Sing, or a good example of studio interference

So, I go to more kids movies than I used to: my son is three and a half, and we've taken him to see a bunch of films in the movie theater. He sits (for the most part), and looks utterly adorable crunching a small bag of popcorn. There's been some solid kids movies that we've gone to  - Moana and Zootopia, which are a good reminder of how kids movies can be smart and entertaining. We just went to see Sing, and while it was fun, it's a good example of what not to do.

The premise of the film from the trailers: a koala named Buster Moon owns a theater that's struggling, and to try and get things back on track, he decides to hold a singing competition. A typo on the flier shows off a $100,000 prize, and a ton of animals from around the city go out to audition and take part in the competition.

This is sort of where the film goes off the rails. For a film called Sing, there's remarkably little of that. What's there is good, and funny, but the film is loaded down with a whole bunch of side plots:

• Buster is trying to get money to finance his prize, and to save his theater.
• Johnny (a Gorilla) likes to sing, but his criminal father thinks its a waste of time.
• Rosita (A pig housewife) enters because she feels unsatisfied being a housewife, and ignored by her husband.
• Meena is a shy elephant who's prodded into competing by her friends and family.
• Ash, a porcupine, is the lesser half of a singing relationship.
• Mike, a mouse, is arrogant and believes the prize is his, and gets into trouble with some Russian bears.
• There's a whole bunch of time spent on characters that don't actually do anything: one is beaned on the head and leaves early in the film, while a couple of others leave.
• Meanwhile, there's some random hijinks as Buster is trying to get the competition on its way.

There's a lot there, and it feels like a whole bunch of parts, such as Johnny's father and Mike's troubles, were stuck in there to put in some action and stakes. What it really does though, is take the stakes away from the focus of the film: saving the theater.

Spoilers: the theater isn't saved about halfway through the film: it's destroyed due to Mike's greed, and repossessed by the bank. This happens about halfway to two thirds of the way through the film. It completely takes away any dramatic tension that the film was building to: the characters were working to win a competition that was essentially a sham. The end basically turns into a singing show for the joy of singing. That's a fine goal, but not something that you should pivot to halfway through the film.

What this film lacks, and what a lot of stories don't do, is focus on the end point. There's plenty of material here for this film to work well on its own: a group of singing animals save their theater. Beginning to end, this would have been a great, heartwarming film to watch. Sing just has a ton of extra junk material injected into it. There's good parts here: Meena's story has a great ark, as dose Ash and Rosita. Johnny's story could have been accomplished with a father who was essentially a blue collar worker. Mike could have been eliminated completely.

This is frustrating to see, because it feels like the solid story was there to begin with, but was chipped away by studio notes. We didn't need a rooftop prison break chase scene here. We didn't need a subplot with Russian mafia. It feels like these parts were added late in the game, with the assumption that it wouldn't matter; it's a kid's movie. Kids like zany antics, so who cares?

Thinking about the stories that are important to me, many were ones that I consumed as a child or young adult. Many of these stories didn't talk down to me as a child: they knew what a good story was and went with it. They weren't necessarily chipped down to introduce characters for toys, or were designed essentially for marketing.

Compare this film to Moana, which came out earlier this winter. It's an excellent story that really doesn't pull punches. Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace recently wrote a good book called Creativity Inc, about Pixar's approach to storytelling (and is a great look at how Disney has taken over Pixar's ability to tell great stories - to the detriment of Pixar). What he writes boils down to: set up a solid story to start and make sure that it's the best you can make it. The visuals, characters, and acting will all follow. It's an approach that clearly works well for Moana, but it's a lesson that Sing really missed.

It's a shame, because the movie is cute and fun. It's a 'rent the movie from Redbox' rather than 'go out and experience it in a theater'.

Proxima Centauri b reality check

Proxima Centauri b: Very, very cool news, but not because it's a planet the size of Earth that's not too far away. What's really neat about this is that it's a planet that's orbiting a Red Dwarf. Red dwarfs are small and cooler than our sun, but they're the most common stars in the universe.

We now know that planets appear to be a pretty common feature around the universe, and this indicates that there could be unimaginable numbers of similar planets in existence. That's pretty exciting stuff right there: out of those numbers, there's going to be other Earth-sized planets right smack in the sweet spot where water can exist.

That's a pretty good starting point for assuming that there's life out there in the universe. Anyone who reads science fiction has probably assumed that we're not alone in the universe. When you consider the sheer number of stars out there, even a small fraction containing water-bearing planets would be an unimaginably high number. A small fraction of that containing life would be the same.

It's exciting news, but there's something interesting with how it's portrayed.

Here's a collection of headlines that have popped up throughout the day this week:

This Planet Just Outside Our Solar System Is 'Potentially Habitable' (NPR)

Discovery of potentially Earth-like planet Proxima b raises hopes for life (Guardian)

Possibly habitable planet found orbiting nearest star (CBS)

A planet orbits around the closest star to our Solar System — and it may be habitable (The Verge)

New neighbor: Scientists discover closest habitable exoplanet (Fox News)

You can see the common point in all of these: Proxima Centauri b does appear to be in the habitable zone of its host star, but that's not to say that Proxima Centauri b is Earth-like, habitable and ready for us to move in.What scientists discovered was a planet that appears to be about the size of Earth, in the habitable zone. But, there's a lot that actually makes a planet habitable. Venus is a planet that's almost exactly the same size as Earth. It's a bit too close to our sun, but it's the atmosphere that really makes it a nasty place to live. It's thick, has lots of pressure and acid. Every spacecraft we've dropped to the surface have melted in a matter of minutes. (We could live in the atmosphere, if we wanted to try some floating cities).

My friend Andria Schwortz pointed out that even if it's Earth-sized, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a rocky planet like Earth: we literally only know the planet's mass and orbit. It could be a gas planet. It could be a rocky planet without an atmosphere. It could also be an Earth-like planet with an atmosphere and liquid water.

Atmospheres are important, because they help regulate temperatures on the surface, whether or not there's liquid water, and so forth. Earth-sized doesn't necessarily equal habitable for humans. There's a long distance from the right size all the way up to habitable. The atmosphere needs to be right (which means nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, etc), the right pressure, the right temperatures, and so forth.

Our environment is the product of billions of years of life and some external factors. There's also Earth's plate tectonics and its moon, which could have aided life. There's also Earth's magnetic field, which helps protect the surface from radiation from our Sun. Life is complicated. Our Moon and some of the outer planets are responsible from shielding Earth from devastating asteroid impacts. There were lots of points along the way that made our existence pretty spectacular. The sheer number of planets make the difficulty of life coming through certainly possible.

Also, we're probably not going to set people down here. It's four light years away, which means it would take just under two hundred thousand years to reach this system with our conventional technology, or about the same length of time humanity has existed. These are unimaginably large distances. If we can boost our way up to a sizable fraction of lightspeed, we're still talking about hundreds of years in transit.

So, despite headlines, we're probably not talking about habitable worlds here.

It's certainly closer to Earth than we expected, and around a star type that's incredibly common. That's a good place to start. Four light years means that Proxima Centauri b is going to be really easy to look at and study. Hopefully, it'll provide new imaging and observational techniques, provide some insight into what other solar systems look like and who knows? Maybe a planet that's relatively close that could support some form of life.

Armada Is Fucking Terrible

Ernie Cline's novel Armada dropped last week with an enormous publicity campaign that's sure to get this book selling exceptionally well. Cline has been riding high on his debut novel, Ready Player One, an Easter-egg infused novel that hit the nerd sweet spot with a hefty dose of references and nostalgia. The problem with Armada is that it's absolutely, fucking terrible.

The plot is basic. A spacecraft drops by the school of one high school gamer, Zack Lightman, and tells him what absolutely every gamer wants to hear: Aliens are about to attack Earth and a secret military organization has shepherded video games, movies, novels and television shows to help attune humanity into fighting back against the alien invaders. On top of all that, Lightman's one of the top gamers in the world, and that because of his scores in Armada, he's one of the last best hopes for humanity. He's brought to a secret base on the Moon, where he meets his long-lost (and presumed dead) father, who's helping to oversee the counter attack.

I enjoyed Ready Player One quite a bit: it was a fun read that had some neat recursive things going for it: it was a book about a video game that relied on the tropes and conventions of real-world video game history, and it worked well enough. Armada is a pretty far cry away from this, going through a story that's essentially a rehash of Ender's Game and The Last Starfighter. Hardly a sentence goes by without Cline dropping a reference to something from the 1980s, and as it becomes more cringe-worthy, it feels as though Cline is simply stuck in the past, unable or unwilling to grow beyond geek-man-child stage and reenter the present.

This bothers me a great deal. The decade was responsible for an incredible surge of creative properties, but it isn't the only decade when it comes to science fiction or fantasy; you'd never guess it from the endless references. Geeks have always been interested in shibboleth, sorting out who belongs and who doesn't in nerd circles. Cline, throughout Ready Player One and Armada, drops references to everything from films to television to games to the occasional novel, and seems to be establishing a sort of precedent: if you don't recognize these sacred tomes, you don't belong. If you haven't put in the hours that Zack Lightman and Wade Watts have in establishing their own geek cred, you're not a 'true' geek worthy of the title.

There's been a bunch of stories that have been incredibly popular that seem to do this sort of listing: Cline's novels, for one, but also shows such as The Big Bang Theory, is essentially lightly-improvised lines of dialogue strung together with a whole bunch of 'in the know' references to any number of geek things. The obsession with checking off the boxes and making a set of qualifications to weed out outsiders isn't anything new to the science fiction or fantasy circles, but it's tiring to see after such a long history.

