Did you see this amazing stained glass Dalek already?
Producer / director / writer Jamie Anderson worked with designer Chris Thompson to help make the lead and stained glass Dalek a reality. It’s based on a Doctor Who audio drama script by Mike Tucker called Order of the Daleks.
“My main thought process was to create a “Gothic” Dalek and replace all the flat surfaces with glass designs. My initial sketches had palisades, crowns, spikes and other gothic elements, but we decided to dial a lot of these back for story reasons. In the episode itself these Dalek casings are made by very primitive monks so the focus needed to be on the stained glass and not the metal elements.”
We’ve been watching The Shannara Chronicles. (We only watch series on DVD, so we’re still working our way through season 1). It’s some of the worst television I’ve seen in a while, and I can’t wait to see more.
One trailer park elf, one spoiled princess, and one edgy ex-bandit, coming right up. Image via IMDb.
Make no mistake, The Shannara Chronicles is terrible. The plot is a meandering soap opera mashed together from two parts Tolkien (a band of hobbits teenagers, occasionally aided by a grumpy wizard druid, must carry the magical ring seed to a distant place through a strange wilderness in order to save the world from a dark lord warlock who mostly just chills out in his tower henge being all evil and stuff) and one part Hunger Games (a tedious teenage love triangle between one girl half-elf boy and two boys girls—one rugged, the other sophisticated—in a vaguely-defined post-apocalyptic North America). Episode scripts are written Mad-Lib style: Dire warning about [peril] goes unheeded, recurring bandit guy threatens to [do something awful], someone explains [plot point] to the confused half-elf dude, princess has to be saved from [unheeded peril].
Yet despite its flaws, Shannara Chronicles manages the trick that most bad television doesn’t: to be both bad and enjoyable. More remarkably, it has managed this feat while remaining convinced of its own seriousness, instead of embracing its camp absurdity like most other beloved bad SFF shows, from Batman to Xena.
There are beautiful things under the layers of bad storytelling. Image via IMDb.
It’s hard to explain why I enjoy Shannara. Taste, of course, is subjective: one viewer’s guilty pleasure is another’s eye-roll marathon. I think there are three things about it that work for me:
The diamonds among the dross. Shannara is a kiwi production and I watch it in much the same spirit that I watch Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies: for the moments of beauty buried in the failings of concept and writing. The visual design is inventive and sometimes startling. Among the actors there are some shining stars like John Rhys Davies, Jed Brophy, and Manu Bennett improving the lackluster scripts with their performances. Plus New Zealand scenery is always worth seeing.
We’re starved for good fantasy. I like classic fantasy. I like it better when it’s done well, but in the absence of that (or when showrunners think that doing fantasy well means adding as much torture, rape, and pointless death as possible), I’ll take it done badly. Plus, it’s refreshing to see a post-apocalyptic story in which the post-apocalypse is a quaint side note to the plot rather than a weight around its neck.
The straight line is funnier than the joke. Comedy is well and good, but sometimes the best laughs come from people who don’t know they’re funny, and if the creators of Shannara know how funny they’re being, they aren’t letting on. I enjoy groaning at the teenage drama, the princess who has to be saved from something once an episode, the elite Elven soldiers who get themselves clobbered by bandits in under ten seconds, and the rest of the show even more when there isn’t a wisecracking sidekick poking me in the ribs and saying Hey, didja see what we did there? Huh? Huh?
Because this is totally how you dress to save the world. Image via IMDb.
In 2016, this terrible year in which some disasters hit with the shock of a thunderbolt and others drag on like a cold you can’t shake, the small-scale disaster of a wonderfully bad tv show is just what I need to take my mind off the rest of the world for a few hours.
In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.
I’m most interested in Arrival (based on a story by Ted Chiang and out very soon now!), Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, and Lilith’s Brood by Octavia E. Butler. It would also be great to see Ann Leckie’s Ancillary series, Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, and Daniel José Older’s Bone Street books on screen.
