Don't Make Me Use My Dad Voice

There are two types of Science Fiction and Fantasy fans in the world:

1.) Those who acknowledge both new and old works as being relevant to the genre.
2.) Those who are wrong.

Yep. That completes the list. That's everybody. I don't know where you fall into the list, dear reader, but you're on there somewhere. I don't get why anyone would denigrate either, but there it is.
Some readers are never going to like certain authors. That's the way it should be. The fact remains that not liking an author doesn't make them irrelevant to the genre.


This rant started because of things I've read recently after seeing them linked on Facebook. I can't seem to find them. One had an explicit statement that anything published more than fifteen years ago is no longer relevant. I believe that it was written by a young person. I understand the hubris of youth and the belief that history started the day that person was born, but no it didn't actually happen that way.

Everything in SF/F builds on what has come before. The roots of modern fantasy go back at least as far as The Epic of Gilgamesh. (And possibly farther. Since it's the oldest known written document it's hard to say for sure but that's the way I'd bet.) Science Fiction goes back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Everything in either genre derives from those two works in some way, shape or form. Everything. ALL OF IT.

Now don't get me wrong. Lots of work is still happening in both genres and it's all relevant too. Harry Potter is a bit older now, but it has legions of fans. The boom in Young Adult literature (much of which kicks ass) is attributable directly to J.K. Rowling. Authors like Veronica Roth, Suzanne Collins and Rick Riordan have all benefited from the popularity of someone else's series. (Please understand that I'm not demeaning any of the above. Their work is awesome. I'm just stating that Harry Potter created a market for them to get the recognition they deserve.) This is a good thing for SF/F and those individual authors alike. It's also good for a guy like me, who likes a good story regardless.

Speaking of the Hunger Games trilogy and the Divergent series, I'll offer dystopic science fiction as a case in point. Darren Allen has an excellent post on this very subject here. I won't go into the types of dystopias he has mentioned. He does a terrific job of that himself. My point is the relevance. Those older works are relevant based on the influence they still have on work today.

The relevance of the more modern work is probably more evident to a younger person. The wave of modern day dystopic fiction probably started with the success (and yes, that's key) of The Hunger Games. The books and the movies related to Suzanne Collins work is long and becoming longer. She re-popularized the sub-genre and sent it higher in popularity than anyone who came before her. She deserves a ton of credit. The fact remains that her work built on a foundation established decades earlier. It's all relevant.

The same can be said of works like The Time Machine and Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. The Time Machine opened another entire sub-genre of SF/F: that of time travel. Journey to the Center of The Earth introduced science fiction to the ancient concept of the fantastic journey. Seriously, every SF work that contains space travel owes a debt to Jules Verne. Every episode of Star Trek, every Star Wars movie, every Green Lantern comic book and all the rest can trace their roots back here, with an assist to the French silent film A Trip to the Moon.

So go ahead and play Halo.  Enjoy it. It's relevant to a new generation of fans. Just don't think you invented the space travel or power armor. Power armor has been around since at least the debut of Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. It's awesome. It's fun. It's just not original. But relevant? Oh hell yeah. Have you seen the hype this game generates? Have you watched the movies or read the novels? (No, I haven't read the novels but if anyone wants to let me know where to start, I'm there. The influence of this video game on an entire generation of fandom is immense.)


Oh, and since I'm rocking out with my dad voice...

There has been a movement recently to add more women into SF/F circles. This in and of itself is a good thing. What is not good is the bullshit people are peddling when they try to highlight their cause. Are you paying attention here people? I have a statement to make:

If someone tells you that women have historically been ignored or pushed aside in SF/F they are either a liar or an idiot. 

 

As a matter of fact, if they're dumb enough to believe that anyone who knows anything about the genre is ignorant enough to believe their bullshit they're probably both. I spent five minutes on the Hugo Awards list site compiling the following list of Hugo Awards won by women before 1980:

Weyr Search” by Anne McCaffrey [Analog Oct 1967] Best Novella 1968
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin [Ace, 1969] best novel 1970
The Word for World is Forest” by Ursula K. Le Guin [Again, Dangerous Visions, 1972] best novella 1973
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin [New Dimensions #3, 1973] best short 1974
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin [Harper & Row, 1974] Best Novel 1975
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm [Harper & Row, 1976] Best Novel 1977
Eyes of Amber” by Joan D. Vinge [Analog Jun 1977] best Novelette 1978
Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre [Houghton Mifflin, 1978] Best Novel 1979


There have been others since, but I've got to work in a bit so that's as far as I took it. Also, I didn't look into the retro awards, so there may have been some there. To be fair, there may not have been as well.

And let's not forget that Mary Shelley was the FOUNDING AUTHOR of Science Fiction. The technology in the work may appear dated to modern eyes, but the book was first published in 1818. No, that's not a typo. Next year is the two-hundredth anniversary of the first published Science Fiction work. It is also the two-hundred anniversary of the publication of the  first ever Science Fiction story written by a woman. A woman who has at least three separate awards named after her. Seriously. Please, people learn something about a genre before you bash it. Check your fucking assumptions and do some god damned research before you start spouting horse manure. Really. The amount of books, movies and toys that come from Shelley's work is beyond my ability to calculate.