There's the story of a geek guy meeting a geek girl, where he interrupts her when she expresses an interest in Star Wars or Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica and interrogates her on the minutia of the world. I've seen it happen before (hell, I've probably done it myself), and it's just flat out not good for any sort of community. There's the personal stories of that one lone geek at high school who gets picked on or slammed into a locker for carrying around a Star Wars novel, D&D Manual or Magic: The Gathering Cards, and how the stories that they read carried them through those dark times. Never mind that High School isn't some sort of fantasy quest to be metaphorically endured, I sometimes wonder about the widespread validity of those stories, or if it’s just a story that we tell ourselves as part of our collective nerd mythology. As books like this and shows such as The Big Bang Theory have demonstrated (not to mention my hometown, where you can spot shirts of Superman, Flash and Green Lantern on the local rednecks) Geek stories appeal to just about everyone, especially now. I think it says more about the high school kid with problems getting along with his classmates and less to do with the kid who blew through Ender's Game for the tenth time.

Within this archetype story, we always complain that we wished that there were more people who were into Star Wars, D&D and McCaffrey's Pern novels, but when it comes to the end of the day, we seem to filter out the people who we don't perceive as being good enough, unless their interests and backgrounds line up perfectly with our own. I've seen many people get worked up over the quality of other costumers at conventions and how they've only jumped on some sort of bandwagon because science fiction and fantasy movies dominate the box office.

Some people might be attracted to it because it's popular and because they saw a film/book/game that looked cool with plenty of people watching/reading/playing it. But so what? Why do you need to be born in the mid-1970s to properly appreciate standing in line for Star Wars or ET? Are you really less of a fan of The Lord of the Rings if you saw the films in the theaters and rushed to the store to pick up the books because you enjoyed it so much? Personally, I want as many people as possible to read/watch/enjoy science fiction and fantasy, so that we can have a richer community of fellow nerds.

This isn't a good book on a story side, by any stretch of the imagination. Where Ready Player One was entertaining and goofy, this just got tedious and annoying to read. The references had a point in the story - it was a hunt for Easter eggs. Here, they're just annoying and don't really serve any point other than to establish, over and over again, that Lightman (read: Cline) is a nerdy kid. We get that from the first couple of pages. Armada feels very much like Cline trying to find some way to make a nerdy adolescent existence mean something greater than it really is. But in doing so, he sets out to define what exactly a geek is, and that vision is limited only to the references he lists off, which is a pretty limiting list of things: science fiction / fantasy did some pretty cool things in the 1990s/2000s, but you would hardly guess it from what Cline/His characters list off.

I really despise this manufactured image of a geek-man-child and related stories, as much as I'm made uncomfortable by the people who rush to fill the role. Armada is a book that rushes to fill that role, and in doing so, it ignores just about everything that makes a book readable: likable characters, a plot that makes sense (seriously, the ending is a pretty spectacular failure), and good supporting characters and elements that support the story rather than prop it up. When it isn't cringe-worthy to read, it's Picard-facepalm worthy when it comes to actually being a good story. Any novel that ends with (SPOILERS) something completely out of left field along the lines of 'and then the aliens came and cured cancer, entered us into an intergalactic hegemony and then everyone lived happily ever after the end', you've got a serious fucking problem. Maybe Cline is doing something more clever - subverting the tropes of video games to pull out a satirical work of fiction that makes us think differently about the genre. If that's the case, you'd never guess under the weight of its failure of characters and story.

This is wish-fulfillment fiction, through and through, from the situation Lightman finds himself in to the few constructed, idealized women who appear in the book. Wish fulfillment isn't necessarily bad: what person playing a video game hasn't wanted to save the world? But how many people use it to define their existence? Lightman, in saving the world, has his many hours validated. He even puts in a scene at the end where his accomplishments are acknowledged by the high school bully who beat up on him!

Armada would work perfectly if there was some recursive thing about it that made all the references make sense. There's been plenty of books / movies like this that went heavy on the nostalgia: John Scalzi's Redshirts comes to mind, along with Austin Grossman's fantastic novel You or even movies like Galaxy Quest. But the thing that made those books / movies excellent aren’t in Armada: it's just an annoying, tedious read that made me want to throw the book across the room when I finished it.

Republican Labels Star Wars Day as Wasteful Spending

Generally, the 501st Legion steers clear of politics. We're not supposed to appear with political candidates or generally deviate from a charitable + costume-styled mission, but there's points where we simply can't avoid it.

The New England Garrison made an appearance in Senator Tom Coburn's annual Waste Book, a publication that points out what he considers wasteful spending. The document can be found here, and on page 84, at #52, there's an entry titled 'Return of the Jedi - (MA) $365, you'll see members of the New England Garrison and Alderaan Base, from when we trooped at the Abington Public Library's Star Wars Day. Our folks had a good time, and apparently the library's patrons did as well.

The document goes on to say the following:

The Star Wars Day event, held at the Abington Public Library in Massachusetts, was paid for with $365 in federal funds, part of an $11,700 grant provided by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The Star Wars franchise has grossed over $4.5 billion over the past 35 years, so taxpayers may wonder why the government is subsidizing fan events for one of the most popular and successful movie series in the universe.

It's enough to make my blood boil.

What immediately strikes me is just how misleading this entry is, or at the very least, the second paragraph. While it's true that the films have grossed more than 4.5 billion listed, there's no direct connection between Lucasfilm Limited and the library, or us, for that matter. We're an organization that LFL works with, but we're not employees. Moreover, this works to imply that the $365 (which compared to the national budget / debt is a microscopic part) that was paid went to LFL or us to pad the bottom line. You want to know what the money was probably used for?

The librarian on staff who's position is funded through grants. At $15 an hour, that's 24 hours, less than a full work week, and far less time than what was probably required to put together the event.

I didn't work with this particular event, but I did work with another library event here in Vermont, where we worked to support the Star Wars club at the Brownell Library in Essex Junction. The grant that supplied a librarian to run the club had actually been cut, and we were there to help support that club. In all, we raised $290, which helped keep the librarian there for the rest of the year.

What bothers me the most is how absolutely clueless this entry appears, given the problems that the nation face, and it's not this enormous debt, and it's not that it's completely off mark, but that whoever placed the entry had absolutely no idea what something like this does. It's not a miniature Celebration, where fanboys can bask in the glory of Lucas's franchise: it's designed to get kids into the public library, where they can see, touch, and interact with all of the resources that are at hand for free to the general public. Libraries are the civilized world's most crucial institutions, not just for the books that they hold, but for their center in the community, for the expertise that their staffs provide, and for the multiplier effect that they can have on one's education. This sort of investment from the federal government is something that can do what is most important: assist in the education and self-betterment of our peers. Now, as the country is slowly inching along in its recovery, this is the type of institution that is evermore valuable, and evermore threatened. The Library Foundation of Hennepin County reported that in the 2002 recession, library circulation jumped 11.3%.

Looking long-term, we consistently hear arguments that the American child is falling behind relatively to their peers around the world, with the public school system often coming under fire for a poor education that public school children seem to be receiving. Those arguments aside for the moment, it's a tiny snapshot of the resources that schools and libraries are pushed to go to. Without additional funding that host communities can't provide, these important institutions simply cannot exist, and with them, any hope for sustained, meaningful economic recovery.

The Star Wars day that's come under fire here is inconsequential, but it's an important insight into how divided we are from the situation on the ground. This congressional member has likely never visited the library, or seen just how federal dollars are used, and what the direct impact on their constituents are. At the same time, the word 'Military' shows up three times. 'Army', 14 times, but most of those are in the footnotes. 'Navy'? 23 times, with a couple of good points about military readiness, but also attacking a kid's program about space and Mars. 'Marines' doesn't show up at all, all institutions that eat enormous quantities of money. I will note, I'm not against military spending, but somewhere in the $1.030–$1.415 trillion, $11,000 was lost in someone's couch cushions. I would argue, as Fermilab physicist Robert Wilson did in 1969, when questioned about the practical security value of a collider: "If only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture... it has to do with , as we good painters, sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about ... it has nothing to do directly with defending our country, except to make it worth defending. " (Rocket Men: The epic story of the first men on the moon, Craig Nelson, p.x) I don't mean to imply that there's an argument being made here that the same money should be put strictly to defense, but I don't believe that this country should be on a path of bare bones financing, at the expense of the American public.

The elimination of this single event at this single library would be inconsequential in the greater scheme of things. But when you eliminate (or suggest to eliminate one), here, and another there, soon, there's nothing left.

Again, I didn't attend this event, but at the one that I did attend, I was greeted behind my helmet by over a hundred patrons: kids, parents and fans, all excited and all of them in the library. I saw a lot of children with books. Reading is an incredibly important skill for the modern world, and everywhere I look, I see evidence that this is something that's far less valued as a whole, when it should be the most important thing that a child learns to love. Reading opens the doors to worlds previously closed to us, and allows for the creation of an innovative, creative generation that will spur this country to great heights, or down to dangerous depths from which we have little hope of escaping in the same amount of time.

It bothers me that the reality on the ground differs so much from the story that's been concocted by a disinterested party, hellbent on their mission (which certainly has its merits) to the expense of all other concerns that come up along the way. It's the programs like this, that build the country, little by little, into what makes it a great nation.

I for one am proud of what the 501st has done to support such events. This summer, we were inundated with over a hundred requests from libraries across New England for similar events, and I fervently hope that we will have twice as many next year.

