Well, this video by comedian Rachel Bloom is pretty wonderful. And it’s a reminder that the next time someone complains about the brutality in Game of Thrones, you can always tell them that torturing Theon Greyjoy may be unpleasant, but at least Westeros isn’t constantly getting wiped out by plagues:

Because we really need our pop culture franchise to be dominated by an increasingly limited number of visions, Deadline and other outlets are reporting that J.J. Abrams will direct Star Wars Episode VII:

Star Trek director J.J. Abrams will be helming the next Star Wars movie. “It’s done deal with J.J.,” a source with knowledge of the situation told Deadline today. Argo director Ben Affleck was also up for the gig, the source says. Michael Arndt is writing the script for the first installment of the relaunch of George Lucas’ franchise by Disney.

There are two issues here: how well-suited Abrams is for Star Wars in particular, and the consolidation of big franchises under a very limited number of perspectives (especially since the perspectives are those of white dudes).

On the question of Abrams as a fit for Star Wars, I’m deeply ambivalent. I think the franchise has been at its weakest when it’s delving too deeply into the details of its mythology. In the initial trilogy George Lucas and his collaborators had the wisdom to retain the emotional power of the Force as a cinematic device by leaving it relatively mysterious. Once the movies started delving into midichlorians and the manifestations thereof, the Force started to seem clunky and silly, no longer something those of us at home could dream of accessing. Abrams and his collaborators have a weakness for focusing on mysteries and exploring them to death, be they Smoke Monsters, strings of numbers, or aliens rampaging around New York City. I do think there’s an extent to which Abrams will be protected from this tendency by Arndt’s script, and the larger plans of Disney, which will presumably will be thinking about projects like television shows and Zack Snyder’s rumored stand-alone Star Wars movie. But I do think that Abrams’ interests in mysteries are actually a relatively a poor match for the greatest strength of the Star Wars movies: using a mysterious concept to open up a larger world, rather than focusing obsessively on the mystery itself.

But really, the profound disappointment I felt on hearing this news is less about my specific feelings about Abrams as a director. It’s more that franchises like The Avengers, Star Trek, Justice League, and Star Wars are opportunities for writers and directors to exert enormous cultural influence, and to accrue the kind of capital and credibility that can become enormous springboards for their more personal projects. The Avengers, for example, gave Joss Whedon an opportunity to bring his unique spin on female characters to Black Widow, who’d been poorly served in Iron Man 2. And its success won him a long-running and one assumes extraordinarily lucrative position overseeing the franchise: his ideas about superheroism will play a major role in American moviegoing for as much as a decade to come, and the money he makes from it gives him the opportunity to pursue more passion projects like his adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. That is an extraordinarily precious thing, and it makes me terribly sad to see that power concentrated in one person, rather than spread out to a number of people with different interests and perspectives on the kinds of questions raised by our biggest franchises.
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I was out of the town for the critics’ screenings of The Hobbit, which I’ll try to catch over the Christmas break. But I really appreciated this essay about Ali Arikan that’s half review of the movie, and half a meditation on a contradiction inherent in the film, and in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy as well. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote work that was incredibly nostalgic for the past, but it’s taken modern technology to put them on the big screen:

The reverence for a supposed golden age ruined by progress is a recurring theme in human history. The Romans had it, no doubt the guys before the Romans had it too. J.R.R. Tolkien, whose children’s story The Hobbit has now been adapted to the screen as a trilogy by Peter Jackson, also subscribed to this philosophy, along with his contemporaries, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Dorothy L. Sayers, and C.S. Lewis. As the twentieth century progressed, Tolkien would be embraced by the alternative society as a sort of prophet of doom, accurately predicting the harrowing bleakness wrought by modernity.

To this day our hemp-wearing chums will knowingly roll their eyes and talk—at length—about Tolkien’s prophetic abilities (in theme, at least). Machines ravaged the earth only a handful of years after he wrote The Hobbit, in the carnage of the Second World War, they pronounce. But machines are operated by people. Human cruelty can be catalogued as far back in history as you want to go. The twentieth century has no exclusive rights on the charnel house.