Some works mentioned above are available at the links below:

SF Predicts the Future: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

(PLEASE NOTE: The picture below was not in any way created/altered/conceived/etc. by me. I blatantly stole it from a Facebook post and have no intent to take credit for it. If someone knows who made this tell me and I'll give them credit. They deserve it. I don't.)

I once read a Facebook post by none other than SF/F author John Ringo in which he lamented the fact that he was having trouble keeping ahead of engineers with his writing. It appears that Science Fiction authors are so good at predicting the future that engineers are following right along and inventing new products directly from the pages/from the screens of works of Science Fiction, only the engineers have gotten so good at it that they are now catching up to what SF writers have predicted. I'm not sure if this is because SF authors and screenwriters are so used to recycling tropes now that the engineers are hip to what comes next or if it's because engineers are just that damned good. I have a feeling it may be some strange co-mingling of the two but I have no evidence of that either. For purposes of this blog though, I will confine myself mainly to what's been seen on screen. Movies and TV will

It's worth mentioning that Star Trek in no way has a monopoly on guessing what's coming. Plenty of writers and movies have made predictions. I used that picture because it got me thinking, not because of any belief that only Trek is accurate. We'll get to who else is in a moment. This is something I've been meaning to write about. Hey, maybe I'll even make a prediction or two of my own.What could go wrong with that? Heh.

The Good:

Well, I started the article off with a Star Trek picture. Trek predicted all of the above and more. Trek gave us the communicator/cell phone, PADD/tablet, etc., etc., etc. Interestingly enough, it gave us more though. I know that a lot of fans of the "hard" sciences don't exactly suffer from an overabundance of enthusiasm for the social sciences but Trek predicted a lot of future trends there as well. "Seeking out new life and new civilizations" would be any anthropologists dream and, while we don't exactly have any aliens to observe yet, they have sought out many groups of people in less populated parts of the world to study. Kirk's Enterprise featured an integrated cast. There was a black woman and an Asian man on a bridge mainly populated by white people. At the time that was science fiction. No one in the modern US Navy would bat an eyelash at it.

The Battlestar Galactica reboot predicted cyber warfare before it was cool. The Galactica survives because it is the only ship in the fleet whose computers are not networked. The Cylons, being robots and therefore having computer brains, were able to easily access the computers of the other Battlestars and destroy them. In our own world, we're just beginning to see true cyber warfare take place but it is here.It's going to get more pervasive. The worst part is that it's not a shooting war and so it's hard to spot until it's too late.

George Orwell's 1984 predicted the rise of the surveillance state and the media-governmental complex. Seriously. There are cameras everywhere, especially in places like Great Britain. The NSA watches everyone in the United States and their communications. The Thought Police seemingly exist today as well, just not as a government agency. We have the media for that. When Brandon Eich, CEO of a major corporation, can be forced to resign for giving money to a group that supported traditional, as opposed to same-sex, marriage and Kelvin Cochran, Fire Chief of the City of Atlanta can be fired from his job for stating that homosexual sex is a sin while off the clock, the though police exist. This time, they're the media though. 

The Six Million Dollar Man predicted the use of mechanical replacements for lost limbs. Not only are prosthetic limbs fairly common but some actually are mechanical. Three D printers have made them much less expensive as well. They will continue to improve.

Exoskeletons, such as in Iron Man or Starship Troopers (the book)  are on their way. They are currently being tested for military applications by several countries. While it is unlikely that we'll be seeing a workable model in the extremely near future they're on the way. It's just a matter of figuring out what will work. I do find it unlikely that the first working model will be invented by a millionaire with a bad heart working with hand tools in a cave but what do I know?

The Bad:

Just about everybody has predicted the invention of a portable laser pistol. Whether it's Star Trek's phaser or  a Star Wars blaster it's just not going to happen, for a few reasons. One is practicality. No one will ever be able to generate a bright enough beam and focus it tightly enough using a package small enough to fit in one hand. Yes, the Air Force is working on a laser that can shoot down aircraft and missiles. It takes an AC-130 to carry one. They haven't made it work yet, but it's probably coming. It's just never going to be small enough to be man-portable.

Dick Tracy had an atom powered watch. Look guys, I'm a proponent of nuclear power on a macro scale as long as the technicians aren't dumb enough to pull out all of the control rods (Chernobyl) and the reactor isn't built in a freaking tsunami zone (Fukushima). The fact remains that nuclear power produces radiation and no watch is going to be able to contain it. Sorry all, but we need to leave the nuclear power generation to plants that are big enough to contain the radiation.


 Mutants, such as those in X-Men  or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles  are simply not possible. Yes, mutation has been going on for as long as there has been life but it is far more likely to lead to the death of whatever just mutated. Even successful mutation doesn't lead to the kind of changes in TMNT. Something as simple as  super strength isn't going to happen all at once based on simple genetics.