EDIT, 10/23 3:20PM: NPR has a great post up on the reading habits of younger generations, and surprisingly, it's not just ebooks and internet things, it's regular, dead tree books and libraries. Read it here.

Barnes and Noble, No!

Since college, I've been using Amazon.com to buy a lot of books. Typically, I hit up the used sections first, where I can generally find decent products for quite a bit cheaper, but generally, for high quality books. In general, I would hit up some of the local bookstores in Montpelier (although now, in Barre, I'm left with far fewer options), Barnes and Noble in Burlington and a bunch of places in between. Amazon, however, has been causing problems for the independent and brick and mortar bookstore scene, and I figured that it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to start doing some of my online shopping somewhere else, at least for new books. So, with a new X-Wing novel coming out, (Mercy Kill by Aaron Allston) I went to Barnes and Noble's website, pre-ordered the book, and sat back to wait. Happily, there's the option to pay with PayPal, which would help me break my habit of ordering from Amazon, which already has my credit card information, and makes the impulse buys all that much more easy. Release day rolls around, and ... no book. Checking the website, I find that it hadn't shipped yet, which is weird, because I had ordered the book last month - plenty of time to get the book out to me within the lower shipping level that I selected.

Last night, I received an e-mail from Barnes and Noble:

Dear Andrew L ,

We want to give you an update about the pre-ordered item(s) listed below. Unfortunately, we just got word that the release date for this item(s) has been changed. We expect to ship the item(s) soon and will email you when it is ready to leave our warehouse. If we cannot acquire the item(s) within 30 days, we will notify you by email.

However, if you would like to cancel this portion of your order, you may do so online at: ...

We are working to fulfill the rest of your order as quickly as possible. Because we value you as a customer, we are sending the items that are currently available in your order now at no additional cost to you. Thanks for your patience.

Please accept our sincere apologies for the delay.

-- Barnes & Noble

Well, for one, the book's release date hadn't changed: Amazon still lists it as August 7th, as does Barnes and Noble. More importantly, Random House, the book's publisher, lists it as August 7th. Weird. I really want to read this book, so I go ahead and follow the directions to cancel the order. If Barnes and Noble isn’t going to ship it to me, I might as well go back to Amazon, who I know will.

Amazon sends me an automated book ordered e-mail, and because I ordered it directly from them, rather than from a 3rd Party, I'm pretty sure it'll ship out ASAP. Barnes and Noble sends me another note:

Dear Andrew L,

We have received your request to cancel your order #.

We regret that we are unable to complete your request because your order has entered the shipping process or has already shipped. We apologize for any inconvenience.

If you wish to return this item, you may return your purchase for a refund within 14 days of delivery by following the instructions we included in your package.

For more information regarding returns please click ...

...

So, which is it? Delayed, or in the shipping process? Barnes and Noble, I followed your directions, and you're not able to go through with even that? Color me unimpressed. So, Amazon's order is cancelled, and I'm simply going to have to wait for this to arrive on my doorstep later than expected.

There's more to my indignation here than entitled fanboy demands: it goes to show just why Amazon has been doing so well with the online market, and why Barnes and Noble has not been doing well. To be fair, if I'd gone up to Burlington's B&N outlet, I'm reasonably sure that I would have been able to pick up the book off the shelf - Star Wars new releases tended to be pretty high profile in the bookselling world, at least when I worked at Borders. But, Burlington's a good 45 minutes up the road from me, and I don't typically go up there unless I'm doing several things to make the trip worthwhile. I doubt that the local bookstore, Next Chapter, has anything in stock, with such a small SF/F selection.

What bothers me the most is that Barnes and Noble has had time to perfect their customer supply chain and management. Working at a bookstore during and after college demonstrated some of the principles of how CSM policy worked, and working at a college with a real start up / business flair demonstrated how it was essential for retaining business. What Barnes and Noble is doing is not great. It's not the worst that I've seen, but it's left me deflated and disappointed that I don't have a book that I was really looking forward to reading. On one hand, it's a good lesson in patience, and another opportunity to turn to another book. On the bookseller / CMS level, it's a customer who took (well, tried) their money somewhere else that was faster, more reliable, and most importantly, happy to take their money.

What bothers me the most is the disconnect between their messaging. Following their directions, I wasn't able to cancel the order as I'd tried to do: attempting to do so providing me with a completely contrary message, which suggests that there's a disconnect somewhere in their system. As of writing this, the book is still listed as pending shipment, and for all I know, it could be waiting for me at home or two weeks away. It’s troubling, because my confidence in their ability to actually do what they’re supposed to do: take my money and put a book in my hands.

The problem that this has revealed is an issue with automated systems. In an ideal world, Barnes and Noble would use their physical stores as their greatest asset: when an online order goes out, their system routes the order to the nearest store to your location, and has them fill the order, dropping it in the mail from their store location. This saves time for the buyer, but more importantly, a real, live person puts the order together and drops it in the mail. In a world increasingly filled with automated systems, people in the loop are incredibly important, because they can do what machines can not: recognize and solve a problem that is unexpected. Any bookseller who paid attention could find that this wasn't a problem, and act accordingly.

This element is crucial to Barnes and Noble's successes as a book retailer. Borders certainly failed to act as a good customer service company: their policy of twisting their customer's arms to buy selected books was one of many reasons why Barnes and Noble is still standing. Amazon has proven that it is far superior when handling automated orders: their supply chain is nothing short of remarkable, and it's going to serve them well into the future. Barnes and Noble's key strength is a physical location, and they would do well to keep people in the loop when it comes to their day to day operations.

When it comes to comparing Amazon to the thousands of booksellers across the country, there's almost no doubt in whom I'd want to buy from: the physical retail stores, from a bookseller who knows what they're doing. The face to face interaction with an employee, even when I don't need their help, is a key part of the buying experience that Amazon.com simply cannot replicate. The recommended titles are simply based off of similar data profiles from customers, going up against a bookseller who can tell you whether or not the book that you're looking for is something worth buying - I know that I've made the case and sold books that I felt invested in. What Barnes and Noble should do is carry this same thinking over to their online world, bringing someone into the loop.

But first, they need to send me my book! In the meantime, I’m going to attempt to learn a valuable lesson in patience, and read something else in the meantime.

Captain America & World War II

The best part of the latest Marvel film, Captain America, is the end credits. Bold propaganda posters with bright, 1940s colors, jumping out of the screen in the best display of three dimensions in the entire film, the credits capture everything that’s to know about the entire film. Fun, splashy, with more than a little propaganda splashed in there somewhere, it’s everything that America remembers broadly about the Second World War: a classic fight against unmentionable evil, where the good guys win in the end.

Captain America as a superhero film felt like a mixed product for me. One part advance marketing for the 2012 Avengers film, helmed by Joss Whedon, another part superhero origin story and the last bit war film. On the whole, it’s a fun ride: Chris Evans is spectacular as the titular character in Red, White and Blue, with one of the better origin stories set to celluloid (or gigabyte as it were), up there with the original Spiderman and Iron Man films. Yet despite that, the film is torn between missions, and fell pretty far from my expectations, which surprised me, given the praise that the film has garnered from a lot of outlets that I generally trust.

One of the film’s strongest and weakest points was its setting of the Second World War. It’s a fantastic place to place a superhero origin, given the near supernatural nature of the war itself, not to mention accurate to the character’s origins. World War II has taken on a mythological status within the United States, as it’s arguably the one point where the country displayed its absolute best, and absolute worst (necessarily – I’m not being revisionist!).

The movie is good – great even – when we’re introduced to a scrawny Steve Rodgers getting booted from his physical, and given the opportunity to prove himself with some medical experimentation that turns him into the only super soldier that the United States is able to create. Johnson sets up a good arc for Rogers as he’s selected not for his physical strength, but for his purely American character of being a well rounded individual: good of heart, smart, resourceful, all traits that live up to a supposed ideal American that the modern right wing would point to. It’s an admirable goal, to be sure: Steve’s a nice guy, and he saves the entire Eastern seaboard, but it’s a simple vision for how the United States and her allies collided with the Axis powers in Europe. (Japan is barely referenced.) The film builds as Rogers is put onto promotional detail, and it’s not until he reaches the front that he realizes his full potential as a soldier. Once there, he gets one awesome costume / uniform that I love.

It’s the wartime action part of the film that drags the film down. Full of tired action scenes with the all-token American team, the film never really materializes as any type of war film: it’s a collection of sequences against a faceless (literally!) enemy who serves as a stand-in for the Nazi and German soldiers on the front lines of the war. Part of this is from the fact that this is a comic book film in a bizzaro Marvel universe, but I can’t think that the reasons for why we didn’t see Nazis in the films: The Hydra soldiers could have hardly beat out the SS troops as ridiculously cartoonish in and of themselves, and there’s an incredible opportunity missed here when looking to set up a story of American good vs. evil. The action scenes feel as if they’re there for their own sake, penciled in by the screenwriters because they couldn’t be bothered to pick up a Stephen Ambrose story, or any one of the other millions of tomes released in the last decade about the Second World War. As a whole? It’s also pretty boring: Cap hits people with his shield, bounces around Europe to take out the Hydra baddies, and jumps over things on his motorcycle.

In a way, this feels very much as how the United States sees and views the Second World War: we know the basics: the US was attacked, went overseas to far-off battlefields against an enemy who displayed a real disregard for any type of human dignity (not that there’s much in war to begin with, but there’s certainly a line drawn at human experimentation and outright murder), where we won by the strength of our soldiers with a moral imperative to win the war. Rogers / Captain America certainly fit this bill to a T.

