Author Archive: jsomers

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.

Pointless FX

Author: jsomers June 14, 2010

So, aside from my exciting life of international adventure, cybercrime, ballroom dancing exhibitions, and writing novels, I sometimes find myself on a couch with The Duchess and 2-3 cats at night, watching terrible, terrible movies. We like movies and have a very low bar for them, meaning we’ll watch almost anything. I am a man who paid for a ticket to view the classic John Candy film “Who’s Harry Crumb?” back when I was a teenager. Which dates me terribly, but if anyone has actually seen that horrible film it will give you an idea of how low my movie bar is.

The other night the movie Daybreakers leaped that bar with aplomb, did a few tumbles, and landed on our TV screen. To be honest I was intrigued by the concept even though I knew the movie had been made in 2007 and shelved for a few years, even though I knew it starred Ethan Hawke, who always looks unwashed and makes me want to Windex my screen whenever he’s on it. (To be fair, I usually enjoy Hawke as an actor. I just wish he’d stop writing). I thought the idea behind the movie was a good one: While it takes the tired old “vampire virus sweeps the world” idea, it has an interesting capitalist take: Once the world is mostly vampires, people just monetize human blood, start farming the remaining humans as livestock, and invert society so everyone can get on with their (immortal) lives at night.

I really like this. It makes sense to me: Once the horror of the whole world turning into vampires has past and everyone’s sitting around at night kind of bored, why wouldn’t society just retool for the new rules? The movie imagines a world that sleeps by day and works by night, cars that are modified to have “day driving” modes with tinted windows and cameras for steering, coffee kiosks offering 20% human blood in each cup, and an evil pharmaceutical company simultaneously farming humans for blood and researching synthetic blood. I like the setup.

Sadly, the movie itself is not so great. It establishes the universes pretty well and has some very nicely done design and effects, but ultimately degenerates into magical science solutions and characters with motivations so vague they might as well not exist. Sigh. But I’m not here to indict another failed narrative, I’m here to talk about special effects, and how often they are completely, utterly wasted in movies.

So, you have vampires. These are more like traditional vampires, not Twilight vampires: They need human blood to survive. They do not have reflections in mirrors. Sunlight kills them kind of gruesomely. A wooden stake through the heart makes them burst into bloody confetti. They don’t turn into bats at will, but blood deprivation makes them devolve into a bat-humanoid monstrosity with no higher brain functions. In a movie filled with vampires there are very few actual F/X shots; I don’t think the budget for the film was huge, and the directors probably had to be pretty picky about where they spent their paltry millions on effects shots. Sadly, they chose poorly.

For example, early in the film when Ethan Hawke’s character is introduced, we see his car first. A shot zooms in on the side mirror, and we see a pretty traditional WOW shot of things floating in the air, disembodied (because he has no reflection) and then the camera spins around to show us Hawke, looking normal aside from slightly glowing eyes and fangs etc. The shot itself is nicely done, and achieves what I suppose was the goal: Establishing that these are vampires. It’s pointless, though. The vampiric lack of reflection never comes up again as a plot point, and there are plenty of other ways the characters are established as vampires (glowing eyes, fangs, a tendency to drink blood and burn horribly in the sun). So what was the point? They blew millions of dollars to underscore something that didn’t need to be underscored. It’s a nifty shot, yes, but there might have been better ways to spend the money. If you removed that 30 seconds of film the movie would not be appreciably changed in any way.

This is often the trouble with F/X shots. You have some movies, like Transformers, where the entire damn movie is one long F/X shot, but then you have the lower-end SF films where the budget is not infinite, and the decision to include some F/X is a momentous one. They’re usually bad choices because no one seems to know how to use them to further the story – or to know that if you don’t need the F/X to further the story, it’s possibly best to just leave it out. Daybreakers could have spent that money on another writer to come up with a better ending than the mumbo-jumbo they put out there. If the lack of reflection had come up again later, been important in some way, that would have improved things considerably, but aside from an aversion to the sun and a deterioration due to blood deprivation the fact that most of the characters are vampires doesn’t really come up much in the plot mechanics.

