Why A Game of Thrones Will Fail

I know, I know.  A lavish production based on a set of best selling books with big name stars, airing on HBO.  And one episode in and here I am predicting its untimely demise.  Why?

The problem is primarily one of scope.  The books, and hence series, are based on a large world with a vast cast.  Other series and movies have also had to deal with geographically diverse locations - I'm thinking of the Lord of the Rings, here - but they've only had to do so piecemeal.  Whilst the Lord of the Rings had to deal with the Shire (and its hobbits), Moria (and its dwarves), Lothlorien (and its elves) and Minis Tirith (with its men) it was able to do so in small, bite-sized chunks.  We get some time in the Shire, and only in the Shire.  Then, things move on, we forget about the Shire, and the film can go on to explore Moria.  We see, we enjoy, then we move on once more.
In other words, movies like Lord of the Rings can handle the large map by progressing through it in a linear fashion.  The Game of Thrones cannot do so, as the cast either communicates with one another across the distance, or actively jump locales in order to discuss events more intimately.
Which leads to the second and greater problem of having a vast cast all interacting pretty much simultaneously.  With so many characters being thrown at the screen, in varied locations, with multiple plots (current and historical) it is a non-trivial task for those not familiar with the source material to keep track of what's going on.
Which will lead to a rapid rate of attrition.
And, worse, those who haven't seen the initial episodes will be unable to jump in mid-season.  This problem will be familiar to the creators of many recent shows that evolved complex storylines and character relationships, though I doubt many had to endure such a viewer-antagonistic opening.

Finally, for those who are unaware of the *layout* of the series (no spoilers, not that I can, as I haven't read it), the later books famously drop an entire half cast off to go and focus on the other half before picking up again.  As the series is pretty much following the books (in a season-per-book manner) then it will be interesting to see how later seasons (should they get that far) translate such material.  You can't really tell half your cast to take 2012 off and come back in 2013.  And I don't think they can use the standard mechanism of just deviating far enough from the material that it's not a concern (a la True Blood / Sookie Stackhouse) as the Game of Thrones books are much more intricately tied together than other, more stand-alone books.

And of course it's made just that bit more difficult by the fact that the book series is still being written.

Upon the strength of the above arguments, I'm going to say that it will stave off a push for cancellation during the first season (based on money sunk, and against high costs per episode), but it will succumb to cancellation before the end of the second season.
Box sets and equivalent will do well, however.
Goodbye, Winterfell, it was good knowing you.
Call me in 15 months and tell me how close I was.

Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 released

SP1 for VS is finally out.  Or tomorrow for non-MSDNers.
Doesn't mention if they've reduced the number of times that it crashes, but since the frequency can't go up, I figure it's worth installing.

See the following link for the announcement and bytes.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2011/03/08/announcing-visual-studio-2010-service-pack-1.aspx

Nudity on Book Covers

Having spent a bit of time recently sorting through various books, mostly of the sci-fi and fantasy ilk, I got to wondering: what is the impact of nudity on a book's cover?

Information regarding nudity on book covers is not that easy to come by on the web. The best I managed was discussion on some Jungle Book covers featuring a naked Mowgli.

http://www.p-synd.com/wild/picture.htm

And, in the end, all we get is speculation on how the publisher might have felt about the view of Mowgli's buttocks.

So does nudity on a cover raise sales? Or does it lower them?

Does it restrict the places that the book can be sold (such as a Target or Walmart store)?

Do publishers tend to have guidelines for artists (no full frontal)?

Do covers with nudity tend to prevail in certain countries? Most books do have different covers for different markets, and the styles do vary from country to country. Some prefer vivid, coloured covers whilst others have row upon row of books with just two tone shapes, a san serif title and the author's name.

Does the genre strongly affect its likelihood? Do publishers of hard sci-fi worry that having breasts on the cover would fail to attract the target market by misidentifying it? Do publishers of heroic fantasy worry that having a penis dangling on the cover would turn off the teenage male buyers?

