Raritania

New and Noteworthy ("Bit Rot," Spiderman 4?, io9)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:40:00 +0000

In today's edition:

* Charles Stross is making freely available e-copies of "Bit Rot," a short story connecting his novel Saturn's Children with its upcoming sequel, Neptune's Daughter.

* At Hero Complex, word that, a year before the second rebooted Spiderman film even hits theaters, Sony has already scheduled the release dates for the third and fourth movies in the series.

I have to admit that I was dubious about The Amazing Spiderman from the start, and didn't come away from the film thinking any differently. (It seemed too soon for another go at the series, I'm not sure the effort offered enough that was new on the level of story or spectacle to justify itself - though I did like the bit with the cranes at the end - and frankly Andrew Garfield came off as obnoxious when he was supposed to seem flip, just as he always does, a legacy of playing jerks on-screen again and again I guess.) However, it is still worth remembering that even with inflated ticket prices and 3-D surcharges, it still made less money than any of the movies in the Sam Raimi trilogy, and to date no superhero franchise has managed four successful hits in a mere seven summers, so that Sony's plan seems awfully bullish.

* Finally, on a lighter note, io9 speculates "What if Pixar Remade Flash Gordon and Other Classic Pulp Classics?"

New and Noteworthy (Game of Thrones, Speculative Fiction 2012, Iain Banks, Cory Doctorow)
6/17/13
A Summer Box Office Update: The Would-Be Blockbusters
6/17/13

Learning the Novelist's Craft

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:24:00 +0000

When first getting acquainted with the "how-to-be-a-writer" industry, I read on a number of occasions that it commonly takes something like a half dozen manuscripts and ten years to get a book published - or at least, to write a "publishable" book.1 Such data as I have seen since then has convinced me that they were not all that far off the mark.

Of course, the reason why this is the case is that it takes such time to hone the relevant skills to the necessary degree. After all, novel-writing not only demands the skills associated with fiction writing in general (like the ability to tell a story, describe a scene or develop a character on the page), or writing in a specific genre (like the ability to create suspense that a thriller writer needs). Novel-writing requires that authors do so in the "scaled-up" manner that makes for a book-length story, which means their managing a number of interconnected subplots, coordinating a larger cast of characters, or presenting the broader field of view and deeper detailing that go with the genre.

Still, those would-be purveyors of advice never said why it should take so long to pick these up. Rather, as I slowly learned, the answer laid in what they didn't say. Search as I might in the how-to books for some tidy explanation of what exactly one has to do to produce a hundred thousand word narrative, I never found it - because writing is more art than science, with little lending itself to formulas, and even the apparent formulas of little use in themselves.

Compare, for instance, the position of a math student and a composition student. Once a reasonably competent geometry student has seen the Pythagorean theorem, they can use it to get the hypotenuse of a right triangle every time the situation in which the theorem is applicable comes up (even if particular situations might require extra ingenuity). By contrast, a composition student who is told what a thesis statement is, and even understands what they had been told, may have a long and rocky road ahead of them before they can consistently write satisfactory thesis statements of their own.

There is, in short, a very heavy reliance on intuitive understanding, understanding achievable only through lengthy personal observation, and especially on learning by doing. In other words, learning to write a proper thesis statement, formulaic as this may seem, requires seeing a good many arguments made in that style, and then lengthy practice at writing such statements.

This is all the more the case with the writing of fiction.

Accordingly, one learns to write novels by reading a good many of them, and more importantly, by actually writing novels. The sheer length of a novel means that this is a slow process, a single first draft easily the work of months or years, without counting in the irregular and nonlinear pre-writing process, or the editing and revision inevitably part of a serious effort. And of course, just as in the mastery of any other skill, several repetitions of the task are likely to be necessary before the result becomes tolerable.2

Moreover, the process tends to be extended even beyond the time actually required to write several novel-length manuscripts for several reasons.

One is the likelihood that the aspiring writer is unlikely to have their training process financially supported. This means that they are likely working at something else for income, which reduces the number of hours - and especially fresh, energetic, clear-headed hours - they can allot to their writing. (I know of one novelist - with a day job - who writes two hundred words a day. He will necessarily be prolific than someone who, able to commit themselves to this full-time, can put in two thousand.)

Another reason is that one does not necessarily jump from one novel to the next. There are inevitable gaps, just as in any other course of work - because life gets in the way, and because, contrary to the celebration of stupid persistence so congenial to the self-help culture, a writer does sometimes need to go and do something else. People can get burned out writing, just as they can get burned out doing anything else, and the problem is exacerbated by the setbacks and disappointments with which the process is fraught - especially when one is not just writing, but pursuing publication. Submitting one's own work is not just a time-consuming process (and remember, any time in which one is submitting queries is time in which one is not actually writing), but a disspiriting one that will frequently have them licking their wounds - again and again and again, for many years.

It doesn't help that the learning process tends to be lonely. Yes, we all hear tales of people gifted with wonderfully supportive friends and family, but the reality is that people who are not writers generally do not understand what writers go through, and rarely have much sympathy for it (especially when a writer gets the urge to vent). Authors do command a measure of respect if they get rich and famous - but an author who is as yet unpublished tends to be treated with suspicion and contempt, as a malingering pseudointellectual who ought to be doing something more "useful" with their time. This doesn't help one's efficiency.

Unpublished authors also suffer in another way from that isolated position. Unlike an established writer with access to agent and editor and a slew of friends in the business, they do not get the benefit of personalized, professional advice. They may not even have anyone who can be a willing and able sounding board for their ideas. This leaves them having to figure out much more for themselves, and makes them that much more likely to squander a lot of time and effort on artistically or commercially dubious ideas.

And so a decade goes by, just like that.

Of course, some writers do not need a half dozen manuscripts or a decade to reach the point at which they write "publishable" novels. Why the difference?3 Exceptional talent is always one possibility, though I am doubtful that it spares anyone who actually pursues this course from having to suffer through a great deal of drudgery and frustration. A more likely possibility is that the author came to their first manuscript, or their third, with their skills relatively well-honed by other activity. They have already read more and written more than their counterparts by that point, and so are better-equipped to make the attempt. (Certainly a writer who pens their first attempt at a novel at fifteen is likely to produce something quite different from what they would have written at twenty-five or thirty-five.)