Of course, you could argue that the concept of the film precluded a lot of vampiric F/X – the whole point is that humans roll with the vampire thing, recreate their materialistic world (except now literally feeding off of people!) and get back to drinking and smoking and wearing stylish suits while living in fabulous homes. It’s not about horror or action, it’s about society running out of resources and turning in on itself like a starving dog. Or it should have been, except for the mumbo jumbo ending, which makes no sense in that context.

Oh well. A better ending, of course, would have improved this movie a lot more than one unnecessary F/X shot, but better endings are a little more amorphous and difficult to quantify, whereas $5 million for 30 seconds of useless film is easy to tally up. Lord knows if they ever make an Avery Cates film, I hope they spend $20 million to build complex Monk robots with animatronic faces instead of just hiring guys to wear latex masks, and then someone will remind me of this essay when they spend $20 million on a single shot of a hover floating in the air and then the rest of the movie is stick figures and stock footage because they blew the budget, and i will despair.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Avery Art

Author: jsomers June 9, 2010

Reader Keith Puryear sent us this:

Yup, that’s an artist’s representation of Avery. I’m always amazed when people decide to visualize him. It’s damn cool. Thanks to Keith for letting me post it!

BAM!

we are all part of the same compost pile

Author: jsomers June 8, 2010

Everyone likes a good end-of-the-world scenario. Ever notice how many SF stories have this as a component – either as the main crux of the story, or as a historical backdrop? Disease comes along, destroys the world, except for our main characters. War comes along, destroys the world, except for our main characters. Zombies come along … vampires come along … superintelligent lizards … you get the idea.

Part of the appeal of such stories is people’s tendency, when imagining such scenarios, to imagine that they themselves will be the main character. In other words, we all seem to assume that when a disaster wipes out 99.9% of the world, we will somehow survive. Because we’re special.

Of course, the stipulation that there would be survivors at all is kind of dubious, albeit admittedly necessary for narrative purposes unless you’re going to Watership Down your apocalyptic story. I mean, vampires come and devour the earth until nothing’s left, how in the world would a few spunky folks escape doom? Part of it is that we all like to imagine we’re smart/lucky/special enough to be survivors, so it just makes sense to us. This is the same appeal that Doomsday Cults have, the belief that you are special enough to witness the end of the world. Forget it, bub: You will witness everything get incrementally worse, just like your ancestors and just like your descendants. No one is special enough to preside over the end of everything.

To be fair, of course, many of these sorts of films could be showing us the final moment of the most resilient survivors – in short, the end of the end. In other words, not a story about some Very Special People who are somehow spared by the universe, but rather the final moments of people who are just as unlucky as the rest of us.

Usually, though, it’s pretty clear the characters in these stories are meant to be Special, and it appeals to us, because we all think that just because The Rapture has failed to happen to for thousands of years, it’s no reason to think WE aren’t important and special enough to be alive when it actually happens. When, in fact, the chances are pretty frickin’ slim. But that’s the appeal: Imagining yourself in that scenario, comparing your theories on how to survive with what the author serves up. I’ve actually imagined myself in Zombie Apocalypses, and wondered what the best strategy would be. In real life, of course, I’d probably be discovered crouching in my crawlspace, slathered in barbecue sauce via a series of events so improbable you wouldn’t believe them even if I explained them in detail, and there would be much Zombie feasting and rejoicing. But it’s fun to imagine what if I was a Type-A personality who reacted well to crisis and apocalypse. I so would not make the mistakes people make in movies. I’d make different, equally disastrous mistakes, yes, but … still.

This is one reason I have an unreasoning affection for the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead: There is a pretty strong implication that the characters in the film are, in fact, the last people alive in the world, or at least their hemisphere. The doom that the credits sequence spells out for them elevates the movie from mediocre horror movie to something I still watch when it pops up on cable – the idea that after all their struggles, these characters are doomed, and none of their efforts will count for anything is a powerful ending, and one that feels a lot more real. Real for a Zombie Apocalypse, that is.

I myself am convinced of my own fleeting meaninglessness in life, and know that if the world ended tomorrow it would more than likely happen so fast and completely I wouldn’t even be aware of it. one second I’d be eating french fries and humming to myself, the next I’d be dissolved into my component molecules, no survival skilz needed.

