Speak out with your geek out; or, in defense of science fiction

As I've mentioned, I'm totally sick, and I should probably hold off on attempting any writing until I have the energy to, you know, go outside and that sort of thing. But nay! I foolishly persevere! In particular, I'm going to do a Speak Out With Your Geek Out post about science fiction (I was alerted Speak Out by Sporkchop). I'm doing this because I am generally opposed to bullying, narrow-mindedness, and unethical "journalism."

When it comes to judging the quality of literature, narrow-mindedness is nothing new. My father was extremely defensive about his love for short stories, because when he was growing up, it was believed that short stories were for people who who were too dumb to read all the way through a novel. Eudora Welty is believed to have been robbed of the Nobel Prize for Literature because she wrote about the American South, and at that time it was thought that regional literature was for people who were too dumb to understand universal themes (you know--universal themes like what it's like to live in the Left Bank or Greenwich Village).

There's plenty of bad sci-fi out there, but there's plenty of bad everything out there. Refusing to read something because it's science fiction makes about as much sense as refusing to read short stories or regional writers--you're really, really just hurting yourself.

So, here's what I like about science fiction:

It's about the larger questions. Science fiction tends to be about either 1. society or 2. spirituality.

People often don't realize that. They think science fiction is either about 1. technology or 2. aliens. But at least the stuff I like isn't about technology or aliens in some kind of vacuum--it's about how these things affect humanity. If we had intelligent robots, how would people interact with them? If aliens landed, what would we do to them? How is technology used by governments to control people? If we had some kind of superhuman power, what would it do to us? Do we own our machines or do they own us? What is the purpose of humanity? How does the past affect the present and future? Is reality the here and now, or is it something somewhere else? What will become of us?

Even adventure sci-fi asks these kinds of questions, if it is good. You don't get this claustrophobic focus on the individual that seems to be the mark of Serious Literature these days. That individual focus can be done well, but it can also result in books that are entirely about the author's genitals and/or need for approval. Cracking open a sci-fi book after reading a book like that is like leaving a hermetically-sealed room and taking your first deep breath of fresh, clean air.

Unless you're reading Philip K. Dick, in which case it's like leaving a hermetically-sealed room and taking your first deep breath of hallucinogenic gas. But it's still pretty awesome.

On being slow to adjust

Oh, hi there! So, it's been over a week since the kids went home, and you might think that I've been hard at work! So very hard at work that I haven't even had time to post about it!

Ha-ha-ha! No, of course you haven't thought that, and I haven't been. Part of it is that I've been catching up on other things, part of it is that my time has been kind of broken up (which tends to prejudice me to working on short-term projects rather than this HUGE one), but mostly it's because it always takes me a while to get back into the writing/editing mind-set after a break. I'm slow to get started, once I start I'm slow, and then I get faster and faster until the project ends. It's weird.

I'm not the only one with dysfunctional adjustment patterns. Today's Wall Street Journal contains a fascinating little breakdown of why e-books from traditional publishers are so expensive.

Basically, traditional booksellers are accustomed to making a certain amount of money per book, and they're set up so that they need to hit that revenue target. From the article:

a hardcover book priced at $26 and sold under the traditional wholesale model will return $13 to a publisher. Subtract 15% for the author royalty, or $3.90, and that leaves a gross of $9.10, says publishing executives. Mr. Shatzkin says that it's appropriate to then deduct about $3.25 per copy for shipping, warehousing and production, leaving a gross per unit sold of $5.85, from which publishers must pay for returns and inventory.

 

In other words, the industry's expecting to make a little less than $5.85 per copy sold. And they can get that from an e-book! From the article:

a back-of-the-envelope calculation of a new e-book priced at $12.99 on Amazon or through Barnes & Noble Inc. under the 70%-30% agency pricing model suggests a return of $9.09 to the publisher in the form of sales. The publisher then typically has to pay the author 25% of net sales in the form of a royalty, or $2.27. This leaves a gross of $6.82. Subtract 90 cents for digital rights management, digital warehousing, production, and distribution, and that leaves $5.92.