Some writers also seem to get lucky, sidestepping a good many pitfalls without even knowing it, or learning more from their mistakes or bouncing back more quickly from their failures, or having good fortune in their advisers, their personal support system, or even the quantity and quality of leisure time they are able to devote to the effort. Some also get lucky in having a subject that makes the work easier. And some are fortunate in not having to go all this way on their own, but being able to get a publisher to take on a relatively raw manuscript, which gets fixed up under the close guidance of the pros, who are there for them on the next attempt.

Unfortunately, luck is not a career plan.

1. Of course, publishable books often do go unpublished - while books that some might deem "unpublishable" do make it into the mill, and even reach the bestseller list. The concern in this post is solely with the issue of achieving a passable manuscript.
2. Despite the subject's lending itself for better to formula, it does not seem at all unreasonable to anyone that a math student should have to do a half dozen of one type of one problem before moving on to the next skill or task. In fact, every textbook on the subject I have ever encountered requires the student to do considerably more than that. By that standard a half dozen novels is not actually so many.
3. One other possibility is that the difference is not in the amount of work put in, but in the ways in which authors number their manuscripts. One writer may count the fifth massive rewrite of his first manuscript as still that first manuscript, while another might regard it as his sixth effort.

On Publishing
10/30/11
Actual Data on SF and Fantasy Publishing
3/26/10

New and Noteworthy (Game of Thrones, Speculative Fiction 2012, Iain Banks, Cory Doctorow)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:07:00 +0000

In today's edition:

* Gawker's Max Read on the accents in Game of Thrones (which has recently concluded its third season).

* As Jonathan McCalmont notes over at Ruthless Culture, Speculative Fiction 2012, a round-up of the best online nonfiction writing about the genre, is out. As might be guessed by those who followed the portion of the blogosphere devoted to science fiction, the debate kick-started by Paul Kincaid's September 2012 review essay about three year's best anthologies for the L.A. Review of Books has a place in it, with Kincaid's piece included, as well as Jonathan McCalmont's response "Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost the Future."

* Ken MacLeod's remembrance of Iain Banks in The Guardian.

* Also in The Guardian, Cory Doctorow on the recent revelations about the NSA's Prism program.

New and Noteworthy (Iain Banks, Age of Zeus, The Jennifer Morgue)
6/10/13
My Posts on Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire
1/2/13
Paul Kincaid's September 2012 Review
12/24/12

The Politics of Continuum, Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:00:00 +0000

While the television show Continuum has drawn attention for its depiction of North America as a corporatocratic police state in the late twenty-first century, its attitude toward that milieu is what seems to have drawn most of the comment. A primary reason for this is that its protagonist (Rachel Nichols' Kiera Cameron) is a policewoman who came back in time to 2012 in pursuit of Liber8, a rebel group fightng the corporate order (led by Tony Amendola's Edouard Kagame), who are depicted as criminals and terrorists. One might consequently expect that Cameron's character is being presented as the hero, Kagame's group the villains – a role-reversal atypical for a genre which ordinarily has the good guys fighting dictatorships and police states rather than defending them.

The resulting ambiguity has been compounded by what the show's creators and cast have had to say about its politics. Their remarks suggest a relativistic neutrality in the conflict between Keira Cameron and Liber8, their attitudes treated as equally valid. This is no doubt meant to seem intriguing and daring, but in practice such "equal time" treatment of conflicting understandings and experiences has often distorted rather than clarified (as journalistic coverage of issues like climate change constantly remind us).

There are also grounds for taking issue with the intent itself. Such a stance, after all, can be a very convenient way of abandoning the responsibility of the writer to seek the truth (again, as the lamentable state of contemporary journalism regularly reminds us). One can also contend that the willingness to give "equal time" to a dictatorial, human rights-abusing corporatocracy and its opponents is problematic from an ethical perspective. (Certainly the show's relativistic stance would have come under far more criticism were the secret police and the dissidents butting heads in a Communist society rather than a corporatocratic one.1)

What the show itself says about the world of 2077 at the outset is also worth noting, and possibly quite telling. Where the origins of the corporatocracy are concerned we are told that business took over an insolvent government in the course of bailing it out financially, a narrative which evokes the idea of efficient, market-disciplined private firms on the one side and government made profligate by its pandering to the voting rabble.2 This premise at the least suggests that the show's economic thinking is not merely of the right (whose sympathy for business and wealth does not necessarily equal approval of corporatocracy), but those overtly anti-populist, elitist quarters of the right where one might most expect to find sympathy for a fully privatized society, especially as this understanding of economic life is never problematized, let alone challenged, at any point during the show's first season.3 Certainly I cannot think of any aspect of the show's future history which similarly reflects any critique of capitalism, corporate power or the tensions between these and political democracy (the Liber8 rebels instead having little to offer but resentment over inequity).4 This makes it at least plausible to argue that the show falls short of the "equal time" standard proclaimed by its creators, the writers viewing the case for the idea of a society run by a Corporate Congress with rather more intellectual sympathy than they do any alternative for which the rebels might be fighting.

1. Simon Barry remarked in an interview that "I think that if you were to ask Rachel’s character if she lived in an oppressive society, she would say, 'No.' And I think that’s kind of the point. Our Liber8 freedom fighters/terrorists, if you will, have a different opinion."
2. It is also quite far from the reality of recent events. What we saw in 2008 was the opposite – profligate businesses run by corrupt executives bailed out by government, governments which arguably run in the red because of their pandering to business and the wealthy, exempting them from their fair share of taxes, showering these groups with giveaways of other sorts, and of course, enduring the revenue shortfalls that go along with the mediocre economic growth that has tended to follow in the wake of "pro-business" policy.
3. Indeed, it is worth noting that the scenario dramatizes at least one fear strongly associated with the populist right, namely the absorption of the United States into a North American Union.
4. Such a reading also seems to me reinforced by the presentation of farm boy and technical genius Alec Sadler as an Edisonade-hero-in-the-making rather than a youth born to privilege, whose ascent to the uppermost strata of the North American Union is a function of his having picked his parents well - implying the meritocracy that is the justification generally given today for such extreme differences in wealth and status.

