Literateur: Henry Kuttner's "Robots Have No Tails"

Few things are more humbling to a writer than pulp stories from the 30's and 40's. You quickly realize everything has been done- and done WELL- almost a century ago.

Henry Kuttner was a master pulp practitioner. He did horror, sf, fantasy, everything. Particularly noteworthy: "The Graveyard Rats." Great story, great title. But today we're gonna look at this bad boy:

Robots Have No Tails is about Galloway Gallagher, a hard-drinking scientist who can only do science when he's drunk. It's like Jackie Chan's Drunken Master, but with science instead of fighting.

The stories are structured as scientific mysteries where My. Galloway has to work backwards to figure out how he performed an experiment or opened some timewarp while he was drunk the previous night.

And they're a hoot. The idea-per-page ratio is staggering. Not only did Kuttner basically invent the Tardis in here, decades decades before Doctor Who, he also offers:

-A dude who accidentally kills a future version of himself by reaching through a time door.
-A robot having a personality crisis.
-Bunnies from Mars arriving from 400 years in the future, determined to take over the world.
-Courtroom drama where time travel and clones and robot free agency are debated.
-Time-traveling mafia lawyers.

Also this exchange:

"You promised to help me. If you don't, I'm a ruined man."
"I've been ruined for years. It never bothers me."

It's even formatted like a classic pulp magazine- two columns per page, cheap paper, retro cover. It's a pure labor of love by the publisher.

The intro by noted author F. Paul Wilson is full of affection as well, though he's totally honest about the stories:

"Are they some of the best SF ever written? Hell, no. They show many of the failings of hastily written pulp fiction. The writing is slapdash at times, suffering from polyadverbosis and digressions that would give Poe fits. The science is often suspect, the extrapolation occasionally sloppy."

But they're still fun. There's a whole lotta of laughs and entertainment to be had here in this short volume. It feels like a contemporary send-up of classic sf, making it that much more remarkable that Kuttner was goofing on the genre so cleverly in the 40's.

-Phony McFakename

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Literateur: "Hellboy: Oddest Jobs"

Alright, this week's episode is all about the collection of words on pages titled Hellboy: Oddest Jobs.

True story: I looked at the contributors and saw "China Mieville" and was like "Whoa, the classic literary author wrote a story in this?!?" Well, turns out I was thinking of Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart. Published in 1958. So, yeah. The author of that renowned 1958 literary classic is not represented in this book.

Some other cool people are, though! Joe R. Lansdale, Garth Nix, Brian Keene, John Skipp, and Tad Williams among them!

(Real quick, if you're not familiar with the character: Hellboy is a boy and he's from hell. Okay, you're all caught up now.)

Hellboy's been appearing in comics for over two decades- I've read every issue- with two remarkably solid movies adapted from the comic, and has had many books written of his exploits. This is the third in this series. Odd Jobs was first, then Odder Jobs, and now Oddest Jobs. I skipped Odder Jobs, but I enjoyed Odd Jobs and have to say the stories in this collection aren't markedly odder than the stories in that book. False advertising, I say!

There are some gems in here:

-Eco-activist students use occult rituals to call up a gigantic, Cthulhu-esque monstrosity to devour mankind as penance for our environmental unfriendliness.

-What really happened to Robert Johnson and every musician that sold their soul to the Devil.

-A comatose 30's pulp fiction fan manifests his rage as a ghost train with black dragons swooping in to murder entire cities and store their remains in the train.

-The truth behind the Roanoke Croatoan disappearance.

-Salamander men kidnap an entire town as ransom to demand the return of their stolen egg.

-Mucho phantasmagorical hallucinogenic mojo goodness.

-Hellboy eats pancakes.

And some nice quotes:

"We're talking class-A uggos here, tentacles and dripping teeth and putrescent flesh all dark and oily with larval eruptions that drip phosphorescent goo. And don't get me started on all the begatting that's going on at all hours."

"They looked like target dummies, or puppets on long, loose strings being lowered to a stage, jumping and dancing as they were struck by bullets, bits of uniform and bone and faint fragments of decayed flesh spraying out above them."

