That's All I've Got to Say

Even in the Information Age, Nothing Beats Getting Carded

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:35:00 +0000

I write for a blog called TeleRead.org, all about e-books. And as much as I might write there about e-stuff replacing or at least supplementing p-stuff, there’s one paper thing that I use quite often that electronic media has yet to replace: the humble business card.

Those who, like me, first got into e-book reading back in the ‘90s, when the Palm Pilot was at the height of its popularity, might also remember how the infra-red beamer on it was supposedly the latest and greatest thing that was going to replace business cards forever.^*

It was the geeky equivalent of a handshake: point your Palms at each other and hold down the “contact” button. Zap! And you could even buy a business card scanner peripheral for your Palm, for those poor benighted souls who weren’t hip enough to have a PDA yet. (You can still get them, but now they’re more useful for cloud-data-storage services like Evernote.)

There was even a silly TV commercial about two people meeting in passing trains and beaming contact information before they were parted.

But it never really caught on—after all, most people didn’t have Palms—and infra-red beaming went out of style when Bluetooth came in. (I don’t know whether current Palm models even have an IR port anymore.)

And although my cell phone will allow me to send contact details via Bluetooth, the other person would have to put his device in pairing mode, and then I would have to find them, and so on.

In the end, it is much simpler just to hand over this simple rectangle of pasteboard.

I suppose it’s the geek in me that thinks of a business card as being like a physical representation of an e-mail .signature (rather than the other way around—I was using e-mail first, after all). It certainly has all or most of the same things on it: the blogs I write for and podcasts I’ve done, my email address, website, phone number, snail address…even my Twitter. Just by handing it over I can instantly give the other person multiple ways to contact me, without the troublesome business of fiddling with syncing electronic gadgets—or even finding a pen and paper to write a number down.

(And it was cheap, too. I went with an on-line printing service, used a pre-made template, and got a couple hundred cards for about $10 including shipping and the ransom fee for not having their advertising stuck on the back.)

Only one electronic thing could possibly replace, or at least supplant the utility of a business card, and that is a system called ENUM. ENUM would map phone numbers to Internet addresses, so the phone number would serve as a means of contact for telephone, instant messaging, email, and so on. Ars Technica has the details.

But ENUM probably will not end up being implemented, at least in the current business environment. It simply isn’t in the interests of the big telcos to provide a means by which they themselves can be bypassed. It looks like Google Voice is going to be the closest we can currently get to one phone number covering multiple means of contact.

Good thing I have my Google Voice number on my business card.

^* Infra-red beaming was supposed to replace using cash for splitting a lunch check, too. It's easy to forget, but PayPal started out as an IR cash-beaming app for the Palm—before dropping the app after a few months to ditch the overhead of supporting it.

Technorati Tags: card,business card,ENUM,Ars Technica,TeleRead,Palm,PayPal,Palm Pilot,scanner

Avatar – Not the Last Airbender

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 02:04:00 +0000

There are some movies that are relentlessly hyped for years but when they appear on the big screen are largely a disappointment. The Star Wars prequels, for example.

Avatar…is not one of them. For the most part, anyway.

The problem is that if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen basically the whole plot of the movie. It is Dances with Wolves, FernGully, Pocahontas, every other cliché you’ve ever seen of the Noble Savage rolled together and mixed with the military-industrial complex from the Alien franchise. Rifftrax is going to have a field day.

There are a lot of movies where this would be a handicap, where you would walk out of the theater feeling unsatisfied for sitting through yet another cinematic retread. But Avatar manages to transcend that fate through sheer application of budget and technology. In short, this is the most realistic CGI ever put to film.

Go and see this movie on the big screen for the sheer prettiness. Definitely see it in 3D. The 3D is what makes this movie—which is appropriate given that (James Cameron’s lobbying for proper venues for) this movie was the entire reason we’ve got so many 3D screens now in the first place. It’s gorgeous. It’s hyper-real. (Real enough that some of the aerial scenes gave me a twinge of vertigo.)

Also, it has mecha in it.

It was pretty enough that I happily forgave the lack of originality in the storyline. It was even pretty enough that I forgave it for causing the Last Airbender movie to have to drop the word “Avatar” from the title. On the small screen, even on Blu-Ray and HDTV, it will be just another Dances with Wolves clone.

Now, if only Cameron would get around to making Battle Angel…

Technorati Tags: James Cameron,Avatar,The Last Airbender,Alien,Dances with Wolves,3D

Series review: Case Closed (Detective Conan)

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:01:00 +0000

Over the last few weeks, I have become addicted to, and have experienced all extant English-subbed episodes of, a TV series called Detective Conan in Japan, and Case Closed over here.

And when I say “all extant English-subbed episodes,” well, there are quite a lot of them. About 430 of 554 TV episodes that have aired over the course of 14 years, 13 movies, 11 OAVs, and 2 live-action TV specials. And a number of “scanlated” issues of the manga, too.

The premise of the show is that genius high-school detective Kudo Shinichi (or “Jimmy Kudo” in the English dub) witnesses a blackmail deal going down with mysterious gangsters—but the gangsters get the drop on him and force him to take a poison pill. After they leave him for dead, the poison causes him to shrink down from a 17-year-old to a 7-year-old.

Disguising his appearance with a pair of his father’s old glasses, with the help of an absent-minded inventor who comes up with helpful gadgets, Kudo takes on the name Edogawa Conan (from Japanese mystery author Ranpo Edogawa, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and goes to live with the family of his girlfriend, Mouri Ran.

Ran’s father Kogoro is an inept private investigator—and in the hope of coming across more information about the mysterious gangsters who shrank him, Conan starts working behind the scenes to boost Kogoro’s reputation as a P.I. He can’t tell anyone who he really is—even Ran. And so begins 14 years of romantic tension…

As one might guess from the name, Detective Conan borrows a lot of inspiration from the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle. Even the place names are similar; Conan lives on “Beika Street” not far away from “Haido Park”. And if Conan is inspired by Holmes, one of Conan’s occasional adversaries—the Kaitou Kid—is modeled after the original Arsène Lupin.

The first 5 seasons and 2 movies of Detective Conan have been released in bilingual format by Funimation (retitled Case Closed after the Robert Howard estate objected), and the 3rd and 4th movies are coming out December 29th. Most of the episodes, movies, and OAVs after that have been fansubbed.

This is a remarkably good mystery series, and I cannot recommend it enough. The overall storyline is a bit slow to get started (it is episode 130 before Conan gets any real leads on the organization that shrank him), but there are a lot of good mystery stories in the mean time.

For those who are not sure if they would like to commit to a full-length TV series, the movies are a good way to experience the series in bite-size. I especially recommend the 4th movie, Captured in Her Eyes, as a decent encapsulation of the series as a whole.

Amusingly enough, the producers of the Detective Conan anime and the Lupin III anime got together this year to produce a crossover TV special, pitting Japanese animation’s greatest detective against Japanese animation’s greatest thief. The show is pretty funny, but for maximum clarity should probably be watched only after becoming more familiar with Conan.

For more information on the show and where to find it, see Funimation’s official Case Closed website, and the Detective Conan Translation Project website.

Technorati Tags: Case Closed,Detective Conan,Funimation,Conan Doyle,Sherlock Holmes,Lupin III,Arsène Lupin,anime,manga,mystery,detective

Has the potential to be very interesting

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:55:00 +0000

This article is about how Google Wave could transform journalism into a more collaborative process. What is interesting to me is how much this echoes what I have discovered in writing fiction with EtherPad – http://www.etherpad.com

The process of writing a story together, with characters owned by respective authors, used to be a morass of writing half the dialogue and sending it back and forth for insertion of respective characters' words, or writing it ourselves and hoping our lack of famliarity with the other person's character didn't lead to us making them act out of character.

With EtherPad (and, presumably, with Google Wave), collaborative fiction writing becomes akin to an act of structured role-playing, where we actually write together at the same time—and unlike normal role-playing, if we decide something came off wrong we can easily go back and tweak it.

Of course, I'm not in the Google Wave trial yet, but I can't wait until I am. It will be very interesting to try it out.

in reference to:

"You may notice that double bylines aren't very common. That's because trying to co-author a news story stinks.
The process usually involves one reporter talking to and researching a few things and another following a different set of sources and finally combining their findings toward the end. This can result in a mess of incompatible and unrelated research that gets either thrown out or somewhat-awkwardly wiggled in."
- How Google Wave could transform journalism | Technology | Los Angeles Times (view on Google Sidewiki)

Harmony Gold vs. BattleTech: The Second Coming?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 06:11:00 +0000

I originally wrote this intending to read it aloud as part of a prerecorded episode of my Space Station Liberty podcast—but I then realized it was getting much too long for that. So I’ll go with a much-abbreviated version when I record my next show. But I didn’t see why this background research should go to waste.

In recent days, two different companies planning to release content based on the original BattleTech game have had their efforts stymied, apparently by Robotech-owner Harmony Gold. This article looks at the history behind the legal enmity. To note, I am not a lawyer, a paralegal, or even a single legal; this is all based on my layperson’s reading of the information I have been able to find.

Back in 1984, roleplaying game company FASA came out with the BattleTech wargame, and subsequently the MechWarrior role-playing game, in which armies of giant robots slugged it out on the field of battle. They had just one problem, though: they needed some giant robots. At the time, it was cheaper to license giant robots that someone else had created than to design their own. So they turned to a model importer, Twentieth Century Imports.

Accounts vary as to whether TCI actually had the rights to license those images. Some people say that TCI did have Import Derivatives Rights; others say they didn't. FASA claimed in one of its filings that Harmony Gold’s license specifically excluded Japanese model kits produced for export—but the judge in that case was not convinced.

Whether they had the rights or not, the mechs used in BattleTech included a number of mecha from several Japanese animated series—one of which was Macross. BattleTech mechs known as the Wasp, Stinger, Phoenix Hawk, and Warhammer, among others, all derive from those designs.

Meanwhile, Harmony Gold licensed the overseas distribution rights to—and indeed became co-copyright-owner of—Macross, and Macross-derived elements such as mecha designs, with Tatsunoko Studios in Japan. This included those Macross mecha designs. In January, 1985, Harmony Gold sent FASA a cease-and-desist letter, sparking "an exchange of correspondence between the parties including numerous cease and desist letters from Harmony Gold."

But FASA kept on using the designs, and Harmony Gold never filed any legal action against them. Probably at least part of this was because of a period of hibernation Harmony Gold went into during the late '80s through early '90s, in which they basically just rubber-stamped any Robotech-related tie-in that came across their desks. This was also when they let Macross II and Macross Plus slip by into licensehood without asserting that they owned the rights.

Fast-forward six years to the early 1990s. In 1991 and 1992, FASA was looking into expanding its BattleTech line—already the subject of roleplaying games, computer games, and novels—into other media. First they pitched a toy line to Playmates, who had been looking for a giant robot toy line. Playmates considered it, but finally decided they weren't interested. Subsequently, FASA entered into an arrangement with Tyco to produce BattleTech toys, and with Saban to produce a tie-in animated show about those toys.

The show lasted 13 episodes, and aired in 1994. BattleTech-the-game fans weren't terribly impressed at the way the cartoon played fast and loose with the BattleTech canon (that's with one 'n', I'm not talking about PPCs) and the toys were described by many as some of the ugliest things they've ever seen.

But meanwhile, PlayMates had came out with its Exosquad line and cartoon, which lasted 52 episodes from 1993 to 1994. Given that ExoSquad had some suspicious similarities to BattleTech, in 1994 FASA filed suit against Playmates, alleging copyright and trademark infringement among other things.

But meanwhile, it was FASA's bad luck that Playmates had buddied up with newly-awakened Harmony Gold, and was selling reissues of some of the old Matchbox Robotech toys under the Exosquad brand name.

So, in 1995, Harmony Gold came to the defense of its merchandising partner and filed suit against FASA for using those Macross mecha designs in its early BattleTech editions. We'll come back to that case later, but let's look at FASA vs. Playmates first.

As FASA asserted in its filing, the Exosquad storyline shares a remarkable number of similarities with BattleTech: most notably, the use of neurally-controlled giant robots by humans to fight an invasion by genetically-modified humans using similar robots. It even used the name "Draconis"—one of the BattleTech houses—for a character. FASA also pointed out that one of the Exosquad "e-frame" mecha strongly resembled a BattleTech Madcat, and the others resembled other BattleTech mechs. And, funny thing, Playmates had several months in which to look over the material FASA sent them as part of its own toy pitch—some of which they never actually returned.

In 1996, Judge Ruben Castillo found "that FASA has established certain protectible (sic) copyright and trademark rights but has failed to prove any facts which establish liability on the part of Playmates." But feeling they brought the case in good faith, Castillo declined to force FASA to pay Playmates's legal bills.

(This did not prevent Playmates's lawyers from filing an appeal to try to get FASA saddled with those bills, but the appeals court remanded the matter back to Castillo, who wrote a hilariously sarcastic fourth opinion in the case noting that if Playmates didn't understand his reasoning, they should have just asked him about it at the time instead of trying to go over his head.)

It's not terribly relevant to the matter at hand, but I think worth noting, that a May 13, 2009 article in the Chicago Sun-Times mentions that Ruben Castillo is on Obama's short-list for Supreme Court nominations. We may very well end up with a Supreme Court judge who decided a Robotech-related case.

Getting back to the other case, that of Harmony Gold vs. FASA, the details are sketchy as I was only ever able to find two documents relating to it in legal-search databases. One of them was a denial of a motion for summary judgment on the part of FASA—they hadn't made a good enough case for that—and the other was a denial of a motion from Harmony Gold asking that FASA return some documents Harmony Gold had mistakenly sent them.

We may never know whether TCI actually did have the rights to sell those mecha designs or not, because in 1997 a FASA representative posted to Usenet that the case had been settled out of court and dismissed. As one condition of the settlement, FASA was not permitted to talk about the settlement. The FASA representative also announced that the mechs under contention had been phased out of the game universe and would not be seen again. BattleTech fans started referring to them as “the Unseen.”

