read my stuff while you’re stuck at home, part 4: gaming tie-ins

So many of us are kinda stuck staying home a lot, and that means more reading time! Or, at least, time spent reading so you don’t go batshit because you’re stuck staying at home a lot……

As one possible thing to read, how about my writing? I’ve already posted about my various writings based on TV shows — including my Star Trek work and my work based on other shows — and work based on movies, and now we turn to stuff about gaming. I’ve written novels and short stories and comic books based on BattleTech, Command & Conquer, Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, StarCraft, and World of Warcraft, as well as an essay about writing gaming fiction.

BattleTech

Short stories:

• “Meiyo” on BattleCorps.com — in Solaris City, Mariko Guardado announces the ‘Mech fights in the coliseum, and winds up part of a plot to overthrow Word of Blake’s rule
• “Three Sides to Every Story” in 25 Years of Art and Fiction — this coffee-table book has a ton of new short fiction, including another story of Mariko Guardado, now doing pirate broadcasts

Command & Conquer

Novels:

• Tiberium Wars — taking place simultaneously with the 2007 game of the same name, this novel focuses on two young officers who fight in the war against the forces of Nod, as well as a reporter trying to bring the real story of Tiberium poisoning to the rest of the world

Dungeons & Dragons

Novels:

• Dark Sun: Under the Crimson Sun — part of the “Abyssal Plague” crossover event, this is the story of two friends, Gan and Rol, who are captured by slavers, and Rol has also been infected with the abyssal plague; their friends, a team of grifters, must rescue them and try to save Rol

Magic: The Gathering

Short stories:

• “God Sins” in Distant Planes — a planeswalker decides to retire, but finds that his worshippers won’t let him

Nonfiction

• “Gaming the Novel” in Kobold Guide to Combat — an essay on the differences between combat in a gaming situation versus combat in a work of fiction

StarCraft

Novels:

• Ghost: Nova — the origin of Nova Terra, who became the Terran Dominion’s most powerful Ghost assassin; the intended prequel to the StarCraft: Ghost game that never happened, this nonetheless provides backstory on a supporting character in the StarCraft mythos

Comic books:

• Ghost Academy #1 — a look at the training of telepaths to become Ghosts, through the eyes of Nova, Gabriel Tosh, Kath Toom, Lio Travski, Aal Cistler, and Delta Emblock

World of Warcraft

Novels:

• Cycle of Hatred — Jaina Proudmoore and Thrall work together with a magical ally everyone thought was dead, in order to stop the rise of Galtak Ered’nash, a plot by the Burning Legion to take over the world

“Stories for Shut-Ins” kicks off with me reading “Used To Be”

“Stories for Shut-Ins: Author Readings from Across the Universe” kicked off today with me reading “Used To Be,” my story in Across the Universe: Tales of Alternative Beatles, edited by Rollickin’ Randee Dawn and Mighty Michael A. Ventrella, published by the fine folks at Fantastic Books.

Check it out!

Star Trek: Voyager Rewatch: “Elogium”

Kes is fertile! Neelix isn’t sure about parenthood! Tuvok misses his kids! Wildman is pregnant! And Voyager is too sexy for its shirt! The Star Trek: Voyager Rewatch goes through the “Elogium,” an episode that is entirely about fucking and procreation.

An excerpt:

As for Neelix, he’s not nearly alien enough. From the moment he finds out what the elogium is, up until his final scene with Kes, Neelix says a whole lot of things about parenthood, including some really hoary and stupid gender-role distinctions (thankfully, Tuvok punctures these pretty thoroughly). If those exact same lines of dialogue were given to a middle-class suburban white guy in 1950s America, not a single word would change. That’s a spectacular failure of imagination.

presenting “Stories for Shut-Ins: Author Reading Series from Across the Universe“

Starting tomorrow, the 30th of March, Randee Dawn will be presenting “Stories for Shut-Ins: Author Reading Series from Across the Universe,” as various authors of that anthology of alternate Beatles tales will read their contributions to it.

First up will be me reading “Used To Be” on Monday, followed by Brenda W. Clough, Bev Vincent, and Charles Barouch. Details at the link!

read my stuff while you’re stuck at home, part 3: movie tie-ins

So many of us are kinda stuck staying home a lot, and that means more reading time! Or, at least, time spent reading so you don’t go batshit because you’re stuck staying at home a lot……

As one possible thing to read, how about my writing? I’ve already posted about my various TV tie-ins, including my Star Trek work and my tie-ins to various and sundry other shows, and now we turn to my movie tie-ins. I’ve written both original novels and movie novelizations, as well as short stories and nonfiction, in the worlds of Alien, Blade Runner, Cars, Gargantua, Darkness Falls, King Kong, Kung Fu Panda, Mary Shelley, Night of the Living Dead, Resident Evil, Serenity, and Star Wars.

Alien

Novels:

• Isolation — a novelization of the 2014 videogame, taking place between Alien and Aliens as Amanda Ripley, Ellen’s daughter, tries to find out what happened to her Mom by traveling to Sevastapol Station where the Nostromo flight recorder has been recovered

Short stories:

• “Deep Background” in Bug Hunt — a reporter is embedded with a platoon of Colonial Marines, who are sent to a planet for what should be a straightforward mission…

Blade Runner

Nonfiction:

• “Do Blades Dream of Electric Runners?” in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — each issue of BOOM! Studios’s comic book version of the Philip K. Dick novella had an essay in the back, and mine was in issue #19 and is reprinted along with all the others in the omnibus; I talk about the comparison between the novella and the cult classic movie based on it

Cars

Comic books:

• Rust Bucket Derby — Tow Mater starts up a demolition derby and Red goes on trial for a crime he didn’t commit