"I feel like my head's been drilled open and filled with cotton candy."

Half the stories are fun, the other half suck. I'm trying to behave better with my book criticism now that I'm a published author, so I'm not gonna rant about the sucky parts. If you like Hellboy enough to read this book, you'll recognize them. Overall, it's about what you'd expect from franchise fiction.

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

The Best Words: December 2015

As a public service once a month, I share a few of my favorite things. In quote form. I'm no longer including neat quotes from Twitter, since they take up way too much blog space. If you want to see what I think was funny on that site, here's the link. And here we go!

“You can’t rollerskate in a buffalo herd.”

-Roger Miller

“Be slow to trust a man with clothing that was too new. You didn’t get to wear new, clean clothing by doing honest work.”

-Brandon Sanderson, Shadows of Self

“The sun barfed heat onto the desert.”

-Bentley Little, The Disappearance

"Traveling with 3- and 4-year-old boys is like transferring serial killers from a prison. You have to be constantly aware."

-Jim Gaffigan

“December 3rd, 2015 is not the day Scott Weiland died. It is the official day the public will use to mourn him, and it was the last day he could be propped up in front of a microphone for the financial benefit or enjoyment of others.“

-Scott Weiland’s widow

"Let me tell you something about a nuclear holocaust. You think it's hard to get a cab now?"

-Gilbert Gottfried

“Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood!”

-Closer

“Two words I don’t like- ‘tombs’ and ‘unearthed.’ People- you’ve gotta leave your tombs earthed!”

-Angel, Season 2

“She’d grown up with seven hundred brothers and knew how they thought, which was often quite fast while being totally in the wrong direction.”

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”

“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”

“There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.”

“Learnin’ how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them.”

-Terry Pratchett, Hat Full of Sky

"How did we traverse the nation with the railroad so quickly? We just threw Chinese people in caves and blew ‘em up and didn’t give a s**t what happened to them. There’s no end to what you can do when you don’t give a f**k about particular people. You can do anything. That’s where human greatness comes from, is that we’re s**tty people, that we f**k others over. Even today, how do we have this amazing microtechnology? Because the factory where they’re making these- they jump off the roof, because it’s a nightmare in there. You really have a choice. You can have candles and horses and be a little kinder to each other or let someone suffer immeasurably far away, just so you can leave a mean comment on YouTube while you’re taking a s**t.”

-Louis C.K.

“Y’know what money CAN buy? A SOLID GOLD GUN. That shoots DIAMOND BULLETS. I call it ‘The Compensator.’”

-Daniel Way, Deadpool (Issue 13)

“Don’t shake that thing in my Hellevator!”

-Hellevator

"You know what four dollars buys today? It don’t even buy three dollars!”

-Saturday Night Fever

“The best two days of a beach house owner’s life are the day he buys it and the day he sells it.”

-Anonymous

“Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales."

-Neil Postman

“Money’s not the prime asset. Time is.”

-Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

“What doubles sin is saying to yourself, I will do this because I know I can pray for forgiveness once it’s done. To say to yourself that you can have your cake and eat it, too.”

-Stephen King, “Morality”

“He was as surprised as anyone when the fecal matter hit the cooling device.”

-Stephen King, “Afterlife”

  

"In every big transaction, ... there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“I’m now convinced that the worst thing a man can do with a telephone without breaking the law is to call someone he doesn’t know and try to sell that person something he doesn’t want.”

“If you ever care to see how all the world’s most awful jokes spread, spend a day on a bond trading desk. When the Challenger space shuttle disintegrated, sex people called me from six points on the globe to explain that NASA stands for ‘Need Another Seven Astronauts.’”

“If there is one thing I learned on Wall Street, it’s that when an investment banker starts talking about principles, he is usually also defending his interests and that he rarely stakes out the moral high ground unless he believes there is gold under his campsite.”

“Note to members of all governments: Be wary of Wall Streeters threatening crashes. They are tempted to do this whenever you encroach on their turf. But they can’t cause a crash any more than they can prevent one.”

“Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.”

-Michael Lewis, Liar’s Poker

“Only the wounded remain

The generals have all left the game

With no will to fight, they’ll fade with the light

There’s nobody left they can blame.”

-The Damned

Rufus T. Firefly: Not that I care, but where is your husband?

Mrs. Teasdale: Why, he's dead.

Rufus T. Firefly: I bet he's just using that as an excuse.

Mrs. Teasdale: I was with him to the very end.

Rufus T. Firefly: No wonder he passed away.

Mrs. Teasdale: I held him in my arms and kissed him.

Rufus T. Firefly: Oh, I see, then it was murder. Will you marry me? Did he leave you any money? Answer the second question first.

"Well, that covers a lot of ground. Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself. You better beat it- I hear they're going to tear you down and put up an office building where you're standing. You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff. You know, you haven't stopped talking since I came here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle."

“Join the Army. See the Navy.”

-Duck Soup

“Like too many ex-hosts of children’s television shows, Toymaker Tommy had ended up doing the rope dance, swinging from the rafters of his garage wearing a hemp necktie.”

-Bentley Little, Death Instinct

“Expecting a trouble-free life because you are a good person is like expecting the bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian.”

-Jeffrey R. Holland

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Cinemasterworks: Christmas With the Krampus

My one-sentence review of Krampus: It's great, go see it!

My multi-sentence review is below. Beware, maties, here there be spoilers!

The Movie

Krampus is an ancient German mythological creature. He's an evil Santa Claus, a horned & hoofed monster who punishes kids on Christmas rather than bringing gifts. For further info- BAM.

In this here movie, we have a dysfunctional family getting a holiday visit from an even more dysfunctional family and everything's very dysfunctional. It's a classic setup for a holiday comedy/drama and then it yanks the rug out in Act Two.

A young boy loses his faith in Santa Claus amid the family chaos and he wishes that his family would go away. Krampus hears his wish and a severe blizzard descends and knocks out the power. And then the title monster and his minions attack the block. Minions include super-vicious mutant versions of: teddy bear, doll, jack-in-the-box, toy robot, elves, and gingerbread men.

Never thought a jack-in-the-box would give me nightmares...

It's a romp. The jack-in-the-box was surprisingly horrifying. Very little CGI, too. The monsters are done well with practical effects.

Now- time to nitpick!

The Myth

Krampus doesn't really do anything that he's supposed to do here. Yeah, he's got the look and the chains and he certainly punishes people. But he mostly just stalks around menacingly, leaping from housetop to housetop and descending chimneys.

He's supposed to capture kids, put them in his bag, and beat them with sticks. This never happens! He never gives coal, either. (Coal distribution is one thing he has in common with our traditional-values Santa.) He just hands out wooden jingle bells at a couple points in the movie.

Most of his actions have a Christmas-y flavor to them and are dark twists on holiday traditions and tropes, but the movie seems to be making up its own mythology about the Krampus beast. There's nothing really wrong with that, but it would have taken almost no effort for the filmmakers to throw us a couple more accurate mythological bones here.

Maybe they're saving them for the sequel?

Killing Children

Kids are murdered here! This is probably the most gleefully demented Christmas horror movie since Gremlins. And it's implied in that movie that the Gremlins are attacking the entire town. And we see the Gremlins kill people. So we can conclude that a lot of people are dying in there. But the movie drew the line on killing kids. (If the Gremlins did that, the movie didn't show it, or even imply it.)

But this has multiple kids getting menaced by Krampus & co. with an off-screen death implied. Plus two kids get thrown into a flaming pit of death. And heck, in one scene, we see a kid get swallowed whole by the razor-toothed, boa constrictor-esque jack-in-the-box. Swallowed whole! And the scene that follows is super-tense because another kid is threatened with swallowing and we're hoping that they'll rescue the swallowed kid before the kid dies or gets digested in the belly of the box-beast.

But NOPE! Our last glimpse of that kid is of it being devoured and probably suffering a horrible suffocating death inside a mutant jack-in-the-box. Cruelest death since that babysitter getting devoured by the sea monster-saurus thing in Jurassic World.