My Posts on Continuum
5/30/13
My Posts on Postmodernism
11/21/12

A Summer Box Office Update: The Would-Be Blockbusters

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:57:00 +0000

The latest Superman film, the Zack Snyder-helmed Man of Steel, took in $125 million at the U.S. box office this weekend (and almost $200 million worldwide), which is not just a very respectable take for a non-sequel, but a new June record, which has BoxOfficeMojo's Ray Subers predicting a final tally in the $300 million range or higher. If this proves accurate, Man of Steel will accomplish what Bryan Singer's 2006 Superman Returns failed to do - provide a launch pad for a successful Superman franchise.

Meanwhile, Iron Man is closing in on the $400 million mark domestically (and near-certain to break it Monday), while it has broken the $1.2 billion mark globally - pulling in as much money as the first two films in the series combined. It's Avengers money more than Iron Man money, and yet another instance of Marvel's seemingly risky investment in that mega-franchise paying off big.

In short, superhero movies are still doing well. So is the Fast and Furious franchise. With $219 million stateside, and $636 million globally, Fast & Furious 6 has already outgrossed 2011's Fast Five, previously the highest-grossing earner in that franchise by a long way - which made the series a rare, "mundane" exception to the prevailing pattern of heavily science fiction and fantasy-based films among the first-rank action blockbusters of recent years.1

By contrast, Star Trek: Into Darkness has been something of a letdown to its producers. With $210 million from the U.S. in the till at the end of its fifth weekend it is far from a flop, but still unlikely to match the first film's gross domestically, despite higher ticket prices and 3-D surcharges (and of course, the larger budget). However, overseas earnings are more than making up for this. (The film has grossed another $200 million internationally, compared with the 2009 movie's $127 million.) The result is that, despite the disappointment of some in the figures, this post-reboot Star Trek movie is likely to be chalked up as a success in the end - unlike After Earth, another big-budget space-themed movie which is regarded now as an unambiguous flop (with a mere $100 million taken in worldwide, far short of what it will take to cover the $130 million budget).

Star Trek: Into Darkness has been much praised by critics, while After Earth has only contributed to the scorn heaped upon the once-celebrated M. Night Shyamalan. But the two together remind us that while Star Wars and Avatar all but set the standard for commercial success, audience response to space opera has tended to be rather more fickle than is the case with more grounded genre fare (like the superhero films that, year in, year out, top the charts).

Of course, the season is not quite half over, with many more big-budget spectacles aiming for grosses in the high nine and low ten figures scheduled for release over the next two months. Coming this Friday is World War Z (capitalizing on the only other trend that has endured as long as superheroes in the 2000s, zombies), and the Friday after that, White House Down (the year's second thriller about a terrorist seizure of the White House, after March's Olympus Has Fallen). In July, viewers can look forward to the reteaming of Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger, Guillermo del Toro's mechas-and-monsters-themed Pacific Rim, Red 2 (a sequel to the 2010 film based on the Warren Ellis comic) and the return of everyone's favorite X-Man in the inventively titled The Wolverine. And in August, District 9 director Neil Bloomenkamp's Elysium, a second Percy Jackson film (Sea of Monsters) and the obnoxiously titled Kick-Ass 2, will round off the season.

I don't have any predictions about how these as-yet unreleased films will do with critics or audiences to offer. However, the $250 million The Lone Ranger looks to me like the biggest gamble of the season given the money sunk into it, the cultural buttons the film pushes (however inadvertantly), the recent travails of Western-themed would-be blockbusters (like Cowboys & Aliens), and the clear hopes of the Suits who greenlit it that it will give them another Pirates of the Caribbean-style success - so that for those who find the ups and downs of the film business interesting, that seems the story to watch.

1. Fast Five (2011), which took in $209 million domestically and $626 million globally, earned 60% more in inflation-adjusted terms than Fast and Furious (2009), which in its turn was the series' highest grosser (certainly globally). The only other such action movies which regularly enjoy such earnings are from the highest profile spy franchises, like the Mission: Impossible and James Bond series (2011's Mission: Impossible movie pulling in nearly $700 million, 2012's Skyfall over $1.1 billion).

My Posts on Star Trek
12/16/12
So Far This Summer . . .
5/29/12
New and Noteworthy (Avengers, "The End of SF"-Again, Fringe Renewed)
5/18/12

Watching Doctor Who at Fifty

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:23:00 +0000

I will start off by saying that this post is not a retrospective about the series. I simply lack the context to provide that, having as I do virtually no familiarity with Doctor Who during its first twenty-six years. Instead it is a consideration of the show in its current form, which is frankly all I really know firsthand.

My first encounter with Dr. Who, after all, was in the American-made TV movie that aired on FOX in 1996. I remember little of it except what seemed to be the titular character's wandering a hospital without his memory for most of its running time. Needless to say, it left little impression on me, and I'd thought, on anyone else, and was later surprised to find that it was regarded as canon, with Paul McGann officially counted as the Eighth Doctor. Recently reading a summary of that movie it struck me that this may have been because I came to the film totally unfamiliar with the character's history (I'd never so much as heard of The Master), and that I might have had a more favorable impression if I came to it as a longtime fan - but in any event, I did not encounter the franchise again until Syfy Channel aired series one of the revival in early 2006.1

Once again, I didn't know what to make of the franchise.2 For one thing it seemed rather light on concept, lacking the density of world-building or intellectual play I found in shows like Babylon 5 or Lexx. Much of what the show did present seemed to me very old-fashioned (the Daleks something out of a '50s B movie), while other ideas appeared just plain silly (like the Autons the Doctor confronted in the first episode of the revival, "Rose"). For another, the Doctor's four-dimensional tourism seemed aimless and casual next to the more purposeful sagas I was used to - and surprisingly Earthbound, the hero of this space opera doing much of anything off-world for just four of season one's thirteen episodes. Instead he spent a lot of time in contemporary Britain, and when traveling to other times, tended to stick with British drama's most conventional choices (e.g. the Victorian era, World War II), which seemed rather limiting.3 Even on a visual level the production left me underwhelmed, neither lavish enough nor exotic enough to stand out from the then rather thick crowd of TV space operas.4

