A 1750s SCOTTISH Karate Kid?

I just watched the original Karate Kid film for Myopia Movies and coincidentally found this Tumblr post that Canadian author Bruno Lombardi, whom I know from the alternate history forum, posted on Facebook.

I thought that would actually be pretty fun to watch and joined in the brainstorming. For the Scottish scenario, I suggested the equivalent to the Japanese Internment would be German bombing of Scottish cities and evacuation of Scots to Canada, with "Mr. MacMiyagi" as the sole survivor of a U-Boat attack on the ship evacuating his clan. Bruno's friend, fellow writer Jonathan Edelstein, suggested instead it could actually take place in the early modern period, with "Mr. MacMiyagi's" personal tragedy being the Highland Clearances.

So here's the scenario we hashed out:

*Daniel is from the yeoman class, while Ali is gentry. There's a clear class difference, but they're both landowners. Mr. and Mrs. Mills aren't going to be exactly impressed, but the class difference isn't such a problem for them that they're going to have Daniel kidnapped and shipped to the Colonies as an indentured servant or quietly murdered. Perhaps Daniel's father was killed in one of Britain's wars during this period rather than dying of cancer and so the Mills, however skeptical they are of this poor(er) man, at least have that respect for Daniel. If he's an officer rather than "the scum of the earth" who formed the enlisted ranks in this period, even better. Edelstein suggested the LaRussos might own enough land to be able to vote, albeit at the lowest possible level (a "forty shilling freehold").

*Our elderly friend "Mr. MacMiyagi" is a Scot who fought for the British government against the 1745 Jacobite insurrection, but was driven off his land during the clearances. During the disaster his wife died in childbirth and his son died with her and with his home gone, he drifted southward and became a groundskeeper or gardener on the Mills' family estate. Traumatized by his various mishaps, he keeps to himself and engages in stereotypically Scottish hobbies like shinty (the Scottish equivalent of Irish hurling) or (if he's literate), writing Scottish poetry?

*The equivalent of Johnny and his Cobra Kai gang are "young gents" who dislike someone they view as little better than a peasant wooing a girl of their class, with Johnny in particular being a spurned suitor of Ali. Given how much more power parents' had over their children's, particularly daughters', romantic choices in this period, perhaps Mr. Mills is somewhat less oblivious than his movie equivalent and recognizes Johnny for the incipient wife-beater he is, or perhaps he also looks down on Johnny on class grounds. After all, Cobra Kai gets more into Johnny's backstory and "the money" he comes from his from his stepfather who barely tolerates him, not his birth family. Perhaps his mother is an actress or from a similarly low-class background who "married up" and the illegitimate Johnny was part of the package? Not only is Johnny a hormonal and jealous a-hole, but he's also classist and nasty toward Daniel because he's overcompensating for his own impoverished background.

*Bobby, one of the Cobra Kais in the original film who tries to restrain Johnny from his grotesque behavior toward Daniel, is an early Wesleyan. In the Cobra Kai series, we later see that he's become a preacher, so he sticks with it.

*"MacKreese" is another veteran of Culloden, only he fought for the Jacobites. He has a beef with "MacMiyagi" for that reason, plus the fact his side lost. He runs his quarterstaff club (I doubt they'd have martial-arts dojos in England at this time) like a particularly abusive military unit, spinning it to his charges' parents that he's teaching them discipline so they don't end up dissolute libertines. Thing is, instead they're a bunch of angry young men abusing peasants (think Chozen from the second film cheating people at the grocery store) or peers they dislike (i.e. Daniel).

So we have something roughly similar to the canonical film in which Johnny and his gang bully Daniel for courting Ali, but an attempt to jump him and murder him is interrupted by "Mr. MacMiyagi" totally wrecking them the way Mr. Miyagi wiped out five Cobra Kai students in seconds in the canonical film. Given the legal hell to pay a poor Scot is going to get for beating up some English gentlemen even in defense of an English yeoman (especially if their parents are important local nobles), perhaps "MacKreese" and "Mr. MacMiyagi" agree to allow Daniel to fight some kind of duel with Johnny rather than getting the law involved? "MacKreese" could spin this as some kind of test for his students (or put on a show of not wanting "Sassenach" laws judging another Scot), but it's really part of some kind of elaborate revenge on "Mr. MacMiyagi" for the Battle of Culloden?

Things start to get a little tricky when we tried to come up with a Scottish equivalent of Mr. Miyagi's traditional Okinawan/Japanese wisdom (be it authentic or something underinformed Americans would *think* was traditional Okinawan/Japanese wisdom). Edelstein said setting it in the 1750s would be too early for Robert Burns, but "MacMiyagi" could tell embellished stories of the founding of various Scottish clans or the great William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. And instead of Daniel's crane kick, there's a finishing move called "the Kelpie."

I personally am rather disinclined to join with woketarians in attacking The Karate Kid (see Ralph Macchio's defense of the original film when it's criticized for being "too white"), but I also recognize the concept of "turnabout is fair play." So if someone actually wanted to make a parody of TKK that riffs on the Magical Asian Mentor and Mighty Whitey tropes, I'd be all for it.

Books Make Good Miniseries: S.M. Stirling's DRAKA

Once upon a time at DragonCon, author S.M. Stirling said that books typically make good miniseries and short stories make good movies. I'm an administrator of a Facebook group dedicated to his works and recently the possibility of films or TV series based on his notorious Draka series from the late 1980s and early 1990s came up. This set the wheels spinning--I'm inclined to think that each of the three main books would make for a good three-hour TV miniseries.

Marching Through Georgia-This would be based on the first novel and depict the Draka's entrance into this timeline's World War II. While the Draka armies surge into the southern entrances of the Caucasus mountain passes, paratroopers under the command of young officer Eric von Shrakenberg land in the northern entrances to trap the German defenders, accompanied by American reporter William Dreiser. Although Dreiser doesn't like the Draka's practice of large-scale slavery, he is intent on convincing his American audiences to cooperate with them to stop Germany, which has conquered European Russia and is currently enslaving and killing Jews, Russians, and Poles by the millions. Here we can see all the consequences of Generalplan Ost in their horror. 