And, most tellingly, neither of Tolkien’s books that have now been adapted into live-action features, The Hobbit or its cinematic precursor The Lord of the Rings, would have been possible without advancements in film production. Both were turned into feature animations of varying success in the 1970s, and John Boorman had long planned bringing the latter to the screen in the same decade, but it was technological progress that allowed Peter Jackson, et al to successfully tackle such densely—and idiosyncratically—crafted works of fantasy. Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a rousing success, hugely popular with both audiences and critics, garnering billions of dollars at the box office, with the final film, 2003’s The Return of the King, sweeping the Oscars. Jackson and his films put the fantasy genre on film culture’s map.

This is one of the reasons I’ve always appreciated A Song of Ice and Fire—it’s fantasy that acknowledges that, while feudal society offered opportunities for glory and luxury to an extremely tiny minority, the standard of living was dramatically lower for almost everyone else, and even those privileged few were vulnerable to disease, death in childbirth, martial rape, death in battle, among other maladies. Tolkien wasn’t wrong that the process of moving into modernity can be wrenching, and the movie’s depictions of, say, Saruman’s deforestation of the area around Isengard, capture those sacrifices. But it’s a world where the only thing that comes out of industrialization is orcs, not, say, penicillin.

As I wrote yesterday—and have said many times before—I’m deeply uncomfortable with many of the ideas in the Twilight series. But it’s easy for people to forget that those aren’t the only novels Stephenie Meyer ever wrote, and if they do, for them to assume that The Host, her science fiction novel, is as unnerving as Twilight. It’s not. In fact, while far from perfect, there’s some genuinely interesting world-building and stories about alien species in the novel. And I’m excited for the movie in part because it’s about how corrosive it is to deny someone control of their body and their mental autonomy:

The story is told from the perspective of Wanderer, a Soul, a member of an alien species that seizes control of the bodies of the species on planets it invades. But the Souls find that humans have stronger wills than great whales, or sentient flowers. And in particular, Wanderer discovers that Melanie, the woman whose body she occupies, has memories and a will, and is struggling to survive as an autonomous, uncontrolled being. Wanderer eventually comes to sympathize with her, and even to try to find a way to give Melanie control over her body and life again. And though there is a love triangle in the novels, it’s a much more nuanced one between Melanie/Wanderer, Jared, the man who loved Melanie before her body was given over to Wanderer, and Ian, who comes to love Wanderer for herself. It’s an important corrective to the drive towards bodily negation of Twilight, though I don’t know how much crossover there is between the readerships of each set of books. But if you were tempted to dismiss The Host because of who wrote it, it’s worth reconsidering at least the movie, even if you don’t want to commit to the novel.

I’ve been feeling like I need a bit of a shakeup in the fantasy that I read, so over the weekend, I finished Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, her rich novel about sorcery and sexual violence in a post-apocalyptic Sudan. It’s not a perfect book—it’s not always clear what’s going on in the interlocking plots, and some of the characters come across a bit flat. But Okorafor’s central innovation is a brilliant one, both for the purposes of the novel, and for conversations around her main subject: she treats misogynistic violence as a strain of magic, something that deeply permeates the world in which her main character, Onyesonwu, conceived in a rape that is part of a campaign of genocide, lives and learns sorcery, emerging in unpredictable ways, and governing deeply-held ideas about what is natural.

When Onyesonwu is conceived, her mother is on a meditation retreat with other women in the desert. The group of men who attack them mostly intend common domination. But Daib, the man who attacks her mother, has more specific intentions: he plans to father a magically influential son on her. When the result is a daughter, one who is marked as an outcast and a product of rape by hear freckled appearance, his plan is thwarted, and Onyesonwu grows up with her own magic, a product of her father’s hatred and her mother’s determination to live, and to raise an independent daughter.

As she grows up, and into the community where she and her mother settle, Onyesonwu’s development of her magic and of her sexual identity both are influenced by the magical norms of the area. She becomes friends with Mwita, another Ewu (a person presumed to be the result of a pregnancy that is caused by sexual assault), but their closeness is initially limited by his magical studies, which Onyesonwu is not allowed to join because she is a girl. “He won’t teach you because you’re a girl, a woman!” Mwita tells Onyesonwu of his teacher. “Because of what you carry here! You can bring life, and when you get old, that ability becomes something else even greater, more dangerous and unstable!” The idea that the capacity to create and sustain life is powerful proves to be true, but the sorcerers’ desire to control it has more to do with their own concerns than with the idea that women can’t handle the way pregnancy inflects magic.

