Sony Pictures Imageworks, the VFX house that did LUCKY 13 for Love Death + Robots, put up a really cool YouTube video deconstructing the graphics work that went into the episode. I continue to love everything about the LD+R adaptations.
Author: Marko Kloos
Aftershocks giveaway on Goodreads
AFTERSHOCKS, the first novel in my new series THE PALLADIUM WARS, will be out on July 1. My publisher, 47North, is giving away 100 ebook copies via Goodreads, and if you live in the U.S., you can throw your hat into that ring from May 31 until June 30:
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/292827-aftershocks
Interplanetary strife! Corporate intrigue! Ancient grudges! Shadowy conspiracies! Firefights and space battles! And yours for the low, low price of FREE…if you manage to snag one of the 100 copies they’re giving away.
“Shape-shifters” and favorite werewolf designs
The Love Death + Robots crew has put up short YouTube videos highlighting the animation in the various segments. The one for “Shape-shifters” is here:
(CONTENT WARNING: Gore)
It’s a pretty awesome werewolf design, all in all, and the fight scene is just knock-down, drag-out violent.
I love werewolf movies, and one of my writing goals is to do a variation on the lycanthrope theme that goes against most common tropes. One day, maybe…when I have time to switch my brain from SF to urban or dark/horror fantasy for a while.
My favorite werewolf design from a movie is still this, though:
That’s the wicked “hound from hell” design for AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, a movie that also still gets my vote for Best Transformation scene. The fact that it was all done with practical effects in 1981 and still holds up speaks to the genius of Rick Baker, who won the very first Best Make-up Academy Award for his work on that movie.
I generally dislike CGI werewolves because most of them are too fake-looking or Uncanny Valley when they’re inserted in live-action. It’s only in recent years that CGI has gotten good enough to do a convincing werewolf. (Number 2 on my list are the creepy-looking werewolves in DOG SOLDIERS, which–surprise–are also practical effects and costumes.) But when they’re CGI wolves in an all-CGI film like Shape-shifters, they can work very well indeed.
What is your favorite werewolf design on the screen? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll check them out if I haven’t seen the movie/show in question yet.
New blog entry at Wild Cards World
In other Wild Cards news, there’s a new post on the Wild Cards World blog, this one by Michael Cassutt: “Word-building in Wild Cards” (yes, you read that correctly.)
I’ve talked about writing for Wild Cards before (most extensively in this post from a while back), but one thing I only touched on in that post is something that’s probably the biggest benefit to having joined the consortium, at least to me.
Not only is it a ton of fun to play in a superhero sandbox that’s so different from what I usually do, but the sheer amount of talent present in the consortium forces me to really bring my A-game. I consider the stories I’ve written for Wild Cards among the very best stuff I’ve written so far, and I hope that trend continues because it teaches me to broaden my horizons and flex muscles that I don’t necessarily use enough on a regular basis.
“How To Move Spheres And Influence People,” a new Wild Cards novelette
My Wild Cards novelette “How To Move Spheres And Influence People” is up at Tor.com today. It’s free to read, like all the stuff at Tor.com, so if you are inclined, I welcome you to check it out and let me know what you think.
“Spheres” kind of muscled its way into my writing schedule unbidden when the character of T.K. and the nature of her ace power just popped into my head one day. It was one of those rare and magic things where the story mostly writes itself. I am pretty happy with the way the story turned out, and I hope you will like it too.
The gorgeous cover art is by the inimitable John Picacio. (This story marks my first Picacio cover, so I get to check that off my bucket list today.)
Online sources for the LD+R stories
Andrew Liptak at The Verge has a handy post up that lists the online sources for most of the short stories serving as material for Love Death+Robots.
In related news, I’ll never get tired of seeing Samira Wiley as Lt. Colby, the pilot of Lucky 13 in the Netflix version. Yes, the original character in the short story is Halley, but they had to make a few minor changes for reasons. Just trust me on that one.
Regarding Shape-shifters, I want to let the veterans know that I am well aware of the fact that it has Marines address other Marines as “soldiers” (which they’d never do in real life; a Marine is a Marine and not a soldier.) But I guess they kept that bit because of the “dog soldiers” pejorative. In the original short story, Decker and Sobieski are Army, members of the 300th Special Operations Company (Lycanthrope), and the script writer for the show changed them over to the Corps without also changing the Army-specific terms in the story.