It was also intriguing to see Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky on the list, for I’m not used to seeing Eastern bloc SFF authors in the Anglo-American market. According to the all-knowing Internets, Roadside Picnic was turned into a Russian SFF art film Stalker in 1979. I never saw that, but did read the Finnish translation (Stalker: huviretki tienpientarelle) when I was too young to really understand it, so it would be nice to refresh my memory.
Besides works in progress mentioned in Zutter’s list, I’m looking forward to OtherLife. It’s adapted from Kelley Eskridge’s Solitaire (2002), which I read only this year and loved. Unfortunately, OtherLife seems currently to have paused in post-production. We live in hope, though! (I’ve been following the story of its development on Eskridge’s blog; do visit for a glimpse of indie movie projects from a writer’s perspective.)
Anything on your radar that especially tickles your fancy? Do share!
Monday is when I write, from a historian’s perspective, about some interesting or useful tidbit for writers, especially writers of genre fiction. I’m doing that again today, but from a different angle. Today I want to talk about representation, specifically the representation of people who are not straight white cis men in books, television, movies, games, and other media.
First things first: I’m a straight white cis man with no significant mental or physical challenges. I am a native-born citizen of the country in which I live and a native speaker of its majority language. I am financially secure and socially comfortable. I am not, as far as I know, heir to any titles of nobility, but other than that, if a privilege exists in the world, I’ve probably got it.
Yeah. I’m about to talk about representation. If anyone wants to get off this ride, now’s the time.
When creators and fans talk about adding representation to popular media, the refrain from people who look like me is often: “Why do we have to have X in this story? What do you mean you can’t identify with the characters? Why can’t all you Xes identify with people who aren’t exactly like yourselves?”
I understand where this response comes from. There are white guys all over the place in popular media, but I’ve never identified with a character just because he was a white guy. There are so many of them that I couldn’t identify with them all if I wanted to. When I look at a character and think Hey! That’s me! it comes from traits other than outward identities. Here are some of the characters I’ve felt connected to over the years:
Spock (Star Trek), Guinan (Star Trek: The Next Generation), Brother Cadfael (Cadfael novels and tv series), Minerva MacGonagall (Harry Potter novels and films), Gil Grissom (CSI), Sister Monica Joan (Call the Midwife), Mr. Bennet (Pride and Prejudice), Cora Crawley (Downton Abbey), Tuvok (Star Trek: Voyager)
They’re not all the same gender, race, age, or even species as I am. Two of them are members of a religious order, and I’m not religious at all. Most of them don’t even (fictionally) live in this century.
What can we learn from this collection? (Other than that I have a thing for Vulcans and a rather inflated sense of my ability to dole out wise advice to young ‘uns.) That representation is an aspect of privilege even when you’re not being represented. Having white guys all over the place frees me to look at the characters in my media and identify with them not based on the outward categories they fall into but because they’re thoughtful, introverted, curious, even-tempered, and passionate about knowledge.
On the other hand, I am a member of a very small minority who is rarely represented in media, and then usually in a dismissive, stereotyped, even offensive way: history professors. According to most books, movies, and tv shows, we are boring, joyless pedants in tweed jackets with elbow patches who obsess over minutiae and care only about names and dates.
“Easily the most boring class was History of Magic, which was the only one taught by a ghost. Professor Binns had been very old indeed when he fell asleep in front of the staff room fire and got up the next morning to teach, and left his body behind him. Binns droned on and on while they scribbled down names and dates, and got Emeric the Evil and Uric the Oddball mixed up.”
– J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s / Sorcerer’s Stone Ch. 8
We always wear period clothes and are at best dimly aware of what century we actually live in, if not actively in denial about it.
Professor Dwayne Cravitz from Rizzoli and Isles s. 2 ep. 6 “Rebel Without a Pause”
(Not to mention that we make our (black) graduate students do unpaid labor so that they can have the “authentic slave experience.”)
