Tag: science fiction

More Marketing Stuff

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So, I spent some time yesterday and today sending a few complimentary copies of the book to reviewers and adjusting the Amazon Ads to concentrate on the “targets” that have produced sales.  So far it looks like the ads that work best are where Amazon selects viewers that have done a search for another product that is either “similar” to my book or “complementary” to it and place my ad somewhere on that search result page.  How Amazon gauges similarity and complementarity is of course the black box.

These targets that they decide on work better than matching my book to searches that contain keywords that my book has been matched with like “techno-thriller” or “vigilante justice” or “suspense thriller.”  These also work but at a lower rate.  So, what seems to be the case is that Amazon seems to know what they’re doing better than anybody else.  And I guess that makes sense.  The algorithm is the wizard behind the curtain but apparently, he’s not some medicine show tramp whose balloon was blown off course.  He’s the real deal.

So now that I’m running the marketing show I’m excited again and waiting for that magic moment when the algorithm decides that I’m ready for prime time and blankets the Amazon universe with free advertisements for my magnum opus.  And every time you open up an email from Amazon, my book will stare back at you in all its black and white splendor.  And once the ten millionth copy is sold, President Trump will invite me to the Oval Office and present me with the Trump/Kennedy Center Medal for the Most Beautiful Literature.  And I’ll autograph a copy of the book for him.  It’ll read, “To DJT, from one native New Yorker, to another.  You, kooky nut, you.  Don’t ever change.  Jake Barter”

But I digress (or hallucinate).  Of late I’ve read just how much AI novel writing has become sort of a catastrophe.  Apparently, there is a sizable segment of the book reading audience that is perfectly satisfied with AI slop.  And I don’t think this is shocking.  Think of what now passes for entertainment on broadcast television.  It’s already down to the level of mindless machine output.  I guess the question will be whether there will be a reaction to this, with a flight to quality occurring.  Even leaving my own personal writing out of this, I’d hate to think that literature will completely disappear from the face of the Earth in favor of subhuman cargo-cult knock-offs.

Well, I guess there can be all kinds of entertainment products out there.  After all, a big part of marketing is identifying a niche that isn’t being serviced optimally.  But it does make me wonder what that niche is for me.  Disgruntled right-wing old guys?  Well, why not.  Talk about a despised minority.  We’re positively reviled by everyone out there.  But I am hoping for a larger audience.  I have a small test audience of women who won the Goodreads giveaway.  I’m hoping for some feedback from them pretty soon.  I’ll compare them to the few women that have already read the book in my circle of friends.  It might be interesting

Donnie Darko (2001) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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Continuing my review of a list of “best Science fiction movies” from YouTube, the next installment is a movie from 2001 that I have heard spoken of as a “forgotten gem;” Donnie Darko.  I will attempt to disavow my audience of that idea.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

I would compare this movie to some mash-up of “The Breakfast Club” with a cheapo time travel/horror movie.  The movie is stewed in teenage angst in an upscale California town where Donnie Darko (played by a young Jake Gyllenhaal) is undergoing psychotherapy to find out why he is hallucinating about a man in a dog mask who seems to be telling him to do dangerous and harmful things like smashing a water main to flood out his high school and burn down the house of a motivational speaker who is appearing at the school’s Health classes.

While staying out all night at the urging of Frank (the dog guy) Donnie escapes death when an airliner engine falls out of the sky and destroys his bedroom.  It turns out that the FAA can’t locate a plane that lost an engine that day.  Meanwhile his science teacher answers questions about time travel by using Stephen Hawking’s theories about wormholes to justify Donnie’s belief that his psychosis is really messages being sent to him from time travelers.  And when he finds out that an old woman who lives up in the hills was a teacher at his school who wrote a book about time-travel he becomes convinced that he will be involved in a time travel event.

It all comes to a head around Halloween so the fact that some of the kids in the movie are wearing masks becomes less inexplicable but no less annoying.  By the end of the movie several people have been killed violently which appears to include his mother and younger sister who are aboard a jet airliner that coincidently has lost an engine over his town before landing.

