As far as I can tell from all focus groups, market research, and user data that I’ve seen, the general difference has less to do with whether women relate more to a specific genre, and a lot more to do with the methods that allow us to use our media to reach a state of escape. Science fiction, fantasy, superheroes, vampires, whatever… guys will check this stuff out simply because it’s cool. But most women need a subtler.

That’s why I wasn’t surprised at see the results of this survey taken on women who read comics. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that can be unpacked from the responses, but overall you can see that female nerds are similar to male ones in that they’re looking for something edgy and empowering. But to sell to women you need to give them more than just a hot and hunky hero (although that’s sometimes a good start), and a big fight—you need give them a character that they can identify with (even if it isn’t the protagonist), and tell a story that engages the imagination.

And that’s because the great thing about the female audience is that once you’ve engaged them, they’ll stick around a lot longer. Women are aware that there’s only so much media they’re going to relate to, so they can be pickier about the relationships.

Take a look at Twilight and you’ll see a passionate audience, committed to consuming whatever comes out in that series, whether it’s movies or books. They have a relationship with the story, and they’re not ready to break up even years after the last book has been put on the shelf.

I know I’m making some big generalizations here, and I’ve really only scratched the surface of the female genre fan.

I’d love to hear other people’s opinions on the subject.

That’s why I was shocked to realize that I was about to close the cover on The City & The City 70 pages in.

First off, it’s China Miéville. Not only have I enjoyed almost everything he’s ever written, I’ve gotten used to the fact that it often takes a while for his books to get going. It’s been a few years since I’ve read The Iron Council, but as I remember it, there was a good long boring bit before the mutant hell-train showed up, and everything got great.

And that’s exactly where I almost put the book down. You get some tantalizing glimpses of the (ultimately amazing) central conceit of the book early on, but it isn’t until around page 80 that you really start to “get” what’s happening, and realize that it’s something truly awesome.

I get why he does it. There’s an impact to subjecting the reader to a street level view of this strange world before lifting the veil. But it’s also as frustrating as hell, especially since the main character is a bit of the “by the numbers” guy. He’s cookie-cutter noir hero who spends the first chunk of the book looking forward to getting off the case.

But once the blinders are off, things get real good real fast. The plot remains is a fairly straight ahead political pot-boiler, with an ending that (at least in my case) became pretty apparent fairly early on, but the setting is so interesting that you want to keep reading about it just to get your questions answered. And the book does manage to answer most of them. I always find it comforting as a reader to be in the hands of someone who can stay a step ahead of me.

There’s no doubt that Miéville is a master world builder. His stories about New Crozubon quickly grew from describing a city, to encompassing a world. His prose often sings, or at the very worst at least hums along nicely, even if the characters come off as a little cookie cutter compared to some of the nuance he’s shown in the past.

But The City & The City is literally an urban fantasy in the way that most book that call themselves that aren’t. It’s a book about a city, and the consensual self-deception that is part of the cost of living in any metropolis. It’s also the story of a place that could only really exist between the pages of a book.

It’s well worth reading. Just make sure you promise yourself you’ll get to page 80 first.

While it would be nice to take a breath, I’m also starting to get excited about what we have to look forward to in 2010: Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Daybreakers,  a brand new Doctor Who, more SGU, and an avalanche of new fiction from top authors.

If you have book, movie, or TV show that you’re looking forward to in 201o tell me about it. And if there’s a small project that you think is worth shouting about, this is the place to do it!

Steampunk is the most obvious example. While it is generally considered to be a genre is fascinated with the past, it is, in its own way, truly futuristic. By telling stories of transformed ancestors it allows us to redefine our vision of ourselves from the other end of the telescope. It is a kind of pseudo-fantasy for a world that is clinging onto the real as it moves beyond the virtual. They are tales of a reality where humanity may on the cusp of truly becoming magicians, capable of transforming the physical world in more radical ways than we ever imagined possible.

And fantasy seems oddly predictive in other ways as well. The threat of global warming seems to be something out of Tolkein rather than Asimov, although without the convenient anthropomorphic villain to slay in order to solve our problems and set the world “right”. Our solutions may have to come through acceptance of our abilities rather than an attempt to fight against them.

Our technologies seem to be on the cusp of unweaving the very fabric or life itself, and in response it may be that we are yearning to experience the world in a more organic way. On that is integrated with our fundamental human sensations. As we live longer, and demand more resources from the world, it makes some kind of sense to tell stories about benevolent vampires that sparkle in the sunlight.

By populating our modern urban landscapes with creatures of myth, we could be giving ourselves metaphorical stories for the kinds of radical choices that may soon be coming for the human race. And for a generation that will have far more control over their own biology than any that has come before, it may well more helpful to have grown up with those of fantasies as opposed to rocket ships and space aliens.

What the author doesn’t mention is how this paradise was essentially an orwellian nightmare—a place where people could be detained for almost any infraction, up to and including supposedly legal narcotics found in their bloodstream.

It was also built on the backs of what was essentially legalized slave labor

Engineering and technology are amongst our most powerful tools, and there’s a certain amount of hubris necessary to take any project of significant size and vision.  But there’s a point at which what you can do far outstrips what you should do.

As our financial system has become more divorced from actual human work we’re seeing the danger that comes from an ability to turn our wildest dreams into reality, both good and bad. And while I’m all for urban fantasy and modern re-interpretations of classic fairy tales, it’s important to remember that our most enduring stories of fantastic creatures are mostly cautionary allegories about the dangers of what happens when our wildest dreams come true.

