natural laws are suspended and anything can happen. And the week between Christmas and New Years seems like that to me.  A solid majority of the working world take most or all of the week off, you get together with people who haven't seen all year and generally do the things that you don't otherwise do. It's where we take the time to enjoy the things we've worked for all year, a time of fewer responsibilities (or at least different ones). I suppose this feeling of strangeness is exacerbated by the career change I'll be making in the New Year, and while it's more pronounced than it usually is, it's how I feel this time every year.

Christmas was nice, with a few rough patches. At the end of the day, our house was filled with dozens of new toys and the next morning Lily woke up and wanted  to spend the morning solving math problems on the back of a piece of scrap paper.  Not that I'm complaining about this, but had I be able to anticipate it, I think we could have gotten through Christmas spending much less money.

The other day, Lily was naughty before dinner and I sent her up to her room. She stomped upstairs and a few moments later I heard her angrily singing "Jingle Bells, DADDY smells!" It's the first time I ever heard anyone angrily burst into song outside of a musical.

Look at this picture and tell me what you see.

It is not in fact a Marcel Duchamp piece, but rather the aftermath of my afternoon with Lily.

We had been to a holiday party earlier in the week and one of the presents Lily had received was a "Make-Your-Own-Bouncy-Ball" kit. The instructions were to pour the crystals into the mold, then keep it submerged in warm water for two minutes. I was watching the kitchen timer, so I know that she was out of my sight for no more than that long when she wandered back into the kitchen with gum near her ear and a pair of scissors in her hand. She said, "Daddy, can you help me cut my hair?"

Lily has never had her hair cut and I knew Jen would not pleased with me if this were the circumstances of her first trimming, so I put the ball down, went to the cabinet, grabbed a jar of peanut butter and started rubbing it around on the gum. I'd like to say that I was putting my chemistry degree to use with my solution, but that's not even true. I just happened to remember this from childhood (though the chemistry background at least let me understand why it would work.)

So I got the gum out and then we shampooed her hair with Berry scented shampoo. Even though her hair smelled faintly of gum, peanut butter and strawberries, I think we would have gotten away with it, had I remembered to discard the incriminating comb by the time mommy came home.

The Magic of Girls

For the past little while we've been assembling jigsaw puzzles in lieu of reading stories at bedtime. Lily is good at it. (Good enough that she hides the box and its reference picture, which sometimes makes the process longer than I'd prefer.) At one point, while fitting the final piece into place, she proclaimed "The magic of girls!" in triumph.

A couple days later, I was playing a game called Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (a sci-fi retelling of Journey to the West, and one of the best video games I've ever played. It's going to get its own post when I finish it. (Edit: Here's the review post) Available for a steal on Amazon right now!) and I let Lily pick up the controller during one of the parts that I knew didn't have anything inappropriate.

There are two characters in the game, and they have to work together to get past obstacles. Monkey, the male character, is tremendously strong and amazingly nimble, capable of climbing just about anywhere, and Tripitaka, the woman, is more focused on solving the technological puzzles.

We were exploring Trip's mountain village when Monkey leaped across a chasm and Lily asked, "Can I jump across that?"

I replied that different people are good at different things. "Trip's not as strong or as good at climbing as Monkey, but he's not as smart or as good as building things as she is."

Lily said "Or as nice either!" and it's strange to think of niceness an attribute on the order of magnitude of other, more easily quantifiable traits. Sure there are actual differences between men and women, but these are as much cultural as they are physical.

The video of the little girl who objects to the steering of girls towards princesses has been getting a lot of play in certain circles, but here's a link to it if you haven't seen it.

I want Lily to be able to pursue anything that interests her, be it superheroes or princesses. (Or weirder stuff. She requested, and enjoyed, and infectious disease stressball for Christmas this year.)

She's on a math kick lately, and we spent the day after Christmas solving basic math problems on the back of a sheet of scrap paper, and I think that's just great, because she's never been told that girls "aren't good at math". It's something she enjoys and something she's good at. I want her to live in a society where she's not judged for being a woman, and where she gets every opportunity available to her male counterparts but that's not going to happen in my lifetime, or hers, so the best I can give her is the confidence in herself. That, and nurture her belief in the Magic of Girls.

