A few months back, I saw this post on Penny Arcade about Card Hunter: http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/card-hunter-closed-beta-hands-on-classic-dd-filtered-through-a-card-game-an

Which prompted me to go and sign up for the beta.

Last week, I finally got an invite to join. I decided to play against type on my Fighter, going Elf instead of Human or Dwarf. This means that my Fighter is more like a mobility Rogue, ad my Dwarf Cleric is in some ways a better tank than the Elf.

The thing that Card Hunter captures is the classic dungeon-crawling, cardboard stand-up using kind of game from the days when you were ten and playing D&D in the living room, no one particularly interested in story.

It’s been interesting for me to see the Deck Building game style applied to a very familiar setting and genre – Deck Building games have been building in popularity over the last few years, largely on the back of the success of games like Dominion, Ascenscion, Thunderstone, and so on. For more on Deck Building games, check out this list on Board Game Geek: http://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/68782/top-10-deckbuilding-games

In Card Hunter, each piece of equipment for your characters comes with its own selection of cards. A sword for my fighter might come with several types of chop cards, which attack two enemies at once, but also include a parry, which gives a chance to block an opponent’s attack. A Wizard, on the other hand, would have Arcane Items that give them their rays, bolts, and blasts. Each character can level up and gain more slots, and with each new slot comes the chance to make your deck bigger an more diverse, able to handle stranger challenges like enemies with heavy armor, or who unleash devastating attacks. You can even equip racial or class-based skills that will give several-round buffs to the healing that you do or the damage dealt from certain types of attacks.

In terms of edition, Card Hunter most resembles 4th edition D&Din terms of how combat works, since the individual attacks all have specific statistics and levels of frequency. But again, that style of D&D was largely informed by MMORPGs, where you could have an array of special attacks and it was easy to use, since the computer did all the back-end mathematics and book-keeping.

Card Hunter, so far, is no revolutionary force in gaming, but if you want a dose of some old-school D&D and don’t have the time to gather a handful of friends around the dinner table and bust out the Dungeon Master’s Screen to send your friends through a module or your painstakingly-crafted homebrew setting, it may be just the thing to whet your appetite.

Short version:

I was very disappointed by Man of Steel. I found it largely joyless, thought the writing was sloppy, and it portrayed a nearly unrecognizable version of Superman the hero.

Long version:

SPOILERS and NERD SMASH alert. 😉

I had a lot of problems with Man of Steel, almost everything of which came down to strongly disagreeing with the writing and directing choices. Superman should be an inspiration of a character, someone who clearly and deeply loves humanity. This version of Superman was too alienated, too detached, and saved people because he was told to (but inconsistently told, by a terribly-handled Jonathan Kent). I’ve been a Superman fan pretty much my whole life, from reading comics and seeing the Donner films as a kid, growing up as a geek with the cartoons, the comics, the games, everything. Superman is a difficult character to write well, largely because most people just write him as an action hero, and have to keep throwing bigger and nastier physical threats against him. Whereas I see Superman as a moral/ethical hero, an exemplar – who chooses not to become a tyrant even though he could, instead inspiring humanity to save ourselves and only stepping in when we can’t.

WHERE’S MY BIG BLUE BOY SCOUT?

In Man of Steel, Clark never shows joy when it isn’t connected to his family or flying (the flying scene was delightful, I will admit. But none of it was connected to humanity, it was the joy of power and freedom). He does connect to Lois at the end, but Superman should connect with and love everyone, all of humanity). It seems like he helps people because he was told that he should help people, not because he wants to do it or feels connected to people. Superman is supposed to be a role model, a man who loves humanity and fights to protect humanity for its worthiness, for its potential to do good. There’s almost nothing on the screen to give him hope for humanity, due to how disconnected and shunned he was. I get that it’s 2013, but that doesn’t mean that Superman should become darker. He’s supposed to be a bright shining beacon. When our world gets darker, Superman should shine that much more brightly.

VERY BAD FATHER’S DAY MOVIE

Jonathan Kent is a coward and a terrible father (Jor-El was also a terrible father). This version of Jonathan was morally inconsistent and a confusing father figure to Clark, setting his son’s priorities totally askew. On the one hand, Jonathan says “whatever kind of man you become, he’s going to change the world,” but also says that maybe Clark should have let his classmates die, that he can’t reveal himself. He never praises Clark for saving people, never talks about *how* he could make the world better. The out-of-order sequencing of Clark’s childhood and relationship with his parents further muddles this, and the last advice his father gives him is to *not* act, to *not* help people. Which leaves adult Clark totally aimless and detached from the world, which feeds into the joylessness and lack of heartfelt connection to humanity.