The Ugly:

Umm... I love them too.. but...uhhh... Lightsabers are never going to happen. Light doesn't work that way. Two beams of light that come into contact won't rebound... they'll simply pass right through each other.  The only way to make something that looked like a lightsaber would be to get something small enough to fit in one hand that could generate a plasma field. It would be so hot that it would burn its user to death as soon as they turned it on. This one just isn't going to happen.

Mecha, such as those in Robotech, Battletech, Avatar and four million other things are just not going to happen either. There is no benefit to a mech when compared to a tank and they'd be harder and more expensive to build. Listen, I know about the rule of cool but that doesn't apply in real life. Such a machine would have too many problems balancing to stand up. Having read that, I'm going to go suck my thumb and watch Robotech. I've been a fan for thirty plus years now.

I loved The Jetsons too but the mass use of flying cars is never going to be a thing. There isn't enough room for runways. The air traffic control requirements would be impossible to meet. Tightly packed lanes are a pipe dream. People would be flying off in nine million different directions and mid air collisions would be common.

No one - and I mean not a single living human being that I'm aware of- predicted the internet before it became popularized. Even Babylon 5, which existed in the era of America Online, Prodigy and Compuserve ignored it. They had William Edgars, the millionaire, read an actual hardcopy newspaper instead of looking up the news on a laptop. The internet may be the single biggest technological innovation of the last fifty years that wasn't predicted on the page or on screen by a SF writer. It amazes me.

Well, that's what I've got. The list is obviously not all inclusive but those are some of the big ones from my point of view. All of the opinions above are, of course, mine. Feel free to tell me I'm full of crap if you have a mind to.


Some products related to things I mentioned above are available at the links below:

Good Luck Terry Foster. We'll Miss You

(This is a Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog, but this is NOT a science fiction and fantasy post. I know most of my readers come here specifically for that kind of content. I respect that and I respect you. This is, however, my blog and I've got something I want to get off of my chest. My normal insanity will return soon. I have a blog planned about the best and worst predictions in SF, a review of Sarah Hoyt's Through Fire and several other books planned. Today though, it's my bloggy and I'll post if I want to. You would post too if it happened to you!)

As a lifelong Detroiter (well, minus a year in Tulsa) I've followed the sports scene in the D since before I can remember. I remember the voices of George Kell and Al Kaline on a hot summer day. I remember Ernie Harwell doing the radio broadcasters. I've heard Mark Champion say "Man, oh man." so many times during Lions games that I can hear it in my nightmares. I've been known to look at the clock at work with an hour and thirty minutes until lunchtime and say "One and a half to go in the half." The five most import things in my life before I had kids were, in order:

1.) The Detroit Red Wings
2.) The Michigan Wolverines
3.) The Detroit Lions
4.) The Detroit Tigers
5.) The Detroit Pistons

(Yeah I read a lot of SF/F and  watched a lot of TV shows and movies. I just didn't do it while a game was on, unless it sucked.)

Yes, I was a Wings fan before it's cool. I'll never forget a column I read by Mitch Albom about a young guy the Wings had just drafted named Steve Yzerman. I'll never forget the look on my dad's face when he realized that I could read well enough to understand a newspaper article given how young I was either. There was always a newspaper in the house and a game on TV. Those poor, abused sports sections had to go through my father and myself before they were done. And contained  in those sports sections was a writer named Terry Foster.

Wikipedia says that Terry's first job locally was as a high school sports writer, starting in 1982. That sounds right, but I don't remember that. For one, I turned six in 1982 and for two, I've never paid much attention to high school sports. As a student at Hazel Park High School in the nineties, I attended precisely one sporting event that I had to pay to get into. I wouldn't have gone to that if there hadn't been a girl in the crowd that I wanted to talk to.  My first memories of the name Terry Foster came later: When he started work as the beat writer for the Detroit Pistons during their championship years. Dude, I noticed, could write. It's odd though. The only newspaper writer I've really felt a relationship with was Bob Talbert. Terry's writing was good and I enjoyed it, but I didn't really connect to him as a person until later. For that, I have to thank my cousin Ron.

Not long after I graduated from high school, Ron told me I should start listening to sports talk radio. At the time in Detroit that meant WDFN. He kept after me but I only listened to two things on the radio: Games and music.  Then one day, I got a job driving a van for a living. I wasn't into oldies at the time and Top 40 radio gets really old really quickly when you're in a vehicle for 8+ hours a day. Ron kept after me to try sports talk as an alternative that wouldn't make me crazy. Eventually, I gave up and started listening to sports talk while I was at work. I loved it. There were a lot of shows that I enjoyed. Jamie and Gregg was the first show I ever listened to. Then came Stoney and Wojo. The ride home, at least for me, came during a show called the Sports Doctors.

The Sports Doctors show was sheer madcap insanity punctuated with occasional bouts of lucid argument. I loved that show. On one side was Dr. Terrance RRRRRRRRRRRRReginald Foster the Third. On the other was Art Regner. Some of their shows were epic. I remember one about low flush toilets that had me laughing for days afterward. They did awesome shows when the local teams won world championships. It was during this show that I really realized that you could care about an on-air personality.

