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PROMPT September 13th

Today, the prompt comes from Charlie ~ !

List some of your favorite books/movies and explain why you like them. After posting your entry, go comment on other bloggers' entries with suggestions based on their favorites.

This is harder than it sounds.

Life, you see, is change. Stories affect what you do and how you think; they also affect other stories, inspiring them. The new story then changes one's perception of the old story. Think of how many times you've heard something like "I like Star Wars." The inevitable response is "but the prequels sucked." But they didn't say anything about the prequels, or even the sequels - just the original movie, retroactively subtitled A New Hope. And that's not even getting into Lucas' retcons.

I ran into that myself fairly recently. For many years now, I've been saying that my favorite movie is the Director's Cut of Blade Runner. This is still true. Or at least I think it is. Is there a movie I like better? At this point, if there were, I'm so invested in "Blade Runner is the greatest movie of all time" that I would be lost if I suddenly switched. And then the sequel came out, and now it's impossible to have a dialogue with someone about Blade Runner without them bringing up the very different sequel. The sequel changed the original - without altering a single frame or line of dialogue. Or, at least, it informs our perceptions of it. Me, I prefer to pretend it never happened. Honestly, I'm not sure why I watched it in the first place. So I could have grounds for having an opinion about it, I suppose.

The reason I like that movie, incidentally, is a combination of factors: the atmospheric soundtrack, the impeccable acting, the ahead-of-their-time effects, and, most of all, the things it says about humanity. All great science fiction holds up a mirror and shows us as we are, warts and all, and Blade Runner is one of the greatest.

It's even harder for me to choose a favorite book. I read Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land at a very early age; it warped me, and shaped me, and for a long time I called it my "favorite." Now, I see more of its problematic nature in light of more recent social developments. Again, the book is the same as it's ever been (apart from the release of the unabridged version); it's only my perception that has changed. Don't get me wrong - considering the time it was published and what I know about the author, it's a remarkable book. But one has to read it in context, these days.

One book I read almost every year, exclusively in October, is by Roger Zelazny, who was a prolific science fiction and fantasy author of the 70s, 80s and 90s. The book is titled A Night in the Lonesome October, and the original editions (I don't know if others have been published) were punctuated by illustrations by the macabre artist Gahan Wilson. I hesitate to summarize it, because doing so can easily spoil it - I'll just say it's a horror story with a dash of humor, narrated by a very loyal dog. And in it, the author draws from various threads of supernatural literature, including Dracula, Frankenstein (the popularized version, not so much the novel), and Lovecraft.

I'm a fan of everything Zelazny wrote, but October turned out to be the last book he published before his death. Appropriate, once you know the theme. I don't know if I'd be quite so enraptured by it if he'd had the opportunity to publish more - because of the effects I've described above. Since the author died, the book remains untarnished in context.

I'm going to go ahead and list one more book. Well, a series, really. It's more contemporary than the others; the author is still working on the sequels. I speak of Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archives, which, look, let's face it, is way better than Game of Thrones in that most of the characters that you're rooting for don't die in painful, horrible ways. Sanderson's signature technique is to come up with fantasy magic systems that are internally consistent, as well as cultures that are alien but make sense, and these books are the pinnacle of his art... so far.

If life made sense, Stormlight would be made into a massive TV series and GoT would be relegated to the obscurity it deserves. (Yes, I read those books. Yes, Martin is an excellent writer; I just didn't like the books. No, I didn't see more than a few episodes of the series.) But life doesn't make sense, and I have to be content with the novels.

So there it is: one fantasy, one supernatural/horror, and one science fiction - just so anyone who chooses to comment as per the prompt above knows what my preferred genres are.