Ramblings of Jeff Somers, author
Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and regrets nothing. He is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series published by Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket Books. He sold his first novel at age 16 to a tiny publisher in California which quickly went out of business and has spent the last two decades assuring potential publishers that this was a coincidence. Jeff publishes a zine called The Inner Swine and has also published a few dozen short stories; his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight, published by Berkley Hardcover and edited by Charlaine Harris. His guitar playing is a plague upon his household and his lovely wife The Duchess is convinced he would wither and die if left to his own devices.
Well, last week I offered to answer any question sent to me here in video form. Here’s the first installment, in which Elizabeth Black asks me what my Eagle Scout Service Project was:
Keep the questions coming! First come first serve but I’ll get to them all, promise.
That’s right: The Electric Church is serious bizness:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100718230223AAmX1dZ
I’ve got an idea: It’s simple but could be fun. I get questions via email on a pretty regular basis, ranging from the sedate and expected (When’s the next book coming out, aren’t those bastards at Orbit going to have a trade size of The Terminal State) to the disturbing (Would you mind sitting in the other chair I can’t get my telescope that far to the left, or Is that really you speaking to me in my dreams telling me to burn down Citi Field?) I try to answer every question as promptly as possible, but I am a busy man, if complaining now counts as an activity you can be busy with.
So, let’s do a weekly question thing, where anyone who wants to can send me a question, and I will post a brief video to answer it. I’ll attempt to do this once a week, but lord knows once I get busy with drinking and sleeping and hunting the grounds for my lost trousers, time slips away fast, so no guarantees. What I do guarantee is that no question shall be ducked. Ask me anything. You may not like the answer, but that ain’t my problem.
Send all questions to mreditor@innerswine.com.
I want to see Chris Nolan’s new movie Inception, though due to time constraints I want this in the same way I wish to learn how to play the solo from Rock and Roll perfectly from beginning to end — vaguely, hopelessly. The way things have been going, I’ll likely see it on pay-per-view in 2015.
Which might be for the best. My lust for Inception reminds me of a fundamental rule of the universe and a fundamental question of the ages: 1. The movie playing in my head right now called Inception is waaayyy better than the actual movie (even if the actual movie turns out to be a 5-star masterpiece, the movie in my head is 15 stars, easy) and 2. Why does every good SF idea have to be filtered through a crime caper story?
Now, full disclosure: My own damn SF ideas are usually filtered through a crime caper, so I’m not framing this as a bad thing, really. Just an observation.
So, let’s start with the question/observation: Why does every SF idea seem to be fodder for tales of FutureCrime™? Well, of course that’s not even remotely true, it’s just an easy/lazy way to ruminate on the subject. There are an awful lot of stories that take fantastic SF ideas and plant them right on top of caper plots, or other plots involving gunplay and/or cops and robbers et al. One big reason for this, I think, is that it grounds the fantastic in something familiar, which makes the story a little more easily accessed by audiences that might otherwise sneer or fear SF tropes. Another reason, though, is simple: People are evil bastards, and I think the vast majority of people would use SF power for evil. In other words: If you had the ability to enter someone’s dreams and examine their subconscious, you’d likely use it to your evil advantage. In other other words, SF ideas get applied to criminal tropes so often because that’s exactly what we’d all do with SF ideas.
Let’s face it, the more thoughtful the SF story, the fewer guns and explosions, the less interested people are in general. Solaris? Try as you might, its audience will remain relatively small. The Matrix? Guns, Kung Fu, and fucking-A bullet time? It’s the national sensation of 1998, Bub.
The fact that no movie will ever match the epic masterpiece in my head of the same name is a familiar quirk of the universe to everyone, I think, and while you might want to blame your rampaging imagination or the severe lack of imagination in Hollywood, what you really ought to be blaming is trailers.
The art of the trailer is mysterious and arcane: Every single trailer created for a movie is better than the movie itself. Obviously this is because you’re cherry-picking the good bits, but also because a skilled editor can take lines and sequences out of context — hell, as the fans of the new Predator movie can attest, they can take scenes that aren’t even in the goddamn film at all — and fashion something wholly new and alien out of it. And talented miscreants all over the Internets have gifted us with remixed trailers that make The Shining into a romantic comedy and shit (genius!). Trailers are magic, and you watch the ninety seconds of genius and the movie you extrapolate from it in your head maintains that level of genius. The actual movie, being something completely different and concerned with things like plot mechanics and how much of Leo DiCaprio’s naked ass they are contractually allowed to show, can never ever live up to that.
