Capstone Week 6: The Grit of Screenwriting and the Joys of SF

I received another book, ordering my next batch once I’ve posted this. The due dates keep shrinking, and I can tell that the library’s services are getting a little tired of me juggling the books they have to promise to keep safe to all of their sibling-establishments. Part of me wonders how low I can bring that deadline. If they made me read these things for just an hour and hand them back immediately afterward to be shipped away, it might make it easier to get things out of them.

(There’s also a little sticker on the paper strap it comes with, telling me DO NOT REMOVE THIS STRAP. I feel a little accused by that. It’s as if they’ve just now discovered I have a criminal record for mishandling my loans. I have a feeling sooner or later they’ll start leering at me, and I’ll find a cut-out of the horse’s head from the cover of Black Beauty in my bed.)

The book this time is Writing the Science Fiction Film by Robert Grant. It’s written largely for people who are making original offerings, but it covers all of its scriptwriting bases pretty strongly. Funny enough, there’s a section on writing aliens which complains about the proshetic-forehead school of extraterrestrials in much the same way I did last week. Aside from that, here’s what I took from it:

The first ten pages of any script, and of any movie, are the most important ones. There’s a lot of work to be done in them establishing everything the audience needs to know about the protagonist, world, rules, theme, and possibly the antagonists. Part of this is about writing for the people who’ll be accepting or rejecting your script, and that means paring down everything that isn’t completely necessary to the story. Grant puts it very bluntly (and very helpfully) as “[I]f there’s one single trick to better screenwriting, it’s this; [sic] reduce every sentence down to its absolute essence, and use the fewest possible words to make the greatest possible impact” (142); I already have a decent idea for an opening scene which mirrors one of the earlier scenes of the novel. There are also plenty of sections in the story in the main character’s past from which to establish a status quo.

But the writing should be clear, no vague verbs, no -ings, no “starts to”s, no adverbs. Exposition should be given to the audience only when they need it, and the pill should be hidden deep in some especially fun and engaging applesauce. Grant recommends a book on writing dialogue instead of going into it himself, a volume by Penny Penniston called Talk the Talk.

The part that I’m trying my hardest to chew on at present is the very simple question “What happens if the hero fails?” (159). This is very difficult because, in a sense, the hero does fail. He achieves a pyrrhic victory as the lone survivor of his ship, with the aliens kept away from the rest of humanity, but that doesn’t imply much achievement because I don’t think the aliens were that interested in Earth anyway. I’ll probably have to play up the horror of them to make them a broader threat, unless I’m just misremembering them.

And, separately, some bits I really enjoyed as a science fiction writer, but which I don’t have much to comment about in terms of this project.

• “No one will thank you if your script is bland in tone.” (152)
• “It doesn’t matter if the physics of your world aren’t real as long as they are consistent and you never break your own rules.” (86)
• “The main character in your story should be the only person this story could possibly happen to.” (38)
• “Despite the apocryphal nature of a lot of science fiction, there is usually a positive message. There’s a promise that... we can fight our way through any adversity and emerge on the other side with our humanity intact... moving on with a new measure of peace, understanding, and, above all, hope.” (73)

Work Cited

Grant, R. (2013) Writing the science fiction film. Michael Wiese Productions.

Capstone Week 5: Romancing the Alien, Even Though It's Mostly For Your Own Benefit

I’ve talked with Jason and explained the general plot of Blindsight to him, and now I’m trying to decide whether this story deserves to be a feature-length film or a miniseries of short television/web episodes. Working in television might be a little less glamorous than film, but there’s something attractive to me about creating something for it. Maybe it’s that I don’t watch very much of it any more, and I’d like to contribute something I’d consider good in the hopes of improving it. Or maybe I just want to pay tribute to the SciFi originals I used to DVR and watch over Legos as a kid.

Beyond that, my research has been going slowly, and I’m hoping to make some hard progress in the next week. I have received my copy of Screening Space, though. There’s a section in it on aliens, and the failure of SF in many media to portray them well, which I wholeheartedly agree with. They blame this on “anthropormophic reduction” (94), the practice by which completely exotic civilizations are crushed under the weight of the writer’s inability to make them sufficiently unlike-us. They also quote film critic Raymond Durgnat a page earlier, who summed up the problem perfectly with “‘It’s hard enough to understand certain assumptions of the Samoans, the Balinese or the Americans, and all but impossible to empathize into the perceptions and drives of, say, a boa constrictor. How much more difficult then to identify with the notions of, say, the immortal twelve-sensed telepathic polymorphoids whose natural habitat is the ammonia clouds of Galaxy X7?’”