At that point, Donnie goes up to the mountains to await the time-traveling storm that’s about to strike.  The end of the movie returns back a month before all the trouble started and this time Donnie is in the room when the engine strikes.  So apparently, he’s sacrificed himself to prevent the deaths of his mother and sister and his girlfriend and the guy who ran her over and was then shot to death by Donnie.  The end.

I hated this movie so much I can’t state it enough.  I despised everyone in it.  That includes Donnie, his English teacher (played by Drew Barrymore), his mother (played by the actress who was the president’s wife in Independence Day), the motivational speaker who turned out to be a kiddie porn purveyor (played by Patrick Swayze), and basically everyone else in the movie.  Everything about this movie was annoying or depressing.  And calling it science fiction is absurd.  There’s absolutely no justification given for any of the events or hallucinations that Donnie experienced.  But honestly, he was such an unlikeable character that all I felt at the end of the movie was annoyance that I had sat through this ridiculous movie.  I don’t recommend this movie to any fans of science fiction.

Dune (2021) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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This isn’t really a normal review.  I won’t walk through the plot.  Instead, I’ll give my impressions of the movie.  Now, full disclosure, I’ve never read the Dune books.  That alone is pretty remarkable considering they came out in the heyday of my science fiction reading career.  I never could actually tell why I didn’t.  Just something about the story didn’t click for some reason.

The first impression I have of this film is the high quality of the cinematography.  The landscapes both desert and temperate are beautifully filmed.  And the special effects of the colossal machines, space craft and the sand worms are wonderfully done.  Of course, on the theater screen they’re even more impressive.

Next let’s look at the actors.  There is a fairly large cast so there is a range of talent and not every character is given equal attention but the actors for the principal characters do a very fine job of making their parts memorable and entertaining.

The plot is something like the situation in feudal Japan where the emperor is in competition with his warlords and internecine struggle is a constant threat.  But we clearly have House Atreides and the Fremen to root for and everyone else to hiss at.  The battle scenes are impressive and the sword fights are well done and very entertaining.

Now I guess I’m supposed to like the Fremen as they’re the “good guys.”  But honestly, I found them pretty unlikeable.  I much preferred Atreides people (whatever they’re called).  And also, the sisterhood that Paul Atreides’ mother is a member; the Bene Gesserit, I disliked them also.  If I was running that universe, I’d have them rounded up and burned as witches.  They’re very annoying.

Now of course, this first movie isn’t the full story.  The second film is out there waiting for me to watch.  So, I’ll leave this encapsulation of my impressions here.

I highly recommend this movie.  This is good storytelling.  The plot and characters are memorable and engaging.  Two thumbs up.  Bring on part two!

Dark City (1998) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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This is one seriously strange movie.  It co-stars three actors you may know (William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland and Jennifer Connelly) but most of the rest of the cast including the protagonist aren’t familiar names.  It starts out as a film noir with a murder mystery and a man with amnesia.  But then it starts getting very weird and keeps getting weirder right up to the final scene.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

John Murdoch (played by Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a bathtub in a hotel room that also contains the body of a call girl who has been murdered and her body carved on by a maniac.  Murdoch has no memory of who he is.  He hears the phone ring and picks it up.  A man calling himself Dr. Schreber tells Murdoch that he can explain what is happening to him but that he must leave immediately because “they” are coming to get him.  So, he runs away and finds out that the police are looking for him for a string of women’s murders.  And then he meets them; the Strangers.  They’re tall, thin bald men who look slightly inhuman and have telekinetic powers.  And Murdoch finds out that he also has these powers.

Police Inspector Frank Bumstead (played by William Hurt) is hunting Murdoch and he interviews his wife Emma (played by Jennifer Connelly).  She claims Murdoch couldn’t be the killer.  Bumstead uses Emma to find Murdoch.  But he escapes.  By the end of the movie Murdoch is caught by the police but he eventually convinces Bumstead that the world they live in is a simulation because of anomalies like the lack of daylight and false memories of places like Shell Beach which do not actually exist.