Does it come and go over time? Am I likely to find a predominance of naked women adorning the covers of books from the 60s and 70s, but a dearth from the 90s?

I should probably datamine my own collection and see if any interesting stats turn up.

If anyone has any information on covers with nudity, by all means, chime in.

The Function of Commercial Media

We have a guest post today that I pilfered from the ether by a chap called Weaver.  The discussion was on why commercial networks do not provide intelligent shows to viewers.  

The function of commercial media is to sell audiences/readers to advertisers. The audience/readers are not the customers, they are the product. The advertisers are the customers, and they want a particular kind of product, i.e. they want the kind of audience/readers it's worthwhile advertising to:

1. people with money,

2. who are likely to spend that money, 

3. and who are, if possible, a bit thick.

These requirements may vary - slightly - depending on the things being advertised, but the business model does not change. You may think you are the customer, but you are not; you are the product (or you are chaff the advertisers don't care about, like a homeless person leafing through a copy of Forbes they found in the street).

The usual grift is that content is designed to keep audience/readers happy; the corollary is the oft repeated lie "but this is what our audience/readers want!" This is like a baker complaining "But of course I use rancid horsemeat - that's what the pies want!" The audience is formed by the content; not vice versa. What the audience/readers want is irrelevant; what matters is what the customers want and the customers of commercial media want the eyes or ears of people who are easy to shill to.

The phrasing, I think, really hammers home the message.  Hell, I'm starting to wonder how we ended up with anything that's intelligent - or questioning how, or perhaps even if that's really the case.  It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.

New authors to enjoy in 2011.

New year, new lists.
Once again I've composed a list of authors that I haven't read anything by, that I'd like to rectify this year.
Asterisks if I've got something by them already.
No inclusions if an author only has one specific item that I'd want to read.
Be nice if I could do about half.
Obviously it's somewhat difficult for people to complain about who's not on the list, if they're not familiar with what I've already read, but there's plenty of scope for complaining about the ones I haven't read, or recommending specific titles.
I'll stroke them off when applicable: (watch for the mesmerizing absense of striking!) and perhaps update it with forgotten / new entries.

• joe abercrombie
• catherine asaro *
• robert asprin *
• JG ballard *
• damien broderick * (I've read some non-fiction)
• louis mcmaster bujold *
• octavia butler * 
• gardner dozois * (I've read stuff he's edited)
• greg egan * (I have read some short stories from luminous)
• mary gentle *
• robin hobb * 
• ian irvine *
• dean koontz *
• nancy kress * (I have read a short story)
• mercedes lackey *
• stanislaw lem
• ken macleod * 
• cormac mccarthy *
• george RR Martin *
• richard matheson *
• elizabeth moon *
• ayn rand *
• alastair reynolds * 
• anne rice *
• kim stanley robinson * 
• RA salvatore *
• john scalzi
• karl schroeder
• clifford D simak *
• olaf stapledon *
• charles stross *
• eric van lustbader *
• joan d vinge *
• vernor vinge * 
• tad williams * 
• sean williams *
• robert charles wilson *
• gene wolfe *

Of course, 'ordinary' reading by authors I love (or random titles that perchance take my fancy) will continue to intrude...

Vampires in World War 2 and the fiction disclaimer

 I recently came across a book called Fiends of the Rising Sun, which features vampires fighting together with the Japanese against the Americans during World War 2.
The copyright page of the book features the following section:

Historical Note:
This novel is a work of fiction set during the Second World War.  As far as possible, the historical details are accurate but the story takes liberties with reality for narrative effect.

It doesn't spell it out, but I'm guessing some of those liberties have to do with the vampires.

This of course brings up the question of the purpose of the fiction disclaimer in general, and its legal requirements and ramifications.

Not all fiction novels contain such a disclaimer.  I don't know the statistics, but I've got a 1983 printing of Brave New World sitting here on the desk and a quick check reveals no such disclaimer.  A David and Leigh Eddings book, The Redemption of Althalus, that I randomly took down from a shelf also contains no such disclaimer.

