Book: Graceling by Kristin Cashore

So, I was looking around for some YA fantasy featuring female protagonists or something, and someone reccomended this book to me. Sounds good!

The description on Amazon.com goes:

"Katsa has been able to kill a man with her bare hands since she was eight--she's a Graceling, one of the rare people in her land born with an extreme skill. As niece of the king, she should be able to live a life of privilege, but Graced as she is with killing, she is forced to work as the king's thug.

When she first meets Prince Po, Graced with combat skills, Katsa has no hint of how her life is about to change. She never expects to become Po's friend. She never expects to learn a new truth about her own Grace--or about a terrible secret that lies hidden far away . . . a secret that could destroy all seven kingdoms with words alone." 

The world-building in this book is a bit light for how I prefer my high fantasy worlds to be built, but still very realistic. For example, not everyone is born with a "cool" Grace like killing or fighting - instead, it's mentioned that some people are Graced with more or less useless skills like the ability to climb trees unusually well. And this does qualify as "high fantasy" pretty well, because although there aren't (so far) elves or dwarves, there are still plenty of castles and kings and swords and all of that.

Then, there's the character of Katsa. She's quickly taking her place as one of my favorite literary characters. She's not just a "strong female character" in that she can swing around a sword. She's also persistent, intelligent, and rather feminist. While there is romance, as one could guess, it's not your typical YA romance, either.  She actually takes time to think about, and discuss, what kind of relationship she wants, whether or not she wants children, and so on. She makes it a point to teach other young women how to stand up for and defend themselves.

There isn't much in the way of a plot - Read the blurb, assume that Katsa and Po end up travelling all around their known world for a while because high fantasy wouldn't be high fantasy without the main characters spending copious amounts of time riding horses from point A to point B in multi-day journeys, and it's pretty straightforward. The book's biggest problem is that a genre-savvy reader could probably see the plot "twist" coming from about halfway through the book, but otherwise, it's a solid start to the series.

New midseason TV!

Now that Fringe is over... OK, I still haven't gotten over Fringe, and there's now an empty Fringe-shaped space in my heart on Friday nights. OK, there haven't been any Friday nights yet, but there will be.

New shows that sound interesting are Continuum (Syfy), Defiance (Syfy), Cult (CW), and The Following (Fox). Then there's Zero Hour (ABC), which looks like it might be compatible with my Ancient Aliens (or Dan Brown or National Treasure) bingo cards.

First of all, the pilots of Cult and Zero Hour won't air for another month or so.

I saw the pilot of The Following last night, and unlike when I saw it at Comic-Con, I saw it from the start. It has Kevin Bacon, making the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon even easier now, and one Shawn Ashmore, the twin brother of Aaron Ashmore who I liked on Warehouse 13 (Oh, hey there's two of them! I can live with that ;-) Plot-wise, it so far seems like there's a non-zero number of characters who will, sooner or later, end up doing stupid things that will result in me yelling at the screen. Oh, and it's about this retired FBI agent who is apparently now consulting (something that retired FBI employees get asked to do both frequently and for good pay, in a rare glimpse of realism on television. It's less realistic that they get paid to consult on catching serial killers). 

Defiance has Jaime Murray from Warehouse 13 (yep, I love that show) and also has a cool-looking MMO. Unfortunately, it does not have a cool-looking MMO that's compatible with Mac OS or Ubuntu Linux. Maybe the little things that are available On Demand will catch me up on what's going on? And there's this really neat website you can mouse around and check out. No, really. Sadly, we'll have to wait for April to see it. (And then it will be back-to-back with Warehouse 13. Yay!)

Also watched the pilot of Continuum, which is apparently Syfy's next entry in its (now) long and storied tradition of just straight-up importing stuff because Canadians are the only people actually making new scifi right now. Future cop winds up chasing down future terrorists in 2012 (really? Did they know they weren't even airing this until 2013?) but this seems like it'll raise a lot of interesting paradoxes about time travel and things, especially considering that Future Cop can't stop a present-day character from seeing glimpses into the future and knowing that they're going to be important and famous.

Slightly spoilery speculation for Continuum behind the cut...

Not really an entire post...

But ran across something from io9 titled "This is what happens when you give fairy tale characters guns on Once Upon A Time" and just had to check it out.

Be warned, this contains spoilers up through the January 13th, 2013 episode!

Books and Movies: City of Bones

So over two years ago, I picked up the City of Bones novel from the library, read it, liked it, and read the sequels, but there were only three books in the series (The Mortal Instruments) at the time.

