I don’t have a whole lot to say about the 2018 Hugo Awards (yet), because I haven’t done all my research on it and also because I’m still trying to figure out how to finish writing about a book that won the Hugo in 1956, so I hope you didn’t come here hoping for takes on the hot new sci-fi of 2018. However, this whole blog thing or whatever it is I’m doing was born at WorldCon and stemmed directly from the 2015 Hugo Awards and the Sad/Rabid Puppies controversy, so I feel the need to at least briefly comment on the very cool, very historic stuff that went down in San Jose last night.
The Velveteen Dream faces off with Richochet prior to their Takeover match. Photo credit: GiveMeSport.com
Tomorrow, NXT will put on its fourth Takeover event in Brooklyn, and if it meets the expectations for Takeover shows being set thus far in 2018, it’s going to be something special. It’s also the perfect opportunity for me to elucidate something I’ve been working on for years now, a kind of Unified Theory of NXT, which views the show’s history since the dawn of the WWE Network as a cyclical phenomenon currently in the middle of its fourth stage. Yes, that is how much I love this wrestling show.
This is the fourth in a four-part series being released weekly between now and NXT Takeover: Brooklyn IV. Part 4 is, just so you know, really fucking long compared to the other three, and that’s because a whole lot of stuff has happened in the past year that needs to be properly parsed in order to come to a true understanding of the history of NXT. In this final installment, I discuss how the NXT roster shook out during a year of transition, and the eight wrestlers who returned the male singles division to the top – only this time, with a couple of twists that speak to the full evolution of this spectacular wrestling promotion.
The Revival vs. DIY in Toroto. Photo credit: Cagesideseats.com
In two weeks, NXT will put on its fourth Takeover event in Brooklyn, and if it meets the expectations for Takeover shows being set thus far in 2018, it’s going to be something special. It’s also the perfect opportunity for me to elucidate something I’ve been working on for years now, a kind of Unified Theory of NXT, which views the show’s history since the dawn of the WWE Network as a cyclical phenomenon currently in the middle of its fourth stage. Yes, that is how much I love this wrestling show.
This is the third in a four-part series being released weekly between now and NXT Takeover: Brooklyn IV. Part 3 focuses on the NXT tag team division, and how a tossed-together group of jobbers and misfits turned a perennial afterthought into the best and most important part of the show, kept their era going longer than either the main event kings of 2014 or the revolutionary women of 2015, and even took a massive hand in shaping the future that was to come.
The Four Horsewomen of NXT, from left to right: Charlotte, Bayley, Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch. Photo sourced from http://www.diva-dirt.com
In three weeks, NXT will put on its fourth Takeover event in Brooklyn, and if it meets the expectations for Takeover shows being set thus far in 2018, it’s going to be something special. It’s also the perfect opportunity for me to elucidate something I’ve been working on for years now, a kind of Unified Theory of NXT, which views the show’s history since the dawn of the WWE Network as a cyclical phenomenon currently in the middle of its fourth stage. Yes, that is how much I love this wrestling show.
This is the second in a four-part series being released weekly between now and NXT Takeover: Brooklyn IV. In Part 2, we focus on 2015, the year that women’s wrestling returned to the United States. By that, of course, I don’t mean that there were no female wrestlers in the U.S. prior to 2015; quite the opposite is true. But it had been almost a decade since women had been treated with anything resembling respect on the WWE stage. Some promotions, such as Total Non-Stop Action Wrestling (now known as Impact Wrestling) had thriving women’s divisions during this period, but WWE is the biggest game in town, and despite the efforts of some members of the talent roster — most notably AJ Lee — it was hard to ignore the fact that the largest wrestling promotion in the world was hiring supermodels and training them just enough to not kill one another while they did battle in Playboy Pillow Fights over a championship that looked like a butterfly or a vagina, depending on who you asked. In 2015, the women of NXT almost single-handedly changed all that, and if the Orlando promotion had done nothing else whatsoever, it would still be worth celebrating for breathing life back into American women’s wrestling.
Sami Zayn, NXT Champion. Photo credit: Smarkoutmoment.com
In four weeks, NXT will put on its fourth Takeover event in Brooklyn, and if it meets the expectations for Takeover shows being set thus far in 2018, it’s going to be something special. It’s also the perfect opportunity for me to elucidate something I’ve been working on for years now, a kind of Unified Theory of NXT, which views the show’s history since the dawn of the WWE Network as a cyclical phenomenon currently in the middle of its fourth stage. Yes, that is how much I love this wrestling show.
This is the first of a four-part series that will be released weekly between now and NXT Takeover: Brooklyn IV. In it, I provide an introduction to NXT (and my personal fandom), a brief history of the company (that’s the part with the title “A Brief History of NXT,” in case you were wondering) and an in-depth look at the promotion’s main event picture in 2014. As always, I’ve tried to make my wrestling content as accessible as possible to the newcomer, but I’m sorry, at a certain point you just need to accept that you don’t know who Camacho is and you can trust me when I say you don’t need to.