 

So they can get a similar return! Whoo-hoo!

Oh, but there's a catch--the e-book has to cost $12.99. That's...kinda pricey for an e-book, no? At least, judging from the article, a lot of readers seem to think so.

Meanwhile, Amazon is trying to set up a free e-book lending service. They would make money because you'd have to join Amazon Prime to get it.

Hmmm..... On the one hand is a business that can't make money off a book that costs less than $13. On the other hand is a business that can make money off a book that is free. Which do you think is going to make it?

Whew!

OK, the remaining child has left, and I am officially DONE with this three-week marathon of child care. Honest to Pete, I don't know how full-time parents do it. Actually, I suppose I do--part of the problem is that I'm not really set up for child care, and it's not like I can ask a six- and/or three-year-old to kick back and watch Weeds with me. I have some toys for the younger kid, but apparently the most exciting thing I have in my house is my two cats, who are entertaining in the extreme, especially the mellow one who won't bite or scratch even if you grab his tail and pull it as hard as you can. (I yell and scream, but when did I ever matter?)

Anyway, I will be watching the younger one during the school year, but just one day out of the week (Tuesdays), so that will be less disruptive (and she's small enough that I can forcibly carry her out to the car so that we can go someplace "educational" and she can stop torturing the poor cats). Right now, I feel like EVERYTHING has been neglected--the yard needs work, I need to pay bills, and oh yeah, I was working on a book, wasn't I? So it may be a few days (like after Tuesday) before I can get it together enough to resume editing.

So then he was, like, oh my God, and she was, like, no way.

The kids have eaten my brain, so I'm not going to really be able to come up with a proper post. Instead, when I saw someone else's post about really bad dialog and realized that I could cobble it together with a post from my old blog on the same topic, it struck me as a good idea. No, I haven't been getting much sleep.

Anyway, the post that attracted my attention was yet another take-down of Mark Trail dialog by the Comics Curmudgeon. The dialog in question reads:

TRAIL: Sergeant McQueen, how is he?

RANDOM EXPOSITOR: He's fine!

Oh, no, that wasn't his response--I'm sorry, my logic circuits kicked in there. No, he responds to the question, "how is he?" with:

RANDOM EXPOSITOR: He’s very popular in the community!

The Comics Curmudgeon (whose name is Josh) rightly adds this exchange to the "prodigiously long" list of "Questions And Responses In Mark Trail That Would Never, Ever Be Uttered By Humans."

Josh is a little obsessed with Mark Trail's bad dialog, and if you're wondering why, you should watch his Mark Trail Theater video. Watching actual flesh-and-blood people interact via Mark Trail dialog is freaking hilarious, because it really brings home how unnatural it is. Mainly, I think the problem is that the writer is trying to shoehorn in information, and he doesn't bother to match the answer to the question--instead he creates a non sequitur. ("What do you think of Sergeant McQueen?"/"Oh, everybody here just loves him." would work a little better.)

[Random side note: When I was a reporter, I sometimes experienced the joys of interviewing people who had been told that the only way to deal with the media is to decide what their talking points are and to spout them off regardless of the question. The result was quite like Mark Trail dialog, and I would have to say things like, "What does your answer have to do with my question?" or I would have to repeat the same question over and over and over until the person decided to start being a human again.]

Dialog can certainly be used for exposition. For example, the Master and Commander books are filled with incomprehensible 18th-century British Navy lingo. So Patrick O'Brian has one of the two main characters be a landlubber who knows absolutely nothing about how ships work. Everybody has to explain everything to him, and in doing so, they explain it to the reader--how convenient!

But I think the most important thing about dialog is that it be something you can imagine somone actually saying under those particular circumstances. People don't answer different questions than the ones asked unless they are either being evasive or being rude. People don't spout off about their political beliefs for hours on end unless they are brutal dictators or total bores. People don't publicly humiliate other people unless they are assholes or very, very angry. The stuff that comes out of a character's mouth speaks to their, um, character, so think long and hard about how someone is going to say something. Don't just go for what makes the story easy, because then Josh will incessantly joke about how your main character is autistic.