Sometimes it’s restful to acknowledge your insignificance.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Book Giveaways

Author: jsomers June 4, 2010

To celebrate the upcoming mass market paperback release of The Eternal Prison (Cates #3) on June 29, I’m giving away 10 copies each of the mass market versions of The Electric Church (Cates #1) and The Digital Plague (Cates #2). The giveaway is being run through the fine folks at GoodReads and runs starting today through June 29.

Although bribes are always accepted, the folks at Good Reads will be picking winners, so it won’t avail you much. So surf on over and put in a request. If you win, I could be bribed into signing the copy. Hint: I like liquor and Gibson Les Pauls.

BAM!, More Shit I Gotta Do

The Doom of Men

Author: jsomers June 2, 2010

That's Mr. Merlin to You

It is The Doom of Men That They Forget.Ah, there is much that the movie Excalibur can teach us, isn’t there? Perhaps you have not seen the movie, in which case I don’t understand you, but that’s beside the point—I don’t understand most people, and spend my life terrified and suspicious. Don’t judge me; you bastards prove me right so often it’s ridiculous.

Anyway, I am not here to bemoan the way you all frighten me with your slang, musky odors, and political beliefs—lord knows I’ve written that article before, several times, and will write it again. No, I’m here to tell you about the time I went to see Batman. No, not the new Batman. The first Batman movie that changed entertainment as we know it, the one starring Michael fucking Keaton (twenty goddamn years later and I still can’t believe it) and Jack Nicholson.

So, it’s 1989. I’m between high school and my first year of college, my liver is still normal-sized and I still know several dozen folks I haven’t spoken to since 1989, and I don’t know several people I know now. Which makes no sense, but let it drift. Batman was the big movie that summer; I think every kid I knew was at the theater that night. The place was a madhouse. People had brought beach balls, which were tossed around the theater. Half of us were drunk, which is of course a scandal—that it was only half (I am personally committed to endrunkening the world, as I am convinced this will lead to world peace, the singularity, and my own independent wealthiness). There was a buzz of energy in the air, like we were all expecting to be sucked up into the air, like the rapture was about to happen.

There is a peculiar moment in life when you’re seventeen, eighteen years old and you actually believe that the swill the entertainment industry is serving you means something aside from extracting a few dollars from your pocket and even more for their craptacular snacks. You think it’s an event that will resonate throughout time, or at least throughout your own existence. Decades later, you imagine you’ll be stopped in the street by reporters who want to know where you were when Batman came out.

Ah, youth.

Anyway, it was a party. The movie started and we cheered and afterwards the consensus was that this was the greatest movie evah.

Looking back on the movie 20 years, you gotta ask if part of that reaction was hype, was feeling like you’d just taken part in a shared chunk of awesomeness. The answer: Absolutely. I saw the 1989 Batman again recently, and that is one fucking awful movie.

Even taking into consideration my expanded movie lexicon, maturity, and the fact that I now have a gleeful Heath Ledger in my brain, the Batman ’89 is a mess, ruined by Tim Burton’s hyper-artificial set design, Jack Nicholson’s fey over-acting, and Kim Basinger’s gravity well of talentlessness. I may be in the minority here, but if I could travel back in time and change one thing, I think I’d skip this movie.

Maybe kill Hitler. But most likely skip Batman ’89.

NOTHING LASTS

It’s funny how time erodes everything down to its core. If the core is good, it’ll survive. If the core sucks, it’s history, or grist for a remake or “reboot”. Nothing lasts. The shelf life of a movie these days is about 10 years, which is roughly the time it takes for the next generation of snot-nosed kids to age into ticket-buying, at which point anything that predates their own existence is considered lame until they turn about 35, when suddenly some of them will discover otherwise. And since Hollywood ran out of new ideas the day Star Wars was released, the only thing that matters now is whether they can convince you to pay $10 for the ticket. A movie you’ve seen fifteen times, own on DVD, or consider a lame relic from your parents’ day? Probably not gonna happen. A remake starring Angie Jolie’s tits and a soundtrack by Trent Reznor? Giddy-up.