My argument here is that it’s just too simple, much as Captain America is, and that the film is basically a reflection of our own understanding and our collective desire to understand the war. The United States faced an enemy that really outgunned and out trained our soldiers for years on the battlefield, bound by a strong nationalistic sense of duty that bordered on fanatical in some instances. The United States largely won the war by outsupplying their armies, slowly improving the training and equipment of our GIs and keeping to a strategy that outmaneuvered the Axis powers, rather than simply outfighting them at every turn by our own prowess, strength and will to fight. This in and of itself is a bit of a simplification, but the study of World War II is akin to a complicated onion, with layers upon layers: it was truly a global war, with innumerable facets.

The Superhero archetype that Captain America displays is something that we commonly believe as a country: it’s a nice narrative, and in a way, Captain America is us, or at least, the parts that we really want to see. The conflict set up between him and Red Skull is horribly underplayed: all things equal, the only differences between the two men are their inner natures: Captain America is good, Red Skull is evil, and it’s a fight that’s set up with some real promise, but ultimately never goes anywhere meaningful, beyond action sequences. Not that the film needed much more than that: it’s designed as a fun action film, so this works, but other Marvel films such as Iron Man really demonstrated that a strong character film is possible: Iron Man succeeded wildly as a story of a self-examination and role within the nation’s character. Captain America never quite does this, although it does a far better job at it than Superman, another type of national hero, does.

Finally, I’m personally tired of the Avengers crossover that seems to be bleeding into every film. Before, we just had to content with the trailers as the beginning of the film: now, they’re in the movies themselves, and while I’m just as excited to see everything next year, I hate the amount of pandering that Marvel is displaying for the film: there’s connections to Iron Man and Thor here in this film, and for someone who hasn’t seen every film, it doesn’t feel so much like connecting stories as trying to bleed the audience dry. The film also hints rather overtly that the next main storyline will be the Winter Soldier run, with the (spoiler!) off-stage death of Bucky.

Captain America is a fun film, but it’s no Iron Man. Well acted (Chris Evans is a superb Captain America and Tommy Lee Jones has some fantastic comedic moments throughout, as well as some of the supporting cast) at points, but the film’s unable to really capitalize on the 2nd World War beyond turning it into one giant series of action sequences that does little to move the characters forward, or even make the audience care about them. The real shame is that I’ve seen people point to this as the ultimate sort of patriotic film, which annoys me because it’s not much more than a regular run of the mill summer blockbuster, just wrapped up in the flag.

Like the end credits, it's propaganda, a self-fulfilling mythos that we perpetuate ourselves to remind us of how great we are. That bothers me, a great deal. Still, it’s fun to see quasi-Nazis get hit in the face with a red, white and blue shield. That never gets old.

I love and hate Genre Arguments

Do you want to read my 2nd person, post-modern, colonial YA alt-noir post-cyberpunk, apocalyptic futuristic novel where virtual reality steampunk zombies battle in a biopunked militaristic dystopian world with elements of space opera crossed with pre-singularity, post-slipstream hard horror science fiction while contrasting alternate reality world views with a magical realistic vampire-inhabited sword & sorcery, non-western utopian fantasy past?

NO!

Open letter to US Airways

Dear US Airways, I wanted to register a complaint with the level of service that I received for a business trip overseas between May 19th and May 27th. I’ve never had any major issues with flights in the years that I’ve flown with a variety of airlines, but upon each step of the way, I was met with inadequate, unprofessional and poor customer service and organization from your airline, which seriously impacted the trip that I undertook, and ended up costing money that I had not budgeted out for the trip, necessitating several discussions with my bank, landlord and employer, which comes as a serious embarrassment to myself and how I am perceived professionally. I have hoped that in the days since my trip, I would have found some explanation for what I’ve come up against, but I’ve failed to do so: I remain exceedingly angry.

Some of these problems are ones that are excusable due to weather and other extreme problems that cannot be predicted or easily worked around: every step along the way, the people placed into the positions on the ground were the problem.

My first flight was from Manchester’s airport (MHT) to Philadelphia (PHL), on US Airways Flight 3988 on May 19. I arrived at the airport in plenty of time, and waited for boarding, when we were told that the flight was delayed due to an airport closing due to severe weather. The personnel in Manchester were by far the most helpful of the entire trip – they were unable to get a flight into Philadelphia, but they were able to get a flight from Boston to Philadelphia the next day. I missed the next leg from Philadelphia, flight 750, that day. (I believe that it was delayed for the night.) Already, I have missed a day that had been booked at the hotel where I had been booked, which was not recoverable from the hotel.

On May 20, I was forced to arrange three separate car rides from people who generously took time from their day to get me from person to person, and I arrived at the airport on time for the next flight from Boston to Manchester. (The flight is not on my itinerary, and I don’t remember the number – I’m sure that I’m in your records.). I was bumped up from the afternoon flight to the mid-morning flight, and arrived in Philadelphia with no issues.

The afternoon flight from PHL to BRU (Brussels) arrived late, and was further delayed from Philadelphia – US Airways flight 750. The flight itself was comfortable, but a rearrangement of seating meant that the entire airplane had to be reseated, and my ticket didn’t have a seat listed – there was a considerable wait to rebook the flight and to get seats, which caused further frustration amongst my fellow passengers. Here, there was little direction or announcement in the terminal, and had I not asked, I would not have known until the last minute that there would have been an issue. Because of the delay in the aircraft, I missed the last shuttle to my hotel, and I was required to hire a car to get from the airport to the hotel, further cutting into the money that I had budgeted for the trip. I had hoped that I would be away from further problems with flights.

On May 26, for my return, I arrived at the airport early, went through security and arrived in time for projected boarding of my flight. Again, there was little direction broadcast to the passengers in the terminal: orders for boarding by Zone, which resulted in a long line of people unsure of where to go, as many were still getting out of security and had missed the original announcements: Again, had I not asked, I would not have found out what to do. Flight 751 was supposed to take off at 10:45, but several hours later, the flight was still boarding, and a problem had been discovered with the fuel, and there was a considerable amount of time spent waiting for the final checks. We were soon ordered off the plane and to return a short time later, as a part was being replaced. Several additional announcements were made throughout the afternoon as to the status of the airplane, and by 3:30 or so, we were permitted to reboard: we did so in ten minutes, with the understanding that if the plane did not push off at 4:10 in the afternoon, the crew would be grounded. 4:10 came and went, and we were once again ordered off the plane. Many wondered why there was such a delay in getting the passengers onboard and with the crew’s readiness at the same time: it seemed like a poor use of time. I would have happily sat on the plane for extra time (if we’d been seated earlier) to accommodate the crew. Indeed, we were not even informed that the flight would not take off: we saw the 1st class passengers getting up to leave. The aircraft staff were extremely unhelpful.

From this point on, I found the biggest failures in your organization: there was absolutely no direction from the flight crew and US Airways airport staff as to what the next steps were. We were told to report to the desk. There were no instructions for baggage, and a number of people waited at the carousel for bags that simply didn’t come. The contractor in charge of the bags informed me that I had to check out with the US Airways desk, and that I would be able to collect the bags afterwards, a half-hour later. Moving upstairs, we came across a line that was four hours long. By the time that I had gotten off the airplane and through the line, I had spent 5 hours – 5 HOURS – waiting for more information. I did not know if I would be able to get a place to stay for the night, when my next flight would take off and what to do next. A fellow passenger in line, Eric Stoltz, found that his bags (he was moving back to the US, and had 6) were left unguarded and unsecured downstairs, and I retrieved mine, quickly. Anybody could have walked into the room and picked up what was mine. This was unacceptable.

After four hours in line, around 9:30, we were given vouchers for a nearby hotel, and caught the last shuttle to the hotel, hoping to get dinner before their restaurant closed for the night. If they had not held their doors open, we would not have eaten at all.

The next morning, more problems surfaced. I arrived with my fellow passengers the next morning, we were again confronted with a multiple hour line as the computer system was down, and we were left waiting, once again, with no explanation as to the delay. I heard passengers yelling, and there was a lot of frustration on our part. Getting through line and through security, the flight was once again delayed from 10am to 1pm, where we were informed that the aircraft had undergone further repairs. We had been under the impression that the flight had been fixed, and that the flight would be safe: my faith in the mechanical abilities of the aircraft was now shaken: if the crew had claimed that the plane was safe to fly last night, why had they continued repairs, and were their claims honest the second time around? The flight did indeed take off, but with a revised landing time: 3:30, when my next, rescheduled flight would be boarding. I would still have to go through security, immigration and put my bags through, then go from A to F terminal. The staff on the airplane were once again extremely unhelpful, and did not put my mind to ease when I asked them what to do next: I was essentially told that I would miss my flight and that I’d have to be bumped again. Given that we landed at 3:00 and that I’d gotten out of security by around 3:30, I most likely could have made my flight.

Getting off the plane, we came across a table with people who had missed connections. Once again, there was no indication of this from our flight crew, and people easily could have missed it. When Flight 751 landed, two people manned the desk, and displayed the more inappropriate and rude behavior that I’ve seen all trip. They shouted at the passengers, were incredibly rude to myself, and according to my fellow passenger Erik, slapped his hand away when he saw his name. This is unacceptable for an organization that interfaces with customers. I was shocked, and stunned, that after the past couple of days, we could come up across something like this. I can understand shouting to be heard over noise, but this was different altogether: these two individuals were rude and abrasive, and should be fired.