Still, I was a fan by the end of the first season. I suppose it just took a while for me to catch its wavelength: its penchant for Douglas Adams-like zaniness and whimsy, its faithfulness to its inheritance, its Britain-centricness.5 (I'd watched a lot of British television before, but little of it genre television, and while I suppose I'm rather more up on British history than most on this side of the Atlantic, once in a while there was a reference to something I didn't fully get, or wasn't familiar with from before.6) It took a while, too, to get to know the protagonist (who would be intolerably Mary Sue-like if he were not a nine hundred year old alien of exceptional charm and generosity), and the dynamic between Doctor and Companion, and the rhythms of the story arcs. The stories got bigger, the visuals better. And while still regarding it as intellectually and dramatically lighter stuff than many past favorites, and packed with implausibilities and dissonances best not examined too closely, every so often it offered a clever idea (as in "Blink"), or a genuinely moving moment (as in "Vincent and the Doctor"), while presenting its humanism with rather more conviction than the later Trek series' managed, and maintaining a cheerfulness that is downright refreshing in this age of dark-and-gritty-everything-with-a-side-of-still-more-dark-and-gritty. It has all made for an appealing enough combination that I find myself looking forward to season eight in a way I would not be to the announcement of an anemic new small screen Trek, or yet another clone of the Galactica reboot.

1. As indicated by the lengthy article devoted to it on Wikipedia, and its 5.9 score over at the Internet Movie Data Base, others responded rather more favorably.
2. It is worth remembering that I had long since read a large portion of the genre's print classics (a fair amount of newer stuff included), and taken in such shows as the famously idiosyncratic Lexx, so that this was not simply a case of a viewer being confused about what to make of a show simply because it "was not Star Trek."
3. Of course, series four of Lexx was set on contemporary Earth - but that followed three seasons of outer-space adventure.
4. For nearly two decades, from the late 1980s to the late 2000s, there was always at least one first-run North American space opera in production, and around the turn of the century, often a half dozen. However, no such show has been on the air since the cancellation of Stargate: Universe.
5. Interestingly, Adams was to be a direct influence on the show's course in a number of ways, not least his writing a number of episodes.
6. Case in point: in the second series episode "The Idiot's Lantern," the plot hinges on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth being a milestone in the history of television, something of which I had not previously been aware. Prior to that, in "The Doctor Dances," when the Doctor followed up "beat the Germans, save the world" with "don't forget the welfare state!" I had been less than certain of the connection implied between the former and the latter - not having yet read Angus Calder's outstanding history of the era, The People's War.

My Posts on Battlestar Galactica
12/16/12
My Posts on Star Trek
12/16/12
My Posts on Lexx 12/16/12

New and Noteworthy (Iain Banks, Age of Zeus, The Jennifer Morgue)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 13:20:00 +0000

In today's edition:

* Patrick Nielsen Hayden's obituary for British novelist Iain Banks, perhaps best known to science fiction fans for Consider Phlebas, the first of his "Culture" novels, and a founding work of the new space opera. He will genuinely be missed.

* Ian Sales reviews James Lovegrove's The Age of Zeus. (You may remember my review of Lovegrove's previous mix of mythology and contemporary military adventure, The Age of Ra, which I reviewed here.)

* Charles Stross's latest crib sheet on writing The Jennifer Morgue - in which he wrote the Laundry's Bob Howard into a James Bondian adventure.

Coming Next Year: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
6/8/13

Continuum

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 12:24:00 +0000

Listed below are my posts on the television series Continuum.

The Politics of Continuum, Part II
6/10/13
The Politics of Continuum, Part I
5/29/13

Of Right and Left Transhumanism

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 13:25:00 +0000

The way we think about the possibility of transcending "the human condition" strongly reflects the way in which we think about humanity and society in general. Transhumanist thought has been no exception, evident across the political spectrum - but tending to differ in line with the thinker's other political attitudes. In fact, it seems possible to speak of a transhumanism of the political right, and a transhumanism of the political left, the key difference between which is the context in which we would see technology utilized to effect fundamental changes in human beings. Rightist transhumanism seeks to achieve it within the existing social order (e.g. capitalism), and even as a substitute for social and political change. Leftist transhumanism regards it as part of a broader project of human liberation, likely to follow the achievement of a more equitable society.

Ray Kurzweil's Singularitarianism is a clear case of the former, positing as it does our experiencing twenty thousand years' worth of change within the space of a century - and still finding ourselves living with a capitalist economy, while the solution of our environmental problems depends on the improvement of technology in response to market imperatives, rather than political and social innovation (like changes in values or the emergence of new institutions). By contrast, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker, or W. Warren Wagar's A Short History of the Future, present the leftist version, in which the modification of the species follows the achievement of a "good society" which has moved past the inequities of our own.

Just as elsewhere in our intellectual life these past several decades, the ideas of the right have prevailed in this discussion, reducing the left to offering little but criticism of the visions of Kurzweil and company. Nonetheless, Ken MacLeod's recent piece in Aeon Magazine contending that socialism, or something like it, is all the more necessary in an age in which our already contentious identity politics have been made much more so by the addition of substantial biological diversity hints at the possibility of movement in this direction.

My Posts on Transhumanism, Posthumanism and the Singularity
11/19/12

Coming Next Year: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 14:10:00 +0000

I have only hazy memories of the original The Transformers TV show from the '80s, and so never had any real opinion about the resentment harbored by many toward the live-action film series about it Michael Bay directed (a modest sample of which you can find in the comments section of this post from io9). I simply found the first film satisfying on its summer blockbuster terms, the second less so (as the college scenes grated, and the affronts to geographical literacy so severe they actually contributed to the third act's confusion). The third movie was more watchable than the second, but ultimately undermined by a bloated third act.

I do have a fairly strong recollection of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, however - strong enough to think of April O'Neil as always wearing a yellow jumpsuit.

The set photos from the Michael Bay-produced reboot of the film circulated earlier this month made clear, this is not what fans will see in the upcoming movie (to the disappointment of many, and the Schadenfreude of at least one fanboy-hating commentator).

In fairness, it may have been unreasonable to expect the jumpsuit's return given the difference between how things look in cartoons, and how they appear in live-action film and television. Certainly that particular article of clothing was left out of the live-action movies of the early '90s - a point that I don't remember coming up in discussion of those movies at the time of their release (and which few seem to be making now). Perhaps it was simply that the space in which such sentiments could be aired was more limited in that pre-Internet world, but perhaps we also had more limited expectations regarding the aesthetic faithfulness of live-action film to our cartoons and comics, with big-budget films based on them still a comparative novelty.