Eventually the Strangers come to Dr. Schreber and demand that he inject Murdoch with new memories to solve his problem.  It’s obvious that Schreber works for the Strangers but he seems a reluctant partner.

Over the course of the movie what we learn is that the Strangers have built the city to study humans.  They are an alien race that has kidnapped humans and housed them in a city that is never in daylight but always night.  They have Schreber inject them with their false identities and every midnight they render the whole city asleep and then “tune” it by modifying the physical landscape (buildings appear and disappear) and people are given new identities or altered memories.

The Strangers are trying to understand the human “soul.”  Apparently, their race is dying out and becoming more human is their solution to survival.  At the end of the movie we find out the city is a construct floating in interstellar space completely separate from Earth.  There is a final showdown between the Strangers and Murdoch and he destroys them and takes control of the city.  In the final scene he meets up with his “wife” who now has new memories that don’t include him and he strikes up a conversation.  And they head for the mythical Shell Beach where his false memories told him he had led a happy boyhood life.  Only now he has created it and brought out the sun to end the endless night.

This is some strange movie.  The film noir atmosphere of the beginning of the movie is quite well done.  The transition to a science fiction theme is somewhat jarring but interesting.  I’m not sure I’d characterize the whole experimental scenario with the Strangers altering the city and its inhabitants every midnight as a reasonable plot.  I guess it’s almost like the delusion of someone with extreme paranoia except that the paranoia is based in fact.  All in all, I’d say it’s a bit overdone.  But I didn’t hate it.  As far as a recommendation, I’d have to say most people would be looking at a fifty/fifty shot at liking it.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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My goodness.  1982.  Has it been that long?  I think I saw this movie in the theater but I’m no longer sure.  Okay, so this movie shows all the signs of riding the crest of Star Wars making sci-fi exciting again.  The theme music is obviously aping John Williams’ theme from Star Wars.  Well, of course they did.  They’d have been nuts not to.  This was the second Star Trek movie and after how boring the first movie was, they must have decided they needed to get back to the original formula that made the tv show work, action/adventure with a little science fiction thrown in for window dressing.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

When the movie begins “Admiral” James Kirk is observing cadets responding to a simulation of a space emergency.  Captain Spock is testing his Vulcan student Ensign Saavik to see if she can reconcile reality with regulations.  During these simulations Kirk tells Dr. McCoy that he feels old now that he’s behind a desk instead of commanding a starship.

Meanwhile the USS Reliant’s Captain Clark Terrell and first officer Commander Pavel Chekov beam down to evaluate a planet to see if it is lifeless as required for the next test of the “genesis device.”  This is a system that can take a lifeless planet and both terraform it and create life on it.  But it turns out that the planet is actually the planet that Kirk marooned Khan Noonien Singh and his group of genetically modified supermen on, twenty years earlier.  The reason that the Reliant’s crew didn’t know this is because some cosmic instability blew up one planet and moved Khan’s world where it had been.  This also made Khan’s home a death sentence that he only avoided by his incredible intelligence.  But the death of his wife Khan blames on Kirk.

Putting “super earwigs” into the ears of Chekov and Terrell, Khan takes control of their minds and forces them to betray their ship into Khan’s hands.  Finding out where Kirk was and about the genesis device, he hatches a plan to destroy Kirk and the Enterprise and use the genesis device to destroy the life on an already flourishing world.  Apparently, this is the dark side of the device and why only lifeless worlds must be treated.

Khan captures the genesis device and lures Kirk into an attack by the Reliant.  After almost destroying the Enterprise Kirk uses some trickery to take over control of the Reliant’s bridge and damages that ship enough to get it to retreat.

