An Unconvincing Narrative

This is Abercrombie the AntLion. He enjoys playing video games. Since he in not sighted, he enjoys the X-Box 360 controller with vibration feedback. His favorite game is Half-Life 2: Episode 2, the story of an oppressed alien species trying to establish itself peacefully in a dimension foreign to its own and attacked frequently by a hideous, glass-eyed, two-legged creature armed with multiple weapons and the ability to manipulate gravity itself.

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My brother sent me a video clip with the actual sequence.  I’m relieved the contestant got it right!

And tonight, on national TV, Alex Trebek said, “Hayden Christensen played a character who can teleport in this 2008 film adaptation of the novel by Steven Gould.”

The category was “From Book to Big Screen.”

So, how cool is that!?

(Thanks to everyone who emailed me after nailing the “question.”)

A person drops by to tell me that my book is far weaker than the movie.

I found your original book fairly linear, and predictable. I found the lead character and supporting cast a little hollow. To call jumper sci-fi, is kind of a stretch, IMHO, super soft light sci-fi maybe. I cant argue that teleportation is a Sci-fi topic, I can say that it is the only thing that remotely relates your book to anything sci-fi. You dont even explore the “How” and “why” in the original book. Books dont have to explain everything, but a shred might help, We spend pages running back and forth with this scorned and abused juvinile, getting into situations that are overly simplified.

Its sad to say but I feel this is a case where the movie (as weak as it is) is better than the book, a rare case in adaptations.

…

Be well,

Roger

Frequent commenter Joe Iriarte comments on the comment:

Hey Roger, I drove past your house. DAMN it’s tacky! Don’t you have any fashion sense at all?! Those colors do NOT go together. I’ve been looking at houses for years–ranch houses, colonials, victorians, craftsman homes, trailers–and let me tell you, yours is one of the crappier looking ones I’ve seen.

By the way, your kids are ugly too. Their noses are too big and their ears are uneven.

Be well,
Joe

Joe, you are my hero.

It is revealing that the email address left by Roger is trangthetroll@hotmail.com.

I invite any of you to discuss the points brought up by Roger in the comments here. Also how he chose to express himself. (And not just his fear of apostrophes and capitalization.)

So, I watch with amusement as president of Brash Entertainment quits after spectacularly poor sales of its video game titles.  They only had two.  One of them, Alvin and the Chipmunks, didn’t do horrible.  It sold a quarter million units but its only other title sold only 16,000 units.

That game was Jumper:  Griffin’s Story which wasn’t, I’m afraid, very good.  In fact, looking at all the Xbox 360 games every made, it ranks 380 out of 381.  That’s right, the second worst Xbox 360 game ever made.

So, why am I amused?

Any money I got from this was up front.

and

Despite the fact that they used dialog right out of my book of the same name and, of course, this game is based on the movie which is based on my books Jumper and Reflex, there is not a single attribution to me or the books in the game and associated materials.

Second worst game in Xbox 360 history.  I’m happy my name isn’t on it.

Hey, just a quick note from Atlanta where I participated in a panel for International Reading association.  Got a cool tour of CNN.  If you were hearing voices in the background during CNN Headline News about 2:30 today, that might have been me.  We were standing 20 feet from the Anchor in the room.

“Should we be talking?” I asked?

“It’s a very tight cardioid mike, but you never know.  Sometimes you hear stuff, sometimes you don’t.”

I still whispered.

Thanks, Jim, for the tour!

Patrick Nielsen Hayden says:

But we know several things. We know that the site will use a blog-like architecture to present an ongoing stream of news, opinion, and observation from various Tor people, myself included, about the SF and fantasy events of the day—and about perhaps less-current things that are nonetheless of interest to SF and fantasy readers, such as medieval siege engines, the Van Allen Belt, hoisin sauce, XKCD, and the novels of Georgette Heyer. We know that there will be non-Tor bloggers also posting to the “front page”; in fact we’ve already recruited several in order to ensure coverage of particular niche areas. (Some of these individuals will be familiar to Making Light readers—wave hello, Bruce Baugh—and we haven’t finished recruiting, either.) We know that the site will also feature new original fiction [emphasis added] on a regular basis, illustrated under the supervision of art director Irene Gallo, and that these original stories—free of DRM, offered as part of the blog feed and also Available For Your Convenience in a variety of other formats—will have their own associated open comment threads, just like everything else on the blog. We know that there will be lightweight “social networking” features for registered users, including the ability to form mutual-interest groups through tagging and the ability to create journals and/or discussions of their own. Most of all, we know that the real point of the exercise isn’t to create yet another blog, but rather, a place and a context for the lively, ongoing, wide-ranging, and profoundly self-organizing discussions that have characterized the science fiction subculture since its earliest days. In other words, it’ll be a lot like Making Light, except with original fiction and art, more front-page bloggers, a more direct connection to SF and fantasy, and run out of the middle of Tor Books.