Science-Fiction movies are all the rage on the ‘reboot” merry-go-round these days, possibly because for decades Sci-Fi movies were treated like something Hollywood stepped in and couldn’t scrape off its shoe, leaving us with dozens and dozens of movies with great ideas and terrible low-budget excuses for sets and costumes. These kinds of films are easy enough to remake, and there’s added value in it for people, too, because they get to see the story done “properly”, with effects and A-list actors and all that. Add to that the possibility of drawing in older fans who don’t go to movies much but who might recall the originals with nostalgia, and it’s a workable formula. Workable because the collective memory of the movie-going public wipes itself every 10 years.

As a result, whatever movie you just saw that rocked your world, forget it. You will. Eventually it will be remade with younger, fresher actors who have just been born and a revamped script, more recent pop-culture references and era-appropriate technological devices as props. You’ll be sucked into attending a screening because of a relentless marketing campaign that reminds you of how great you think the original was, as your memories are vague, and before you know it the only version of Casablanca you can remember is the 2017 version starring Macaulay Culkin in his big comeback. Because it is the doom of men that they forget.

REBOOT HELL

Of course, what happens to a culture when it stops creating new material and just rehashes existing plots, characters, and tropes? What happens when we stop creating Star Trek, The Original Series and settle for Star Trek by That Guy Who Created Lost? Which was a fine movie, I think – though ask me again in 20 years. One could argue that we’ve all been remaking the same plots for thousands of years anyway, with the same basic characters, and all that’s ever changed are the names, the props, and the settings, and possibly some of the mechanics as technology and culture change. In one sense, sure—everything’s either a story about murder, theft, unrequited love, requited love, war, god, or zombies. Mostly zombies.

I think the safety net here is the tendency for folks to create their own counter-programming. Big Entertainment has to keep churning out the goods to keep fannies in the seats, but there will always be a disaffected group of folks who can’t swallow it and who therefore create their own media to entertain themselves. And thank god for them, because they’re laying the foundation for the future reboots of the world. Damn kids.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

I Got Nothing

Author: jsomers May 28, 2010

Since I find myself without any enraged opinions to post here, it’s time for another slew of my songs. Because exactly no one asked me to post more music. That’s how it works: Ignore me and I just keep coming back. It’s how I got published in the first place, actually. We Somers’ just bang our heads against walls until one of us is dead. It’s our Way.

So, without further ado:

Song230
Song236
Song239
Song245
Song252
Song262
Song263
Song264

The usual disclaimer: 1. I admit these are not great music; 2. I claim copyright anyway, so there; 3. No, I cannot do anything about the general quality of the mix, as I am incompetent.

gee-tar

TDP Review in the San Francisco Book Review

Author: jsomers May 27, 2010

The new mass market editions of the Avery Cates books are garnering a second wave of reviews for the series, and naturally I read them all and plot revenge as necessary. No revenge needed this time, as I note the San Francisco Book Review loooooves The Digital Plague:

“Somers is an incredible storyteller whose creativity never wanes. There are more twists and turns in one of his books than in three or four works of other sci-fi authors. He also depicts a future police state filled with all sorts of high tech gadgets and weapons that is both thrilling and terrifying. With three Cates novels already under his belt, one can only hope that Somers is hard at work on a fourth.”

Yowza. You heard the man: Buy that book! http://www.sanfranciscobookreview.com/featured-fiction/the-digital-plague/

BAM!

Never Show the Monster

Author: jsomers May 24, 2010

What will I write about now that Lost is over and done? Especially since I think Lost may have scared me off of episodic TV with overarching mythologies forever. The Prisoner didn’t do it, Twin Peaks didn’t do it, The X Files didn’t do it. But I think Lost will be the show that convinced me to never waste my time on any sort of entertainment that has longevity as a goal. In short, if the creators have a stake in making as many episodes as possible, I think I’ll wait for the DVD set. If the consensus is that it was handled well from beginning to end, I’ll take a chance.

Because, frankly, the finale of Lost almost ate my will to live.

