READ THIS BOOK: A Hero at the End of the World

This is a bit of a departure from my usual topics, but today marks the publishing date of one of THE MOST EXCITING BOOKS of my entire life. It's called A Hero at the End of the World and it's written by Erin Claiborne -- a very talented author who has been writing fanfic for years, and is now branching out into original fiction for the first time. This book is absolutely laugh-out-loud funny, a kind of Douglas Adams-esque satire on young adult fantasy tropes: A story about a Chosen One character who fails to live up to expectations.

A Hero at the End of the World is published by Big Bang Press, a small press I helped launch last year. It's specifically dedicated to publishing original novels by fanfic writers, and Hero is the first. And it's getting SUCH GOOD REVIEWS, I'm so excited! Kirkus Reviews gave it a starred recommendation (which is notoriously unusual for a debut novel), and the Book Smugglers (a popular YA/fantasy book review blog) rated it "Excellent." Here's the plot summary:

"According to prophecy, 17-year-old Ewan Mao is destined to kill the evil tyrant who has been terrorizing Britain for as long as he can remember. But when Ewan chickens out and his best friend Oliver Abrams defeats the villain instead, Ewan’s bright future crumbles before his eyes. 

Five years later, Ewan is living at home and working in a coffee shop while Oliver has a job in the government’s Serious Magical Crimes Agency. They haven’t spoken since they were teenagers, but a routine investigation leads Oliver and his partner, Sophie Stewart, to uncover a powerful cult… one that has drawn Ewan into a plot to end the world."

You can read an excerpt here!

One of the best things about Big Bang Press is the amount of freedom we have. A Hero at the End of the World is a mainstream teen fantasy novel with a diverse cast including queer characters and people of colour in the lead roles. It's written by an author who is proud of her background as a fanfic writer, and published by people who love fandom and want to promote the work of creators who come from the fanfic and fanart communities. (And did I mention that this book was illustrated by fanartist Jade Liebes? Her art is amazing!)

I hope some of you guys decide to check this book out! Erin is a great writer, and we've put a lot of hard work into making this the best book it can be. For more info, please check out the Big Bang Press website, Tumblr or Twitter accounts! Or you can just can order a copy in paperback or ebook format right now. :D

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Interstellar, costume design, and the difficulties of "realistic" visual worldbuilding.

Interstellar is one of those movies where the costume design is almost invisible, which is part of what makes it so interesting. The simplest explanation is that the visual style is purposefully "realistic" and avoids any kind of futurism... which in itself is unrealistic. A conundrum, right? Technically, it doesn't make sense for people 50-100 years in the future to wear the same clothes as people in 2014. But from the perspective of a filmmaker who wants his apocalyptic sci-fi film to be taken seriously, this aesthetic decision makes perfect sense.

The earthbound setting of Interstellar is a classic American fantasy: a manly farmer hero, raising his kids in a bleak, rural landscape. Despite the film's image as a deep and thoughtful space epic, it still relies on the familiar old Hollywood scenario of a messianic white American dude being the one person who can save mankind. (And yes, I know his daughter does the actual saving, but this is very much a film about Cooper, not Murphy.) Underdog heroes NASA and Matthew McConaughey save humanity while the rest of the world is apparently helpless. Politically and socially, this is a tired old trope, but it aligns well with the kind of generic hero that can be inserted into a complex movie with minimal exposition. Cooper is the kind of guy who, for better or worse, is perceived as "universal." Luckily, McConaughey's performance was brilliant.

So here we have Coop and his kids, looking both relatable and realistic in their jeans and hoodies. This is the difference between a meticulously researched film that is actually realistic, and a film whose worldbuilding gives the appearance of realism, and therefore does not jolt viewers out of their comfort zone. On the whole, the appearance of realism tends to be the better choice. We're watching fiction, after all.

Decades in the future, the characters on Earth continue to wear clothes that look nondescript in the context of present-day fashions. We see Murph in her practical, neutral-toned outfits both at work and when visiting her brother at the farm. Judging by the clothes worn by Murph and her peers, fashion has stopped evolving altogether. 

As someone who follows fashion, I'm certain this level of sartorial stagnation could never happen in real life. Even within a dying civilization where fewer new clothes are commercially available, fashions would continue to change over time. But I understand why Christopher Nolan and his costume designer made this decision, because it grounds the film in a sense of reality -- or rather, what we think of as reality in 2014. The other option would be to dress Jessica Chastain in futuristic outfits to illustrate the passage of time, which would clash with Nolan's desire to distance himself from the popular visual tropes of the Hollywood sci-fi genre.

When we see Murph wearing nondescript shirts and jackets, we only think of the passage of time in relation to to her age and Cooper's journey, not in the general sense of what year it is for the rest of the world. We already know the film is set in the future, so there's no point in introducing the costume equivalent of a flying car.