Since that time, FASA has gone out of business, and the BattleTech rights have gone through a number of different hands. The computer game rights went to Microsoft, and the print-game rights went to WizKids, a company founded by FASA-founder Jordan Weisman, and were then transferred to Catalyst Game Labs. Another company founded by Weisman, Smith & Tinker Inc., has re-licensed the BattleTech computer game rights from Microsoft and is making MechWarrier 5 in partnership with another company called Piranha. And this is where things get interesting.

Just recently, Catalyst announced they had reobtained the rights to use original images of the "Unseen" mechs and would be publishing them again—until they were brought up short when an unnamed company contacted them about terms of the confidential settlement which included an agreement "that the sole and exclusive world-wide right to [the Macross] mecha (outside of Japan) would rest with another US company." Catalyst insisted that none of the people it had contacted about the matter prior to this had known of the settlement, but it was complying and hoped to work with the unnamed company in the future.

Meanwhile, a certainly-not-unnamed company, Harmony Gold, has been sending cease-and-desist orders to websites hosting the MechWarrior 5 trailer, on the grounds that it features one of the Unseen—a Warhammer, otherwise known as a Macross Tomahawk or Robotech Excalibur.

When I had Harmony Gold representative Kevin McKeever on my live Space Station Liberty talk show the other day (mp3 download here), I brought up the Catalyst Game Labs issue. This is what Kevin had to say, starting approximately 1:03:30 into the show:

Right now I can only simply say this: Harmony Gold has not been stripped of any rights. We entered into a confidential settlement agreement that I can't discuss. [...] There is one thing I want to point out, that Harmony Gold still continues to enjoy exclusive control of the Robotech property, and imagery contained within it.

I should emphasize that this statement was given in response to the question about Catalyst Game Labs. At the time, I had no knowledge of the MechWarrier 5 trailer issue, though I suspect Kevin's response if I asked him about that would be identical. Smith & Tinker has already told IGN they have no comment in the matter.

I have to wonder what the companies were thinking. At the least, it would seem that both Catalyst and Smith & Tinker failed to do their homework, or what in business is called "due diligence," before embarking on that action. For Catalyst, this is somewhat understandable given that it is a third party to the legal case. But Smith & Tinker was founded and is led by FASA founder Jordan Weisman—and if anybody should know the terms of that settlement, he should.

The icing on the cake is that a legal dispute has been going on over in Japan over the last few years as to who really DOES own the rights to those mecha designs. Harmony Gold's claim that they advanced in the '90s court case comes from their partnership with Tatsunoko Studios, who was one of the companies involved in producing the Macross TV series. However, even though the Japanese courts have given Tatsunoko the "author's rights" to the series, they have given ownership of the character and mecha designs to Studio Nue, the company that designed them.

If this is in fact the case, Harmony Gold would not have a legal leg to stand on when it came to preventing BattleTech from using Macross mecha—in an ironic echo of FASA, they licensed them from a company that didn't have the right to grant them. (Though judging from Kevin McKeever’s “have not been stripped” comment above, clearly Harmony Gold does not believe this to be true.) And FASA has worked with Studio Nue itself; they commissioned Nue to redesign those "Unseen" mecha for the Japanese edition of the BattleTech game.

Update: As I have been informed in comments below, this is not the case after all. I was misunderstanding what the divided rights meant. In fact, they mean that Tatsunoko (in Japan, and hence Harmony Gold outside of Japan) has the exclusive right to distribute and merchandise the Macross show that’s been made already and all elements within it; Big West and Studio Nue have the exclusive right to make new derivative works based on those elements. This could have interesting implications for the planned Robotech live-action movie. (Though it does set up the question of whether the BattleTech game would legally be considered merchandising of the Harmony Gold-owned Macross, or a derivative work based on the Nue-owned mecha designs.)

So, is Jordan Weisman intentionally setting up for a legal rematch with Harmony Gold? It doesn't seem to make sense. Only hardcore BattleTech fans would care one way or the other whether the Unseen mechs come back, and the legal fees Weisman is risking are out of proportion to any possible financial gain. But it seems really weird for a Warhammer to show up in a MechWarrior game "by accident" after the long legal history it's been a part of.

Given the lack of representatives from any of the companies involved to comment, apart from Harmony Gold, guesswork is all we have right now. But I would be delighted if representatives from any of those companies would agree to appear on my show and present their side of the story.

Also, I've posted all the public legal documents from the 1990s cases at http://terrania.us/hg-fasa . There's some fascinating reading in there. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: BattleTech,MechWarrior,Robotech,Harmony Gold,Unseen,Phoenix Hawk,LAM,Macross,TCI,Playmates,ExoSquad,Ruben Castillo,copyright,trademark,lawsuit,Smith and Tinker,cease and desistdesist,IGN,Piranha,Catalyst Game Labs,Wiz Kids,FASA,Space Station Liberty,Podcast

Bent out of Shape

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:22:00 +0000

There has been a great deal of controversy in recent months over the casting choices for the movie version of Avatar: The Last Airbender. The fact that most of the protagonists were cast white and Asians were reserved for the villains has many Asian-Americans and their supporters “bent” out of shape given that the characters were very clearly of Asian ethnicity in the original animated show (although they were mostly voiced by white actors).

I posted my own views about the controversy in my LiveJournal back in January. I thought that the casting directors had just picked the best available actors or actresses for the job, and they had all simply happened to be Caucasian. But since then, my views have evolved.

I’ve seen some evidence that suggested the directors intentionally set out to cast the film Caucasian. For example, the original casting call was for actors who were “Caucasian or any other ethnicity,” which suggests they were looking for Caucasians first and anything else second.

And I’ve heard the song “Nobody’s Asian in the Movies,” from the “Commentary: The Musical” commentary track to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which sums up pretty clearly the state of Asian casting in the modern film industry. An Airbender movie could have been a great chance to change that, casting ethnic Asian actors in leading roles. But apparently it was not to be.

It has come out recently that one of the producers of the Airbender movie, Frank Marshall, has a Twitter account. He has been posting tweets about the production status of the movie. Naturally, some overzealous fans took that as an opportunity to start deluging him with demands for an explanation.

So, today Marshall tweeted the following:

Our vision for the movie is of ONE world, made up of four Nations, influenced and inspired by the Asian undertones of the series. This world will have an ethnically diverse cast that represents many different heritages and cultures from all corners of the globe.

On the surface, this sounds like a reasonable response, all very politically correct. It’s certainly in line with the way that some of the earlier casting calls for extras requested people to show up in whatever ethnic garb they had, be it kimonos or lederhosen. They want to make the show more “ethnically diverse” so that all ethnicities from the real world are represented, not just Asian.

The problem is, the world of the Avatar animated series is not “ethnically diverse” (or at least, not as much so as the real world). It is based strictly on the Asian subsets of our world (with just a few notable exceptions such as those leaf-wearing swampbenders).

In diversifying the ethnicity of the cast for the movies, they are not faithfully adapting the show—and they are getting rid of one of the things that made the animated show so great to begin with. The animated series’s strong focus on Asian culture was one of the things that made it stand out.

It feels to me like the producers made up this “ethnic diversity” stuff to justify the casting decision they’d already made—to have their cake and eat it too. They want to keep the “Asian undertones” but cast white people in the main roles because white people are safe. They don’t want to worry about non-Asians staying away from an all-Asian movie.

Of course there are many white Avatar fans, but the producers have to worry about attracting a wider audience than just fans. They’re pouring $250 million into Airbender. That’s an awful lot of movie ticket sales just to break even.

And in the end, I’m…disappointed. I’ll still go see the movie anyway. I’m not going to protest, or write a letter, or sign the petition, or call Marshall ugly names. But I’m sad that Hollywood couldn’t manage to transcend its usual way of doing business for once and get an adaptation right.

Technorati Tags: Avatar,Airbender,Aang,Frank Marshall,caucasian,Asian,controversy,racebending,Dr. Horrible

Review: Darkness of the Light, by Peter A. David

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:45:00 +0000

I read Peter A. David's new fantasy novel, Darkness of the Light (available through Sunday the 27th as a free ebook from tor.com's downloads page). It is quite a good book—but I honestly can't recommend reading it yet.

The book is a fantasy novel with some science-fiction trappings. The premise is that earth's human population has been nearly wiped out by a massive wave of invasion by twelve temporarily allied alien races. (Smaller waves of these races had come to earth in the past, but were wiped out by the humans of the day. They nonetheless entered legends as monsters such as the Cyclops, Minotaur, fauns, vampires, trolls, dragons, and so on.) These aliens were exiled to earth for some not-too-clearly-specified crime, and their alliance lasted only long enough to conquer the planet—they now do little but fight among themselves. The wardens of this prison world are the mysterious Overseer and his legion of Travelers.

As is necessary for a story, the status quo is about to be disturbed and disturbed big by a series of seemingly unrelated events that are taking place. Without going into spoilers, there are about half a dozen seemingly-unrelated subplots that interweave and touch each other in odd places. There are a dozen major characters—some heroic, some villainous, some tragic—who interact in different ways over the course of the story. David does his usual fine job of deftly keeping the stories moving, switching between subplots to keep perspective fresh without lingering so long away from any we forget what is going on in them.

There are only a couple of problems with the book. One has to do with its genre-bending. For about 9/10 of the book, it all seems very science-fictional. Yes, there are dragons, fauns, cyclopses, etc., but the book very clearly seems to be going for the whole "legends have their basis in greatly distorted fact" thing, with a side helping of "any sufficiently advanced technology (or psionic ability) is indistinguishable from magic." But then, not far from the end of the book, there is a plot revelation that comes right out of the fantasy playbook, and it is a bit jarring because it seems as if it has not been adequately telegraphed—it feels like learning that the starship Enterprise is powered by moonbeams and fairy dust.

The book's other big problem is that it is the first book of a series, and the ending shows it. While I would not exactly call it a cliffhanger, the ending leaves most of its characters in very unresolved situations, and teases a number of important revelations that will have to wait for the next book. And according to Peter David's blog, the next book will not be out until September, 2009. Argh! I wish I had known this before I started reading this one.

And that is why I cannot recommend reading it yet. It will only leave you frustrated, as it is one of those stories that ends where it ends because the writer has run out of space before he has run out of story to tell.

Still, when the sequel or sequels are available, I recommend giving it a shot. David creates a fascinating world, with a number of interesting mysteries. That is precisely why it is so frustrating.

Shadow Chronicles: The DVD Review

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 00:15:00 +0000

Having received my copy of Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles yesterday, I decided I would review it. You can find an audio version of this review at my podcast, Space Station Liberty in Prerecorded Show #1; you'll also find this review on ePinions once they get around to approving it.

Packaging:

Something that no pictures or descriptions of the Shadow Chronicles DVD have thus far have managed to convey is that the DVD itself comes in a very attractive slipcover. It is a foil-enhanced slipcover, so that every part of the picture save for Ariel, Scott, and Vince in the center panel, and the title logo itself, is bright and shiny. The effect is particularly pronounced on the earth in the top and bottom panel, the Ikazuchi at the bottom, and the irises of Janice Em's eyes at the top. Very nice-looking, and I bet that it'll make endcap displays of the thing really stand out in the stores.

The plastic keepcase within the slipcover duplicates its front and back; nothing really special about it. One minor point against it is that there is no actual liner insert save a Funimation promotional pamphlet. It would have been nice to have something like a miniature version of the hand-and-pendant promotional poster on one side, a chapter list on the other. Still, it's not like that would be a major selling point in any event.

The silkscreened DVD art is the hand clutching the notched pendant from the promotional poster, with the spindle hole at the center of the pendant.

I give the packaging 4 shiny slipcovers...out of 5. It misses 5 only because, as pretty as the foil slipcover is, they didn't do anything truly spectacular with it, and the lack of an insert is slightly annoying.

Disc Interface:

On insertion there is first an FBI warning, then a Funimation logo. Then there is the standard disclaimer screen that says the extra features are for entertainment only, the opinions expressed don't necessarily represent those of Funimation, et cetera. The odd thing is, this screen is only present for one frame. I had to step through frame by frame just to be able to read it at all. You would think that if they wanted you to be able to read it they would show it to you for longer than that, but who can know the mind of Funimation?

After that is a 2 minute, 15 second trailer for Funimation's remastered Dragonball Z release. The odd thing about this trailer is that though I could use the track skip button to skip past the Funimation logo, and I could even use it to skip past the FBI warning, no amount of mashing of that button would make my default DVD player software, PowerDVD for Windows, skip ahead to the disc menu. (VLC was much more sensible about it, though.) Happily, the "Menu" button did jump me out of it to the disc menu. Still, I consider this sort of thing extremely tacky on a consumer purchase disc. Not good, Funimation, not good at all.

The disc menu itself has a brief opening animation, then a 44-second loop of scenes from the movie with a snippet of Scott Glasgow music accompanying it that plays in the middle of the screen. The Shadow Chronicles logo is at the top, the menu options at the bottom. The interface of the menus is nicely minimalist, with no confusing tricks as to where the indicators go or where you click to set them; the animated backgrounds don't get in the way.

I give the disc interface 3 unreadable disclaimers out of 5. It looks pretty and is easy to use, however that Dragonball Z commercial lowers the score big time.

Video:

Shadow Chronicles is presented in anamorphic widescreen, 1.78:1 aspect ratio, as are the menus and the Birth of a Sequel featurette.

A big advantage of going digital all the way, from production to distribution, is that the source material never hits an analog step. The numbers on their screens never once stopped being numbers on their journey to consumers' screens. As a result, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles has one of the most gorgeous, clearest digital transfers of any movie I have ever seen. In some places, there was snow that for a moment I thought was a problem with my TV set, but then I realized the movie was showing a video communication panel at the moment, and the snow was actually on their screen.

While their budget was not huge, there is nothing getting in the way of seeing almost every penny of it on your TV. I'd love to see how it looks on an HDTV.

Birth of a Sequel looked a little grainier, as it was shot at a lower resolution (using standard camcorders for part of it) and probably compressed a lot more to give more space to the main feature, but it was all right for what it was and nobody judges a movie by the video quality of its extras anyway.

And so the video quality gets 5 crystal clear images out of 5 from me. As Yellow Dancer put it, "It don't get any better."

