I think I still have mine. It involved "moon worms" and a non-corporeal intelligence. As well as characters who never existed as toys.
Author Habits That Annoy You
- Thread starter Captain Dax
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Yep. And the original novel was meant to be a standalone, so McCully wrapped everything up at the end, with Zorro revealing his true identity to the world, hanging up his mask, and settling down to live happily ever after with Carlotta. The End.
Then the movie made Zorro a sensation and, being no fool, McCully ignored the ending of his own book to write an ongoing series of Zorro novels for the rest of his life.
I seem to recall that, not unlike Dr. Watson's various spouses, Zorro's wife (wives?) and love interests tend to come and go without explanation.
Yes. One fan, Matthew Baugh, made an entire chronology attempting to reconcile all the contradictory Zorros out there. You can see the timeline here if you're interested.I seem to recall that, not unlike Dr. Watson's various spouses, Zorro's wife (wives?) and love interests tend to come and go without explanation.
Truly comic books owe a lot to this man.
To clarify, McCulley didn't do stories explaining how a particular character survived, the way comic books commonly do. He just brought the character back with no explanation, or even an acknowledgement that they'd ever died at all. He was essentially pretending that they'd never been killed off in the first place.Truly comic books owe a lot to this man.
I think that happened in the early Golden Age. IIRC, Red Skull reappeared without explanation. Maybe the Joker, too.
Yes, appearing to die at the end of one story and turning up without explanation in the next was a standard move for the Joker, as well as for Hugo Strange, the other of Batman's earliest recurring villains. And of course, it's been a common trick for other archvillains down through the ages, including the Master in Doctor Who and Murdoc in MacGyver (the original).
Bill Finger and Bob Kane actually killed off the Joker at the end of his second ever story in Batman #1. But someone thought better of it, so at the last minute they inserted a panel where a doctor examined the Joker and declared, "This man--He isn't dead! He's still alive--and he's going to LIVE!"
Starting two or three sentences in a row with the same word ("He _____. He _______. He_____."), or using the same adjective in two consecutive sentences if there's no obvious good/artistic reason to do so. Maybe I'm just picky.
I try to avoid that and similar things when I write. Makes me glad for the variety and flexibility of the English language.
To go back to the whole continuity thing for a moment, one of the worst cases of stories being inconsistent for me has the be the later seasons of Andromeda. Some episodes there was a full crew on the ship with tons of people everywhere, and then other episodes the main characters were the only people on the ship. And it went back and forth, so it wasn't like the extra just appeared and stuck around, one week they'd be there, and then the next week they'd disappear, only for there to be a full crew again the week after that. And then between either two episodes or during a season break, the Commonwealth, which is basically it's version of the Federation, went from only being a handful planets to suddenly being practically back to its full strength it was at before it broke apart hundreds of years before the series.
Yeah, once Bob Engels took over as Andromeda's showrunner, it's amazing how ineffectual he was. A showrunner is supposed to be responsible for giving a show a consistent voice, style, and continuity no matter who's writing the scripts, but season 3 in particular felt like it was alternating between two or three different shows. The scripts by Zack Stentz & Ashley Edward Miller still felt like the original smart, hard-SF show they'd worked on in seasons 1-2, but the scripts by Engels were a nonsensical and badly written fantasy-action schlockfest, a completely different universe that didn't even follow the same physics. The other writers' scripts felt like their own thing too, not quite the same show as either of the others. It feels like Engels really had no sense of what the show was supposed to be and just let the writers do their own things. It wasn't unlike the position Fred Freiberger was in when he took over Star Trek, but so much more extreme.
I tuned out on Andromeda in S3 because of this, and because IIRC the show's scheduling became inconsistent. The last memories I have of it are an episode where Tyr was a full-on anatagonist and may have died and the Spirt of the Abyss may have been involved, which felt fairly incomprehensible, and an earlier episode where Dylan and and Tyr and Beka(?) were apparently commanding squadrons of slipfighters or whatever they were called, but it was all onscreen graphics, which made it feel impossibly abstract.
Actually I liked that about the show, that it was one of the only shows that tried to depict space battles realistically, with the ships too far apart to see more than one except in screen graphics, instead of copying Star Wars's WWII-dogfight version of space battles or The Wrath of Khan's Hornblower-sea-battle version, neither of which is remotely how a space battle would actually work. The only other modern show I can think of that portrays anything like realistic distances in space battles is The Expanse. (The original Star Trek ironically did it better than modern shows because it didn't have the FX capability to show two ships in the same shot most of the time.)
To the assertion that watching graphics on a screen can't be suspenseful, I offer the movie Fail Safe as a counterargument. The fact that the characters were watching a big wall display depicting events happening thousands of miles away beyond their ability to control was a key part of what created the suspense. Alfred Hitchcock and plenty of other filmmakers have always known that what you can't see is a great source of fear and tension.
Of course, having crewed fighters at all in Andromeda was unrealistic and a concession to the Star Wars WWII-pastiche paradigm, even though the slipfighters could function as drones remotely operated by Andromeda herself. Atomic Rockets has a good explanation of why space fighters make no sense: https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fighter.php#id--Why_Fighters_Are_Worthless In short, there's no point wasting the fuel to propel the mass of a pilot and their cockpit and life support when a missile or drone could do the same job.
I spoke to DC Fontana about this at a SF convention in New Zealand. She had quite a glint in her eye and congratulated me for noticing. (The line, not the glint.)
It was "Vulcan's Glory" (Feb 1989) and she wrote it when ST V was still in its early stages of production, so Sybok was not-yet-canon. The movie premiered in June 1989. Roddenberry and Fontana had both spoken out publicly about the idea of a half-sibling for Spock being unwise, and DC even quoted her old TOS-era memos warning the 1960s TV writers that giving Spock too many close relatives could water down Spock's uniqueness.
Technically, what DC did was permissable, and just a little bit mischievous. But Paramount could have removed her line (of "Spock is the only son of Sarek") if they wanted to.
That isn't necessarily a contradiction, though, since Sarek disowned Sybok, and therefore no longer considered Sybok his son. As far as other people knew, it would be a true statement. If it was phrased that way, as someone else talking about Spock, it could still be valid if the speaker didn't know better.
Yep!
We also say that somebody is "their father's son, all right", meaning they share certain obvious qualities. You could then infer that Sybok takes after his mother, and Spock is the only one of two sons with his father's traits.
Except Sybok's mother was a "Vulcan princess," whatever that means, so she was unlikely to be as much of a counterculture V'tosh ka'tur type as Sybok.
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