If so, it would seem we have become more demanding in that respect, and perhaps too demanding.

Reflecting on that possibility it seems to me that while I feel that pop cultural icons should not be lightly altered (as my responses to the reboots of franchises from James Bond to Star Trek make clear), and would look favorably on news that it has not been completely left out (bringing it back in one scene, even ironically, could be a nice gesture), I'm neither particularly surprised, nor particularly dismayed. Not everyone is so forgiving, however, as we will be reminded during the inevitable nit-picking of every detail escaping the scene of the production in the year to come.

My Posts on Star Trek
12/16/12
My Posts on James Bond
11/9/12
New and Noteworthy (Planet of the Turtles, Facebook, YA Saves the Economy)
3/26/12

Sex on Screen: "The Joylessness of Sex" on Television

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 14:09:00 +0000

I previously noted the decline of sex as a theme of blockbusters at the American box office, and the disappearance of gratuitous nudity as an element in major hits.

Of course, this has had partially to do with the unprecedented abundance of sex on television. Still, as Gina Bellafante notes over at T Magazine,

what's striking about the current depiction is how much of it just isn't sexy — how much of it is divorced from any real sense of eroticism or desire. The audience, at home in bed in need of diversion, is betrayed. What they get instead is sex that is transactional, utilitarian — the end product of a kind of twisted careerism.

This is less surprising than it may seem. Even as some applaud a new age of openness, and others decry the sexualization of culture, society remains at bottom deeply sex-negative. In those quarters where religious-traditionalist hostility to sexual imagery has weakened (or at least, sunk beneath the surface of everyday life), postmodernism and identity politics have filled its niche. Terms like "objectification," when tortured far past any useful meaning in that way that has become routine, can virtually outlaw such concepts as physical attraction, sexual fantasy and even sexuality itself.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, proponents of such ideas have had their effect, one which has naturally been manifested in our cultural production. Sex as a set-up for degradation or self-destruction, sex as a temptation to be resisted or a display of weakness, even sex as banality and disappointment, whether treated comically or tragically or tragic-comically, is broadly accepted. Sex as a prelude to the monster or killer striking like some cosmic punisher (as in horror movies), sex as an occasion for embarrassment or frustration or gross-out gags (as in "raunchy" comedies), sex as indiscretion or transgression for which someone will soon pay dearly (the basis of the erotic thriller and much other drama), sex scenes which make the viewer's skin crawl (Ms. Bellafonte describes several), are what we can expect. The idea of sex and sexuality as a source of pleasure (for the characters, or the viewer) is regarded with much more apprehension, and within the mainstream, is rather more elusive, even as depictions of sex have become more frequent and graphic and accessible.

Once again I remember Roger Vadim's remark that "Hollywood is sometimes licentious, but always puritanical." And that hasn't changed. If anything, that characterization seems truer of the place than ever.

The Decline of Sex in American Film: The Mysterious Disappearance of Gratuitous Nudity
2/28/13
The Decline of the Sex-Themed Blockbuster
1/9/13

June 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 14:05:00 +0000

New and Noteworthy ("Bit Rot," Spiderman 4?, io9)
6/18/13
Learning the Novelist's Craft
6/18/13
New and Noteworthy (Game of Thrones, Speculative Fiction 2012, Iain Banks, Cory Doctorow)
6/17/13
A Summer Box Office Update: The Would-Be Blockbusters
6/17/13
Watching Doctor Who at Fifty
6/13/13
New and Noteworthy (Iain Banks, Age of Zeus, The Jennifer Morgue)
6/10/13
The Politics of Continuum, Part II
6/10/13
Coming Next Year: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
6/8/13
Sex on Screen: "The Joylessness of Sex" on Television
6/8/13

The Best and Worst James Bond Novels, Revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 30 May 2013 12:24:00 +0000

As of late, one of the bigger draws to this blog has been my post on the best and worst of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels - which offers what has struck me as the general run of opinion about those books, along with a few thoughts of my own.

For a quite different take on the matter, check out this post from Bookriot last year, which ranks the series from best to worst and makes quite a few surprising choices along the way - so that Moonraker winds up at the top, and Live and Let Die at the bottom.

Also of potential interest: this post over at Cult Box which discusses the more idiosyncratic books in the series - including, naturally, Moonraker, You Only Live Twice and the much-criticized The Spy Who Loved Me.

My Posts on James Bond
11/9/12

The Politics of Continuum, Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 30 May 2013 11:56:00 +0000

In the science fiction series Continuum North America in 2077 is under the direct rule of business corporations, which operate a police state to protect their domination of society.

In discussing the show's premise many casually label the show's "North American Union" fascist. It is indisputably anti-democratic and right-wing, but fascism is a specific form of such rule. Defining fascism in such a way that it encompasses anything wider than the Fascist party of Mussolini has always been problematic, but some analysts have made useful attempts to at least identify characteristics distinguishing it from other political forms.

To take one example, Chip Berlet and Matthew Nemiroff Lyons characterize it as a political ideology which "glorifies national, racial or cultural unity and collective rebirth while seeking to to purge imagined enemies, and attacks both revolutionary socialism and liberal pluralism in favor of militarized, totalitarian mass politics."1 Such characteristics seem pointedly absent from the world of Continuum. The political culture of the North American Union appears cosmopolitan, and neither celebrates a golden past, nor promises a golden future. Nor does it seem to display much concern with the mobilization of masses, or militarism as such. Additionally fascism tends to be at least formally critical of capitalism, and offer a vision of class reconciliation through a corporatist economics in which business, labor and a strong state ostensibly cooperate at an institutional level to achieve national economic goals. By contrast, the dominance of corporate power is naked and matter-of-fact in the show's milieu.

This makes the label "fascist" a misnomer. The NAU is, rather, a "corporatocracy," a polity directly ruled by corporations (not unlike India under the East India Company, prior to the Raj). This regime may serve similar ends to fascism (typically viewed from the left as capitalism's defensive reaction against socialism), but as shown by what is absent from the NAU's order, there are significant differences in the rhetorical and practical means they use to achieve those ends.

1. This description, which appears in their book Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), seems consistent with compelling but less clinical analyses offered by other observers. Wilhelm Reich's description of fascism as the "mixture of rebellious emotions and reactionary social ideas"; and Walter Benjamin's characterization of fascism as a politics which organizes "the masses" around their self-expression rather than the self-interest it seeks to deny them, and "the introduction of aesthetics into political life"; both fit quite well with Berlet and Lyons' usage of the term.