Audio:

For viewing Shadow Chronicles, the disc offers a choice between a 448 kilobit per second Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound track, and a 256 kilobit per second Dolby Digital 2.0 track. Both of them in English. The one subtitle track—closed-captions for hearing impaired—is English as well; non-English-speaking Robotech fans will just have to wait for a localized release, or a fansub.

I watched the complete movie in 5.1 on my Logitech speaker system, and sampled parts of it in 2.0 on my headphones. The 2.0 track is great for those not blessed with a surround system; the sound is crisp and clear and there is good directionality from left to right in scenes that involve directional effects.

However, the 5.1 track is what really shines. There is good use of the surrounds, especially in battles where explosions can seem to come from ahead, behind, or all around you. It showcases the music of Scott Glasgow and the voice acting of the Robotech crew very well. The sound was always crystal clear.

The audio on Birth of a Sequel is a somewhat tinnier-sounding 2.0; it doesn't really matter much since it's an interview documentary rather than a feature film.

5 audio channels out of 5. And what the heck, I'll throw in the extra point one, too.

Extras:

The big extra on this disc is a 45-minute featurette called Robotech: Birth of a Sequel. Considerably meatier than the fluff pieces that are usually what is meant by "featurette," this goes into detail about what it took to produce Shadow Chronicles, including interviews with fans, production staff, voice actors, and so on. Scott Glasgow's musical composition gets its own section. It does gloss over some matters, such as the change in voice actress for Ariel, but there's only so much detail it could go into.

Incidentally, those who have seen the segments of this documentary that were shown at conventions or theatrical screenings will want to watch those parts of this show anyway; the on-line versions were missing a few key scenes from those segments.

The two-minute Shadow Chronicles teaser and a number of Funimation trailers round out the extras on the disc. Notably absent are any sort of commentary track, deleted scenes (which had been mentioned as a possibility by Tommy Yune in interviews), or even the Shadow Chronicles United Nations public service announcement that is even specifically mentioned in the documentary. I suppose it's just as well; every extra piece of something on the disc would make the main feature that much more compressed.

I give the extras 3 documentary segments out of 5; what's there is excellent, but what could have been there would have been excellent too.

Content:

I first saw this movie at a screening in St. Louis. I had to rent a car to drive up and back. The video was a bit too dark and the sound was off, but it was still a marvelous experience.

If you read reviews of it on the robotech.com forums, you'll see a lot of belly-aching about how the CGI was too artificial, the character animation too stiff, and so on. But I'll be honest: I didn't notice all of that. Once the movie started, it was like I was right back in 1985, in front of my TV set seeing Robotech for the first time. For the next hour and a half I was mesmerized by the action and the drama, seeing old favorite characters and interesting new characters for the first time. It was a delightful experience, and well worth the hassle of getting up there to take it all in.

And now that the DVD has arrived, and I've had a chance to watch it again, make screengrabs, and go frame-by-frame through various bits, I have to say I like it even more.

But that's not to say it was perfect. There were a few little annoyances.

The big one comes in the way the movie covers the events of the last two episodes of Robotech. The first part of the movie occurs simultaneously with those episodes, taking the point of view of the returning fleet rather than our heroes on the ground. The thing is, there are some changes made in the way it covers those episodes. To go into more detail would spoil it, but suffice it to say that the order of some events is changed around, and the meaning of some dialogue is altered and expanded. Also, only Ariel and the Regess are ever shown inside the Hive, despite Scott, Rand, Lancer, and the others having been in there with them at the same time in the original show.

Harmony Gold's position is that the changes are more in the nature of "selective editing"—just picking camera angles and moments of dialogue that didn't have anybody else in them—to tell a different side of the story and keep new viewers from getting confused—but the changes are a bit more extensive than that alone could explain. About the only way to explain this degree of difference is to look at the different episodes as being like the separate stories in the movie Rashomon, the same events seen from two different points of view that saw and heard different things. This may not sit well with some of the older fans, who are used to events happening the way the TV show said they happened.

But by far the greatest flaw of Shadow Chronicles, and the only one really worth discussing in detail, comes from its length. Shadow Chronicles has less than 90 minutes—about 4 TV episodes' worth of time, when you consider commercials—to introduce all its characters to new viewers and set up the story for successive chapters in the Robotech saga. There are about a dozen important characters to introduce or reintroduce, and half of these are major characters who need more time than usual to tell their stories. In the end, a number of the new characters get short shrift in terms of characterization, and when some of them are killed off it lacks the impact of, say, Roy Fokker or Ben Dixon's deaths in the original show.

I find myself wishing they had been able to take twice the length of time to tell this same story—say, as eight episodes of a TV series. That would have allowed us to see more of the new characters and get to know them in more detail, with less exposition necessary, and the deaths could have had more of an impact.

That being said, Shadow Chronicles was by and large quite good, and a worthy successor to the Robotech name. The story doesn't seem to have any major plot holes, or plot elements that were too hard for me to buy. The explanation for what happened to the SDF-3 is believable—much more so than the mysterious spacefold to another universe from End of the Circle—and the interactions between characters make sense. I like the way that shadow technology has been expanded into a story element of greater significance than simply "the edge we need to win against the Invid." And the new adversaries are ominous and spooky.

When you think about it, ominous and spooky enemies were one of the major elements missing from every attempt thus far to continue the story after the end of the Robotech saga. For the tale to be gripping, the heroes have to be challenged by an adversary who stands a serious chance of winning the war. Nobody's really been able to do that so far. The most that the RPG could manage was to have the Invid change their minds and come back, and the enemies in the End of the Circle novel—Robotech's last attempt at a post-series sequel—were more like those from Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama books: aliens who are more weird than menacing. You get the feeling they don't even care about humanity, as long as it has the sense to keep itself out of the way. However, the Shadow Chronicles's "Children of the Shadow" don't have that problem. From what we see of them here, they look like a force to be reckoned with, they definitely have plans that involve erasing humanity, and the REF is going to have some tough times ahead of them.

Moving on to the technical details: the CGI for the mecha combined with the digital ink-and-paint for the character animation work all right together. Not perfectly, but a heck of a lot better than in earlier movies that tried it, like Golgo 13 and Lensman. Still, in a few places, the animation does show its budgetary limitations. Shadow Chronicles really is more of an OAV or a TV movie than a theatrical feature, the various theatrical screenings to the contrary.

Even so, the score by Scott Glasgow was top-notch, bringing a much more theatrical feel to the soundtrack at least. Unlike the old Robotech TV score, it doesn't repeat itself frequently; even when the same themes are used, they appear in different forms. Themes start out subtle, and grow over the course of the show. I will be looking forward to the soundtrack release.

The voice acting is mostly top-notch. Some of the actors' portrayals have changed over the years, as their voices change with age or else they lose track of how they originally voiced the characters. The only really jarring change is that Alexandra Kenworthy voices the Regess a bit too softly, in my opinion; she lacks the harsh, strident tone that she had in the TV show. This Regess sounds altogether too kindly, even when she's talking about the Invids' vilest foes. It's somewhat annoying that Marlene/Ariel's voice was recast, though there are a number of good reasons for it—chief among them being the need to differentiate Ariel from the deceased Marlene to avoid viewer confusion. Kari Wahlgren does a good job, and perhaps it's for the best that she sounds so different now that she also looks different; it might be hard to get used to Melanie MacQueen's voice coming out of that new-looking face. And Melanie MacQueen is not entirely forgotten; she at least gets a couple of cameos as the voice of the deceased Marlene Rush.

In the end, I give the movie itself 4 Neutron-S Missiles...out of 5.

So, to sum up:

Packaging: 4 out of 5
Interface: 3 out of 5
Video:     5 out of 5
Audio:     5 out of 5
Extras:    3 out of 5
Content:   4 out of 5

Overall:   4 out of 5

Starring Jeff Bridges as Jon Katz...

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 20:15:00 +0000

(I just submitted the following as a story to slashdot.org. I don't know if they'll run it, but whether they do or not, it was too good not to repost here. Mad props to my friend Matt Gerber for originally pointing out the CNN.com article to me.)

Long time Slashdot veterans will remember Jon Katz, the editorial writer whose Slashdot articles invariably became hotbeds of controversy. It appears he may have the last laugh; how many of the Slashdot posters who ridiculed him went on to be played by Jeff Bridges in a movie?

In his new book, "A Good Dog: The Story of Orson," Katz chronicles the life and death of the lovable but troubled border collie that transformed his life. It continues the story begun in Katz's last book, "A Dog Year," now being made into a movie starring Jeff Bridges as Katz.

Katz critics may get a chuckle out of the plot synopsis for the film: "A man having a mid-life crisis has his life turned upside down when he takes in a border collie crazier than he is." Further amusement comes from this article about the movie's filming, with this quote from the owner of the house used to double for Katz's:

Mercaldi said she was looking forward to seeing the film, with her home of 13 years as a co-star, "especially since they trashed it," she said. "The character was a real slob, so it doesn't look like our house."

The film should be released "sometime in late 2007."

G.K. Chesterton was right

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 05:51:00 +0000

G.K. Chesterton was a very perceptive man.

In "The Bottomless Well," one of the stories that makes up his book The Man Who Knew Too Much, the titular character explains to a companion, in the process of laying out the solution to a mystery:

"You've got to understand one of the tricks of the modern mind, a tendency that most people obey without noticing it. In the village or suburb outside there's an inn with the sign of St. George and the Dragon. Now suppose I went about telling everybody that this was only a corruption of King George and the Dragoon. Scores of people would believe it, without any inquiry, from a vague feeling that it's probable because it's prosaic. It turns something romantic and legendary into something recent and ordinary. And that somehow makes it sound rational, though it is unsupported by reason. Of course some people would have the sense to remember having seen St. George in old Italian pictures and French romances, but a good many wouldn't think about it at all. They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority."

As long ago as Chesterton wrote it, it still holds true even today. How many things that we're told that seem to go against conventional wisdom do we take for granted without even bothering to investigate them, solely because they seem to go against conventional wisdom?

This quotation was brought to my mind today by a case in point. Every so often on the Internet, you'll see someone mention Shakespeare's famous "kill all the lawyers" quote, often in regard to some particularly outlandish court decision or lawsuit. Inevitably, someone will pipe up, "Shakespeare didn't mean that lawyers should be killed, those were bad guys and they wanted to kill the lawyers because they knew that lawyers would stand in the way of their proposed tyranny." And people nod their heads and accept this, without looking any further into the matter. Why? Perhaps partly because Shakespeare used such arcane language, they can't be bothered to go back and puzzle it out for themselves. But largely because, as Chesterton said, it "sound[s] rational, though it is unsupported by reason." The very fact that it goes against the apparent meaning of the quotation actually makes it easier to believe.

But the interesting thing is, Simson Garfinkel did go back to the original context—and found that the meaning of "kill all the lawyers" is very different from what these responses claim.

Garfinkel writes, "A very rough and simplistic modern translation would be 'When I'm the King, there'll be two cars in every garage, and a chicken in every pot' 'AND NO LAWYERS.' It's a clearly lawyer-bashing joke."

He supports this using examples from elsewhere in the play, and from places in Shakespeare's other plays as well.

And here's another example of Shakespearian dialogue not meaning what people think it does. Hamlet at one point famously tells Ophelia, "Get thee to a nunnery." There's a very widely-believed explanation going around that what Hamlet meant by "nunnery" was a "house of ill repute," which is to say, a brothel. For example, "Take Our Word For It" explains:

When Shakespeare had Hamlet tell Ophelia, "Get thee to a nunnery," he meant a "house of ill repute", but the word had only recently been recorded with that meaning. Prior to then it had referred to a community of nuns since at least the 13th century, having come to English from the hypothetical Anglo-French *nonnerie, from French nonne "nun".

Except…if you look at the context, it's not quite true. Random House's "word of the day" column says in part:

In Hamlet, the "nunnery" exchange happens just after the "To be or not to be" speech. In the space of thirty lines, Hamlet tells Ophelia five times to go to a nunnery, in slightly different forms. While it is a matter of interpretation, an honest reading strongly suggests that Hamlet is using the literal sense here. He speaks against having children ("Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners" [some critics feel that this should be punctuated as "Why, wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners," with the "Why" an interjection, not an interrogative]), tells her to distrust men ("We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us"), tells her not to marry and disparages the institution of marriage ("I say we will have no moe [more] marriage").

It makes perfect sense, under the circumstances, for Hamlet to be telling Ophelia to go to a convent and remove herself from the fleshly world. To assume that Hamlet is really referring to a brothel would go completely against the character of everything he is saying.

And the Shakespeare Online Hamlet FAQ declares:

Is "nunnery" a euphemism for a brothel in Hamlet?
It is true that "nunnery" had two very different meanings in Tudor England. Modern dictionaries only list one definition of the word, which is, of course, a convent. However, if you look up "nunnery" in a dictionary of archaic words and uses, you will see that "nunnery" did mean both a convent and a brothel in Shakespeare's day. Its meaning as a "brothel" was colloquial, though, even in Tudor England. Despite the use of "nunnery" as "house of ill repute" in Shakespearean England, there can be no question that Hamlet is referring to the standard definition of the word – a house of meditation for women who have devoted themselves to God. Only by entering a nunnery can Ophelia ensure that she will not procreate and become a breeder of sinners. As is pointed out in the Oxford edition of the play, "The injunction makes it clear that nunnery is not being used here in the sense of "brothel", as it is in "Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem" [by Thomas Nashe], for example, where a nunnery is synonymous with a college of courtesans (Nashe, II. 151-2)." Hamlet is indeed disgusted by the behavior of his mother, and takes his hostility out on innocent Ophelia, but he does not call her a whore in this particular line.

And yet, people continue to accept and promulgate the "brothel" theory, without even looking back at the original play. Why? Because claiming that the word means exactly the opposite of what it appears to mean somehow seems more rational and logical than claiming it means exactly what it says. We're predisposed to accept it because it goes against appearances.

Or, as Chesterton put it, "Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority."

Think about that the next time you hear something that seems to make sense because it goes against conventional wisdom.

