Erik Owomoyela

Author Archive: Erik Owomoyela

Creative Constraints of Ice and Fire

One of the things about A Song of Ice and Fire that I was less than enthused about is the books’ fixation on constructing an intricately realized bizarro version of medieval England. Why so many Americans are fixated on a world that was largely gone by the time Columbus made it across the Atlantic, and whose influence a lot of our ancestors came here specifically to get some distance from, is kind of irritating.

But since Western fantasy fiction co-opts medieval Europe all the time, this isn’t really news. What apparently is news is that the books have a lot of violent sexism and misogyny, which led George R. R. Martin to tell Entertainment Weekly that the one choice necessitated the other. Naturally I was not enthused.

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June 4, 2015 Storytelling, Thoughts, Read more >

Star Trek was already too Star Trek-y

Because I am very clued in, I learned that the Internet was freaking out over Simon Pegg having called genre fiction infantile after he’d already posted a reaction to the Internet’s reaction.

As to his main point, I think he’s half right. Major film studios have absolutely taken to using genre fiction as a way to deliver spectacle rather than deep or challenging narratives, but that’s hardly a problem unique to fantasy or science fiction. The Fast & Furious franchise or The Expendables both blockbuster ticket farms too, and I wouldn’t argue they have a greater enduring cultural value than The Avengers.

What’s most concerning about the comments is the context: Pegg happens to be co-writing the next Star Trek film, a role he took on after the studio booted the movie’s original director after some unspecified creative differences. In his interview, Pegg said the original script was “a little bit too Star Trek-y.”

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May 20, 2015 Storytelling, Thoughts Read more >

Too many planets

One of the stranger arguments against counting Pluto as a planet is that if we were to include any object of its size and mass that doesn’t orbit a bigger planet, then our solar system would just have too many planets in it for our brains to handle.

The idea got a lot of play back when the International Astronomical Union was debating whether Pluto should be considered a planet. But evidently it’s become so widespread that even critics of the IAU’s decision are buying it:

In a sense, the IAU chose to cauterize a wound, a weakness in the definitions, that if left unchanged, would have led to who knows how many planets in our Solar System.

Mostly, that article goes to argue for a new set of definitions for celestial bodies that isn’t just haphazardly tailored to produce a specific set of planets in our solar system. But it still doesn’t explain how the discovery of a new planet would constitute a wound. Evidently, without official intervention, we should fear that a bunch of fuzzy pictures of small planets might start spilling onto high school astronomy charts, and freak out our impressionable youths who need to be able to count everything using their fingers.

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February 20, 2015 Space, Thoughts Read more >

Black holes and the trouble with science fiction

I should be really excited for the movie Interstellar. I think part of why I’m not has to do with my growing skepticism about movie plots in general, which I’ll have to get into later. But regardless, this sort of thing is really impressive:

 In short, in order to accurately create a visual for the story’s black hole, Kip Thorne produced an entirely new set of equations which guided the special effects team’s rendering software. The end result was a visual representation that accurately depicts what a wormhole/black hole would look like in space.

What really impressed me, though, is that apparently nobody thought to do this before. And that kind of says a lot about the state of both science and science fiction.

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October 23, 2014 Space, Storytelling, Thoughts Read more >

Mass Effect 3 Revisionism

What's your favorite color?

Okay, when I saw that someone had come up with a 400-page plan to rewrite Mass Effect 3 I was a little annoyed that I hadn’t done it myself, because it seems like a fun project for someone who has too much time on their hands, as I occasionally do. On the other hand, the whole project seems based on exactly what I thought was so off-base about the whole Mass Effect 3 freakout in the first place.

Part of the problem is that the complaints tend not to acknowledge the constraints that arise when a script needs to be paired with the expense of creating an interactive 3D environment and pairing it with actual enjoyable gameplay and making it all work on a budget. But the bigger issue involves whether total freedom of choice is a realistic goal to begin with.

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January 21, 2014 Games, Storytelling, Thoughts Read more >

Argue the law

stoneI didn’t start seriously watching Law & Order until the show (and the police procedural in general) were pretty much played out, so it was a revelation when Netflix enabled me to start watching from the beginning. As cliché as the show’s promise of ripped-from-the-headlines stories would get, it really did a terrific job of capturing the cultural mood of its era.

One very early episode, “Subterranean Homeboy Blues,” presents the case of a white woman who shoots two black men on the subway, and gets through her trial essentially on the argument that the shooting was justified because black men are scary. It was apparently based on the case of Bernhard Goetz, and I got to thinking about it over the weekend as the George Zimmerman trial was wrapping up. And I think there’s more than the obvious parallels worth considering here.

I deliberately didn’t pay much attention to the actual Zimmerman trial, because I think turning one particular case into a cultural event does a disservice to basically everyone involved.

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July 15, 2013 Government, Thoughts Read more >

Keeping a republic is hard sometimes

Egypt rally

For the past few years, I’ve tended to commemorate Independence day by watching an episode of the HBO miniseries John Adams, since it combines two things I generally like doing: Fairly superficial intellectual exercises and watching TV. Normally, I go with the obvious episode — “Independence,” the one about the Continental Congress — but this year I had something else in mind.

A major thread in the show’s later episodes is the impact of the French Revolution on the new United States. It’s an especially timely look now, since just yesterday Egypt’s first-ever democratically elected leader was forced out in a military coup, and there’s a lot of mixed feelings about whether it’s a good thing or not.

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July 4, 2013 Government, Thoughts, Read more >