The space suits are the only costumes that look like "costumes" in this film, so they're the only ones that really get discussed in promotional interviews. The earthbound costumes are designed to be absorbed passively without any kind of conscious thought, rather than reminding the audience that they're watching a work of fiction.

In this interview, Interstellar costume designer Mary Zophres says, “My first, gut instinct was that you should not anticipate what the future is going to look like. In fact, there is no attention paid to sartorial aspects at all. It’s unimportant.” She goes on to say that the space suits were meant to look like they'd been cobbled together from spare parts. Since most viewers' personal image of a space suit is still based on the astronauts of the late 20th century, that's what they went for in Interstellar. Any additions or changes were for purely practical purposes.

Costuming is always important to the way we consume a movie, but it's particularly important to Christopher Nolan's work as a writer and director of science fiction blockbusters. All of his best-known films are out-and-out fantasy (The Dark Knight, Inception, The Prestige), but their costumes and set design are intended to add a veneer of realism. 

Nolan movies are treated with an unusual amount of respect compared to other sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters, and I'm pretty sure his costume design choices are a major contributing factor to this attitude. With the unavoidable exception of Batman, all of his characters are dressed to look as normal and everyday as humanly possible, which distracts us from the fantastical concepts behind each movie. In Inception (perhaps my favourite costume design film of all time) Nolan is telling a story of pure fantasy, but it's illustrated in the visual language of a real-world drama.

Dreams are depicted as buildings and hotel rooms full of everyday humans, and the only fantasy elements are the stretching dimensions and timescales of the dream world. Even those are introduced to us by an architect who carefully explains the situation by scribbling a diagram on a piece of paper -- which, incidentally, is also how Nolan explains wormhole travel in Interstellar.

Because most of Inception takes place in this realistic urban landscape, and because all of the characters are dressed in staid, businesslike clothes, it feels more like a corporate espionage thriller than a successor to the worlds depicted in movies like Dark City, Paprika and The Matrix.

In the case of Interstellar, we're watching a movie that melds sci-fi ideas about relativity, apocalyptic climate change (more or less), and space travel. But we're also watching a Hollywood fairytale where NASA selects an American everyman farmer dude to lead a world-saving space mission, where five-dimensional beings help him transmit Morse Code messages to his daughter through time and space. Humanity is saved by a combination of the power of love and faith, and a message sent via books falling off a shelf and the ticking of a wristwatch. 

As a viewer, this combination of hard sci-fi and nonsensical Hollywood fantasy requires a herculean feat of suspending one's disbelief. We need all the serious and "realistic" trappings we can get. Hence why Interstellar was marketed with Google-sponsored lesson plans and interviews with the film's astrophysicist, and why Nolan spent so much time on the ground-level worldbuilding elements of Coop's farm, the NASA labs, and the overall aesthetic of Earth scenes taking place in a contemporary setting.

I usually tend to write about costume design from a characterization standpoint, but characterization is rarely an important aspect of a Nolan film. In Interstellar, the most personal costuming detail is Cooper's jacket -- which is later copied by Murphy as an adult, as she wears a jacket that looks very nearly identical to her father's. In amongst a cast of characters with no individual style whatsoever, this is a beautiful little personal touch; a subtle sign that Murph hasn't abandoned her father's memory quite as thoroughly as she likes to think. 

Further reading

• "Why won't Christopher Nolan just embrace sci-fi?"
• My response to people who object to Interstellar being described as a Hollywood fantasy.
• The costumes of Alien: Uniforms and characterization. 
• Space suits, retrofuturism, and Prometheus.
• Supercut of Christopher Nolan's favourite movie tropes.
• Q&A with Jeffrey Kurland, costume designer of Inception.
• Article discussing Interstellar's space suits.

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Constantine: "The Darkness Beneath"

Previously: Constantine, "Non Est Asylum"

If you're still on the fence about watching this week's Constantine, here's a line that tells you everything you need to know: "There's nothing blacker than gypsy magic."

Yes, this episode hinged on the kind of racist stereotype that I'm surprised is even allowed on TV in 2014. Friends, this was not a pleasant hour of television.

I think Constantine is going to save this mining town by blowing up the mine where everyone works.
— Hello Tailor (@Hello_Tailor) November 2, 2014

In order to introduce the new female lead Zed, episode 2 saw Constantine visit a Pennsylvania mining town without his regular (and so far pointless) sidekick Chas. This town had a problem with vengeful spirits killing off local miners, and because Constantine is indistinguishable from Supernatural, our hero traveled across America to solve their problem by interrogating a bunch of angry men and befriending a sexy yet mysterious lady. That's Zed, by the way. We still don't know much about her except that she was probably described as "tempestuous" in the casting call.

The victim in the pre-credits scene was a mean drunk husband who burned to death in the shower. After various unimaginative demonic shenanigans, we learn that his wife is the one who brought the mine monsters into town, and Constantine's solution is to... bring her (implicitly) abusive husband back to drag her down to Hell. Oh, and she's a "Romani girl," hence the godawful "gypsy magic" line I quoted above. To make matters worse, this tired old stereotype was completely unnecessary to the situation at hand, and could've been removed without making any difference to the plot.

The most frustrating thing with this episode was how easily they could've made it better. It was written by the creator of Farscape, a delightfully weird show with its fair share of interesting female characters. But this episode wasn't just poorly written, it was a paint-by-numbers example of generic supernatural/mystery TV. What makes this all the more baffling is that it's adapted from a comic that actually does have some personality, and both of the showrunners are supposedly Hellblazer fans. I'm yet to see much evidence that anyone in this show has gone beyond reading the Hellblazer Wikipedia page, though.


Last week I mentioned that one of Constantine's biggest problems will be differentiating itself from similar genre shows. Well, that issue is already making itself known. This episode was even more like Supernatural than last week: Constantine saves a small town from undead spirits, and the unimaginative monster-of-the-week storyline was marred by sexist and racist subtext. At least Supernatural is capable of genuine menace and horror, and its dud episodes are elevated by the compelling relationships between its lead characters. Unfortunately, it looks like Constantine is only emulating Supernatural's bad points.

The whole "Pennsylvania mining town" concept could have been used to transfer themes from Hellblazer to a contemporary American setting. But there the resemblance ends. What we got was a story where a woman is clearly intimidated by her husband (who is implied to be abusive), and uses her magic powers to warp some protective spirits into attacking miners as revenge. This is a totally solid fairytale idea, and could have ended on the very Hellblazer-ish note of Constantine having to "defeat" an enemy who isn't really a villain, but is just a normal person who has been pushed to the limit.

Instead we got an episode that fails to explore the emotional context of the setting, and culminates in the wife character being depicted as a one-note villain who is punished by being dragged to hell by the spirit of her husband. And let's not forget that Constantine just blew up the local coal mine, thus ruining the economy of the entire town. I feel like they should've made a bigger deal out of that??

There are two explanations here: Either the writers are simply misinterpreting the way the Hellblazer comics told this kind of morally ambiguous story, OR they're purposefully writing this kind of simple, cliched episode because they think it's the best way to stay on air.

I have no idea how many women are on the production staff at Constantine, but I'm guessing not many. So far Zed is slightly less cardboardy than Liv, the female lead who was written out of the pilot episode. That doesn't mean Zed behaves like an actual human woman, though. The relationship between her and Constantine is very muddled, lurching from unconvincing sexual tension to an intrinsically unpleasant dynamic where she is ~drawn to him~ while he orders her around and acts like a douche.

The thing is, the Hellblazer version of Constantine is by no means a feminist character, or even a nice guy. He tries to do the right thing, but he screws up a lot. But the comics tend to be critical of this, and we also benefit from seeing his internal monologue all the time. Ideally, Constantine would show his struggle to be a good man, but balance this with storylines where he fucks up or is forced to make bad choices. He also needs to be backed up by a well-written female character, which Zed is not. She's meant to be a foil to Constantine, but their relationship is unbalanced from Day 1. She needs his help with her powers, while he uses those powers for his own ends. On top of that, she has to persuade him to let her join him. We're also told that she's in her mid-20s -- an inexplicable decision because Angélica Celaya is 32, only one year younger than Matt Ryan.

With Zed now thrown into the mix, we're left with an entire cast of characters whose motivations are frustratingly unclear -- and not in a good way. Constantine appears to be motivated by sheer altruism to follow Liv's map and fight a bunch of monsters. Chas may or may not be some kind of traveling demon hunter as well. And Zed's reasons for teaming up with Constantine are partly because she needs his help, and partly because... she dreams about him? How convenient.

As it stands, Constantine can only go downhill if it continues on in this vein. The similarities with Supernatural are too pronounced, and so far Constantine's characterization is disappointingly weak.

I'm hoping that they do a character-focused episode soon, so we can learn more about Constantine's backstory and get a better idea of his motivation. Right now he feels like an extremely watered-down interpretation of the character we see in Hellblazer, to the point where he's only recognisable thanks to superficial traits like his accent and costume. A costume which, by the way, is already beginning to look a little awkward. He wears that brand-new trenchcoat and undone red tie all the time, and it's making him look like a poseur. Why not just take the tie off, or at least tie it properly for part of the episode? Most viewers have little or no knowledge of the comics, so callbacks like this are immaterial. They should lay off the meaningless details (Britishisms like "blighter," really?) and focus more on the actual substance of the show -- such as it is.
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