New and Noteworthy (Tobias Buckell, Charles Stross, Fan Fiction)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 29 May 2013 14:34:00 +0000

In today's edition:

* Tobias Buckell, in a response to a piece over at the self-delusion-themed blog You Are Not So Smart, discusses how "survivorship bias" has contributed to a hyperabundance of worthless advice about writing and publishing - just as it has everywhere else in life.

* Charles Stross' series of "crib sheets" in which he has been discussing the road may of his books took from the first germ of an idea to publication. Thus far he has discussed Singularity Sky, The Atrocity Archive, Iron Sunrise and Accelerando.

The piece on Singularity Sky is probably the best "how I broke in" story I have ever read, offering a glimpse of the frustration and nerves and dead ends faced by those trying to get out of the slush pile and into the business (elided in the sanitized tales which we usually get about query letters happily answered).

The piece on Accelerando is likewise noteworthy for its comparison of that novel's first chapter (set circa 2013) to what we have really been living through in that time period, and what it suggests about our earlier expectations about the Singularity.

* Wired on one effort to make fan fiction a commercially viable enterprise - Amazon making a deal to distribute stories about selected Warner Bros. television shows through the Kindle.

The Best and Worst James Bond Novels, Revisited
5/29/13
The Politics of Continuum, Part I
5/29/13
Game of Thrones: Toward the End of the Game
5/25/13
New and Noteworthy (Warehouse 13, David Walsh, Star Trek "Pre-boots")
5/25/13

Game of Thrones: Toward the End of the Game

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 25 May 2013 16:45:00 +0000

Over at Tor.com Chris Lough considers the possibility that HBO's Game of Thrones may come to an end before the series of novels on which it is based gets its concluding volume into print. Might, then, the TV series (projected to run about seven seasons, and thus wind things up circa 2017) offer the ending of the saga before the books do?

It certainly does seem plausible that we will not get both of the last two volumes to George R.R. Martin's series within the next four years, given how slowly volumes four and five came out (A Feast for Crows and A Dance of Dragons taking some eleven years to appear after A Storm of Swords). Still, as Lough points out, the series' creators have many alternatives to actually presenting that conclusion, including the series giving only some of the ending; leaving the real conclusion to a film to come out later; or putting off the conclusion for a bit longer by going on hiatus for another season.

All of these strategies have been used before (though given the norms of American TV, that first option, giving only some of the ending, seems most likely). Yet the challenge for the series' writers begins well before the conclusion. A Storm of Swords offered material sufficient for two seasons - but the fourth and fifth books were rather less satisfactory for many readers, because so much of what they contain seems to be of marginal importance to the whole (admittedly, one cannot be sure until the end). Arya and Sansa do continue their journeys - but these are much further removed from the core of the conflict in Westeros than in the first three volumes. The same goes for Tyrion's adventure after his escape from Westeros, while this seems even more the case with Daenerys' time attempting to establish a new order in Mereen in the fifth book. The attention these books devote to established characters now being used as viewpoint figures (Brienne, Samwell), and new characters in new places which had received little direct attention prior to these volumes (the events in the Iron Islands and Dorne) only deepens the impression of this part of the story as looser and lacking in significant events. Only Cersei's misrule in King's Landing, Stannis' struggle against her and Jon Snow's tenure as Lord-Commander of the Night's Watch remain at the heart of the drama, and even these portions of the books lacked the tightness of their earlier treatments. The fact that Feast and Dance mostly depict events that happened simultaneously (with Crows dealing with only some plot threads, and Dragons picking up others where Storm left off) adds yet another complication.

Next to what came before, it can seem diffuse and anemic, and it ought not to be assumed that viewers of the show will be more forgiving than readers of the books, confronting the writers with a significant challenge if they mean to hold their interest for another three seasons, and making some alterations seem all but inevitable. One is that they will synchronize the events of Feast and Dance (so that, for instance, we will see Cersei's and Tyrion's plots unfolding in the same episodes). Another is that they will compress these events, perhaps by turning them into a single season by dropping anything not absolutely essential to the story's trajectory. (I certainly expect that we will see much less of the Iron Islands and Dorne.) I also think we are likely to see rather more revision of the material that is retained than we have seen in the series to date (throwing in as many surprises as the story can stand to spice things up).

Of course, even after all, that, I doubt the results will match the vigor and pace of the first four seasons, but they might be sufficiently strong to hold on to the viewers' loyalty until the revelations of the (hopefully) more eventful The Winds of Winter.

My Posts on Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire
1/2/13

New and Noteworthy (Warehouse 13, David Walsh, Star Trek "Pre-boots")

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 25 May 2013 14:43:00 +0000

In today's edition:

* Warehouse 13 has been cancelled, which means that its fifth season will be its last - news which has been a surprise given how happy the channel had seemed to be with the flagship show of the rebranded channel. However, it seems less surprising when one considers their decreasing interest in original dramatic programming (even softcore genre material of this kind) in favor of reality TV and wrestling, with such content as they do air typically imports (like Merlin, Lost Girl and Continuum, and the upcoming Sinbad and Primeval: New World).

* Three pieces by David Walsh. The first is a follow-up to his earlier consideration of Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty which responds to later revelations about the film's production. The other two discuss Baz Luhrmann's hit remake of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, with the first a review of the movie which considers a side of Fitzgerald and his book that you very likely did not encounter in high school; and the second an examination of some recent misadventures of the tiresome Prince Harry and company through the lens of the novel, and the film, in turn, through Luhrmann's associations with British royals.

* An amusing piece from SFX's Nick Setchfield on what Star Trek might have looked like had it first appeared in the 1890s, 1930s, 1950s or 1970s.

The Syfy Channel
12/20/12
Warehouse 13
12/17/12
My Posts on Star Trek
12/16/12

Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:34:00 +0000

Listed below are my posts on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, and the television series based on it, Game of Thrones.

