New entries elsewhere: Teleread, Codex

Recently, I was extended an invitation to join the staff of the Teleread.org blog. This morning, I was struck by a sudden inspiration and sat down and wrote my first entry, entitled "E-books: The peer-to-peer dichotomy." If I hadn't posted it there, I would have posted it here, but I figure that this way it will get a little more exposure than it otherwise might have.

In other news, I have written a review of a PDF role-playing game that interested me, and submitted it to RPG.net to go with my other reviews on the site. It has now shown up there, so please do go and read my review of Codex: Story Gaming for Creative People.

The fourth bus book

And here's a review of the last bus-reading book from my GenCon sojourn.

Burden of Proof by John G. Hemry

The second book in a series, this space naval courtroom drama nonetheless contains sufficient explanation of what happened in the prior book that it can be read without leaving the reader lost.

Lt. JG Paul Sinclair, legal officer on the starship USS Michaelson by dint of a 2-week elective Academy course, is experiencing some ups and downs. A close friend is being promoted off of his ship, and the too-slick officer who replaces him (who happens to be a high-ranking Admiral's son) is not pulling his own weight. His relationship with his girlfriend's father gets off to a rocky start. And then there's a fatal accident onboard the ship with some questions remaining as to its cause, and Sinclair cannot in good conscience stay silent when he finds some evidence that the investigation into it missed.

There are plenty of space-naval dramas out there, David Weber's Honor Harrington being the best-known example. There are also many realistic courtroom dramas. What's rare is to find a book combining the two genres. In Burden of Proof, Hemry does an excellent job. Of course, there is nothing really requiring this book to be set in space; it could just as easily have been transposed to modern-day Earth in almost every respect, right down to replacing the "Greenspacers" who interfere in a military weapons test with modern-day Greenpeace protesters doing the same thing. But the SF elements are handled ably and well, and do not feel like window-dressing the way they could have in such a book.

The courtroom drama, though it only occurs relatively late in the book, is also handled well. By presenting it from the point of view of the inexperienced Sinclair, the reader gets to learn about elements of legal strategy as Sinclair learns, rather than simply being presented with them as in the average Matlock or Perry Mason episode. Although Sinclair insists that he does not want to become a lawyer, there are signs that his fascination with matters of law may lead him down that path despite himself.

Of all the books I read on the bus last weekend, I think this is the only one for which I will actively seek out other books in the series (which currently contains four books in all). I'm glad that I bothered to pick it up in the dollar store after all.

GenCon: The Robotech Report

I had originally written this for the RDF Underground podcast, However, Justy elected to hold off on reading it in the hope that I would be able to get some audio recordings of convention panels taped off to MP3 as I had hoped. It looks like I am not going to be able to do that after all, so I might as well provide this as the quick capsule summary for curious Robotech fans. There were three Robotech panels: a Friday "Robotech Retrospective," a Saturday Shadow Chronicles panel, and a Sunday free-for-all.

The Friday panel was a sort of Robotech teaser: a retrospective where Harmony Gold representative Tom Bateman gave a Powerpoint presentation discussing the history of the Robotech show and toy line. He talked about the failure of Sentinels to get off the ground—a story that Robotech fans know by heart by now, the failure of Matchbox's lackluster 2nd wave of shoddy American-designed toys coupled with the value of the dollar dropping to less then half its prior value against the Yen.

He also discussed Robotech 3000 and some of the reasons it was so different from Robotech. Tom showed a DVD-quality version of the Robotech 3000 trailer which can be downloaded in low-res from Robotech.com, and discussed some of the fans' reactions to it—and the TV network exec reactions to it, which were about the same as the fans'. In my own opinion, rather than from anything Tom said, I suspect that the network reactions were as much responsible for killing the project as the fans'.

Tatsunoko was rather blase about the 3000 idea, too—though interestingly enough, they apparently thought 3000 might be salvaged by doing it as a cel-based rather than CGI-based show, and they actually did anime character design renditions of the 3000 characters. And Harmony Gold was reluctant to throw the entire concept out, as much money as they had already spent on it. But about the time Tom Bateman came on board at HG, they decided not to throw good money after bad, and to go back to the drawing board to come up with something that answered some of the questions posed in the last episode of Robotech. Hence, Shadow Chronicles.

There wasn't much for Robotech fans at the Funimation panel, just that the Shadow Chronicles DVD would be out in November, and there was going to be a digital theatrical run. (There was also a fellow who was a bit confused and asked why Robotech was being redubbed with different voice actors. Fortunately, Tom Bateman, though not a presenter at this panel, was sitting behind me and was able to explain that, no, that wasn't Funimation but ADV, and wasn't Robotech but SDF: Macross.) I asked the Funimation rep about what would be on the Shadow Chronicles DVD, and he said that it hadn't been finalized yet so he wasn't able to say, but there would be an announcement soon (he might have mentioned some upcoming con, I forget).