The cast of Double Star includes daring space pilots, scheming politicians, deadly Martians, and an Emperor, but they are all effectively backdrop compared to the narrator and main character, Lorenzo “The Great Lorenzo” Smythe, an actor so good he literally becomes another person. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Lorenzo is one of the most fascinating sci-fi characters I’ve read about, which is weird, because his “base” personality is that of a selfish xenophobe who thoroughly believes his own hype despite the fact that he’s completely broke – in other words, about as basic as human beings get. But there are a number of contradictions baked into him from the beginning, and as the story moves along, those contradictions multiply. Lorenzo is a washed-up has-been who is also an amazing actor, a conniving louse whose noble qualities draw friends and allies to him, an unrepentant hater of Martians who spends his life fighting for their political rights. He is Lorenzo Smythe, but not really, because he is actually Lawrence Smith, but not anymore, because now he’s John Joseph Bonforte. His identity is rewritten, folded up, torn to pieces, and taped back together into a form both totally familiar and unrecognizably alien. How could he be anything but fascinating? He is the ultimate thespian of the future, a character whose entire raison d’etre is the act of transformation. He is change incarnate.
If you’ve followed this blog even a little, or heard me constantly plug it on the Unspoiled: Dark Tower podcast, or even just had a thought, maybe one time, along the lines of “hey, I wonder if Miles is ever going to write anything new for Universes of the Mind again,” please accept my most sincere apologies. I am aware that we are rapidly approaching the first anniversary of this blog, and so far I have finished covering a grand total of three (3) Hugo-winning novels. I am also aware that I haven’t posted on this blog since March, meaning it’s been a solid six months since there was anything resembling new content here. And I am most certainly aware that the content I published in March was supposedly supplemental material about the Shannara series, which, as much as I love it, has never won a Hugo Award.
I am aware of all that, and I’m sorry, and I promise it won’t happen again. Mostly because I only plan on getting married the one time.
So, with apologies taken care of, let’s jump right back into the list of every novel to win the Hugo Award! Where were we again?
When I first heard about The Shannara Chronicles, I will admit to probably being too optimistic. I mean, we were still talking about MTV, after all. But I wasn’t the only one, and I had some good reasons. The Smallville guys were writing it, the Iron Man guy was producing it, and Terry Brooks, the author of the series on which it was based, a man famous for refusing to let movie and television people get their hands on his story without damn good reason, was personally involved in the creative process. Beyond that, as previously mentioned, the book being adapted was The Elfstones of Shannara, arguably the best novel in the entire series. There was reasonable cause for hope.
Still, it took me over a year to get around to watching the first episode. During that time, I learned that the show had been greenlit for a second season, which was good. I also learned that it had made its way to Netflix disturbingly quickly, which was bad. Finally, at long last, I convinced my fiancée to sit down with me and watch that first episode, practically praying that it be good enough, at least, that she’d consent to watch the next one.
As it turned out, that wasn’t in any way a concern. Because I myself had no interest in watching the next episode, still haven’t, and probably never will.
There was a time (a very short time) when it looked like Terry Brooks’ Shannara series was finished way back in the 90s. In 1997, after the release of the stand-alone prequel The First King of Shannara, Brooks departed the world he’d spent 20 years building for a different trilogy, which came to be known as The Word and the Void. It was his first true work of so-called urban fantasy, a story that certainly involved magical creatures and events, but was set in the modern United States as opposed to a fictional world like Shannara. It was also written on the smallest scale Brooks had ever used, forsaking the “traverse the lands and fight the all-threatening evil” motif of high fantasy in favor of one person’s relationship with a hidden magical universe and the people who, like her, are aware of its existence. The heroine is Nest Freemark, an incomparable female protagonist, and even Brooks’ trademark time-hopping is confined to a few years instead of decades or centuries, as Nest ages from book to book, going from 14 to 19 to 29. It is a phenomenal trilogy that, more than anything else, demonstrated Brooks’ ability to write outside the confines of Shannara or epic fantasy in general. With the original Shannara trilogy and follow-up Heritage series having been seemingly capped off by the prequel, The Word and the Void seemed to indicate that Brooks was finally moving on.
I’m moving right along through Heinlein’s Double Star, but during the break between Hugo essays, it’s time for this blog to take its maiden voyage into one of my personal great literary loves: high fantasy. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara, and the launching of a fantasy series that remains ongoing after four decades.
If you’ve never heard of the Shannara series, I can’t say I’m surprised, particularly if you’re on the younger side of the fantasy reader spectrum. Brooks and his work haven’t gotten a whole lot of love during the Internet Age. I’d like to believe that there’s a large constituency of fantasy nerds who read that first book, didn’t like it, and never read any more, but the truth is probably that there’s a large constituency of fantasy nerds who never read the first book, but heard it was a Tolkien rip-off that had never been turned into a popular movie or TV show and dismissed the entire series out of hand. As a result, mention that you’re a Shannara fan in most online fantasy circles and you will invariably be shouted down by people with suggestions for the good fantasy series you should read instead.
To indulge in the sort of profanity I usually try to avoid on this blog: Fuck those people. Over the course of this week, Universes of the Mind will be celebrating Shannara’s 40th birthday as only a lifelong fan could, and it’s only appropriate to start with an explanation of why it’s the most important fantasy series you’ve never read.
Universes of the Mind 