Kirk manages to rescue the chief scientists of the genesis project.  They happen to be one of Kirk’s old girlfriends and her son who also happens to be Kirk’s son.  The young man despises Kirk for not being a pacifist geek like himself.  Finally, the showdown arrives.  The Enterprise is heavily damaged and can neither outrun nor outfight the Reliant.  So, Kirk lures Khan into a “nebula” where the Enterprise’s weakness will not be decisive.  Kirk manages to get enough potshots off to destroy the Reliant but Khan decides to activate the genesis device in order to destroy the Enterprise which without warp drive will not have enough time to escape its destructive force.

Seeing that time was of the essence Spock leaves the bridge and heads for engineering where to the horror of McCoy and Scott he intends to enter the warp drive containment room.  Spock uses his Vulcan neck pinch to disable McCoy and then uses the Vulcan mind meld to give McCoy some kind of subconscious suggestion and we hear him say to McCoy, “Remember.”  Spock then enters the radiation area and removes the safety housing from the warp drive and with his face and hands in the radiation field, “fixes” the warp drive manually.  As soon as it comes on line, the bridge crew uses the warp drive to escape the genesis blast by a split second.

Then McCoy calls Kirk over the intercom and tells him to come to engineering in time to say goodbye to a dying Spock.  The rest of the movie is Spock’s funeral in space where after the eulogy by Kirk, his coffin is shot out of the ship toward a planet that the genesis device somehow produced out of the nebula where the Reliant was located.  After that Kirk and his son have a reconciliation.  When asked again by McCoy how he feels Kirk says, “Young, I feel young again.”  In the last scene we see Spock’s coffin on the ground in an idyllic setting on the new planet.

Okay.  So just as a point of departure, Star Trek: The Motion Picture; the movie that preceded this one was awful because it was boring and nothing much happened.  So, this movie had lots of action and stuff happens left and right.  I read that they achieved this by kicking Gene Roddenberry upstairs and not letting him play with the script.  So good for them for figuring that out.  Ricardo Montalbán as Khan Noonien Singh is a wonderful hammy villain.  The crew of the Enterprise were very much their old selves from the tv show.  So, what’s not to love.  And the tragic farewell of Spock to Kirk is the climax of the movie.  Sure, it’s hammy tv acting at its worst.  But it’s wonderfully satisfying for any fan of the old show.  How the young respond to it I won’t speculate on.  I highly recommend it to all fans of Star Trek TOS.

The Danger of “Best Of” Lists

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Recently I went on-line and found a best twenty-five modern science fiction movies list.  And I went through it and found half a dozen movies I hadn’t seen.  And I gave the list to Camera Girl and told her to submit it to her friend the local librarian to get me the DVDs through interlibrary loan.  Well, the only movie they had the first day was “Children of Men.”  Last night we watched it.  Oh boy.

I knew that it was a dystopian alternate history movie where humanity become completely infertile.  What I didn’t know was that with the exception of Michael Caine I would hate everyone in the movie.  It takes place around London in the year 2027, I think.  London is stewing in a smoldering revolt by the illegal immigrants that are being deported.  The plot revolves around a pro-immigrant terrorist group that has found an immigrant girl who is pregnant and the attempt to assist her to escape to an international group called the Human Project that intends to cure the world’s infertility.

I won’t go into a lot of detail because this isn’t a review.  It’s just a rant.  Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Chiwetel Ejiofor play main characters and I found myself disliking them ever more deeply throughout the movie.  Basically, this is a pro-immigrant, anti-western civilization diatribe with environmental hand-wringing thrown in for good measure.  And the whole film is ugly, brutal and depressing from start to finish.  When it was over I apologized to Camera Girl for not shutting it off after the first five minutes.  As I mentioned I liked Michael Caine’s character.  He’s an old hippie-stoner which isn’t great but it is Michael Caine so he makes him lovable.  But that’s hardly a good reason to watch this mess.

