Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ – favorite apps and troubleshooting tips

Vicki got me a Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ as a combined early birthday/Father’s Day present. I’ve had it for just a few days, and here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Favorite Apps

Certainly the one I’ve spent the most time in is ‘Comics’ by ComiXology (free). Image quality and ease of use are great. Holding the KF in portrait mode and swiping to flip pages, it’s easy to just get lost in reading and not think much about the interface, which is a high compliment. There are some fancy panel-by-panel reading modes I haven’t experimented with yet. Double-page spreads pop up small at first, because they fit the whole spread onto one screen, but it’s easy enough to pinch-and-spread zoom, and it’s nice not to lose any of the image along the center from the binding. The biggest downside so far is that AFAICT there is no higher-level navigation tool (like a TOC or maybe thumbnail display of all pages), so if you want to go back 30 pages to see what Nick Fury said to Cap, you gotta swipe 30 pages.

Other pluses:

• Nothing is ever out of stock or out of print, and you don’t have to buy big collections to get that one back issue you really want. If you want Thor #337, you can just go buy it, for $1.99.
• Prices are pretty good. So far all the graphic novels and collections I’ve checked have been a buck or two cheaper through Comixology than in dead-tree form. Current issues are typically $3.99, which is about what you’d pay at the newsstand, and most back issues are $0.99 or (more commonly) $1.99.
• A decent number of free comics. A LOT of popular series give away the first issue for free so you can try ‘em without dropping any coin, sorta like how you can get a free preview of most Kindle books.
• Image quality is flawless. In zooming the images I have not found any scanning, image compression, or display artifacts. The comics just look damn good.
• Good customer service. The one time I had a problem (see below), it was fixed in about 5 minutes.

In sum, ComiXology will probably kill my dead-tree comics reading even more thoroughly than the Kindle has depressed my dead-tree book reading. And no more $#@$&ing polybags!

Pocket (free)

This started out and is still advertised as a way to save webpages so you can read them offline. I use it for that, but also as a bookmarking tool and sort of DropBox-for-webpages. It’s one of two apps that I find myself using as much or more on my laptop and desktop machines as I do on the KF.

EverNote (free)

Very easy-to-use app for writing and saving notes (and other content) across machines. This is the other app I use about as much on my other computers. A lot of times when I want to compose, I don’t want to even have the option of futzing around with formatting–playing with formatting is a slippery slope into staying busy without really getting anything done. In the old days (before the last week) I’d open up a Gmail draft and do my writing there. Now I use EverNote. What I like best: a lot of programs sort of force you into either using folders or search, but not both. EverNote has full-featured folder organization and a good search tool. Why can’t more developers figure this out?

Solar Warfare (free)

Despite the silly name and unimpressive icon, this is a great fly-around-and-blow-stuff-up game. Back in the 90s I played a LOT of Terminal Velocity, and Solar Warfare delivers a pretty similar experience.

Troubleshooting

Deleted comics on ComiXology

I’ve had two hitches so far with the KF, and both got fixed pretty quickly, but not very intuitively, so I thought I’d post the stories in case anyone else has the same problems.

The first problem was with ComiXology. In the first hour that I had the app I downloaded close to two dozen free comics. Then I bought my first graphic novel, and I got a pop-up warning saying something like “To make room for this giant file we’re deleting some of your other files”. To this day, I have no idea why this happened:

• the new file was only a few MB;
• the minimum space setting for ComiXology is 250 MB;
• the default space setting, which is what I was using, is unlimited (meaning about 25 gigs at the time).

My first thought was, “Well, that’s annoying, but I can just redownload the deleted comics from the cloud.” But when I went to ‘My Comics’, it only showed the new graphic novel and the two single issues that had survived the bogus space purge. One of the menu options is to restore deleted comics, and I tried that, to no avail. Rebooted and tried again, and still got nothing. So I clicked on the in-app support link and sent an email explaining the problem and everything I’d done to that point to fix it.

I sent the problem message at 11:57 PM. At 11:59, I got a personal response from a ComiXology tech support person, and I learned a little more about how ComiXology works. There are actually 2 places in the app where you can see your comics. The ‘My Comics’ tab only shows the comics currently on your device. To see all the comics you’ve ever purchased (or gotten for free), go to Featured > Purchases. From there I was able to redownload all of my deleted comics, and I haven’t had any problems since.

Vocals wouldn’t play over headphones

The second problem cropped up last night. I had transferred about 150 songs to the KF using Amazon cloud storage, and I bought a couple more through Amazon using the music store. They played just fine over the KF’s speakers, which are the best small device speakers I’ve ever heard. But when I tried to listen using headphones, I could hardly hear the vocals at all, they were just drowned out by everything else. Here’s what I tried to fix the problem, in order:

• tried another set of headphones, didn’t work;
• rebooted the KF, didn’t work;
• downloaded another free music-player app and fiddled with the equalizer, that didn’t work either;
• streamed part of a movie (Captain America and Thor are both free to Amazon Prime members!), and had the same problem: all the sound came through just fine, but the dialogue was suppressed to the point of being unintelligible.

