From Dreaming to Running: Putting the Android on Screen

Last week I got to attend a very nice panel from DePaul and One Book One Chicago: three scholars discussing aspects of adaptation, with Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Scott's Blade Runner as the focus.

Paul Booth (who runs the wonderful DePaul Pop Culture Conference, among other virtues) chaired the panel. These were really engaging, fast-moving talks, with lots of visual aids, so notes below are just sketches and highlights.

Thoughts on "Venom" (2018)

What a strange mess of a movie. If it had been just a little bit worse, it would have been more enjoyable—never quite good enough to be immersively entertaining, never quite bad enough that you can laugh at it.

Really the film's only strong feature is Tom Hardy, an unusually vulnerable Eddie Brock. Hardy plays up the character's slight dopiness rather than focusing on the tough guy that you can tell even this film thinks he is at times, keeping a strangely amiable, roll-with it attitude even as things get pretty bonkers.

But what a mess of a film. Pacing is all but nonexistent, with the alien symbiote visibly tentacle-possessing people within the first minute or two. It wants to be a shockingly violent movie, but is incapable of achieving that within the bounds of a PG-13 rating; it wants to capture the character Venom's gross-out cannibal comedy allure, but doesn't know how to achieve that beyond a few hard-to-hear voiceover lines; and most of all it wants to transform a monster we've barely had a chance to meet into an anti-hero we're rooting for, and fails quite remarkably. Venom's "change of heart" is the moment that this film really falls apart: not only is there no plot or visible development leading to this massive 180 in the character, but it's literally just stated, flat out, in a voiceover, "I will save this planet rather than destroy it"—incredibly easy to miss, and never explained or justified.

Quick Thoughts on "Illyria: A Shakespearean Fantasy"

Just got back from the first night of Illyria: A Shakespearean Fantasy, produced by EDGE theatre.

This was so much fun! I fear I can't put together a particularly coherent review at this hour, but it's such a limited run that I wanted to get down some impressions and encourage you to check it out.

Structured primarily around Twelfth Night (shipwrecked separated twins, cross-dressing shenanigans), Illyria also draws on A Midsummer Night's Dream (rom-com escapades in fairy-controlled woods) and The Tempest (magic & supernatural beings). Illyria plays up the fantastic elements to good effect and, perhaps more impressively, strips downs and blends some fairly tangled plots—the resulting script is lively and more consistently humorous than many straight adaptations of Shakespearean comedies I have seen, while maintaining the kind of multi-thread madcap quality that makes his comedies so enduring.

Podcast #2- American Gods w/ While Reading and Walking's Leah von Essen

Happy to announce that our second podcast is live! We're joined by Leah von Essen from While Reading and Walking to talk about Neil Gaiman's American Gods, the television adaptation of which is premiering soon.

Download Directly (mp3) | RSS Feed | iTunes | Google Play

• 0- Introductions
• 2:42- Upcoming Events
• 4:42- Main Discussion
• 18:13- Thoughts on other Gaiman works & adaptations
• 25:14- "Hard Question" about belief & religion
• 32:25- Questions about Sandman & other gods appearing in American Gods
• 35:44- What else have you been reading?
• 38:08- Credits

Be sure to check out Leah's site, While Reading and Walking. You can also catch her on Book Riot, and I highly recommend following her on Twitter: @reading_while. Leah also mentions some reading projects like Read Diverse Books.

Besides American Gods, we reference many other works by Gaiman. Non-Gaiman references include:

• Fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
• Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• Binti and other works by Nnedi Okorafor
• The collection The Djinn Falls in Love, which includes stories by Gaiman, Okorafor, and many more.

Our events-reader this episode is Mary Auber from the Weird & Wonderful club, which meets at City Lit Books. You can find lots of meeting notes from Weird & Wonderful on Positron.

Our music is provided by Pelafina. Check them out on Facebook and Bandcamp!

Hope you like the show! Questions, comments? Sound off in the comments, or drop us a line at positronchicago@gmail.com.

Thoughts on Otherworld Theatre's "A Princess of Mars"

Disclaimer: Positron received press passes to see this production. We'd totally tell you if we didn't like it anyway, though. Fortunately, it's really good.

Otherworld Theatre has just launched its second run of A Princess of Mars, their stage adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1912 tale. Directed by Tiffany Keane Schaefer, adapted by Schaefer and Nick Izzo, the play is a rollicking adventure featuring inventive effects and stage combat.