So, one of these days I will leave the house, wearing just a tattered old bathrobe and tissue boxes for shoes, and I’ll buy a ticket for Inception using a jar of pennies and some Burger King coupons, and then I’ll sit there and be very, very disappointed despite giving the movie a likely four-star review to the people who sit down in front of me for the third or fourth consecutive showing. And then I will be removed from the theater by security, as usual.
Ah yes, the half-assed, cobbled together post on Friday afternoon! A Somers tradition, whether you realize it or not. En garde!
And that’s it for today. I have a busy weekend of whisky consumption, baseball games, and naps to get going on. No, actually, I’m hella busy this weekend (and I support the effort to have huge numbers in math prefixed “Hella-“)
So, I’ve been watching Persons Unknown. There, I said it, and I feel better for having admitted it. It’s not a good show – between the sketchy character development and the ridiculous 1970s camera work (wherein everything is FLASHED BACK with groovy EFFECTS so you know you’re watching a MIND SCREW) it’s slightly less than compelling drama. Of course with these sorts of serialized dramas, where the main point is the mystery behind it, you expect a little wonkery and wankery; the producers, after all, expect to string you along long enough to get a syndication deal, and then roll in your money for the rest of their lives.
Still, I started watching it. I watched it a) because I am a sucker for shows with mysterious premises like “x number of strangers are kidnapped for no obvious reason”, and b) because it sort of came out of nowhere for me – just suddenly on the screen. And after two episodes I was pretty much done with it: It was stiff, kind of poorly written in a everything-weird-but-the-kitchen-sink way where all sorts of bizarre details are thrown into the mix for no apparent reason, and I had not come to care about any of the characters at all. So after two episodes I was ready to fold up the tent and abandon ship.
And then I saw the preview for episode three, and it was bananas.
The power of the Bananas Plot Twist (BPT) should never be underestimated. You take an ordinary, possibly not very interesting story, and give it a sudden and irreversible twist to the left, and you can transform something boring and generic into something, if not good, at least interesting. It’s like the Truck Driver’s Gear Change in music (that moment when the song suddenly and unexpectedly lurches into a whole new key for dramatic effect, e.g. Man in the Mirror): Just when your audience is writing your story off, you throw something bizarre and wonderful at them and they stick around.
All I saw in the preview was gas masks being dropped from a plane, but only three masks for six people, and then gas everywhere. And I thought, well, damn, I guess I want to know what’s going on here after all.
The trick, of course, is to introduce your BPT early enough in the story to hook folks before they do actually give up on you. In the case of Persons Unknown, the third episode was perfect: The first episode is all about premise so I was willing to accept some slow storytelling and lame character development. Episode two wore me down a bit as the characters glumly sleepwalked through their predicament, and I was just getting ready to give up when the BPT came up and reeled me back in.
The other trick is to make the BPT bananas enough. We’re a long time in on the modern story form, and a lot of twists have been done plenty of times before – if you’re going to try to pull off a BPT, don’t go weak sister on it: commit and take one more step across the line than seems absolutely necessary. When you’ve got a show like Persons Unknown to begin with – a show about strangers kidnapped and psychologically tortured, for god’s sakes – you can’t just reveal that someone’s not who they say they are. That’s ho-hum. Think John Locke revealed as paralyzed or Agent Cooper dreaming about the Man from Another World – go for it.
Persons Unknown remains in the meh category for me; I’m interested enough now to see where it’s going, but if there isn’t something amazing by, say, episode 8, I may wait for the spoilers to show up on the Internet. Still, the gas masks got me this far, and there will probably be other BPTs that might suck me in further, who knows? There had damn well better be. I’m a sucker for a good BPT.
Well, I still have a book coming out end of this month (uh, The Terminal State (Avery Cates #4), in case I forgot to mention it) so I’m going to give away even more books! I’m giving away 15 copies of The Eternal Prison mass market (Avery Cates #3) this month over at Good Reads:
http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/4703-the-eternal-prison
The idea here is that I gave away books 1 and 2 in June, book 3 in July, and thus folks who maybe have never read the series can get interested and be compelled to buy #4. It’s a genius plan! Right? Right?
Anyways, go join Good Reads and sign up. Now.
OKey-dokey, couple of announcements:
1. The oh-ficial site for Avery Cates #4, The Terminal State (on sale 7/27/10) is live! Check it out. Let me know what you think.
2. This means we’ve picked our winners for the Voice-Acting Contest. I got a lot of entries, and many were really, really well done. hearing your own words so passionately read back to you is pretty amazing, and I thank everyone who took the time to submit a recording to me. I hope you had fun making the files, because I had a great time listening to them! Sadly, I only needed four winners, and I have them:
Patty Blount is the voice of Mara
Tyrel Devlin is the voice of Wa Belling
Ben Linford is the voice of The Poet
Jeffrey Lamar is the voice of Canny Orel
Where can you hear these lovely voices? On the videos embedded in the new site, of course. You might have to look for them …
Pass the word, and all feedback on the site welcomed.
