Clone Wars... again

My family has gone out of town and left me alone again for a few days.  One of the things that I haven't done since the last time this happened (back in April) was watch some TV, and by TV, I mean, stuff on Netflix.  And by stuff on Netflix, I mean my long-deferred and delayed re-watching of the entire Clone Wars run.  So far, I've finally watched the last three episodes of Season 2, where I'd left off, and the first 9 episodes of Season 3 (it's nice that each episode really is only 22-23 minutes long.  And at least a minute or so of that is the credits, which I tend to skip through.)  With roughly twenty minute episodes, it takes five or six of them to be equivalent to one movie, so watching twelve episodes isn't as big a deal as it sounds; it's like basically saying that I watched two movies over the weekend.

And I have to say that the relatively high esteem that I hold this show diminishes somewhat the more I watch it.  Sure, there are a lot of great moments in it, no doubt—but overall, it isn't as good as I remember it.  I mostly remember the really great episodes and the really great moments, and forget that for every one of those, there's probably two that are not.  Mostly, these are just mediocre rather than actively and offensively bad—it manages to avoid that most of the time at least—but the more you watch of the show, the more those start to pop up.  And the UN-ish utopianism of some characters and situations that continue to reappear and reappear over and over again starts to get really tedious.  I'm already rolling my eyes at military objectives constantly being over-ruled in the name of "humanitarianism" of some sort or another.  Sometimes, it's just to make a not-so clever in-joke or self-referential quote, like being on some kind of "mercy mission" or whatever, but it's tired, and old.  Especially when it continues to be the same old "for some reason, without trade routes, everybody on every planet is starving, no matter how biologically rich and resource plentiful their planet actually is."  And the fact that this is supposed to be a military adventure show about soldiers and their generals, the Jedi, it's all too often... not.  It's as if the writers, collectively, know absolutely nothing about the military, or military life, or military campaigns, or anything at all that should be a basic requirement for writing military science fiction.

And sure; I'm not demanding that military science fiction authors be veterans—but it would be nice if they at least spent some time educating themselves on a few basics of some military campaigns of the past, so they could  refer to them indirectly, without looking like they have no idea what they're talking about.  But like I said, this is a tiring problem, but it tends to drag the show only down into mediocrity, not actual badness.  So at least there's that.  Or maybe it's just me that thinks military science fiction is more interesting than Peace Corps. in space science fiction.  Which I actually have no interest in.  At all.

So, yeah—my memories of the Clone Wars are colored by the highlights of the show, and I tend to forget about the reversion to the mean that happens all too often, to say nothing of the lowlights (which almost always feature Jar Jar Binks, the droids, Padme Amidala, or kids in space.)

I've got some highlights still coming for Season 3, which I'm looking forward to.  The Nightsisters and Savage Opress's debut are only two episodes away from where I am, I think.  I don't remember thinking that the Mortis episodes were all that wonderful, although they do have some great visual design, but then I've got the Citadel break-in and the Trandoshans hunting Ahsoka and the younger jedi, including the series debut of Chewbacca. Of thirteen upcoming episodes still to watch, I'm excited about at least eight of them.  That's not a bad ratio.  Season 4 has some great episodes too.

But in the future, it's unlikely that I'll ever attempt to watch the entire run again.  This is the third time (or maybe the fourth) that I've done so, and the first time in at least a couple of years, but for whatever reason, the lowlights are showing more than I'm used to.  I think I'll just stick to watching the episodes that I already know are really good from this point on.

Playing with your action figures in the dirt

Safari guide

Something Nick Cole said in the podcast I linked to yesterday struck a nerve; what Galaxy's Edge is is him and Jason Anspach playing with their Kenner action figures in the dirt as kids.