I won't get into the day their "It's Official" bit started because there was some controversy and I don't want to get involved. If I talked about the day they started it, I would talk about how hard I was laughing and how frustrated Terry got with Art. About how I almost died that day because driving on the expressway and laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes was not a good plan for long term survival.

Seriously, I'm not the type to get caught up in the lives of famous people, at least not as far as what most people think of "famous". I have a degree in history but that's different. Those are mostly dead people whose lives have influenced massive amounts of people for generations after they were gone. I don't worry much about the adventures of Brangelina. I have no interest in who Russel Crowe is screwing this week. I don't know how many men Elizabeth Taylor was married to or which celebrity adopted a kid from what country. Don't get me wrong. I don't wish bad things on celebrities but that's just not me. With the WDFN crew, and especially The Sports Doctors, it was different.

These were guys who loved the same things I did. As I got a little more mature and started looking toward a wife and children of my own. I had, after all, just lost my father a few months earlier and didn't have time to talk to. None of the men on the air were mentors, per se. I've only ever met one or two of them in person and never for long enough to do more than exchange pleasantries. Still though, when they weren't talking sports they talked about life.

It seemed like every day Terry had a story to tell about his wife or one of his kids or maybe all of the above. At first when I heard him do it I kind of rolled my eyes. It was a sports talk station right? I wanted to hear someone screaming about the failures of the Tigers (it was the 90s after all) or the Lions and their pathetic excuse for a team. I wanted to hear someone celebrate the National Championship the Wolverines won. Oh, and of course the Wings won two Stanley Cups in the same time period as well. Somewhere along the line though, maybe about the time T started building his man's room, that all changed. I mean, I still wanted to hear about the sports but I started caring about the people too.

Over the years, I got more and more interested in the side conversations. A couple of the guys had kids including Terry.  They talked about the WDFN family, but it felt like it was my family. Seriously. I hung out with these guys ALL DAY LONG when I was driving for a living. I followed everything on that station. Everyone had their favorite shows and hosts and mine was the Sports Doctors show and Terry Foster.

Terry was (and still is ) one of us. I don't know if anyone from outside the Detroit Area would get this or not, but Detroit takes a lot of crap from the rest of the country and in a lot of ways, we've written it off. Oh sure, we cared about 9/11 (which I found out about while listening to WDFN) or national elections or whatever but on a personal level, it's whatever. Terry though, Terry grew up here. He graduated from Cass Tech. He got his degree from Central Michigan University. A lot of people from around here go to CMU. He loves our town and our teams. Foster is the kind of guy that a local can identify with. When someone talked some trash about us, Terry responded. I don't know if I can articulate how much it means when you can listen to one of your own have your back on the radio. I'll miss that.

WDFN was eventually forced to cut its local lineup in favor of national talent, in large part because of the fact that another local station, at the time 1270 AM, went sports talk. Once the 1270 AM lineup moved to FM on 97.1 the feud was effectively over. WDFN is an AM station. It couldn't compete and a lot of on air talent left the station and went to The Ticket. Terry was no exception.

How Mike Valenti and Terry Foster ended up working together is better explained here but for my purposes I'll just say they did. Mike and Terry were awesome together. I just watched a video where Mike talked about how he'd been doing a show with Terry for thirteen years. I had no idea it had been that long. Terry kept being Terry. He brought the fire. When Terry FREAKING Foster said something is right or wrong in Detroit, whether in sports or in the actual city, he was right. Even if he wasn't right he could convince you that he was right. He had the energy and the passion. He could bring it. There were times I thought Terry was going to murder Mike or vice versa. It never got boring.

He kept talking about his family and we kept following him. We watched his marriage develop and his kids grow up, or at least we listened to it. As a divorced man who doesn't get to see his kids anywhere near as much as he wants to (wish me luck in court on Monday as I attempt to change that)  it was awesome to be able to know what was going on in the lives of someone's kids. Listening to him made me miss my kids more but it also helped me cope. I'll never forget that.

So now he's had a couple of strokes and can't do it the way he used to. He's decided that it's time to move on. It takes guts to admit that and I respect him for doing so. Too many people cling on to the past instead of admitting what they're at in life. He did what was right for his family. No one who had listened to him over the years expected anything that would harm them. Actually, let me rephrase something I just said: He did the right thing. Period. Dot. End of sentence.

The only part of this whole thing that bothers me is that he didn't really get a chance to go out on his terms. I'm not talking about the fact that he didn't do a farewell show. All I've heard is that he wasn't able to. No one has hinted that he wasn't allowed to and I've heard it stated that he was offered the chance to do so.  It's that I wish this could be some kind of magnificent thing. The man has earned the right to do this the way he wanted to and now he can't do it. If you read this T (and you probably won't) please understand that I'm not mad at you. I really am pissed at the fact that your body sold you out though. This just doesn't seem right.  We'll miss you Terry. You take care. Detroit sports will not be the same without you. And know this: If I were empowered to give out a Golden Scalpel Award for Best Talk Show Host, I'd give it to you.