Well, I guess I should go back to that list and get a better idea what the rest of the movies are really going to be like.  If the guy who made this list thought this was a good movie, then his judgement is certainly suspect from my point of view.  You know, if all of a sudden, every woman on Earth became infertile, I’m guessing that all of the biologists in the world would be working on that problem night and day and I’m pretty sure they’d at least figure out what the cause was.  In the movie they don’t even know that.  This alternate history is so depressingly bleak that I can’t see why anyone would make this movie.  I’m left with the idea that this was some kind of moral lesson to let us know that not treating illegal immigrants like members of the family is so evil that Gaia will punish us by making us sterile and wiping us off the planet.  That isn’t science fiction.  That’s propaganda to make the Left feels virtuous.  The only part of the movie that I liked was at the end where the protagonists are leaving a battleground where the immigrants are battling the British Army and suddenly a few fighter jets go overhead and rain down death and destruction on the immigrants.  I think I gave out a little cheer.

Iron Lung (2026) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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Today I went to see “Iron Lung” with grandson prime.  He is a big fan of the writer/director and star of the movie Mark Fischbach or as he’s known on YouTube, Markiplier.  Mark has about 35 million followers on YouTube and leveraging that much support he was able to make the movie with his own money (~ three million dollars) and get it distributed to over 3,000 theaters in the United States.  It’s been in the theaters for a couple of weeks and has made already something like thirty million dollars.  Estimates say it’ll end up at forty million dollars.  After giving the theaters half of this he’ll get twenty million dollars which is six times what he invested; an unheard-of return on investment for a motion picture in this day and age.

All very interesting.  How was the movie?

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Full disclosure.  This movie is not for anyone who doesn’t know the background “mythos” from the video game of the same name.  The visuals, the dialog, the “easter eggs” that the story revolves around will be difficult-to-impossible to understand without prior knowledge of the plot elements that only the die-hard fans of the game know beforehand.

The plot revolves around a convict being promised a reprieve if he will allow himself to be welded into a small submarine and dropped into an ocean of human blood that has been found on a “moon” somewhere out in interstellar space.  And this is being done in the hope that the convict will find something in this ocean to help explain and potentially remediate the result of the “Quiet Rapture.”  And what this refers to is the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of all the planets and stars that humanity had colonized in interstellar space.  The only humans remaining are one that were off-planet in space stations and ships.  This remnant of humanity is attempting to marshal its remaining numbers and resources to attempt to save the human race from extinction.

Once the prisoner (Simon) is submerged he looks for anything that could help explain the rapture.  And during his voyage he encounters harsh working conditions of the craft, hostile life, proof of the bad intentions of his mission handlers and the existence of some malevolent intelligence that is undermining his grasp on reality and even his sanity.

Eventually we discover that his handlers really never intended to rescue him at the end of the mission and we also discover that the intelligence he senses emanates from contact with the extra-dimensional creatures that killed off humanity and eliminated the stars and planets of our universe for the sake of their own plans for our space.  And the ocean of blood is all that remains of the murdered human race.

At the end, as both Simon and his handlers face destruction at the hands of these malevolent beings all he can do with his last efforts is eject from his submarine a flotation device carrying the records of what he’s discovered for the sake of some follow up mission that might try to use the knowledge gained to help mankind in some unspecified and apparently hopeless effort.

Wow, bleak!  As I said earlier, no one but fans of the creator of this movie will know what’s going on.  It’s too confusing and intentionally cryptic.  And talk about your depressing story.  This is the ultimate.  But at the same time there is a huge and enthusiastic fan base for just this story.  Mark’s viewers and the video game’s players are literally LEGION!  So, if you’re not in those categories you won’t and probably shouldn’t go to this movie.  And if you are you almost certainly will go and maybe several times with friends of the same persuasion for company.  And as I’ve said before this may be the beginning of a new way to make and target entertainment.  Gen Z likes its own things.  And they aren’t as interested as the Millennials in being preached to by movie studios about what they should like and what they shouldn’t.  And good for them.  The interesting thing is that Mark Fischbach wants to create more content that entertains his audience and produce other people’s stories for this audience.  Maybe I should send him my “screen play” for the “The Sniper.”