I'm 45 years old, which means that when Star Wars first came out on Memorial Day 1977, I was all of 5½ years old.  And, of course, I immediately started picking up Kenner Star Wars action figures, and did so for a good five years or so before I kinda grew out of it, I guess.  I started with the normal ones; the Luke and Vader figures where the lightsabers slid in and out of their wrists like Wolverine claws, an R2-D2 and C-3PO, a Han Solo, a Hammerhead and a Walrus man, a stormtrooper, etc.  I used proof of purchases to get a Boba Fett figure in advance of the release of Empire Strikes Back, and picked up a few more Empire level figures here and there—I don't recall that I got very many (if any) Return of the Jedi figures, although my little brothers might well have.

I also had a few of the more expensive things; I had a TIE fighter and an X-wing, for instance, although I recall keenly wanting the Death Star playset and never getting it.

Rather, what I did was mix and mingle these Star Wars figures with my Fisher Price Adventure People, which I had a lot of (probably because they were a lot cheaper) and which were to the same scale.  Granted, they weren't really the same genre—Boba Fett getting into a fist-fight with a rally car racer, construction worker, paramedic, or safari guide on the back of a neon green van like Indiana Jones fighting Nazis on the back of a truck is the kind of thing I'm talking about. While a submarine flew around like a space ship trying to grab him with its claw arms, and a rubber octopus wrapped its tentacles around his neck. Meanwhile, a gigantic, over-sized tiger toy with an articulated jaw that was to the wrong scale so that he was roughly the size of a T. rex, as well as some of those 70s style rubber dinosaurs needed to be fought.  Boba Fett was usually pretty awesome in these fights, because of course he had a blaster, a gigantic missile on his back, and a smaller missile on his wrist.  Plus, he looked a little bit like a space crusader in that armor.

By the early 80s, the Adventure People line had picked up some space stuff, almost certainly as a reaction to the success of Star Wars.  At first, it was stuff like pretty realistic astronaut and space shuttles and stuff, but they later picked up pretty gnarly looking robots and aliens and "astroknights."  This meant, of course, that it "matched" the Star Wars characters a bit better.  That bad-ass "Clawtron" robot was a formidable foe for Boba Fett, and "X-Ray Man" felt like some kind of Guardians of the Galaxy-esque supervillain.

This is a big part of what they mean, I think, when they talk about playing with your toys in the sand.  It doesn't mean trying to replicate the Star Wars setting or the Star Wars characters, really—it means playing around with Star Wars elements in a unique environment that is Star Wars-esque... but not really Star Wars.

Back in town...

http://hankgarner.com/episode-206-jason-anspach-and-nick-cole-galaxys-edge/

Nice listen.  Something I stumbled across this morning. I was disconnected from my internet most of the last week and a half, so I'll just drop that for now rather than try to create some kind of new content while I'm actually still fairly distracted.  This podcast elucidates an interesting take on "how to approach reconstructing Star Wars."

A few notes:

• Don't take yourself seriously.  This isn't "important art"; it's an entertaining story.
• Don't try to rebuild Star Wars exactly.  This is more like playing with the Star Wars toys outside, where you use Star Wars elements, but rename them and reimagine them like we did when we were 7 year old kids with the old Kenner action figures and stuff.  In my opinion, this is the real key.  L. Sprague de Camp tried to "reconstruct" better writers' stories, but "fix" esoteric and nerdy details about them (Pusadian Cycle vs. Howard's Hyborian stories, etc.) and it just makes him look like a self-important goober.
• The Force in Galaxy's Edge is maybe more like the Ring in Tolkien.  There's probably only one Sith so far, Goth Sullust (or whatever exactly his name was) and a whole galaxy worth of Gollums, and Frodo Bagginses, who can carry the Ring more or less safely to Mount Doom, don't really exist; they're singular characters.
• Grand destinies aren't often really what we want.  Let's tell stories about normal people in fun, entertaining situations. (I will point out that few of the characters are really normal people in Galaxy's Edge so far, though.  Wraith the bounty hunter, or Chuun the Legionnaire brevet lieutenant are not normal.  Even the little girl looking for a bounty hunter wasn't just a "normal" character.)  But the idea that maybe there could be better stories about Lobot or 4-LOM, for instance, is a great point.  As Star Wars became more and more focused on the Skywalker family, who apparently are the only truly important people in the entire galaxy, it somehow lost what it was.
• Like Lucas originally meant; Galaxy's Edge will be "serial like"—nine novels, one out every month, and then a "prequel" series (maybe) after that about the Savage Wars.
• The first four novels have titles; two are already out, and the third is available for pre-order, by the way:
• Legionnaire
• Galactic Outlaws
• Kill Team
• Attack of the Shadow