More here.

Should be really cool.

Unfortunately it isn’t ready yet but if you pre-register, you get regular emails with lots of cool stuff. They regularly offer DRM free e-books and glorious desktop art in multiple resolutions.

And, just sayin’, there is a brand-new, post-Reflex, Millie and Davy short story that will appear there once they get going.

Science Fiction Talk & Signing

Saturday, April 19th – 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm:

LOCAL AUTHORS STEVEN GOULD & LAURA J. MIXON TALK on “Two Writers, a Marriage, and a Movie.” Steven Gould is the author of such books as Jumper, Griffin’s Story, Blind Waves and more; while Laura J. Mixon has written Astropilots, Proxies and stories for the Wild Cards series. Together, they produced the ecological thriller Greenwar, and two daughters. They will talk about their current projects, how they maintain a family around two authors, and the impact of the recent Jumper theatrical movie on their lives. This is a free event, and Steve & Laura also will be happy to sign books.

At Title Wave Books (New Location at 1408 Eubank NE, Albuquerque in the Princess Jeanne Shopping Center at the corner of Eubank and Constitution. Phone 505-294-9495.) Map.

I went to our doctor today. (Noble Girl has an ongoing sinus infection.) I’ve known our doctor socially for a long time before she became our doctor so when I showed up with Noble Girl she said, “Speak of the Devil!”

Seems that, for the second time in a little over a month, she’s been cleaning the iguana cage and, on putting fresh newspaper in the bottom, has found my face looking up at her.

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I’ve had several requests from many of you for pictures of Laura and I dressed up for the premier. I didn’t have any from the New York Premier but Patricia Rogers just posted a flickr set with pictures from the Jack Williamson Lectureship AND the Albuquerque Jumper Premier. Here’s Laura and I:

and again:

I think Laura looks HAWT!

See the entire set here.

This was one of the (many) very nice things the Williamson lectureship did for me this last couple of days.

The projectile head up in the corner is a bronze casting of an actual Clovis point.  Having only gone to the lectureship once before, I was unaware of this really cool door prize.   I still have imposture syndrome but I also had a really good time.

June 10th.

I don’t have a Blue-Ray player but I’ll definitely spring for the two disk special edition DVD with all the commentary. And of course I’ll have a loop set up of the credits (just the part where it says, “based on the book by….”)

Click the pic for more details about the discs.

Box Office Mojo–click the pic for latest updates.

By the time Jack Williamson was my age he had published over 29 novels and over 73 short stories. He then went on, before he died, to publish almost as much again, be awarded the second ever SFWA Grand Master award and then, in this decade, win both the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell awards.

So, it is with a great deal of humility (and a severe case of imposture syndrome) that I let you know I will be Special Guest of Honor at the 32nd Williamson Lectureship at Eastern New Mexico University.

Also speaking at the lunch will be special guests Christopher Stasheff and Connie Willis. In the morning before the luncheon there will be a presentation on the physics of both the novel and movie versions of Jumper by Alberto Rojo, recent Jack Williamson Endowed Chair and associate professor of physics at Oakland University. In the afternoon there will be panels at the University Library

2:00 Tribute to Fred Saberhagen
3:00 New Directions: SF and Fantasy
4:00 PG for Violence, Action and Scary Creatures: SF and Film

At 4:00 pm on Thursday the 10th, Connie Willis, Walter Jon Williams, and I are also doing a “Young Readers and Writers” event at the Portales Public Library.

Click the pic for the official Lectureship site.