Oh, and if we’re medieval historians, we’re indistinguishable from renfaire performers. (I can’t find a link to it now, but the memory is seared in my mind of an NPR interview with a scholar attending the annual medieval studies conference in Kalamazoo which made it clear the interviewer thought it was basically a fantasy convention.)
Come on by my history class sometime. I won’t be wearing a costume or droning on about names and dates. I’ll be deep in conversation with my students about social structures, economic forces, multicultrual interactions, source analysis, and all the other interesting parts of history.
Now, history professors are not, by any stretch of the imagination, a historically oppressed or marginalized group. I know how aggravating it can be to be badly represented even as a comfortably privileged middle class white man, but I can’t really imagine what it must be like to be, say, a Native American woman, or a gay man who uses a wheelchair, or a Muslim teenager with Asperger’s, and have to deal with not only the weight of the social disadvantages that come with that and seeing people like myself so rarely and poorly portrayed in media.
Of course we can all identify with people who aren’t like us. That’s not the point. The point is that, no matter who we are, we all deserve to see enough people outwardly like ourselves in books, television, movies, and other media that we don’t have to identify with them just to feel like we’re there.
History for Writers is a weekly feature which looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool. From worldbuilding to dialogue, history helps you write. Check out the introduction to History for Writers here.
Browsing Tumblr the other day, I ran into what looked like stills from a scifi series. My immediate reaction was “What is this? Who’s she? I wanna see it!!”
Turns out they were indeed scifi show stills. The pictures come from an article by Dalton Ross on Entertainment Weekly. He talked with The Expanse showrunner Naren Shankar about a new character introduced in season 2, and shared these photos.
The commanding presence that drew my eye is marine Roberta “Bobbie” Draper from Mars, played by New Zealand actress, model, and boxer Frankie Adams.
Mr. Shankar talked about casting Ms. Adams for the role:
“When you ask a casting director to find a 6-foot half-Polynesian, the response is usually one of stunned silence, like, ‘Really?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, really.’ We’ve been very conscious about maintaining the ethnic identity of the characters in the book as much as humanly possible. And we were really intent on doing that with Bobbie.
“We actually looked in the U.K., Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, Hawaii, and New Zealand. And when [co-author] Ty Franck saw the first casting tape on her, he said, ‘That’s her, that’s her,’ right away. She’s a professional boxer, as well as being a model and so she had the physicality and a very interesting, unusual kind of face you rarely see on television. She’s awesome and we couldn’t be more delighted to have her on the show.”
I have to say that the third shot (above) reminds me a lot of the 2004 Galactica reboot. I’ve only seen the pilot for The Expanse, though, and that streamed over a very hiccupy connection. It looked interesting, but for some reason or another I never got back to it.
I seriously hope that Bobbie won’t just be another case of Strong Female Character syndrome. Kick-ass female characters can be awesome, and they are definitely an improvement over women as mothers or love interests. But I’m done with women written as one-dimensional beings, be it demure damsels in distress or forceful fighters.
I want the people in my entertainment to be complex and three-dimensional regardless of their gender. Whether The Expanse delivers or not will remain to be seen, though. (Haven’t read the books that it’s based on, so I’ve nothing to go on there.) Apparently I now must check out season 1 in order to see season 2 when it comes out. 🙂
It’s a good time to be a Sherlock Holmes fan. There are now plenty of adaptations to choose from. There’s the BBC’s Sherlock if you like visual inventiveness and whip-crack dialogue. For a more traditional procedural that does interesting things with characters, there’s CBS’s Elementary. For Hollywood thrills you can go back a few years to the films starring Robert Downey Jr. as the great detective. For series in the Holmesian spirit without the same characters there’s the medical drama House or the mystery/comedy Psych.