Bottom Line: 5 out of 5 Awesome Shows


The Great Detroit Sports Debate is a book Terry co-authored with fellow Detroit sports writer Drew Sharp. It is available at the links below:

Declan Finn's Live and Let Bite

(You can check both myself and Declan Finn out at the webcast he hosts and I appeared on. I promised him a blog at the time that the webcast was originally supposed to happen but my net has been down all day, so I'm a little late. Sorry Declan!)

First off the warning: Yes Live and Let Bite is book three. Yep, that means  there are two books before it. You should check them out too. I've reviewed them here and here. They're worth checking out. I mention this simply because you're going to want to read the first two books before reading this one. I really enjoyed this book and I'll talk about why below, but I'm not at all certain that this book would work as well as a stand-alone. There are a lot of references to what has come previously and it may be a bit confusing if you're not familiar. This is not a bad thing. It just means that you need to start at the beginning.

 Live and Let Bite is the story of our hero, Marco Catalano and our heroine Amanda Colt, the world's finest female vampire and their battle against existential evil. This time our evil takes the form of an ancient vampire assassin. She is a little off mentally and very impressive physically. In a universe where the bane of vampires is fire she takes a daisy cutter to the face and keeps running. She shrugs off things that should kill her and just keeps fighting.

Let's take a second to talk about our villain: Nualla is dark and mysterious. She  comes straight at Marco and he doesn't know why. She may work for a Council which may or may not exist. What we do know is that she is definitely an evil vampire (and one of the things I really like about these books is that vampires exist on a scale similar to the Dungeons and Dragons alignment system) who is extremely powerful and has a vendetta against Marco. The reason she gives (nope, not gonna spoil it) is nebulous at best and helps set up the next book (which will get here soon, I hope).

I don't generally do spoilers. They're not my thing. But I'm going to break the rule here: MARCO AND AMANDA ACTUALLY GET TOGETHER!!! And FINN DID IT RIGHT. When an author hints long term at a relationship it always makes me nervous when they finally let it happen. It often turns into a total cheesefest. The last episode of JAG comes to mind here. But Finn makes it believable. He makes it fun. He makes it awesome. This is a payoff worth waiting for. How things are going to work between a twenty-five year old mortal and a century old vampire is yet to be seen but at least they've admitted that they're both interested. Things are still in the early stages but I can't wait to see where this goes.

Finn once again delivers with the fight scenes. They're well planned out and vicious. I would not want to meet these guys in a dark alley. Well, meeting Marco in a back alley might not be all that bad. He tends to save the innocent, but the villains in this book are bad news. I do have a kind of complaint here though.

Marco and company have a tendency to prepare a battle space to a "T". This makes sense but it seems that once they've prepped a space the fight always goes the way they thought they would or at least close enough. The enemy gets a say in what happens and sometimes I think Finn forgets that. That doesn't mean it's not exciting. It doesn't mean that the good guys have won just because they think they've won. It's just really tightly plotted.

Finn has a healthy disrespect for government and it comes through. One of our main characters reveals that they were a government agent hunting the supernatural in the nineties and got downsized. Now another of our favorites has become the new guy with a much smaller department and budget.  So even with the lives of its citizen on the line, the US government found an excuse to cut the budget.  I'm  sure they managed to give a few phones away with the savings though. I got a good chuckle out of that.

A huge part of what I enjoyed about this book was that it always looks forward. Finn is building something here. The storyline is racing ahead and things are hinted at. There is a constant interest building. Finn is building a world one step at a time here. Things are opening up slowly and I'm following along amazed. He has very obviously planned out an extended plot going on here.

I did a post awhile back about Hollywood and some books that need to be turned into movies. In this case though, I'm going to suggest that maybe this series gets the Game of Thrones treatment. There's a television series here. I mean that. We may need to give Finn a bit of time to get a little further ahead before it gets started but this makes sense as a series. It's written that way and it works that way. I have zero pull in Hollywood but if I ever get some (about as likely as my getting hit by lightning twice on the same day as I hit the lottery) I'm going to make Finn an offer for this one.


So anyways, I'm totally waiting for the next one. Hopefully it will be here soon. I want to find out what the bigger threat is. I'm wondering if I'm right in predicting that we're going to see Marco go through a Luke Skywalker type storyline in the near future. His attitudes, his love for a vampire lass and Finn's alignment system have me wondering if we're not going to see a redemption story soon. We'll see how that goes. I'm anxious to see if I'm right.

Bottom Line: 4.5 out of 5 Vials of Holy Water

Live and Let Bite is available for purchase at the link below. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.

Top 10 Songs about Games and Gaming

Congratulations to me! This is my one hundredth post! I had to go with something big. I couldn't decide what to do. I mean, I could do another book or movie review, but that's what I ALWAYS do. That didn't appeal. I could have come up with some kind of long ass post talking about how great I am (true) and how awesome all of the authors who have submitted their work for review are (still true) but I'm just not that type. So, what to do? Well, when I started this blog, I listed some things that I considered to be SF/F. Books and movies were givens. I also listed comics and gaming. I haven't done much with either, other than to list them as part of the Dragon Award lineup.My comic budget is pretty anemic though, and the last game I bought was World of Warcraft: Legion. It's the best expansion yet, but that's not what I wanted to do either.