Doing the Cha-Cha

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 06:21:00 +0000

Is having your own personal reference librarian for the Internet an idea whose time has come? chacha.com certainly hopes so. The premise behind this unusual search portal is that you search on a term, then are put in contact with a guide who will run the search for you, pull up the most likely results, and help you refine the search to find more of what you need. These people are paid as contractors, earning $5 an hour (or $10 an hour if they build up a really good record as excellent searchers) plus recruitment incentives for the searches they run—though a big difference between this and other pay-for-contributions sites such as the late lamented Themestream or ePinions is that guides will have the option of being paid instantly via a transfer to a debit card (with a $2 fee per transfer).

The site was only started earlier this month, and there are a few questions as to whether it will last very long. The premise reminds me a good deal of Themestream, a site from just prior to the big dot-com bust that paid writers for blogging before anyone even knew what blogging was. I actually managed to make a couple of thousand dollars from that site, due to writing two articles and getting them slashdotted. But Themestream burned through its venture capital and fizzled like a meteor hitting the ocean. Is Cha-Cha going to do the same?

Also, the search interface is slightly clunky. In order to get a guide, you should probably search on a very broad and general term, then ask the guide to refine it for you. (i.e. if you want a plot synopsis of Naruto, search on "anime" and then ask the guide for the synopsis.) The software interface for guides is a little clunky, too, consisting of a currently-Windows-only Java application that serves as a chat tool and wrapper for Internet Explorer. It's a little tricky to work with.

On the other hand, the idea of having, or serving as, an Internet reference librarian on topics of interest to oneself is a remarkably cool idea. And if $5-$10 an hour is chickenfeed, it's not bad for sitting-at-your-computer-anyway money. I'm definitely going to ride this rocket until it flames out, while hoping the idea catches on.

Incidentally, if any of my readers (yes, both of you) would like a guide invitation, please drop me a line and I'll be happy to shoot one off to you.

Edit: Also, ChaCha just appeared on Good Morning America—though it did so in the time slot that my local station pre-empts for its local news segment. Oh well, at least I can read their article about it.

MP3 Commentary Track for Robotech: "Enter Marlene"

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 00:54:00 +0000

Here is a new audio commentary track I have recorded for viewing with episode #70 of Robotech, "Enter Marlene." It is an 11-megabyte 64 kilobit mono MP3, timed for playing with the NTSC version of the Robotech Remastered release of this episode. (I suppose if you have the original DVD release, you could watch it with that also, though the timing might be a bit off for some things; if you've got a PAL DVD, you might want to use an audio editor such as Audacity to speed the track up by 4% to sync it to your disc. Or Sharecrow may actually be able to adjust the speed itself if you edit the .crow file; I'm not sure.)

To watch it, simply start your DVD player (that is, select "Enter Marlene" from the main menu and it will start playing automatically) and your MP3 player or iPod at the same time. Or you can use the Sharecrow mp3/DVD player if you watch DVDs on a Windows computer. Simply right-click the links and select "Save" to download the audio file and the .crow configuration file, save them in the same directory, then load the .crow file once you start playing the disc. When you select "Enter Marlene" from the menu, the commentary track will start playing automatically.

Audio file: here or here
.crow file: here or here

Update: I have just finished an update to this commentary track, so it is now current as of 11/14/06. The main changes were to clarify some things about the relationship between Ariel and Marlene Rush, based on what I learned by talking to Tommy Yune at the Shadow Chronicles screening on November 11th. You can actually hear the sections I changed in their original form in the commentary track excerpt segment that I did for RDF Underground episode #51.

Here are some links to things I mention in the commentary.

Stan Bundy's "Early Return" essay, "Palimpsests"

Peter Walker's "Late Return" essay (updated slightly by me, with his permission)

Rook Bartley's red Alpha, with Jupiter Base logo visible on wings

New entries elsewhere: Teleread, Codex

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 23:26:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 14:33:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 05:14:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 19:44:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 20:16:00 +0000

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.

Review: Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 19:57:00 +0000

A version of this entry first appeared in episode #42 of the RDF Underground podcast.

As you probably already know, there have been several significantly different recountings of what happened to the Robotech Expeditionary Force between the end of the Macross Saga and the end of the New Generation. First there were the Sentinels movie, and Macek's original script treatments for the rest of the show as recounted in Robotech Art III. Then there were Jack McKinney's novels, which diverged from Macek's story further and further as time went on. Then there were John and Jason Waltrip's comic book adaptations of Jack McKinney's novels, which diverged from the novels further and further as time went on—but only got about 80% done before a change in comic book company licensees terminated the project. And there was also the Palladium Sentinels RPG.

All these different versions of Sentinels history share a number of common elements—but the one common to all of them is that they are no longer 'canonical,' if indeed they ever were. In making Shadow Chronicles, Harmony Gold consulted with fans to nail down all the necessary elements of a new continuity, starting over with a clean slate so they could make sure that Shadow Chronicles was internally consistent with the rest of the series—including the parts that hadn't ever been told. The new changes would leave fans wondering: just what parts of what they read "really happened" and what parts had been retconned into burrito hallucinations. Enter Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles.

The original plan had been to release Shadow Chronicles in late 2005 or early 2006. With that schedule in mind, Harmony Gold commissioned a five-issue comic book series that would cover the REF side of events immediately leading up to the Shadow Chronicles. With story treatment by Tommy Yune, who also wrote the story treatment behind the Shadow Chronicles movie, and scripting by the Waltrip brothers, this series would retell and rewrite the events of the last portion of the Sentinels saga for a bit less fan confusion. And so the comic book came out, proudly emblazoned with "The prelude to the upcoming DVD release!" on the front cover. And then the Shadow Chronicles DVD…failed to materialize.

But let's look at Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles anyway. A few spoilers for the broad plot points follow.

The miniseries begins sometime in an estimated 2041 or 2042 by the official timeline with a gavel bang, a gunshot, a scream, and a body. Shortly afterward, military police, Rick Hunter, and Jean Grant burst into an empty office with the goal of arresting General T.R. Edwards, who has been discovered to be a traitor to the REF. What they find is the body of Lynn-Kyle, Minmei's cousin, dressed in the uniform of Edwards's own Ghost Squadron—and no Edwards. Rick realizes that if Kyle was here, Minmei had to be also, and Edwards must have absconded with her.

After crippling the SDF-3 and critically injuring Lisa Hayes, Edwards and the Regent escape to Optera with an experimental starship, an Invid Brain, and squadrons of invisible Shadow Fighters that the REF is unable to counter. And, of course, Minmei. The rest of the series chronicles the REF unlocking the research that Edwards didn't quite manage to destroy, taking the fight to Edwards on Optera, then preparing to journey back to earth with the experimental Neutron-S Missiles that Edwards created in tow. However, as the rest of the fleet is leaving, a test-firing of one of the missiles produces results that were not anticipated—or at least, not foreseen.

The last page of the last issue ends on a cliffhanger with the triumphant caption, "The Shadow Chronicles begin!" (Except they don't, actually, but we'll leave that for later.)

Because I don't like going out on a downer ending, I'll talk about what Prelude got wrong first, and then talk about what it got right.

The fundamental problem with Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles can be symbolized by its title: it's not a complete work on its own. Rather than taking a name in its own right—say, something like Sentinels: The Fall of T.R. Edwards—or even borrowing the name of one of the novels that it covers, Rubicon (and pretending the previous comic book miniseries by that name hadn't happened), this is a work that defines itself as a shadow—pardon the pun—of another work. What if Tolkien had called The Hobbit "Prelude to Lord of the Rings" instead? What if Star Wars: A New Hope had been "Prelude to the Empire Strikes Back"?

You'd expect that with a title like "Prelude to…" it would at least be written with the goal of explaining to the average potential viewer just what was going on. You know, the person who was born after Robotech stopped being shown, and doesn't have the time to watch an 85-episode TV show for the sake of a two-hour movie?

But you'd be wrong. Not only does Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles do nearly nothing for someone who's never seen any Robotech before, it even does very little for anyone who's seen Robotech but not read Sentinels. Even someone who's seen both Robotech and the Sentinels movie might be lost. Prelude starts in media res, with only lip service paid to the 85-episode TV series and no explanation of who these characters are and why they're significant. Robotech fans, who will know who at least some of these characters are, will still be left wondering things like:

What have Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes been doing for those thirty years since the end of the Macross saga?

What are Lynn-Kyle and Minmei doing on Tirol?

Why is Lynn-Kyle in a Ghost Squadron uniform? Why did Edwards shoot him? Why did he kidnap Minmei?

Who is Edwards? Why did he turn traitor? How did the REF find out?

Where did Edwards get the Invid brain?

Who is this Jack Baker person? Vince Grant? Jean Grant?

Who are the Sentinels? Why are they so willing to help the REF? Did the REF ever do anything for them?

And that's just from the first few pages. Some of this is explained later on, but by then it's too little too late, and even Robotech fans may be too confused by the time they get there. It's like tuning in for the last two hours of a ten-hour TV miniseries. Heck, I've read all the Sentinels novels and The End of the Circle (you may, if you wish, feel sorry for me) but it's been so long that I still have trouble following some parts of it.

But let's assume that you're totally up to snuff on your Sentinels reading and know everything that's going on here. What you'll find on reading is that Prelude discards a lot of the good elements of the Sentinels series—for instance, having apparently liberated their worlds without help from the REF, the Sentinels aliens are reduced to standing around providing ship-building expertise, mysterious mystical advice, or pretty looks—while keeping some of the hokier ones, such as the cartoonishly villainous T.R. Edwards complete with his "Phantom of the Optera" half-mask and obsession with Minmei. I can just see it now. [[In the podcast version of this, I inserted at this point audio clips of "Sing, my angel of music!" from the Phantom of the Opera, Minmei singing, "To be in loooove…" and then a male scream sound effect. —Ed.]]

Though, oddly enough, the crush is never actually made explicit in this miniseries, which could make the manner of his eventual defeat a little puzzling to those who don't know about it. The manner of Edwards's defeat and demise has been somewhat improved over Macek's "original" version, which involved a psychic battle between him and Rick Hunter, but is still a trifle cliche'd and annoying.

And Edwards isn't the only cartoonish thing. Several anime/manga cliches make their way into the comics' pages, including REF bridge officers with big round super-deformed "anime-surprise" eyes and sweatdrops…and even Invid Enforcers with sweatdrops. Yes, that's right. Invid Enforcers…with sweatdrops. I think the less said about that, the better. There are also some Schwarzenegger-action-movieish stunts—in particular, a certain Cyclone ride by Vince Grant comes to mind—that are a little bit hard to buy.

Also hard to buy are some of the plot points. Admiral Rick Hunter seems to be an adherent of the James T. Kirk school of admiralty, where the higher rank you are, the more rank you can pull on people who think you should be leading from the rear rather than the front. Not only does he personally lead the ground assault on Optera, at one point he even jokingly pulls rank on Vince Grant, who feels that as the captain, he should be the last one into their escape ship. "I'm an Admiral. So move it, soldier!" It's also a little hard to believe that Hunter would be so willing to authorize the use, even as a last resort, of the Neutron S missiles—doomsday weapons built by his arch-nemesis that they know nothing about and that haven't even been tested yet.

There's also the minor problem that, focussed on an ensemble cast as it is, Prelude never really has time to give any one person all that much attention or characterization. Rick Hunter, Vince Grant, and T.R. Edwards probably get the most attention; beside them, everyone else is relegated to second-fiddle status. Even Lisa Hayes only gets a dozen or so lines through the entire five-issue run, and as for Jack Baker or Karen Penn, who were intended to become the Sentinels series's main human characters? Forget about it.

Finally, and most ominously, there's a hefty dose of Haydonite mysticism about, with the faceless Veidt hovering around dispensing fragments of obscure wisdom and chatting to some ominously-unidentified entity. To think I'd almost managed to forget about Haydon, the planet-sized god-mcguffin whose appearance in End of the Circle was so annoying that I've mentally blocked exactly what he did. The implications of the mysticism-drenched final scene don't bode too well for Shadow Chronicles, either.

But it's not all bad. For a Robotech fan who has at least some idea of what's going on, Prelude does have some attraction. It's fun to see many of the old familiar faces again, even if some of them are almost completely unrecognizable. Rick, Lisa, Lang, Louie, Dana…even Minmei gets a cameo, though we never really get a good look at her face. The Sentinels of old are around, too, though in a much-reduced role from the original Sentinels fiction. Max and Miriya are conspicuously absent, though they do rate a mention in Issue 5. It must also provide a good sense of closure to fans of the Sentinels comic books to get to see them completed—sort of—after all this time.

Some of the plot points, and congruences to Robotech, are interesting, if a little troubling. One nice touch is the way Edwards plans to ascend to a higher plane to continue his evolution (as the Regess would later do successfully), but is potted by a reflex cannon shot before he can. And Janice Em refers to the test-detonation of the Neutron-S missile as "a terrible error" using an identical phrase to the Regess's description at the end of Robotech. It does make one curious to see Shadow Chronicles to see if anything comes of that, doesn't it?

The artwork is nicely done, providing a smooth transition from the old Sentinels character designs to the new in cases such as Janice Em's where the change was substantial. It's interesting getting to watch Rick Hunter go from having dark hair to having white hair, and seeing old and new ship and mecha designs in color and in action. Omar Dogan, the artist, has a good talent for drawing both people and mecha. Hopefully he gets many more Robotech assignments in the future.

If all had gone according to Harmony Gold's plan, the last issue of Prelude would have been followed quickly by a DVD or other release of Shadow Chronicles, so fans would have been able to go from reading the last page of the comic book to watching the first minute of the movie and finding out what happened next. But now it's been over six months without any trace of Shadow Chronicles.

It's really too bad that all this time couldn't have been used more productively. Instead of a 5-issue miniseries, we could have had an entirely new Robotech comic book series. Call it, say, Robotech Revisited, or Robotech: Points of View, and aim it at everyone rather than just fans. In the first issue or two, retell the Macross Saga story. Perhaps tell it through the eyes of one of the Sentinels or Shadow Chronicles main characters—say, Jack Baker or Karen Penn or maybe even T.R. Edwards. This way you both fill in newbies on what-all happened, and give old-timers a different look at the same events—and you give the storyteller character some additional characterization too.