Galaxy's Edge: Galactic Outlaws

I don't post a lot of book reviews here anymore, but here's one, because I can't help it.  I just finished reading Nick Cole and Jason Anspach's Galaxy's Edge: Galactic Outlaws, the second book in the Galaxy's Edge series. Legionnaire was the first, and Kill Team promises to be the third.  It was just released yesterday and I had it on pre-order.  It was delivered to my Kindle first thing in the morning when I logged on.  Needless to say, I read it pretty quickly.

First off; I'm intrigued by their business model.  Follow the link above to see how it works; it's kind of a Kickstarter-like proposal although they manage the business end themselves rather than through something like Kickstarter. You pay a monthly fee and get content each month of various kinds—but although I'm intrigued, I'm also cheap and wary of new ideas, so I just bought the books the "old fashioned" ebook way—on Amazon.  But because this series is so good so far, I might overcome my inherent cheapness and just buy a membership in their club.  There's a lot of stuff that you get with some of those memberships besides advanced copies of chapters of the next book as it develops: concept art, podcasts, webinars, signed hard-copies, personalized contacts from the authors, etc.

Which isn't necessarily unwarranted.  The Partner level subscription will run you $120 a year, which even for a few great books, is a fair bit of money, but to all appearances, they make sure to provide plenty of value to justify that.

In the meantime, for $2.99 (twice) you can get the two books that are out as Kindle files from Amazon.  The first book is a kind of "prologue"—it's a great space war story, that feels a bit like the Michael Caine movie Zulu set in space.  In retrospect, it appears to have been merely setting the stage for what is to come in the series proper, which starts with this book.  It's still early on, and it ends with things just getting started, in some ways, but at the same time, it's a very satisfying story, and lives up to the promise that the authors' provided when this whole project first came to my attention: it's #StarWarsNotStarWars.  To quote from the blurb for the book itself: It's sleek starfighters, exotic aliens, loyal bots, blasters, scoundrels, heroes and powerful enemies in a thrilling adventure that will take you back to that magic place a from a long time ago…

It's Star Wars as the franchise was.  As it should have been.  It makes no bones about being pastiche, just as George Lucas really made no bones about Star Wars being pastiche (read some of the posts I've made on the subject, particularly here, here, here, here, and here—in that order) of a number of things, most especially Flash Gordon plus Dune plus the Lensmen series.

Anyhoo—while the first book reads like space Zulu, this story, which is really two plots involving two groups of characters who combine near the end, is very reminiscent of space True Grit.  Considering the degree to which Westerns contributed themes and character beats to the oldest Star Wars movies, this shouldn't be a surprising twist.  The setting feels an awful lot like Star Wars (except some internal character monologues give it a slightly darker feel sometimes), and there are a few interesting call-backs to the first book, which is less like a sequel and more like a spin-off, if the whole series were a spin-off of the prologue.

Minor spoilers in this next paragraph, although they're telegraphed pretty early and transparently, so not really—one character that we're introduced to early on is quite obviously effectively immortal or at least very long-lived—space Wolverine from the X-Men, if you will.  One character that is hinted at for the entire book turns out to be the first (and maybe only, although where's the fun in that?) ersatz Sith Lord, and while there is no tradition of ersatz Jedi that we are shown, there is a character (and maybe even more than one) who may yet end up playing the role of Obi-wan Kenobi. At least they're set up so that they could, and they hint at it.