There's No Rules!

Like another popular horror film from this past year- It Follows- this film has a consistency problem.

The limits of Krampus and the monsters are never clear. We never understand how much power they have and their weaknesses are not explained or explored. Sometimes you can shoot the monsters and kill them, sometimes not. Sometimes fire works, sometimes not. Krampus is never seriously confronted, so we have no idea if he even has any weaknesses.

When a film doesn't make its rules clear, I always think of that Little Caesar's commercial and shout "There's no rules!" You should do the same.

And what's up with the elves? They're made out to be super-terrifying and their appearance is a huge event...and then they just hold the family at spear point. They're either wearing silly masks or those silly masks are supposed to be their actual faces. Either way, elves=major letdown. (Only Terry Pratchett can do scary elves right.)

That Opening Sequence

I didn't make this connection until the next day- they don't hang a lampshade on this, but the opening sequence isn't just a throwaway joke. It has a meaningful connection to the grandmother's childhood flashback.

The film starts with a slo-mo montage of people trampling each other in a store on Black Friday. People fight, get tazered, and are generally awful as an upbeat Christmas song plays.

This gets a huge laugh. It's a gem of a sequence and a great way to start the movie. But it's quickly forgotten, as it never connects to the rest of the film.

Or does it?

In a vividly animated flashback later in the film, the German grandmother character talks about her childhood and how rough things were in her small German village. People turned on each other, stole food, and were generally awful. This led to her unintentionally summoning Krampus, who proceeds to take her family away and punish the entire town.

This explains a puzzling element in the film- it happens off-screen, but Krampus and his pals wreck every house in the neighborhood and presumably kill or capture every resident. This seems oddly harsh, since the boy only asked that his own family get taken away. But the Black Friday opening sequence explains that we're ALL naughty and we've turned into the same kinds of awful people that turned on each other back in Germany's severe economic depression.

And thus we must all be punished. And Krampus is happy to dole out the punishment.

That Ending

It has a deeply ambiguous ending.

Things go downhill and get darker and darker in the last act and this is a PG-13 film, so it reaches a point where you know they're gonna have to cop out.

And they do. It was all a dream.

Or was it?

The little boy wakes up and finds his family alive again, happy and getting along and enjoying Christmas morning and all seems well with the world. He's hugging his parents and overjoyed and then sees that he's been given a jingle bell in a box from Krampus. Everyone in the house starts looking at each other pensively.

And then it pans out to reveal their house is inside a glass snow globe that Krampus is placing on a shelf. It pans further out to reveal Krampus' lair is full of similar snow globes.

It looks a lot like this. Way to spoil the last scene, marketing people!

Now. Does this mean that they all actually died and Krampus has their spirits trapped under the dome forever? Or does this mean that Krampus really granted the boy's wish and gave him a happy Christmas under the condition that they all behave and keep their Christmas spirits high, because Krampus is watching and he'll get them if they don't behave?

There's probably other ways you can read it, too. Most ways you look at it, it's a cop-out. But if it makes you happy, you can believe that they're really all dead!

Conclusion

The film is very messed-up and a lot of fun! There's some classic images and scenes in here and it's a wild ride that leaves you exhilarated and entertained. Horror-comedies are tough to pull off and they made a noble attempt here. It's very much a horror film with comic touches and the balance feels just right. Take your whole dysfunctional family out to see it!

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

Earworm Analysis: "Danger Zone" by Kenny Loggins

I love me some 80's pop. Any of it. All of it.

The 80's were a time where heavy metal drifted from my older brother's room, cheesy synth-heavy pop drifted from boom boxes at the school yard, and classic rock & oldies drifted from my parents' car stereo. I didn't really have any control over what I heard, it all just washed over me and I passively received it. It didn't occur to me to develop musical preferences until the 90's, when I became fanatically obsessed with one band and one genre after another.