It’s one of the most difficult things to do well in science fiction, to the point that very few writers really bother with it and the academic consensus has often decided that the genre’s just us writing about ourselves in silly googly-eyed costumes. But that’s not what it’s supposed to be, and it isn’t impossible to do correctly, and I know that it isn’t.

In Charles Stross’ Accelerando, humanity makes first contact with “the Wunch”, a set of third-rate subroutines in a greater galactic router-system who steal and brutalize the forms of the unsuspecting as the nasty monsters just outside the playground, only to overcome them easily and start dealing with runaway alien economic systems. In the short story “Love is the Plan the Plan is Death” we see romance and tragedy from the viewpoint of an alien insect with an arachnid mating cycle, and in the more ambitious modern offering “Three Worlds Collide” humanity discovers a society where eating babies is the ultimate moral imperative, for completely intelligible evolved reasons, and then has themselves interrogated by a race which has eliminated all pain and suffering from themselves. And in Blindsight...

Blindsight is named after a condition in certain blind people, those who can’t see because of damage to the brain and not to the eyes, where they can still identify things in moments of danger. If you throw a baseball at one of them, for instance, they’ll catch it without a problem, but they won’t be able to explain how they did it and they’ll continue to insist on not being able to see anything. The brain continues to be a mysterious object, and in Watts’ novel this is one of the core themes; all of the main characters are damaged or split up in some way, their consciousnesses stretched and their minds ravaged in the name of higher learning or personal protection. The aliens themselves don’t seem to be really alive, and it’s revealed in the climax that they aren’t conscious at all. They’re so good at what they do because they don’t have any pesky self-reflection soaking up their neurons, and that’s what makes them so dangerous as a spacefaring race. While we become great at things by training them until we do them without thinking, they can do them that well automatically.

That’s the ultimate horror in this story’s universe, that we aren’t alone in the sense that there are no other creatures in the universe, but just in the sense that there’s never going to be anybody to talk to, anyone remotely comprehensible to us. Humanity is a biological glitch in a universe dominated by much stronger, fitter, survivable species with far fewer qualms about cogito ergo sum.

I just need to figure out how to express that visually, and not by sitting the audience members down and ranting to them about it individually.

Work Cited

Sobchack, V. C. (1987). Screening space: the American science fiction film. Ungar Publishing.

Capstone Week 4: A Blindsided Blindsighted NoSourGrapes Denouement

Not a very productive week, overall. My ILL requests arrived, and I was going to pick them up on Saturday, but I had work for exactly as long as the library was open, and I couldn’t get someone else to pick them up for me since they’d have to show the helpdesk my ID. (It doesn’t help that they’ve doubled my hours.) Having learned that the Sunday hours are a lot laxer than I remembered, I’ve received two of them now, How to adapt anything into a screenplay and Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes.

Without any correspondence from Doctorow, and knowing most of his work is under a NoDerivatives license anyway, I decided I needed to find something else to make into a script. Unfortunately, almost everything in the public domain worth adapting has already been done, and a lot of the people who should reasonably be copyright-free (like Lovecraft) still have tenuous claimants despite all of the adaptations. Some authors like Olaf Stapledon seem to be in the public domain in their countries, but not here (which is terrible because a film of Last and First Men sounds like the best cinematic idea of the year), and for others no one can really tell and people seem to be using other metrics besides actual copyright law. It’s a horrible mess.

What surprised me, while I was doing all of this frantic running around, is that Creative Commons isn’t actually much better than copyright. It’s in the blood of the major to champion systems like CC, and I used to think that it was naturally going to be the light at the end of the tunnel for copyright trouble, but… Well, nearly every licensed work I could find worth working with was under a “NoDerivatives” license that barred any actual creative usage. Admittedly coming from someone who likes derivative fiction as much as any other kind, if not slightly more, this is childish and misses the entire reason people fight copyright. We didn’t want Tarzan of the Apes copyright-free so we could read it on our iPads without paying, we wanted it so we could make movies about Tarzan! Saying people can distribute it however they like but must not make anything in, of, or around it is an attempt to get famous and build fandom without accepting the consequences of accomplishing either of those things.