Yes, a look at the cover makes it look like a cheesy romance novel aimed at teens, and yes, there is an endorsement from Stephenie Meyer on the back.

But, this book has less actual romance than any given chapter from any of the Twilight books and more action that the entire franchise, so it gets points for that. Also, it's got very good pacing - not only is there plenty of action, but what could have been a long, boring "infodump" is broken up into brief segments through the book - but the worldbuilding. Oh my god, the worldbuilding. If there's one thing that will make me fall in love with a series, or at least forgive more major flaws that I would otherwise, it's worldbuilding.

The book is set in New York City, with plenty of references to local geography, and the premise that some run-down or defunct appearing locations in the city were only an illusion to hide places with supernatural elements. And, the supernatural elements are plentiful and interesting for a fantasy book: There are the expected werewolves and vampires, and several other species, but so far every species has an origin that more or less makes sense within the universe. The weapons and magic are also creative, and seem to consistently follow rules.

The plot has a few predictable elements, although mostly from the heroic epic archetype (seriously, if you can't guess who Clary's father is by the end of the first bit history she hears, you must not have read much fantasy at all) but also a couple twists, and the dialogue is very believable for a YA fantasy, so while it's not amazing on the level of Hunger Games, it's definitely better than some more popular YA fantasies and most of what's on the CW right now.

So, back to the point, when a friend and I went to see Breaking Dawn Part 2 (yeah, I know) we saw a trailer for it, and it looked pretty awesome, so I went to re-read the books.

Then, my sister and I were chatting online, and we ended up discussing the beautiful human being that is Aidan Turner (as we often do when we chat online) and we looked at his IMDb page and discovered that he was actually in the City of Bones movie.

Which made us very happy. Then we saw that it had an August release date.

Shit.

In all of three years that I was working at a movie theater during late August, I cannot remember one good movie that was released during that time. Which is kind of discouraging, because really: Lots of interesting visuals, plenty of action scenes, and dialogue that's practically written to be onscreen? It seems like someone would practically have to try to make an adaptation of this that wouldn't be at least marketable and popular with teens in movie terms. One can only hope that the release date was not the studios resigning it to the dumping grounds of mediocre movies, but because someone decided that it was better to release it after the last Twilight movie and after SDCC 2013.

Well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see...

And now a few spoilery things!

Ancient Aliens: I'm Literally Shouting at the TV Right Now

Oh god. Why do I do this. WHYYYYY.

Right. To motivate myself to pick up a real science textbook.

So far we've got:
The author of Chariots of the Gods - which, as I understand from my archaeology book, was THE book of ridiculous archaeological psuedoscience that was held up as an epitome of everything psuedoscientific - was talking about something. Apparently, the fact that on the equinox, the edge of a shadow from a temple falls on another temple. Because geometry is too hard for humans to have invented on their own. Where does this guy think calculus came from? Does he even know what calculus is?

Someone saying that fire was of mystical significance to ancient cultures that had rituals involving fire, not because fire was, say, necessary to cooking food and surviving the cold, but because fire looked like spaceship exhaust.

Then someone said that the rituals associated with kings wear crowns coming from how aliens might look if their heads were backlit by something, because I guess human heads can't be backlit?

Think that was the flimsiest logic you've ever heard? Well, here's one even better: The proof that a certain ritual by an indigenous tribe in Mesoamerica was inspired by extraterrestrial visitors is that - take a moment to put down and swallow whatever you're eating or drinking, your keyboard will thank me - the outfit worn by the "medicine man" is almost the exact same shape as 20th-century astronaut suits!

[cue some kind of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff here]

Oh, hey, it's the "TARDIS rock art". Although I'd think it's more credible if they actually said out-and-out that it means the Doctor visited them.

"Star beings"? What? Is "extraterrestrial" not mysterious sounding enough any more? Since I'm going on a Doctor Who tangent, is a Star Whale a kind of Star Being?

"Maybe quantum entanglement is already occurring" *cue animation of Aurora Borealis*

Oh. My. Flying. Spaghetti. Monster. They're trying to sell DVD's of this? Does this imply that people actually buy DVD's of this?!? Why would you do that? (I will not take "but drinking games" as an answer because that's what Netflix is for)

Wait, this is almost literally Stargate. They're even talking about the importance of Abydos! I think I would buy the DVD if it actually was a Stargate/Doctor Who crossover.

Yeah, and we're done. Or at least my brain is breaking.