It's amusing and entertaining to see the chemistry established as the group of what reads like the space opera version of "the D&D party" starts to come together—the hot-shot gunslinger who's kind of the lead protagonist and reads like Boba Fett's capabilities with Han Solo's personality, and a bit of a Batman/Bruce Wayne dichotomy going on.  The young "Mattie" from True Grit who is his de facto ward and student, kinda, and her side-kick, the C-3PO analog who's build on an old war bot chassis and can still access its old programming and armament, making him a much more interesting C-3PO than C-3PO himself ever was.  The talented ship's mechanic, who—although I'm not really very familiar with this franchise, I know enough to recognize this one—is very similar in many respects to Kaylee from Firefly.  The nerdy, young hacker who can create mechanical and electronic deus ex machina effects to keep the plot moving as needed. A human R2-D2 if you will. The ChewbaccaNotChewbacca co-pilot who's very Kzin-like in many ways, but who is still obviously Chewbacca anyway.

It's also amusing and entertaining to count (and I noted quite a few already) clear correspondences with the Star Wars setting—where Star Wars has the Clone Wars, mentioned briefly for a bit of color in the first movie, here we have the Savage Wars, which play a similar function.  While in Star Wars, we had only brief exposure in the very early 80s to the concept of the Mandalorean "supercommandos", the early legionnaires play a similar role; watered down current legionnaires feel more like stormtroopers.  Brief mention is made of what sound an awful lot like the ruins of Death Stars from the past, although the super-weapon referred to briefly here is equally grim.

If you see the Republic as an analog to the US today, which wouldn't necessarily be unfair (although not necessarily deliberate) then its fall from what it once was to what it is now is less iconic than the overthrow of the Republic and establishment of the Empire we're shown in Star Wars. And yet, it's also more tragic and more true to life; the degeneracy of a once powerful state consumed by a political class of parasites that hollows it out and guts it from the inside is all too familiar.

In many ways, this feels an awful lot as if they'd done their research by not just watching the very earliest Star Wars movie, and a bit of Empire, and then "fixing" where Star Wars started going wrong by creating a pastiche that doesn't, but rather, it's as if they were steeped in the early drafts of the first two movies and borrowed as much from them as from the screenplays as they actually turned out.  I doubt that they actually did, but if they had, the result would be eerily similar.  This is the grand vision of what Star Wars tried to be, and ultimately ended up not being able to sustain.  I've said many times before (read my links above) that the Star Wars of the late 70s and even early 80s is very different than the franchise as it evolved.  Although in many respects, Empire was an even better movie than Star Wars was, in some ways, it set the stage for things to go wrong, and Return of the Jedi coasted by on momentum, with many things already starting to go wrong.  (And obviously, the franchise went really off the rails after that, in spite of flashes of brilliance here and there in some of the video games, some of the episodes of shows like The Clone Wars and the possibility that we'll actually still get a really good new movie out of the franchise yet.  Maybe.)  And it's hard to see what Star Wars once used to be without squinting really hard and deliberately ignoring stuff that we've been steeped in for decades now.  But if you could somehow do that, Galaxy's Edge is in many ways, exactly what I'd expect it to look like.  What I said back in March about my own modest efforts, who's end result is still mostly TBD, is absolutely and completely true for Galaxy's Edge, so I'll repeat it:

It's new, yet should feel very familiar to anyone who's familiar with space opera tales of swashbuckling derring-do featuring laconic alpha male space cowboys who shoot first, space Templar-like warrior-monks who get into crazy martial arts sword-fights on space-ships, vast legions of faceless soldiers, and sassy space princess damsels in distress.  It may not feel exactly like such stories that you're already familiar with—and that's on purpose—but it should feel like those stories deconstructed... and then reconstructed all over again.  This time, all of the confusion over good and evil, black and white, what heroism is, who the good guys are, what a good guy is, what the dickens SJW dogma and political correctness has to do with space opera at all, etc. has all been washed away and what had become tired and disappointing is now a blank slate, ready to be made new, fresh and exciting again.

Ladies and gentlemen; that's Galaxy's Edge.  I highly recommend it.

Reading...

