Last Dance of the Sugar Golem

 

There's still time to back Upon a Thrice Time, a fairy tale anthology which includes my story "Last Dance of the Sugar Golem."

This started as an entry to Apex Magazine's holiday-themed flash fiction contest in 2015. A retelling of "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1816), it didn't win, but I liked it well enough to keep tinkering with it. Though never a big fan of the play, I had read Hoffmann's source material as part of my college study of old/classic second-world fantasy literature and really liked the similarities between Marie's visit to the Candyland-like doll kingdom and Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666).

My story went through several revisions and rejections leading up to 2020, when I learned about a call for submissions to Upon a Once Time. They were looking for fairy tale mashups--two stories combined and retold as fantasy, sci-fi, noir, etc. This helped me realize that my sugar golem story drew on not just "The Nutcracker," but also "Mr. Fox," Joseph Jacobs's version of the Grimm Brothers' "The Robber Bridegroom." A cousin recited "Mr. Fox" to me when I was little and I've never forgotten the grisly plot and haunting imagery. It took very little work to make its influence more overt, but a bigger revision was switching to a first-person narrative. I submitted it for Upon a Twice Time, the second volume in this series, and was accepted for the third volume.

You can visit the Kickstarter page here.

Cover art by Jana Heidersdorf.

Do You Want To Build a Scarecrow?

Credit: solaroid by way of TV Tropes

Today's mail brought my copy of Scarecrow, a themed speculative fiction anthology edited by Rhonda Parrish and published by World Weaver Press. (See the cover here; you can order it here or from Amazon.) Along with work by Devil's Arithmetic author Jane Yolen and others I'm excited to read is my short story "The Straw Samurai," which was inspired in part by the above illustration of a tengu. A tengu is a Japanese mythological creature, and my original intent was to write a story about one for the companion anthology, Corvidae, to be continued in a sequel for Scarecrow. Because I had this idea just three weeks before the submission deadline (Halloween, 2014), I had to blend it into a single, standalone story that I barely finished on time. As expected, it deals with both tengu (crow-people) and a scarecrow, but it was chosen for the latter theme.

Here's a quick blurb:

Okamiko is a lonely human girl in a land of Monster villages. She wanders between these cow-people and bird-people and dog-people, struggling to find where she belongs...until a family of chough-children want her only friend - a supposedly magical stick of bamboo - in exchange for a straw samurai.

 Without giving anything significant away, I can also tell you:

• the story is a retelling of the Japanese folktale "The Tengu's Magic Cloak"
• it features anthropomorphic animals, or mutants - a subject I devoted a lot of attention to in this post
• even though the corvidae called choughs (pronounced "chuff") aren't native to Japan, I made my tengu red-billed chough-people because of the similarity in appearance
• it represents my fascination with the subject of supernatural transformation, as explained here
• the main character was inspired by both Ponyo (from the Miyazaki movie, itself a retelling of The Little Mermaid) and my daughter Greta
• I've written two novels set in this same universe of retold myths and legends, and while several excerpts were shortlisted and one was an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future Contest, this is the first story set in that universe to see publication
• it is also the first to be written specifically for a themed call for submissions

It's not a terribly long story, so that's probably more than sufficient preamble. I hope you'll take the chance to read it!

"Jurassic World" Review

I thought Jurassic Park: The Game by Telltale Games (2011) was a worthy sequel to the first film, whether or not it's considered canon. (Does it really matter in this series?) Not only did it feature all the same dinosaurs and settings, but also puzzle-solving game-play clearly inspired by all the technological challenges in the movie - even an explanation why "Push to Close" is the button for restoring electrical power. It fleshed out the character Harding (albeit a younger version), whose story deviated from his role in the book but explained what he was doing during the events of the movie following his brief appearance with the sick triceratops. Setting it during and immediately following the movie was a great way to capitalize on its urgency and the audience's nostalgia. What's more, it beat the new movie Jurassic World to introducing a Mosasaurus threat and the first on-screen death of a female character (by the mosasaur in both cases, oddly enough).

Despite all that, the game was criticized for being more a movie than a game, and not many are likely to "see" it as a result of that hybrid nature. Fortunately, Jurassic World is a nostalgic sequel in its own right, featuring a more impressive hybrid in the Indominus rex. (See what I did there?)

I loved the first movie and went on to read the book much younger than I probably should have. My copy is so used it fits my hands like a well worn baseball mitt. I must have reread Dennis Nedry's death scene the most, since that page is so exhausted it's falling out. Prior and after this, I was known for an obsession with dinosaurs and often bragged that one of the first words I could spell was "paleontologist." My point is, I went to Jurassic World fully expecting a nostalgic experience, but I also walked out wondering where the line is between "nostalgic" and "predictable."

I wrote my own sequel to Jurassic Park when I was eleven or twelve. Like Crichton's actual sequel, Lewis Dodgson was the villain, but I also contrived a way to get the entire original (surviving) cast back on the exact same island for pretty much the exact same tour. The kids ended up stranded with Grant again, and when he played another playful prank on them (as in the movie), Tim said, "That was another good one!" Fan fiction at its least creative.

Jurassic World does a much better job than me or either of the other movie sequels at recreating the original. (Spoilers follow.)

"Edge of Tomorrow" Stuck in Yesterday

www.edgeoftomorrowmovie.com

In Edge of Tomorrow, a video game character's ability to reset or "respawn" is a very apparent metaphor (and intentional, according to this Hollywood Reporter interview with director Doug Liman). It occurred to me that the movie's central question could be "What if you had to keep playing a video game until you won?", which at first sounds intriguing. But on second thought, wouldn't it be more poignant and memorable a movie if it made me think about things like reincarnation, resurrection, or succeeding in life? The metaphor inside a metaphor is a bit convoluted. More interesting to me is the premise of a villain that can respawn and learn from its mistakes, sort of like the robots in The Incredibles or maybe the artificial intelligence of the xenomorph in the upcoming game Alien: Isolation.

It was Incredibles director Brad Bird who first piqued my interest in this movie when he tweeted the following:

Sure, he may be biased, being a sci-fi aficionado and having directed EoT star Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol. Then again, he is also the writer/director of some of my favorite movies, including those mentioned, The Iron Giant, and Ratatouille. That, and I was intrigued by his calling EoT "original." He made a similar pitch for Gravity, another movie that won me over and that inspired the amateur film study on this blog.

While EoT is not a sequel or a reboot, it is an adaptation of a Japanese book called All You Need Is Kill, and therefore not original in the sense of a "new idea." Bird suffered a lot of Twitter backlash on this point and so clarified two days later that he knew it was a book adaptation and simply meant "original" as "first film."

Now having seen it, I have to call "foul" on interpreting originality so loosely. As a fan of retellings, I have no complaints about recycling old ideas; however, I personally felt a little betrayed by his and critics' praise for the film as something unexpected and fresh. I did enjoy it, but I kept waiting for the originality I'd paid for, wishing I could reset my expectations. Like Tom Cruise's character in the movie, it's only on the edge of tomorrow because it's still stuck in yesterday.

To demonstrate, the following are plot points or other elements from the movie that draw from existing films (spoilers follow):