And Onyesonwu also tries to integrate herself more deeply into the town where she is initially understood to be separate by going through a ritual 11-year-old girls perform, even though her mother disapproves. The ritual turns out to involve clitordectomy and giving the girls stones to hold under their tongues to slow their speech. And the surgeries performed on them are enhanced with magic: “The scalpel that they use is treated by Aro,” Mwita explains to Onyesonwu when she experiences agonizing pain when they’re first intimate. “There’s juju on it that makes it so that a woman feels pain whenever she is too aroused . . . until she’s married.” For some of the girls in Onyesonwu, that pain is a terrible curse, as it is for one of her friends who, when she grows older, is turned away by the man she loves because he cannot bear to cause her pain. “Soon we’ll be eighteen, fully fledged adults!” her friend rages. “Why wait until marriage to enjoy what Ani gave me! Whatever the curse, I wanted to break it. I’ve been trying . . . Today it felt like I was going to die. Calculus refused to continue.” But for another, Binta, who was being molested by her father before the ritual, the magical and surgical removal of her capacity for pleasure is something of an escape. “Ani protects me,” she explains to her friends of her father’s reaction. “He-he understands now…He won’t touch me anymore.”
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I got an early birthday present today with the publication of Three Parts Dead, the first novel by my friend Max Gladstone, and a book I’ve gotten to read in various iterations over the years. It’s the story of Tara Abernathy, a necromancer who gets hired by a McKinsey-like firm called Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, and for her first assignment, finds herself staffed to a city called Alt Coulumb, which has a rather significant problem: God, specifically Kos the Everburning, who keeps Alt Coulumb powered, is dead. With the help of her boss, Elayne Kevarian, an anxious junior priest named Abelard who was on watch when Kos died, a vampire, a cop with an unfortunate addiction, and some gargoyles Tara gets to know Alt Coulumb, a rich and fully-realized fictional city, and learns a lot about the nature of faith.

That latter aspect is a significant part of what makes Three Parts Dead so excellent. The novel and the world it explores is based on an economic understanding of faith, and the relationships between gods and their worshippers, as well as between humans themselves, are significantly governed by contracts freighted with power and significance. Max writes:

Gods, however, made deals. It was the essence of their power. They accepted a tribe’s sacrifice and in turn protected its hungers from wolves andw ild beasts. They received the devotion of their people and gave back grace. A successful god arranged to receive more than he returned to the world. Thus your power and your people grew together, slowly, from family to tribe, from tribe to city, from city to nation, and so on to infinity. Nice strategy, but slow. Theologians centuries back had developed a faster method. One god gave of his power to another, or to a group of worshipers, on a promise of repayment in kind, and of more soulstuff than had initially lent. Gods grew knit to gods, pantheons to pantheons, expecting, and indeed requiring, their services to be returned. Power flowed, and divine might increased beyond measure. There were risks, though. If a goddess owed more than she could support, she might die as easily as a human who shed too much blood.

After Tara’s graduation from the Hidden Schools, a magical academy inspired in part by Max’s wife’s experience in law school, and before she joins Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, she works as a country magician.
“Ned Thorpe lost half the profit from his lemon crop every year, due to a bad arbitration clause in his reseller’s contract. Ghosts stole dead men’s bequests through loopholes in poorly written wills,” she reflects of her work. “Shopkeeps came to her to draft their pacts, farmers for help investing the scraps of soulstuff they eked out of the dry soil.” But she’s something of an atheist. “Millions of people live without gods,” she reflects. “They live good lives. They love, and they laugh, and they don’t miss churches and bells and sacrifice.” When she gets to Alt Coulumb and starts sorting through the web of contracts Kos signed before his death, the contracts she has to maintain, and her understanding of worship, gets rather more complicated.
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Over the last two television seasons, both Fox and NBC have both tried to make science fiction and fantasy shows work, focusing heavily on the visuals rather than the conceptual and emotional architecture underneath them. Both Terra Nova and Revolution look good. Fox spent money to make sure its dinosaurs didn’t look like an embarrassment. In its pilot, Revolution’s abandoned shells of airplanes and overgrown Major League baseball stadiums have a handsome air of decay. But watching both those shows and the finale of SyFy’s Lost Girl in recent days, it’s striking the extent to which shows seem to be able to pull off either the look or the ideas, but rarely both.