Follow this up with an abbreviated retconned version of The Sentinels, through the eyes of its participants, a different participant each issue. Show what "really" happened and what didn't all the way through, tell us who those people are. When Dana Sterling and Louie Nichols arrive on Space Station Liberty in the aftermath of the Robotech Masters saga, have them tell about how it all happened. Maybe have one of Sue Graham's reports reprise New Generation, leaving the last two episodes to be covered in the Shadow Chronicles movie. And then finish up with the story told in this five-issue Prelude. That would have prepared all the readers for what they were going to see in Shadow Chronicles, and perhaps have generated new interest in the original Robotech as well as Shadow Chronicles buzz.

Perhaps if they had realized how long it would be without a distributor back then, they could have done something like that, instead of what we did get.

As it is now, I'm very worried about how successful Shadow Chronicles will be. In order to succeed, it can't just be a good movie. It has to be a good movie that can be understood and enjoyed as easily by newcomers to the Robotech saga as by old-timers. There can't be an entry requirement of watching an 85-episode TV series with mediocre dubbing and dated animation in order to get it, or people just won't watch—and the movie can't be successful on fan buzz alone. This is a tricky balancing act, since many potential viewers will think they won't be able to follow it without watching the original, so they just won't bother watching it. Serenity flopped at the box office for this very reason, and it only had 13 episodes of a recent Joss Whedon TV series behind it.

Now, granted, I've heard an interview from the writer for the TV movie—not the Waltrips—where he talked about using events from the last two episodes of the TV series to recap what was happening for new viewers. I know that Tommy Yune only did the story treatment, not the actual script. But still, I'm worried at how nobody at Harmony Gold who green-lighted Prelude realized that it was not going to serve the purpose a prelude should.

All in all, Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles is just that: a prelude to the Shadow Chronicles movie, aimed mainly at hard-core fans. It has good artwork and decent writing marred by only a few problems, but casual or non-fans will probably find it more confusing than enlightening, and the implications of the Haydonite mysticism that surrounds its ending make me moderately pessimistic about what might happen in Shadow Chronicles.

For more information, a fascinating page-by-page fan analysis of the Prelude miniseries, comparing it to elements from the TV show, novels, and comics, can be found linked in the sidebar of Roboblog III: The Odyssey.

Books whose author did not write them, redux

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 15:08:00 +0000

It's been some time since my post about Amazon, Lori Jareo, and Princess and Wolf—probably my most-trafficked journal entry ever—came out, and it occurs to me that I really owe what little readership I have left a follow-up. Not on the Jareo thing per se—as there's really not much to follow up on there—but on the Princess and Wolf affair.

Not too long after I wrote that entry, I went down to my local college library and sat down with their Books in Print terminal. I entered the ISBN from Princess and Wolf, 5558607068, and got this:

Search Results: No match found.
ISBN/UPC: 5558607068; Status: In Print, Forthcoming; Format: Book

Then I looked up the prefix—5-558, the part of the ISBN that identifies publisher—and got a surprise. Just when I'd thought the saga of the the book whose alleged author had never heard of it couldn't get any weirder, it turned out that the ISBN belonged to a Soviet publishing house who had only ever published one book.

Title:	Signs of the Times - PPD
Author:	Roger E. Herman
Publication Date:	August 1998
Publisher:	Sigma-F
Market:	United States
ISBN:	5-558-49909-5
ISBN 13:	978-5-558-49909-4
Binding Format:	Paper Text

Publisher/Distributor Information

Sigma-F

ISBN Prefix(s): 5-558

Type of Company:	Publisher
Status:	ACTIVE

Editorial Mailing Address:
Abramcevskaja, 3-165
Moskva, 127576 RUS

Not long afterward, the copy of Princess and Wolf I had ordered from Amazon arrived, and it turned out to be, as I had expected, The Princess and the Wolf, a romance novel by Karen Kay. And I made another discovery. The ISBN inside the book itself was 0-7394-4227-9, the book's original number. The 5-558 number was printed on a label that was pasted over the ISBN bar code on the book's dust jacket. And things started becoming clearer.

You see, ISBNs are expensive, but you can only purchase them from the source in huge blocks. I forget just how many numbers are in a block (100? 500?), but there are substantially more than any small publisher will ever need—especially if they've only ever published one book. What is a small publisher to do with the rest? Resell them to other people who only need a few ISBNs.

Given the paste-over label and the cheap price of the book, it occurred to me that the most likely explanation was that a bunch of overstocked copies (copies that bookstores are able to return and publishers are contractually obligated to buy back) were bought by an overstock vendor, who also bought excess ISBNs from Sigma to paste on so that the book could be sold without confusing it with its more expensive non-overstock self in bookstores' inventory tracking systems. Somewhere along the way, someone mis-entered author and title information, and the error propagated from the source to all the e-tailers who based their catalogs on the source. We'll probably never know for sure exactly what happened, but it seems like a reasonable supposition.

Not long after the earlier journal entry, Amazon corrected its page for the book to have the correct information. I went ahead and used Amazon's return option to return the book unread, citing the incorrect information to get free shipping back. And that's the story.

Robotech vs Mospeada Continued

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 01:05:00 +0000

A version of this entry originally appeared as part of RDF Underground podcast #40.

In my last entry about Genesis Climber Mospeada, I focussed on all the minute ways the first episode differed from the pilot dub and the Robotech episode. Now that I've watched the rest of the series, I'd like to talk about some of the ways the shows differ in broader strokes.

Out of the three segments of Robotech, Mospeada is probably the one that was messed with the least. It wasn't cut up into little pieces, zoomed in and airbrushed, and shuffled around as Southern Cross was, and it didn't have chunks cut out of it to drop in footage from another series as Macross did. For the most part, you see the exact same thing on the screen in both Mospeada and Robotech: New Generation, barring odd cuts here and there for time, violence, or nudity constraints.

But the behind-the-screen themes are often somewhat different, as well as some of the treatments of the characters.

As originally conceived by its Japanese creators at Tatsunoko, Mospeada was to focus on an ensemble of seven characters who make up a small resistance group that journeys toward Reflex Point, each of whom has his own reasons for going. This was an intentional homage to the Akira Kurosawa film, The Seven Samurai, which involved a group of lone samurai with different agendas who banded together for a single task. The Seven Samurai would later be remade into one of the greatest western movies ever made—The Magnificent Seven—and many other Kurosawa samurai movies would form the basis for Spaghetti westerns that followed, such as Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name trilogy.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that Mospeada's creators chose to utilize so many elements from westerns throughout the show—including one track called "Sasurai" which sounds an awful lot like the theme to the old TV and radio show Gunsmoke. The influence is more obvious in some episodes than others—such as the way the showdown in episode three takes place at the "KO Corral," or how the village where Jim Warston (rendered in ADV's subtitles as "Jim Austin"), or Lunk, tries to find Alfred would be right at home in any Clint Eastwood man-with-no-name movie—but it's there in even the little touches, too. Stick Bernard's band of freedom fighters rides motorcycles, placing them close to nature in the same way as cowboys who rode horses. Jim Warston's utility jeep stands in for a covered wagon. Even the Mospeada armor's footsteps sound like spurs jingling, an effect that is mostly lost with the Robotech remastered edition's new sound mix.

In Robotech, the Invid have come to Earth because this is the last remaining place in the universe where their food supply can be found. The idea of evolving themselves to adapt to live on Earth is more or less a side issue. But in Mospeada, the situation is quite different: evolution is the Inbit's only goal, and the quest that drives them to journey from planet to planet. They invade world after world to study its life forms in depth in their quest to seek out the "perfect" form of life, or to become it themselves, and Earth is only the latest planet in their galaxy-spanning quest. This is what the "genesis climber" in the series title means—the Inbit seek to climb the ladder of evolution, going beyond their genesis to a new higher state of being.

In order to study Terran life in its peak condition, the Inbit don't just create evolution laboratory pits, they actually clean up and purify the world with their superior life-based technology. They restore the ozone layer and natural levels of carbon dioxide, recreate plant and animal species lost to extinction, and destroy and neutralize all traces of nuclear power and nuclear weapons—here you see the Japanese preoccupation with environmentalism and the A-bomb that dates all the way back to the end of World War II. By the time they move on at the show's end, Earth has been restored to a largely primeval state—leaving mankind, whose HBT fuel is much safer for the environment than old fossil fuels or nuclear energy, in possession of a much cleaner and healthier world.

Ask any Robotech fan who the "main character" of New Generation is, the way Rick Hunter is for Macross and Dana Sterling is for Robotech Masters. Odds are they'll say Scott Bernard. But the funny thing is, according to the interviews in the booklet bundled with Mospeada, the Japanese seemed to see Ray—who we know as Rand—as being the main character. (Of course, it may simply be an error in the translation and they mean to say he is one of the main characters.) They refer to making him and Mint (Annie) cheerful types, to keep things from getting too depressing as the series progresses and the struggle for survival grows more severe.

What's more, Ray—and others like him, who were born and raised in the thirty-three years the Inbit have occupied the planet—were born with a sort of natural telepathy, apparently due to exposure to Inbit telepathic fields from the time of conception. Although this is not made an explicit plot point in most of the series, it does explain how Ray is quick to intuit out the purpose of the Inbit genesis pit with the dinosaurs, how Mint is briefly possessed by the Inbit Refless by the campfire, the significance of Rand's Viking fever dreams in the cave, and how nobody seems to get too suspicious when Aisha (Marlene) is affected by Inbit communications and deaths; Ray and the other native Earthers apparently take occasionally picking up Inbit mental communication signals for granted.

But now that we've covered differences behind the camera, let's look at differences in front of the camera.

Most obviously, each episode of Mospeada is a couple of minutes longer than it was in Robotech. This is partly due to American TV having more commercials per hour than Japanese TV, and partly due to a need to cut some things for the somewhat more rigorous American broadcast standards.

But what exactly got cut? Not as much as you might think, and certainly almost nothing that changes the story in any significant way. The cuts are more often a nip and tuck of a few seconds here and there than they are lengthy deletions—and as a result, the differences usually won't leap out at you on viewing Mospeada, especially if it's been a while since you've seen the original Robotech.

The main things to go were long establishing shots, signs and banners (especially fractured English or references to the Japanese names of renamed characters), Japanese gestures such as the V-for-victory sign, characters making silly faces (often after getting hit on the head), bits of conversations that weren't needed for the English script, flashbacks to footage we saw a short time before, parts of Yellow's songs, nudity, and blood. A lot of these clips can be seen, unsubtitled and using the un-remastered footage, on Elements of Robotechnology (the extras bundled with the Legacy and Protoculture collections) disc 7.

Some of these clips were put back in for the "Remastered" edition of Robotech, but there were only so many they could add back. The decisions on what scenes to cut had been made before dialogue was recorded, and getting the original cast back in to do additional voiceovers was not an option—so if there wasn't any English dialogue for a clip that involved speech, it didn't make the cut. Thus, the only way to see all of these clips in their original context is to watch the Mospeada DVDs.

In interviews with Greg Snegoff and other writers for the original Robotech TV show, the writers talk about the dialogue for the original Japanese anime being sometimes almost comically bad, so they ended up having to throw it out entirely and rewrite the shows from the ground up. I have to admit that sometimes I can see what they mean, but only in rare instances, such as Jonathan Wolf turning traitor because he needed to stay alive long enough to "get his power back" to face the Inbit one last time. The funny thing is, though, comparing the episodes of Robotech to the subtitled episodes of Mospeada, the conversations still often end up being remarkably similar—probably about 90 to 95% faithful in most episodes, assuming the subtitles are correct. The differences are often in small details, as when Mint or Annie decides that Jim or Lunk is no longer the man of her dreams. In Mospeada, Mint says she thought Jim had a house, and she doesn't want to marry a vagabond. In Robotech, Annie says she's decided never to marry a soldier. And of course Protoculture is HBT, a hydrogen-based fuel that isn't manufactured by the Inbit, but is tightly controlled by them because of its use in military hardware.

However, Robotech often adds dialogue where Mospeada doesn't. This commonly happens with flashbacks, as when Rand realizes the Invid can sense protoculture reactions, or Lunk thinks back to when his friend died. Robotech has the characters talk over the flashback, explaining it, whereas Mospeada is content to let the footage do the explaining and have the dialogue before or afterward clarify it. Furthermore, Robotech's characters are a lot more talky in general—especially the Regess, who can be heard saying something practically every moment an Invid is on the screen. It may come as a surprise the first time you view Mospeada and hear absolute silence when the Inbit are flying around. Also, some conversations that incorporate long, thoughtful silences have no silence at all in the Robotech version.

Still, it's hard to get too irritated at Robotech for adding all this extra speech given that it meant they could have the characters say whatever needed to be said without having to worry about matching lip flaps. Still, at least one scene was rendered eerily more effective by the lack of dialogue—the episode-ending footage of the Inbit surrounding Jonathan Wolf's town after Wolf had been killed and could no longer buy its safety.

In regard to character treatments, most of the characters in Mospeada are fundamentally the same as they are in Robotech, even if their names are different; however, Mospeada deals with a couple of them very differently than Robotech did. For example, Mint is not just exuberant and love-struck like Annie; she's also prone to babble nonsense words when excited or surprised. Series composition designer Yasuhiro Tomita calls these interjections "cries of the heart," words that come from Mint's soul without conveying any logical meaning. He says, "This means Mint's words cannot be a means to communicate with other people. They are the words to express feelings of joy and anger straight from the heart."

The other character who gets a surprisingly different treatment is Yellow Belmont, aka Lancer/Yellow Dancer.

We've all heard Cam Clarke's portrayal of a slightly effeminate male voice, which doesn't change much from when he's being Lancer to when he's being Yellow Dancer—and Steve Bradley's not-feminine-at-all singing voice. It is hard to imagine either one of these voices fooling for a single moment anybody who wasn't suffering from a severe case of heatstroke—especially since, as Robotech viewers, we've heard this voice before coming out of Max Sterling's mouth.

Mospeada, on the other hand, uses a remarkably different treatment. After Stick tells Yellow Belmont he has no room in his party for another woman, Yellow says, still using the female voice that she has been using all through the episode, "Then I'll become a man."

