Books From The Bin: Warpath

I always hear about people who bought books based solely on the cover. I don't think I've ever done that, because books usually cost money. What I do, is get free books based on how bad the cover and the back blurb are. And I want you to trust me here, today we have a doozy.

Books From the Bin: Warpath by Tony Daniel

INDIANS RULE THE STARS!

In the far future the bulk of humanity has spread across the galaxy--only to discover that the American Indians got there first!

Long before Columbus, a tribe of Mississippi Indians discovered the metaphysical Effect that makes space travel possible and paddled their birchbark canoes to distant worlds light-years from Earth. Now an interstellar Indian nation, armed with spears and guided missiles, comes into conflict with colonists from a technological civilization so advanced that even their homes and newspapers possess artificial intelligences. History seems poised to repeat itself, but on a galactic scale.

And on the icy planet Candle, only one lonely man stands between the universe and an endless... WARPATH.

Normally at this point I would sardonically remark, "Where do we begin?" But no. This time, there is nowhere to begin. This guy, the author, had a whole bunch of ideas and threw each and every one of them into this book with nary a whim of how they would look fitted together. The narrator is a man reconstituted from a radio signal copy of himself sent off from Earth in the distant past (but our near future). His wife's signal got fucked up so they made her brain control the weather. Some of the (ahem) Indians have holographic animals from another dimension that live in space clay. There's a character who needs to take future-barbiturates or else she makes the people around her melt, and the reason for this power is that her mom got knocked up by one of the multidimensional Pokemon.

Those Digimon are like, the crux of the book too, for some reason. Once a Native has got the clay and has melded minds with their Tamagotchi, then they can actually, literally paddle a canoe into space. The first scene is a character doing just that. After finishing that scene, I quit the book for four years. Upon picking it up again, I found no solace. At one point, the radiowave narrator meets a distant descendant of his original self, and instead of being curious about how maybe his family line is holding up or anything of that nature, he gets really horny because she looks just like his dead wife. And then they fuck.

No, really. And every single sex scene is like if poison could be administered straight to my brain through words. But not to worry, the descendant he fucks turns out to be an evil cyborg with a robot brain, and then Radiohead and his friends fuck up the robot part so she ends up braindead. And just so everything is wrapped in a nice bow at the end, Radiohead puts the child-like mind of his dead wife into the descendant that he'd already been fucking for a month!

Oh god, I haven't even gotten to the Indians. This was not written by someone who cared much about researching Native peoples. I think he thought to himself, "Woah dude, what if spirit animals were REAL?" and then he combined it with every other idea he had written down and figured he knew enough about Native Americans from westerns. Because it really doesn't get any more complex than that. Throughout the whole book, all the Native peoples are called "Mississippi Indians" despite never having interacted with anything they had called "mississippi." They had never even seen Europeans before meeting them in space, and yet there was no effort to figure out what a Native culture would look like had colonization not happened and also space travel. They're just like, slightly mystical and kinda warmongery. Like in a western. The extent of the groundwork this guy did was to watch Dances With Wolves.

Another extra ingredient to this dangerously overloaded plot element sandwich is the AI's that run people's homes and stuff. These are just copies of people's brains, but slightly hobbled so they won't feel bad that they're glorified answering machines. They're actually called "half-sents" as in, half-sentient and nobody has a problem with that existential nightmare. Radio Ga Ga's wife is stuck as the weather and he doesn't think to get her out of there until like, the end of the book. And it turns out it's not even a problem, they just copied a low rez version of the mayor's brain and stuck it in there. Radio Goo Goo doesn't even think of that until right before that, where they go to the ancient Earth most of humanity has left behind and the villain has an evil Neopet that eats AI's. Also it's a giant snake. And then he has a JoJo Stand fight with the main character Indian and his magical bear. And then the good guys win, which is good because otherwise the bad guy would've gotten the, uh. The dirt. The magic animal dirt. God damn it.

