Yet Another Immortal Detective

As if the television sprites were reading this blog last week and decided to grant my wish, Fox has finally actually started airing episodes of New Amsterdam. As I said in a comment on my last post, I found it very interesting this summer when they started advertising both this show and Moonlight at the same time. Immortals have become trendy again.

Last night was the first episode of the show, and if it seems like I’m writing about it awfully early in the game, well, it is a Fox show, so I’d better talk about it now before it gets cancelled, eh? It is definitely a show that fits in well with the “angsty immortals with relationship issues” genre. Which, I should emphasize, is not to say that it’s a bad show in any way; I actually quite liked it. But it was amusing to me that, even though this show is not about a vampire, it neatly sets the stage for a hefty focus on relationships quite early.

It turns out, you see, that John Amsterdam was made immortal by a Native American shaman back in the early colonial days, so that he would remain alive until he found “the one, and your souls are bound together.” So for the last 400 years, he’s been living in New York, looking for his true love, which, as his friend puts it, really means that he’s looking for his death. Amsterdam seems very tired of living forever, and when he ends up having a heart attack near the beginning of the episode and technically dies for a little while, his friend says he looks actually happy for the first time in a long time. This is apparently supposed to mean that his true love was nearby for the first time, presumably to get the overarching plot rolling.

Vampire Detectives of the Small Screen

Where was I? Oh, yes, the angst and drama surrounding vampire/mortal relationships. As it turns out, TV has been a wonderful place for these to play out. sonetka alluded to some of that going on in Buffy, but I never watched Buffy regularly. Instead, I watched two amazingly similar shows about vampire detectives, separated in airtime by a little more than a decade.

The first series, Forever Knight, I first saw during my impressionable youth, watched regularly for a while, lost track of, never finished, and then rediscovered upon joining Netflix during the dark days of graduate school. It was a Canadian show that had made its way down to the US, to which I was introduced by my aunt and uncle from Chicago, who could always be counted upon to feed my interest in fantasy. It was an awesome show, in a really-bad-early-90s-special-effects kind of way. In the first season, for example, the transformation to vampire mode was signified by the screen darkening and a yellow rectangle of light appearing in a bar over the vampire’s eyes, because they hadn’t yet figured out how to change just the eye color. But these are minor issues, I assure you.

The show is pretty much entirely driven by the main character, Toronto police detective Nick Knight.* Nick has been a vampire for 800 years now, and for the last several hundred has been looking for a cure. As the opening credits narration so eloquently puts it (in the voice of Nick’s nemesis and master, no less): “He was brought across in 1228. Preyed on humans for their blood. Now he wants to be mortal again. To repay society for his sins. To emerge from his world of darkness. From his endless… Forever (K)night.” Can you see where all the tension between the pros and cons of vampirism and mortality might come in here?

Here are the dichotomies, as embodied by various major characters:

Vampire Detectives of the Page

Like sonetka, I too have been thinking about vampires. In part this is due to the recent resurgence of immortality on TV, (namely CBS’s Moonlight,) but I’ve actually had vampires, and more specifically vampire detectives, in my life since high school, so I’m going to backtrack and look at this weird theme from the beginning, starting where sonetka left off, in books.

My first encounter with the combination of vampire and detective fiction came through my high school enjoyment of Mercedes Lackey’s books. Her Valdemar series is gaining something of the never-ending quality of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books, but, also like McCaffrey, she has been prolific in other series as well. One of those other series was the Diana Tregarde Investigations set. There were only three books in the series, Children of the Night, Burning Water, and Jinx High, due to, I kid you not, unbalanced fans threatening Lackey for revealing the truth of occult police work (and a bunch of other stuff.)

In any case, Lackey’s main character, Diana Tregarde, is a Guardian, who guards the force, fights evil, etc., etc. She must solve occult-based mysteries to save the world, which makes for some weird and wacky plots, but with some good fantasy/horror suspension of disbelief, everything makes sense within the context of the book. They’re fast-paced, like any good adventure mystery, and not nearly as cheesy as they sound initially. But what does Diana do to pay the bills when she’s not out fighting monsters? She writes romance novels. And who does she meet in the first book, who helps her gain insight into the dark side of the occult world, and also happens to be tall, dark, devastatingly handsome, and averse to sunlight? A vampire boyfriend, of course. Sound familiar? The vampire boyfriend turned out to be one of the more interesting side characters, but given that the next two mysteries took place out of town, he mostly became relegated to phone conversations and textual references, and then the series ended and we heard of him no more. Alas.