However, throw in enough about the Draka as the story goes along that we get the creeping realization their winning might be even worse. Through Eric's memories and Dreiser's heavily-regulated visit we see just how horrible life in the Domination is. On leave Eric has to stop two Janissaries (soldiers drawn from the slave population) from raping his driver, millions of slaves are worked to exhaustion in military factories to prepare for the coming war, Dreiser is threatened by a Security Directorate minder who thinks he's going to try to spread sedition among the slaves, and Eric's father Karl tells Dreiser it's in the US's interest to help the Draka stop Germany and Japan from becoming great powers because the alternative to their dividing the world between them (and the Draka enslaving everybody under their control) is Germany, Japan, and the Domination allying against the United States. Draka small-talk reveals even more horrors. For example, Eric's fighter-pilot sister thinks buying a female Russian guerrilla as essentially a concubine would be doing her a favor (the master-slave sexual dynamic encourages a lot of situational lesbianism among Citizen women), other soldiers talk about how "it's a long way to the Atlantic" as though they've planned to conquer their ostensible French allies from the get-go, Dreiser thinks that the Draka view the rump Soviet state in Siberia as a "caretaker" before they take over themselves, and even the "distressingly liberal" Eric advocates the Domination merely "regulate and tax" occupied Europe rather than enslave the entire population and casually discusses sterilizing alcoholics and "retards." 

Ultimately, even though the Nazis are defeated, the Security Directorate assassins sent after Eric for his liberal-minded ways are dealt with, and Dreiser makes arrangements for Russian guerrillas who helped the Draka to be evacuated to the United States, we have a more ominous ending than a happy one. It's been a long time since I've read this book, but the first half could be the everything leading up to a large-scale last-ditch Nazi attack that threatens to destroy Eric and company and relieve the trapped Germans and the second half could be the Nazi attack itself and the aftermath.

Under The Yoke-This one is based on the second book and would be a straight-up horror show, albeit with a slightly happy ending. All the stuff the Germans were doing in Russia and Poland? The victorious Draka are doing it on a somewhat more subtle level from the English Channel to the Pacific Ocean. American secret agent Frederick Kustaa, pretending to be a brain-damaged Draka veteran (i.e. so he doesn't have to imitate their very distinctive accent, spar, dance, etc), is sent in to facilitate the defection of a European nuclear scientist who'd been given Citizenship but soon found he could no longer bear working for the absolutely worst people ever. However, while trying to smuggle the scientist out of Draka-occupied France, he gets involved in the internal politics of a newly-established Draka plantation, including rebellious young Communist Chantal LeFarge who has attracted the attentions (ahem) of both the master and the mistress and Polish nun Marya Sokolowska, a Resistance agent. 

The first half would be everything leading up to Frederick's arrival at the plantation. Frederick's insertion into Finland and helping Finnish rebels fight Draka occupation forces while bachelor Draka officer Andrew von Shrakenberg is unknowingly hunting for him would be a big part; meanwhile you have Marya and Chantal arriving at the plantation and becoming part of the household staff. The second half would be everything that happens after Frederick arrives. The ending features a pregnant Chantal escaping with the American extraction team while Frederick, Marya, and Andrew give their lives to stop a dirty bomb from detonating--for Chantal at least it ends somewhat happily and the other three essentially become martyrs saving thousands of people from death by radiation poisoning.

The Stone Dogs-This one, based on the third book, would be a generational saga like something out of James Mitchener. To tighten it up, I'd start right before the 1970s secession of India from the anti-Draka Alliance for Democracy and the consequent Draka invasion to keep the focus on Frederick and Marya LeFarge (the twin children of Chantal, fathered by a Draka rapist but born free in America who become secret agents), the young Draka officer Yolande Ingolfsson, and the returning Eric as a reformist Draka politician. To tighten it still further, the miniseries could focus on the race for a stalemate-breaking superweapon. The Draka have the titular "Stone Dogs," a bioengineered virus intended to drive the Alliance military insane, while the Alliance has a computer virus that causes Draka military assets to self-destruct when the Domination goes to war footing (and an almost-afterthought sleeper ship The New America in the event of a Draka victory). The first half of the miniseries can end with the cornered Eric forced to launch a nuclear attack on the Alliance when the spiteful Yolande engineers the escape of the enslaved Marya, whom she'd deliberately told about the Stone Dogs. The second half can cover the resulting nuclear war and the peace treaty in which the Draka grant Citizenship to the Alliance survivors on the Moon and beyond (but not on Earth, for more horror) and allow the New America to leave the solar system and establish a colony at Alpha Centauri. It'd be a combination of 2001 (or 2010 since that involves a US-Soviet confrontation) and The Day After.

Drakon-Per Stirling himself, this fourth book would be the one that would work best as an actual movie--I think he compared it to Predator. Only the very beginning and a couple minor scenes take place in the world of the victorious Domination and most of it in modern-day New York City. Basically an accident with wormholes deposits female Homo drakensis (the Draka genetically-engineered themselves into a superhuman master race) Gwendolyn Ingolfsson in our world and she begins building a personal empire with the ultimate goal of bringing in a conquering Draka army. A naval vessel from Samothrace (the colony established by the Alliance exiles) sends cyborg secret agent Kenneth LeFarge through a wormhole after her and the battle is on. Given how the book was written in the late 1990s, maybe make it a 1990s period piece? In an age of smart phones and online videos, concealing the events of the climax would be very difficult, but in the Domination frame-story, it seems only a few people are aware of what really went down.

Hmm...make a Drakon movie first, with the victory of the Domination depicted in flashbacks or something Gwen or Kenneth tell their respective servants/allies? If it does well enough, then go whole-hog on the original trilogy.