I won’t go into gory details about how I despised that ending. Some of you might have enjoyed it, but really, for me it was terrible. Despite the dangling plot points and unanswered mysteries everyone is complaining about (which now pretty clearly were simply cool plot twists they threw in without any idea of how to resolve them), I don’t think the problem with the final season was too little explanation. It was too much explanation. They gave us two supernatural, godlike beings: Jacob and Smokey. Immortal. They each have distinct abilities and oppose each other. Despite the fact that both seem to lack a certain value for human life, one is painted as more or less ‘good’, whereas Smokey is painted a evil evil evil, with it plainly stated that if he got off the island he would destroy the world at large.

And that’s where the explanation should have stopped. Every detail we got about these two beyond that set up was a mistake.

It’s like a bad horror movie: You’re vaguely intrigued and possibly scared as long as the monster stays off-screen. Horrific details and people screaming for mercy while their entrails splatter the screen is all you need to get into the mood of the movie. Then they give you a nice lingering shot of the monster, and it’s a guy in a rubber suit with chocolate syrup all over him, and you can never take the movie seriously again. If they’d kept Jacob and Smokey vague, elemental-type characters – good and evil, one trying to escape to the world, the other trying to prevent him, with the castaways simultaneously providing Smokey with a way off and Jacob with new acolytes – the story would have been stronger, and there would have been a lot more time to explore the other aspects of the mystery. And I’ll guarantee the climax would have been tighter and made more sense.

When they tried to clarify Jacob and Smokey, things got silly. A golden light. A donkey wheel. Two squabbling brothers. Meh. In the back of my mind their back story was pretty awesome and badass, which it would have remained if it had been allowed to stay in the back of my mind, instead of replaced by the insipid, cheaply dressed scenes they gave us. I mean, they’d established the basics very early on: Jacob, Smokey, the Others – all they had to do was have Richard, the other immortal character, explain that Smokey was trying to escape and needed, somehow, to trick the castaways into helping him, and the rest of the story is a thrilling one about people choosing sides, making deals, double-crossing each other, and finally having a kickass confrontation to settle everything. Instead, we got bogged down by a golden light, a stone cork, and an alternate universe that was just Jack’s purgatory or dying hallucination or similar such bullshit.

And all, I am convinced, because they made the terrible decision to show the monsters.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

I Didn’t Win. Again.

Author: jsomers May 21, 2010

In a week where all of my posts are centered on me and my writerly activities engaging in competitive literary pursuits, with a severe lack of Deep Thought pieces, I once again am here to report that I did not win anything last night at the Moby Book Trailer Awards.

I wasn’t planning on attending, due to a lot of circumstances involving previously made plans and a very, very, insanely early wake up for me today, but at the last minute Alex over at Orbit emailed saying the orbit crew were attending and would purchase for me alcoholic libations if I attended. So I rallied The Duchess, reorganized our plans, threw on a jacket and headed into the Meat Packing District for the event. It was held at The Griffin, which is a snazzy place. We had to wait on line outside and give our names to security in order to get in. All very swanky. My editor Devi and the extremely talented Creative Director Lauren P. showed up as well, and Alex bought me a couple of whiskies.

The “ceremony” had an air of slapdash about it, but was a lot of fun. The Duchess and I only stayed through my category, and I think everyone felt bad for me when I didn’t win. Heck, I felt bad for me. But all in all: Free booze in a swanky locale? Win. Don’t cry for me, Orbit Books.

More Shit I Gotta Do

Literary Upstart Recap

Author: jsomers May 18, 2010

UPDATE: They posted a short slideshow of pics from last night. I am here. That’s me dressed in my Super Cool Author costume, reading my story Rust on the Tongue.

Short version: I did not win. Medium version: I had a great time, got a little drunk, got to see my agent and her lovely, not-yet-ground-down-by-lit-life assistant, and did not win.

Long version: The Duchess and I arrived at The Slipper Room at about 6:50pm, and there was already a long line of people waiting to get in, which is always a good sign when anything resembling a literary reading is going on. But I’ve done readings in bars before, and I know how it goes: The majority of the people are a) lured in by the drinks specials or b) there as friends of some other writer. You end up shouting over the belligerent drunks until, being slightly and belligerently drunk yourself, you crowd-surf, throwing punches and curses until you find yourself staring up at the sky lying in a puddle of your own urine and blood out back by the dumpster.