At this point I was pretty unhappy. I have an iPod that I use for most of my music listening, and I doubt the KF will ever be my point music player. But sometimes it would be nice to put something on while I’m reading a book or doing other stuff on the KF. More seriously, I am going to be watching movies on this thing, and a working headphone jack is not negotiable. I’m sure Amazon would have replaced the KF if it was truly defective, but I’d already put a bunch of stuff on it and I did not relish the prospect of redownloading all of that crap and setting up the apps to play well together again.

Then this morning I accidentally discovered the problem. I was listening to Song A over the KF speakers and put in the headphones for one more test before I wrote to Amazon about the problem. When I put in the headphones, I started hearing recently-played Song B, even though Song A was still up in the player. I think the music player had some kind of hiccup wherein it was trying to play 2 songs at once, and it ‘solved’ this existential quandary by suppressing the vocals, both in the music player and on everything else. So, when you thumb the options menu for the music player, one of the options is ‘Clear player’. I did this, and the problem was instantly solved, both for the music player and for the streamed movie. So now I clear the player every time I exit, and I haven’t had any more problems.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I’ve seen the Hobbit twice now, once with friends at the midnight premiere in 48fps 3D, and at a Saturday matinee with London in old-fashioned 24fps 2D.

It is simply not possible to review this movie as if I was seeing it with no preconceptions; for one thing, I know too much Tolkieniana, and for another, my expectations were colored by having seen and mostly loved Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy–which I suspect is true for at least half the population of the planet. I expected the visuals to be extremely impressive, and I was steeling myself for the story to be a bit of a letdown, mostly because of the invented storylines stuffed into The Two Towers. I was doubly on guard because, again like almost everyone who will see this movie, I knew that the Hobbit had grown from two movies to three and was going to incorporate bits from the extensive appendices at the end of LOTR.

One last thing before getting into the actual review part: I’ve read the Hobbit three or four times in full. The first time would have been around the age of 12, the second in high school, and the third in 2001 when I reread the Hobbit and LOTR in preparation for Fellowship. I’ve only read the book once more, about a year and a half ago, when I read it aloud to my son over the course of a month or so. Until that most recent read-through, I had forgotten how much stuff happens in the book, and how much of it happens after Bilbo and party reach the Lonely Mountain.

Story

I haven’t read the LOTR appendices so although I knew what bits weren’t in the Hobbit, but of the added bits I could not tell what was invention and what was from the appendices (and in fact still cannot). This is actually the highest compliment I can pay the screenwriters; the invented stuff in LOTR stuck out so badly because it was so glaringly against the spirit of Tolkien’s writing (I’m looking at you, “Foromir”). I would have preferred Radagast to be a bit more Na’vi (quiet dignity, one with nature and all that) and less of a loony, but I can’t say that he’s anti-Tolkien in spirit (and now I’m looking at you, Tom Bombadil). Playing up the whole Azog/Thorin nemesis thing was a bit Hollywood but maybe only struck me that way because I knew that their confrontation was not in the book; I can see someone who is familiar with LOTR but not the Hobbit mistaking it for part of the book (and, as I can’t say enough times, I don’t know what’s all in the appendices, maybe Azog is there and is a big deal, I just know Thorin didn’t face him down in the book).

One thing I absolutely loved was getting to see the dwarves as competent adventurers and badasses in battle, which unfortunately we did not get nearly enough of in LOTR since Gimli was mostly played as a clumsy oaf. Erebor was also very convincingly realized as the greatest dwarven kingdom in Middle-Earth.

Visually the movie was almost unsettlingly seamless with LOTR. Since we’ve already spent so many hours in Jackson’s Middle-Earth, it’s easy to take it for granted, and merely ho-hum when we should be gobsmacked. Dunno how much that’s a problem, though, since I was plenty gobsmacked. I was nervous about the storm giants and extremely nervous about the three trolls, but I thought both sequences worked out quite well. Watching the movie I often thought of Zak’s line about LOTR, that “Jackson seemed–with gratifyingly few exceptions–to choose the most metal and least hippie possible interpretation of any given scene” (except, obviously, during the Radagast scenes).

Projection Mode

Two things about the 48fps showing. First, the picture was waaaay sharper than I was expecting. I suppose this is because the lack of jerkiness and jump between frames allows the eye to focus on smaller details, even though the individual frames are not at any higher resolution. In fact, it verged on being too much–sometimes it was distracting, because I was looking at pine needles or grass stems when I should have been watching wargs, and sometimes it was almost exhausting, in the same way that the Grand Canyon is visually exhausting–there’s just too damn much to look at in every direction all the time.

Second, and not so hot: the picture was unnaturally bright, all the time. The entire movie looked like it was shot as a soap opera. That was also distracting, and frankly irritating. When I saw the movie the second time, at 24fps, I could immediately tell that the picture was inferior–I could see that it was jerky where  the 48fps had been smooth, and motion-blurred where the latter had been crisp. But the lighting was right–or, at least, it was what I am used to–and after about 5 minutes I forgot about the projection entirely and just enjoyed the movie. Which is not something that ever happened with the 48fps version–all the way through I was constantly thinking, “Damn, that picture is sharp” and “Damn, that lighting sucks”.