The Saturday Shadow Chronicles panel was fun, and well-attended; one of the other attendees later mentioned that he counted at least 50 people before he was called to duty on the AV equipment. Tom opened it out with another new (or at least new-to-me) trailer of Shadow Chronicles footage set to music from the old Robotech score, and then he talked some about the project. A lot of it is stuff that the obsessed fans know already, and I'll go more into detail about it when I do my full report.

The highlights of the panel were some documentary segments that Tom showed, making-of segments that will be included as extras on the Shadow Chronicles DVD. Informationally there wasn't a lot of stuff there that the fans don't know already, nonetheless it was a treat to see some of the fans' responses when asked about Robotech (the fellow cosplaying a Veritech, the family whose daughter was dressed up as Annie right down to the E.T. cap, the parents who said they named their kids Maximillian and Miriya, the guy who looked right at the camera and proclaimed, "Robotech is GOD," etc.). It was also interesting to see some of the faces behind familiar characters.

But the other highlight of the panel was a 4-minute 15-second excerpt from Shadow Chronicles, covering from 1:11 to 1:15 of the movie if the on-screen timer was accurate, that served as a sort of sampler of what Shadow Chronicles covered—starting out with a humorous moment, moving on to a serious character moment, and concluding with a massive space battle sequence. Everyone liked it so much, he showed it again at the end of the panel. There were also some trivia questions for goodies like T-shirts—I won one of them by answering who relieved Gloval on the bridge when he went to give his report, and my brother won another by answering who Annie's boyfriend was in "The Lost City". (I'd watched that very episode of Mospeada with him the night before; it's just lucky that was one of the names Robotech didn't change.)

Most of the questions and answers were stuff that fans already know, like why they chose to do Shadow Chronicles rather than going with Sentinels, or whether we were going to see chanting children pulling the SDF-1's fold engines through space-time (Tom said no, and in response to someone else's question, "there won't be any flying horses, either.") I asked Tom when we would know whether Shadow Chronicles would be continued or be another one-off like Sentinels; Tom said that there definitely will be more Shadow Chronicles, though what form it would take (movies, OAVs, or TV series) was yet to be decided.

Tom also said it was unlikely that Shadow Chronicles would be dubbed into Japanese for a Japanese audience, given that the story had too many divergences from Mospeada for it to work as a Mospeada sequel, and Tatsunoko was't interested in doing a Mospeada sequel anyway. However, he did expect the DVD would be imported by Japanese fans of the show just for the sake of seeing the Mospeada mecha and character designs newly-CGI-animated; in an ironic reversal, Japanese fans have been buying a lot of Robotech toys and such, because there's a lot more Robotech stuff available now than there is stuff for some of the original shows.

There wasn't really anything new at the Sunday panel, just an amusing competition between eight selected Robotech mecha to see which one came out the winner.

Books on the bus: my thoughts on three titles

Here are brief reviews of three of the books that I read on my bus trip to and from GenCon. I would have reviewed the fourth one as well, but I couldn't remember the title so couldn't look it up on Amazon. It will have to wait until I get home.

Brother Death by Steve Perry

Light SF action-moviesque popcorn. The protagonists are a brother and sister, born of genetically-engineered heavyworlder stock, who shared the same childhood but different adult lives. He was trained as a special type of bodyguard called a Matador, she became an assistant planetary police chief. Together, they are confronted by a series of impossible locked-room murders, including an attempt on the sister's life using her own gun that had been impossibly retrieved from within a security vault. Behind it all is an insane religious cult devoted to the artifacts of an ancient alien race, who have seemingly attained the power to walk through walls.

This is more or less the scientifictional equivalent of the "Mack Bolan" novels, largely action-adventure with people shooting and hitting each other, sprinkled with a little SF flavor. As such, it's not bad popcorn reading. Though it seems to be a late book in a series (checking Wikipedia, it's 8th of 9), there is enough background provided not to feel lost.

I passed this book on to a fellow bus passenger; hopefully he'll post his thoughts on it via BookCrossing, so I can go back and paste this review in, since I didn't have time to enter the number on the label in before I handed it off.


Early Eight by L.T. Fawkes

A decent little murder mystery with a bit of an unusual protagonist. Terry Saltz is a working man who one day made the mistake of getting drunk and high and committing some mayhem that got him sent to jail for a while. When he got out, he started putting his life back together, going on the wagon and getting some jobs as carpenter and part-time bouncer for a local bar and grill. And solving murders on the side.