However the setting may change, there are some key elements of Sherlock Holmes’s character that remain the same: the keen powers of observation and deduction, the cycles of intense focus on a problem and lethargic dissipation, the antisocial habits that make him near impossible to live with.
Oh, and Sherlock Holmes is a total jerk-ass.
The standard interpretation of Holmes in modern media is that he is an asshole with no patience for anyone else, either because he’s not neurotypical in some fashion or because he just can’t be bothered to care about anything so pedestrian as decent manners. He gets away with it because he’s just so brilliant.
Well, lately I’ve been rereading the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle, something I’ve been meaning to do for years. I’ve gotten very used to the modern Holmes, so I was surprised to rediscover that the original Holmes wasn’t like that at all. In fact, Conan Doyle’s Holmes is compassionate and generous.
ITV Studios is producing a new Beowulf adaptation. Named Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands, the mini-series puts a modern spin on one of the oldest poems in Old English. According to Esquire Network:
“Based on the complex protagonist of a classic poem written between the eighth and tenth century, Beowulf takes place in a mythological place, The Shieldlands, and challenges the notions of good and evil, heroes and villains, and the rule of law against one’s moral code. The drama stars Kieran Bew (DA VINCI’S DEMONS), in the lead role Beowulf; multi-award- winning actor William Hurt (DAMAGES); acclaimed actress Joanne Whalley (WOLF HALL); Ed Speleers (DOWNTON ABBEY) and David Ajala (BLACK BOX).”
Beowulf: RttS started airing in U.K early January 2016, and Esquire Network is bringing it to U.S. January 23. Location work for the production was shot in the north east of England, in county Durham and Northumberland; 13 episodes have been produced so far. The show has a very perfunctory Instagram account and a more active Facebook page. There’s also a behind the scenes piece with live action clips:
Beowulf Behind The Scenes The World Revealed with Kieran Bew and Ed Speleers via Esquire Network
Beowulf: RttS definitely holds some promise. Apart from being inspired by Actual History(TM) and Anglo-Saxons / Old English to boot, it sounds like there’s some gender-bending (International Business Times reports a “new female thane”); in addition, photos include not just white men among the cast (see MedievalPOC and Farawaysite.com).
While I’m excited about the recent resurgence of genre films and tv productions in general, I’m discouraged by the apparent lack of quality control that comes with trying to ride the trend to make a quick buck. (Vikings, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, or 2015 Fantastic Four, anyone?)
Sadly, it sounds like Beowulf: RttS might be one of them: according to U.K news site Metro, viewers criticize the series for its “unconvincing CGI, stilted dialogue and unrealistic action sequences” and as “a blatant rip-off ” of Game of Thrones. I can add to the list some decidedly silly costuming and a peculiar combination of plausible and fanciful in the sets and props. I’m torn whether to give it a shot or not – on one hand, it’s based on Beowulf, for crying out loud; on the other, WTF is going on with the design!?
In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.
We all have our storytelling pet peeves: the things that make us yell in frustration at the screen or put down a book in disgust. Some things have been done to death already and we want to see something new. Some things play on outdated assumptions and problematic tropes. Some are just lazy writing.
Misery loves company, so let’s share. Here’s a few of mine.
1. Fathers and sons who have a bad relationship.
A father who was never emotionally available to his son and is now disappointed in his son’s failure to live up to his expectations? A son who resents the pressure put on him to be like his father and craves the love and approval his father never gave him?
It’s been done. Really, it has. Everyone from Homer to Shakespeare to George Lucas has done it. That dead horse has been pounded into subatomic particles by now. There is nothing new to be said on the subject. Time to move on.
2. Heroes who have no plan
Or if they do have a plan, it depends on factors that the hero can’t control or predict.
This doesn’t mean that plans have to be perfect or go off without a hitch. You can’t control for everything. Plans have to change in response to unforeseen events. There can be plenty of good drama in the uncertainties of chance, and I’ll even take the occasional deus ex machina if it’s clever enough. But a hero who’s counting on the deus ex machina for victory? That’s right out.