Apparently the disclaimer originated because of the movie Rasputin and the Empress.  The Russian Princess Youssoupoff sued MGM for libel over the portrayal of a character that she claimed (and the court agreed) was based on her.  The movie was released in 1932, the court case occurred in 1934, but I can't find what movie was the first to use the disclaimer.  It may have been Rasputin and the Empress (they pulled the movie for several years) though I can find no reference to it.

So some form of fictional disclaimer tends to be tacked onto movies and books in order to prevent the author(s) from being sued.  Does this really work?  Well, the answer is somewhat.

At this point we are venturing into matters of law, which naturally varying from country to country.  What follows is mostly US law, since other western libel laws are similar enough; that or you are more likely to get sued by someone from the US.

The problem is that if people who know the plaintiff would identify a character with them, then argument can be made that, fictional disclaimer or no, the defendent has defamed them.  It doesn't have to be a match, but the differences do have to be fairly minimal.
Once you've got the match, you then have to demonstrate that it's not a satire or parody, and, generally speaking, you have to demonstrate that it's not actually true (I'm not even going to touch the sue-for-bad-restaurant-review fiasco).

Still, if you defame a vampire, they're not going to take you to court.
They'll just rip your throat out.

The Sci-Fi Blurb

With so many different sub-genres and styles within science fiction, sometimes it can be difficult to properly pigeonhole a new book.  Is it space opera?  Is it hard sci-fi?  Comedic?  Adventure?  Sometimes the title is a giveaway, sometimes the title is ambiguous, and of course sometimes the title is downright misleading.

Case in point:
The Hundredfold Problem.

The title here is in the ambiguous category.  I might lean a little towards hard sci-fi with the title suggesting a mathematical puzzle to be explored through the text, but I'm going to need more clues.
So we turn to the blurb:
"Four million years ago a Dyson sphere was built on the fringes of our solar system."

Okay, we're a single sentence in, but it's pretty safe to say that once we start exploring long term time scales and Dyson spheres, we are fully ensconced in hard sci-fi.
But let's read on a little bit more:
"...secretly sending its most dangerous criminals through a matter transmitter to the sphere nicknamed Big Dunkin Donut.  But now arch-villain Dennis the Complete Bloody Sadist is threatening to destroy the sphere.."

Ah.  That would be the part where the blurb takes an utter right hand turn and the book finds itself hauled post-haste out of hard sci-fi and plonked in the zany bucket.


When it comes to blurbs, however, The Hundredfold Problem is a mere lightweight.  Whilst the more lettered may be able to rattle off a hundredfold blurbs before breakfast, the rest of us may want to consult Ghastly Beyond Belief.  Which, I must say, deserves the award for least appropriate title.  It should also win an award for least appropriate tag line: "Sterilize yourself with fear...".  Finally, it does have a starred sentence on the cover exclaiming "The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of Quotations", which is in fact highly accurate and descriptive.

The early chapters contain a wealth of blurbs, scraped, stripped and exposed, with a little commentary for those who haven't read the contents of the book that the blurbs are attempting to sell.
Some are highly inaccurate; some appear to be deliberately misleading (A Handful of Silver?).  But blurbs are meant to stand out.  Here are a few that stood out for me:

"The truly amazing story of a world much like our own, only startlingly different."

"He had to be stopped, for all women were his playthings and all men his pawns!"

"Free drugs!  Easy sex!  No job hassles!  Some people just don't know when they're being oppressed!"

"It was love - between a mad scientist and a degenerate speck of hypermatter"

"She was all woman - ask the men who made her!"

"He was a destroyer from another planet, bent on the destruction of the world"

"Fluids running out of my brakes." - (this is the entire blurb)

"Only an intergalactic guerrilla force of pigs could destroy the monsters of the Ghost Plateau!"

And of course the one I most want to read:
"Harder than human!  A bionic man with a computer crotch satisfies the lust cravings of a super feminine world!  More than Mortal Meat!"


With so many great blurbs, where's the time to read the damn contents?