I've spent some considerable time lately out of town, and am about to do so again, so this may be the only blog post I'm able to sneak in for another ten days or so.

One advantage of traveling is that I get to read a bit more than normal.  This time, I mostly did so on my phone.  I've finished several books—and I can't remember for sure which ones I finished right before I left, and which ones I finished more recently.  Looking back at my latest Kindle post, I see that I didn't actually read the ones that are highlighted in green.  I'll probably update that one and keep it as a kind of constantly updating archive, or something.  Let's do a quick round-up, shall we?

• Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott.  I'm pretty sure that I finished this before leaving, actually, but I hadn't mentioned it here.  It's a true classic.  In at least some ways, the Robert Taylor, Joan Fontaine, and Elizabeth Taylor movie from 1952 loosely based on this novel is more exciting, but in others, of course, it can't compare.  If you haven't read it, you should.  It may try your patience, and will certainly increase your vocabulary.  It's amusing sometimes to read older novels and remark on the pacing and the prose style, which is verbose and sometimes so baroque that it feels rococo.  
• Galaxy of Heroes by Gus Flory.  This imagines a space opera setting in which humans are kind of at the bottom of the totem pole and always getting chased from one place to another, in danger of imminent extinction.  Kind of how the Jews imagine their history to be, maybe.  It took a while to grow on me, but I ended up being satisfied with the book in the end.  It felt like the whole novel was set-up for a series of sequels, though—in some ways, it doesn't stand on its own as well as it should.
• Albion Lost: The Exiled Fleet by Richard Fox.  This took a while to grow on me too, partly because it bounced around between too many characters, who only near the end of the book finally started to warm up to the audience.  And then, the whole thing was clearly a prologue to a series—which doesn't exist yet (although I think at least the immediate sequel just came out recently.)  It was intriguing, but clearly can't be seen as anything other than part of a whole which has yet to materialize.  As with Galaxy of Heroes, I found I was further into the novel before it really grabbed me than I'd have liked.  If I wasn't traveling, I might have ditched it and read something else at about the 25-30% mark, but I persisted, and as with Galaxy of Heroes, in the end, I'm glad that I did, and I'm intrigued enough by this prologue to think that actually seeing what the series proper looks like now that it's primed to get moving, wouldn't be such a bad idea.
• Galaxy's Edge: Legionnaire by Nick Cole and Jason Anspach.  Fabulous novel.  Absolutely wonderful.  Can't wait for the follow-up, which is due out tomorrow (I've already got it pre-ordered.)  Although this is the first of the #StarWarsNotStarWars series, i.e. an ersatz Star Wars not unlike my own AD ASTRA at least in gross conception, I should point out that this initial offering is fairly different than classic Star Wars.  It's military fiction with truly elite troops, and the "Empire" (the Republic, as it's called here) is not so much evil in the mustache-twirling, Nazi-uniform wearing Star Wars style as they are incompetent, bureaucratic, and careless with the lives of its citizens and others alike in a all-too realistically cold manner.  In other words, they're much more realistic and frightening—yet ironically a bit less iconic.  That said, it misses almost all of the Star Wars beats—it's pretty much a straight up war story with a plot borrowed from Michael Caine's Zulu at a high level.  And the epilogue seems to suggest that it too was prologue-like in nature (three for three with space opera books I've read recently) and somewhat atypical (for Star Wars) approach was setting the stage for one of the characters to emerge as a more cynical bounty hunter type character in the future—as if there were a Boba Fett with a Heart of Gold variant or something.  We'll see how it develops, but faulting the story for not being as Star Wars-like as I anticipated when it's still uniformly excellent seems a bit unfair somehow.
• Enemy of Man by Scott Moon.  I really wanted to like this, as Scott Moon seems like a nice guy, but I admit that I've been kinda struggling with it.  I'm not really liking the protagonist character very much, because he seems like one of those "buffeted about by stronger personalities" types of characters rather than someone who takes charge.  I'm not giving this up, but I am not finishing it until after I read the next Galaxy's Edge book, so it's on the back burner for now.