Babel Clash

Today we segue from B-movies to the best in SF&F on TV. Rather than impose my favorites on you, I’m just going to make a list, and you’re going to tell me your favorites. But wait, there’s more! Not only must you pick a favorite show–you must also choose a favorite episode. Mind you, the shows you name must still be making new episodes now. I realize there’s a huge number of awesome SF&F shows in the past, but we’re not going there today. If we were, I’d certainly name BSG; I’m watching that right now. But alas, it has ended.

And here we go:

Supernatural
Vampire Diaries
Eureka
Flashforward
Sanctuary
Warehouse 13
Dollhouse
True Blood
Doctor Who
Torchwood*
Fringe
Ghost Whisperer
Smallville
Heroes
Stargate Universe

*put it on list as current, even though I’m not sure if it’s coming back

Those are all the shows I can think of. Which ones am I missing? You can add to the list by naming shows, but I’d also like you to name your favorite episode of the show you like best.

What are the best of the best?

So alien lifeforms. They come in all shapes and sizes in SF:

So what do you think?  Will they be cute, scary, attractive, or revolting?

Today I’m gonna talk about b-movies, specifically SFF films that have terrible scripts, bad acting, rotten effects, and somehow manage to be totally awesome. I have to confess I have a weakness for these things. I loved MST3K.

Recently, we watched a movie that introduced my 10 year old son to the idea of MST3King a movie. This wasn’t SFF, but it was hilarious nonetheless. It was a Mexican movie, filmed in the 70s, about two kids who run away from their parents because of a dog and they travel all over Mexico having these wacky adventures. This is hilarious because of the stuff that happens to the kids. They’re slapped, beaten, threatened with death, jump off a train, locked up by an insane policeman. They smoke, hit on ladies, and it’s just all around amazingly inappropriate. I watched the movie, just gobsmacked by how much our perceptions of what’s acceptable have changed. But then again, our parents let us run wild all summer long, as long as we were in the neighborhood. We ran in packs and played lawn darts. Things have unquestionably changed.

So my husband and I watched this movie with our son and we laughed until we cried, making up our own dialogue. The kid had so much fun he didn’t ask to get his Gameboy or go play Wii. We watched until the end, and it was such great interactive entertainment. Now I’m looking for our next movie to MST3K.

Anything with a lesser Baldwin is generally a good candidate. Plan 9 from Outer Space is a genius work for this purpose. We also watched Raptor Island with …wait for it… Lorenzo Lamas. That’s a mark of quality entertainment, I tell you. Andres and I MST3K’d that one, too.

What are your favorite SFF B-movies?

To dance from Ann’s topic on Steampunk: I get a lot of worldbuilding questions. Some of them are a little bit trippy. I once got an email explaining to me that the author of the email was writing an urban fantasy and could I please point out to him which elements of my worldbuilding I considered as mine. The answer is I consider everything I write mine, odd duck that I am.

But back to worldbuilding, sometimes people want to know how to create a world that is fantastic but doesn’t stretch the reader’s capacity for suspending belief. In reality, you can stretch the reader’s capacity for disbelief to colossal proportions. You can build a most fantastic world, if you take care to make it logical and follow its own rules. See Terry Pratchett

I typically come up with the world first, and let the characters grow from it; but you can do it the other way around as well. Start with a new character and build the world around him or her, as long as everything you do has a reason. Every thing you stick into your world will affect your characters. If the character lives in the desert, the water will be precious. If he lives on an archipelago, he probably can swim. But making a kick-ass swimmer hero in the middle of Dune-like planet presents a bit of the problem. Where is he going to go to dazzle us with his swimming mojo?

Sometimes people throw a bunch of cool elements into the setting, but the elements make no sense together. Like adding steampunk or vampires or whatever is hot at the moment into a storyline clearly not designed to accommodate them. I once saw an aspiring writer on one of the writing-related boards state that she was writing an urban fantasy and she was loading it with sex because that’s what sells.

First of all, assuming that sex is necessary to sell is a mistake. I’m up to three books in my first series and nobody had sex yet. Doesn’t seem to be hurting me. Second of all, a UF with a lot of sex is likely (but not necessarily) to edge into the territory of paranormal romance: different agents, different publishers, different book buyers. PRN is not UF and vice versa. The new series, which you see on the sidebar, basically sits exactly on the line between uf and PRN and everyone from agent to the reviewers had kittens trying to figure out how to classify the thing. And third and most important, if you don’t like writing sex and you’re just sticking it in there so the book will “sell”, chances are you’re writing bad sex and there is nothing more cringe-worthy than a bad sex scene.

If you put it into your draft, make sure the story can’t survive without it.

I did a quick poll on twitter to see what people wanted to talk about today and steampunk came up. Since I’m interested in this topic, I’ll be happy to discuss it. First, if you aren’t sure what that actually is, Katiebabs has a great series (three parts) discussing the various elements. It starts here. Feel free to go peruse that; I’ll wait. And here’s an excellent Wiki offering a list of steampunk works in various media sources.