So. Assuming that there is some technical fix for this, so that we can have the sharpness of the 48fps picture without the soap-opera lighting, I would take it every time. But if not, forget it. I go to movies to enjoy a story, not be distracted from the story by the picture.

Other reviews that surprised me, or made me think, or were otherwise enjoyable: Mike’s review, Zak’s review.

 

Tales of the Flaming Vagabond

Or, How My Old Roleplaying Campaign Came to Influence (in a very minor way) Two of the Most Popular Science-Fictional Universes

I’ve blogged here a bit about Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, which has been one of my favorite pastimes for almost two-thirds of my life, and which was my primary creative and recreational outlet between the ages of 16 and 21.

A story not previously told is how the campaign I started with my roommate in high school ended up leaving tiny footprints in the Whedonverse, and may have affected, in an even tinier way, the Star Wars universe itself.

I have long maintained that other  people’s roleplaying stories are strong contenders for the most boring of all narratives, so I’ll keep this brief. In my last two years of high school I was played a lot of SW:RPG with my best friend, Jarrod Davis. I think we both tried out a fair number of characters–at least I did. The ones that clicked were Kantar Kallark, my Karkadian pilot (my sketch, above), and Biltrex Karkhon, Jarrod’s human mercenary and smuggler (Jarrod’s drawing, below). Apparently we were really into the letter ‘k’. We officially teamed up and for a year or so (in both real and game time) we operated a Ghtroc 720 light freighter, the Exostar.

I honestly don’t remember what happened to the Exostar–this was 20 years ago. Presumably we sold it or it crashed. Whatever happened, we found ourselves with a nice pile of credits, a need for a ship, and a yen to move up to something bigger. We found what we wanted in a comic book.

Here’s the first glimpse of Salla Zend’s Starlight Intruder, from the Dark Empire comics. Han, Leia, and Chewie hitch a ride to Byss with Salla and her partner, Shug Ninx.

Here’s another view. You can just make out that the front module is taller than long, and grades from an oval on the left side of the ship to two stacked circles (probably docking ports) on the right. Here’s another image from a different artist that clarifies the front end a bit:

We were both quite taken with the Starlight Intruder. The Dark Empire Sourcebook provided dimensions, stats, and a model designation: Mobquet Medium Cargo Hauler.

I’ve Made a Few Special Modifications Myself

It is an article of faith with Star Wars roleplayers that ships are built to be modified, and that the famous named ships of the movies, comics, novels, and so on are not necessarily stock versions of their respective models. For example, the Millennium Falcon is a Corellian Engineering Corporation YT-1300, but there are other YT-1300 configurations out there. The two shown above are from Galaxy Guide 6: Tramp Freighters, which was our smugglers’ bible for most of our campaign (you can see more ships from that supplement here, and some more YT-series freighters here).

I bring this up because we liked the Starlight Intruder, but we wanted our ship to be a little different. In particular, we wanted a round hammerhead bridge section, more like the one on Princess Leia’s blockade runner (or CEC CR90 corvette, if you prefer). And I could not abide main engines that came out of the bottom of the tail section like hoses. Engines that aren’t aligned with the vessel’s center of mass give me the heebie-jeebies–I’m lookin’ at you, original starship Enterprise.* (Why this bothers me when most pop sci-fi ships ignore Newtonian mechanics anyway is admittedly irrational. Move along.) The engines on our ship would stick out the back, thank you. The drawing above is what we came up with.

* Yes, I have the technical manual, I know about the warp field explanation, I’m just not buying it!

The name of the ship was a deliberate homage to the Tales From the Floating Vagabond RPG, which I adored at the time and still think is pretty great–hell, the cover of the book  is trying to punch you in the face! Although I never actually ran TFFV, my Star Wars RPG games have always had more than a trace of TFFV’s gonzo spirit.

The Vagabond came into our campaign in 1992 or 1993, and it was our home base for several years–again, in both game-time and real-world time. We modified it over the course of those years–the final version, shown above, had capital-scale turbolasers on either side of the hammerhead, and a capital-scale missile launcher on top (the cylinders tacked onto the bottoms of the connector sections are supposed to be turbines to charge the turbolasers). Our characters eventually owned bigger ships and smaller ships, but the Vagabond was home–until it got blown up underneath us in an incident that I am still not sure if Jarrod has forgiven me for.

The RPG ship was history, but the Flaming Vagabond was destined to live again…

We Can Rebuild Her

Jarrod’s a digital effects artist. If you’re enough of a geek to be reading this, you’ve seen his stuff. There are nebulae in Star Trek: Voyager that started out as digital photos of the clouds over his apartment. The nuclear mushroom cloud over LA in season 6 of 24 was his work, too. He has an Emmy on his mantlepiece. (For a full list, see his IMDB page.) And sometime in the early 2000s, he made this digital model of the Vagabond.