ZOD

Zod should have been awesome. The Terrence Stamp version of the character leaves a big shadow, and the Michael Shannon version pales in comparison, when he needen’t to have done so.

I wanted a Zod who was desperate, out of resources, driven to his edge by the loss of his people, the repeated failures of their colony worlds, and the compatibility failure of trying to use the World Engine elsewhere. A Zod who approached Clark genuinely, without mustache-twirling. Who beseeched Clark to help them find a compatible planet. That Zod would have then be driven to desperation and decide that Earth is Krypton’s only hope, who comes to violence only when pushed to it. A Zod who rose up against the corrupt ruling council on Krypton  because they were blind and doddering rather than seeming to do it because he was evil and the script said he should, would have been an amazing villain, and would have helped make the end of the film truly emotionally resonant.

Plus, Zod’s choice to Krypto-form Earth seemed needlessly arbitrary given the availability of the genesis chamber and the many seed worlds. He only needed Kal, not Earth. In another version of this film, Zod, done well, would have been an incredible tragic hero-as-villain.

LOIS

Lois was awesome, but her presence in the 2nd half of the film was shoe-horned in by weak writing. I love that she was a war correspondent, that she could throw down with all the machismo-idiots and get the story. Amy Adams did a great job with what she was given, which sadly wasn’t much (after Act I).

FAORA

Faora’s “your morality makes you weak” made no sense. The Kryptonians care for one another – hell, Zod is all “It is my very purpose to protect Krypton!”, so Clark caring for humans (which he does because he was told (inconsistently) not because he has any connection with people) makes sense. If Faora had said “your compassion for these ants makes you weak” or “you’re holding back. You’ll never beat us if you hold yourself back,” or if she’d been established as a sociopath that Zod had to reign in, that would have made sense and made Faora a very cool character (she was already awesome, and I love that her badassitude was totally unconnected to sexualization).

There were too many Kryptonians, especially since nearly all of them had negligible characterization. They were generic Sci-Fi bad guys. And they even acted like they *knew* they were the bad guys, which totally undermines the idea that they have a Biological Imperative to protect Krypton and Kryptonians.

WORLD-BUILDING

Also, this film totally messed with the Kryptonian yellow sun mythology in a messy, clunky way. How is Jor-El a badass able to go toe-to-toe with Krypton’s greatest military leader if Jor-El been a scientist his whole life? Are all Kryptonians supposed to be super-strong on Krypton even under the red sun? Jor-El says that the yellow sun will make Kal-El strong, but if that’s the case, why are all the Kryptonians super-strong from the moment they set foot on Earth? The only advantages Clark has by having been on Earth is having adjusted to the atmosphere and learning to calibrate his senses. This problem could have been solved with one line from Zod when talking about visiting the seed planets. “And as we drank in the light of younger stars, we grew strong.” Done, solved.

Another world-building bit. Why did the Krypto-forming machine have to be used on Earth? There’s no narrative momentum behind it, just Zod’s bloody-mindedness which makes him want to do the most complicated possibility instead of kidnapping Clark and going somewhere that would be easy to Krypto-form. If Zod had said “there is nowhere else. It has to be Earth,” I’d have been far more accepting of the idea.

BIGGEST MOST IMPORTANT POINT:

Superman doesn’t kill people. This ending is a HUGE violation of the character’s central morality, and the film’s arc and emotional fabric doesn’t justify the murder of Zod. The ending would have been more impactful and justified if Supes had at said “I don’t want to hurt you.” to Zod or Faora or any of the Kryptonians. There’s no struggle (explicit or implicit), with calibrating his super-strength in the first fight with the Kryptonians, which would have built up to the ending with Zod. I’d have liked it if Supes got angry, lashed out and took one of the Kryptonian’s arms off, then freaked out at what he’d done, which would then let him get his butt kicked.

CALLOUSNESS & CONTROL

In the final scene in Metropolis, Supes seems completely callous with regard to anyone who isn’t Lois. When he finally puts the suit on, he mostly stops saving lives, with one or two exceptions There’s no time where he takes a millisecond out of the final Metropolis fight to combat the disaster porn. The film never gives him the moment to have a grace note with the people he saves, for them to salute him, thank him, anything. The closest we get is “this man is not our enemy,” in Smallville, which is a far sight from “thank you for saving my life.” There’s just so much disaster (especially in Metropolis), so much destruction, that any moment Supes spends not saving people’s lives seems callous.