The Sniper Marketing Campaign is Live!

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Keywords have been added, categories have been refined and Amazon Ads are garnering thousands of impressions and dozens of clicks. Even a few sales have been registered! Now it’s time for anyone who has bought a book to give their opinion on its entertainment value as a review on that mega-information portal; Amazon.com.

So for anyone who has bought the book please give it a great review as soon as possible to enhance the effect of the advertising.  Amazon only credits people who have bought the book into their review algorithm.

The link below will bring you to the Amazon sales page.  Near the end is the review section.  Clicking on this link will not cause you to buy the book, just bring you to the sales page.

Thank you.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 23JAN2026 – Often Unreliable

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I think the fondness for first person (often unreliable) or third person limited viewpoint comes from a fundamental aspect of modernist philosophy. That aspect is that in modernist thought there is NO absolute truth. There’s my truth and your truth and (heaven help us) Kamala Harris’s truth. The Omniscient narrator belies this point, for that story, their narrative is the truth. They deny that such can exist in support of their raging relativism. I think the second issue is the types of “stories” they write. Plot is limited or irrelevant, the characters aren’t characters but more archetypes or mouthpieces for their viewpoints. They view the whole purpose of literature to essentially be propaganda. The more traditional is that we are telling a story. There is probably meaning there but in general rarely is allegory the prime purpose. Not to say this doesn’t happen, e.g. Starship Troopers is a polemic on Duty, but honestly, it is also a hell of a good story. Thirdly, the modern literature folks are oddly like what the Puritans were alleged to be. They’re afraid someone might be having fun somewhere and they must prevent that at all costs.

 

Point of View Blues

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I was just watching a YouTube video which tried to explain why narrating a novel in third person omniscient is wrong but third person limited is right.  The young woman explaining all this was personable, eloquent and prepared with arguments for her thesis.  Ultimately, she was foursquare against “head hopping; meaning switching back and forth between points of view in a scene.

And who knows, maybe she’s right.  Maybe subjecting the audience to the point of view of two people within a dialog is just too confusing for audiences.  But you know what?  I have a feeling if a story is interesting enough and the characters sympathetic, I’m guessing that the audience is following along just fine and just wants to find out how the plot will progress.  I think a lot of times editors edit even when they should be reading and feeling whether the story is achieving that minor miracle we call entertainment.  And if E.E. Doc Smith used too many exclamation points and Robert E. Howard had Conan grunt the same way in too many scenes, I’m sure a competent editor would have demanded these faults be eliminated from the final version of the book.  But would that have added significantly to the entertainment value of the story?  I don’t think so.  Sure twelve-year-old me and current me are different readers.  We notice different things in the same book.  I would see the pulp aspects of the writing and even the temporal changes in writing and culture that have occurred over the course of almost a century since these books were written.  But I can still enjoy the story as a story.  If it elicits emotions or makes me think about a scientific point the author is trying to make then even if the prose is far from deathless, I can be entertained.  I don’t need Shakespeare in space.

So, here’s my point.  The book publishing industry is dying.  And it’s not dying because of the prevalence of the third person omniscient point of view.  It’s dying because the gatekeepers of publishing just as the gatekeepers of movie-making consciously squeezed all the fun out of novels in order to advance a social justice narrative that they thought was mandatory to push.  So, the cure for this isn’t better editing.  It’s better writing, writing that keeps the interest of the readers.  Better plots and better characters and more fun.

Of course, I went back and tried to decide if my narration was third person omniscient or third person limited.  And by golly I think it was omniscient.  Now I could go back and rewrite the novel by switching the point of view in all of the tens of thousands of words to third person limited.  But then it wouldn’t be my story.  Because I don’t think that way and so I would be stumbling about trying to rework the sentences to fit this requirement of the narration.  Well, I guess editors have to eat so I can’t blame them for pushing the party line that provides them with work.

But I just can’t see it from their point of view.