But 80's pop still has a huge place in my heart. It sounds like a simpler time of neon joy and bright clothes with an undercurrent of existential dread as we wondered each day if/when the Soviets would nuke us. We're all sentimental about our childhoods because we didn't have bills to pay and we were less aware of our mortality and the human condition. But really, there's never been a golden age of existence. As long as humans have been around, we've constantly faced light and darkness, ups and downs, danger zones and non-danger zones.

Which brings us to "Danger Zone"! It's been memed and covered and endlessly referenced on Archer. It's a super-catchy, driving tune that was custom-made for a movie driven by Commie nuclear obliteration paranoia (And unintentional homoeroticism). The song feels frivolous and dangerous at the same time.

Let's take a closer look at it!

The Song Itself

This is a bangin' song. It's rokken like Dokken. If you don't feel revved up and awesome after hearing it, I don't know what to do with you.

The song takes you through peaks and valleys of 80's-tastic riffs and synths and only slows down long enough to give you a moment to think about how proud you are to be American before it leaves you no choice but to resume your fist-pumping and head-banging.

I salivate with Pavlovian patriotism whenever I hear this song anywhere.

I will hear nothing against it.

The Lyrics

Let's take a gander at its poetry:

Revvin' up your engine
Listen to her howlin' roar
Metal under tension
Beggin' you to touch and go

Highway to the danger zone
Ride into the danger zone

Headin' into twilight
Spreadin' out her wings tonight
She got you jumpin' off the track
And shovin' into overdrive

Highway to the danger zone
I'll take you
Ridin' into the danger zone

You'll never say hello to you
Until you get it on the red line overload
You'll never know what you can do
Until you get it up as high as you can go

Out along the edges
Always where I burn to be
The further on the edge
The hotter the intensity

Highway to the danger zone
Gonna take you
Right into the danger zone
Highway to the danger zone

This song was written for Top Gun. Loggins had access to the film. And these are the words he sang.

Now before you fact-check me- yes, I know Loggins didn't actually write it. Two studio hacks wrote this song and Loggins was the FOURTH CHOICE for recording this song. Toto, Bryan Adams, and REO Speedwagon all, for one reason or another, passed on it. I often wonder how Loggins felt about being the fourth one on the list. Hey, worked out okay for him in the end. Do you know any Kenny Loggins songs other than this one?

So, whoever wrote this song wrote it FOR THE MOVIE TOP GUN. And thus, I have some questions for the songwriters:

-The phrase "highway" is used four times- do jets travel on highways?
-Do you really say that you "ride" in a jet?
-Does a jet engine actually "rev"?
-Why the reference to a "track"? Do jets really go on tracks?
-Is "overdrive" really a thing in jets?

Obviously, every word in the song is a sexual innuendo- that's true for 99% of songs- but the vehicular references here all sound more appropriate for car racing than jet flying. Except for a token reference to "get it up as high as you can go," there's pretty much no aerial innuendo. Missed opportunity! If ever there were a song for copious sexy jet references, this would have been the one.

And a lot of it just doesn't make any sense. "You'll never say hello to you until you get it on the red line overload"? What does that even mean?

The Video

It's not good.

Sorry to say that, because I love this song.

The video is full of clips from Top Gun, which are awesome.

FEEL THE AMERICA

The Top Gun stuff is all cut together very well. But if I wanted to watch Top Gun, I would watch Top Gun. Because it's awesome.

FEEL THE THUMB

The only content in this video that is not Top Gun footage is scenes of Kenny Loggins, flat on his back on a bed, looking like he's in extreme pain.

OUCH!

DOUBLE OUCH!

And then when he's not laying down and wincing, he's just leaning against things or standing there in a dark room looking at the camera and sometimes lip-syncing.

Not straying too far from that bed, though.

Was Kenny Loggins too high to perform? Why film every scene in a dank hotel room? Could they not afford a set? And was it mandatory for 80's male lead singers to wear a striking white shirt with slick hair and sunglasses and a scuzzy-looking beard?

I would look up whether Sisters of Mercy or Kenny Loggins had that look first, but I'm a busy guy.

The Verdict

This is a near-perfect song despite its ridiculous lyrics and inane video. I will defend it to my dying day.

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.