Listen, I didn't want this feature to turn into A Woke Look At Problematic Books, but sometimes you read a book about Space Indians and a whole bunch of other shit and then you're trapped inside because of a pandemic but also you're still working a night shift and everyone is curfewed at eight PM so you literally never leave the house except for work and now this book is just sitting there waiting for you and you can't stop thinking about being an AI stuck in a house all day with no way out there's no way out there's no way out

So anyway I'ma give this book like a five out of ten.

Concept Corner: Avantasia The Metal Opera

I've been playing coy long enough. I covered Operation: mindcrime and called it one of the greatest metal concept albums ever. I even covered one of Ayreon's albums, with just a mention of its long supposed rival metal project. That's right, today we cover the other biggest power metal collaboration project, Avantasia.

Concept Corner: Avantasia - The Metal Opera

Avantasia is a project created by Tobias Sammet, the lead singer and songwriter of Edguy, a German power metal band. Avantasia released its first album, The Metal Opera in 2001. This and the next album, The Metal Opera Part II share an explicit story, while subsequent releases either had a much more subtle story or none at all. Like Ayreon, this project collects singers and musicians from across the metal genre, though Avantasia has a few distinctions from Ayreon in that department. Lucassen's project, at least in the beginning, tended to feature less well-known musicians, which is commendable for finding more obscure talent. Avantasia took a different route, finding the all-stars of the metal community right out of the gate, even bringing Michael Kiske, legendary singer for the band Helloween, back into his first metal project since leaving Helloween. For a Helloween fan, this was the Holy Grail.

The story is communicated almost entirely through liner notes in the lyric book, and let me tell you, it's a doozy! There are a couple instrumentals with light speaking parts and there's plenty to gather from the music, but I wasn't aware of the whole story until I recently knuckled down and read all of it. You'll understand why in a bit.

Sonic The Hedgehog (2020)

SONIC

HE CAN REALLY MOVE

SONIC

HE'S GOT AN ATTITUDE

HE'S THE FASTEST THING ALIVE

HE'S THE FASTEST THING ALIIIIIIIIVE

Man, this sure had a long leadup, am I right? Like Ghostbusters 2016, most of the buzz about the movie didn't really have all that much to do with the movie and occurred way before it premiered. But that's all "hype." It's all "marketing." So what's the deal with this thing? Did a more photogenic Sonic save it?

Eh. It was okay.

It really disappoints me to say that, but I can't claim I didn't see it coming. The studio did what lazy studios do when trying to reintroduce a franchise character to an audience they underestimate: They done plopped Sonic in the real world, with very little connecting to anything a Sonic fan would remember. Sure, there's rings, robots, he says, "Gotta go fast!" once, but they didn't bother trying to adapt anything.

Say what you will about the more current releases, but Sonic stories weren't always hamfisted trash. The first two games communicated themes of nature vs. technology very well just through level progression. Sonic 3 & Knuckles had a pretty good story, with Robotnik remaking the Death Egg on the fallen Angel Island, Knuckles thinking Sonic was part of it, and eventually Robotnik steals the Master Emerald and Sonic has to go Super to stop him. Now it's certainly no Final Fantasy 7, but with textless cutscenes they did a good job,

So what I'm saying is, this movie subtracted more than it added. Sonic's world, sometimes known as Mobius, gets a single scene early in the film before he's fled to Earth and the rest of our film takes place. But not before an opening so cliche, I think in the last 10 years there's been more parodies than straight uses: In the middle of the end-movie action scene, the screen pauses and Sonic narrates to the audience, "So, I bet you're wondering how we got here." I'm shocked the filmmakers had the restraint to not use a record scratch. He also has an Owl Mom for some reason, and echidnas are trying to capture him. But that don't get resolved. This is really just an origin story for Robotnik, and even then we're only catching the tail-end of it. He's already a pretty evil machinist in the beginning, it's just by the end he has a wacky mustache and hates Sonic.