Indeed, I had also been bumped from my flight, from the 4:00 to Manchester to the 6:15. I went through security and passport control and waited for my flight – we were bumped to another gate, and by our boarding time of 5:45, our flight crew had not shown up, although the person at the desk informed us that they were in the building. Our flight was to depart at 6:15, and our pilot and crew only showed up at that point, where we had to wait further for them to prep the cabin. We boarded, and had to wait 20 spaces on the tarmac for our turn to take off. This normally wouldn’t have been a problem, but our plane had been turned off, and until we were in the air, we were told, the air conditioning would be ineffective – it was 80-90 degrees outside, and extremely warm. The flight attendant did hand out water, but came very close to running out. By the time that we had taken off, we were already extremely late, and landed in Manchester around 8 or shortly thereafter. On top of all this, my ride, who had been watching the website for updates, noted that the flight was still registered as not having taken off by the time we landed, and I had to wait for them to pick me up – they were embarrassed to have left me hanging.

In short, I held boarding passes for nine flights: every single one was cancelled, delayed or changed, with considerable problems along the way. Why, in Brussels, did we have to wait by an entire row of empty consoles to reach a desk that was staffed by two people for over 200 passengers. Why were we not given clear instructions on where to go, and why does there appear to be no contingency plan for unexpected problems such as these on your part, causing a major disruption in the plans for your customers? I hold a customer service-oriented job, and had I caused a comparable problem in my own company, I would have been fired. Why were your personnel in Philadelphia, greeting Flight 751, so abusive and rude to us? Why does it appear that your company has such a low expectation of your customers that you treat them as such? I sincerely want answers to these questions, so that I can understand what I went through over the course of my travels with your company. I have trouble imagining that I will ever willingly fly US Airways again, because of this experience, and I believe that I am either owed an explanation or my money back for the work time that I missed, and the money that I had to expend above and beyond what was budgeted. I certainly did not receive the value that I expected – and have received, from your competitors – indeed, I did not get what I paid for, as I was not delivered to either Brussels nor Manchester on time. I expect some problems when it comes to air travel, but not to this magnitude.

Please let me know if you have any questions. I look forward to your e-mail and explanations.

Sincerely,

Andrew Liptak

Watson

A lot seems to get lost in the minutiae when it comes to science fiction and fantasy: we were supposed to have flying cars, disregarding that most people can't drive when limited to two dimensions, space exploration will be our salvation, despite the fact that our odds of reproducing and successfully colonizing anything outside of Earth is extremely limited at the present moment, and that when robots and computer systems can best a human, it's the beginning of the end of humanity.

I've been thinking of this since I read Ted Chiang's novella, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, dealing with the education and development of a viable A.I., and the complexities that arise when putting together such a thing. Chiang rejects the notion that a computer that's rigidly programmed will automatically produce a superior being: rather, intelligence is far more complex, and anything that is truly intelligent in the same way that we are could potentially come about in the same ways that people can.

Why all the fuss about Watson? It's an interesting programming trick, to be sure, but hardly the end of humanity as we know it. One of the books that I've been fascinated by over the last couple of years is P.W. Singer's Wired for War, which examines the development of robotic combat systems, a science fiction concept in and of itself. Every time a new type of robot is deployed, the internet inevitably shits itself predicting that Terminator is right around the corner, and that it's time to start stocking up on canned goods for when the robotic rebellion comes barreling down on our squishy, organic heads.

The future is rarely as predicted: look at the accuracy of weathermen. Within science fiction, we take far too much that's designed for entertainment as gospel, and very rarely will a science fiction film actually see some realistic predictions. 2001: A Space Odyssey missed by a long shot (we were supposed to have habitable moon bases), Terminator predicted our demise years ago, and Minority Report, one of the only films that seems to have gotten a lot of things right, overestimated things by half a decade: we've got our motion controlled computers, except that it's in gaming consoles.

The pace of technology doesn't live or die by our expectations of entertainment and wonder: indeed, the truly visionary science fiction films understand that our surroundings are build around how we will use things. Moon's director, Duncan Jones, noted that when building the sets and equipment for his film, they wanted to make sure that the designers built it with practicality in mind. Steven Spielberg gathered a bunch of technology experts into a think tank for the world-building of Minority Report.

To date, we don't have servant androids, daily moon flights or Zeppelins, for the simple reason that there's either no practical daily use for such things, or there's a better alternative. True, robots do exist in people's homes, in the form of iRobot's Roomba, but these aren't multiple-purpose devices: they exist to fill a certain function. I wouldn't trust it (as much as I'd like to) to cook me dinner, fetch the mail or put away things out of order, simply because I can do those things myself, and at a far less cost than such a thing would run me otherwise. Commonplace spaceflight, while on the brink of actually happening to the general (if wealthy) public, is not for business or industry, but entertainment, simply because we haven't found any other way to make it profitable for investors, while airplanes can do everything that an airship can faster and cheaper, because the infrastructure and needs of the economic world are in place for it.

At the same time, the things that are the most science fictional in our world go almost unnoticed, either because they aren't dramatic in any particular way: the number of computers and electronics in an automobile, for example, to the tablet computer that I'm typing this on. Take anything from the modern day and transplant it into the golden age of science fiction, it would most likely shock the world. Even things like Amazon.com, Facebook and Twitter fall under these categories, developed in response to how people interact and use the internet: technology has an almost organic development, changing in response to other, prior changes that pave the way for own existence. Twitter, for example, most likely never would have existed but for the happy coincidence of the prevalence of text messaging and Facebook's own introduction of status updates. Amazon.com was an outgrowth of business's ability to consolidate and the introduction of wide-spread internet use. When looking at the future, it's often the really little things, rather than the dramatic, that define our lives.  There are exceptions to this: major terrorist attacks such as on September 11th radically changed things in a lot of ways: most likely, some technologies and political or business environments would have altered how things went, much like the industrial boom that was sparked by the Second World War changed America's stance amongst the other nations on the planet.

Singer's book comes to mind in all of this, because of the way that robotics have developed for the battlefield throughout the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. He rejected the idea that we'll ever have a '3 Laws of Robotics', simply because they get in the way of a combat robot, but also because we really don't have robotics in the same way that we thought we might have: automatic responses and programming, with a person in the loop to direct how it carries out its mission. Robotics, rather than multi-purpose, are task-specific, much as Watson is on Jeopardy. He might be able to put together a lot of information and connect the dots, but that's what he's supposed to do: world domination most likely won't occur to him, and even if it did, I doubt that it could be carried out. Now, should he have the ability to learn, and apply the fact connection to a desire in a highly complicated and sophisticated manner, we could have a very different story.

We were supposed to have robots in the future. Instead, we have iPads, surveillance cameras, global positioning systems and quite a lot more, because of needs that weren't predicted back in the middle of the century, predictions that were influenced by the optimism that only a wealthy nation full of technology could bring.

Were these predictions bad? No. Unfounded? Nope. 2001: A Space Odyssey, came out at the beginnings of the Space Race, unsure of what would happen. In 1969, we went to the moon and discovered a magnificent, but empty expanse on the Moon, and haven't looked back. Blade Runner saw a future that was more grounded: a lived-in world, mired with the same human problems that have been the constant throughout our history.

When it comes to predicting the future, we might very well still have a lot of these things: we're making early steps towards civilian spaceflight, environmental costs might predicate the elimination of airplanes, and household robotics will likely be more sophisticated. However, the steps towards this direction will always rest on the requirements of the people using them. We simply don't need a supercomputer to take over the world: we needed one for entertainment.

Opposing Viewpoints

And by we, I mean book bloggers, science fiction aficionados and other assorted freelancer writer types. Earlier today, I had an interesting talk with fellow blogger and podcaster Patrick Hester, (@atmfb) where we had an interesting debate about the role that the book blogging community plays within our little world of speculative fiction, authors, conventions and publicists. This had been sparked by several comments on another blog that equated to: I disagree with Author X because of a) politics b) personal attitude or c) religion, etc, which I think is a somewhat ridiculous attitude to have. This tangentially connects to a couple of exchanges that I've had with people in the recent past about the entire purpose of blogging in general, which leads back to the question: why do we do this? And more importantly, how should we do this?

Science fiction and its related genres are akin to commercial art. As such, they tend to be incredibly complicated works that draw upon numerous influences and elements, hopefully in a nice, commercially friendly package that will sell in numerous units to a willing public and make the publisher just a bit wealthier. Over the course of the discussion that Patrick and I had today, we looked at the ways in which people approached books.

One example here was that reader X didn't like Orson Scott Card, because of an opposing political viewpoint that Card has that vilifies homosexuality and equates global warming to a sort of conspiracy. I vehemently disagree with Card on a lot of political issues, but I'm generally curious as to how people associate a writer and their own personal politics with what they write. In some cases, there's quite a bit of clear influence amongst a writer's works. Heinlein looked towards libertarian viewpoints, for example, and so forth (I've just written about this recently, for other examples). While clearly, there are elements of personal belief within every book that any such author writes. However, the privilege of having an opposing viewpoint does not equate condemning the book or an author simply because of someone's personal politics, especially if someone is acting as a reviewer or interviewer for said author. Books should be judged on their merits, not on the author's personal habits.

In the course of our conversation, how then does one avoid reviewing a book without any sort of outside influence? Should a book be able to stand on its own, completely free from its author's beliefs, offensive as they might be to the reviewer? There's a considerable amount of grey area here, and I suspect that there is no good answer to this problem. As a historian, dislike the idea of judgment of past actions, simply because said ideas don't match up completely with my own. (The same goes for music reviewing. Some bands sound amazing on concert, and recorded, but what happens when you find that in reality, they are some of the most annoying, pedantic, irritating people in the world who don't give two seconds thought to their fans or those who care about those who essentially worship them as minor deities? Or the actor/artist/writer who does the same? Certainly, there is an amount of fanboy disappointment when one's idols don't meet up to one's expectations - I've had that happen a lot.)