Luckily, I had The Duchess with me, which meant my own physical danger was lessened. She’s a formidable woman.

We opted to have a slice of pizza beforehand, mainly because I’d been talking about whiskey the whole walk over and The Duchess was getting nervous about managing me later, and wanted food in my stomach. While we were eating, one of our neighbors from Hoboken walked in. I stared at him and he stared at me; neighbors so rarely show up in your real life it’s strange when you run into them. It was a bit awkward. Made worse when we found out one of his friends was reading as well, and he was there to support him. We made conversation for a bit and then he backed out of the restaurant and made for the bar. Now whenever I see him around the block we will have to made awkward conversation about running into each other at Literary Upstart. I may have to move away.

Inside the bar, there was a roiling crowd already. $1 beers will stir up some passion. I introduced myself to the MC and he explained the basic process: Five of us would read our stories, and we’d remain on stage while the other read. Then there would be an intermission, then trivia, then we would all assemble on stage again to have our stories critiqued by the judges and then a winner would be announced. This sounded horrible. Critiqued on stage while I had to stand there, grinning? I am not a brave man. I started ordering whiskies. Normally, I like to go in the middle of a pack of readings. Gives me time to get drunk, to judge to mood of the room, to chant internally superstar in an effort to convince myself that I am, indeed, a superstar. I had barely finished three double Jamesons, neat, when I was announced as the first reader of the evening. Staggering up to the microphone, I had one of those moments where you feel like you’ve swallowed something awful and large: I was sweating, out of breath, nervous. I still read pretty, well, I think. At any rate, I did not pass out, vomit, or have my pants fall down with some ridiculous cartoon whistle in the background, and these are all good things.

The other readers did well, too, although only one story really grabbed me and made me jealous. One of the authors was visibly shaking as they read, and I thanked Jamesons for sparing me that.

During the intermission, I had a few more drinks and told the other authors they were geniuses. They told me I was a genius too. Except one, who just nodded, accepting the compliment as their due. I started to get angry, then wished I had that kind of crazy confidence, and got depressed. The Duchess sent me to the bathrooms so as not to cry in front of all the hipsters.

The bathrooms in The Slipper Room are amazing. As long as your definition of amazing includes mold, damp, narrow bathrooms you cannot turn around in with locks on the doors which are theoretical at best. The toilet seats were always down, forcing me to touch what appeared to be the filthiest surface in the universe. If I die of some alien flesh-eating bacteria tomorrow, you will know why, and avenge me. While I was using one bathroom, a girl walked in on a guy using the one next to me, and there was such a flurry of screaming and activity I wondered what in the world he’d been doing in there. Another bathroom had no sink, and various people had scrawled sink-related graffitti, like dude, where is the sink? and seriously, what happened to the sink? The Duchess, upon hearing this, wondered who brought Sharpies into the bathroom with them.

The trivia portion of the evening was drowned out by drunken conversation. This is what happens in bars. When the friends of the event organizers try to shout down the people who just came out for a few drinks and some conversation, I wonder if they’ve ever been in a bar before, and if shouting down loud drunken people has ever, in the history of booze, worked. I suspect the answer is no, and it did not work that night either.

Back on stage, I had to stand and listen to the judges’ critique of my story. They were gentle and humorous. At one point the mood of the story was compared to Kafka, and my agent, bless her, suddenly howled in laughter as if this was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. I pretended to be outraged, but my agent is wise to my tricks and simply ridiculed me more, which is really how I need to be handled.

I didn’t win.

As we got ready to leave, people came up to me to tell me they really liked my story. While waiting in line for the bathroom again downstairs a guy slapped me on the shoulder and told me I’d been great, and asked if I knew I was going to be critiqued like that. He seemed like someone who’d come to get drunk on a Monday night and accidentally attended a literary reading, but had enjoyed himself. Strangely enough, so had I.

Bullshit, More Shit I Gotta Do