Then she goes over to her jeep and strips, removes her makeup, and then turns around and reveals that "she" is really a man. Yellow then says, in a deep masculine voice, "I am Yellow Belmont. I am really a man. Let me go with you to the Inbit's headquarters in North America."

And Ray's poor little heart is broken into a dozen pieces.

That's right—Mospeada uses two different voice actors for Yellow—an actual female voice for his bishonen side, and a deep masculine voice for his male persona. It's a startling portrayal, and one that I really wish Robotech had kept. Michael Bradley is a great singer, and Lancer's songs are probably the best music Robotech has to offer, but still, the all-male Yellow Dancer in Robotech completely spoils what should be a shocking moment for the audience at the end of episode 3. We should have no idea that this hot lounge-singer is really a guy until he reveals his true nature—but Michael's and Cam's voices give it away right off the bat. And it makes the entire rest of the cast look like idiots that they couldn't tell from his voice that he was a guy in drag.

Amusingly enough, Michael Bradley wasn't told about Lancer's dual nature when he was called upon to write and perform his music. In the Robotech 20th Anniversary Edition Soundtrack liner notes, Bradley writes:

If I recall correctly, [Lancer] was described as a kind of "Top Gun" jet pilot type of guy (not sure if that was very accurate). No one ever mentioned that he also wore a bra and pretended to be a woman when he was performing as a rock star. If I had known that, I probably would have sung the vocals a little more feminine (I was also an actor, after all) or, at the very least, I would have dressed as a woman in the studio. :o)

Aside from making for a better and more believable cover identity, this also allows Yellow to use his female voice for teasing the other members of the group, such as when he's taking a shower with that pierced bucket and tells Jim Warston to stop peeking. It's a much more believable portrayal than Robotech's.

All in all, watching Genesis Climber Mospeada is a pretty neat experience; it's almost like getting to see Robotech for the first time all over again. And at only $25 at The Right Stuf dot com, Robotech fans have no excuse for not having it on their own DVD shelves.

Episode Comparison: Robotech New Generation vs Mospeada Episode #1

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 14:33:00 +0000

(A version of this review, with audio excerpts from the show, originally appeared as part of one of the RDF Underground podcast. Not sure which one, I think maybe in the #34-#36 range.)

As you may have guessed from my Internet handle, I’m a big fan of a TV show called Robotech. Robotech is an 85-episode daily-syndication TV series from the 1990s that was originally formed by merging three separate and unrelated weekly-syndication animé (Japanese animation) TV series. This has been a bone of contention in animé fandom ever since, as it became fashionable to hate Robotech and its creator Carl Macek for this act of “butchery” once he was no longer the sole purveyor of Japanese animation to the western world. Much of this hate comes from fans of the Super Dimensional Fortress Macross series, the most well-known part of Robotech, and the only part that was successful in its own right over in Japan. They seem to feel that Robotech traded on Macross's success, and maybe they do have a point.

But for the two less famous TV series, Super Dimensional Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada, inclusion into Robotech was probably the best thing that could have happened to them. Mospeada was only barely successful when it originally aired, and Southern Cross was such a monumental flop that it was actually cancelled halfway through its planned run—something that normally just wasn't done for animé TV series. Southern Cross and Mospeada would probably have passed unnoticed into obscurity, not even considered worth bothering to fansub, if it hadn't been that they were incorporated into America's first smash hit animé TV series.

Instead, twenty years after they would otherwise have been forgotten, they were completely remastered so that a remastered version of Robotech could be made. And, as a convenient side-effect, box sets of Southern Cross and Mospeada were released for the enjoyment of fans of the original animé. Animé vendor rightstuf.com is offering them for $25 each—about a third of their list price. That's less than you would pay for the Robotech version.

The New Generation was always my favorite part of Robotech. Giant transforming fighter planes were nice and all, but they always seemed a bit…inaccessible. It was hard to imagine myself piloting one, but very easy to imagine what it would be like to ride a motorcycle that wrapped itself around me to become a suit of powered body armor. And an earth-based resistance operation, and all those ruins to explore, were more exciting ideas to me than those far-off space battles. Now, after all this time, I finally have the chance to watch the original version and see how it holds up by comparison.

In light of that, I decided to examine the first episode of Mospeada, "Prelude to the Attack." Thanks to the Robotech extras discs, we have two different ways to do that, even if you don't count the Robotech version of the episode: the first episode from the boxed set, AND the unaired Harmony Gold pilot episode from back when they had planned to do straight Macross and Mospeada dubs.

First off, let's look at the quality. The subtitled Mospeada from the boxed set uses the same remastered video footage used in the remastered version of Robotech, and looks quite crisp and sharp. The audio track is a clean, good-sounding stereo, without much directionality in the dialogue. It doesn't have the roomshaking surrounds of the Robotech Remastered version, but for an early-80s TV show, it still sounds pretty good. The Harmony Gold dub, on the other hand, looks and sounds pretty bad by comparison. It lacks the opening and ending credits and the episode title, and appears to be a transfer to DVD of an old videotape recording of a telecine from unremastered film. But still, as the old saying goes about a dog walking on its hind legs, the remarkable thing about this dub is not so much that it be done well, as that it's done at all.

In terms of dialogue, the dub seems to be about 75 to 80 percent faithful to the translation as given in the subtitled version. A lot of little things remain the same, a few major things don't. One thing is that the main character in Mospeada is named Stick Bernard, and the dubbed version of the episode "sticks" with this name. However, in the subtitled version, Harmony Gold and ADV chose to render it as Stig, S-T-I-G. Stig is actually a common Scandinavian forename, and seems to go reasonably well with the Germanic surname of Bernard, even if it may not necessarily be what was originally intended. The dub also called a character originally named Ray "Randy," which was shortened to Rand in Robotech. And Marlene is referred to in the dub as "Marlin." But if you think that's bad, in the booklet of translated interviews and articles that was bundled with the DVD set, she is referred to as "Marine".

The Harmony Gold Mospeada dub seen here predates the decision to make Robotech. As such, it features some different casting and writing decisions than the "Invid Invasion" episode that we all know so well. In fact, about the only actor in the same role in both the Robotech and Mospeada versions is Mike Reynolds, better known as Dolza and Senator Russo, who plays the shuttle captain. It's a little startling to hear Melanie McQueen—Lisa Hayes and Marlene—providing the voice of the Regess (or Refless, as Mospeada calls her). And Cam Clarke—Max Sterling and Lancer—is also recognizable as one of the shuttle's flight crew.

But the real kicker is where they have Dan Woren, aka Roy Fokker. Some folks who've seen the Macross Plus dub felt that Dan was miscast there as the voice of teenaged aerospace design genius Yan Neumann. But in the Mospeada dub, he is cast as Stick Bernard—by comparison, Yan Neumann was who Dan was born to play!

One of the first things you notice when you watch the episode is that Stick and Marlin were interrupted in the middle of their love chat in the corridor by another crewmember, who dropped down out of a hatch in the ceiling and told them to get a room. If you're positive you don't remember that from Robotech, you would be right. American TV had more commercials per hour than Japanese, so they had to lose some footage from each episode to fit into the timeframe. It probably would have come back for the remastered version of Robotech, except they never recorded the dialogue for it in the Robotech dub so didn't have anything to put there. Mospeada's the only place you'll find it.

The voice acting in the Mospeada dub is by and large not quite up to the standards seen in the Robotech dub of the same episode. By the time they did that dub, the actors had been working on the Robotech project for months and gotten in a lot more practice. Here, they more often seem to be phoning their performance in. For instance, Dan Woren's acting when Marlene's shuttle goes down is particularly flat; it detracts from the emotional impact the scene is supposed to have. In short, the dub is fun to watch to see the original casting choices for the characters…but it's also a little painful. The subbed version is better for casual viewing.

But let's move on from the dubbing to the episode itself.

The music for Mospeada is very different from the Robotech soundtrack. It has a bit of a harder edge, and more of an authentic jazz feel to it. You may be surprised to learn that the composer and arranger for the instrumental music is none other than Joe Hisaishi, better-known for scoring all of Hayao Miyazaki's movies since Nausicaa. Nonetheless, there's a track or two that sounds like it might have at least indirectly inspired some of the Robotech music—and that's not even counting the reuse of the "lonely soldier boy" phrase from the opening titles.

Quite a few differences between the Mospeada and Robotech storyline are seen in this episode. The biggest difference is that the Invid—or the Inbit, as they're called in the original series; I guess Invid was easier to pronounce—have been occupying Earth for some thirty-three years as of the beginning of the TV series—not just the dozen or so years as from Robotech. Instead of a returning Expeditionary Force, mankind is attacking back from Mars Base, the colony outpost where many of mankind's survivors fled. Instead of being born "in deep space on a Robotech ship," the members of the returning shuttle fleet were born on Mars. The Alpha and Beta fighters are the Legioss and Tread, and the Cyclone is the Mospeada—Military Operation Soldier Protection Emergency Aviation Dive Auto. As originally conceived, the show was hardly going to feature the Legioss and Tread at all, and be more of a Seven Samurai with transforming motorcycles—which is why the show is named after the motorcycles. But the creators came under pressure to make it more like Macross, and so gave the planes a bigger role.

But back to the episode differences. In Mospeada, when the shuttle goes down, it's not because they're re-entering too fast, as in Robotech—it's because the atmosphere is thicker than it should have been at that altitude. At the time, they think it's some kind of Inbit weapon—but the actual reason is that the Inbit, being super-environmentalists, had returned the atmosphere to its original state before mankind had depleted the ozone layer and caused the greenhouse effect and so forth. This is a change that I kind of wish Robotech had kept, as it makes the Invid into more of a force to be reckoned with rather than placing the blame on the captain's incompetence. And Stick doesn't believe that Marlene is dead, at least at first—he says to the locket, "If you're alive, I'll find you." Interestingly enough, in the Mospeada storyline, she may actually be alive after all, judging by one of the articles in that translated interview booklet…

The most interesting difference to me comes when Stick encounters the desert at the edge of the forest. In Robotech, Scott is excited to see it because it reminds him of home (though why he'd know how vast Venus was, or be homesick for a "Martian landscape," when his home was Tirol or a Robotech ship is never adequately explained), and then as he drives across has the internal monologue about ghosts. In the Mospeada *dub*, he's worried about the heat, and resolves to think happy thoughts of Marlene to help see him through it. And so he imagines Marlene there, babbling to him about the wedding. In the Mospeada sub, he is impressed at how big the desert is, then drives across it without speaking—and Marlene appears, floats around the bike, and wafts away in complete silence (apart from the soundtrack). Of the three different interpretations of this sequence, this one is definitely the most effective; it gives me goosebumps just watching it.

In fact, there are a lot of places where excess dialogue was added in Robotech or the Mospeada dub. More in Robotech, though. For instance, when Stick saves Ray from the Inbit, he doesn't say a word from the time Rand sees him up to when he fires his last missile—unlike in Robotech, where he keeps up a steady stream of banter as he hops around and blows the Invid away. It's a little hard to get used to, but after a watch-through or two, the subtitled version proves that less is definitely more.

In both Robotech and the dub, Stick or Scott comes off as decidedly unfriendly to Ray or Rand, mistaking him for an inattentive soldier and grabbing at him in anger. In the sub, though, he seems to know Ray is not a soldier right off the bat—maybe it's the clothes—and just grabs him in order to get his attention away from the cool new bike. Consequently, in the episode of Robotech Scott seems to come off as a little self-important, even a bit of a showoff; but in Mospeada Stick's a more focused soldier.

It's going to be interesting to compare the other differences from Robotech to Mospeada as the show goes on. The one problem I really have in watching it is that thinking of everything as a part of Robotech, and placing it in relation to the other two series, is so ingrained in my mind that it's hard to separate the unique and different background that Mospeada has. Guess I'll just have to work on that.

At any rate, the Super Dimensional Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada DVD sets are being sold by Right Stuf for $25 each. Buy them both and you get free shipping. At that price, every Robotech fan should have them in his collection.

Review: Tempus Fugit, by Lawrence Lee Rowe, Jr.

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 01:08:00 +0000

The title, Tempus Fugit, has a double meaning…because not only does "time fly" for its protagonists, it also flies for the reader who turns its pages.

I do have to start off by admitting that it is regrettable that it was advertised by spamming. [Note: Since writing this review, I have heard from the author. He noted that the spam was sent without his authorization by an overzealous employee, who is now an ex-employee.] Indeed, I found myself in a bit of a moral quandary as to whether or not to purchase it when I found the solicitation in my email box. On the one hand, I intensely dislike rewarding spammers; on the other, the premise was completely fascinating, and one about which I had often wondered, and if not for the spam I would never have heard of the book. And at least it wasn't another ad for prescription pharmaceuticals of uncertain provenance and even less certain spelling.

To resolve this quandary, I searched Google for reviews, figuring that if it got good reviews, I would spring for it; if it was decried as tripe, I would not. As reviews of people who actually read the book were uniformly positive, I was now insatiably curious, and so I sent in my order right away. Now, having obtained and finished the book, I am very glad indeed that I compromised my principles a tiny bit just this once.

The premise on which Tempus Fugit begins is that three of our Founding Fathers—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin—are duplicated out of time by some unknown agency, a year or two before their respective deaths, and deposited together in the modern-day United States at the Mount Rushmore monument with $100,000 in seed money. The story follows their adventures as they learn to cope with and try to blend into this brave new world and find answers to the primary question on their minds: what sort of nation has their fledgling Republic grown up to be? They also wonder about the identity of the strange agency that brought them to this new time, and what its purpose might have been, though answers to that question are less forthcoming.

Tempus Fugit is quite well-written, structurally and dramatically. The prose is neither amateurish nor impenetrable. Even the 18th-century-idiomatic dialogue of the Founding Fathers is surprisingly readable; where context does not suffice to illuminate meaning, the author provides convenient footnotes to explain obsolescent usages or historical contexts. In fact, there is so much historical information that the book sometimes seems like 2/3 novel and 1/3 political history textbook. However, it manages to present the history very naturalistically, only resorting to footnotes when character dialogue does not cover it completely.