Besides, saying that it’s fine for people to share your work is a nicety at this point, given there’s no actual way to make people pay if they’re monomaniacally devoted to copying that floppy. If CC were the dominant means of copyright control and not an idealistic underdog struggling for donations, I think most of the futurists and up-and-comers would find similar reasons to criticize it, if only because that’s their natural response to anything in power.

Anyway. In my search I narrowed my options down to two, Doctorow’s Little Brother and Peter Watts’ Blindsight. I’ve read both of them, but the former was already turned into a play, and it’s for teenagers more than adults, so I chose Watts. Blindsight is actually a really great story, although it’s more grim and philosophical than colorful and wondrous, and I’m going to need to take steps to make it clear that this isn’t a space slasher film because the characters seem designed for that kind of story. Everything’s certainly cramped and neurotic, and first contact only makes it worse.

How to adapt anything into a screenplay is a broad text, and it’s mostly about adapting things into three-act Hollywood screenplays - Krevolin’s philosophy appears as early as page 10, with his cardinal rules: “You owe nothing to the original text!” and “If it makes for a good story, it stays. / If not, it must be trashed!” He characterizes screenwriting as a very trimmed-down mode of writing, where only the bare necessities make it into the final work, which is a good point, and he’s also of the opinion that many pieces of fiction are actually in the wrong media entirely for their purposes, which I think is a fascinating reaction. His actual thoughts on how far an adaptor should go seem much more reasonable than his initial rule - “just look at how well O Brother, Where Art Thou? Played with The Odyssey and yet still did not betray its essence… so, yes, you can alter [the source] in any way you need to, but don’t lose the essence that drew you to the material in the first place” (174) - and I plan to keep that in mind when trying to tell the story of the p-zombies from beyond Pluto.

My copy of Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes has an ILL paper-slip over the cover, which charmingly lists the AUTHOR as “Tom Weaver; Tom Weaver; Tom Weaver”, as if it’s trying to summon him. The book’s a compilation of fifty or sixty separate interviews with people from the black-and-white low-budget days of pulpy SF filmmaking, but given how thick the volume is I’m going to need to review the directors interviewed specifically and look for the ones I’m coming the closest to emulating here.

Work Cited

Krevolin, R. W. (2003). How to adapt anything into a screenplay. Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Capstone Week 3: Adaptation, Adaptations, and First Notes on Genre

My endgoal’s morphed twice in the last week. I started out wanting to write a vague script of some description, and I moved to adapting Asimov’s “Nightfall” properly and trying to do it some justice (which the two extant adaptations have apparently failed at). When it turned out I was about two decades late to avoid copyright trouble, so I’ve had to turn to older material. I’ve decided I do want to work on adaptation, partly because I’ve always enjoyed the intellectual challenges involved with translating stories between media and partly because it’s so difficult to do well that I want to understand what I need to avoid.

So, for right now, I’m trying to get Cory Doctorow’s permission to use one of his modern Creative Commons short stories for the project’s sake, and if that doesn’t work out I’m going to look through what the public domain has to offer. Until that’s ironed out completely, my research will be in how adaptation works and how to write science-fiction screenplays in general.

While the ILL delivers some meatier sources, I have found something to discuss in the “Science Fiction” chapter of Jule Selbo’s Film Genre for the Screenwriter.

There’s always some contention in defining science-fiction about where it falls on the speculative spectrum and how we keep it separate from fantasy (or don’t, in the case of bookstores). Selbo argues the rules of the genre are simply that there must be some extrapolation of existing scientific thought, focusing on asking and answering one or more what-if questions. Fantasy is about creating a new rule for the setting whenever you need one, while sci-fi is about following a handful of rules to their logical conclusions.

(Funny enough, the book lists Twister as a science-fiction film, which is accurate even though it’s the exact opposite of what someone would expect when they hear the term. In much the same way, Donnie Darko is one of the best fantasy films of the 2000s.)

More than that, the central technique for any screenwriter working in the genre, the author advises, is the creation of a sense of wonder. The audience needs to be shown “the world of scientific possibilities and how mankind can be/is affected by mankind's fascination" (166), which is at the heart of this kind of narrative even when it plays out darkly in works like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

That sense of wonder is what I’m courting. It’s what endeared SF to me, and made me interested in both reading and writing. Whatever I adapt, I want it to be the sort of thing that would’ve inspired me as a kid.