And keep in mind the particular situation. When you ignore circumstances...well, I think I'll just cut-n-paste from my 2007 blog entry here:

 

...I started out on V.C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic today.

Dear God. I mean, it doesn't quite hit the wildly hysterical highs of the prose in The Bridges of Madison County, but it's pretty bad. Is there anything more inadvertently funny than purple prose?

The book starts out with these kids' dad getting killed in a car accident. And this is how a police officer breaks the news to the mom. Keep in mind, this is DIALOG--these words are supposed to be coming out of somebody's mouth:

"According to the accounts, which we've recorded, there was a motorist driving a blue Ford weaving in and out of the lefthand lane, apparently drunk, and he crashed head-on into your husband's car. But it seems your husband must have seen the accident coming, for he swerved to avoid a head-on collision, but a piece of machinery had fallen from another car, or truck, and this kept him from completing his correct defensive driving maneuver, which would have saved his life. But as it was, your husband's much heavier car turned over several times, and still he might have survived, but an oncoming truck, unable to stop, crashed into his car, and again the Cadillac spun over . . . and then . . . it caught on fire."

Of course, later the police officer says the father died "instantly." You know, instantly AFTER the crash, and the flipping over, and the second crash, and the second flipping over, and the fire. THAT'S when he died instantly.

Progress report

I was going to take advantage of today's peace and quiet by reading a book, and then I realized that, if I was going to be reading, I might as well read Trust. I went through five chapters, so I'm up to chapter 15. Those chapters include a long section that is basically exposition and needs to be slimmed down--I think all the information is necessary, but it's hard to provide it without creating an exposition dump. I'm going to compress to see if that does the trick; if it doesn't, I'll have to come up with something else.

The good news is that the funny parts made me laugh. So that's heartening. Also, some of the stuff is getting cut because the first few chapters are better focused--I already told the reader what the story is about earlier, so I don't need to repeat that information. That's a good sign, I think.

Plots and premises

So, I've got a couple of days before the kids descend again--I may edit, or I may just enjoy the novelty of peace and quiet. Anyway, I've been watching Battlestar Galactica--yes, yes, I know I'm behind the times with this one, but better late than never, right? Anyway, I'm most of the way through season 2, and it has given me food for thought on why plots are so important.

If you look at Wikipedia's definition of an A plot, you'll see that it's job is to drive the story--and believe me, stories need to be driven. Battlestar Galactica's premise is what's contained in the opening credits: The remnants of humanity are hunted by the Cylons as they search for a new home called Earth.

That's a premise. That's not a plot. The A plot for the first 1-1/3 seasons of Battlestar Galactica is that the humans find Kobol, which points them toward Earth. This is not a simple process, because the whole Kobol-will-lead-to-Earth contingent is lead by a person who is actively hallucinating, and there's a whole other you-are-a-nutbar contingent, which is equally if not more powerful.

Now I'm, oh, about another third of the way through the second season, and we no longer have an A plot. We just have a premise. And if you're like me and you like novels as well as television shows that are novel-like, the drop-off in quality is just painful. It's not only that the episodes suddenly stand alone, it's the contrivance necessary to create the emotional resonance that came organically in the first 1-1/3 seasons. Did you know that Apollo had a pregnant girlfriend, who he betrayed? That there's this Cylon raider named Scar who has been devastating the Viper pilots? That there's a huge black market on the fleet, dominated by someone who has been with it less than a month? All these things are introduced in single episode, and a HUGE deal is made of them, despite the fact that we've never heard anything about them before. It reminds me of the bad old days of network television, where a major character would fall in love, get engaged, and break of the engagement/watch their fiance die all within 40 minutes. Then six months later they would do it all again with somebody else, because it was assumed that television viewers were too stupid to care.