Following the general outline of Burroughs' story—with some extremely effective changes that I'll get into below—A Princess of Mars is the story of John Carter of Virginia, a veteran of the Civil War mysteriously transported to Mars. In Burroughs' version of the red planet, it's a dying but habitable world populated by a wild assortment of alien cultures and creatures. Carter is quickly caught up in a variety of conflicts and escapades, eventually following in love with the titular damsel in distress.

Frank E. Schoonover's
1917 cover.

Burroughs' tales of "Barsoom", as the Martians name their planet, are violent and rather silly, plagued by racism and sexism that are absolutely wince-inducing to read today—Burroughs, of course, is also the creator of such culturally-insensitive works as the Tarzan series. After acknowledging their faults, however, the Barsoom tales are also undeniably fun—exuberant, free-wheeling, and almost childishly imaginative and melodramatic, with Carter a kind of superman thrown up against bizarre monstrosities and enemies. Barsoom has also had an immense impact on science fiction and fantasy: as an important ingredient in "sword & sorcery" and "science fantasy" genre development, and as a direct influence on writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and countless others.

But that's Burroughs, and, while this play is true to the broad outline of his work, it's very much its own creature.

Otherworld's production is, without reservation, a delight. I hadn't made it to any of their productions before—after seeing the House Theatre's production of Diamond Dogs, I'm belatedly kicking myself for not seeking out more of the SF/F performance art in Chicago—so I really wasn't sure what was in store. A Princess of Mars exceeded all my expectations: entertaining through and through, with a memorable cast, great costumes, tech, and stage combat, and a really delightful script.

Think Galactic- Diamond Dogs Outing

This past Saturday, I joined some other members of Think Galactic for a theatrical outing—The House Theatre of Chicago's performance of Diamond Dogs at the Chopin Theater.

Diamond Dogs is a stage adaptation of the Alastair Reynolds novella of the same name: a kind of horror-survival story set in the far future, transhuman space opera world of Reynolds' Revelation Space universe. Saturday's production also featured a pre-show discussion with Reynolds himself, as well as playwright Althos Low (pen name for Steve Pickering & others) and director Nathan Allen.

I've been meaning to see more of the SFF-allied theater in Chicago, and I am *so glad* I made it out to see this—really quite a spectacle, not shying away even slightly from the science-fictional elements, and with some pretty brilliant tech—props, costumes, puppetry, light & sound—it pulled them off surprisingly well.

More discussion, and possible spoilers, below:

Belated thoughts on Arrival

Okay, it's been out for almost a month now, but I really wanted to get down some thoughts on Arrival, the recent film by Denis Villeneuve. An adaptation of Ted Chiang's 1998 Story of Your Life, the film follows a linguist and her team as they try to communicate with some decidedly non-human aliens.

A couple things to note right off the bat. Firstly, if you're an SF fan, you need to go see this. It's one of those incredibly rare science fiction films that doesn't just look science-fictional, it's actually powered by ideas. That's a very small family—Garland's Ex Machina last year springs to mind.

Secondly, if you haven't read Chiang's story, that is also a thing you should really do. Chiang is among the absolute best short SF writers, full stop, and Story of Your Life is one of those works that is already a touchstone for the field, tackling two heavy ideas—the relationship of language & cognition, and determinism & the nature of time—in a story that is still intensely human, and stylishly-written to boot.

Taylor Clark had a great piece on Chiang leading up to this film in the California Sunday Magazine, by the way. Recommended.

My thoughts below are pretty critical of the film, but please remember that I really enjoyed this film, I want to see more like it. It's an interesting case-study, though, in how adapting really science-fictional (i.e., cerebral) ideas from print to film is problematic, and it also showcases a few tendencies in current block-buster-y film that bug me, perhaps the more so because of all the things this does right.

Spoilers likely for both film & story below. Also, I should note that I saw this with other Think Galactic members, and a lot of thoughts below came out of our discussion.

Chicago Nerds- Welcome to Night Vale

For the last meeting of the Chicago Nerd book club, we discussed "Welcome to Night Vale" (2015) by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor.

The novel is set in the world of the podcast of the same name, which a fair number of us are completely enamored of. It's a twice-monthly show, a bit like "The X-Files Home Companion": a small community radio broadcast from a town where the strange and supernatural are commonplace. It's a very weird mix of the surreal, horrific, and mundane, that somehow adds up to astonishingly comedic. For some! Not everybody at group is into it.

We found the adaption of that show to a novel format fairly problematic--particularly given the importance of narrator Cecil Baldwin and the music of Disparition to the show's tone. Nonetheless, we had a fruitful discussion, with much attention paid to listening vs. reading. Spoilers below!