Early Eight is the third murder mystery featuring this particular character, but enough backstory is filled in along the way that it's never an obstacle to getting involved with the characters and following the way the story goes. The mystery itself involves two simultaneous deaths—an attractive but self-centered woman strangled in her car after a pool tournament, and an older real-estate magnate planning to divorce his wife who perishes in a fatal auto accident. Is the accident murder? If so, are they connected? And did Terry's older brother Berk have anything to do with the crimes?

As murder mysteries go, this is a fun read. Far too often in literature, "working class" is synonymous with "stupid." It's interesting to see a mystery where working stiffs are portrayed not as rubes but as intelligent people in their own right. The motives, methods, and resolution are believable, and the story was fun.


The Cat Who Talked Turkey by Lilian Jackson Braun

What the heck was this?

I remember when I was first introduced to the "Cat Who" mysteries; my High School French teacher's bookshelf was full of them, along with the Mrs. Polifax mysteries and some Inspector Maigret. I enjoyed them, even though they were a little cutesy and it was hard to suspend disbelief at the cats' antics, but I wasn't really driven to keep up with the series.

Now, seeing the book in a cheap pile at Wal-Mart, I figured why not try it—and wow, what a disappointment, especially so soon after reading Early Eight. It seems to me that the "Cat Who" mysteries actually used to be mysteries, but judging by this one, now they're just cutesy.

To paraphrase what I once said about a movie, it's a sad state of affairs when the blurb of the book is more exciting than the actual book itself. Talked Turkey's blurb implies Qwilleran has to solve an execution-style murder on his property, and somehow the mysterious reappearance of wild turkeys thought long-gone from the area has something to do with it. Well, it doesn't (nor is it ever explained at all, in fact), and the murder is barely even mentioned in the book; the fact that it gets "solved" in the end is more or less coincidental. In actuality, the book is by and large a slice-of-life story about Qwilleran, his cats, and the community. Which is fine if that's the sort of thing you're looking for, but not all that great when the book is being advertised as a "mystery."

The Cheapness of Digital Cinema

Last year, I wrote a journal entry about how movie theaters were looking for gimmicks to try to bring more people into theaters and away from their home-theater TV setups. One of those gimmicks was digital theaters. Of course, the question was then and still is now, "Who's going to pay for this?" The theater chains think the studios should, the studios think the theater chains should, and so there's no great exodus to digital screens—just the occasional cinema converting one at a time.

But even considering the expense of the process, it seems that one impetus toward digital cinema conversion, believe it or not, could actually be cheapness.

After a long and arduous search, Harmony Gold finally found a distributor for its long-awaited sequel to the Robotech TV series, Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles. Funimation will be releasing it to DVD, and they will even be releasing it theatrically. Except, there's a catch to this theatrical release.

Will the film be shown in a theatre in my city?

Possibly, it’s important to understand that Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles can only be shown in theatres with digital projection systems. (No 35mm prints of the film exist at this time.) While that may seem to limit the venues the film can screen in, there are more and more theatres slowly converting to digital every month.

Funimation is going to supply the film into theatres where there is a demand for the film to be seen. To that end, we suggest that you contact your local movie theatre and tell them you want to see the Funimation Films release of Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles! Theatre owners/mangers want films that people want to see so we urge you to contact your local theatre and let them know you want to see the film.

The theatres near me do not have digital projection so I guess I’m out of luck?

Not necessarily, as I mentioned above more and more theatres are slowly already have, are converting to or researching the possibly of, digital projection systems. Many theatres are often part of a larger theatre chain and many of those theatre chains are spearheading the conversion to digital projection. So when you tell your local theatre manger your desire to see Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles on the big screen it creates a incentive for the theatre to convert to digital or have the theatre chain to book it into their theatres that already have digital projection.

The idea of a movie theater converting to digital—such an expensive process that there has been the aforementioned continual wrangling over who should pay for it—on the strength of wanting to show Shadow Chronicles is frankly ludicrous, but the announcement is still very interesting.

It used to be that you would only see big-budget blockbusters screened digitally, probably because there were so few digital theaters that it didn't make sense for a distributor even to try to aim for them. But apparently there are now enough extant digital screens that we can see quite the opposite: a digital-only theatrical release because Harmony Gold and Funimation are too cheap to want to spring for 35mm prints of their film.

To be fair, 35mm prints are often quite expensive, and spending that money on Shadow Chronicles would probably be counter-indicated before they know how well the film is actually going to do. And it's not necessary to create more than one digital "print" of a film, because it can then be downloaded or burned onto DVDs for shipping very cheaply. That being said, I find it very interesting that digital cinema has apparently become a viable option for film distribution based on budgetary concerns of the distributor, when the spread of it was slowed by budgetary concerns of the theatrical chains.