For much of its first two seasons, Lost Girl managed to be a relatively low-effects show for a story set amongst the fae. The episodes relied on physical props, on people acting as if they’d been controlled, on wild eyes and good makeup and what looked like surprisingly enjoyable sex for basic cable. But in the second half of the second season, as succubus Bo and her human and fae comrades went to war against a powerful antagonist called the Garuda, the show’s effects faltered. Suddenly, it looked a lot more like Charmed, the WB show about three sisters who also happened to be witches, which started airing in 1998. The Garuda’s lair, like those of the demons the sisters faced down on Charmed, looked more like a basement hideaway than an evil citadel. His wings of fire were transparently terrible animation rather than a compelling deception. But even though the fight scenes looked disappointing, everything that surrounded them worked. The show had ideas it wanted to explore—Bo’s confrontation with the Garuda was a way for her to finally accept leadership within her community, and a tool for her to confront issues in some of her relationships with both humans and fae—and the actors involved had the chops to pull it off.

Terra Nova and Revolution both look a lot better than Lost Girl, a Canadian import that fits well into SyFy’s lineup, a place where the core audience is used to doing a little extra work to suspend disbelief. But even if the visuals on Revolution make it easy to believe that the population of the United States has dramatically shrunk, and that Wrigley Field is overgrown, the show’s ideas and acting interfere with its emotional credibility. If Revolution was interested in exploring what life was like after the clock turned dramatically back on technological development, we could enjoy the sight of the lost world, we could explore the things things they’ve built to replace lost conveniences, the infrastructure that once held society together. Instead, there are pesky questions hanging around the premise. If Ben Matheson knows why the electricity went out, why has he kept silent for fifteen years? Why does electricity work in Grace’s attic if it doesn’t wear anywhere else? Why aren’t people building steam engines? I understand that the show intends to answer these questions, but it’s hard to imagine that the answers will be good enough to justify the irritations of the inconsistencies, or that Tracy Spiridakos, the show’s CW-style lead actress, can provide enough emotional weight to give us consequences beyond the setup.

I’d love science fiction and fantasy shows that both look great and have great setups. But Battlestar Galacticas are few and far between. And apparently they aren’t frequent enough, or big enough hits to convince networks that their shows need to have concepts, visuals, and people who can actually act. Revolution‘s off to a good start, ratings-wise: 11.7 million people tuned in to its pilot, boosted by a lead-in from The Voice. But genre fans shouldn’t let networks buy them off with things that look good but don’t have anything underneath the hood. And if we have to pick one or the other, I’ll take solid worldbuilding and actors who can carry that world on their shoulders over pretty, flimsy pictures.

It says a lot about the military that it apparently didn’t occur to anyone that men’s body armor, which female soldiers wear too (they can choose from a range of sizes), might not actually be optimized for women’s bodies or the way women move in combat. The Christian Science Monitor reports that military chemists are trying to solve a basic problem of armor design—that apparently adding curves makes armor heavier—and using Lucy Lawless’s Xena: Warrior Princess costumes as inspiration:

“It rubbed on the hips, and the vests were too long in the front, so that when you had female soldiers climbing stairs or climbing up a hill or a tree, or sitting for a long time in a vehicle, that would create pressure points that in some instances could impact blood flow and cause some discomfort,” Lt. Col. Frank Lozan, who is helping design the body armor, told the Monitor. A subsequent study by the U.S. Army found that the ill-fitting gear actually interfered with how the women were able to perform during combat, making “it difficult for them to properly aim their weapons and enter or exit vehicles.”

Now obviously, that’s an inspiration that should only be taken so literally. The ladies of the U.S. military can probably skip the leather skirts. But the point is that when you start thinking about people in roles or situations that haven’t been open to them previously, you start thinking creatively about what they’d need to succeed in those circumstances. And there’s nothing wrong with scientists looking for inspiration even in unexpected places, when linear thinking hasn’t met the needs of people they’re trying to serve.

My favorite novel of the summer is G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen, which follows the adventures of adventures of Alif, a young hacktivist in a repressive Emirate, who finds himself in trouble after the state censor, known as the Hand of God, appropriates a computer program he wrote and starts tracking down dissidents, and with a broken heart after the upper-class girl he’s in love with becomes betrothed to someone else. Alif flees his home one step ahead of the state security forces, with Dina, his neighbor, only to find that he’s stumbled into a version of his city where djinns exist, and where computer code and Arabic text have taken on unprecedented power. I spoke with Wilson, herself a convert to Islam, about the power of text, writing Arabic characters as a white author, and imagining the Arab Spring before it even took place. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the things I really enjoyed about Alif was the novel’s sense of the power of language, whether to summon, reinvent, conceal or wound. Do you think there’s something particularly powerful or incantatory about Arabic? About computer code?