The nice thing about having a single big A plot drive the action is that events have a built-in emotional resonance, because they are somehow associated with this big idea. Hopefully that idea is important enough to make the audience care, but at least you only have to puff up one plotline, instead of having the characters gnash their teeth and rend their garments over a brand-new idea every freaking episode.

On not caring about how things work

Between a bad stomach and too much Diet Coke yesterday (I was mindlessly guzzling it as I read that Sayers book--I'm sure Dorothy is getting tired of being blamed for all my problems), I didn't fall asleep until the not-so-wee hours of the morn. In fact, since I am looking after the kids tomorrow, I fell asleep this morning at roughly the same time I'm going to be expected to be up-and-at-them tomorrow morning. Won't that be fun.

This is obviously the sort of day where, if I am really lucky, I might be able to read through half a chapter of Trust before nodding off. So I'm going to prattle on here about a writing topic, namely the divide among science fiction readers between those who care how stuff works, and those who don't.

Not surprisingly, I'm in the latter group. In fact, I was a little surprised to discover the first group existed. I found that out when got very involved in the Firefly fandom. One day Joss Whedon mentioned in an interview that he didn't care how the ship's engine worked, and people were shocked--absolutely shocked. How can he not care? they asked. How is that possible? (And yet, they clearly liked a story written by a man who said, "If you start asking me science questions, I’m going to cry.")

I realized then that these people are mostly engineers, and are therefore rather out of touch with the fact that the vast majority of humanity doesn't care how any engine works, including the engines that they use every day. Seriously, what percentage of the population actually understands how the internal-combustion engine in their car works? And that's, you know, a real engine that causes real people real problems if it doesn't work.

Me, I read science fiction because it's fiction--there are some interesting stories there. I was an English major, I worked in publishing, and I read all kinds of fiction, all the time. But there are people out there who pretty much just read engineering manuals, and what they are looking for in their science fiction is a really interesting engineering manual.

I consider the books that read like engineering manuals to be an incredible waste of my time, in no small part because the science--the engineering, the physics, whatever--isn't real. So, for example, when the exciting chase at the thrilling conclusion of the otherwise fine On Basilisk Station is interrupted for page after page of explanation of that book's fake physics, I get very annoyed. This book is fiction, yes? The physics are also fiction, yes? Ergo, the fictional physics should serve the fictional story, not stop it dead in its tracks because someone is operating under the delusion that the reader actually needs to learn this stuff. (Because fake physics has so many useful applications in real life? Seriously, not since the dragon attack at the end of Beowulf was interrupted to give the reader the genealogy of Beowulf's assistant has a story gotten so far off track at so inopportune a moment.)

I think it's very important that speculative fiction has rules, otherwise everything just falls into mush. But it's also easy to get caught up in explaining and explaining stuff that is simply bullshit, like faster-than-light drives or wormholes. Even the way real phenomenon, like time dilation, are used in fiction doesn't make much sense if you think about it--if you travel at, say, 90% of the speed of light, the time-dilation effects are way less than if you travel at 99% of the speed of light, so what's the rush? Plus, how do you speed up and slow down a ship that much without turning the people in it into goo? (I will just say for the record that the creators of the Alpha Drive really had to work really hard to solve that problem. No, I do not know how they did it. And unless it's important to my story, I don't care.)

Progress report

I input the edits through chapter 9. I realize that sounds like a lot, but as I thought, these later chapters are requiring less work, so actually I was pretty lazy today. I blame Dorothy Sayers: I started one of her mysteries today, and they are so nice and tight and laden with odd characters and juicy clues that I feel compelled to read them in one sitting, otherwise I forget who everyone and everything is.

This is just too funny

This is a compendium of authors insulting each other's works. It is hilarious. Of course I don't think all the criticisms are valid (and the fact that D.H. Lawrence, of all people, would criticize anyone else for being dirty-minded is astonishing), but the choice of language is just priceless. (Seriously, compare it to the insults by directors: It's “A great cow full of ink.” and "Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig [Austin] up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone." vs. "Shut up!" "You're boring!" "You're stupid!" "Fuck you!" "So's your momma!" "Booger head!" "Neener butt!")