Jim Carrey was pretty good, as I'm sure most people thought he would be. He doesn't quite bring the Grinch-level energy I've come to hope for, but it's certainly not bad. James Marsden was Mr. Bland the Human Actor, really not much to say there. Sonic. Sonic Sonic Sonic. I mean, he was more tolerable than he was in Lost World. Ben Schwartz did fine, I thought it would be really distracting, but by the end I felt the voice fit just fine. Sonic as a character is like a hyperactive kid, which I guess is fitting enough. He doesn't so much learn a lesson as get everything he wanted, but I wasn't really expected some hard-hitting emotional truth from this.

It's funny that nothing but the video games ever has any consistent idea of what rings are for. In the one cartoon called SatAM, they gave him some kinda power boost, they never show up at all in the whimsical cartoon or the OVA, and in this movie they make portals. It's not something really important, just a little thing I wanted to mention.

But yeah, there was nothing especially terrible about Sonic (LIKE THERE COULD HAVE BEEN) but nothing make it stand out. They took all the safe routes, which means it couldn't have attained any real highs or lows. I wonder what we could've gotten if they'd taken a chance on a full CGI movie in the Sonic universe. I guess we'll never know. Maybe if there's a sequel it could expand on that, but honestly I don't think we'll be going anywhere fantastical.

Sonic The Hedgehog Redesigned Trailer

This is weird. It's an unprecedented oddity that a company previewed a product, everyone hated what they saw, and not only did the company decide to redo the thing that everybody hates, but they pushed back the release date to make it more fair for the artists involved and as the final kicker, it actually looks like an improvement over the original product.

Has that happened before? It's sort of been a thing with video games, but that's after a product has already released and they patch it for people who have bought it. But this is a movie! It's at most a solid 2 hours of images on a screen that nobody's actually seen yet.

Let's be honest, usually the internet adding input to any creative endeavor is a recipe for disaster. Remember Boaty McBoatface? Remember that 4chan exists? So, to put it lightly, I'm flabbergasted.

I mean, hell. He looks like Sonic now. Like, actually Sonic. They got the guy who made the best Sonic cartoon ever made to do it.

Honored to have been brought in to lead the design on the new Movie Sonic. Working with Jeff and the modelers, riggers, texture/fur artists and animators in LA, London, and Vancouver was a thrill I'll never forget. #SonicMovie pic.twitter.com/HhcVIxAhXB

— Tyson Hesse (@tyson_hesse) November 12, 2019

I didn't see that coming. Especially after Monster Sonic. Can we talk about Monster Sonic for a minute?

As you're all doubtless aware of, I have to watch bad movies. There's something insidious in my brain that makes me do it. I was fucking on board to watch this blue abomination traipse across the screen while sounding like Rutabaga Rabitowitz. Hell, I turned up to watch Sherlock Gnomes on opening day, this would be nothing.

So now I'm a bit torn. Actors have said there weren't any reshoots involved, meaning the only thing that has changed is the design of Sonic himself. All the writing, all the voice acting and human actors are remaining the same. So really, my opinion shouldn't change that much from the initial trailer. I'm not expecting Spider-Verse over here. They altered the feel of the trailer somewhat from the first draft, and I'm not completely on board. Gangster's Paradise was an unexpected choice, to say the least, but it was distinct. This time they used Blitzkrieg Bop. The most overused track in existence. Oh wait! They added more high-hat at the end and slapped in some video game noises! Totally different now.

Let's be honest with ourselves. Any Sonic fan that still exists is used to a lot of shit. Name a Sonic game (apart from Mania) that's overall actually good in the last ten years. Okay, nix Generations as well. There ain't much there. So if the movie's pretty bad (which I am still expecting) then it's pretty par for the course for Sonic. I expect to enjoy Jim Carrey as I always do, but like, the rest of it doesn't seem like it's gonna have a high grade of quality here. It looks like a movie from the 90's, like Masters of the Universe. The old trope where a popular character's movie has them leave their own world and enter THE REAL WOOOORLD. It's been played out over a decade ago, but then again everything good about Sonic was left in that era. Regardless of how it turns out, I'm still going to see it because it releases on Valentine's Day and I need something to distract me from the monstrous gaping void of loneliness that threatens to engulf my very essence.