The duties of a reviewer, interviewer, and critical thinker are to examine said works. I myself tend to be a curious person, and I find myself wishing for more information about the book. What influenced this novel, or sparked this author's imagination to set these words down on paper? This sort of process is not something that happens completely independent of any sort of outside influence, especially in the science fiction genre. It is this sort of core understanding that I believe is essential to the arts: the drive for understanding, not only of the book itself, or merely for entertainment, but because we relish stories. The earliest stories were incredible teaching tools, ones that undertook the task of teaching ethics, demonstrating to others a slightly easier path in the race to the finish. The better stories are the ones that get away with the teaching before you realized something was up, whereas the bad ones simply expound upon their morals until you throw the book away.

Interviews are another topic all together, and it was suggested that during an interview, the conventional topics such as religion and politics should be completely avoided during an interview.  I disagree with that assessment, because such things are often a major influence on a person, especially in the case of speculative fiction. What are the responsibilities of a book blogger, beyond the usual business of product placement? I firmly maintain that any form of information dissemination is a style of journalism, and as such, has the ability to influence opinion, and has a number of responsibilities therein. As Stan Lee said through Peter Parker: “With great power comes responsibility”, and as such, reviewers, interviewers and critics have the responsibility to weed out the bad and point out the notable. They should examine the influences upon the works that they look at, ask questions and consider any and all possibilities. This obviously happens to a varying level of completion and attention, but reviewers should at least consider how their actions benefit a greater audience.

Thus, I believe that ignoring the influences upon a book, no matter what the underlying values are, does a grave disservice to the author and potential readers that follow. This is not to say that there are numerous books out there that are not worth reading, but that evaluating a book based on a few, selected criteria is not an honest look at said book and story. While I disagree with the opinions of Dan Simmons or Orson Scott Card, that doesn't mean that completely ignoring or disregarding will do much better. Reading and attempting to understand such viewpoints is far better, and does not mean that one advocates such positions.

Beyond that, books, like people, have a complicated genesis, and evaluating a book on a single issue or merit belies the complexity and background that any sort of reviewer should be judging a book on. This, I believe is the beauty of our intellect and abilities to communicate. No single person has a monopoly on what is right, and what is wrong. In the grander picture, we really know very little at all, and denying the chance to learn more or to understand is a poor action indeed.

The Sky Isn’t Falling: Science Fiction as a Genre

Lately, it seems like there have been numerous article and opinion pieces on the state of the science fiction genre, as opposed to the fantasy and horror genres, with science fiction losing out to both and declining as a field. More women make up the total readership, and tend to read more towards the fantasy genre, while commercial ready fiction such as True Blood, The Dresden Files and Twilight have pushed their respective genres towards audiences that are highly receptive towards what they have to offer. Speculative fiction as a genre is not going away: rather, it seems to be growing stronger, with more ties towards the literary fields and with a growing readership. Science fiction is not a genre to be counted out, but it is a style of fiction that will need to undergo much thematic change in the future in order to remain relevant to readers.

Science Fiction as a whole is one that covers a wide range when it comes to themes and topics, and simply stating that the genre as a whole is failing is a rather meaningless, if somewhat dramatic statement. To say that people will stop writing about the speculative future is to say that people will stop imagining what will happen next: that is simply not going to happen. Rather, it is more realistic to assume that some of the more traditional stories might go away as our understanding of the world around us changes: this is a natural expectation.

Science Fiction is a genre that acts as a mirror for the present. It acts as a rare opportunity for creators to examine commonplace issues in a way that it relates to the present; viewing current events out of context as a way of examining them from afar. This is something that I don't believe is new or revelatory when it comes to analyzing the genre, but it is something that bears reminding as people attempt to predict the future of the genre as a whole.

The future of science fiction isn't limited to literature.

Amongst other articles that I've heard reiterated most often is the decline in the fiction that is presented in book (or soon, in virtual book) form. While that might be the case, especially compared to the rise of competing genres, science fiction is not limited to the printed page. As technology progresses, new avenues have presented themselves as methods for the genre to thrive. Content-wise, science fiction is a genre that fits very well with any number of video game systems, and the rise of games with larger story arches, such as Mass Effect, Halo, Gears of War and others demonstrate that science fiction has moved forward with interactive stories that have appealed to a very large audience. I don't believe that I've seen a comparable success with the any sort of video game that follows 'high-browed' literature style to tell a dramatic story.

Similarly, while the same isn't true with films, it's very clear that while they don't win awards as consistently as dramatic films, they can still do very, very well when it comes to earning money for their creators and generating a wide following. One doesn't have to look far beyond Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings and Avatar in recent years to realize that people do like science fiction and fantasy in large numbers. Even looking at the critical reception of films such as Inception, Moon, District 9, and Pan's Labyrinth to see that the genres are capable of being far more than 'just' crowd pleasers, but can also act as an introspective on the problems and conflicts that surround us in everyday life, addressing themes on identity and culture, morals and ethics, just to name a scant few.

Speculative fiction hawks have to get away from academic acceptance.

Listening to a piece on NPR the other day, I listened to Margaret Atwood note that it paid to be somewhat cautious when labeling works of fiction. She herself was caught up in a bit of drama when she characterized her works as being speculative fiction, rather than science fiction, characterizing her work as speculative fiction, creating a distinction between the genres, which rubbed numerous science fiction fans the wrong way, prompting a lot of speculation as to the nature of the genre. Reading over numerous book blogs and talking with fellow readers, it's clear that there is a large rift amongst people as to how to accept science fiction.

Science fiction seems to largely be unclaimed by the literary academic fields, dismissed from major awards on numerous grounds. I noted the bitterness in an acquaintance's words that a literary award was left devoid of science fiction and fantasy works, and I have had to wonder there is such attention paid to the status of the genre in these fields as other books have gained considerable attention in the mass media, such as Cormic McCarthy's post-apocalyptic The Road to Lev Grossman's The Magicians, both of which seemed to fall under a more mainstream section of the genre, while enjoying what appears to have been quite a lot of critical and commercial success. At the same time, other books, such as Cherie Priest's Boneshaker, and Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora seem to have done very well within their speculative genres, if the outcry of fans over the delays in the third book of Lynch's stories and the quick sellout of Priest's sequel novella are anything to go on.

Obviously, labels matter to an extent, but only when it comes to the marketing of said fictions, which makes the complaints about the literary discrimination seem only stranger to me, from both sides of the spectrum. While Atwood's remarks seemed remarkably short sighted for an established storyteller, numerous science fiction novels that line my shelves are ones that I can point to as superior works of literature, groundbreaking even outside of their own genres. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials was a series that provided some profound philosophical and religious points for me as a high school student, while Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 provided an understanding and appreciation for knowledge that remains with me to this point. The fantastic fiction that is out there provides argument and understanding on par with numerous works of literature, and I heartedly believe that genre snobbery is something that is largely baseless and short sighted.

Despite the labels that are out there, books like The Road and The Year of the Flood demonstrate that there is a leaking out of the genre to other genres, and one doesn't necessarily have to go to the science fiction section of the bookstore to find books that could largely fall within the genre. The label on the back of the book matters very little, and readers should be more aware of what else is out in print, especially as regular fiction catches up to the present. Given that we are increasingly living in a world that is science fictional, it stands to reason that some of that will bleed into our entertainment.

That all being said, the genre has survived for going on a century at this point, often as a crowd-pleasing genre, and one that certainly wouldn’t attract any academic or critical interest at various points in its history.

Fans need to understand that Speculative Fiction is about change... and it is changing.

If there is any one lesson that Science Fiction as its own, self-contained sub genre can impart, it is that the future is going to present a changed reality for all of those who inhabit it. The stories tend to follow how the protagonists can change their world for the better, usually based upon their actions. (This is a broad assumption, but one that I feel is valid) As such, it needs to be understood that the environment that fostered the genre in its earlier, formative days has given way to a world that has been drastically changed by economic, environmental and political events that leaves the current generation of readers with a vastly different understanding of the world as opposed to those who grew up during the Cold War.

Science fiction of the recent past was heavily influenced by world events: a book such as A Canticle for Lebowitz is one that likely could not have been written in the present day, ground breaking as it is. Fiction generally relates to its surrounding cultural contexts: It comes as no surprise that a film such as District 9 would succeed commercially and critically in today's present environment, whereas a film such as Star Wars did the same in the 1970s.

As such, the works within the genre should be expected to change with times, as our understanding of the present (as well as our understanding of technology and the things that surround us) changes. Works of epic space opera such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy and some of the minor space arcs such as Timothy Zahn's Conqueror's Trilogy or Ender's Game fit within their own contexts.

A common argument that has been talked about is that the futures presented in the past tended to be optimistic, with people believing that the future held a brighter future for humanity, which in turn translated into works of science fiction. Today, the opposite seems to be true, and as such, the fiction that tends to look backwards towards better days - fantasy - seems to be on the rise. At the same time, the science fiction that seems to be garnering more attention is the dystopia stories: Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl and assorted stories, Cormic McCarthy's The Road, and the multitudes of zombie novels that predict our demise in the rise of undead and lone libertarians seeking to preserve the American way of life out on their own. In a way, the most successful form of science fiction to come is likely Steampunk, which presents a darker form of science fiction, set in the past, where readers can feel comforted that their current world of advanced technology (or at least medical science) leaves us much better off than in the Victorian world.

Science fiction isn't dying, dead or going anywhere.