Movie Review: MORTAL KOMBAT (2021)

Once upon a time, the fighting game Mortal Kombat set the gaming world on fire, sowing controversies about video game violence and spawning not just multiple sequels, but two live-action movie adaptations. After the failure of the second film Mortal Kombat Annihilation (listen to some friends and I absolutely destroy it on a podcast here), the planned third movie languished, but now in this plague year of 2021, it's back. And it's a lot of fun.

The Plot

The film begins with Chinese warrior Bi-Han (Joe Taslim) murdering Japanese ninja Hanzo Hashashi (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his family in 1617, but his baby daughter is rescued by none other than the thunder god Raiden (Tadanobu Asano). Fast forward to the present day and we meet Cole Young (Lewis Tan), a past-his-prime mixed martial artist reduced to short-notice fights for $200 a pop. However, he's approached by soldier Jackson Briggs (Mehcad Brooks), who wants to discuss a mysterious dragon birthmark they both have. However, Briggs, Cole, and Cole's wife and daughter are set upon by Bi-Han--now the sorcerous centuries-old killing machine Sub-Zero--and Cole finds himself meeting Briggs' military comrade Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) and captive criminal Kano (Josh Lawson). Kano has the dragon icon himself and soon the three are pulled into the mysterious world of Mortal Kombat, a tournament fought to protect the Earth against invaders from the desolate realm of Outworld. Outworld has won nine of the last ten tournaments and its agents, led by Shang Tsung (Chin Han), are intent on winning the tenth tournament and invading Earth by hook or by crook.

The Good

*The movie is simply an absolute blast. It's fun and over-the-top and is never slow and boring. And the film integrates the characters' specific moves and supernatural powers into the storyline in clever and fun ways.

*The performances are pretty good. Lawson is clearly having the most fun as Kano--although I was skeptical of his being the comic-relief character instead of Johnny Cage, he is an absolute riot. McNamee manages to play Sonya as having a bit of a chip on her shoulder without being unsympathetic and obnoxious. Asano channels a bit of Christopher Lambert's 1997 Lord Raiden with his accent, although he's avoids being the clumsy exposition machine of the original.

*The characterization is generally an improvement over the original, especially the Sub-Zero/Scorpion rivalry. All the original did was have Shang Tsung brag that although they were "the deadliest of enemies," they were both slaves to his will. This movie straight-up makes Sub-Zero a heavy and much more than just a ninja who can freeze people--we're talking Elsa from Frozen levels of ice-sorcery with all the different types of havoc it can wreak. And they made Sonya a bit of a conspiracy theorist complete with a board covered in news articles, which is an interesting tweak on the character. She is much more useful than in the original, where she spent much of the first movie getting perved on by Shang Tsung and/or getting taken hostage. And Briggs is definitely an improvement over his appearance in Annihilation in which he mostly came off as Butt Monkey to salvage Sonya from the various indignities the original put her through.

*The film kind of pokes fun at itself and asks the obvious questions, like why "Kombat" is misspelled.

*There's a lot more Asian actors playing Asian characters, which is an improvement over the original film in which the Asian thunder god Raiden is played by the French-Swiss Lambert in such a way that my podcast crew straight-up starting laughing upon seeing him in the original film. And the almighty TVTropes claims that Scorpion and Sub-Zero were portrayed by white actors in the original, although given how they were masked I couldn't really tell. Here they're played by actors of the appropriate ethnicity.

*Just like the games, the film presents an elaborate mythology with plenty of room to play with in future films.

The Bad

*The setup for a tournament structure of fights is rather forced, albeit not as badly as in Annihilation.

*The original set up Johnny Cage, Liu Kang, and Sonya Blade as a power trio, but this one is more focused on Cole Young as the protagonist. And although there are some interesting things they hint at (his hardscrabble orphan upbringing, the demonic ninja he sees in his nightmares), they're not developed enough. He's not bad, but kind of meh.

*On that note, many of the other characters are underwhelming, especially the villains. Tsung is all right, but Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa was a much better actor playing a much more developed character. They're not on-screen enough and don't have enough to do. And Asano's Lord Raiden is much less entertaining than Lambert's. Liu Kang also takes a major demotion in this film, even though there are some hints of a more interesting back-story than in the original.

*Where was the original song? That song is one of the most iconic musical parts of the whole franchise.

The Verdict

An improvement on the original and hopefully the start of a new franchise. Everybody go see it and make sure that happens. After all, Taslim has a multiple-film contract in the event this film performs well. :) 8.5 out of 10.

Dracula and the Gypsies: A New Story Idea?

For Myopia Movies' Halloween vampire month, we watched the 2004 action-horror film Van Helsing for our Patreon feed (it's not posted yet, but don't worry it'll be there) and the 1992 sort-of classic Bram Stoker's Dracula as a public episode. I posted on Twitter a couple times about the two films' (and possibly the original novel's) portrayal of the Gypsy (Romani) people.

Let the record state I'm generally not a fan of "political correctness" or its more modern and virulent "woke" and/or "cancel culture" mutations. Seriously, a whole lot of their antics remind me of Cultural Revolution "struggle sessions," only on Twitter, and they sure love to eat their own. I'm not going to accuse the original novel or the 1992 film of being racist toward Gypsies like  this article does simply because I'm aware of what the anti-Gypsy stereotypes are and neither story uses them. Gypsies/Romani are often stereotyped as beggars, thieves, cliched fortune-tellers, and even kidnappers of children. Heck, Cher put out a song about how the Gypsies were disdained as "tramps and thieves" in the American South in 1971. However, in the 1992 film and a graphic novel adaptation using text from the book, Harker makes the following remark:

"The Count's gypsies, fearless warriors who are loyal to the death to whatever nobleman they serve - day and night they toil, filling boxes with decrepit earth from the bowels of the castle."