I have terrible time perception; my memory is often suspect, frequently hallucinogenic, and sometimes outright fantasy, and I find it impossible to place events in a clear timeline in my own damn life. I can’t explain it. Something that happened 20 years ago will seem like it happened last month, something that happened last month will feel like a lifetime ago. And let’s not even get into my day-to-day memory – it’s a disaster. Yesterday I had agreed to meet my wife The Duchess at her office to help a friend of hers with some computer troubles, and I forgot no less than four times during the day, having the following conversation:
THE DUCHESS: I’m just calling to remind you about coming by here later.
ME: The what now?
So, whenever I’m tempted to write about past experiences or my perception of things over time, I hesitate. When writing fiction this is no problem – is probably a boon – but when I’m trying to write about the real world and make actual points, I get nervous, because it’s entirely possible that Ronald Reagan did not tap dance on national television in 1983 like I remember, and using the Reagan Tap Dance as an example of cultural revival in the 1980s might invite criticism from the peanut gallery. The cruel, unfeeling peanut gallery.
Still, to be an author is to be heroic, right? So I will tender this observation: When I was a kid reading fantasy and sci-fi paperbacks like they were oxygen keeping me alive, there were a lot of stories involving people (usually youngsters) crossing over into magical lands where they were no longer simply schoolchildren or loafabouts, but heroic warriors or skilled wizards. Today, however, this trope seems to have shifted: No longer do characters cross over into magical worlds separate from our own reality; rather characters come to realize that the world they live in is actually but obfuscatingly magical to begin with.
It’s a subtle shift, in a way. The books I’m thinking of from my youth – starting with the granddaddy of all crossover stories, The Chronicles of Narnia and running through a lot of the books I read as a kid (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Guardians of the Flame, The Darwath Trilogy, to name three off the top of my head) all involved mundane, ordinary people from my world being swept into a magical realm where they either had the opportunity to simply reinvent themselves, or where they actually had amazing new abilities they lacked here. Today, look at the obvious examples: Harry Potter and the Twilight series: These stories posit that the mundane, crushingly dull world we live in coexists, or actually is the magical realm where we can reinvent ourselves or discover we have amazing abilities. The characters in these books don’t need to cross over, they just need to open their eyes.
Part of this shift might be just simple innovation: After years of stories where ordinary shlubs travel to magical worlds, a little change to the formula was needed to spice things up, and when those changes proved popular they spread. Part of it is changing sensibilities, though, I think. I think there’s more of a sense these days that the world we live in is kind of amazing, and that magic and adventure might lurk around every corner, and not exist solely in a magical world we have to be very, very lucky to stumble upon. You can speculate endlessly on cultural shifts like this: Is it the way kids are raised today versus how they were raised in earlier decades? Is it the explosion of the Internet, which makes so much more of the world visible to us all, whereas in the past it was a dull murky shadow at best? Who the hell knows. Quite possibly it’s just that this subtle shift in the mechanics of stories makes timeworn ideas seem fresh again, which is a nasty trick all us authors use.
Now here is where my memory makes me uneasy: You see, it’s entirely possible that these plot tropes existed simultaneously back in The Day, and I simply don’t remember it. Sort of the way entire cousins of mine existed back in 1980, yet seem to have appeared fully-formed in 2008 out of thin air, demanding I appear at family functions. It could be that my childhood self simply preferred the sorts of stories where people had to find hidden magical doorways rather than waking up and realizing that they actually have magical powers in the real world. Who knows? I can’t even remember my own name some days, and have had a series of Memento-esque tattoos applied to my body in order to get me through the day.
In the end, of course, none of this has anything to do with quality: Either approach can yield fantastic stories, and everything old gets new again someday, when a cranky, forgetful drunk will write about it. It’s in The Prophecies. trust me.
Since we’re releasing The Eternal Prison as a mass market paperback, some new reviews are popping up. Since I love reading my own name in pixels, I naturally read them all, compile enemies lists, and post the good ones. I sometimes post the bad ones, when they’re really bad, but this time it’;s a good one, by Niki Bruce:
“Once again, Somers has succeeded in delivering a fantastic sci-fi, action thriller with enough resonance to current times that you’ll have no trouble believing in his dark future.”
Rawk. Read it here: http://reviewernikibruce.blogspot.com/2010/06/avery-cates-returns-in-jeff-somers.html
So, if you’ve been thinking of picking the book up, here’s that little extra push.