Here’s how it compares to the Starlight Intruder and to my original drawing. The biggest change is the addition of the fans of steering engines around the main engine nozzles, which I think look pretty cool. If RPG-Vagabond still existed, I’d add those babies in a heartbeat.

Possibly my all-time favorite image of the Vagabond is this simple render-and-Photoshop job. As Jarrod was the first to point out, it’s not perfect (you can see the horizon going through the middle section, for example), but it has always been good enough to fool me into thinking, “Hey, cool, that’s our ship!”

Little did I know then that I’d be saying that a lot more.

Into the ‘Verse

In 2002 Jarrod worked on Firefly. And I mean, worked. All the effects guys busted their humps to make that show look great. Jarrod didn’t get a lot of sleep that year. Why would anyone want this lousy job? Well, because it was awesome, obviously, but also because it afforded him other interesting opportunities, like sneaking the Flaming Vagabond into the background of various shots:

In the pilot, “Serenity”.

In “War Stories”, at Niska’s Station. This wasn’t actually Jarrod’s work, another animator put the Vagabond in there and had it flying backwards. That was fine with me–it reminded me of a great line from IIRC one of Brian Daley’s Han Solo books, where Han and Chewie are trying to figure out how to get into a heavily-defended facility, and Han says, “Maybe if we back in slow enough, they’ll think we’re leaving.”

In “Shindig”, with landing gear extended.

…and in the opening sequence in the movie Serenity. I remember almost passing out in the theater when, not quite two minutes into what would turn out to be one of my favorite movies, I saw our ship flying by.

I Feel…a Disturbance in the Force

This did not go unnoticed. The appearances in Firefly are listed in the Wookieepedia entry on the Mobquet Medium Transport. And it is possible that Jarrod inspired someone on the Star Wars side to return the favor.

This rather familiar ship appeared in the background in the sixth strip of the Star Wars webcomic Evasive Action: Prey. It has been kinda-sorta canonized as the Firefly-class mid-bulk transport. Was this minor addition to the Star Wars universe inspired by the Flaming Vagabond? According to the Mobquet Medium Transport article:

The Mobquet Medium Transport is shown in the background of the episodes Serenity, Shindig, and War Stories of the show Firefly. As a response, the Star Wars artist Thomas Hodges made a similar move. See Firefly-class mid-bulk transport.

That makes it sound like Hodges put a Firefly-class transport in Star Wars because Jarrod had put a Star Wars ship in Firefly. But the article on the Firefly-class transport makes a weaker claim:

Whedon included a Star Wars ship, the Mobquet Medium Transport, in the background of the Firefly episodes Shindig and War Stories, and an Imperial shuttle in the pilot episode Serenity, so the cameo can be viewed as returning the favor.

Okay, first thing to understand is that Joss Whedon didn’t put any of the cameo ships in Firefly/Serenity (there are others, including an Imperial Lambda-class shuttle), and in fact he probably never knew they were there. Jarrod writes, “Joss was delightfully hands-off when it came to the bulk of the effects work, leaving it to the guys who live and breathe it 24/7. All those cameos were there because we, as geeks, wanted them to be. So we took every opportunity we could.”

Anyway, from this second entry it’s not clear if Hodges was inspired by the Vagabond or put a Firefly-class ship in Star Wars on his own steam, and people linked the two cameos later. Maybe someone who knows him can ask?

Still, I like to think that Flaming Vagabond inspired this little bit of sci-fi universe cross-pollination–even if it’s only true from a certain point of view.

The End?

I hadn’t thought about the Vagabond in ages until last week, when I watched Serenity with my 8-year-old for the first time. Writing this post sent me digging through boxes of old gaming stuff for drawings and stat sheets, and along the way I found the character sheets for Kantar and Biltrex. They’re still alive out there somewhere, we just haven’t visited them in a while. But Jarrod and I both have Skype now, and our kids are out of diapers, so who knows?

And I remembered that the Vagabond is only mostly dead. The Incident We Don’t Discuss blew up the back two-thirds of the ship, but the hammerhead bridge section survived along with Kantar and Biltrex, and is presumably sitting in some forgotten corner of their really big ship, the Ziggurat. After years of smuggling and privateering, Kantar and Biltrex are relatively wealthy, and the Vagabond was always a modified Mobquet Medium Cargo Hauler…

Star Wars, “Star Wars”, and Episode VII

Sometime in the mid-90s my brothers and I were gathered around our parents’ dinner table. The fact that the prequels were in the works had been announced, but nobody knew anything else yet, not even the title of the first movie. My brothers and I were enthusiastically speculating about the upcoming movies and how awesome they’d be. When we paused for air, Mom asked, “What if the new movies aren’t as good as the old ones?” We scoffed. Why, George had deliberately stopped making Star Wars movies at the top of his game just to let special effects catch up with his vision. Clearly, the new movies were going to not just equal but surpass the old ones.

Score one for you, Mom.

Why do I care so much about Star Wars? I suppose that could be taken in two ways: why do I, personally, care so much about Star Wars, and why does my generation care so much about Star Wars?