Not only are they NOT work-shy bums and petty criminals, they're very diligent workers and even, to cite TVTropes, a Proud Warrior Race. The "loyal to the death to whatever nobleman they serve" even reminded me of the samurai code of Bushido. Making this particular group of Romani into some kind of band of Eastern European samurai might not be historically accurate (IIRC most Romani were peddlers, metal-workers, etc), but not only is it anti-stereotypical, it's actually kind of cool.

However, I do agree with the "woke" crowd of the importance of varied, non-stereotypical representation of minority groups in media. Not only does it avoid encouraging negative stereotyping and its unfortunate consequences (ranging from the hypocritical snobbery in the Cher song to outright violence like this recent series of attacks on French Romani after rumors of child abduction), but it also allows for more complex and interesting stories.

So here's an idea I had for a Dracula story focused on the Count's Romani servants that takes place during the actual novel. The Gypsies living around Castle Dracula have served him and his vampire brides as general-purpose minions, warriors, etc. for centuries and he in turn has protected them from rampant racism (Gypsies were actually legally enslaved in Romania for a long time) and spared them his predations. Although the Gypsies serving the Count are probably Eastern Orthodox or Catholic, Dracula as a verifiably-real supernatural figure might occupy some kind of spiritual position among them, since regardless of the faith they practice many Romani include certain elements that may date back to India.

But now the Count wants to move to England. As depicted in the book and film most attend to their traditional duties as his servants and bodyguards and some might even think this is a chance to travel to what is to them an exotic new place (Britain), but there is conflict within the community. Some feel like their patron is going to abandon them to the racism and cruelty of broader Romanian culture, while others (perhaps more educated or more zealously religious) have come to realize just what Dracula is and the danger he represents to the wider world. Given how Dracula has historically been the community's protector and how a Romani community in this time and place is more likely to be traditional and insular, the elders might put down grumblings by dissidents. After all, if the alternative is rampant persecution, members of minority groups often have unpleasant choices to make. I'm not going to judge Iraqi, Syrian, and Egyptian Christians for their support of secular dictators and I know darn well why Jews have historically asked "is it good for the Jews?" re: the ascension of a new king or a political development.

However, when Dracula returns to the Transylvania with several hunters hot on his trail, the conflict within the community reignites. As in the book many will fight to the death to protect their Count against outsiders, but others might want to stay out of it or even assist the vampire-hunters. And given what's going to happen to the Gypsies in forty years, the traditionalists may have a very good reason to mourn the loss of their protector.

Given my own work obligations and higher-priority projects, this is something I probably wouldn't write myself. Owing to how it's set so deeply into a culture that's not well-known by outsiders, it might be a good idea for anybody who wants to take this story and run with it to do extensive research. Googling isn't going to be enough unless you find some real primo academic journal articles like this one on Muslim Roma--the Writing Excuses podcast recommended attending festivals to learn about different ethnic groups. Here's a big one in Spain, for example, and another in France. There was a Gypsy music festival in New York City that went virtual due to this year. Failing that, libraries (especially college ones with a lot of really niche books) or someone more familiar with the culture to assist would be good ideas well.

ENOLA HOLMES: The Possibilities of an Indian Inspector Lestrade

In the recent Netflix series Enola Holmes, the police officer Inspector Lestrade is played by Adeel Akhtar, who is of Pakistani background. In the original stories, there's no indication that Lestrade was anything but a white Briton (although his name is actually French) and someone online suggested this was simply a case of colorblind casting where the actor's ethnicity/nationality is simply not considered in picking the role, making Lestrade Indian actually raises some interesting possibilities in regards to his back-story and characterization.

For starters, why is an Indian man working as a police officer in Great Britain in 1884, the year the reform bill that's a big part of the movie passed? Akhtar himself suggested that his Lestrade came from a working-class background and had to work his way up to his police position, leaving his back-story full of possibilities.

*India at the time was part of the British Empire and theoretically Indians could travel and live anywhere within its bounds--the Komogata Maru Incident I helped research as a graduate student was a legal test of that concept). Furthermore, many Indian sailors lived in port towns and even had British wives due to there being so very few Indian women in Britain. Akhtar's Lestrade could be from that background, perhaps a former sailor or a child of such, which would tie in with the working-class background. A 1931 census indicated there were thousands of Indian students in British universities, so Lestrade could be going to school part-time and paying for it by working as a police officer. Given his apparent age, this could be something he's been working at for awhile.

*Another possibility is that his presence in the UK is related to the Indian Civil Service. According to the book I used when I taught AP World History, theoretically anybody could work in the Indian Civil Service, but because examinations were held in Britain, it was extraordinarily difficult for Indians to access them. The Indian National Congress was actually founded in part to include more Indians in government--it didn't start out as a national independence movement. Lestrade's family could have paid for him to come to Great Britain to take the exams, he failed, and he's working as a police officer to pay them back. Or more optimistically, he hasn't taken the exams yet and this is how he supports himself until he does. His associations with the civil-service might explain why he is a police officer despite not being British--an Indian man applying to Scotland Yard might be rejected due concerns he might not be able to do the job effectively as a foreigner or simple straight-up racism, but an exception might be made for a civil-service candidate, either current or previous.

*Also, given how Lestrade's name is actually French, there are some other possibilities. This might be a name he adopted upon coming to Britain, indicating a desire to assimilate (especially since one study, albeit a disputed one, suggests Britons with Norman names are wealthier than those without even centuries after the conquest) or perhaps a Dark and Troubled Past he's trying to avoid. Alternatively, given how the French had a colonial presence in India before being defeated by the British, perhaps he's distantly descended from a Frenchman? Bonus points if as such he's actually Catholic, given the history of anti-Catholicism in Britain even in the 19th Century.

Although I'm almost certainly reading too much into this, if more Enola Holmes films are made (it is based on a book series) and Akhtar continues to play the role, this could be an interesting rabbit hole to go down. And if anybody wants to write a fan fiction story elaborating on this, go right ahead.

(Heck, Lestrade is public domain by now--although one wonders if a specifically Indian one is--so you could actually write a novel. Just leave out Enola completely and it probably won't be a copyright issue.)