There. Done. So long!

Or maybe I could go a bit beyond that and talk about how amazing the character designs are, and how impressive it is to see a film that is based around building something out of the elements of classic fantasy rather than the ridiculous mish-mash of maniacal horror villains that have served us as the basis of most non sci-fi genre films made in the last half century. After all, aren’t the monsters from Halloween, Friday the 13^th, Nightmare on Elm Street and a hundred other modern horror films also fantasy characters? They’re not really real, that’s for sure. And yes, they’re homicidal maniacs, but in the end they’re cut from the same cloth as vampires, werewolves, trolls, and a hundred other things that have gone bump in the night for over a thousand years.

Hellboy II is different though. It’s menace comes out of the same tradition as Lord of the Rings. They’re creatures from a world that exists at a broken angle just outside of our own. Beasts rising out from the cracks in the mirror. On that level alone there are enough fresh ideas in this film to make it worth seeing, even if the story its trying to tell is weak, disjointed, and just plain broken.

Lawrence Miles, a most excellent writer, recently posted something about the new Doctor Who episodes that I think resonates perfectly with Hellboy II (and is probably worth a post all by itself):

Any CGI monster is by definition going to be regarded as a Special Effect rather than a natural part of the story. The advantage of a “real” monster, whether it’s a Dalek, a gasmask-zombie, or even a Muppet, is that it stops being bizarre after the first couple of minutes. The audience begins to treat it as a normal element of the story-world, and accepts it as a given fact, which means that we find the programme much more engaging. Whereas the point of a computer sprite will always be to make the viewer say “gosh, wow, look!”, and the result of this is usually a series of set-pieces in which the episode shows off the CGI as much as possible whether we care about it or not.

And with HB2 you get both practical and CGI creatures. The real-world creations walk, lumber, and stagger around. Even Hellboy himself is by and large a suit, with the actors face peering out from underneath the red paint, grinning with a set of large white teeth. Added into this group of heroes is Johan, a Prussian gasbag, whose containment suit costume is a prop of such gorgeous artistry that I often found myself simply admiring its hundreds of tiny details while the story fell to pieces around it. Beyond the director’s obvious understanding of the nature of fantasy, it’s that kind of attention to minutia that clearly makes Del Toro the right man to handle the Hobbit.

It’s also used to build up the backbone of the story, with multiple emotional arcs being centered around the relationships between the different oddities inhabiting the story and the rest of the human race. Even the human characters are monsters to be shunned by the normal people. It’s a powerful idea, but like much of the film’s narrative, it’s only used as shorthand, and then discarded once its work is done.

The CGI spectacles are definitely eye-catching, with one big monster in particular reminding me of something straight of Miyazaki. It’s a simply breathtaking creation (even if its weak-point is a videogame trope straight out of the ending of Half-Life). But again, the narrative lets us down: When the villain chides Hellboy for wanting to kill it you’re right there with him, wondering why he would want do that to something so magnificent and grand. But if you take a second to think about it, you realize that it was the villain himself who unleashed it after our hero, commanding it to kill him. It’s a juicy moral dilemma that the film utterly avoids sinking its teeth into.

The movie’s gorgeous tapestry is riddled with hundreds of these little plot holes, leaving a film that delivers exceptional moments, but never bothers to earn them. Instead, when it wants you to feel something it simply holds you down and pours the emotions straight into your throat, like a bottle of emotional castor oil.

And oddly enough, maybe in the end you do feel a little bit better walking out of the theater than you did walking in. But it still leaves a bit of a bad taste in your mouth.

It’s solid “the hero is a villain” stuff in the tradition of Gaston.

Well, now there’s a trailer to look at!

I’m not sure I’m excited yet, but it definitely seems interesting…

They released 3rd edition of the game back in 2000. This was a major revamp of the system, taking a stand by recreating the game after the muddy depths of the previous had taken the game even farther into muddy realms of arcane rules where only the mightiest nerds might find their way out to fun.

Reading those books back I was struck by how strange it had all become. The game didn’t seem to be about anything. Well… that’s not technically true.: It was still about Dungeons and Dragons. But it was no longer about much else. This was a roleplaying game simulating a roleplaying game.

The game worked, but it didn’t interest me much. The barrier to entry was too high, and it was still vulnerable to the kind of munchkin behavior that turns what is supposed to be a friendly social interaction into a war of rules, and keeps everyone but the hardcore out.  I’d tried it out a few times, but found it to be a fundamentally unsatisfying experience. As a player there was always that vague unease that somehow you had made a mistake when creating you character. That rather than being on the path to godhood you were doomed before you had even started.

All the best tabletop games share one thing in common, that is that their rules are simple, but the gameplay is deep. You discover the complexities of the system by playing the game, not by reading the rules. 3rd edition failed that test, and I stayed away.

A few weeks ago the 4th edition of D&D was released. The new system still the beast with three books that it has always been; Players Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual. But it’s been revised and streamlined. This is a simpler, smarter game. One that seems to have more roads to fun than it does to ruin.

Having now had a chance to play the game as both the Game Master and the Player, it’s clearly not totally “fixed”. But in the end that seems to be broken in the right way. In a world filled with computers that handle everything seamlessly, it’s fun to still have a game where you can gather around a table with a bunch of your friends, make a bunch of mistakes, screw up the rules and still have fun. It’s a game where even when it’s going wrong it feels like there’s always another opportunity to try out a new strategy, or pull victory out of the toothy, acid-spewing jaws of defeat.