For me personally, it was always the sense of personal freedom and an enormous–and enormously strange–universe to explore. I did not want to be Luke Skywalker. I wanted to be Han Solo, with my best friend, my ship, and the whole galaxy just a hyperspace jump away.

I did not have an unhappy childhood. Far from it. But I was an unsatisfied child trapped by childhood itself. I knew from a very early age that I wanted to be a paleontologist, but I didn’t want to be a paleontologist when I grew up, I wanted to be one right then. And more to the point, I didn’t want to have to wait to grow up. I wanted the personal freedom that came with being an adult. (Obviously, I knew nothing about the responsibilities that limit that freedom, but still…) And I could tell that what for want of a better term I will call childhood society was both fake and pointless. The schoolyard rivalries, popularity games, and above all, organized sports were all manifestly things that would stop mattering the moment I walked off campus for the last time. So I was never invested in them. I was in band and academic bowl because they were fun, but for the most part I was just marking time until I could do what I wanted.

Science fiction was my escape from the mundane world. I knew about the idea of escapist literature from a young age and I saw no problem with it. I explicitly used sci-fi that way, like a drug. For the decade between the ages of 11 and 21 I was not here most of the time; psychologically I was out there. What changed when I was 21 was that I got put on my first real research project, which got me back into this world because I finally had real meaningful work to do here (and, er, I got married).

But in between I spent a lot of time out there in general, and out there in the Star Wars galaxy in particular. I ingested loads of other sci-fi and fantasy. I read Tolkien and the Dune books and watched a ton of Star Trek, and enjoyed them all. But none of them had the same qualities as Star Wars, which as I see them are (1) limitless freedom and (2) the idea that the actions of one ordinary person can change the future. Tolkien wins on (2)–the hobbits were Just Folks thrown into exceptional circumstances–but loses on (1), because for me limitless freedom meant space, not a medieval fantasy realm, no matter how convincingly realized. Star Trek loses on both counts, for me, because it is so explicitly a team thing. Nobody on Star Trek ever goes off and has adventures on their own. I was already stuck in one command structure (school) and had no desire to escape into another one. I enjoyed Star Trek for the space exploration and the occasional battle–the stuff most reminiscent of Star Wars, in other words. Dune loses because of the strict stratification between the aristocracy, who Matter, and everyone else, who Don’t. Only Paul Atreides could be the Kwisatz Haderach. Anyone could be Luke Skywalker, the farmboy who got swept up in an adventure.

(Or so I thought. Little did I know then that Luke was a pawn in a 20-year-old conspiracy by Obi-Wan and Yoda to turn Anakin’s son into a weapon against the Sith. Innocence really was bliss.)

So: escapism, freedom, the idea that an ordinary farmboy (or, just possibly, a socially isolated nerd) could save the universe. Probably the same things that have made Star Wars the most important science fictional thing since Jules Verne. I guess there’s only one way to take the question after all.

Stephen King used to write a back-page column for Entertainment Weekly called “The Pop of King”. It was a great column; it’s how I discovered Veronica Mars (from a certain point of view) and the Jack Reacher books, which are pretty much my favorite TV show and thriller series, respectively. Once King wrote about why he kept going to horror movies. He knew that almost every one of them was going to suck. Every time he walked into the theater he knew the movie would not only be a disappointment but a predictable, boring disappointment. So why did he keep going in? Why not just say, “Bah!”, wave his hands, and walk away?

The answer, he wrote, is that a handful of times in his life he had been scared witless by a good horror movie, and that even though such movies only seemed to come along once or twice a decade, he kept plunking down his eight bucks (did I mention that this column was written several years ago?) and getting his hopes up, on the off chance that this movie would be one of the handful that could really channel the magic.

Star Wars is now more of a genre than a brand or a setting. Counting the Ewok movies and the Clone Wars movie, there are nine movies, four television series, more than 100 novels, dozens of comic books and graphic novels, and loads of video games, spanning several millennia of galactic history. Some of this stuff is excellent, a lot of it is good, almost all of it is at least entertaining. Perhaps inevitably, some of it just plain sucks. I doubt if anyone has identical feelings toward all of it. Most of us fans probably console ourselves with the thought that the stinkers “aren’t really Star Wars”, that there is an invisible but real metaphysical line between Star Wars–whatever it is that channels the magic for us–and “Star Wars”, the derivative stuff that happens to be set in the same universe. This privately-drawn line probably has little relationship with the official Lucasfilm position on what stuff is canon and what is apocrypha–a point I’ll return to later on.

So then the interesting thing is not insisting that my divvying up of all the Star Wars stuff into Star Wars and “Star Wars” is the One True Path, but finding out where different people draw the line, and more importantly, why.

Andrew Rilstone apparently draws the line between Star Wars–that is, the original 1977 film that only received the Episode IV: A New Hope tagline on its 1981 rerelease–and everything else. In “Review: Revenge of the Sith” he wrote:

I have a smart answer to the question “What do you think of the Star Wars prequels?” It is this: “I like ALL of the Star Wars movies, apart from Empire Strikes Back, and the ones which came afterwards.”