Then I thought about it. Okay, what really happened was that I accidentally clicked on the Youtube app on my phone when what I wanted was Yahoo, but nobody's perfect. That's when I saw the video to my favorite song about a game and thought to myself, "I should do a post about the best songs about games." So now you're all stuck reading about it. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

First off the disclaimer: No, I had no involvement in producing any of this. No, I'm not going to spend days posting all of the relevant information. Each song will include a link. If you're interested in finding out who produced any or all of this stuff, feel free to click on the appropriate link(s) and get your information there. And without further ado...

Number 10: Natural 20

Musically this track is just there. It's got the guitar riffs and Mikey Mason has the voice to carry it. Let's face it though. The charm of this track isn't just that. If you've ever sat down at a table and played a pen and paper RPG then you know why the phrase "natural (or nat) twenty" would bring a smile to any player's face. If not don't bother asking. Just go to the hobby shop and pick up a book and some dice. Now. I'll wait.

Number 9: If I Had a Billion Platinum

First off, I've been a Weird Al fan since the Eighties. I love parodies! Second off, I love The Bare Naked Ladies. Third off, when I was a broke ass n00b in Everquest, I found this track on Youtube. It was one of the earliest gaming songs on the internet. And besides, who doesn't want all the Kunark loot? (Well, other than anyone who played starting with Scars of Velious or later.)

Number 8: Hard Like Heroic

World of Warcraft. Music parody. Double entendres. What else do you want? How about some hysterically funny video footage? Seriously. Go "Do it like a druid in the general channel." If you don't know what I'm talking about, find out. This is awesome.

Number 7: Just Loot It

Gear and gold. That's what MMORPGs are all about. Oh, and when you're from Detroit, the only thing better than a gaming parody is a gaming parody of an Eminem track. If it's not obvious enough, this was inspired by Just Lose It. That's just another reason to love this one. Raiding +  Detroit hip hop = win.

 

Number 6: Crank that Druid Boy


When I first started playing WoW I wouldn't participate in Player versus Player content. No, not ever. I played on a player versus environment server, I didn't do PvP quests. I didn't do battlegrounds or arenas. I wouldn't touch it. Then I saw this video. That night I logged in and figured out how to queue for battlegrounds. The song itself is good but what really makes this video is the PvP content in the video. You've got to check this out. Then you've got to go pwn some n00bs and cap a flag.

Number 5: End of the World (of Warcraft)

I almost didn't put this on here because it's too catchy. On one hand, that's a good thing. Things don't get stuck in your head unless they're good. On the other hand, I'm going to be hearing this song in my head for for the next two weeks. Oh, and since this is a parody of The End of the World as We Know It I want to watch Deep Impact now too. There's nothing quite like mixing the images of Orgrimmar and Morgan Freeman to really make your brain tingle. Ouch.

 

Now comes the hard part. I don't wanna have to slot these last four! I don't wanna! Good Lord. I guess I'll do it. Gimme a sec to figure this out.

Number 4: Uhhhh.... Game On

Picture this with me. You're sitting in your girlfriend's bed. She says she doesn't feel like gaming. It's your girlfriends bed. It's Tuesday night. Raids just reset. It's your girlfriend's bed. The solution to the problem is obvious: Call out a bunch of Bollywood dancers to dance around the room and convince her to jump in Vent for the raid. That's really the only viable solution. You can't let The Guild down right? Oh and, if my girlfriend didn't read this blog, I might be tempted to point out that any video with Felicia Day in it is probably going to be fun to watch.

Number 3: Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?

Yes, two of my top four videos are from The Guild. Sue me. It's another video featuring Felicia Day.We get to see quite a bit of Amy Okuda too. It doesn't get any better than an online relationship with a girl when you don't even know what she actually looks like. I've seen crap like this happen and it cracks me up. The fact that someone made a video about it just makes it even more funny. Just be careful with the winkies in guildchat. Oh, and yes I'm a fanboy of The Guild. That makes sense though. There are three types of people in the world: MMO players who love The Guild. Non-MMO players love The Guild and non-MMO players who don't love The Guild. That completes the list. If you don't love The Guild, you're not a true MMO player. Period. I almost had three videos from The Guild on the list, but then I realized Now I'm the One that's Cool isn't about gaming even if the show is.

Ready for the top two? I'll guarantee this is going to piss a few people off. Some of you out there only consider all "gaming" to involve video games and both of the top two are from table top RPGs. Here we go...

Number 2: Roll a D6

No it's not Like a G6 it's Roll a D6. If you don't know what they're talking about you've never done any tabletop RPG playing. The video is epic. The lyrics are on point. Anyone who has played can identify with what they're talking about in the song. Ignore the comments on this one. It's a song people, not a documentary. Some of the details are a bit off, but who gives a rat's ass? Not this guy.