I don't believe that this is the case, at all: science fiction is a genre that has been seen to present some utterly fantastic and relevant stories for readers, addressing concerns of the present day in a twisted context. Looking beyond the artificial walls that genre terms provide, it's likely that the stories that we grew up with are likely going to change a bit: the random adventure in a space ship with strange aliens and laser guns might not be quite as common in the wider genre world, but they're likely to be replaced by stories that offer far different visions and interpretations of the future, by simple virtue of being written and created in the present day. 'Real life' is rapidly becoming something out of a science fiction novel, with hand-held computers, global positioning sensors and advances in all sorts of other technologies.

While some of the subject matter is changing, so to is the mediums that we can see the genre, and by this virtue alone, science fiction and fantasy is a genre that is here to stay, simply because it is a resilient genre that can fill numerous forms. Life itself spreads and survives on numbers, so to does the speculative fiction genres, where massive franchises of video games, movies and tie-in fiction enthralled millions of fans each day, generating excitement at the box office, blogs and conventions, where people look to the next really cool thing that they can take in. In its popularity, it is already bleeding into the mainstream consciousness through any number of forms. At this point, do mainstream literary awards matter for the genre as a whole, or signal some form of mainstream acceptance of the genre? I doubt it.

Stop Punking the Genre!

In 1983, the term Cyberpunk was born, with a story by the same name by author Bruce Bethke in Amazing Stories #94. The term is defined as a "[S]ubgenre of science fiction that focuses on the effects on society and individuals of advanced computer technology, artificial intelligence and bionic implants in an increasingly global culture, especially as seen in the struggles of streetwise, disaffected characters. (Prucher, Jeff, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, 30). The word itself comes from the meshing of 'cyber' and 'punk', which to me has always seemed as an electronics rebellion. Certainly, the subgenre is one that presents drastically different stories and meanings than what had traditionally been science fiction, and in a way, the style represents a degree of cutting edge thinking that really belongs to the first on the scene, with the truly unique and original thoughts that go against the grain. I think of cyberpunk as the books that are out looking for a fight, ready to cut those unprepared with what they have to say.

My main issue here is two-fold. The first is that with that in mind, it's hard to apply that sort of label to any sort of science fiction after the term is pushing 30 years old, much as it's hard to take someone seriously who's been involved in the punk scene for a comparable amount of time, with several records under their belt to a major record label. The surprise and edge vanishes after a while, and in a way, the 'Cyberpunk' term has become a label that's synonymous with electronics and dystopia. At the same time, the suffix '-Punk' seems to be added onto any number of themes and styles of science fiction literature. Steampunk is a ready example, both visually with film, photography and costuming, but also with such books as Cherie Priest's Boneshaker, where there is a blend of dystopic and steam-powered technology. The problem that I see is that the idea behind 'punk'-style music, video, literature is that it's something that ultimately rebells against a label, and in science fiction's field of vision, -punk is the marketing term to rally behind in creating a subgenre, undermining or missing what the word in the meantime really means.

The term itself came at a time of globalization and a rise of technology around the world, and has since become a label for any number of stories that correspond to a use of technology, with dystopic and near-future themes. Promoted by Gardiner Dozois, the term has largely been used to describe books by William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, Bruce Sterling, Neil Stephenson, and many more. Neuromancer really cut in close at a time before the Internet and home computing, creating a vision of the future that was wholly unique, interesting and edgy. In a large way, the term really did apply to a lot of these earlier books. (This is not to say that modern books in the 'cyberpunk' genre are bad - far from it. This isn't a specific criticism at the books within, just at the association and labeling that they're saddled with). Like observing a quantum event, you change the picture simply by looking at it, and in effect, calling something 'punk' undermines the meaning of the term, and ultimately, does the books labeled as such a big of a disservice. In this day and age with computers and virtual worlds becoming the norm, computers and electronics aren't necessarily that edgy, and any book written in the genre will most likely be compared to Neuromancer in some way or form.

At the same time, I've long been irritated by the Steampunk genre as a concept. According to Brave New Words, the term was coined just four years later by K.W. Jeter in a letter, noting that he believed that stories set in the Victorian era will become the next big thing, and suggested the term Steampunk, most likely in relation to the same edgy connotations that '-punk' gave the word 'cyber'. Once again, the idea of the word 'punk' being used as a label, especially a label right out of the gate, goes against all of the rebellion and fire that the term really should hold for that which it describes. Steampunk is a subgenre that is really beginning to grow a bit more, but doesn't feel new or edgy as far as its content goes: much of what you can see in the stories has long roots in the genre: the stories of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, for example, could easily fall well within the common definitions of Steampunk, and they did it when the concepts were really new and punkish in their own right. (Wells, especially, went across the grain in his literature and his personal life). Thus, a lot of this current steampunk fad is a retread over old ground, with stories that tell drastically different things this time around. Cherie Prist's latest book, for example, isn't so much about technology as it is about character inter-relations in a steampunk-styled environment, one that I'd really label as alternate history over Steampunk. The same goes for recent books by K.J Parker with Devices and Desires, Christopher Priest's The Prestige and Ekaterina Sedia's The Alchemy of Stone. I've long believed that the term science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction in general really transcends the content and goes far more towards the themes, plotline and characters of each work.

Still, there seems to be a tendency for new genres to be bestowed with the '-punk' suffix to differentiate various groups of works by content and theme to perfectly define its own little sub-genre and capture a specific audience. In a large way, it's a good move on the parts of publishing marketing departments to better make their books sell: define an audience, and target them. In some cases, it's warranted. The stories of Paolo Bacigalupi, for example, such as The Windup Girl, The People of Sand and Slag and The Calorie Man, all exist within stories that are defined by their environmentalism-styled stories, ones that have a clear and defining message within a near future, influenced by current events. I've seen others, and called them myself, bio-punk, because in a way, they are some of the more raw, unique and though-provoking stories that I've yet seen. I'm sure that there are other stories, (including the upcoming story at Lightspeed Magazine called Amyrillis, by Carrie Vaughn), that looks at the environmental future and the speculative elements of the next several decades, at the same level of intensity as the early Cyberpunk stories. At other points, I've seen a tendency to apply the label to other things that really don't warrant it, and I can't help but wonder if '-punk' has just become synonymous with 'subgenre' or 'cool'. With the rise of steampunk and cyberpunk, what's to say that there won't be a major movement like 'biopunk', but alongside such things as woodpunk, ironpunk and stonepunk, each with their own style of stories, each more ridiculous than the last? In this possible future, Homer's Iliad, Odyssey and the entirety of the Greek myths will be re-categorized as 'Bronzepunk', and the Apollo-era of space stories will be titled 'Vacuumpunk' (which will most likely be re-titled for ironic effect, vacuum pump fiction).

The main question behind all this is that if the term '-punk' becomes an expected title for any style of sub genre, does it really convey the same meaning as it did in those early days, when? I think that it doesn't, because the idea behind the term is that the fiction is unexpected and raw, and placing the label on it becomes an effective, safe bandage that soothes what shouldn't be. The fiction isn't at fault, it's the hype behind it. Ultimately, speculative fiction as a whole is done a disservice by the constant subgenres, which separates out everything into miniscule categories that are ultimately meaningless, governed and sold based upon their superficial elements, but not the central themes that ultimately make a story worth reading. Punking a genre seems to be the epitome of posing, especially if the term is simply applied to a brand of stories for the simple purpose of finding a market for them.

Military Science Fiction is Soldier Science Fiction

Author Michael Williamson recently came across my article on io9, and posted up his own response. He makes some good points, but I wanted to address some of the areas where I disagree.

I have a couple of counterpoints to this that I'd like to address. I haven't had a change to read through all of the comments and address them individually, but I'll try and point out a couple of things that I think need corrected from the article above and my own on io9.

The first, major point is that no, I don't want Clausewitz to write science fiction. After reading his works for my Military Thought and Theory course (I've received an M.A. in Military History from Norwich University. For my own disclosure, I work for the school and that specific program as an administrator for the students, but the Masters degree really pushed me in terms of what I knew and how I understood the military), I think he's one of the more dry reads that I've yet to come across, and that while there is a lot of outdated information in the book, given the advances and changes in how militaries operate, there are some elements that I feel work well, conceptually.

The main point in the article wasn't written to say that military science fiction had to be more like a Warfare 101 course in how future wars should be fought - far from it - but that military science fiction could certainly benefit from a larger understanding of warfare. As you note, there's a lot of military themed SF stories about the people caught up in warfare, ones that examine how they perceive warfare, and how warfare impacts the individual in any number of ways. This comes in a couple of ways, one story related, the other more superficial.

There are very few  (I can't recall any that specifically look to this) military SF novels that look at warfare in the same context. While I agree that stories are about characters, it's also the challenges and the subsequent themes that embody their struggle that makes a story relevant and interesting to the reader. This, to me, as a reviewer and reader, is the element that will set up a book for success or for failure. Characters, the story/themes/plot, and the challenges that face him all work together to form the narrative. What the characters often learn from their challenges is what the reader should also be learning, and this, to me, is a missed opportunity for some elements of military science fiction. A majority of the Military SF/F stories out there have the characters impacted, but warfare is generally painted as a element of the narrative, not something in and of itself that can be learned from.