A Television Series Inspired By Dean Koontz's Novel WATCHERS

This morning I saw fellow Atlanta Horror Writers Association member Andy Davidson posting on Twitter about his lifelong love of Dean Koontz's novel Watchers. Apparently he'd first read it when he was ten and re-read it every year since. I read the book somewhat later--I first got into Koontz in middle school with Cold Fire (the Dickerson Middle School library had it) and read Watchers and Phantoms soon afterward--and so I replied that I would love to see a quality movie adaptation. Unfortunately, most of the films based on it were direct-to-video garbage.

(Seriously, in the first one Travis and Nora, who are married in the book, are a mother and a son. A later version made Travis a military deserter rather than a decorated Delta Force retiree. One looks like a rip-off of Predator. And so on and so forth.)

Andy suggested a television series would be better than a film, something that reminded me of S.M. Stirling's comment at DragonCon many years ago that books made good miniseries. Although my first thought was something like one of those British TV series that lasts for around ten episodes and then done (what I think would be an appropriate adaptation of The Thing in the Woods), then I remembered the original 1960s TV series The Fugitive. Although in the 1990s film the events look like they take place over about a week or two (at most maybe a month), the original TV series ran for four seasons. The Fugitive presumably takes place in the 1960s and the novel Watchers takes place in the 1980s, both before truly large-scale government and private surveillance and tracking. It would be much easier for Dr. Richard Kimble to evade the U.S. Marshals or Travis, Nora, and the super-intelligent dog Einstein to evade the NSA, the KGB, and the predatory monster The Outsider for a prolonged period of time than today.

(It's been years since I read Watchers, but the NSA guys hunting Travis comment on how between his experience as a Delta Force operative and how he and Nora sold Nora's house for cash, tracking them would be very, very difficult. And we see that thanks to Travis's military experience, he knows just how to get false papers.)

The first season could be "everybody meets everybody" and the early hunt for the Outsider, with the climax being the Outsider's killing of Travis's landlady that causes Travis and Nora to become fugitives. The second season and perhaps a third could cover how Travis and Nora are fugitives, their getting stalked by the KGB's assassin, Einstein's distemper scare, and the final confrontation with the Outsider.

Between all the different factions hunting them, how some of them are working at cross purposes (the NSA and the KGB's hired hit-man), and one of them is chaotic force of destruction (the Outsider), a Watchers TV series could last a respectable amount of time. And given fiction's increased interest in exploring social issues these days, one could touch on other topics besides "how will Travis, Nora, and the dog escape the baddies this week" or "how will the NSA keep the Outsider from blowing the cover-up going on a rampage this time."

(In the book Nora, raised as a recluse by her emotionally-abusive aunt, initially has little ability to function in the real world and is stalked and nearly raped by the handyman she hires to work on her house. Given how fearful and lacking in self-esteem Nora is and how inept she is at "adulting" when we begin the story, I could easily imagine her blaming herself and not reporting it to the police if Travis and Einstein hadn't stopped the bastard. And if I remember right, the perpetrator only pled guilty to a lesser charge and got jailed because Travis--a man and a decorated soldier--wouldn't tolerate the police not taking it seriously. Travis's first wife died of cancer they didn't know she had until it was too late, so you could touch on health care, the importance of catching cancer early, etc. And lead NSA agent Lemuel Johnson is so hard-driving and neurotic because his father, a self-made wealthy black man who managed it during Jim Crow no less, raised him without any tolerance for failure whatsoever. One could use flashbacks Lemuel has to meeting Einstein and the Outsider before they escaped the lab to show how just pitiable and messed up the Outsider is despite how to all outward appearances it's a merciless monster. There's a lot of room for thoughtful stuff here.)

And if you make it a 1980s period piece, there's no cell phones or cameras, doing everything in cash isn't really suspicious, stuff like the Patriot Act doesn't exist, etc. That would allow for a much longer show simply because the NSA wouldn't be able to locate Travis and Nora easily, nor immediately locate and squash the KGB. And the success of It and Stranger Things shows that now is a good time for 1980s nostalgia pieces. Barnes and Noble went so far as to even point out that those who loved Stranger Things would really like Watchers.

"Son of Grendel" Is Here! And It's Supporting a Food Bank!

My newest independent writing project, the steampunk-fantasy novella "Son of Grendel" is here at last. It is a prequel set approximately a year before the events of Battle for the Wastelands.

Here's the book copy.

A tyrant’s heir must go into the mountains to face a band of insurgents on its own ground. Not everybody will emerge from the confrontation unscathed, not least him.

Falki Grendelsson, eldest son of the first lord of the Northlands, serves as a company commander in his father’s elite Obsidian Guard. Though many lords would keep their sons close and out of harm’s way, Grendel is determined his son learn the business of war firsthand for the day he puts on his father’s cloak.

But when Robert Dalton leads displaced farmers armed with stolen Old World repeating rifles in a raid that kills a favored officer, Grendel sends Falki to make an example of them.

Falki has never fought this type of war before. Although the Obsidian Guard has the deadly weapons of the ancient world and dirigibles to rain fire from the skies, Dalton’s insurgents know the land and the mountains hold terrors beyond his increasingly-desperate men.

In order to cement his father’s new order, Falki has to triumph not only over a physical foe who would gladly kill him, but his own demons. And victory over one might mean falling to another…

"Son of Grendel" and the character of Falki Grendelsson more broadly allow me to explore the issue of race and ethnicity in the Wastelands world, something that dates back many years to a meeting of my now-defunct Cobb County writing group. Author G. Gerome Henson (you can find his work in the Thunder on the Battlefield: Sword anthology) asked me if Wastelands was a generic fantasy world where everybody is white except for a few fringe characters. I hadn't really put a lot of thought into it at the time, but Henson's comment got the wheels spinning...