Number 1: Best Game Ever (A Different D&D Song)

Mikey Mason FTW!!!!! This one will take you back if you're a pen and paper RPG player. You know that one dumb-ass you used to game with? The one that got killed every damn week and pissed everyone off? Remember all of the horrible shit you wanted to do to him? This is a song all about doing it. It's hysterically funny. It's so well performed. The emotion Mason shows singing this song is something I've only really seen from Jack Black before. Spoiler: They beat the dragon at the end. I started thinking about doing this post a few days ago. I've watched this video eight times today. It's playing right now. After all, once you've "Saved a barmaid, slayed a dragon, got some treasure, raised a flagon and we split up some XP" (yeah, I

plagiarized that part) does it get any better? Not in my book. Go. Watch it. Love it. Buy it. It's worth it. I wish I had a prize to send him. Thanks Mikey! I enjoyed it. Oh, and you bookended the list. That's worth something, right? Oh, and his bookshelf is epic.

Some products related to the songs above are available at the links below:

Declan Finn's Demons are Forever

(Author's Note: I will be on Declan Finn's podcast The Catholic Geek on Sunday April 2 from 7 PM till 9 PM. You can look for my review of Love at First Bite, the sequel to Demons are Forever at about 9:05 PM that night. So tune in, or log on or whatever it is you do with podcasts and it'll be an awesome time.

Also, for the record, this is the second book in the series. I did review the first one.)

Way back, in the Late Pleistocene Era,  I went to high school with a guy named Brandon, but we all called him Monk. I still do. Monk is now married to the greatest sister in law of the heart EV-AR Melissa and has three young boys who I miss dearly since my move back home to Michigan. He has since cured himself of the malady I am about to discuss. His timing was epic.

I know it's weird, and most of you won't get this, but I can't help think of him while reading Declan Finn's Demons are Forever  because the main character, Marco Catalano, is a lot like Monk was in high school: He knows an awesome girl. He loves the awesome girl. He hangs out with the awesome girl. He just can't work up the gumption to tell the awesome girl how awesome she is and that he wants to be her man. Back in high school, and into my early twenties, I called this maneuver "Pulling a Monk." Marco appears to be a natural. And he's Catholic too. I wonder if he needs a nickname...

The thing about Marco is he's kind of like a Monk crossed with a Chuck Norris and a little bit of Buffy thrown in. Yeah, he's a physical bad ass but he's scared of a woman. Marco kills vampires in hand to hand combat using skill, brains and luck, along with the occasional assist from his friends and comrades. Monk, uhh...played football and baseball, but vampires? Not so much. At any rate...

I really like Marco as a character. Like, I want to hang out with the guy sometime. I know he doesn't exist, but Finn does a good enough job with the character that it's like being in the same room with a real person. Catalano has enough foibles to make him believable and enough confidence to make him worth reading. He's a really good guy with a really dark streak that he's not really comfortable with. I don't blame him. He fights for what's good and right but sometimes he has to kill vampires. He sees them as people and he struggles with it.

Marco's I-wish-she-was-my-girlfriend is named Amanda. She's a vampire, but this is where Finn turns vampirism on its head.  Amanda is a good vampire and a good Christian. She is a bloodsucker, it's true, but she is neither evil nor a sparkly emo whiner. Amanda is a hard-nosed, very intelligent and a good warrior in her own right. She faces down some men who give her problems because of her incredible good looks without breaking a sweat. She's just as gutless when it comes to talking to her I-wish-he-was-my-boyfriend but she's hardcore when it comes to everything else.

The book sizzles. The action sequences are impressive. Finn obviously spent hours mapping out the best way to do violence to vampires and other things before writing this. He has very carefully choreographed the fighting in this book. It's impressive. Marco and company are smart and dangerous. Catalano knows that he has to out-plan his enemies and he does so well. The action is so well described that I found myself moving in my seat along with the movements in the fighting. It was exciting. I had my adrenaline going. I wanted to kick ass along with him. It's probably better that I didn't though. I'm a three hundred pound man. I would have gotten in the way.

Something I've often commented on is the need for an epic villain. Finn delivers. Given the fact that the characters in the book can't figure out what Mr. Day is, I won't spoil the fun. But he is pure, unadulterated evil for a reason. He is deadly and vicious. He has a very interesting back story. He's the kind of guy that REALLY REALLY REALLY deserves every terrible thing that happens to him. He's tough as hell and smart. This is no Cobra Commander making stupid mistakes. Day is smart and savvy. He makes chaos because that is his nature. He is cocky but he's damn near indestructible so he should be. But Day does what he does in a logical manner. I wouldn't want to take this guy on.

Finn is a man of both religious and political conviction and it comes through in his writing. Marco, though a New York native, ends up in San Francisco. He is less than impressed with some of the antics of his neighbors. It's obvious that his beliefs belong not just to him but to Finn as well. I was okay with it because I share most of the same beliefs but if you find yourself on the more liberal and/or non-Christian end of the spectrum you may find some of the book to be a bit grating. Rest assured it's no worse than what us rightists feel when we're reading works by Scalzi, but  you guys aren't as used to it. Buck up though. The story is worth it.