Progress report (I think that's what I'll title all these sorts of posts)

Life interfered yesterday and the day before (and will again tomorrow!), but today I edited through chapter 5. I also went back over some of the earlier chapters and compressing some of the more extraneous stuff so that we get to the A plot faster. I'm realizing that between the earlier and the current efforts to include backstory, I've got some repetition and overlap, so I'm cutting that as well as doing a general compression. As a result, right now chapter 5 is way tinier, but I'll fix that later (or I'll just have a short chapter--there's no real harm in that). Unlike in Trang, this book has narration from different characters' points of views, so I also am strengthening that--not everyone sounds like Philippe.

Now I'm going to read over the next few chapters--hopefully there will be less editing required, since we're into the story at this point.

Editing away

Today I did some more editing of chapter 2 (including some background material that it was obvious was confusing the writers group) and edited chapter 3 and most of chapter 4. I'm now a little concerned that all the background material is delaying us from getting to the A plot, but we'll see--I've done some compressing and may do more. Feedback from people who have read Trang also may help, but it's also important for me to remember that this is all going to be a big compromise.

Yesterday I didn't do jack, because the night before last I didn't sleep. I have the occasional sleepless night, as well as the periods where I will switch off between not sleeping and sleeping, like, 14 hours at a stretch. That's always really annoying, because writing is not busy work--if I'm tired or sick or hungover, I just can't do it very well (although sometimes I'm actually better at copy editing if I'm tired and just a little cranky).

I wound up watching most of Samurai Champloo. Heh-heh-heh. I lovelovelove Cowboy Bebop (which is by the same director), and I had been warned that Samurai Champloo lacked the character depth of that show. And that's true--it's also much more R-rated, with, say, an entire episode taking place in a brothel and revolving a character's unsuccessful attempts to get laid by a geisha who is actually an undercover police officer. (The first time she beats him up, he's so horny/dumb that he thinks it's "the rough stuff"--and he likes it!) But I love it, I just love it--I have enough of a frat-boy sense of humor that the crudeness doesn't bother me, plus it just hits the right WTF? note for me. I don't mind anachronistic beatboxing any more than I minded The 1970s Blaxplotation Planet or how the crew was hunted down by some old leftovers in Cowboy Bebop. It's funny because I definitely have a tipping point on that kind of randomness--I really didn't enjoy FLCL because the whole thing was just, Hey, that doesn't make any sense! But if it makes emotional sense (which the beatboxing does) or is just a funny add-on to an otherwise coherent story, I don't mind it a bit.

Chugging along

Yesterday I had a family obligation, but today I did the edits for chapter 2. I find myself pushing back a little against some of the input from the writers' group if only because a lot of the questions now are about things that were fairly major plotlines in Trang. I don't want to confuse new readers, but then again, I think it's inevitable that when you pick up Book #2 after not reading Book #1 that you're going to feel like you missed something. Because, you know, you did.

OMG! I worked two whole days in a row!!!

Yeah, my standards are pretty low at this point.... Anyway, I finished editing chapter 1, which went well. I read through it afterward and decided that part of it seems a little extraneous now, so I did some compressing, too.

And a relative who works in education gave me some books on conflict resolution, so I finished reading those. I don't see that they're necessarily going to alter much, but I suppose it's always good to make sure your diplomat actually, you know, sounds like a diplomat.

OMG, I actually did some work today!

I know, try not to let the shock permanently damage your nervous system. But I got quite a bit done on chapter 1 of Trust. Because I had the writing group look over the chapter, I had all these different edits of the chapter. And for whatever reason (coughcoughburnoutcoughcough) when I'd look at them, it was too overwhelming. I just couldn't deal with everything that needed fixing.

This time I just went right into Experienced Writer Mode, taking one edit, going through and making the changes that were easy to make, and then taking the next edit and doing the same (everyone had very useful suggestions for tightening, and I basically took them all). At the same time, I made notes of suggestions that were more amorphous--generally stuff like adding more background.