That last fight, IMHO, should have been all about containing Zod and protecting people escalating as Zod lashed out, all the while Supes saying “I don’t want to hurt you. We’re all that’s left. We can live with humanity. They’re like us, we can learn from each other.” An then, when he does kill Zod, the film has earned that as the emotional climax. “Krypton had its chance” was both callous to Kal-El’s people and a totally un-earned line. If the computer Jor-El had said it and then Kal repeated it, I might believe it. Instead, it felt like just another way for Clark/Kal-El to be callous.

And a martial arts nit-pick. If Supes had enough control of Zod to make his head completely immobile, he could have tossed Zod to the side instead of breaking his neck. Writing fail. If the finale was about keeping humans safe, it could have been more dynamic, with Supes taking a beating repeatedly to save people, which Zod turns into an advantage to wear Supes down until Supes is pushed to the edge and has to make a choice. Even though, as I’ve seen others say, Superman is the kind of hero who finds a way to save everyone. Because he’s an inspiration. If Spider-Man can save everyone like in the first McGuire movie, then Superman can save everyone. To do any less is to lessen Superman.

Other Bits

JESUS ALLEGORY

There was too much of it. He’s 33 years old, the too-blatant scene with the priest, cross-shaped flying formation. There’s no self-sacrifice in the ending, so the allegory is even wasted, both too overt and mis-handled. Plus, Siegel and Schuster were Jewish. I get that there’s a strong thread of syncretizing Jesus and Superman, but I don’t like it, especially in this film.  Jesus was a pacifist (EDIT: okay, maybe not a pacifist, but he never repealed the Sixth Commandment – so presumably he wasn’t about murder – the big thing with Jesus was sacrificing himself to save people, which contrasts to Superman who kills someone to save someone else), and this Superman is a murderer.

MISSED EASTER EGG:

We had a Captain Farris at the end of the film – the woman who didn’t know what terra-forming was and who said, “I think he’s kinda hot.” If that had been Cap. Ferris (with an e), we could have had a tie-in to a JL Movie-verse Green Lantern. 🙂

SUMMARY

The overall effect of Man of Steel was to create a Superman who was so alien and alienated that he was barely recognizable as the hero. And starting a Justice League sequence with a Supes who has already killed someone sets a very dark note for that universe. Superman should be the light-hearted optimistic counterweight to Batman, not the tragic Olympian older brother. Just because it’s 2013 and we’re a post 9/11 world doesn’t mean that Superman should be darker. He should be brighter, an even clearer exemplar and call to be greater, to be kinder, to be braver. He shouldn’t be a murderer.

INSPIRATION

What the film did do was inspire me to write more supers stories, stories that call out to our better natures, that show a brighter path, heroes that inspire instead of heroes that murder and plod along with muddled morality. Over lunch, my girlfriend and I were talking about other superhero stories, and the thing I felt most keenly was the need to write more female superheroes, as well as the desire for a good Wonder Woman movie. I really don’t grok the idea that audiences wouldn’t storm the theater for a Wonder Woman film. She’s only the worldwide best-known female superhero.

The fans of the Lynda Carter show are now of an age for many of them to have children. Daughters to be inspired by Wonder Woman and sons to be impressed by seeing a model of feminine strength and heroism. You’d get to sell a combo tiara and sword kit, for goodness sake! The merchandising alone should pay for the film.

I’m glad I saw Man of Steel, because all of its failures (in my mind – I’m perfectly happy if other people loved it) inspired me to do better, to try harder, to honor the superhero stories that have called me to be a better man, a better person, and to pass that call to heroism on for a new generation.

The marvelous folks at io9.com have generously opened their blog space to run the exclusive cover reveal for CELEBROMANCY, as well as the first chapter as an excerpt!

http://io9.com/read-the-first-chapter-of-celebromancy-511337692

Go forth, and enjoy. 🙂

It’s that time of year again. The time when the young writer makes the rounds on the internet, hat in hand, asking for brief berths on websites, submitting reading copies to reviewers, and generally trying to build a promotional blitzkrieg to surround their new release.

So this is me, standing on the sidewalk of the internet with my Eight-Foot Bride costume holding a rose. 

Celebromancy is coming on July 15th, so if you’re a reviewer and don’t have a copy of Celebromancy (or Geekomancy) but would like to review it, OR if you’d be interested in having me visit your blog for an interview or guest post, please drop me a line.

Some book industry folks are saying “The blog tour is dead, don’t put yourself out over it,” but working for Angry Robot, I’m seeing a solid correlation between authors who to a *lot* of blog tour and outreach and authors who have a good first month of sales. It’s certainly not a guarantee (almost nothing in publishing is a guarantee) but the correlation is enough to make me willing to hit the promo circuit hard for Celebromancy.