Legion of Super Heroes: Unnatural Alliances

The Legion series had a short run, and while there are no episodes that I'd call outright bad, there are some that are pretty weak, and this is one of them.

A better word might be unnecessary.

It's unnecessary because never once did I ask myself "Where did Imperiex come from?" Most of my questions were along the lines of, "When are we getting rid of him?"

We open on a space farm where a yappy space dog detects the arrival of evil space cowboys.

"What's that Lassie? Timmy fell down a space well?"

The head evil space cowboy (called Terra-Man, more on him later) is looking for someone named Abel, but his caretaker plays dumb.

The Legion, in the form of Superman-X, Bouncing Boy, Duo Damsel

I like her new look for this season. Also, that robot looks very dapper in its bowler.

and Star Boy, shows up, and inform him that the only thing he's going to find here is trouble "with a capital L."

I don't care if you've been sitting on the sidelines for this season, Bouncing Boy. I still love you!

Terra-Man traps Superman-X in a wad of bubblegum,

Kell-El hoped the the remake of Rocky would revitalize his film career.

then goes off to kill Abel, who turns out to be a little kid, telling him  "Sorry, boy, life's not fair. Or in your case, particularly long." I chuckled at that.

The Legion rescues the boy and buries Terra-Man and his crew in a pile of rubble, perhaps chuckling to themselves that "No one could have survived that!"

Terra-man blasts himself out of the rubble as soon as they turn their back. Which brings me to my next complaint. Terra-Man - Jesus.  The Legion does actually have some pretty decent villains, guys. There's no need to transplant a Robot Jonah Hex into the setting. Look at the comics based on the show.  They did a great job with the established villains, even if, near the end of the run it seemed like Tharok was responsible for every crime in the galaxy. (However, they always made great use of Starfinger! Arm-Fall-Off-Boy for the win!)

On board the ship, Duo Damsel sends Superman to talk to the kid.

Superman-X: That's a nice doll you got there.
Abel: It's an action figure. I made it myself.
Superman-X: You're like seven. I doubt you could even make toast.
Abel: I built him because I was lonely. He's my only friend.
Superman-X: You ever think that's because you still play with dolls?

Please Kell, stop eating that puppy. You're making me cry.

That is kind of funny, because Superman-X is a giant space asshole. But I also think it's something of a missed opportunity. I think his humanization could have been a compelling storyline if they just stuck with one variety of asshattery. Is he a militarized asshole Superman from the future? That's what they seem to be establishing early on, but then, in this episode alone, we get the milquetoast ordered around by Duo Damsel (fucking Duo Damsel, man. Wrap your head around that for a minute) and a straight up jerk who takes cheap shots at a seven-year-old, neither of which is consistent with the earlier characterization.

We get some cool scenes from Star Boy, who is pretty much nobody's favorite Legionnaire. But his powers are nicely animated and used in an interesting fashion and he's also voiced by someone with the great name of Bumper Robinson.

Star Boy doing something cool. Almost certainly the only picture of its kind on the entire Internet.

I was watching this episode with my daughter and when she saw Imperiex turn up with his army of Destructobots, she sneered as only a five-year-old can and said, "The only thing they destruct is themselves." Oh, snap! So, Imperiex shows up and demands the boy.  The Legion refuses. Imperiex attacks. Destructobots board the ship and the Legion fights them. Then Terra-Man boards the ship and the Legion fights him. Somewhere the faint strains of Yakety Sax can be heard.

Terra-Man overpowers the Legionnaires on board and grabs the kid. He goes to zip away, but Imperiex shows up, carves up Terra-Man and grabs the kid, revealing that Able would go on to develop the technology that would make Imperiex's cyborg body possible. He quips, "Now that I've met my maker, it's time for you to meet yours," blasts X and takes off. They fight a couple Destructobots before returning to the Legion cruiser.

X is having a crisis of faith, but Duo Damsel gives him a pep talk and when he sees that Terra-Man has regenerated, he zips out to talk to him. As much as I hate the character, I do love his design and that capelike speed blur.

 T-Man reveals that he was a backup plan in case X failed. They team up (or do they?), disable the cruiser together and take off to find Imperiex and Abel.

Imperiex is camping out roasting s'mores with Able.

"Mmmm...s'more please!"