The major ethnic groups of the Northlands, the realm bounded by the mountains, the Iron Desert, and the two seas are as follows:

Sejer-A sort of pan-Scandinavian culture. Very Viking. Grendel is a Sejer. The Obsidian Guard, Grendel's equivalent to Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard that is exclusively equipped with Old World (pre-apocalyptic) weaponry, recruits heavily from among them.

Jiao-The primary cultural base is Chinese, but there are elements of Japanese culture as well like taiko drumming. Grendel's late queen and only formal wife, Falki's mother, was Jiao. Alongside the Sejer, the Jiao comprise the bulk of the Obsidian Guard.

Flatlanders-Sort of generic Old West white people. Robert Dalton and the people of Jenner's Ford are flatlanders. In the main novel, Grendel's warlords Alexander Matthews, Travis "Mangle" Steuben, Stephen Quantrill, and Jasper Clark and the bulk of their troops are flatlanders, as are most of the people under Grendel's rule. However, the Obsidian Guard does not recruit from among them.

(More importantly from Falki's point of view, other than his de facto stepmother Signe Allansdottir, Grendel's concubines are flatlanders and so are their children. Although Falki is the eldest, the only one born of a legal marriage, and the most experienced soldier, he is alien to his father's flatlander subjects in a way that the majority of his siblings are not.)

Nahada-Arabs. Falki's lieutenant Thomas Nahed is a Nahada. I haven't delved too much into his back-story, but since he is an officer in the Obsidian Guard (exclusively recruited in Sejera, where Grendel was lord for years before conquering the rest of the Northlands), he was probably a member of Sejera's Nahada minority. Most Nahada live further south under the rule of Grendel's subordinate Alexander Matthews.

Menceir-Colloquially known as "the trading folk" and less flatteringly as "pikeys," they're sort of a hybrid between the Roma (Gypsies) and an Indian caste whose name escapes me at the moment who traveled around carrying good to trade on bulls. I think said group are the Banjara, but I'm not entirely sure.

Also, the Amazon links for "Son of Grendel" and Battle aren't Amazon affiliates as usual, but smile.amazon.com links supporting the charity Feeding America. With so many businesses shut down or operating at reduced capacity due to the coronavirus outbreak, food banks need help more than ever. If you use a smile.amazon link, make sure it's set to Feeding America to benefit that particular charity.

Enjoy!

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Guyver 2: Dark Hero (1994)

Although the film podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood did an episode on the film The Guyver on my suggestion, it didn't seem like there was much of an interest from anybody in doing an episode on the sequel Guyver: Dark Hero. Given the film's iffy quality, I can't exactly blame them. Since movies and e-books are very helpful in getting me through otherwise-dull elliptical sessions, I snagged this one off Amazon Prime for a pre-Thanksgiving workout and off we went...

The Plot

It's been a year since Sean Barker (David Hayter) bonded with the Guyver, a suit of biomechanical armor of alien origin. With the evil Kronos Corporation and its alien Zoanoid warriors defeated, the armor's urge to battle evil prompts Sean to fight (and oftentimes kill) drug dealers and other criminals. This alienates him from his girlfriend Mizki (Billi Lee) from the first film, who thinks he's going insane and has no time for his "I don't kill, it kills" excuses. Plagued by strange dreams and seeing news on television of "a werewolf attack," Sean sets off for an archaeological dig in Utah overseen by Cori Edwards (Kathy Christopherson) and her father Dr. Marcus Edwards (Stuart Weiss), a pair of renegade scientists investigating things like Bigfoot, crop circles, etc.

Unfortunately, the Kronos Corporation turns out to be involved, as are a bunch of even more skilled and dangerous Zoanoids. Sean is in for the fight of his life...

The Good

*It's a fast-moving and entertaining film--most of the time.

*The script and the dialogue, although they have their issues, represent a significant improvement over the ponderous original. Watching clips of the original on YouTube (they've taken down the full movie since we watched it for Myopia, it seems), it's clear just how clunky the original was and how improved this one is.

*The opening narration is a vast improvement over the original, which had a laughably obnoxious combination of a Star Wars opening crawl ripoff and a ponderous voice-over. Instead we get a quick introduction complete with the image of the Guyver unit flashing and doing its thing and then we cut to a bunch of drug smugglers murdering a security guard.

*Replacing Jack Armstrong with David Hayter in the role of Sean is a vast improvement given how poor Armstrong's acting was in the original film. Even though Mizki is absent for most of the film, Billi Lee is an improvement on Vivian Wu. No unintentional hilarity, hard-to-understand accents, and overdramatic silliness from these two.

*Cori is a much stronger and more driven character than the passive Mizki.

*The fight choreography has improved quite a bit over the original film. In-universe I suppose it's because Sean has had more time to train in martial arts and learn about his armor and these Zoanoids aren't just Kronos's hired gang-banger muscle, but regardless it's much less silly to watch.

*We finally figure out just what Kronos's master plan is besides "conduct grossly unethical medical experiments to turn people into shape-shifting monsters."

The Bad

*There were several parts of the movie, particularly those taking place at night or in the cave system where the archaeological stuff was taking place, that were difficult to see. This might've been because I was watching it on my Kindle at my not-as-well-lit apartment gym (the LA Fitness didn't have that problem), but I don't think I've had that problem before. Something to keep in mind.

*Toward the end of the film there are some parts where it dragged.

*Given all the crap Sean and Mizki went through together in the first film and how they're still together a year afterward despite her knowledge of what Sean does with the armor, I would have liked more acknowledgement of their relationship. Instead Sean moves onto a new love interest relatively quickly--the film seems to take place over the course of only a few days, meaning that he and Mizki broke up at most a week before. It would have been much more interesting if he'd written her a letter or called her from the archaeological site indicating that he had found Zoanoids and she followed him there, with the Kronos Corporation taking note that she's the daughter of the traitor Dr. Segawa. Given the need to keep the run-time concise, throwing in a full-on love triangle might not fly, but Sean just forgets her too quickly.