Superficially, wars are incredibly complicated events, and often, I don't feel that they're really given their due in fiction. There are a couple of points that I want to make in advance of this – this doesn’t mean that I want or require more detail on every element of warfare, from how the logistical setup for an interstellar war might be put into place, or how the X-35 Pulse rifle is put together to best minimize weight requirements in order to be effectively shipped through lightspeed. Those sorts of details aren’t important to the character’s journey in this, and they add up to extra fluff, in my opinion. Weapons and systems put into place for warfare are great, they sound great, and the same arguments are put into place in politics today. What makes the better story, in my opinion, is a better understanding of the mind behind the sights, from that individual soldier’s motivations to his commanding officer’s orders and training, and how war is understood on their terms. In a way, world-building for any story should firmly understand just what warfare is, or at least come to a consensus within the author’s mind as to how it will be approached.

Oftentimes, generals are accused of fighting the wars gone by. That’s certainly true in the ongoing conflict in Iraq/Afghanistan, and why there was quite a bit of resistance in shifting the military’s focus over to a counter-insurgency war, rather than one of armored columns and maneuvers: generals fight with what they have, and what they’ve trained for, and changes come afterwards. Starship Troopers, The Forever War and Old Man’s War all do the same thing, and that’s not really what I’m arguing against – the authors wrote what they knew – Heinlein, undoubtedly from his experience with the Second World War, Halderman from his own experiences in Vietnam, and Scalzi from observation and research. Science fiction looks to the future, but unless you’re a dedicated expert in a think tank, there’s really no expectation that these books will be predictors of the future, but also aren’t necessarily going to be good at the military thought and theory behind the battles on the pages. Will the individual soldier know anything about logistics and engineering solutions? Probably not, but those things certainly will influence how that soldier is operational on the battlefield, which will undoubtedly affect his view and outcome on the battlefield. While these elements might not surface in the text, they should be understood.

Art is formed within the context of its formation.  I don’t believe that a book written in the Post-WWII world should be really in depth on theoretical warfare on the character level, nor should it look beyond what the audience and writer really understands. However, as times change, context changes, and books are understood differently. There is no doubt in my mind that we will see science and speculative fiction stories in the next decade that are directly impacted by our understanding of the world since 9-11 and the warfare that has come as a result, because the current and budding writers are also changing their views on the world.

I see most military science fiction like I see some types of military non-fiction. Stories like Starship Troopers are like Band of Brothers. They’re fun and good character stories, but anything by Stephen Ambrose is certainly not serious military nonfiction, and isn’t something that I would use to better understand the nature of the Second World War. Looking at a similar book, The First Men In, by Ed Ruggereo, is a better example, (one that I recommend highly, as a counterpoint), but that tells a good character story AND looks at the strategic nature of Airborne operations during Operation Overlord.

Military Science Fiction can best be summed up as soldier science fiction, with the characters learning much about themselves and society – that’s never been in dispute from me. What I would like to see someday added to a field is a novel that better understands the nature of warfare, and extrapolates some of the lessons that can be learned from it.

Military Science Fiction Isn't Military Science Fiction

On Thursday, io9 published a piece by me entitled Your Military Science Fiction Isn't Military Science Fiction, which garnered a number of e-mails, praise, rejection and a lot of conversation about the thesis that I posed: Military Science Fiction is essentially Soldier Science Fiction, in a way that a Stephen Ambrose book isn't really Military History. The elements are there, but when it comes down to it, there's a lot of military science fiction out there that really looks to things other than warfare. Starship Troopers is about politics, the Forever War is about how societies change with time, and so forth.

While the premise sounds ridiculous on the first glance (It's got soldiers, of course it's about the military), the intentions behind this idea go a bit further. While stories incorporate the military within their plots and environments, there's very few military science fiction (or speculative fiction or space opera, if you wish) stories that really makes sense within their finer details, such as tactical and technological ones, to larger elements of the worlds, such as the military thought and theory that goes behind the stories. In a number of cases, the stories look back on wars previously fought, such as the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam and so forth.

My argument stems from both issues. Military experiences are largely evolutionary, and the experiences that are borne out of one war are often applied to another, but not universally. Not only does theory change with the new information, the situation on the ground also changes. From my own readings of the straight-up military science fiction genre, there's very few books that get this right - more often than not, these books take the visible aspects of recent wars or notable ones, and applies them to space. While the translation isn't exact when it moves to science fiction novels, it's a fairly close approximation, with smaller changes cropping up where needed.

One major tendency is that technology itself isn't a silver bullet when it comes to military theory and practical combat operations. Amongst military historians, there is a 'Western' style of warfare, of which, there is a technological element, but one that contributes. Technology alone is rarely an element that dictates the successes of a mission, but its usage and integration into regular military formations, is. The lines here blur when it comes to far more modern technology, and it can be argued that the Cold War was entirely dictated by technological advances, and that major elements of the Gulf and Iraq Wars were likewise won because of superior technology - this is not the case. Within military science fiction, the technological aspect often takes precedent, whether it's superior bombs, combat suits, guns or ships, but oftentimes, the surrounding culture and background history isn't as well thought-out as to the implementation of such advances, which then pairs superior technology, but in situations and tactics that are largely borne out of older wars.

This line of thinking isn't necessarily a condemnation of these older books, and they're certainly not held to any sort of predictive level - their view and existence is about other issues, decidedly not about where the future of the military will lie. However, they do act as a good sort of test case and examples of what can be done to do such a novel: the worlds behind these conflicts needs to be sought out and thought out. Readings of military theorists, such as Clausewitz and others make for good starting points, and within that context, an author can put together a background history that provides an environment for military operations that makes far more sense. There's no need for a futuristic treatise on military thought and theory (On War was exceedingly dull - a sci-fi version of it would be only just a little less so), but within the proper context, there could be some fantastic books out there.

To be fair, there are a number of books out there that do have a number of elements that work extremely well - Dune, by Frank Herbert, provides such a look, but others, such as Nancy Kress's Probability Trilogy, Charles Stross's Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise duo, Karen Traviss's Wess'Har Wars, as well as a couple of others, which represent a certain amount of good thinking and conceptualization behind the worlds in which they exist, and tend to fall in more of the military science fiction realm, rather than the soldier science fiction side of the house.

This isn't to say that the works out there are bad. I greatly enjoyed John Scalzi's Old Man's War, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Joe Halderman's The Forever War. They're enjoyable, entertaining, and provide a good line of thinking behind their respective stories, but in a lot of ways, they represent a very different line of thinking than the military side of the house.

Changes to Facebook

A couple weeks ago, Facebook changed its overall website appearance and layout once again, prompting user outcry and complaints about how the site had changed once again, and that they were going to leave the site. However, the frequent changes to the site's appearance are the reasons why Facebook is going to be around for a while.

In the time since Facebook started, it has had an incredible amount of influence on how people begin to interact with one another. Growing up with much larger, completing websites such as Friendster and Myspace, the website has shown that it's able to take on their competition by adapting to major changes in how people utilize the internet. When it started, the website was essentially an online profile, listing someone's name, their favorites, a picture, a way to upload photographs, and a wall. Originally, when I first started with the website in 2005, the wall feature had a disclaimer on it: "We don't know what this is for, but type away", or something along those lines. Initially as a comments field, the Wall has become a central part of the Facebook website, changing how people interact with one another, share information and update their friends on the mundane aspects of their lives.

The wall feature is the most important aspect of the website, and something that other websites have attempted to copy - Myspace now allows for status updates, as does numerous chat clients, such as gchat and AIM, while becoming the literal center of attention for users. The home page, once one's profile, changed to a friends list, to a new feed that gathered everyone's status updates to keep everyone up to date with everything that was going on. The result is an addicting one - hundreds of millions have signed up for the service, and while each new update undoubtedly sees a drop off in people, either out of frustration or security concerns, the site has continued to grow.

Facebook's constant changes to the design are what will be keeping the website from going the way of their now smaller cousins. It's a good business practice, and demonstrates that the site is not only keeping up to date with what their competition is doing, but it shows that the company is innovative and looking to lead the way in just how people use the internet. This, I think, is the most important aspect of the site's longevity thus far.

Since the site began, the ways in which people have utilized the internet has changed a lot, partially at the site's prompting, but also with the introduction of other websites. Looking at the bigger picture, it's unlikely that the website Twitter would have appeared without the introduction of Facebook’s status updates, and in its stripped down form, Twitter has become incredibly popular. With this new competition, the latest versions of Facebook have focused on the updates that people post to their profiles via the news and live feeds that exist in the home page. With it, Facebook is able to offer the exact same thing (although with four times the characters as their competitor), with all of the extras that the site already offers. Its adaptation comes not only in how people use the internet, but how they access the internet. Dedicated Facebook sites for mobile devices have been developed, while some of its competitors, such as myspace, keep the same format, reducing functionality and the overall appearance to the site.

Similarly, the introduction of new features, such as the suggestions to users who they might know, as well as easy ways to import contacts allow the site to keep users invested, talking and continuing to use the site as often as possible. The site’s purpose, in this instance is to become as useful as possible for people to connect to one another, and it’s certainly succeeded in the time that I’ve used it, keeping me in touch with a number of people whom I would have fallen out of touch with years ago.

As the site moved from a social networking site into the greater business world, it's also been clear that the site has had longer term business plans as the site has begun to expand, hinging on the ability of the site to adapt effectively to new online environments. The introduction of small paid applications, targeted ads and other similar practices help with the website when it comes to its finances, helping to generate cash for the site. This, in my mind, is why Facebook will never charge for access, no matter how many of the groups out there claim that that's in the works. It doesn't make sense, because a lot of the site's growth is most likely contingent on signing up as many people as possible, and introducing a fee, no matter how small it is, would impede that greatly, although long-time users would likely cough it up. No, the key to Facebook is the growth of the platform, and clearly, they're doing something right in that regard.