That also means that this blog will get quite full of promo activity from June through August, so if you like seeing lots of content about my writing career, rejoice! If you like everything else, I hope you’ll stick around through the self-promo to get the other fun bits you enjoy.

For an idea of what awesomeness could result from answering this request, here are some of the Geekomancy promo appearances that I think came out the best:

• http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/12/13/michael-r-underwood-the-terribleminds-interview/
• http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit-mike-underwood-talks-about-geekomancy/
• http://www.roundtablepodcast.com/2013/03/20-minutes-with-michael-r-underwood/

This is not a post about Star Trek: Into Darkness – not in the normal sense. I haven’t seen Into Darkness yet, but with all the discussion around Star Trek, I had a different point.

I’ve talked a lot about the role of Star Wars in my life. But for a big chunk of my formative years, Star Trek had a bigger effect on my development as a citizen and as a thinker.

I enjoyed the rebooted Star Trek film, but it didn’t do, for me, what I want Trek to do, and I think we need that thing.

What thing? you ask. For me, Star Trek is about sociology, about psychology, about ethics and philosophy. Trek is about exploring not only new worlds, but new ideas, about re-examining your own worldview.

I grew up with Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was a big chunk of my Science Fiction 101 education. From there, I watched Voyager and Deep Space Nine, which for all their flaws, taught me that the universe was bigger than I imagined, that many different kinds of people could and should wield power and determine their own future. And above all, I think it taught me two things:

1) To challenge the idea that there’s only one right way of thinking about the world.

2) The joy of exploration.

Looking at 21st-century America, I see an ongoing need for both of these.

Austerity and short-sightedness has crippled NASA’s ability to follow our once-inspiring path into space, and every year that we let our space program moulder, the more we lose a foothold in space as well as losing the dream that comes with it, the call to adventure. And contemporary political discourse in the USA is so polarized that it’s become obstructionist and truly vitriolic. Members of the other party are painted as THE ENEMY, as Un-American, as Tyrants/Fascists/Socialists, and all the while, income inequality grows, education atrophies, and our infrastructure crumbles.

We need a new Star Trek. Not the films, because the films seem to be far more about the action than the Utopian dream of Gene Roddenberry. I think cinema is the wrong place for Star Trek at its best.

What we need is a new Star Trek TV show. A 21st century vision of space exploration, filled with optimism, acceptance, and heterodoxy.

Star Trek has usually been on the leading edge in diversity, but it’s been long enough since we had a new Trek show that the shows are now several steps behind the curve in terms of reflecting the fight for visibility and acceptance being fought by marginalized groups.

We need a Trek show with a <50% white cast. We need a new Trek show with a female chief engineer and/or a female doctor and/or a female captain. We need a new Trek show with Muslim command staff, with Wiccan officers, with atheists and agnostics alongside devoted theists of many stripes. We need a new Trek show with differently-able crew in command roles. We need a new Trek with trans characters, visibly GLBTQ/QUILTBAG characters, who are far more than their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Star Trek is a universe where humanity has supposedly figured its shit out, and I think that’s a dream that’s very worth dreaming, and is powerfully important to see.

The re-booted Battlestar Galactica was a powerful vision of a possible future, one deeply reflective of a post-9/11 USA mentality of being under siege, of getting our hands dirty for survival. I though that show was powerful, and eventually got to some good thematic ground about accepting the person-hood in others. But it was dark, nihilistic, and for me, not inspirational.

That’s not the dream we need right now. We need a brighter dream, the dream we want to dream for our children and those who come after us. Now I admit that part of heterodoxy is accepting views other than your own, and on this I admit my own bias. I imagine there may be Trek fans for whom the Rodenberry Ideal is different – where the right religion has saved all of humanity, where homosexuality has been cured.

This is a point I struggle with. Because as much as I firmly believe that we *must* accept the validity of GLBT/QUILTBAG identities, that we must accept religious diversity, I know that there are people for whom that world is dystopian. I believe that I am right while accepting that requiring others to live by the way I see the world is still control, and can be met with the same rancor as I direct toward current legal/social structures.

The only thing I can do is talk about my dream, is call for people to imagine a more accepting, more compassionate galaxy. I can write about it here and in my own fiction, and hope that others are inspired to find empathy and compassion through narrative that influences their own lives.

But most of all, I want a new Star Trek. I want to see the dream reborn.

To boldly go where no one has gone before, into a future of compassionate heterodoxy, acceptance, and where all people are equal parts of the future.