Okay, now that we’re on the same page, Jess Rosen asks: What about struggling with adding steampunk to a novel without making it all steampunk. Doable?

That’s an interesting question, I think. Full disclosure here: I have a project with Anne Sowards right now that I’d call steampunk. Here’s the blurb I used in describing Bronze Gods:

Bronze Gods takes place a dark, lush dangerous world set in what we’d call fairy. Only “under the hill” isn’t the pastoral utopia it once was. Because there are fairly regular crossings (once every hundred years or so), our technology has gradually infiltrated the other world. So when steam ships go missing, well, that’s where they’ve gone. The original population, the Ferishers–what we’d call the Seelie and Unseelie–have long since interbred with the humans who crossed over. Now there are no pure bloods left, and there are noble houses formed on the basis of how much Ferisher blood is left in their lineage. Ferisher blood permits their human descendants to work small magics and cast glamours. The fey who refused to share their world with the interlopers fell into the Fade; their bodies withered and died, leaving them hungry, angry spirits that haunt the countryside. Some citizens can summon those spirits and use them to gain strength and power. In this book, there’s murder, mayhem, dark rituals, theatre, forbidden romance, a dark stranger who has been called the Lord of Spiders, a drug-addicted gray knight who works as a cop, and a genealogist who is cursed with sensing lies.

So I have some background in this. However, that said, I would actually caution against “adding steampunk elements” just because the market is hot. Unless you have a finished manuscript from the sub-genre that’s heating up, as I did, by the time you finish the book, they will have acquired all the steampunk they want, and the market will be turning to something else. By the time you hear about a trend, as a writer, chances are, it’s already passing, at least in terms of acquisitions.

I wouldn’t suggest trying to tailor a manuscript by shoehorning elements in to make it fit, at least superficially, the demand for steampunk. The elements are either integral to the plot, or they are not. I don’t think a book can be “a little bit steampunk”; it’s like being a little bit dead or a little bit pregnant. One either is, or isn’t.

You’re free to disagree with me, of course. Do you think a book can (or should, maybe that’s the better question) have steampunk elements without being all steampunk?

Not to blatantly self promote Babel Clash, but my favorite con moment was last year’s Babel Clash panel at Comic Con.  Okay, so it blatant self-promotion, but still, I think it’s fun.  We had our first live geeky debate on the topic:  “Urban fantasy vs. Epic Fantasy.”  Our guests were Patrick Rothfuss, Seanan McGuire, Rob Thurman, Kat Richardson, Jeanne Stein, Amber Benson and Thomas Sniegoski.

You can find the clips on YouTube.

Babel Clash Live Debate part 1
Babel Clash Live Debate part 2

Yes, we are planning some new live debates for 2010.  More information to come in the months ahead.

In comments on the gaming post, Shannon asked me about my best convention. I’m not going to tell that story here because I suspect I have a strange definition of best. Instead I’m going to tell a con story and invite y’all to share your best story as well, whether it’s funny, awesome, embarrassing or all of the above.

I had a friend in college; she was far more plugged in to this world than me. I hadn’t yet started gaming. But she was into gaming, SCA, and all of that. We met in Washington DC, weirdly enough, and found we both lived in Indiana. We stayed in touch, though we went to different colleges. Our freshman year, when I was home on break, she took me to my first SF con.

I was a little unsure about the whole business, but I totally knew who Nichelle Nichols was. I shook her hand and found her to be a very cool lady. I was less convinced about the huge lines for various comic book people and artists. I wandered through the dealer area and went to a few panels. I found myself very confused as to what I was supposed to be doing.

This wasn’t a big con, mind you. At some point I found myself standing with Debbie in a big group of people. They were all fawning on a middle-aged man wearing a rather outlandish scarf. The thing was super long and particolored; they were all hanging on his every word. I was standing there, rather bored by the whole thing, when the man glanced at me with a big smile. He reached out and shook my hand and then said, “I bet you want my autograph.”

I blinked at him and said, “Why?”

I had NO earthly idea who Tom Baker was at that time. He looked positively astonished. My friend dragged me away, totally chagrined and then tried to explain that he was Dr. Who, which led to a really hilarious Who’s on First type conversation.

Years later, I think about my younger self and cringe. Because now if I met Dr. Who at a con (albeit Eccleston or Tennant), I would so totally be among the crowd hanging on his every word. I blush when I think about 18 year old me, who knew so very little. It’s kind of an awesome but embarrassing memory.

What’s your best con story?

We have a lot of fans of both Ilona and Ann joining us this week.  Thanks for visiting Babel Clash, and we hope that you continue to follow our geeky debate.  All the comments are great, too!  Keep it up.

For those of you who have noticed that only Ann’s title is listed as our feature book, please know that we’ll give Ilona equal treatment next week.  Her new novel, On the Edge, will be our featured book for the second half of our conversation.

Also, we do have excerpts of both books for you to enjoy.  Here you go…

On The Edge Excerpt
Doubleblind Excerpt