Darkness Falls

Novels:

• Darkness Falls — novelization of the 2003 horror film about the secret origin of the Tooth Fairy, who preys on children and adults alike

Gargantua

Novels:

• Gargantua (as K. Robert Andreassi) — novelization of the 1998 TV movie about a family of monsters who menace a tropical island

King Kong

Nonfiction:

• “‘Twas Stupidity Killed the Beast” in King Kong is Back! — my essay on how it wasn’t beauty that killed the beast, as the famous closing line of King Kong insists, but rather human venality

Kung Fu Panda

Comic books:

• “Contest of Chompions” in Tales of the Dragon Warrior #1 — an eating contest and a fighting contest are at the same time, and Po must somehow participate in both

Mary Shelley

Nonfiction:

• “‘I Was Brought Into This World to be Abandoned’—Mary Shelley Gives Us the Heroine She Was” on Tor.com — a review of the movie

Night of the Living Dead

Short stories:

• “Live and On the Scene” in Nights of the Living Dead — during the zombie outbreak of the movie, a reporter from WIC-TV in Pittsburgh reports on the strange deaths, which start to hit very close to home

Resident Evil

Novels:

• Genesis — a novelization of the 2001 movie Resident Evil (given the subtitle to distinguish it from the sequels), released in 2004 alongside the novelization of its sequel Apocalypse, as Alice Abernathy must remember who she is while trying to survive multiple deathtraps and a whole lotta zombies
• Apocalypse — a novelization of the 2004 sequel, where the zombies take over Raccoon City, and Alice and several new friends must stop them, as well as the creature Nemesis
• Extinction — a novelization of the 2007 movie, where the world is a wasteland, overrun by the undead, and Alice teams up with a group of survivors to stop the Umbrella Corporation from making things worse

Serenity (Firefly)

Novels:

• Serenity — the novelization of the 2005 movie that concluded the River Tam storyline from the Firefly TV series

Nonfiction:

• “‘The Train Job’ Didn’t Do the Job” in Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds, and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly — my essay on why airing “The Train Job” first was a big factor in Firefly not finding enough of an audience to stay on the air

Games:

• “Merciless” in Echoes of War Supplement #2: Things Don’t Go Smooth — I wrote this module for the Firefly RPG in which the players must do a heist in a museum of full of Earth-That-Was ephemera

Star Wars

Nonfiction:

• “The Madness of King George” in Star Wars on Trial — I provide a counterpoint to David Brin’s 1999 essay “What’s Wrong (and Right) with The Phantom Menace,” where I disagree with his thesis that the politics of Star Wars are elitist and un-democratic
• “Top Ten Positives About the Prequel Trilogy” in A Long Time Ago: Exploring the Star Wars Cinematic Universe — I enumerate ten good things about The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith (yes, I actually found ten)

KRAD COVID readings #5: “Ganbatte“

The latest of my KRAD COVID readings is “Ganbatte,” which is the first work of my fiction that has won an award! Appearing in Joe Ledger: Unstoppable and taking place in the world of Joe Ledger created by Jonathan Maberry, the story provides the backstory for Lydia “Warbride” Ruiz and which won Best Short Story in the Scribe Awards given out by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers in 2018.

Check it out, and please consider subscribing to the channel!

talkin’ the Mirror Universe on Sci-Fi Diner

The latest episode of the Sci-Fi Diner podcast is now live, and episode #381 is a recording of a panel that I participated in at Farpoint 2020 last month, in which we talked about Star Trek‘s Mirror Universe. Introduced in the original series’ “Mirror, Mirror,” and seen again in several episodes of Deep Space Nine, Enterprise, and Discovery, not to mention a ton of novels, short stories, and comic books, we talk about the world where the good guys are bad guys, the Vulcans have goatées, and the uniforms are outlandish.

The panel is moderated by Kyle Williamson, who cosplays as Q, and also does the Fandom Spotlite podcast. He’s joined by me (who’s written twice in the MU, the Voyager MU short novel The Mirror-Scaled Serpent in Obsidian Alliances, and the short story “Family Matters” in Shards and Shadows), Sci-Fi Diner podcast cohost Miles McLoughlin, and Royce Essig of the web series Dark Operations: Terminus.

Check it out!

Star Trek: Picard‘s “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2”

Everything comes to a head on Coppelius — the super synths, the Zhat Vash, the Borg Cube, La Sirena, Soji, Soong, Narek, Data, Seven of Nine, and more than one big-ass fleet of ships. My take on the grand finale of Star Trek: Picard‘s first season, “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2.”

An excerpt:

Rather famously, playwright Anton Chekhov believed that stories should not have extraneous details. On several occasions, Chekhov wrote about this in letters, variations on the theme that if you have a gun on the wall in your story, it should be fired by the end of the story, or it shouldn’t be on the wall in the first place.

This season of Star Trek: Picard has hung a good many guns on the wall, and while Part 2 of the season finale fires most of them, it doesn’t quite fire them all, and a few of them misfire badly. Having said that, it’s a most satisfying conclusion to the season.

Friday fanfare: “Splendid Isolation”

A depressingly appropriate song from Warren Zevon’s magnificent 1989 album Transverse City. Probably the only rock-and-roll song that references Georgia O’Keeffe, certainly the only one to reference both her and Michael Jackson, it’s a good song for coronavirus blues…..

KRAD COVID readings #4: “Behold a White Tricycle”

The latest of the KRAD COVID readings is a shorter one: “Behold a White Tricycle,” a story I originally wrote in the early 2000s for a wound-up-never-being-published anthology called 44 Clowns: 11 Stories of the 4 Clowns of the Apocalypse. It was eventually printed in my 2015 short-story collection Without a License, and I read it for you here…….