*Speaking of Sean, in the first half or so of the movie he's really self-absorbed and aggravating. Somebody really needs to read How To Win Friends and Influence People and commit it to memory.

*Given how the Zoanoid Striker (Jimmie Walker) from the first movie survived and is implied to have defected to the CIA, it would have been amusing to see him again. Although he was easily the weakest of the Kronos Corporation's minions and didn't seem overly dedicated to the cause ("JUST DOING MY JOB!"), he did rough up Mizki and I imagine Sean would not be pleased to see him again. Furthermore, given his outlandishly stereotypical antics in the first film, perhaps fellow African-American Atkins (Christopher Michael) finds him embarrassing and has forced him to get his 'hood tendencies under control, including no longer letting him speak entirely in rap.

(I'm now imagining a scene where Atkins unleashes Striker against Kronos's Zoanoids and he relapses into his ghetto persona in front of Sean. An embarrassed Atkins has to chew him out.)

*The opening credits after the battle with the drug dealers are way too long.

*There are some unintentionally hilarious slow-mo scenes and scenes where Barker is trying to yell. Although Hayter is an improvement over Armstrong, he still has his Narm-ish moments.

The Verdict

An improvement over the original, but still not exactly great cinema. Worth renting or streaming, but not really worth buying. 7.0 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: 10,000 BC (2008)

Once upon a time, not long after I graduated from the University of Georgia, a movie called 10,000 BC came out. The reviews were poor and I probably had more important things to do, so I didn't bother to see it even though I vaguely thought it looked kind of cool. However, I eventually got Netflix to watch The Dark Crystal show and obviously I'm not going to pay $12.99 per month for just one show, so I decided to snag this one on a whim.

The Plot

In prehistoric Europe (per the Wikipedia it's somewhere in the Ural Mountains, although I got the vibe it was just north of the Alps), a tribe of mammoth hunters adopts a orphaned girl named Evolet (played as an adult by Camilla Belle). The youth D'Leh (played as an adult by Steven Strait) soon develops a crush on her. As an adult he claims her as his woman by slaying a mammoth, only for her and many other villagers to be taken prisoner by a bunch of vaguely Semitic slave-raiders. He and some friends follow them in a rescue attempt, a journey that will ultimately take them to the Mediterranean and one of the rising civilizations of the Near East.

The Good

*No matter how ridiculous it gets, it's a fast-paced and exciting movie. It's never boring and makes good fodder for exercise--time flies when you're watching cavemen fight giant killer birds, saber-toothed cats, and maybe-Mesopotamian slave-raiders on a journey from Europe all the way to what looks like Egypt. And there are lots of exciting and awesome moments.

*There's some good imagery here, including just what it is that some of the fringe inhabitants of the evil Bronze Age empire's realm describe as birds.

*I'm glad they used prehistoric terror-birds as movie monsters. Although it's been done in the novel The Flock that was long ago optioned for film (although who knows if it'll ever be made), I don't recall it ever being done on film before.

*Although nobody is really stretching themselves, the acting is all right.

*I liked the general look of the protagonist and his tribe. Their mainstay is hunting mammoths and other large game, so their homes and clothing look to be made of animal hides and, for solid structure, bones. They're Caucasian, but they have darker skin and dreadlocks, with the lighter-skinned and blue-eyed Evolet an orphan from a different tribe. Given how the earliest humans came from Africa and genetic evidence suggests early Europeans were darker-skinned as recent as 8,000 years ago, them being in some kind of transitional state between modern notions of "white" and "black" makes sense. And the villains seem rather Mediterranean, which would make sense given how the centers of early civilization were all there and Europe (with the exception of parts of Greece and that was later) was basically a bunch of dudes in bearskins at that point. Mediterranean peoples taking European hunter-gatherers as slaves wouldn't be unrealistic--after all, scientists found a Carthaginian man with maternal-line DNA connecting him to hunter-gatherer peoples who lived in present-day Spain.

*The soundtrack is pretty good.

The Bad

*The dialogue needs a lot of improvement, especially early on in the film. It's clunky and too on-the-nose. The latter part is most blatant with the young D'Leh and Evolet--for someone who's about eight, D'Leh is remarkably poetic about his feelings for Evolet, whom he probably doesn't even really know that well at this point. The dialogue continues to be bad, leading to several moments of unintentional hilarity. Honestly I would have thought someone like Roland Emmerich could have found a better screenwriter to co-write the film with him.

*Even though they did get some of the ethnic stuff (maybe) right, as TVTropes put it, the film puts Rule of Cool ahead of anything remotely resembling historical accuracy. If you don't care about that sort of thing this isn't a problem, but if you do it's probably a low-level irritation. Seriously, an Italian or Swiss (or maybe even Russian) hunter-gatherer leads a tribe of Zulus or Kushites to war against what looks like either Egypt or Sumer that's ruled by a god-king type who may or may not be human. And one of his minions looks like a Middle Eastern John Wayne (with a mullet no less) who has the voice of a Goa'uld and talks in the Black Speech.

*It's hard to tell some of the cavemen characters apart, especially early on in the film.

*I'd have loved more on the main villain, whom we don't meet until much later. Not going into more detail for reasons of spoilers. There are some hints, but they're very blink-and-you-miss-it. I only got the clue from checking TVTropes to make sure I didn't miss anything.

The Verdict

If you're looking for a prehistoric fantasy movie in the vein of Fire and Ice or the caveman films of the late 1960s and early 1970s like When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth and One Million Years BC with better special effects, go for it. A good movie to rent or stream, especially if you need something to keep you busy while you exercise. 7.5 out of 10.

A Less Lame Fate for John Connor in TERMINATOR: DARK FATE

When Terminator: Dark Fate was slated for release, I really wanted to see it. They were bringing back Linda Hamilton for Sarah Connor and Edward Furlong for John Connor, which was pretty cool. Of the Terminator films I've seen, Terminator and Terminator II: Judgement Day were the best ones, with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator Salvation being kind of meh. I didn't even bother with Terminator: Genisys due to awful reviews and the whole "John Connor gets turned into a robot" part, even though the idea of a Terminator raising Sarah Connor to be a bad-ass after an evil Terminator tried to kill her as a child seemed kind of cool.