This is going to be a digital folklore/marketing rant. You have been forewarned. 🙂

Viral. This is one of the marketing buzzwords that hit the scene a while ago, having already spent quite a long time in Internet years bouncing around in conversation before that.

Here’s what “viral” means when you’re talking about actual flow of attention and cultural transmission:

A video, post, or idea is ‘viral’ when it spreads aggressively, seeming to grow and spread on its own (like a virus, you see. Brilliant!).

To best talk about Viral content, it’s good to mention the briefly-hot discipline of Memetics. To me, when you talk about viral videos, the idea of a meme as a seemingly self-directed bit of information making its way through an ecosystem of ideas is a useful framework, especially when it comes to talking about modes of transmission.

Here’s the important thing: If you’re a company or marketing firm, you can’t just make something that’s viral by design from the beginning. A cultural property/meme becomes viral through its spreading. You can do your best to make a meme that’s easily spreadable, that you think is as catchy and engaging as possible. But it’s up to the cultural ecosystem to decide whether something is viral.

Very often in marketing business-land, I hear the preposterous phrase “We made a viral video” or “You should make a viral video.” But that’s not how it works. You can’t just hop on YouTube, see some crazy videos that have inexplicably risen to millions of views and just go “Yeah, I’ll do that!”

Even if you’re Paul and Storm. Actually, their video from the Geek & Sundry show “Learning Town” helps explain how silly the idea of “making a viral video” is. Let’s bring in the Troubadours themselves to help out.

This is not to say you shouldn’t try to make content that’s spreadable and exciting. You should! But when you’re in the planning stages, don’t talk about how you’re going to “make a viral video.” That’s not how things work.

You can, with enough money, force something to look like it’s gone viral. You can promote it, advertise it, stuff exposure into a bajillion different outlets. But that’s not a viral meme – just a massively-advertised one. Some things are both, but virality is not controlled by the creator. The point of something ‘going viral’ is that it doesn’t need that push. If something is viral, it’s because it is sufficiently catchy that viewers/readers/etc. advertise it for you. Since word of mouth is the holy grail of content recommendation, it’s understandable why companies want to find the magic formula for making viral cultural properties/advertisements. But it’s not up to the creators to decide if something’s viral. That’s for the crowd to dictate. Viral cultural properties are an example of the Word of Mouth phenomenon going into overdrive. It’s not about you, it’s about us.

That’s how the internet works. For better or worse, only the crowd can decide what the next Nyan Cat or FUS RO DAH! will be. And that’s kind of cool.

This week, there’s been a great campaign (which I’ve mostly seen on Twitter) with #WomenToRead – encouraging readers to investigate the works of the incredible female writers in the genre. I have the honor of knowing many of those women professionally and personally, so I’m very happy to give some suggestions. I could go on, but this should do you for a while.

• If you like your epic fantasy with cool worldbuilding and lush language, read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms or The Killing Moon by N. K. Jemisin.
• If you like your dystopia with a strong sense of community, read The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.
• If you like Indiana Jones and dragons, read A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan.
• If you want something with a classic SF feel but a modern sensibility, read vN by Madeline Ashby.
• If you like pirates and magic and romance, read The Assassin’s Curse by Cassandra Rose Clarke.
• If you want to read an award-winning, truly different urban fantasy, read Zoo City by Lauren Beukes.
• If you like Downton Abbey and magical machination, read Between Two Thorns by Emma Newman.
• If you like Urban Fantasy with a overmatched but determined lead, read Nightshifted by Cassie Alexander.
• If you want to read some fantasy and SF classics by women, make sure you’ve read A Wizard of Earthsea and The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin.
• If you want to read up on the origins of Cyberpunk, be sure to read “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” by James Tiptree Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon)
• If you’re looking for some awesomely surreal 70s utopian/dystopian SF, read The Female Man by Joanna Russ.
• If you want to read what is arguably the first modern Urban Fantasy, read The War For The Oaks by Emma Bull.

What Women in Genre do you think everyone should read?

Added – friend recommendations

My friend Chad (also a writer), recommends Low Red Moon by Caitlin R. Kiernan. I haven’t read it, but she’s also a Nebula award nominee this year with The Drowning Girl.

I’ve been sitting on this for a while, but I’m now allowed to announce that I’ve made a new three-book deal with Pocket Star!

YOUNGER GODS is a very different kind of UF series, but I think that it will appeal to readers who have enjoyed GEEKOMANCY, while also broadening my reach to folks who aren’t as much All Geek Stuff, All The Time.

I’m also very happy to be continuing the GEEKOMANCY series with a new short novel in that world.

I’ll be talking more about both of these projects soon, but for now, it’s off to a celebratory dinner with me!