They Call Me The Seeker

From the men who brought you Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess comes Legend of the Seeker, a new live-action fantasy series based on Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth series. Like Hercules and Xena, this is a straight to syndication show, so it’s on random networks at various times in the week.

I saw this on hulu.com and decided to give it a try, seeing as Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert were involved. After the first few episodes, I was not at all impressed. This is a generic fantasy - think watered down Lord of the Rings or D & D with a monster manual that is 10 pages long. Everything about this show is predictable, cliché and safe.

I won’t go into a large amount of details, listing grievance after grievance of how the show fails to be any thing other than Hercules without comedy. The show takes itself way too seriously, which you can’t really do in a show like this, where exposition runs rampant and slow mo battle scenes are the norm.

Sorry Mr. Goodkind, I hope they paid you a lot for the rights.

Blinded By The Twilight

On the side I work in Champaign schools. I work with grades 6 to 11, and despite the differences in age, there are similar things about these kids - like gossiping during class, trying to sneakily use cell phones and getting distracted by all sorts of shiny objects. One of the current distractions (in a good way) is Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, the four part book franchise that some have called the new Harry Potter. The series focuses on teen Bella and her romance between vampire Edward. The past two weeks female students have brought up Twilight in some way in almost every class. Since South Park made fun of it, this book is a genuine phenomenon, and with last Friday’s release of the movie adaptation, it seems one that will be around for awhile.

Of course, the question is “does Twilight deserve this much adoration?” Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s children lit market has seen some of fiction’s most innovative and fantastical ideas in the past few years. While many of these series are pale comparisons of Harry Potter, there are some that have used the surge of new readers to create unique series that focus on the main purpose of children’s lit - escapism.

The Spiderwick Chronicles is one of my favorite kid’s series out today, not just because of the writing, but because of the wonderfully illustrated creatures and the world they suppose. The series was created by Holly Black and Tony Diterlizzi, and I was fortunate enough to talk to Holly Black about these wonderful books.

Matt Knicl: What is it about fairies that fascinates you?

Holly Black: People often think of faeries as little girls with wings that sparkle, but according to folklore, faeries are capricious and dangerous creatures. A smart person wouldn’t even say the word “faery” for fear of getting their attention, but instead call them by placating names like “the good neighbors,” “the little people,” or “the people of peace.” Not because they were good or little or peaceful, but in the hope that faeries wouldn’t steal their children away and replace them with changelings or blight their crops and cause the cow’s milk to go sour. Unlike most other creatures from folklore (vampires and werewolves, for example), faeries were never human and it is their very alienness that fascinates me.

Read the rest of this entry »

I made a promise I couldn’t keep. Covering Comic-Con by oneself is impossible. The convention center took days to explore, and each panel had a line so long, you would have had to be there an hour before hand to ensure attendance. I thought I’d have free time, but at night when I thought I’d post, I was occupied by parties.

As far as the Con went, I have mixed feelings. As a comic fan, everyone and everything you’d want to see would be there, and lines in teh comic book area wouldn’t be too horrible. But, the movie and TV and video game and toy stuff really stole comics’ limelight, and filled the con with tourists and kids who admittedly didn’t read. Harold & Kumar were there, for example, and their booth put Marvel’s to shame. But once I stayed out of the entertainment section and kept to the comics area, I had a good time meeting with publishers and creators.

The parties were by far the best part of the Con because I could meet and talk to people one on one. You’d turn around and Joss Whedon or Bruce Campbell would be chilling. I met Mark Waid, Stephen Baldwin, Bill Willingham, the heads of DC and Marvel, Keith Giffen, and Grant Morrison at these parties, and as a professional and a fan boy I had a great time just talking to people.

News: Read the rest of this entry »

If you read today’s Buzz, you saw but a small portion of my exclusive interview with Anita Blake scribe Laurell K. Hamilton. This is the interview in its entirety.

Matt Knicl: Who do you feel is your target audience?

Laurell K Hamilton: I don’t really target an audience. I write and if I’m enjoying it and having fun then I hope that the reader will enjoy it and have fun. In all honesty, when the sexual content was lower the demographics were 11 to 60 plus, women as well as men. I think the comic book has brought a lot of men in, but we’re seeing more men in line.

Matt: Some fans feel you put parts of your personal life into your books. Do you feel this is true or not?

Laurell: No. I put very little of my personal life on the page.

Matt: How much of the negative and positive fan feedback do you allow to influence your writing?