Then I ran out of time. One of the reasons I haven't been editing is because I've been trying to do too many things at once--get X amount of exercise, do Y with the house, etc.--and I decided that I need to be more ruthless. If I don't get as much exercise as I "should" while I'm editing, that's just too bad. (And on the flip side, if I exercise rather than edit, I can't pat myself on the back for being such a good person.) Perfectionism is rather notorious for making people less productive, and I've definitely been falling into that trap. I mean, the house works a lot better now, which is certainly nice, but it's not like everything needs to be absolutely optimized TODAY or the world will come to an end--better to spend that time taking out one's obsessiveness on one's prose, no?

Nonetheless, I have certain commitments (like I had today) that I can't just put on the back burner, namely the kids. And I'm going to be on a much heavier caretaking schedule in the second half of August, so you know, I better edit while I can!

The post that I couldn't post, so I moved the blog instead

This is an interesting article about fan fiction, not so much because of all the introductory stuff ("...and that's why it's called slash!") but because of the stuff at the end about how much literature (including everything Shakespeare ever wrote, not just Hamlet and King Lear) is swiped either from other literature or from historical events. (Plus the article quotes Anne Rice being hysterical. I think it's incredibly funny that she takes herself so seriously. She writes vampire porn, badly, yet in her mind she's Marcel Proust.)

Anyway, once upon a time I did write a Firefly fanfic. I knew I'd never sell it, so I didn't bother to polish it, but if you want to read it anyway, it's here.

Over here! Over here!

So, this blog is here now. It used to be on LiveJournal, which I realize was always kind of a rinky-dink place for a blog, but I started on there a long time ago with a different blog, and I didn't feel like changing. But lately LJ has been having a lot of issues and failures, and I've got this site over here, so....

And there are nice things this place lets you do that LJ does not (seriously, if you're thinking of doing a blog, go with Blogger or WordPress--they're free too, and they offer a LOT more features than LJ). Like, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of the blog. And I can post little pictures! It'll be fun!

Real life and fiction (and some looong footnotes)

in

So, have you heard of the Battle of Rorke's Drift, which took place in 1879 in South Africa? That's the battle in which about 150 British soldiers hanging out in a "garrison" (read: old trading post with no real defenses) managed to survive a two-day attack by 3,000-4,000 Zulu troops. It's a remarkable story--I mean, yes, the British were pretty much doomed in South Africa and holding onto Rorke's Drift didn't actually help with that, but from a tactical perspective, it was pretty amazing.

And it was made into a pretty amazing movie called Zulu, which among other things made Michael Caine a star.

And yesterday I read the book Zulu: In Space.

OK, it wasn't really called that. But that's what the book was--a retelling of the Battle of Rorke's Drift in space with aliens. The Zulus were played by the really alien aliens, and the British were played by the humans and their allied aliens, and I just know we could have a long discussion about post-colonialism, post-post-colonialism, post-post-post-colonialism, and whether we should still be offended by this sort of thing or if we're all over it now.

But was it a good book? Honestly, I can't say--I didn't enjoy it nearly so much once I figured out it was Zulu: In Space. I have a good memory for stories (to compensate for my terrible memory for names, I guess), and once I realized what I was reading, everything became dull and predictable, especially because the book followed the (extremely memorable) movie very closely. So reading it was like: Oh, here are the two wounded guys who together make one soldier; oh, now the Zulus--I mean, the aliens--have gotten over the wall, that's going to suck; oh, now the British--I mean, the humans--are singing back, it's about time.

There was also the knowledge that surprises weren't going to come from certain sources. When the humans & friends find a pair of weird alien buildings on this weird alien planet to occupy, they wonder why the buildings are there and why they are arranged the way they are arranged. At first I wondered, too, thinking this was a set-up for some delightful or dreadful surprise, but of course the buildings were arranged that way because that's the way they were arranged in South Africa in 1879. What, you were expecting something interesting, or maybe just something germane to the story?