Mass Effect: A game review for non-gamers

As Mark mentioned, he was excited about Mass Effect long before it came out. After getting so involved in watching him play BioShock and then learning that Mass Effect was from the same people, I got pretty excited, too. I fear, though, that BioShock has ruined me for all other games, because its level of plot was so high and engaging, and it was so darn pretty. Mass Effect didn’t push BioShock off the top of my list, but it didn’t disappoint, either.

I was around when Mark played through Knights of the Old Republic as well, and as you might be able to tell from my old review from back then, I didn’t like it that much. A lot of the packaging annoyed me, to the point that I couldn’t get truly involved in the plot and didn’t enjoy being in the room with the game. Mass Effect is very much the same style of game, as Mark pointed out, but much, much better from my perspective, because they have moved far beyond all the things that irritated me.

Mass Effect - A gamer’s perspective

Not too long ago, I was presented with an opportunity to be massively disappointed. I had seen some of the early previews and interviews surrounding the game Mass Effect, and frankly my expectations, in spite of my best efforts to contain them, had grown to the point that I could not possibly be satisfied. A story-driven game with heavy role-playing elements set in a fully-realized science fiction world? It sounded more or less like just plugging wires directly into the pleasure centers of my brain, as far as I could tell.

Mass Effect was created by Bioware, the same company that created Bioshock, which I reviewed earlier here on the Buffet, and for which Dana published a review from the perspective of a non-gamer. This is also the same company that created the game Knights of the Old Republic (and its sequel, KotOR II) for the original X-Box console (the games were both also ported to the PC). This second game is much more important for understanding Mass Effect, because the two share a number of similarities in terms of the type of game and the manner in which the player is expected to interact with the world.

I have been very pleased in the past with Bioware’s work, and once again, they do not disappoint. I enjoyed the game immensely, in spite of my stratospheric expectations. I have a few quibbles, of course, because nothing is ever perfect, but in Mass Effect, they have delivered a solid, highly entertaining game that leaves me both satisfied with what I got for my money and eager for more.

Discworld Profile: The Witches and Tiffany Aching

Another major set of recurring characters throughout the Discworld novels are the witches. Though there are quite a few witches mentioned in the books, there are really just a few who become true characters, the most notable of which are Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg. They are based in the mountain kingdom of Lancre. As characters from some of the earliest of Pratchett’s books, they were originally intended as vehicles for parody, which set them up with some amusing traditional boundaries that the characters have more or less demolished as they, and the system of witchcraft as practiced on the Disc, developed more fully. (It is for this reason that the first witches book, Equal Rites, doesn’t seem to fit with the details mentioned in later books, as Pratchett changed his conception of their characters afterward. For the better, I might add.)

Granny Weatherwax is one of the best recognized Discworld characters in the series, both amongst readers and denizens of the Disc. Grumpy, stern, and completely no-nonsense, most of the people of Lancre fear her, but definitely know to go to her if they’ve got a real problem. She often fixes their problems by giving them what they actually need, though, as opposed to what they think they want, which does not serve to make her popular. She is quite powerful, but rarely bothers to use “real” magic when simply using headology (not to be confused with psychology) will work just as well, if not better. When the situation calls for it, though, she has been known to stop a sword with her bare hands and reverse the bite of a vampire by making him take on her attributes rather than the other way around. The vampire ended up with a fierce craving for a decent cup of tea. One of her main witching talents is Borrowing, in which she lays her mind over that of an animal to go out and have a look around. She is seen as filling the role of The Crone in the Three Goddesses coven model, though no one would ever say so to her face.

Nanny Ogg is Granny Weatherwax’s best friend, or at least most constant companion. She could be seen as a foil for Granny Weatherwax, except her own character is so well developed. Where Granny Weatherwax is tall, thin, and snappish, Nanny Ogg is short, round, ribald, and (to those who don’t know her well) kindly. She is very popular with the people of Lancre, and is perhaps related to more than half of them, given her prodigious numbers of husbands, children, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. She is an extremely accomplished midwife, to such an extent that she is called on for her services when the female personification of Time is giving birth. She is seen as the Mother figure of the coven, for obvious reasons.