Now, he does go on to say that this a joke, and he’s written shedloads of very insightful essays on the other movies, which clearly indicates that he thinks they’re worthy of such close examination. But I still take him at his word, and as for why, I can only point you to his short, bittersweet essay “Thoughts on Revenge of the Sith“, where he concluded, “[it] was special, special to you, and this sequel which everyone is talking about is, well, only a movie”.

I suppose for me the original trilogy is Star Wars and everything else is just “Star Wars”. Mike will probably protest that I wrote waaay too glowingly about Revenge of the Sith (e.g., this and this) for that to be accurate. And it’s true, there is a certain charge that one gets from seeing a new Star Wars movie in the theater. I know, I’ve experienced it three times in my adult life (I’m not including The Clone Wars, which was entertaining but, well, only a movie). But each time, the charge wore off. It was only a borrowed gown, gilt by association.

As far as everything else goes, the closest thing to Star Wars is the Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn. One of the back cover blurbs said, “Read and enjoy, the magic is back.” Well, okay, this magic wore off after a while, too. But it got me closer to the hidden wellspring of Star Wars than anything else has. Where Zahn’s novels fall down for me is that they are too prosaic. They are basically technothrillers set in the Star Wars galaxy, featuring characters we know and love. That may not be entirely Zahn’s fault, because he never had complete narrative freedom. For example, the alien race that eventually became the Noghri was originally going to be the Sith, until Lucasfilm shot that idea down because it trespassed on the prequel trilogy. Who knows what a no-holds-barred Zahn Star Wars novel would look like?

I still doubt that such a novel would transcend “Star Wars” and become Star Wars, because I’ve read lots of Zahn’s other books, and they’re all of a piece. They’re very good, but the stories tend to get resolved entirely by people being clever, which is satisfying reading, but not Star Wars. In Star Wars, sometimes the good guys prevail because Han lets out a battle cry and bum-rushes a whole squad of stormtroopers. Zahn’s characters are never quite that seat-of-the-pants, and the books are somewhat diminished for it (to be clear, by “diminished” I mean “less Star Wars“, not “less than stonking reads”).

Next up is the Clone Wars television series. The characterization, storytelling, and occasional sheer badassery (read: Yoda taking on a bunch of droid tanks singlehandedly) are much better than most of the prequel trilogy. But the stories are inherently limited in scope by the television format. In the original trilogy, Luke, Han, and Leia had about six hours to save the galaxy. In four seasons of 22 half-hour episodes (with one more to come), Anakin, Asohka, and Obi-Wan have had 44 hours to, er, fight the Clone Wars to a draw. And that’s that. I think the show is about as good as it could be, given what it is. It’s just that what it is makes it “Star Wars”, not Star Wars.

And after that, I’ll stand by what I said above: some of it is good, some of it is bad, almost all of it is entertaining. And, en masse, it’s ultimately exhausting. Star Wars is a great escape. “Star Wars” is only a pretty good playground. I’m ready for the real stuff.

Here’s a curious thing. George Lucas has said many, many times that there would never be any sequel trilogy. Surprise, surprise–he also said that there would never be a prequel trilogy, right up until the day he announced that there would be one after all. But he has also said a couple of times that if there was a sequel trilogy, he would probably ignore all of the Expanded Universe stuff set after Return of the Jedi, and do his own thing. And it appears that he is now making good on that promise–or is it a threat? Because as of right now there are at least 80 novels set after ROTJ, not to mention several extremely popular comic book series and graphic novels (e.g., Dark Empire), and all of that is probably going to become apocrypha when Episode VII comes out.

If I was a producer of post-ROTJ Star Wars material, I’d be upset, somewhere on the spectrum between “a little miffed” and “volcanic”. But I’d have to remind myself that Lucas has never been unclear about the fact that if he made the sequels, he’d tank whatever I’d done. Caveat auctor. (FWIW, Timothy Zahn appears to be totally cool with it: “They have no obligation to touch base. As with any other franchise, once we write something, it’s owned by Lucasfilm, as it should be. It’s their property.”)

However, as a consumer, I’m ecstatic. A lot of the EU post-ROTJ storylines just don’t do it for me, starting with the whole Yuuzhan Vong thing. (1) Alien invasion is an inherently Earthbound storyline. It doesn’t work at galactic scale, unless the invading aliens are godlike galaxy-shapers. (2) The Yuuzhan Vong are invisible in the Force. How convenient. But Yoda said he could feel the Force flow through rocks and trees and even between the land and the ship. Last time I checked, the midi-chlorian count of a rock was pretty damned low. If Y-Z are just sentient ysalamiri, I’m calling foul. (3) Organic ships and gravity-based weapons? Stupid. Here’s why (scroll down to ‘Organic technology’ and ‘gravitics’). (4) You guys killed Chewbacca over this crap? To be edgy? Screw you. I don’t mourn Chewbacca, I mourn whatever chowder-head gave the keys to the galaxy to R.A. Salvatore instead of Timothy Zahn. It’s like someone up there (in San Fran) said, “Hey, let’s make the whole Star Wars galaxy fight a bunch of guys that aren’t Star Wars!” So, throwing all that out is a Good Thing.