The two other goofs I noticed were Decker and Sobieski addressing the Master Sergeant as “sergeant”, and the Marines wearing their sleeves rolled while in the field. Both are details only few people outside of the Corps would notice, but every Marine would.) Rest assured that I know the differences. Regardless, it’s a kick-ass adaptation of the short story, and it’s really growing on me more and more the more I watch it. It’s even motivating me to pick up Decker’s universe again and go ahead with the series I had in mind for him. (The story was supposed to be part of his backstory.)
I’m super pleased with the way everything turned out, and the fan response has been phenomenal. Interestingly, “Shape-shifters” has tended to be either among peoples’ very favorite episodes, or all the way at the bottom of their lists. “Lucky 13” is either well-reviewed, or somewhere in the middle of the list, so Shape-shifters is the more polarizing one. (One of the viewers who hated it said it looked like bad Twilight fan fiction, which did amuse me.)
Writing with Ulysses.app
I’ve been a long-time Scrivener user for over a decade, but for the last year or so, I’ve been migrating my work to Ulysses more and more, and right now I think I am at the point where I’ll be using it exclusively.
Ulysses is a writing app like Scrivener, and it has much of the same functionality, but with a stripped-down and streamlined interface. I can do the same tasks in both apps, but I prefer Ulysses now for two major differences that make my workflow much easier.
The first is file management. Unlike Scrivener, Ulysses has its file management baked into the app. All my writing is always available in the left-hand navigation pane, and I can find everything I’ve ever written without having to leave the app or open a second window. With Scrivener, I still have to find the project’s .scriv file in the Finder and keep my own version control, but Ulysses does all of that for me.
The second is file synchronization. Ulysses syncs all content and changes seamlessly from the MacOS to the iOS apps via iCloud. If I make a change on the laptop, it shows up on the iPad’s and the iPhone’s Ulysses apps just a few seconds later. With Scrivener, I have to save my work to Dropbox and manually sync everything before I open a project on a different device.
Ulysses is very much like a highly streamlined version of Scrivener with no interface fluff. It’s simple, powerful, has just the amount of features I need, and it gets the job done with a minimum of fuss. The only drawback is that it’s a Mac/iOS-only app, so if you run Windows or Linux, you’re out of luck. (Some would say that the subscription-model pricing for Ulysses is a drawback as well, but I don’t mind paying a yearly subscription to ensure prompt updates and new features. I already do that with Office 365 anyway.)
Where to find “Shape-Shifters” and “Lucky 13”
I’ve had more than a few people asking where they can read the two stories of mine that were used for the (amazingly done) episodes in Tim Miller and David Fincher’s “Love Death + Robots” on Netflix.
Episode 10 of Love Death + Robots, “Shape-shifters”, is based on my short story “On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare”, which you can find here on Amazon in DRM-free Kindle format.
Episode 13 of Love, Death & Robots, “Lucky 13”, is based on my short story “Lucky Thirteen”, a story in the Frontlines universe. You can find it here on Amazon, in Kindle and Audible formats.
Lucky Thirteen has been out since the early days of Frontlines, and many readers have downloaded and read Halley’s rookie pilot story already.
“On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare” has never been published anywhere before today, but a lot of people have asked for an opportunity to get their hands on it, so I decided to make it available the same way I offered up Lucky Thirteen a few years back, via Kindle Direct. (The Kindle version is DRM-free and has lending enabled.)
Love, Death & Robots
The first season of Love, Death & Robots, the new animated anthology put together by Tim Miller and David Fincher, kicked off on Netflix today.
https://www.wired.com/story/love-death-and-robots-review/
Two of the episodic shorts in that project are based on stories I wrote. The first is an adaptation of the Frontlines short story “Lucky Thirteen”. It stars Samira Wiley (of “Orange Is The New Black” fame) as the lead character. The second is called “Shape-Shifters”, and it’s based on “On The Use Of Shape-Shifters In Warfare”, my Lycanthrope Soldiers In Afghanistan short story.
I’m super pleased with the way both of those turned out, but the other stories are also clean hits out of the park. Several are adaptations of stories by Alastair Reynolds and John Scalzi, so I am in pretty good company. And hey–maybe I get an IMDB entry now.
If you want to check it out, here’s the official Netflix page.
(“Shape-Shifters” is episode 10; “Lucky 13” is episode 13. And fair content warning for “Shape-Shifters”…it’s rather a lot more gory than Lucky 13. And the whole series is decidedly NSFW and adult-oriented, so don’t watch it with the Sesame Street demographic.)