Then I learned that in Dark Fate they basically kill off John pretty early on and the future leader of the resistance against the machines--this time a new being called Legion instead of SkyNet--is a Mexican woman named Dani Ramos. I can understand the desire by many in the entertainment industry to appeal to more diverse audiences and make it so not every hero of every story is a white male, but killing off John Connor to make way for a Mexican female leader of the resistance is about as subtle as hitting the audience in the head with a sledgehammer.

So here's an idea I had that would allow for a younger, more diverse cast to take the stage without showing contempt for John Connor, who it turns out wasn't that important after all. It's based on this deleted scene from a special director's cut of T2:



In a world where Judgement Day never happened, John Connor is now a U.S. Senator and as such has access to all sorts of classified information, which he passes onto his mother, who uses it to fight SkyNet incursions. This is similar to how the "Carl" Terminator that killed John Connor but ultimately learned to love and fight for humanity secretly sends Sarah information to help her fight other SkyNet incursions. Perhaps in defeating one such attack, Sarah captures a Terminator and reprograms it to help her fight other Terminators, thus leading to this world's version of "Carl."

Ultimately, like in the canonical film, SkyNet and its future are ultimately erased, leaving "Carl" stranded in our world as the last of his kind. However, the new evil AI Legion emerges later and the whole "time-traveling machine war" starts up again, with Dani as the prophesied leader of this new resistance much like John Connor was the prophesied leader of the old one.

This solution seems like it would please everybody--it keeps the more diverse and female-centric cast that many people liked about Dark Fate (John doesn't even need to be physically present for the action--he could send Sarah information that allows her to find Dani and Grace before the new Rev-9 Terminator kills them) while at the same time avoiding a rather bone-headed attempt at being "woke."

Alternate History: Japanese Avoid Midway To Attack South, Large Scandinavian Jewish Population

Went visiting the alternate history forum again and found a couple interesting scenarios that I'm posting here for your enjoyment.

Operation FS: Japan's Final Strike-One of Japan's military plans that was never actually executed was Operation FS, the planned occupation of Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia. The ultimate goal of the plan was to cut off Australia from the United States and force it out of the war. The plan was supposed to be executed after the destruction of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Midway. Fortunately the United States won that round and the plan, already in jeopardy due to the Battle of the Coral Sea, was shelved. In this scenario, due to some messages getting through to the Japanese high command that didn't in real history, the U.S. loses the carrier Yorktown as well as the carrier Lexington at the Coral Sea. This leads to the shelving of the Midway operation and the go-ahead to strike south. Although economic realities mean that Japan is still going to get reamed--and the timeline's opening states the operation will ultimately fail--how the Japanese ultimately fail and what effects this operation has elsewhere could be significant. And these types of scenarios are always fun to read if one is interested in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

Gyðinga Saga - The History of the Jews of Scandinavia-In this scenario, there's a larger movement of Jews into Scandinavia earlier than in real life that leads to the emergence of a Jewish community that views itself as neither Sephardic nor Ashkenazi. The main scenario has some plausibility issues--the latter part discusses the experience of these Jews under Nazi rule, but with a divergence that far back Hitler might not even come to power in the first place--but the follow-up discussion is pretty interesting. For starters, these Jews will be much, much more European genetically (due to intermarriage between male Jews and pagan women of other Scandinavian or Baltic ethnic groups, with the resulting children raised as Jewish) than the Ashkenazi, whose non-Jewish DNA is from a different European population and stopped entering the Jewish gene pool much earlier. This in turn led to discussion as to just what the Nazis, whose anti-Semitism was primarily racial rather than religious, would make of the Gydes. After all, the Nazis largely spared the Karaites, on the grounds they were more akin to Turkic peoples. One board member theorized that the Nazis would view them as "Judaized Germans" rather than racial Jews and try to "deprogram" them rather than exterminate them. This might resemble the German abductions of Polish (and other Slavic) children of ostensibly Aryan ancestry for Germanization.

Both My Supervillain-Protagonist Stories Are Now "Wide"

Back in 2013 when I was in graduate school, I wrote two short stories featuring Indian-American supervillain Andrew Patel as the protagonist, "Ubermensch" and "Needs Must." Although I would consider myself a political conservative, I do agree with the concept of more minority representation in speculative fiction, not just on the grounds of giving children the chance to see themselves as superheroes but also because members of these groups have money to spend. Look at the success of Miles Morales, the Afro-Latino hero of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse or the Muslim Miss Marvel who will be getting her own Disney show soon. When I first tweeted them out, none other than Muslim fantasy writer Saladin Ahmed retweeted the links for me.

Although I had plans to write more stories featuring Patel, there wasn't a whole lot of reader interest compared to my alternate history and straight science fiction and fantasy projects. I've got a draft of a third story that actually links Andrew and his world with The Thing in the Woods in a Stephen King fashion (I got the idea from my friend Nic, overlord of Myopia: Defend Your Childhood), which I might include in a collection someday. However, that's likely all we'll ever see of Andrew Patel until we get to that future Thing sequel where he makes an appearance.

In the meantime, although I do make sales now and again (I sold a copy each yesterday, for example), the Kindle Unlimited borrows really dried up. According to one of the writing podcasts I listen to, one should stay in KU until the borrows stop coming in and then one should go wide on outlets like Kobo, Barnes and Noble, etc.

To that end, the two tales of supervillain Andrew Patel are now "wide" on non-Amazon markets. "Ubermensch" can be found on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and Apple here and "Needs Must" can be found in these markets here. They are also various library markets like Overdrive, but they're not live there yet.

So if you're interested in the tales of an Indian-American biomedical engineer who read a little too much Nietzsche in college and has transformed himself into a cyborg to achieve transcendence, enjoy!