Those things have always been very present in my mind, particularly since moving to Egypt right out of college and having to wrestle with this language, which was so, so, so different from English. I’d studied French for about six years, and even though they’re two different languages, there are enough similarities that there are very few things you can say in French that are impossible to say in English. In Arabic, you’d need a bunch of different words to translate a single word. Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people, but what you’re able to think. That was a very interesting idea for me, and it certainly carried over to Alif in a big way. The way computer code carried over was from a conversation with a friend who writes computer code by day and comic books, mostly for the Indian market, by night. He was trying to explain to me in layman’s terms quantuum computers and how it’s different from computing we have today. He began to make allusions to monotheism and polytheism and our computers and quantuum computers, and I just said that’s really cool. I’m not a programmer myself, but I am a very, very picky end user of technology. I like my machines to work they way they’re supposed to, all the time. It made me really interested to learn more about how these machiens work, and how they talk.

Well and of course technology and social media are changing the way we speak in the real world, too. You’ve got all these abbreviations from texting that have crept into everyday language.

There’s a whole parallel universe of Arabic text-speak, which uses English letters but substitutes in numbers.

As someone who writes about the power of culture and stories to determine our worldview, I was really tickled by Alif’s conversation with Vikram the Vampire, a djinn, about how censors forget to crack down on fairy tales. Was that a detail that was drawn from your experiences?

It is absolutely drawn from truth. In many countries in the Middle East, and this is changing in the wake of the Arab Spring, but for a long time censorship of books and film was a very big deal. There were books you couldn’t buy, things with political content would be censored, but there were some genres of books and film that the censors just didn’t understand. They didn’t understand that below these fantasy themes which they thought to be very childish were these popwerful political messages. There were these English news journals and things you couldn’t get. Anything critical of religion, whether Islam or Christianity, you couldn’t find. No Christopher Hitchens. And yet you could walk into an english-language bookstore and find America Gods or the The Chronicles of Narnia. All they see is the surface metaphor. They don’t really get what these books are saying.
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I’ve eased up on the book club because I think it’s hard for a critical mass of folks to keep up—we all have a lot on our pop culture agendas. But some people have been asking me what I’m reading or what I’m looking forward to this summer. So here are five books that are either coming out, or are relatively new releases that I think are worth making time for if you’re escaping to the beach somewhere.

-Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson, Out on July 3: Alif The Unseen may not be the first major fictional take on the Arab Spring, but it’s definitely the first to examine what would happen to a censorious oil state if a talented young hacker of Indian-Arab origin, after having his heart shattered by the upper-class girl he’s in love with, goes on the run with his veiled neighbor and best real-life friend and a djinn. It’s a terrifically fun novel about the connections between literature and coding, magic and Islam, and the identities we create for ourselves.

-Shadow and Bone, Leigh Bardugo, Out on June 5: For all my YA readers of all ages in the house, Bardugo’s fantasy set in a Russia where the tsar’s advised by both a Rasputin-like holy man and a powerful wizard is the first part of a trilogy, and by the end of Shadow and Bone, you’ll be glad that’s the case. Fictional authoritarians don’t always pack the punch or capture the rot of unstable regimes, but Bardugo’s does. Plus magic and smooching and some super-scary demons.

-Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel, Out on May 8: Wolf Hall, the first book in Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, is one of my favorite books of recent years, a rich, strange volume that actually captures what it feels like to be inside a non-modern mindset. I’m excited for the HBO adaptation, if it ever comes to fruition. But I’m even more excited for this sequel.

-The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson: Johnson’s novel of life in North Korea has been out for a while, and at first blush, it might not seem like beach reading. But it’s gorgeously written, and a propulsive adventure, a reminder that life as we know it can be so strange as to approach magical realism. If you want a reckoning with American inability to comprehend the world beyond ourselves, this is one of the most innovative ways to have that conversation with yourself and a piece of literature.

-Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel: I feel like I shouldn’t even have to make the case for this graphic novel memoir, given how wonderful Bechdel’s meditation on her father, Fun Home, is. But for those of you who are unfamiliar, Alison Bechdel is a genius, and Dykes to Watch Out For, her long-running syndicated comic strip about a lesbian community, was fantastic, no matter what your sexual orientation.