3. Villains who have no goal
A good villain has a goal they are trying to accomplish and a plan for achieving that goal. No matter how fiendishly complicated the plan, if the goal is just to indulge a vaguely sexual obsession with the hero, something has gone wrong in the writing.
“Annoy the hero and force them to play with me” isn’t a goal, it’s a toddler tantrum. 4. Weirdos who can’t tell fantasy from reality
A terrible murder has happened at an SFF convention. When the police show up to question witnesses, the bystanders refuse to speak English and answer all their questions in Klingon. It turns out a vampire cosplayer killed a werewolf LARPer. Why? Because vampires hate werewolves! No other motive required!
This one isn’t just lazy writing, it’s insulting. The usual targets are fandom or kink communities, but anyone who isn’t in the mainstream can be a victim. I’m a history professor. According to popular media, that means I must show up in class wearing a toga and insist that my students address me as “emperor.”
Writers of the world: the inability to distinguish reality and fantasy is a sign of a serious mental illness. It is not how those of us who belong to non-mainstream interest groups go through life.
5. “Gimmick” serial killers
This one is really just the intersection of 3 and 4, but it shows up often enough to merit special mention. These are the characters who kill people as part of some elaborate symbolic game. “My God, the killer is targeting people whose names are anagrams of Alice in Wonderland characters and staging their bodies to look like scenes from Rogers and Hammerstein musicals, and they’re doing them in reverse alphabetical order when translated into Albanian!”
That sound you hear is my suspension of disbelief repeatedly slamming its head into a wall in hopes of inducing a coma.
I could go on, but that’s enough from me for now. Your turn. Got something on your mind that you could do without ever reading or watching again? Share in the comments!
Story Time is an occasional feature all about stories and story-telling. Whether it’s on the page or on the screen, this is about how stories work and what makes us love the ones we love.
Aaaaaaaaaahh! This may be the best thing since sliced bread: screencaps from the 1995 BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice (with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth) with quotes from Parks and Recreation. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, etc., etc., Pride and Recreation:
Author Patrick Rothfuss is known for the charity Worldbuilders and his Kingkiller Chronicle – a trilogy of The Name of the Wind (published 2007), The Wise Man’s Fear (2011), and a thus far unnamed, unpublished final installment.
Patrick Rothfuss / DAW.
Rothfuss just shared some great news: The Chronicle was signed by Lionsgate for a “big narratively intertwined multi-platform development deal” (in Rothfuss’s words). The plan is to produce a tv-series with a connecting movie and a video game – how awesome is that?
“You see, I never expected a studio would treat me like a human being. But through this whole process, Lionsgate has treated me with amazing respect. I’ve made what to me seem like reasonable requests, and they responded to them… reasonably. And I’m not just talking about pretty words here, they’re making contractual agreements granting me control of things. They haven’t just been reasonable, they’ve been kind, and understanding. […]
“Lionsgate is making its own press release today and there will be stories in all manner of Hollywood news outlets pretty soon. It’s not a coincidence that my blog is launching up on the very same day as their big announcement. In the same hour, even. Lionsgate coordinated with me so I could share this news on my blog at the same time they’re launching their story.
“This was important to me because if you read my blog or follow me on social media… well… you’re a part of the reason my books are a big deal. A lot of you have been a part of my team for years, and I wanted the chance to tell you about this piece of news myself rather than have you hear it on the street.
The fact that Lionsgate was willing to go to some lengths to let me launch this blog simultaneously with their press release is another good sign, in my opinion. It shows they respect me, and it shows they respect you guys, too.”
Sounds good to me! Scratch that – it sounds great. Empathy and respect make valuable capital for businesses, too. I’ll surely be keeping an eye on this project. And the best of luck to Rothfuss in the development process!
Co-Geeking 
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