Laurell: I’m going to quote Thornton Wilder at you. He said criticism, negative or positive, should never end up on the written page. The people who love you can’t take too seriously because then you think you’re wonderful, and nobody’s that wonderful. And the people that hate you – that’s not true either because they hate you. They don’t know you. They hate you because of words on paper. I actually don’t read any critique or criticism; I don’t read any of it. If it’s negative, you sit there and feel bad and if it’s positive you don’t feel like you can live up to it. So either way it messes with your head. As a working writer, you just can’t afford to get caught up in it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lazy Narnia

People tend to compare the book to its movie adaption, so when coming out of theaters the first thing spoken is the comment about how the movie fared compared to the book. My friends, and other professional critics, have pointed out that the movie was very different from the book. For some, this is a point of weakness, but for me, that’s actually a strength.

The Narnia books are children’s books, and this is due to the immature use of fantasy characters and the allegorical nature of the text. J.R.R. Tolkein was a friend of C.S. Lewis, but he hated Narnia because it was a patchwork quilt of fantasy cliché for some reason - werewolves and minotaurs and fauns and centaurs and talking animals live in a 100 Acre Woods type forest with little sense of practicality and a functioning secondary world. The big secret is that the books are all Christian allegory, which isn’t a bad thing, but direct allegory is a thing of Aesop and Kipling, not more complicated fantasy like Tolkien or Neil Gaiman.

I’ve read all the Narnia books several times, but lucky for me that was awhile ago. I don’t really remember Prince Caspian exactly, so when I saw the film I wasn’t putting both side by side to see which was “better.” But, I found the film to be a great movie because it not only adapted the book to a post-LotR mainstream audience, but it was able to add depth to the secondary world that the book lacked. I mean that the movie had hundreds of people shown in some scenes whereas the book would list the exact number of characters present, which would usually be about ten to fifteen characters (which makes you wonder how a sparsely populated world was supposed to operate, which was one of Tolkien’s beefs with the books, as LotR went to great lengths to make Middle Earth a realistic place with towns and commerce and economy). The action scenes were unique and made up for the lack of action during the mandatory allegorical dialog downtime in the beginning. I actually found the movie’s violence adding to the credibility of the world.

I’m sure they will do more movies, though which books I’m not sure (probably Dawntreader, Magician’s Nephew and Last Battle), and I welcome them, even though I may have been hesitant to begin with, because in the end Dinsey could have done much worse.

Hey kids! Sorry for not updating for a few days - the Convention was amazing! There was so much to see, so much to do - everything vaguely nerd was there - from Japanese designer toys to trading card games to comics. Walking around, there was so much going on you actually forget to eat and drink. You bump into famous people and realize they are human beings, or hear them speak and become more convinced they are a literary god. I’m still absorbing the events, but I’ll share with you some of the cool news I picked up. Read the rest of this entry »

After researching supernatural romance detective novels for my column in The Buzz, I decided to give some of the books I haven’t yet read a try. So far I had only read all the Anita Blake books.

Rachel Morgan is a different sort of detective. Granted, it’s in the same vein as Anita Blake, and there are some similarities, and as far as the book’s gimmick goes, the differences of this world are more interesting. Instead of having characters operate in the back alleys of our world, the world of The Hollows series is an alternate history where bioengineering accidentally wiped out many humans. With so many mortals missing, the once hidden races, like vampires and leprechauns, now stood out. So instead of an all out war, every species integrated into human society. Of course, not without obstacles. Read the rest of this entry »

4 out of 4 stars

The Spiderwick Chronicles is Nickelodeon’s second film venture in recent years adapting a children’s series into a movie. A Series of Unfortunate Events was a great movie, unlike Spiderwick, which was purely adequate.

Based on the book series of the same name by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi (a Magic: The Gathering card artist), we see twins Jared and Simon (Freddy Highmore), their older sister Mallory and recently divorced mother (Mary-Louise Parker of Weeds) moving into an old, abandoned house. It doesn’t take long for Jared to discover his great uncle Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around Us. Read the rest of this entry »

Bored of the Rings

Okay, before I begin, let me preface this by saying I’m not against Tolkien’s epic fantasy. However, there are things about it that need addressing. I’m not attacking his writing style or even the story, rather how Tolkien chose to present them. If you like Lord of the Rings, that’s great, but I’m going to voice a different opinion, which is my own and shouldn’t influence your liking of the book. This is aimed more towards people who haven’t yet read Tolkien.

Let me first say that Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy, or even a quadrilogy. Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings as one book, but the publisher broke it into three separate novels. It might be more pertinent to say that Lord of the Rings is then two novels in four volumes - this includes The Hobbit (which is essential to LotR - Fellowship of the Rings references events and characters from The Hobbit to the point of annoyance throughout). But this is still inaccurate as The Silmarillion, the history of Middle Earth, reveals important plot points about LotR, like that Sauron is a demon and Gandalf is basically an angel. This means to read LotR, you need to read five volumes of text. Throw in the Lost Tales and Tolkien’s other Middle Earth writings, and you have a ten volume monster on your hands. Read the rest of this entry »