Game of Thrones: Toward the End of the Game
5/25/13
New and Noteworthy (Science Fiction in China, Ian Sales, Game of Thrones' Sansa, The Horror Genre, Charles Stross)
5/21/13
Review: A Dance With Dragons, by George R.R. Martin
9/22/12
Game of Thrones: Season One
3/30/12
New and Noteworthy (Michael Bay and the Sublime, Game of Thrones, Gary Shteyngart and Default, Alan Moore)
7/26/11
New and Noteworthy (Stross and the Singularity Debate, Game of Thrones)
6/23/11
New and Noteworthy (The End of Big Publishing, Dinklage on Game of Thrones)
4/21/11

New This Week: Star Trek: Into Darkness

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:22:00 +0000

Much has been made of the fact that Star Trek: Into Darkness fell well short of Paramount's $100 million-plus projection for the opening weekend. It made $70 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period and $84 million in the Thursday-to-Sunday period - which, given 3-D and IMAX surcharges, higher ticket prices all around, added up to a weaker opening than the first film had - despite the tendency of audiences to come out up front for the sequel of a well-liked film also enjoying positive buzz (and a larger budget). TrekMovie.com offers a round-up of the analysis, including a number of explanations for the disappointing numbers, including the lateness of the shift of the opening to Thursday (which ended up just stretching a three-day gross over four days), the four year gap between this film and its predecessor, and the intensity of the competition in a box office which saw the release of Iron Man 3 and The Great Gatsby in the two preceding weeks.

I do think these were all factors, but that they had their effect because of a larger problem: the last film was well-liked, but simply did not win over the big base of loyal new fans that enthusiasts of the reboot expected. Certainly the demographics of the audience point to this, with, as Trekmovie.com noting,

Deadline reports exit polling shows that 64% of the audience was male and only 27% was under the age 25. For the 2009 Star Trek movie, 35% were under 25. And in comparison Iron Man 3 had 45% under 25. So with all the talk of this not being your father’s Star Trek, there may be too many fathers in the audience.

This reminds me of something many a Trek fan, myself included, said about the reboot back in 2009 - that it was a fun summer blockbuster, but not much more. Putting it bluntly, it went the same route as the Jason Bourne series, dispensing with older elements while not adding enough new ones to elevate it above the level of the generic - and that seems to me to be how the audience has taken it. That being the case, is it really any wonder that those who came out were disproportionately longtime franchise fans rather than eager new converts?

Still, many observers are seeing a silver lining in the film's overseas earnings, which seem likely not just to outdo those of the first movie, but to more than offset any shortfall in the movie's North American earnings, which are themselves far from marking it as a flop. The upshot is that a Star Trek 3 a few summers from now still seems close to a sure thing.

My Posts on Star Trek
12/16/12
Reflections on the Jason Bourne Series
10/27/11

New and Noteworthy (Science Fiction in China, Ian Sales, The Horror Genre, Game of Thrones' Sansa, Charles Stross)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:16:00 +0000

In this edition, still more pieces that caught my eye during the hiatus (which is hopefully really over this time).

* In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alec Ash's interview with writer Fei Dao about science fiction in China touching on the genre's history and influences in China (interestingly he identifies Soviet science fiction as one of the "big three" influences, alongside Western and Japanese science fiction), its current concerns (reflecting the country's modernization), as well as the audience for this type of work and the prejudices it is up against (which are not all that dissimilar from what it has seen in the West).

* Ian Sales on taking Amazon's bestseller lists as a guide to larger trends in book publishing.

* At Fanpop, a well-constructed response to the enmity so many apparently feel toward Game of Thrones' Sansa Stark. (I would have to number myself among those who see her character as one of the series' more sympathetic - and a reminder that much as we complain about the prevalence of Mary Sue/Gary Stu characters, a large segment of the audience all but demands them, and becomes quite unreasonable when their demand is not met.)

* A provocative piece from Airlock Alpha's Amber Hollingsworth which takes on the issue of "Why Horror Isn't Scary, But Thrillers Are."

* And last but not least, a number of Charles Stross's posts, including his response to Margaret Thatcher's passing, and its aftermath; his "Public Service Announcement" about why it is best to ignore the news; his announcement of the release of The Traders' War (an omnibus edition of the first three Trade of Queens novels, "revised and reassembled as the single book it was meant to be"); and his piece on British nuclear disarmament, which offers a succinct critical history of the country's strategic deterrent.

Incidentally, you can find my review of the Trade of Queens in its previously published six-volume form here.

Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire
1/2/13
Of Mary Sue and Gary Stu
7/9/11

At My Other Blog: Reassessing The Limits to Growth

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:38:00 +0000

Over at my other blog I take a look at the original The Limits to Growth four decades on.

Taking a fresh look at the classic study is a reminder of a great many things - not the least of them the abysmally low level of public debate (public understanding of this very short, simple book being incredibly distorted), and how timid our political imaginations have become (the era of Big Solutions long behind us, even with the Big Problems endlessly getting bigger).

New and Noteworthy (Self-Publishing, Paulo Coelho, SF Novels 1985-2010)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:15:00 +0000

A few items that caught my eye over this blog's quite unplanned late March/April hiatus:

* John Winters on being a (self-described) self-publishing failure, a much needed corrective to the kinds of success stories our rags-to-riches-quick-fantasy-obsessed culture trumpets.

* By way of the Ukiah Blog, a piece by Victoria Beale in the New Republic which offers a critical take on Paul Coelho, as both artist and thinker, with her assessment of the author's Message tidily summed up in its last sentences:

[U]nder the platitudes Coelho’s philosophy has always been a harsh worldview: unhappiness or lack of fulfilment is only for the weak and unfocused. And increasingly in his books, success can only be measured against the author and the obstacles he has overcome. The gospel of self-reliance has never been so trite or unforgiving.

Make what you will of Coelho's star status at Davos.

* Finally, over at Strange Horizons Martin Lewis reviewed Damien Broderick and Paul di Filippo's Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985-2010. To go by Lewis' review the book has its limitations (he's actually a lot harsher than that, eventually resorting to a four-letter word to express his disgust) but given the scarcity of critical efforts even attempting a comprehensive overview of science fiction "after the New Wave" (a fact which prompted me to put together the book by that very title), it seems worth at least a glance from anyone interested in a big picture view of the life of the genre in these years.