This doesn't just happen with books based on historical events--although I've read quite a number of fantasy/alternative-history/steampunk books that devolve into history textbooks (that I've already read, thanks). It happens with books based on earlier literature--when King Lear shows up, the reader is not exactly shocked when it turns out that Princess Cordelia is a peach but that her sisters are not so nice.

I think it's a matter of letting the tail wag the dog--it's fine to be inspired by true events/other literature, but if you're just retelling someone else's story, why bother? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is respected because it's not Hamlet: In Space or Hamlet: The Musical or Hamlet: The Version More Consistent with Tom Stoppard's Political Beliefs. Even something as fundamentally silly and commercial as the 2007 movie version of Beowulf isn't about a super-duper guy who fights a monster and the monster's mother, and then finally bites it facing a dragon--it's about how that legend came to be. (And now I'm reading the Wikipedia entry about that movie and realizing that it was written by Neil Gaiman. Ex ungue leonem!*)

(* Before you start thinking that's totally unwarranted praise given how noisy and over-the-top the Beowulf movie was, I studied Anglo-Saxon poetry for a year in college, and it's obvious that the movie was written by someone who is both familiar with the poem and with the language--there's a lot of clever transitioning between Modern English and Old English.** Considering that most of the time Hollywood produces laughably ignorant crap like "When you taught Beowulf, did you make the kids read it in the original Middle English or did you use a translation?"--which is not only dumb because Beowulf is Old, not Middle English, but also because unlike Middle English, Old English is incomprehensible to speakers of Modern English, even the alphabet is different, so getting snippy because a high-school teacher teaches Beowulf in translation simply indicates that President Bartlet is an overly-demanding asshole with a gigantic stick up his butt--I was pleasantly surprised.)

(**OK, this is hard-core geekery about the use of Old English in the movie version of Beowulf. Wikipedia says that Grendel (the monster) speaks Old English, but that's not quite true. Grendel speaks Old English words, but he does not speak Old English.

What do I mean? Well, let's look at a Modern English sentence:

Beowulf tore off Grendel's arm with his powerful hands.

You understand that, right? You know who did what to whose arm and with what he did it. And you know that because of the order in which the words appear. Word order is key to Modern English.

Word order is irrelevant to Old English. Instead, they used word endings to tell you what was the subject, what was the object, what was the indirect object, etc. An adjective like "powerful" would have a different ending depending on whether you meant that Beowulf's hands were powerful or that Grendel's arm was powerful or that Beowulf or Grendel were just generally powerful.

Assuming you gave every word the correct ending, you could mix up those words and not change the meaning of the sentence. In other words, in Old English:

Hands with arm his tore Grendel's Beowulf powerful off.

His powerful arm off Grendel's with tore Beowulf hands.

With his off Beowulf hands Grendel's tore arm powerful.

Grendel's tore arm with powerful off hands his Beowulf.

would all make total sense, and they would all mean "Beowulf tore off Grendel's arm with his powerful hands."

That's a big part of the reason Old English is so freaking incomprehensible to Modern English speakers--when a sentence begins "With and what weather with held he hot the that and the though," the speaker of Modern English pretty much throws in the towel. (And the Anglo-Saxons did that sort of thing all the time, because their poetry didn't rhyme, it alliterated. Since word order didn't affect meaning, it made perfect sense to organize their sentences by grouping together words that started with the same letter.)

What they did in the movie version of Beowulf was have Grendel use Old English vocabulary and Modern English syntax. So when Grendel says, "Mother, the man hurt me," it sounds a little weird ("Muther, tha maen hurt mea" or whatever--I'm not looking it up), but you can understand him. Which just goes to show how important word order is to us--if, instead, he said "Man me mother hurt the," you'd have a much harder time understanding him, even though those are Modern English words.

For the record, later in the movie there's a couple of minstrels who are speaking proper Old English (in fact, they're reciting the original Beowulf). It's not even recognizable as English.)