So watch I did, and after enduring the painfully slow text, slideshow, and ominious music (and the second and third part videos), I was informed that the Roman Catholic Church had secretly trained and guided Mohammed to create a social movement that would wipe out the “true” Christians that the church hated, and re-take Jerusalem from the Jews and deliver it to the Vatican with minimal effort.

The Vatican is credited with having their missionaries plant rumours among the Arab nations that they would soon have a new prophet to rival the likes of Jesus and Moses.  Meanwhile, they educated Mohammed, and later manipulated him through his first wife, Khadijah, and her cousin (whom the video claims were Catholic converts), making him ready to fulfil prophecy.

At first the plan was successful, and Mohammed raised an army and marched across the middle east.  But the plan backfired when the Muslim generals, enboldened by their conquests, decided to keep Jerusalem for themselves and set their sights on Europe, and then the world. The Vatican obviously didn’t like this, because it had world domination plans of its own.

The whole thing is a summary of an account by one Alberto Rivera, a staunch Protestant fundamentalist who claimed that he had once been a Jesuit agent, ordered to undermine Protestant churches.  While a Jesuit he is supposed to have heard stories and read secret documents detailing the Vatican-Islam connection, before denouncing the Catholic church (which Rivera claimed was the Whore of Babylon from the book of Revelations) and eventually moving to the U.S. Rivera inspired a number of Jack Chick’s comic tracts, which just tells you he must have been a real winner. The story goes that the Vatican made several assassination attempts before finally succeeding in poisoning Rivera in 1997.

Now, apart from being a Wild Conspiracy Theory,* and racist at that (What, Arabs can’t create their own religion without help?), Rivera’s story also makes for a striking adventure tale. Large authoritarian organization creates pawn to dupe the masses and take over the world, only to have the pawn rebel and lead the masses against his former masters? Great stuff! I was thinking of using it as a story seed, and heck, I still might. But I realized I had kind of read that story before, when I read Dune.

Of course, it’s no secret that Islam (presumably the version not created by the Vatican) is the inspiration for much of Dune—Herbert even uses Arabic words throughout the book. But throw in the Bene Gesserit conspiracy angle, and it sounds a lot more like Rivera’s ramblings.

In Dune, Paul Atreides is a subject of the Bene Gesserit breeding program, designed to create a superbeing as a tool they will use to dominate the universe. Against orders, Paul’s mother trains him in the Bene Gesserit ways. Later, after a brutal attack by enemies of his family, Paul finds himself lost among the Fremen, who had been conditioned generations earlier by the Bene Gesserit to expect a prophet. Paul, of course, becomes this prophet (and the superbeing), but instead of allowing himself to be used by the Bene Gesserit, he turns on them, and leads the Fremen in a bloody jihad against the Empire.

Again, great stuff! (Man, I freaking love Dune!) But is the similarity between Herbert’s book and Rivera’s conspiracy theory just a coincidence? Or did one borrow from the other? Dune was published in 1965. According to this unsourced article, Rivera didn’t establish himself in the U.S. as an anti-Catholic evangelist until after 1969. Then again, it seems fairly unlikely that Rivera was a big reader of science fiction (the genre most likely being a tool of Satan and whatnot). I guess this is just a strange example of life imitating art. I prefer the art over the, uh, “reality”—in this case the art is much better written.

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* Here we observe the Wild Conspiracy Theory in its natural environment, the Internet. Notice its adaptable plumage, which can be made colourful to entice prey, or camouflaged like the skin of a chameleon. The elusive nature of the Wild Conspiracy Theory sometimes makes it difficult to identify, however it can be recognized by the plaintive call it uses to attract a mate: “Fnord!”

It started off okay, although there are some great moments in the film where Robert Downy Jr.’s dad is explaining that technology will solve all our problems. I was the lone madman in a theatre full of normal people, so I did my best not to cackle maniacally when he says that. Then, like magic, RDJ builds a particle accelerator (sort of) thingy in his garage, and uses it to pull a completely new and conspicuously unnamed chemical element out of his arse, that, among other things, holds the entire second half of the movie together. It used to be, writers would think up actual words for this stuff. It would add, you know, verisimilitude… or something.

I mean, really, it offends me as a potential writer and all-around geek that there was no name for the inevitable Wikipedia article on this fantastical element. Which is odd, being offended, because I did enjoy the movie. Great special FX, plus, y’know, Scarlett Johansson in a catsuit, kicking ass and not even bothering to take names… and that’s my point: chucking some names in there is just common courtesy. If you make up some sort of bullshit technology that your whole plot-arc is based around, at least spot-weld some techno-babble to it so people can pretend like they know what you’re talking about.

They did it (or rather didn’t do it) in Avatar, too. The eee-vile corporate cliche (don’t get me wrong—actual corporations are cliches too, but I digress) was on Pandora to mine a super-valuable element that, yadda yadda, makes some kind of supertech possible (I dunno, fusion, FTL, anti-grav, gimmick-free cinema, or whatever; doesn’t matter)… and oh yeah, the native Na’vi’s humungoid treehouse sits right on top of the largest deposit of the stuff, making the attempted genocide / big explodey fight scene / special effects extravaganza of the decade at the climax of the movie gratuitously necessary, and the best name Cameron could come up with for this giant steaming pile of McGuffin was: “unobtainium”… cause it’s so, like, hard to _get_… get it? Me am clever, yes?

Okay, anyone out there writing a sci-fi-action screenplay… pencils down, listen up: We all know your amazing and heretofore unknown super-substance is some sort of hand-wavium, but you DON’T ACTUALLY CALL IT “HANDWAVIUM,” or better yet, just hand-wave the problem of a name entirely. Not if you want to avoid insulting your audience.

Damn. There was a time when writers actually gave a shit what things were called. You’d never catch Tolkien phoning it in on the main event. There’s a man who understood the value of naming things. I mean, in the Lord of the Rings, shit had like six names in four different languages. And all those words had their own bloody histories. “Hobbit”… now there’s a word you can hang your plot on. AND HE DID! So what if it took him like 12+ years to write that story? The guy understood craftsmanship! And in his defense, there was that whole apocalyptic war-to-end-all-wars thing happening while he was trying to write it. YOU try pounding out over half a million words of brilliantly poetic, flowing prose, on deadline, while fricken’ Nazis are bombing the shit out of your country!

I tells ya, these folks in Hollywood have it too easy. People will sit through anything nowadays, long as it’s shiny & splodey enough. And dammitall, I ain’t gonna stand fer it no more… Just you wait, I’ma gonna…. jus’ a sec…

HEY YOU KIDS! GET OFF MY GULDERN LAWN, AFORE-AH-HAV-TUH-WHUP-YUZ!!!

Where was I? Anyway… enjoyable flick. Not real deep. But still, ScarJo in tight clothes, so…

I mean, if a movie can’t stimulate my imagination, it better freaking have some hot babe in black latex tearing up a room full of mooks, ya dig?

Well, I know it’s been a while but Metapunk is back up and running, after a few hurdles. First I decided to move the blog, then the site was hacked and I lost all my comments (not that there were all that many, but…) and had to repost everything from backups. But we’re back, baby and better than ever! Also, I’m going to make ever so much more effort to post on a regular basis, even if it’s only a paragraph or two.

A lot has happened on the game front—there have been some radical changes to the design. I mean, I’ll be able to make ten games with all the failed attempts I have.

I’ve also actually been writing some prose—a short story I plan to enter in a literary contest. It’s kind of on the experimental side. Anyway, after it’s been through the judging process and so on, I’ll probably post it here so you can read it, if you’re interested.

And the holodoxy, while it has not advanced particularly, has been sort of fleshed out a little bit… More on that coming soon.

So if you’re one of the few people besides my mother who has been waiting for the site to come back online, well, you’re in luck. Cue AC/DC’s Back in Black…

]]> http://www.metapunk.org/blog/2009/09/were-back/feed/ 2 http://www.metapunk.org/blog/2009/04/the-fantasy-of-writing-fiction/ http://www.metapunk.org/blog/2009/04/the-fantasy-of-writing-fiction/#comments Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:23:11 +0000 Andre http://www.metapunk.org/blog/?p=52

I’ve added a Stories category, which is where prose fiction, poetry, or other random lexical smatterings will be found.  Of course, this is a shameless challenge to myself, because it means I’ll have to produce some on a regular basis.  We’ll just see how well that works…