New and Noteworthy (Self-Publishing, Stross on the Presidential Election, The Hydrogen Sonata)
10/23/12
New in Print . . . (After the New Wave: Science Fiction Since 1980)
8/21/11

May 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:10:00 +0000

New and Noteworthy (Tobias Buckell, Charles Stross, Fan Fiction)
5/29/13
The Best and Worst James Bond Novels, Revisited
5/29/13
The Politics of Continuum, Part I
5/29/13
Game of Thrones: Toward the End of the Game
5/25/13
New and Noteworthy (Warehouse 13, David Walsh, Star Trek "Pre-boots")
5/25/13
New This Week: Star Trek: Into Darkness
5/21/13
New and Noteworthy (Science Fiction in China, Ian Sales, Game of Thrones' Sansa, The Horror Genre, Charles Stross)
5/21/13
At My Other Blog: Reassessing The Limits to Growth
5/21/13
New and Noteworthy (Self-Publishing, Paulo Coelho, SF Novels 1985-2010)
5/2/13

April 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 02 May 2013 20:29:00 +0000

NO POSTS THIS MONTH.

The Decline of Sex in American Film: The Mysterious Disappearance of Gratuitous Nudity

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:26:00 +0000

A quick search of the Internet for the words "gratuitous nudity" turns up innumerable expressions of nostalgia for the '70s and '80s as a golden age for this kind of content, which devotees of a common line of argument hold virtually disappeared from film by the end of the 1990s.

Political correctness, of course, keeps reputable mainstream writers from expressing such laments, so those thoughts turns up mainly in dialogues between anonymous users of a web forum, or quirky independent blogs, or lists made by the users of sites like the Internet Movie DataBase. Still, there are exceptions, Roger Ebert notably expressing what many more were thinking in his review of '70s blaxploitation movie spoof Black Dynamite when he wrote that he was

happy to say it brings back an element sadly missing in recent movies, gratuitous nudity. Sexy women would "happen" to be topless in the 1970s movies for no better reason than that everyone agreed, including themselves, that their breasts were a genuine pleasure to regard . . . Now we see breasts only in serious films, for expressing reasons. There's been such a comeback for the strategically positioned bed sheet, you'd think we were back in the 1950s.

To my knowledge there has been no really serious attempt to statistically quantify movie nudity over the years, let alone do so in the methodically more rigorous way that tracking the incidence of gratuitous nudity requires, but there seems to be something to the perception nonetheless. The "desk clerks at resorts who just happened to be naked [and] coeds strolling the halls of dorms all day wearing nothing but incompetently tied towels" on which Steve Penhollow remarked in The Journal Gazette are clearly gone from our movie screens, while the propensity of characters to just happen to hold their meetings in strip joints has similarly gone into decline. So has the way that action sequences tended to crash through the doors of rooms where people just happened to be having sex (like in 1985's Commando, or 1988's Die Hard). Where nudity does occur not only is it usually more plausible within the plot, but it also tends to be briefer, angled and positioned and lit so as to conspicuously limit what is shown, and in general suggest rather than display. (This was even the case with the threesome in Wild Things that put Denise Richards on the pop cultural map.)

What happened to explain all these changes? The dampening effect of identity politics on sex in film has surely been a factor, with any female nudity that might be branded gratuitous especially vulnerable to such pressures. So has the explosion of alternative options for accessing sexual content, generally cheaper, easier and more convenient than going to the theater (as is the case with flipping a channel, visiting a web site or getting a disc), making nudity less effective as a draw to feature film.1 However, one ought not to overlook other changes in the economics of filmmaking, particularly big-budget filmmaking. In the 1980s would-be summer blockbusters (like the aforementioned Commando) were still being made for $10-20 million - or $20-40 million in today's terms. Sharply rising costs have meant a decreasing willingness to take risks of any sort. Now comparably positioned movies cost $150 million as a matter of course, requiring filmmakers to shoot for a gross of $400 million or more, a financial territory where any extra ticket sales nudity might bring are much more than offset by the liability of an R rating - something studios have been much more prone to avoid, with even the Terminator and Die Hard franchises going PG-13 for their fourth installments in the late '00s.2

Unsurprisingly, nudity is probably less present in such productions than in any other kind of film today. Where the megabudgeted movies about comic book superheroes are concerned, the PG-13-rated nudity of X-Men's Mystique was as far as it went. Much the same can be said for the other, upper-tier action films, from family-friendly fantasy epics to the movies of Michael Bay, who out of exactly those considerations famously had Scarlett Johansson keep her bra on (despite her wanting to go without it) during a love scene in The Island. While less thoroughly impacted given their lower (if also burgeoning) budgets, and embrace of the R-rating, the "raunchy" comedies which seem like such "naturals" for this kind of content have been subject to the same climate, and have similarly become more inhibited about nudity of this type (such nudity as does appear in them of quite other sorts, for quite other purposes).

On the whole it seems that the less commercially ambitious the fare, the more leeway it possesses, a situation which would suggest exactly the opposite of the familiar claim that "sex sells." Or at the very least, its qualification by another adage, that less has become more, a subtler use of this particular spice (like casting an action movie heroine who can enticingly fill out a jumpsuit, or the presentation of a teasing, strategically concealed glimpse of what's under the jumpsuit) the more practical approach. Still, it all leaves many a movie fan dismayed at the thought that they will never get a really good look, while a good many men of a certain generation look back longingly movies like Porky's or Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the films, and what they represented. In these quarters, they seem as much objects of nostalgia as the paramilitary action movies of the same era, that long, strange period between the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, and the age of the millennium bug.

1. Take premium cable television, where gratuitous nudity is comparatively alive and well, helped by lower financial stakes, and the flexibility television's serial nature affords, while the small screen also has fewer alternatives where the sensational is concerned. HBO's Game of Thrones can go only so far in presenting epic battles or historical pageantry, but it can afford plenty of what Steve Penhollow terms the "cheapest special effect." Nonetheless, TV is certainly not immune to the aforementioned cultural politics, the threshold for giving offense at times surprisingly low here (witness the intensity of the criticism of a few seconds of an episode of Stargate: Universe in which Julia Benson wore a perfectly intact and completely dry T-shirt).
2. The trend did not continue in the case of the Die Hard series, of course, the recent fifth film appearing with an R rating.

Seven Days Until A Good Day to Die Hard
2/7/13
The Return(?) of the '80s Action Movie
2/7/13
The Decline of the Sex-Themed Blockbuster
1/9/13