He recounts his origin story, which sucks as much as he does. Cut back to T-Man and X, who have located Imperiex. They land on the planetoid where they've taken refuge, and Terra-Man sends his goons out to flanking positions. He rises to give the order, and X is visible right behind him, but his men fail to strike and in the next wide shot, moments later, X is nowhere to be seen. Terra-Man uses his telescopic vision to check out his guys and sees that they've been reduced to sparking, headless corpses, in what was a really well done little scene.

Roland the headless Thompson robot.

Surprise! Superman-X just needed someone to find Abel and Imperiex! X and Impy team up to destroy Terra-Man. Impy then turns on X, but the Legions shows up and fights back. He teleports away, declaring that the timeline has been preserved.

Terra-Man...just doesn't make any sense. He's kind of presented as a bounty hunter, but even a little reflection shows how ridiculous that is. Were he successful, what would he do to collect his fee, travel forward to the future he invalidated? How was K3NT going to pay him anyway? Bitcoins?

Not that we think he could ever do it, because he has a kindergartener at his mercy three times over the course of the episode and still fails to kill him. And I'm not sure why he opted to grab the kid, tie him to his space bike and fly through legions of people who want to protect him, rather than executing him on the spot.

And since he's such a buffoon, he diminishes both Imperiex, who was supposed to his this existential threat, and Superman-X, who was proclaimed a "beast" by Ron-Karr in the second part of the season two opener. (However, Ron-Karr's judgement has always been suspect.) They have to team up to beat that guy? Seriously? What kind of fuck-ups are they?

Further, doesn't the Legion have a huge trump card now? They can just keep doing what they're doing, and if looks like they're going to lose to Imperiex, can't they just say, "Hey, that thing you were going to invent that brings about Imperiex? Don't invent it" and give their Big Bad a retroactive abortion?

Remember, Remember the Ides of Octember

My old Linguistics professor was one of those ridiculously accomplished polyglots who spoke dozens of different languages. He did have a weakness however. Somehow, even though he taught a class in the United States, he had utterly failed to assimilate any kind of idiom, and whenever anyone used one, crash class would come to a screaming halt as we tried to explain what the phrase meant.

I think the title I used for this post would have given him a stroke.

My lovely wife bought me, among other things, a copy of the Ides of Octember, the Pictorial Bibliography of Roger Zelazny. It's been available for almost a year, but I always put off getting a copy, probably for the same reason I still haven't written a commentary post for Wilderness. I like writing these posts, and I really enjoyed reading the Collected Stories and I was increasingly aware that there would be nothing new to read or to review after I completed each of them.

As the title suggests, it's an absolutely exhaustive bibliography of everything Roger Zelazny published in the English language, not just novels and stories, but also poetry and essays, including a secondary bibliography covering works about him.

I love it. I can't say how much appeal it has for the casual fan, but it is a treasure trove of the hundreds of vivid images associated with the stories and trivia about their formation. Wondering what the winner of the 1986 Yugoslavian Lazar Komarčić award for best science fiction novel translated into Serbo-Croatian was? Wonder no more!

The first thing I looked up was the cover images for Jack of Shadows. I could never find the art for the first copy that I had owned and I was beginning to think that I had imagined it, but there it was right there in front of me. (It was the Richard Hescox painting for the 10th printing of the paperback, if you're following along at home, and I'm still tremendously fond of the piece.)

The Phantom Titles section is another treat for those familiar enough with Zelazny's work to appreciate them, and I often liked the phantom versions more than the actual published titles. I think The Kneeling Legless Man is much more gripping than Deus Irae, though I have to admit that Zelazny's puns always make me smile. Also, it looks the authors had so much trouble with naming the books in the Millennial Contest series that they didn't have any energy for anything else, which would explain a lot about Farce. And Darkband/Dark is the Color are both better titles than A Dark Traveling.

It's a great book and a great resource. For me, it's already given me a couple more ideas for things I haven't covered, like the old computer game, and it promises to give me much more enjoyment in the weeks to come.

"Have you an ill omen for me this day?"
"Beware!" jeered Render.
"Yes! Yes!" cried Caesar. " 'Beware!' That is good! Beware what?"
"The ides-"
"Yes? The ides"
"-of Octember."