I do have one gripe: One of the side characters, whose name I have refused to remember, is stumb as a dump yet she manages to kill vampires. She is, in terms of intelligence at least, the antithesis of the rest of the team. She should be dead but she's not. I don't get this character. She shouldn't be here. She's a bit too obvious. I'm kind of hoping that she's a mole somehow. She's a little too out there stupid. It makes sense if she is playing stupid as a form of camouflage but that's the only way it makes sense. She shouldn't be able to work her way through a brawl without screwing up. It threw me a few times. This chick is just terrible. Then again, it's not a world ending error and I really did like the rest of the book.

Bottom Line: 4.5 out of 5 Test Tubes Full of Holy Water

Demons are Forever
Declan Finn
Three Ravens Publishing, 2023


Demons are Forever is available for purchase at the link below. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.

Michael Z. Williamson's A Long Time Until Now

Once in awhile a book comes along out of nowhere and hits you with a setting that you weren't quite expecting. I mean, think about it. We're Science Fiction and Fantasy fans. We've been on a million starships, seen a million alien worlds. We've walked through the gates and into the throne rooms of more medieval kingdoms than we can even count. Each is unique and special but it's all been done and even the surprises really aren't that surprising. As exciting as the action and the characters can be, settings are just regurgitated tropes. Well, unless you're reading A Long Time Until Now by Michael Z. Williamson. Then things get different in a hurry.

The story opens with convoy in Afghanistan. Then there's a noise. The next thing we know, everything has changed, only nothing has. Our heroes (several members of the Army who were part of the convoy) are sent hurtling back in time to, well, we're never really certain when. Call it a few millennia give or take. That part is fairly standard. What makes this different is mix of peoples that show up. Prehistoric Afghanistan becomes a mixing bowl of people and time periods. We're treated to dealings with prehistoric cultures from two different places and eras, Roman legions with Indian allies from a later period and visitors from our future.The Americans are at the top of the pile due to their technological advantage right up until they're not. I don't want to give too much up here, but things do get rather interesting in that regard.

The interesting part here, to me at least, is that Williamson freely acknowledges the humanity of his characters. The young woman who decides all the men are going to rape her because she's the only woman around is believable and even understandable. The older characters (in their thirties and forties) and their aches and pains. Several have medical problems that require medicines that aren't manufactured in ancient Afghanistan and have to figure out how to take care of themselves. It's not always easy for our lost soldiers and then it gets, well... not worse, but weirder.

Dealings between cultures are always going to be weird. It's all well and good to respect someone else's culture. It's even good to try to adapt to other cultures when necessary. It's never easy though, and it gets worse when the two sides don't even have a language in common. Mad Mike nails it though. His characters are smart enough to know that they don't know how another culture works. The try to figure things out. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they fail miserably. Fortunately, they have a linguist with them that can help figure things out.

The amount of research that went into this book is unreal. Williamson is able to take us through the construction of an eighteenth or nineteenth century wilderness fort step by step using modern tools. He acknowledges a lot of organizational issues and addresses them. Unlike a lot of others, this book makes sense. The fort is produced by work. The tools are what the troops could reasonably expect to have. Food is gathered or hunted for by people who are aware that they are going to run out of rounds eventually. Their personal hygiene supplies run out and people get bummed out about it. It just works.

In any story, the characters are what hold interest. Williamson does a damn good job with those.  There were times in the story where I wasn't sure if I wanted to hug these guys or get them good and drunk, but they were all people I could get along with. They were well trained and motivated, yes, but they reacted right in other ways. I have a vision of a writer out there somewhere working on something similar. In this alternate story though, the people who get marooned just embrace the suck and get the job done. Williamson's characters do get the job done, but they do it while acting like real people. They mourn for their lost loved ones. They have porn downloaded to their phones. (Yes, there is a realistic way to charge them.) Life sucks when they first get there because the food is bland. It all works together. These characters live and breathe.

That brings me to my first complaint. It's not the first time I've written this. Sometimes it seems just a bit too coincidental that a group that gets lost has an exact mix of the bare minimum in skills needed to survive. I get that it's necessary for the story but for me it stretches the bounds of believability when every skill you need is present and there are no slackers around. Seriously Mr. Williamson, where is the shitbird? Every unit has one. Even more than that though, we get a lecture on how the Roman legions were so fearsome because they were so well organized and then find out that the person giving the speech has an MBA. Don't get me wrong. I'm not some idiot leftist who thinks that the only reason people enlist in the military is because they're too stupid to realized that they could get hurt in a war. But that doesn't necessarily add up to a ten man element having an organizational expert, an expert in husbandry, an expert in botany and someone who knows how to forge metal into tools in it. I know it fits the requirements of the story and it doesn't really pull me out of the story when I'm in it. A Long Time Until Now is a good book though, and I found myself thinking about it when I wasn't reading. The effect was that it took me longer to get back into the book when I picked it back up than I would have otherwise.

My only other whine is about the ending. It's plausible per the standards of the story, but if feels a bit deus ex machina to me. I know that there was no way the characters were going to find their own way out of the problem given their technical know-how and what they had available but it seems like a bit of a stretch to me. All whining aside though, this was a damn fine book. I'm looking forward to Williamson's next one.

Bottom Line: 4.5 out of 5 M4 rounds

A Long Time Until Now
Michael Z. Williamson
Baen, 2016

A Long Time Until Now is available at the link below: