New Story Day: Welcome To Heroism

Beloved readers, I’ve got a new short story for you!

Today “Welcome To Heroism” went live at Uncanny Magazine. It follows a mysterious app called The Dare. Appearing out of nowhere, The Dare gives users outrageous fame if they’re the first person to complete its challenges. At first the challenges just seem incredibly reckless, like running into wildfires or messing with data centers. But as the challenges become things only the superhumans in the audience can do, they also become increasingly altruistic. It’s almost like The Dare has an agenda...

You can read “Welcome To Heroism” for free at this link.

This is my eighth appearance in Uncanny Magazine, one of my favorite destinations in the world of speculative prose. The issue also features work by Stephen Graham Jones, Theodora Goss, Samantha Mills, Ai Jiang, Marissa Lingen, and more. It tickles me to be in their company.

If you read it, please let me know what you think! It’s a story idea that buzzed around in my head for years. I had to let it out, via the nearest available keyboard.

Two Sales to Announce!

I have two good pieces of news to share this week. I've just signed a pair of contracts for two exciting projects.

First up: I've sold a new story to Nature Futures. This one is "Tucking In the Nuclear Egg," a story about giant monsters with a little more science than I usually apply. It's about the logistics of shielding and caring for a kaiju egg that's constantly putting off multiple Chernobyls worth of radiation. It's terrifying and tender - and yes, this does mean I sold a kaiju story to Nature! This feels like a life goal.

This is my second sale to Nature, following "The Tentacle and You" in 2019. There may be a little more news about that tentacle story coming soon.

up: I can announce my first essay of the year! Uncanny Magazine has accepted "The Assassination of Professor X," which is a deep dive into the history of the character, how he's been rewritten in the last two decades to be more despicable and less idealistic, and how his famous disability has been erased in parallel. Professor X is a rare character as a disabled mentor, and I don't take his destruction lightly. I've been stewing on this for years, and I look forward to sharing it with you all in the coming months.

The Expendable Disabled Heroes of Marvel's Infinity War, live at Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction

It's my honor to have a piece in the Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction issue of Uncanny Magazine. Between Lightspeed and Uncanny Magazine, Disabled People Destroy has allowed voices from multiple marginalized communities to speak openly about the stories that matter most to us and the fandom community. The issue is packed with excellent stories and essays by the likes of Fran Wilde, Merc Rustad, and Nisi Shawl. I've been waiting for this issue for years.

My essay is about the representation of disability in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, particularly as it appears in Infinity War. Infinity War is the biggest nexus for MCU characters to date, and has a number of disabled characters in its cast: War Machine, Nebula, Bucky Barnes, and Thor are a few. Yet they're handled carelessly, either marginalizing them based on their disabilities, or seeking to erase those disabilities from view. It speaks to how few disabled people work on the Marvel films, how few write them and act in them, and it's time for that to change.

Marvel is celebrating their biggest box office hit and ten years of blockbusters. It's time for Rocket Raccoon to stop stealing disabled people's prosthetics.

You can read the entire essay for free right here.

You can buy the whole issue right here.

Thanks for reading! I have more good news for y'all coming soon.

New Story: "Fascism and Facsimiles" live at Fireside Magazine

I have one more story for you this summer! It's been a busy few months and I've capped them off with a new story at Fireside Magazine.

"Fascism and Facsimiles" is a superhero story about henchpeople. The world is about to learn that Captain Democracy isn't a great hero, but a sleeper agent for the evil organization Kommand. It might possibly be a parody of something, not that our heroes are aware. Two underlings at Kommand are startled to learn the guy who's been kicking their heads in for years is actually a co-worker. They're more surprised to learn just how evil their employers are. It's a story about work friendships and about the struggle to refuse to be complicit.

This is my third story at Fireside, following "Bones at the Door" and "A Silhouette Against Armageddon." I'm so happy to have another story find its home with them again.

You can read the story for free by clicking here.

Superman Movie Outline - Written in 30 minutes

"He's boring."

"He's invincible."

"There are no good Superman stories."

I tire of people slagging this character. Superman is a dated concept, and yet one that's quite appealing with how preposterously cynical our culture has gotten. I'm exhausted with all the claims that there's nothing left to do with him except kill him. If hope is boring, then you're telling the story wrong.

This led to me joke around on Twitter last night about a Superman movie that wasn't so gloomy. Something truer to the vision of Superman a lot of us hold. Things got out of hand.

Back in 2013 I played a little game: I was given thirty minutes to write as much of a Wonder Woman movie as I could. People liked it. Allan Heinberg and Patty Jenkins certainly nailed their vision this year, and if there is a good Wonder Woman movie in existence now, then why not move onto the world's most famous and least popular hero?

Here comes a Superman movie written in thirty minutes. Because these stories are *so impossible* to write.

Up, up, and away.

"The Terrible" Published at Flash Fiction Online

The first piece of my recent Good Newsathon has walked out into the world: "The Terrible" is in this month's Flash Fiction Online!

I'm honored to have a a story in this month's Flash Fiction Online. "The Terrible"

This is an honor. Not many writers have been published four times in this magazine. FFO was my first pro-sale, and has continued to be a home for diverse authors and wildly diverse stories. It's a privilege to have contributed a few tales to their catalog.

"The Terrible," which originally ran at DSF, is a Superhero Comedy. Actually, a Supervillain Comedy. It follows The Terrible, self-proclaimed arch-nemesis of the world's most powerful woman. He's come so close to killing her dozens of times, and tonight he has the perfect plan. But something's wrong. It's almost like her heart isn't in it...

Review: Logan is to Wolverine what the Deadpool movie was to Wade Wilson

Logan is to Wolverine what Deadpool is to Deadpool, significantly more faithful to the character than anything before it. Is it the best X-Men film? It’s weighty, weary, knee-deep in sacrifices, with fights so visceral I jerked my head along with the punches. It has little of the optimism you find in mainline X-Men films, in favor of a bleak Western-tinged story in which Wolverine tries to do the right thing one last time in his life. It is a beautiful send-off for Hugh Jackman, whose portrayal has been every bit as iconic as Christopher Reeve’s Superman and Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man.

X-Men is My Star Wars

Star Wars or Star Trek? My answer is X-Men. Because I grew up with them, I like my SciFi Extra-Special-Implausible. Not growing up with Star Wars, I confess to never “getting it.” When the Prequels landed, I was unfazed. They were just another trilogy about a Mary Sue with his cast of not-as-special-people who were important because he knew them. They weren’t as well made, but they were clearly the same model. Today, the greatest thing about Force Awakens is watching other people get so much out of it.

I told you that to tell you about ADD. In my lifetime ADD became ADHD, then became a "myth," a thing doctors made up for money, or lazy people made up as excuses. The current scorn for its sufferers is garbage. I have it, and have since childhood - the same week I received medication, my grades skyrocketed. Even then I struggled with reading. Superhero comics, with their mixture of art and the written word, were a huge part of introducing me to the desire for literacy. Here, nothing was more invigorating than X-Men comics, and particularly Wolverine.

So half my readers just closed this article because, ugh, another Wolverine fan right?

The rest of you: hold on for four more sentences.

Because he became particularly meaningful to me at Age 13, when medical malpractice put me in full-body pain for the rest of my life. As opposed to Superman’s invincible skin or Batman’s eternal dodging reflexes, Wolverine feels every blow. He’s shot, stabbed, even eviscerated, and the good artists captured that the pain registered on his face. He could survive anything, but only win by powering through the pain.

Kryptonite or Bad Writing: What's Superman's Real Weakness?

The more I hear people wishing Batman would take down Superman, the more I believe it comes from a greater hatred of power than of its abuse. The current popular iterations of Batman are of a tyrant building his kingdom, an autocrat ruling Gotham with an iron fist, an angry billionaire of unchecked privilege and brutality. Somehow Superman is the one labeled overpowered and unrelatable.

People keep saying he's invincible and therefore a bad character. But Superman's weakness isn't just Kryptonite. In the biggest comic event of all time, the mofo was straight-up beaten to death in a fist fight.


His weaknesses include magic, mind-control, various diseases, other Kryptonians, and the bajillion other aliens that are just as powerful, or more powerful, but are dicks about it. He's vulnerable to super-sharp weapons, the light of a red sun, pretty much every energy weapon I've ever seen. He can be out-smarted, caught by Green Lantern rings, or Black Lantern rings. And there are always nuclear weapons. If he has a greatest weakness, it's probably the emergencies of normal people who he constantly puts his own life on hold to assist. That's why I like him better than Batman. Increasingly, Batman is a fantasy of punishing someone, where Superman is a fantasy of helping someone.

A Realistic Spider-Man?

The Russos Weigh In On Their Realistic And Grounded Take On The Amazing Spider-Man #Marvel #SpiderMan... https://t.co/tgXxvOGeIa

— ComicBookMovie.com (@ComicBook_Movie) January 9, 2016

So yesterday the Russo Brothers did an interview about how "grounded" and "realistic" their approach to Spider-Man would be. I couldn't help offering some tips on how a realistic Spidey story would go.

• A realistic Spider-Man? So, a kid is bitten by a spider, gets no powers, and struggles with poverty?
• His widow aunt can't afford their bills, so Peter gets a second job. They're evicted anyway.
• Peter photographs himself as an elusive vigilante. Daily Bugle won't call him back and he winds up with three reblogs.
• Mary Jane swipes left.
• Rich evil Norman Osborn dons a goblin mask and terrorizes the city. Pundits wonder when he'll run for president.

@Wiswell Continued funding of his secret projects is assured thanks to generous campaign contributions to both parties. #RealisticSpiderman

— Keith Manuel (@KeithAManuel) January 9, 2016

• While Peter is at a wrestling show, his uncle is shot. Naturally he blames poor standard of living and NRA lobbyists.
• Boy genius Peter develops liquid steel webbing technology. A troll swoops his patent and sues him.
• Doctor Octopus is a Podcatcher knock-off app that fills Peter's phone with malware.
• A sexy cat burglar is tearing up the city. Peter, who has crushing debt and no powers, never meets her. The end.

Your Daredevil Fanfic Minute

Foggy: No no no no no.

Matt: What's the matter, Foggy?

Foggy: I just realized this guy is going to kill one of us and you're the main character.

Matt: You're the plucky comic relief.

Foggy: In a Marvel thing.

Matt: They wouldn't.

Foggy: MATT HE LOOKS LIKE JOSS WHEDON

"The Terrible" is live at Daily Science Fiction

My superhero short "The Terrible" is now up and free to read at Daily Science Fiction! It follows The Terrible, the self-proclaimed greatest villain in America's greatest city, as he thinks to finally kill off his heroine. Tonight is not going as he intended. It springs from the relationship I wish more heroes and villains had. No spoilers.

I want to thank Max Cantor, Tam MacNeil, and Cassie Nichols for beta reading this thing, and convincing me that while demented, it was a good kind of demented. Also to Sunil Patel, whose Twitter goading got me to keep the heroine's name. It is my favorite superhero name I've ever invented.

In other news, I'm packing up for my last convention trip of the year, to the annual World Fantasy Conference in Saratoga Springs, NY. Last year's was one of my all-time favorite cons, and this year I'm doing a panel! Drop by at 4:00 PM on Thursday, when I'll be part of Monsters as Devourers, discussing the psychological roots of why we tell so many stories about zombies and werewolves coming after us. It should be a blast.

Short Story Publications, and a Bonus!

If only all my posts could have this much good news. The editors at Podcastle just produced their latest episode, which includes an audio version of my short story, "Wet." You can listen to it for free right here.

"Wet" follows the unusual friendship between an immortal and a ghost stranded in Arizona. This is a reprint of a 2014 story of mine, originally appearing in Urban Fantasy Magazine.

Daily Science Fiction has also posted its Table of Contents for October, and I have a brand new story appearing for them on October 27th. "The Terrible" is about a supervillain who takes his heroine for granted. It's my tribute to Wonder Woman.

And just before Halloween, SF Signal will be running a Mind Meld on children's movies that terrified us. I'll be contributing, but if you want to know what beloved classic scared the crap out of me for an entire decade, you'll have to click back over in two weeks.

Last but not least, I've also been invited to a panel at Saratoga's World Fantasy Convention. I'll be joining expert authors for an hour of Monsters as Devourers - figuring out what human-eating  monsters have always wanted out of us.

Let's celebrate by shipping Jason and Sadako, by artist Bryan Lee. 'tis the season.

 

Civil War Draft: How the Sides of Captain America: Civil War Were Decided

Tony: My movie came first so I get to draft first.

Cap: Is that how this works?

Tony: Vision is essentially my operating system plus Ultron's ultimate body. So, gimme.

Cap: It's on already? Uh, alright, alright. You have a guy who can fly. I want a guy who can fly. I need somebody I can trust. He's the highlight of that Ant-Man movie. Falcon.

Tony: Hell. Take Ant-Man, too.

Cap: I don't know...

Falcon: What? No, take both of us.

Cap: Do I have to?

Ant-Man: I don't know why anybody wants me either. Is Carol Danvers in these movies yet?

Falcon: You guys know this is a war, right? Civil War?

Story Sold to Daily Science Fiction!

I'm happy to announce that I've sold "The Terrible" to Daily Science Fiction. It's my first sale to DSF, and will make my fourth debut in a market this year. I couldn't be happier with the story they took.

"The Terrible" is a short about a supervillain who's never paid proper attention to how his hero's weaknesses work, or why she keeps escaping and checking back in on him. He thinks he's her arch-nemesis. We all have things to learn.

Talk to Villains - #fridayflash

I never expected to solve more crime as a reporter than as a bulletproof icon. Yet Simon Magus is responsible for more crime in this city and on the planet than any drug runner. He’s a CEO, the kind that builds skyscrapers named after himself, paid for by what his companies export into war zones. He hates me – one of me, for what I’ve been doing in those same parts of the world when I’m not pushing for a Pulitzer.

He invited me to a lunch on the top floor of one of his skyscrapers, witless that it'd been me who stopped a homicidal robot on its roof three days prior. Even with all the shattered glass, he had a breakfast table set up with Kopi Luwak and imported baguettes. Simon honestly wanted to talk to me about my criticisms of his company, at first to see if he could wow and bully me into retreating, but later about the veracity of my sources and how to keep shareholders happy while enacting reform.

All the while he peppered in attacks against my alter ego. He wanted to convince me what a danger he posed, taking responsibility away from normal people. As though he sells VX nerve gas to normal people. The surprising thing was that when I kept disagreeing, Simon grew more eager, like being stolid earned his respect.

I'll never forget. He said, "Cal, the world doesn't need him. It needs you."

That haunted me, and not just as I put on the tights and stopped his robots. Maybe that means he won.

The next day he bought my paper. We’d gone too deep into the red over the backfiring paywall, and without his money we’d have sunk. He said he’d bought it with the money he'd typically donate to PBS. He had me on the dais as he announced the takeover, and asked me to be the new editor in chief.

If this is a scheme, it’s Simon’s best. Not a single crate of weapons has ‘mysteriously gone missing’ off his cargo liners since our first breakfast together, which if you do the math, has saved more lives than I can at the speed of sound. I can’t help doing the math.

But if he expects me to run a puff piece Sunday, he’s got another thing coming.

Girl of Steel w/ Magnet

Theirs was barely a love story. And the attraction? Unfair. She was the Girl of Steel, and he was a magnet. She never bent, she never broke, but she couldn't let go of him. They met in the middle of a Chemistry exam: an alloy plus an object possessed of a magnetic field equaled true love. Neither were consulted about the affair they'd never stop having. They were merely equated, as romance tends to work.

It hurt the Girl of Steel's self-esteem. She was used to resisting, to withstanding, and at her favorite times, upholding. But this boy walked by and she instantly zipped to his side, and she never minded it. She minded that she didn't mind. She minded what others would think, too.

The world still needed her to build cars and skyscrapers and specific models of cans. They needed her for frying pans and satellites. There was not a country on the planet that didn't view her as a one-woman industry. Not a country on the planet that wouldn't judge the affair with this boy with his lopsided electrons.

He didn't see her as an industry. The magnet didn’t even see her as industrious; she got no work done around him. They looked into each others' eyes, studying the ripples in electron behavior, and watching countless hours of The Food Network. It was stuff the other major materials made fun of – the stuff she'd made fun of until that fated exam. The stuff she'd thought was cliché without having ever considered how clichés established.

He said that perhaps clichés were an industry. Was not all industry repetition?

That was trite, and she knew it, and she couldn't help liking it anyway. Not giggling, certainly not giggling like he did at her slights and insights. He was so enthusiastic, despite never having been asked to love her, to always be there, to, in his own way, always zip to her side, which, when she paid attention, she realized he did, being less massive than her. Sometimes bites of him chipped off on impact. The Girl of Steel collected those bits of him, and turned them into earrings, since they were clingy. He called her industrious. She called that trite, and she was right, and she didn't care, and that ambivalence bothered her, and she didn't care about that either.

Soon they went on public dates to every Friday exam at the lab, to see what other couples Science would pair up on paper. To see what else would come out the other side of equations. It was difficult to understand, and the magnet never really understood, but it felt nice. That was the Girl of Steel's reasoning, too, not that she ever said it. It was easier watching the inexplicable when the explicable didn't work. Love and the Friday exams were exasperating.

The 4 Ways Marvel Really Got Thor Wrong

Recently, Marvel Comics released their second movie about Thor. It’s part of their Avengers franchise of movies, which show very little scholarship about mythology. Many of us wonder if Marvel cares about anything more than making lots of money by way of vapid movies that are a lot of fun to watch. In doing so, they've utterly ruined the character forever. This must be remedied. Here are their four greatest transgressions.

Why would they do this to him?

1. Thor Speaks English At All
Some critics have pointed out that, historically, Marvel made Thor speak in a bad impression of Shakespearean English. A Norse god wouldn’t sound like Shakespeare. But this ignores the real contention: a Norse god wouldn’t be speaking English at all. He should be bantering in a dialect of Old Norse that’s unrecognizable even to modern Scandinavians. It would seriously help the authenticity of Marvel films if everything Thor said was utterly incomprehensible to any typical American moviegoer.

They didn't have contact lenses, either.

2. The Race Card
Some people have complained that Heimdall is blackwashed in the Thor movies, played by Idris Elba. Idris Elba is blacker than the average American imagines the average Icelander is. The average American doesn’t know much about how many ethnicities spread across Europe by the 13th century, and the average theologian has barely cracked why gods do anything, much less why they pick a specific skin tone or bone structure. However, Idris Elba has an amazing gravitas that we can all agree every god should have. Because Idris Elba is only one actor, most of the gods in the Thor movies don’t have this gravitas. Marvel screwed this up big time by not cloning Idris Elba.

No one asks if Tom Hiddleston is the right race to play a trickster god.

3. Thor Coexists With The Hulk
Look, it’s not that hard. The pre-Christian Nords didn’t know about radiation. There is nothing in their lore or cycles that references gamma waves or their implausible relationship to human emotion. The Incredible Hulk is simply irreconcilable with any of Thor’s mythology. Any modern science has no place in a shared universe with Thor, even science as miraculously bad as what supports the Hulk’s existence.

Yup. Pride, Instagram and Haar.

4. Thor Wasn’t a Comic Book Character
Our primary sources for the Norse gods are the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and the Gesta Danorum. While some of the manuscripts in the Prose Edda were illuminated with beautiful imagery, the stories of Thor were never relayed in screen-printed sequential art. Frankly, everything Jack Kirby ever drew looked entirely inaccurate to visual stylings of the 13th century Scandinavians. Worse: they didn’t have movies. Making the things into movies is fundamentally inaccurate. If Marvel had any cultural sensitivity, they would force audiences at all their premieres to starve around camp fires in the middle of a blizzard and have Stan Lee recount the tales orally. He’d probably do it. He loves cameos.

This is actually 100% historically accurate.

It's my hope that by starting a dialogue about Marvel's failure to accurately capture their source material, that we will bring about change. By forcing blockbuster movies to be entirely accurate to someone else's vision, and by stripping anything that anyone was having fun with, we will create films that no one wants to see. And once no one will go see them, no one will ever complain about them again.

The future is in your hands, True Believers.

Why I tried writing a Wonder Woman movie no one will make.

TV series cancelled because a DC main character smiled.

So yesterday I posted the synopsis for a Wonder Woman movie that I tried to write in thirty minutes. It's rough as heck, but seemed worth trying when many people have spent years on adapting the character to film and came out of it saying she's an impossible character. At Comic-Con last weekend they announced a Flash and a Batman/Superman movie, and Twitter rightly got upset about the lack of such a famous character getting her screen time.

I wasn't offended until the old arguments that she's uninteresting or not fit for motion pictures resurfaced. These arguments are nonsense, and given that she is the most iconic female superhero, and the current glut of superhero movies are already decidedly light on ladies, it reads gross.

First and foremost: there is an excellent Wonder Woman movie. It's animated, free to stream if you have Amazon Prime and cheap on DVD, and could be remade live action shot-for-shot into a splendid blockbuster. And it'd be an empowering, fun action flick that happened to star an iconic woman. Please don't tell me that's the reason why you can't make it.

Second and possibly foremoster: Wonder Woman is a sexy warrior from a familiar but different culture who engages critically with ours and gets to fight anything from the Grecko-Roman bestiary or pantheon you want. She has a history of punching Nazis, robots, aliens and dragons - the untouchable holy quartet of ass-kicking. From a writing and promotional perspective, there is no reason she's not a franchise. Probably a really explodey dumb one that grosses embarrassingly well.

And my synopsis was for that kind of blockbuster. It's honestly not the Wonder Woman I'd like to make, rather the kind that seems like every producer deems unfeasible, a message I deem harmful.

If Smallville adapts the costume well as a gag,
then costume design isn't a valid excuse anymore.

The Wonder Woman movie I'd rather make is of a superhero who bridged to our culture in World War II against the worst of all possible enemies, then grew up with us for decades, with the moral decay of wars in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq, who is a crucible for our shortcomings and an agent against them. If it's too much like the Superman I'd write, well, tough. We deserve heroes we can’t relate to when we suck.

Also, the superhero movie I really want to make is actually Daredevil & She-Hulk: Attorneys at Law, but that's another story and another company.

There's a Wired column I won't waste your clicks linking to that asserts a Wonder Woman movie has to be uncomfortably feminist and bondage-themed. That's needless clickbait writing, something encroaching more and more of Wired. The truth is that a WW film can be about uncomfortable feminist issues and bondage, or about other facets of her character. The bondage baggage, in particular, is something I couldn't think to incorporate in my half hour and probably wouldn't in my final draft. It ain't essential, but it's out there and a valid interpretation.

My guess is that the real pitfalls of a Wonder Woman movie aren't that no one has an idea. As many annoying things as Joss Whedon has said about the character, he had a decent idea before Warner Bros shot him down. It's more likely money-backers who don't believe in female leads, testy focus groups, the decreasingly tenable profits blockbusters must bring in turning studios even more conservative. It's enough to make you wonder what we'd get if copyright laws were different and anyone could make a movie about her.

Enough to make you wonder. Get it?

Bathroom Monologue: Big Brother and his Faithful Five

Established in 1948 to defend our country from a world in stark peril, they are the First Family of National Security.

Big Brother: a born leader, Big Brother's skin is as invulnerable as his righteousness. Possessed of the superhuman strength to keep the nation aloft, he is on constant patrol to prevent his countrymen to prevent them from harm. Only those who do wrong have anything to fear.

The Unknown Soldier: he's been slain in every foreign war, he'll fall in every one to come, and he never ceases to inspire. Where is he buried? Where is his tomb? It is in all our hearts. He'll sacrifice for so long as we are at war – and we have always been at war against injustice!

Interrogirl: your safety is always on her mind – and so are you! The world's foremost telepath is constantly scanning brainwaves for signs of danger from her maximum security detention center.

The Prism: a technopath of the highest order, he knows what friends you'll add to that app before you've even downloaded it. Never forget to add him!

Together these five stand vigilant on every frontier of conflict. They're on distant shores, on our streets and in our homes, keeping the world exactly as it should be. They make justice count – to five!