Reading the book, one has the sense that Rowe put a great deal of research into its writing, learning our Founding Fathers inside and out. He does not pull any punches, either; the threesome are presented as human beings with feet of clay, rather than the idols whose faces we carve into mountains and put on currency. Washington is a man of more action than thought, who can act impetuously and without mercy when necessary. Franklin is a genius, but a very lecherous and bawdy one who is prone to earthy humor and whose occasionally scathing wit can cause even his best friends to cringe. And Jefferson is a childish, hypocritical racist who can't change his thinking no matter how hard he tries—and his attitudes get both him and the others into trouble more than once. The trio of Founding Fathers do not get along perfectly; they sometimes bicker over group decisions, and an old grievance causes tension between Washington and Jefferson despite Jefferson's attempts at reconciliation.

It should be noted that the book doesn't pull punches where obscenity is concerned, either. The F-word is used from time to time, and "nigger" is used frequently. This may seem jarring to modern readers, but "nigger" was simply a word in common usage in the Founding Fathers' time, and even in Mark Twain's; it was only later that it came to be considered an epithet, and the book does make this clear. There is also some graphically-described violence, as the threesome are accosted by a pair of thugs who discover the hard way that it's not wise to mug even a 65-year-old George Washington. And at times the book's humor becomes a touch earthy, especially on the part of Franklin.

But despite these unpulled punches, the book is great fun. The Founding Fathers come across as real people, with their little foibles and idiosyncrasies. It's amusing to watch them make guesses based on incomplete information and get some things wrong, but a lot of things remarkably right. Rowe doesn't present them as some kind of backwoods bumpkins; he reminds us that Franklin and Jefferson were among the brightest intellects of their time, classically educated and keen thinkers—and if Washington wasn't as brilliant, he was at least blessed with abundant common sense. Placed into this strange new situation, their reactions are clear-minded and rational as they set out to learn as much as they possibly can. And some of the situations they get into along the way are absolutely hilarious—for example, the Founding Fathers' reactions to daytime television are not to be missed.

If the narrative has any serious flaws, they are only that from time to time incidental characters spout off dialogue that sounds incredibly artificial, almost like they were giving a prepared speech. People don't talk like that in real life, but it is necessary that the points they make be overheard by the Founders so that they can discuss what people think of them, or of events that happened after them. Also, the book is obviously the first in a series, so it does not so much end as come to a good stopping point.

All in all, Tempus Fugit is a great work of historical speculative fiction, and much the sort of thing I would have expected to come out of a political SF house like Baen, rather than being self-published. I'll be looking forward to the sequel, which is apparently due sometime in spring, 2007.

The first chapter may be read in its entirety online.

Review: Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc & Edgar Jepson

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 22:25:00 +0000

In live theater, every action has to be broad. When you wave, you don't just flick your wrist, you move your whole arm. The audience is sitting at least a few yards away from you and you're only life-sized; in order to see the significance of your action, every motion has to be exaggerated.

Perhaps this can explain to a certain extent the exaggerated characterization in Maurice Leblanc and Edgar Jepson's Arsène Lupin (otherwise known as Arsène Lupin: The Book of the Play—and not to be confused with the very first Lupin book, the collection of short stories Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar). This work of uncertain literary pedigree is based on a 4-act theatrical play Leblanc wrote with Francis de Croisset in 1909. Unlike other English-language Lupin novels, this is apparently not a direct translation of a French volume, but rather an early example of "novelization"—written solely by Jepson but based on Leblanc's play. As such, its writing style is significantly different from Leblanc's other Lupin works. I'd love to know what Leblanc himself thought of it.

The story's origin as a 4-act play is readily apparent; the action is limited to only about three primary locations, and mostly takes place at the Paris townhouse of a millionaire businessman, M. Gournay-Martin, whose millions are not sitting lightly on his head: having been robbed once, three years before, by Arsène Lupin, he has now received word that he is to be robbed again. Lupin has promised to rob him not only of valuable furnishings and artwork from his Paris townhouse, but also of a fabulous coronet, valued at half a million francs, that he prizes most highly. And all this comes at what should be the time of Gournay-Martin's greatest happiness, as his daughter Germaine is soon to be wed to the handsome young Duke of Charmerace, newly returned from a 7-year expedition to the South Pole. Charmerace races to the scene of the crime in Gournay-Martin's only remaining car, but is too late—the house has been stripped clean by the time he arrives, with the exception of the coronet—locked in an impregnable bedroom safe.

But never fear—the French police are on the case, in the form of Examining Magistrate M. Formery and Chief-Inspector Guerchard. Formery and Guerchard do not get along well; Formery is so short-sighted and full of himself that he could be considered a progenitor of The Pink Panther's Inspector Clouseau; he largely serves as comic relief. Guerchard, however, is significantly more competent, and is clever enough to be one of the most challenging adversaries that Lupin has ever faced. It is likely that Guerchard, described by one of the characters as "the greatest detective we've had in France since Vidocq," is more than a match for any ordinary criminal—but Lupin has never been merely ordinary.

But then, as they investigate, another message from Lupin comes: since he wasn't able to get the coronet earlier that day, he's going to strike a third time—showing up between 11:45 and midnight to steal the crown in person. Tension mounts as the hour draws near. Will Lupin show his face, with the police ready and waiting? Will he capture the coronet, or will Guerchard capture him?

The peculiar thing about Arsène Lupin is that the titular character barely appears in the book at all. Instead, we follow the household—Charmerace, Germaine, and Gournay-Martin in particular—as it is stirred up by Lupin's promised burglary. Then we follow Charmerace, Formery, and Guerchard as they investigate the case. It is only at the climax that we actually get to see Lupin…or is it? He is a master of disguise, after all…

The book is written to try to keep the secret of where Lupin is and what he is doing while the household is thus agitated, only hinting here and there and then springing it on the audience at the end as a surprise. But to be honest, this book was written at a less-sophisticated time, and today's readers—having been innoculated by exposure to thousands more twisty plots (thanks to television, movies, and mystery books) than the average reader of that day could have known—will probably guess where Lupin is hiding before the end of the second chapter. (You probably have a pretty good idea already just from reading this review.) But even if you guess, you can still enjoy the book simply as a police procedural (or perhaps I should say "criminal procedural"), like Columbo or Jake and the Fatman where you already know who committed the crime and the pleasure is in watching the police unravel it. That is, if you can get past the uneven writing style.

The first chapter or two are, to be honest, not terribly prepossessing. Characters are not so much characterized as they are semaphored at you. Not a single mention is made of Germaine Gournay-Martin without belaboring the point of how totally spoiled, self-centered, and all-around disagreeable she is; not a single mention is made of Germaine's servant Sonia Kritchnoff without expressing how melancholy and oppressed she is by being subject to Germaine's whims. And it is blindingly obvious from the first time we meet him that the Duke of Charmerace is far more taken with Sonia than with Germaine, as they cast wistful looks at each other behind the self-absorbed Germaine's back (or even in front of her face). It's so over-the-top that it descends into melodrama; you practically expect a mustachio-twirling villain to step through the door and tie Sonia to the railroad tracks. Leblanc's other Lupin stories, even via their varied translations, are never so cheesy as this; it is largely this that leads me to believe Jepson wrote this work himself, with Leblanc's only contribution being the dialogue and stage direction.

Another difference is that the humor seems to be broader, and more blatant, than in the other Lupin stories—sometimes bordering on the farcical. This can be partly explained by it being an adaptation of a play; for the play to keep people entertained, the playwrights would have had to throw in jokes every now and again, as well as comic-relief characters. It could be that these jokes were put in by Leblanc's writing partner when the play was originally written, and were then translated to the page by Jepson with the rest.

And some of these jokes may be a trifle obscure to the modern audience.

For example:

"I mean to marry my daughter to a worker—a worker, my dear Duke," said the millionaire, slapping his big left hand with his bigger right. "I've no prejudices—not I. I wish to have for son-in-law a duke who wears the Order of the Legion of Honour, and belongs to the Academie Francaise, because that is personal merit. I'm no snob."

A gentle, irrepressible laugh broke from the Duke.

"What are you laughing at?" said the millionaire, and a sudden lowering gloom overspread his beaming face.

"Nothing—nothing," said the Duke quietly. "Only you're so full of surprises."

Modern-day readers, especially American readers, might not get the joke to its fullest extent—the Academie Francaise is the redoubtable French organization that, among other things, polices the French language, insisting that people use good old-fashioned French rather than English loan-words like "hot dog" or "Walkman." Thus, not only is it snobbery, it is the very height of snobbery—and that's the real reason why Charmerace is laughing.

And then there's the servant who was arrested twice—once for participating in a Socialist demonstration, and once for participating in a Royalist demonstration—when he worked in the service of Socialist and Royalist politicians, respectively.

"You don't seem to have very well-defined political convictions," said M. Formery.

"Oh, yes, sir, I have," the concierge protested. "I'm always devoted to my masters; and I have the same opinions that they have—always."

Many characters are none-too-subtly ridiculed by the narrative—especially when the characters are themselves comic relief. For example, the bumbling M. Formery is described as "[appearing] to be of the opinion that Nature had given the world the toothbrush as a model of what a moustache should be." Gournay-Martin—a self-important, florid-faced, overweight fellow with close-set eyes, is another favored butt of narrative jokes; when he receives some unwelcome news and sits a touch too heavily in an antique chair, we are treated to a physical description of a slapstick gag. It probably worked much better on the stage than in print.

But once it settles down, comedy elements aside, the story is compelling. Despite Lupin's apparent absence for most of the book, he serves as a sort of larcenous Godot—the fact that he's coming drives the narrative; the characters become more anxious as the hour of his scheduled arrival draws nearer. Guerchard, at first so calm and analytical, begins to lose his cool as all of Lupin's detective adversaries invariably do—even the great Sherlock Holmes, ahem, pardon me, "Herlock Sholmes." And there's also the matter of the Duke of Charmerace's growing attraction, despite his impending nuptuals, to Sonia Kritchnoff—and Sonia is hiding a secret that could cost her, and Charmerace, dearly.

As an Arsène Lupin novel, Arsène Lupin is atypical. Not really written by Leblanc, it's rather like a novelization of a James Bond movie script (oh yes, they do exist—I own the one for The Spy Who Loved Me), or "Bram Stoker's Dracula by Fred Saberhagen"—a story written at one or more removes from the original author's work. It's not really a mystery, despite the presence of a criminal and a detective; it's more of a drama about the duel between these two larger-than-life personalities. It is a trifle melodramatic and farcical, and it probably worked significantly better on the stage than on the page. (I dearly wish I could see an English-language version of the play staged; I'll wager it would be great fun.) But even considering all of that, it has a compelling story and snappy dialogue, and is worth reading on that count alone.

(If I weren't so terribly modest, I'd also point out that the fact that you are able to read it, if you read it via Gutenberg or another public domain repackager, is at least in part attributable directly to me; I'm the one who volunteered his copies of Arsène Lupin and The Hollow Needle for scanning and addition to Project Gutenberg. You can see the scans at Greg Weeks's website.)

Although he is hardly remembered today outside of France, save for his role as the predecessor to the popular Lupin III anime, Arsène Lupin used to be an absolutely huge part of French pop culture, and to some extent still is. The play upon which this book was based was adapted for film and television numerous times, including three silent films and an early 1932 "talkie" that starred John Barrymore as Lupin and Lionel Barrymore as Guerchard—their first appearance together in a motion picture. (The Barrymore picture is not terribly faithful either to the play or to real life; it features Lupin stealing the Mona Lisa by rolling up the canvas on which it is painted—except that in reality, the Mona Lisa is painted on a sheet of wood.)

And Lupin inspired more than just Lupin III. It is at least possible and on the whole quite likely that he inspired Leslie Charteris's The Saint, and Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat can only be one of Lupin's direct descendants. Come to think of it, since he was among the very first modern criminal heroes, every heist or caper film ever made probably owes something to Lupin—particularly that David Niven/Peter Sellers comedy about the debonair ladies'-man jewel thief who matches wits with the semi-competent French Inspector. Yes, that one. (Especially since I seem to recall that in at least one of the Lupin novels, Lupin also romanced the wife of the Inspector who was trying to catch him.)

For more information on the original Arsène Lupin, and how he compares to his modern-day anime descendant, check out the MP3 commentary track I recorded for Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro. Be sure and watch the movie without it first, though!

Review: The Eight Strokes of the Clock by Maurice Leblanc

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 22:12:00 +0000

This review was originally written for posting to alt.pulp, but given that it's been a while since I updated this journal, and I enjoyed writing it, I should go ahead and post it to this journal so that more people might see it.

I am told that Maurice Leblanc once bemoaned that writing so many novels about master thief and adventurer Arsène Lupin had spoiled him for writing about anybody else: the protagonists of any other books he tried to write invariably turned into Arsène Lupin, no matter who they had originally been supposed to be. Perhaps this explains the curious little author's note that begins The Eight Strokes of the Clock:

These adventures were told to me in the old days by Arsène Lupin, as though they had happened to a friend of his, named Prince Renine. As for me, considering the way in which they were conducted, the actions, the behaviour and the very character of the hero, I find it very difficult not to identify the two friends as one and the same person. Arsène Lupin is gifted with a powerful imagination and is quite capable of attributing to himself adventures which are not his at all and of disowning those which are really his. The reader will judge for himself.

—M.L.

A thematically-related series of eight short stories that originally appeared in Excelsior Magazine in 1922-23, Eight Strokes has the distinction of being the last Arsène Lupin novel to fall before the Bono Act public domain cut-off date—if, indeed, an Arsène Lupin novel it is. The eight tales follow the adventures of "Prince Serge Renine" (exactly what kingdom he's supposed to be a prince of is never explained—it could well be that "Prince" is just his given name. I guess that would make him "the Prince formerly known as Lupin") and his assistant, Hortense Daniels, as they unravel eight perplexing mysteries—or, rather, as "Renine" unravels them and Hortense tags along. Chronologically, the stories are set in 1911, between Lupin's retirement from crime at the end of The Hollow Needle and his greatest adventure of all, 813.