Also, I think it’s magnificently profligate of Lucas(film) to just write off 80+ novels and other tie-ins–worth, conservatively, tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Maybe I’ve always been overly enamored with Larry Niven’s “Down in Flames“, but that’s cool (even it means just abandoning this timeline instead of unmaking it).

Finally, if tanking all of this “Star Wars” gets me more Star Wars, I will dig the mass (entertainment) grave myself.

Here’s a dumb reason to be prematurely down on Episode VII: Disney is distributing it. The same fanboys who are bitching about Star Wars being a Disney property now were happy enough to give Disney their coin six months ago when they went to see The Avengers. Which was made by Marvel Studios, another Disney property, and distributed by Disney. Which didn’t stop it from rocking all of our faces off last summer. Episode VII is being made by Lucasfilm, produced by Kathleen Kennedy, based on a story by George Lucas, with the actual script being written by Michael Arndt. Now, Arndt has only had two screenplays produced to date, but the first was Little Miss Sunshine, which won him an Oscar, and the second was Toy Story 3, which made us bawl as the toys slid down the hill of garbage toward the incinerator (and was also Oscar-nominated, if that matters). So I think we can be cautiously optimistic.

If the movie ends up sucking after all, well, I’ve lived through the disappointment of a crappy Star Wars movie. Like Stephen King going to see the latest horror movie, I’ll undoubtedly pony up for a ticket, to see if Episode VII is “Star Wars” or, just maybe, Star Wars.

All the images used herein are concept paintings by Ralph McQuarrie, borrowed from here and, for the last one, here.

Star Wars Saturday, Part 2: Where science meets imagination (and marketing)

The second half of our Star Wars Saturday was going to the Discovery Science Center in Anaheim to see a traveling exhibit, Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination.

The Star Wars part of the exhibit was basically a ton of actual models, costumes, and props used in the filming of the Star Wars movies. That was pretty sweet, and pictures of those models and props are the raison d’etre of the post.

The “science” part of the exhibit was fairly thin. For various topics like spaceflight, walking machines, robots, advanced prosthetics, or whatever, there were real-world examples, often with examples, models, or videos. I could be wrong, but I estimate that the exhibit was about 2/3 Star Wars movie props and maybe 1/3 “science” stuff. I put “science” in scare quotes because those parts of the exhibit were supposedly there to show how the people who made the Star Wars movies were inspired by real-world technology.

But there are a couple of problems with that story. It’s a commonplace now that our real-world technology is inspired by science fiction more than the reverse. And the exhibit bore that out, because most of the examples that supposedly inspired George Lucas and the ILM model-makers are from the past decade and therefore post-dated the movies they allegedly inspired. Although Star Wars was primarily inspired by pulp sci-fi and 1930s movie serials, there is no doubt that the advent of real spaceships and computers and so on in the decades preceding A New Hope had some influence. There is probably an interesting historical story to be told about the effects of the space race on Star Wars–but you won’t find anything about that in this exhibit.

My resistance to the Lucasfilm mind-probe was negligible.

So, on one hand, the point of the exhibit is basically to go see some cool stuff from the movies, with a painfully thin veneer of “science”. I’m used to sell-out hijinks like that from children’s museums and science centers. It’s annoying, but I am not outraged like I would be if one of these blatant Lucas-fests was hosted by a natural history museum or planetarium.

On the other hand, I knew exactly what I was getting into when I went, and wasn’t honestly that interested in anything other than seeing the movie models and props. And we did poke around the rest of the museum long enough to see some cool stuff and learn a little, so maybe the strategy of using Star Wars as a gateway drug to science is not completely ineffectual–although I still think it’s misguided, and that science is sufficiently interesting that no gateway drug ought to be required.

Oh, and the exit from the exhibit dumps you into a Star Wars gift shop (that you can also get into without going through the exhibit, natch) with some absolutely ruinous pricing. For example, the same plain-Jane action figures you can get at Target or Wal-Mart for six or seven bucks were priced at $17.95. So if you go, caveat freakin’ emptor.

Okay, enough whinging about the perversion of science by marketing. I went to see a bunch of real stuff from the Star Wars movies, and I got my wish, so on with the photos.

Credit where it’s due: the first display case in the exhibit has four models of real conceptual spacecraft, including a matter-antimatter rocket, a laser-boosted interstellar ship, and this Bussard ramscoop ship. I think these are the first actual models of any of these things that I have ever seen, so, hey, real (projected) science FTW.Scattered among the real shooting models and costumes were a handful of concept models and maquettes, including this early rendition of General Grievous’s flagship, which is something else I had never seen before.

This big model of the Millennium Falcon is about the size of my dinner table, and the level of detail is just unbelievable.

But I was far more charmed by this little hand-sized version, which was made for the shot in Empire where the Falcon is stuck to the back of the Star Destroyer’s bridge tower.