Discworld Profile: The Librarian

The Librarian is one of Discworld’s more popular characters, having been turned into an orangutan thanks to a magical accident. He only ever says “ook” (or occasionally “eek”) and is partial to bananas, but don’t even think of calling him a monkey. (Orangutans are apes, remember?)

The Librarian works at the Unseen University, and though the wizards there have offered to change him back to a human, he has refused, finding the physical capabilities of an orangutan quite useful for navigating the shelves and wrestling recalcitrant magical tomes into place. No one seems to know who he was prior to becoming an orangutan, which is perhaps the way he wants it.

In addition to enforcing due dates and silence in the library, the Librarian has been known to aid the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork in times of crisis, and is the chief organist for the Unseen University. His most intriguing skill however, is his ability to travel through L-Space, the extra-dimensional space connecting all libraries. L-Space allows travel through both space and time, though the few librarians skilled enough to travel through L-Space are supposed to follow very strict rules about not changing the course of events. The Librarian doesn’t always follow the rules however, and in Small Gods he uses L-Space to save books from a burning library.

Discworld Profile: Rincewind and the Wizards

Before becoming a world of its own, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series was a straightforward parody of such fantasy staples as Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders and Robert Howard’s barbarian. The first two books, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, comprise one story about Rincewind, the world’s worst wizard, as he takes the Discworld’s first tourist, Two-Flower, through various fantasy parodies. Sourcery (as with “Colour,” a British spelling) reveals why Rincewind is such a terrible wizard as he attempts to run away from Discworld’s first sorcerer since they killed themselves off centuries before.

Running away is a recurring theme in the Rincewind books. He’s cowardly, lacks any real skills, and expects the worst (because it often happens, usually to him). Somehow, he manages to survive and save the world, even though nobody believes it.

Discworld Profile: Death and His Granddaughter

As a tribute to Terry Pratchett, I’m going to kick off a set of posts about favorite Discworld books. Technically, every book that Pratchett has written that is set in the Discworld is part of the overall series, (36 so far,) but in reality, there are subsets of books within the whole that star specific sets of characters. These characters sometimes meet and overlap, but there are still several streams of narrative that readers can follow through the Discworld. Some of the main subsets include books about these characters: the Night Watch, the wizards, the witches, and the anthropomorphic representation of Death. (You can see a nice categorical and chronological breakdown here.) I have a particular fondness for the Death books, particularly the later ones starring his granddaughter, Susan Death.

Back in the beginning, Death was just your basic anthropomorphic being, thinking only Deathly thoughts, doing just what people expected Death to do. But then he started to wonder. What was it like to be human? Why did humans want to be human so badly? So he built a house, and planted a garden, and got a servant, and adopted a daughter, Ysabell, to whom he gave frilly pink clothes with skeletal bunny rabbits on them, because as far as he could figure out, that’s what girls liked. Years later, he also decided to get an apprentice, Mort. As you might imagine, Death’s apprentice and his daughter, as the only real humans in Death’s realm, find themselves drawn together, after the obligatory failed adolescent attempts at flirting via cruel put-downs, sarcasm, and general awkwardness. They get married, produce a daughter, Susan, and die while she is away at boarding school as a teenager.

Ysabell and Mort decided to raise Susan without a lot of contact with her grandfather, so when her parents die and Death goes missing, it comes as something of a shock when she is tapped to take his place until he can be found. This revelation does explain some of her unusual traits and abilities, though, like the white hair with one streak of black, and the ability to turn invisible. When performing Death’s duties, she also finds that she can walk through walls, function outside time, and use the Death VOICE. She is quite smart, and extremely practical. Upon graduation from school, she pursues a career as a governess and then a schoolteacher, though she does keep finding herself in the position of needing to save the world, or at least right it before it all goes wrong, on a regular basis.

Here’s a rundown of the Death arc books, in chronological order:

Horrifying Literary News: Terry Pratchett Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s

British author Terry Pratchett has announced that he has been diagnosed with a rare form of early Alzheimer’s. From the BBC article:

“All other things being equal, I expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers,” he said.

“Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet.”

He told fans the statement should be interpreted as “I am not dead”.

“I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else,” he said.

“For me, this may be further off than you think. It’s too soon to tell.

“I know it’s a very human thing to say ‘is there anything I can do’, but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.”