In the first story, "On the Top of the Tower," Renine prevents Hortense from eloping with a man she actually finds distasteful, but sees as the only way out of her distressing home life. (Hortense lives with her appointed guardian, an uncle whom she does not like.) He accomplishes this feat by shooting out the tires of the car in which they are leaving—and when Hortense chases him down to berate him, he charms her into accompanying him in exploring a nearby abandoned chateau. In this chateau they discover a still-running clock that chimes the hour of eight o'clock—twenty years after it should have stopped—a hidden telescope…and an ancient crime.

The solution to this mystery frees Hortense from her uncle, and Renine strikes a bargain with Hortense: as the clock struck eight times, she will accompany him on seven more adventures. At the end, he will recover a precious heirloom brooch that was stolen from her years before—and in return, she will give him…he's too much of a gentleman to say exactly what it is he wants, but they both know exactly what he means.

And so their adventures begin, as they proceed to solve seven more mysteries together, each more mysterious than the last. How was a box set on fire when there was nobody in the room? How was a man stabbed in the back when nobody went into or out of his cottage after he entered it? Why are women being systematically murdered with identical hatchet blows to the forehead, several months apart? And will Hortense overcome her reluctance to meet with Renine as the adventures come to a close and the time to honor their agreement draws near?

Arsène Lupin is a product of the same literary period as Sherlock Holmes, albeit from the other side of the English Channel. As a result, their adventures end up being a trifle similar; as with Holmes's Watson, Lupin often adventures with a less adroit companion—be it his girlfriend of the moment, a police inspector, or even Maurice Leblanc "himself"—to throw his cleverness into relief. In this case, the role is served by Hortense, for whom Lupin has fallen as he did for so many other women before or since. Hortense is a typical Watson in that she is invariably mystified by Lupin's leaps of intuition, and dazzled by the cunning that he applies to solve crimes and catch true culprits. This isn't to say that she is stupid, just that Lupin has the sort of pure brilliance that—just as with Holmes—can only be explained by the writer "cheating" and setting up the mysteries just so his protagonist can knock them down.

Perhaps it's just that I've been watching the new Doctor Who and Doctor Who Confidential series lately, but it seems to me that there's something of the Doctor about Arsène Lupin, in the way he will take on companions (and paramours) to dazzle with his whirlwind manner, amazing intelligence, and leaps of intuition for the space of an adventure or two—before moving on to someone else. Even his romance with Hortense, whom he woos over the course of the eight mysteries in this book, is fated to last only a short while before Lupin finds new loves in 813 and The Teeth of the Tiger. (Lupin's previous lovers having died through natural causes or accidents, or rejected him when they found out he was a criminal, or even run away to a convent(!), it can be said that Arsène Lupin does not tend to have the best luck with women.)

Some of the mysteries seem quaint when viewed from a century later. In "The Tell-Tale Film," Renine correctly identifies a supporting actor's obsession with a silent film's leading lady from the out-of-character smouldering glances he casts at her in the scenes they share on film. (The medium was so new back then that they could get away with that; these days, they'd call that either "bad acting" or "bad directing.") Subsequently, Renine and Hortense discover that the actor has indeed kidnapped the actress and is hiding in one of the locations where the film was shot—this apparently being before studio movie sets were in common use.

In another story, the hatchet-wielding serial killer turns out to be an insane sociopath. It's not a terribly surprising explanation, and one could say it even presages modern-day literary serial killers such as Hannibal Lecter—but all the same, it's rather disappointing in a series that is generally characterized by adversaries who are fiendishly clever rather than just off their nut.

Apart from the author's note at the beginning, and a couple of gratuitous references stuck into the story, there's nothing really in this work that specifically requires Renine to be Lupin, apart from exhibiting the same cleverness, cunning, and personality. Renine is always referred to as Renine, though this is nothing new—Lupin is generally referred to only by his alias even in books when we already know exactly who he is (such as The Teeth of the Tiger).

All in all, the mysteries are entertaining, and the romance with Hortense is diverting, but the stories are not as interesting as Lupin's longer novels, where more time can be taken to set up the crime and its solution, nor are they as fun as Lupin's earlier career where he debonairly commits the most outrageous crimes while thumbing his nose at the inspectors sent to track him down. Still, as a collection of short stories, it can be read in more than one sitting without losing track of the story, and Leblanc had quite a gift for coming up with clever crimes. It's a shame that the Arsène Lupin tales have been largely forgotten over the years.

Now at Amazon.com: bad fanfic and books whose authors did not write them

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Meadows) — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 21:14:00 +0000

Those of you who, like me, are fanfic writers may often have dreamed of getting your works published in print—getting acclaim from wider audiences, perhaps even making a little bit of money, too. Of course, for most it's an impossible dream. There are very few writers or media entities who are friendly enough to fanfic to publish or even look at fan-written stories (by and large with good legal reason)—and print-publishing it illegitimately is tantamount to waving a red flag in front of a legal bull the approximate size of a wooly mammoth.

Of course, that doesn't stop some people from trying it anyway. But the remarkable thing in this case is not that the fanfic got published—it's how it got published, and to what extent.

We start with fan author Lori Jareo, who wrote a lengthy novel-length epic work called Another Hope [Google cache link, will expire within a few days] set in the Star Wars universe. I haven't actually read the work in question (nor do I have any desire to), but apparently it belongs to the sub-genre of fanfic called "What-If?"—taking an existing story and changing some plot details to see how it plays out. And as fanfic goes, there's nothing wrong with that; some of the best fanfic stories have been alternate-universe adventures of this sort. In this version of events, Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi arrive on Aalderaan before it gets blown up by the Death Star, and get blown up along with it.

The book has been decried as bad—overdosing on technical details, and often getting details wrong. As one reviewer notes, "There is no 'Star Fleet' in Star Wars, that's a Star Trek organization. The relevant equivalent here is the Imperial Navy." And as fanfic goes, there's nothing wrong with that either. Every fanfic writer has a right to write drek. It wouldn't be fanfic without bad fanfic.

But where we start to get off-kilter is that the book somehow ended up on Amazon.com. Yes, you heard me right. There is a work of bad Star Wars fanfic currently (as of this writing) available for sale on Amazon.com.

Ms. Jareo isn't worried [Google cache link, will expire within a few days] about getting in trouble over the copyright issue, either:

Q: Having set Another Hope in an already existing universe, I find myself wondering if there was any concern on your part regarding copyrights?

No, because I wrote this book for myself. This is a self-published story and is not a commercial book. Yes, it is for sale on Amazon, but only my family, friends and acquaintances know it's there.

And there you have it! She published on Amazon—but it's okay, because only her friends know. (Well, and anyone who read their parish newsletter, but that's neither here nor there.) Except…as it turns out, it's not just on Amazon—you can actually find it all over the place by now.

But it gets better. A bit of research on the publisher, WordTech Communications, turns up this FAQ:

How many people work for WordTech?

WordTech is composed of two individuals: Lori Jareo and Kevin Walzer. Lori manages the daily business and production operations, while Kevin manages the editorial selection process and book/web design.

So, this is not just a writer, but a publishing-industry professional (who even has a journalism degree if a comment on the Making Light blog entry is to be believed), working for a publisher that claims to be "one of the nation's largest poetry publishers"—who apparently didn't realize that not only is it a bad idea to print-publish Star Wars fanfic in general, it's a really bad idea to put it on Amazon and expect nobody but your close friends to find out about it. (Although I suppose you could say she was partly right; the book was apparently published in September of 2005, and it's taken until April 2006 for a fuss to be made.)

But let's put that book on the backburner for the moment and look at another book-that-shouldn't-be that's also listed on Amazon. This is a book called Princess and Wolf, ostensibly written by Mercedes Lackey and published by Daw. It's also listed at Powell's, as well as dozens of other places just like Another Hope, above.

Except it, well, isn't written by Mercedes Lackey, or published by Daw. In fact, Misty is completely in the dark as to what it is. As she says in a reader comment on the Powell's listing:

This is a mystery. DAW books never published this. I certainly never wrote it. So far as we are concerned, it doesn't exist. There are no pictures anywhere of the cover, so we can't even tell if it's someone else's book listed under my name by mistake.

I'm baffled, my agent is baffled, my publisher is baffled. We can't get people to remove the listing because they all claim that the distributors "have a ton of them" in the warehouse.

The book is a complete mystery. Googling on it turns up no pictures, no reviews, no useful information of any kind—just listings of it on various online bookstores. (If anyone out there happens to have bought a copy, please leave a comment here describing it?) There's no way to tell whether it is a clerical error and the book does not actually exist, whether there's a clerical error and somebody else's book got mis-tagged with the wrong author's name and publisher, whether something Misty really did write got tagged with the wrong title (highly unlikely), or whether someone else really is trying to publish their own work under Mercedes Lackey's name. And then we have the Kafkaesque situation of booksellers unwilling to remove a listing for a book that they have already been informed the author did not write, because there are still plenty of copies of it left to sell.

It's also worth noting that Amazon has not yet removed Another Hope either (although they have edited the comments on the book down from about 30 critical of the author to just two that were critical of the work itself), even though they have had more than six months to notice that they were selling unlicensed fanfic.

And there are other questionable books on Amazon as well. For example, even though Condé Nast is bringing legal action against Blackmask.com for the act of republishing the still-in-copyright The Shadow and Doc Savage novels, you can still find these books for sale on Amazon even now. And who knows what else you could find if you dug deep enough?

But how does this sort of thing happen? How is it that Amazon, the biggest bookseller in the world, sells unlicensed fanfic and books of which their supposed author has never heard? How is it that these books are available in dozens of other online bookstores as well?

Looking back at that FAQ from WordTech offers a clue:

WordTech uses print-on-demand technology for our books. Our printer is Lightning Source. "Print-on-demand" means that the book is printed in batches as small as one at a time on a digital press, instead of being part of a large offset press run. The quality is equivalent to standard printing, with glossy four-color covers and nice text paper.

[…]

Our books are distributed through Ingram, the largest book distributor. Our printer, Lightning Source, is a subsidiary of Ingram, so all of our titles are automatically picked up by the Ingram database. This means they are available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders, and independent bookstores.

A lot of small publishers are starting to use print-on-demand technology, as it is much more convenient for small print runs that don't benefit from the economy of scale that lets the big mass-market publishers produce books so cheaply. And as Lightning Source is integrated with Ingram, the world's largest book distributor, this means that a Lightning Source printed book is already halfway to hitting the shelves of every major bookstore and a lot of minor ones too. All that's necessary is that it have an ISBN.

The ISBN, or International Standard Book Number (not "ISBN number," as that is redundant), is "a unique identifier for books, intended to be used commercially." Each book has an ISBN number, and each ISBN number is (usually) used only for one book. An ISBN can be bought by anyone; the issuing agency doesn't care whether the book is fanfic or not, or whether it's written by who it says it's written by. It just sells the number and the publisher can stick it on anything he wants with it. In the case of Princess and Wolf, that number is 5-558-60706-8.

Each number is made up of a country or language code, a publisher code, an item number, and a checksum digit. In the case of Princess and Wolf, the country code, 5, means the work was published in the Russian Federation and ex-USSR. In order to find out who the actual publisher is, I would need access to the Publishers' International ISBN Directory, which my local libraries do not carry.

Regardless, it is necessary that a book have an ISBN before it can be stocked in most bookstores, including the major on-line ones. The corollary to this is, apparently in some cases an ISBN is all that's necessary—if the book has an ISBN and Ingram is carrying it, onto the list it goes.

Amazon carries a huge amount of books, and not just from big publishers either. As mentioned before, print-on-demand, Lightning Press, is used by a lot of small publishers, including self-publishing "vanity press" outfits. There are literally thousands of these books published every day, and the cost to list an individual book on Amazon's website is very very low. So, if there's even a chance a book might at some point be sold profitably, it's in Amazon's interest to list it—and thus, all these thousands of books are listed automatically, probably by doing an ISBN lookup against some database and importing the information it finds there into its store. And if the ISBN was tagged with faulty information when the work was originally published, that same faulty information will be imported into Amazon's store, as well as every other bookstore that carries it.

No human intervention is needed, and thus there is no way for every book (perhaps even for any book) to be checked over to make sure that it's kosher. Amazon doesn't even have the books on shelves, but deep inside some large automated warehouse that only permits retrieval when an order is placed—so when a question does come up about the book, they apparently don't have any way to check on it. And if the alleged author of a book complaining she never wrote it is not sufficient, it would seem that nothing short of legal action will cause the book to be unlisted once it's up. (Granted, if they responded to every request they received to take a book down, they would probably be so busy taking books down and/or putting them back up again that they probably wouldn't have time to do anything else, but still…)

How long can Amazon (and other booksellers that use the same automated system, but Amazon is the most visible) continue to get away with this? Presumably Amazon will try to use the DMCA "safe harbor" provision, whereby they'll be okay as long as they take down the offending material within ten days of receiving official legal notification, but does that really apply when they are selling a physical item, not just posting copyrighted information? And it's worth noting that they responded to Mercedes Lackey's request for removal of Princess and Wolf with a refusal due to existing inventory (though admittedly that wasn't an official legal request).

As for Another Hope, Lucasfilm has been informed of it by at least two or three different sources by now; according to this blog entry, Jareo's website was replaced by a blurb stating the book would be removed from Books in Print as of Tuesday. When I try to view the site now, I find it has vanished altogether save for the Google Cache links I linked to early in this article.

Some fanfic writers are worried that backlash over this published fanfic could result in a crackdown on fanfic in general, the end of the blind eye that many franchises choose to turn to writers who don't get too big for their britches. However, I doubt that an isolated incident involving one very stupid person will result in consequences for anyone except for that person. We will simply have to wait and see.

UPDATE: As one of the comments on this entry notes, the Amazon listing for Princess and Wolf has been updated in title to Princess and the Wolf and its author has been corrected to Karen Kay. (Here's a 359KB screenshot of the original appearance of Amazon's listing, for posterity.) Apparently it is another edition of a historical romance novel that is listed elsewhere under its proper author and title. I had halfway expected that was what it would turn out to be. There is no indication as to why the book ended up in Mercedes Lackey's name; we'll probably never know.

UPDATE (7/28/06): I have now written a follow-up entry wrapping up the Princess and Wolf affair.