And speaking of Star Destroyers, this one (also from Empire) was wicked cool. I had a plastic kit model of a Star Destroyer when I was in high school, and Jarrod and I used to zoom it slowly over our heads to replicate the opening shot of A New Hope. Seeing this beast brought back a lot of memories. Geeky memories, sure, but memories nonetheless.

The Yoda puppet was unexpectedly my favorite thing in the exhibit. It was one of the last things we saw. I was getting a little jaded on all the awsome, and then we came around a corner and BAM! There’s Yoda. “Judge me by my size, do you?” No, sir. “And well you should not…”

Where’s the fun of being a Jedi if you don’t get trained in a swamp by a little green backwards-talking alien that’s 900 years old? Those pansies in the Jedi temple didn’t know what they were missing.

For more info on Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination, including future exhibits sites and dates, check out the Wikipedia page.

Star Wars Saturday, Part 1: Attack Shuttle!

London and I are big fans of The Clone Wars, and we especially groove on some of the ships and vehicles of that era. We salivated over the big Nu-class Attack Shuttle toy when it came out last year, but it originally retailed for something like $80 and we weren’t going to part with that much for it. However, last night we found it on clearance at Target for $39.98 so we snapped one up.

One thing to bear in mind in all the over-the-top action to come: when all the doo-dads are packed away, this thing is a pretty darned accurate rendition of the Attack Shuttle from the Clone Wars show.

With the wings in flight mode–or S-foils in attack position, if you prefer–it looks like it could have flown right out of the television screen.

But then you deploy the pop-up guns…

…and land the thing, raise the crow’s nest/fighting platform, and open the defense stations in the wings…

…and it transforms into a full-on base, with room for approximately a zillion action figures. There are no fewer than five guns that fire little plastic missiles: one on each side of the cockpit, one on each of the spring-loaded pop-up guns (London is playing with one of these in the above photo, with Ahsoka standing on the platform for the gunner), and one in the stubby dorsal fin. There are also “secret” non-firing guns on top of the cockpit, on the defensive walls that pop up out of the wings, and facing backward on either side of the engines. It really seems as though the thought process of the designers was, “Hey, we have a couple of cubic centimeters here that aren’t doing anything–let’s make  a secret compartment with spring-loaded guns that really fire!”

And I am totally cool with that. In toy-industry lingo, this thing has tons of play value. It has play value tangled in its hair and hanging out of its pockets. I want to go play with it right now.

And yes, the cockpit can detach, deploy stubby wings and a double blaster for a top-hatch gunner, and fly off as a ‘recon fighter’. There’s even a little spring-loaded engine that folds down automatically once the cockpit detaches to give this idea a gloss of verisimilitude.

I suspect that the detachable cockpit-fighter may be the point for some people where this toy jumps the shark, but I love it. It reminds me of the old ‘mini-rig’ vehicles that Kenner made for the Star Wars toy lines after Empire and Return, and captures the same spirit of gonzo-stupid-awesome–a mix that I think is an important part of Star Wars, period.

In sum, the Attack Shuttle is a new toy that reminds me of my favorite things about the old toys, without being imitative and without sacrificing the accuracy of the vehicle when all the secret bits are stowed. I’m glad we finally got one, and if you have a Target nearby you should at least go check. (I’m assuming you’re into Star Wars or you wouldn’t be reading this in the first place!)

Dungeon crawling on Barsoom

Michael Whelan's cover for "A Fighting Man of Mars"

“We reached the city of Warhoon after some three days’ march and I was immediately cast into a dungeon and heavily chained to the floor and walls. Food was brought me at intervals but owing to the utter darkness of the place I do not know whether I lay there days, or weeks, or months. It was the most horrible experience of all my life and that my mind did not give way to the terrors of that inky blackness has been a wonder to me ever since. The place was filled with creeping, crawling things; cold, sinuous bodies passed over me when I lay down, and in the darkness I occasionally caught glimpses of gleaming, fiery eyes, fixed in horrible intentness upon me.” — A Princess of Mars, Chapter 18, “Chained in Warhoon”

“‘Labyrinthine passages connect these caves with the luxurious palaces of the Holy Therns, and through them pass upon their many duties the lesser therns, and hordes of slaves, and prisoners, and fierce beasts; the grim inhabitants of this sunless world.

“‘There be within this vast network of winding passages and countless chambers men, women, and beasts who, born within its dim and gruesome underworld, have never seen the light of day–nor ever shall.’” — The Gods of Mars, Chapter 4, “Thuvia”

“The room was filled with specimens of the strange beings that inhabit this underworld; a heterogeneous collection of hybrids–the offspring of the prisoners from the outside world; red and green Martians and the white race of therns.

“Constant confinement below ground had wrought odd freaks upon their skins. They more resemble corpses than living beings. Many are deformed, others maimed, while the majority, Thuvia explained, are sightless.

…”‘Why is it that we see no therns?’ I asked of Thuvia.

“‘They seldom traverse the underworld at night, for then it is that the great banths prowl the dim corridors seeking their prey. The therns fear the awful denizens of this cruel and hopeless world that they have fostered and allowed to grow beneath their feet.’” — The Gods of Mars, Chapter 5, “Corridors of Peril”