Work Cited
Selbo, J. (2015). Film Genre for the Screenwriter. 147-169. New York: Routledge.

Capstone Week 2: Screenwriting, Collaborateurs and Courting the Danish Indie Kids

I discussed this project with my friend Stephen, who’s going to be creating a Capstone next semester, and we’ve decided to collaborate: I’m going to write a script, and he’s going to film it. This makes going forward a lot less complicated, except for the business of deciding what I should be writing. But whatever the finished product should be at this point, I know it has to be filmable by someone with a very low-budget, and I’ve decided to start my research from there. (My entry in Screenwriting class was rejected for filming elsewhere because it was so intensely high-budget, so this is a weakness I direly need to shore up.)

The best resource I’ve found thus far on dealing with penniless-filmmaking is an online article in the magazine Script, written by Clive Davies-Frayne and entitled “Four Ways to Control Your Script’s Budget Without Compromising the FIlm”. It makes some points that were pretty obvious to me, like that you should film all of a location’s scenes all at once at that location, but also some that I’d never thought of, like that defining all your locations from the beginning saves time and effort compared to writing location-independent scenes that could be filmed anywhere. Some of it is based in the idea that the reader will actively be paying actors, and the slightly optimistic note that big names sometimes take on small roles for less money if the productions are interesting enough, but the meat of it is in its advice on making the most of your locations and not just writing long scenes to cover up a dearth of places to go. (This is one of the lucky things about writing a screenplay being shot somewhere you’ve spent four years living in.)

The article also lists items in the manifesto of Dogme95, a film movement started by Lars von Trier & co. in Denmark, the same year I was born. The manifesto forbids things like nondiegetic sound, props not found on location and complicated lighting, and styles itself as a vow of chastity on traditional means of directing. I’d heard of the movement through clicking through random Wikipedia articles a year ago, but I never really understood what they were trying to achieve; looking at it as a money-saving measure the way Davies-Frayne does, the whole thing comes together. However, it also forbids genre movies, and there are some things I’m not sure I’m willing to give up in this as-yet-unconceived script of mine.

Moving forward from here, I’ve found a bunch of guidebooks on writing low-budget scripts, and I know where to find the script of at least one of my all-time favorites, but once I have a concrete direction I’m going in I could take a deeper dive into the films and traditions my work will be trying to descend from.

Work Cited

Davies-Frayne, Clive (2013, Jan 18). Alt Script: Four Ways to Control Your Script’s Budget Without Compromising the Film. Retrieved from http://www.scriptmag.com/features/alt-script-four-ways-to-control-your-scripts-budget-without-compromising-the-film

Persuasion, Occultism, and Lizard-Thinking

The bit of The Persuaders that interested me the most was its look into the confusion and desperation of advertisers themselves. It’s easy to think of advertising as a kind of all-knowing conspiracy, given how omnipresent it is and how it conditions and affects us in ways we don’t really appreciate, but seeing the burden for any one group trying to actually pull it off makes it much less scary and more personal. The idea that advertisers are themselves unsure of the effects of their work, and that many of them are artistic people who resent having to work in the industry, fleshes out the profession in a way I never really thought about before.

There’s a kind of schadenfreude that comes from seeing people slowly fail at creating an ad campaign, but Rapaille’s seminars create a much bigger picture of the kind of soft mysticism that happens in the field. Having read his interview, his work on Nestle seems like a straightforward, smart campaign based on raising children with coffee, but it’s not very long before we see him as the kind of person who removes people’s chairs and makes them scribble out their memories to find out their “true” opinions. If you’re curious, the “reptilian brain” thing comes from the triune brain hypothesis, a theory of the brain which has been thoroughly criticized by people who at least seem to know what they’re talking about. (My pet reason for doubting it is that its idea of the primitive unreasoning reptile-brain doesn’t fit well with things like toolmaking crows.)

But the best takeaway from Rapaille, for me, is that it doesn’t really matter which underlying system he’s using. He could just as easily be starting with the eight-circuit model of consciousness, because he’s still going to get some lucky hits on the back of folk-psychology alone. The fact that any company with a diverse-enough ad campaign will never know if his advice worked would be enough to keep him afloat anyway, because he’s accomplishing for corporations what bad self-help books do for individuals.

Even modern esotericism takes these things deathly-serious, given its concern with ideas-as-supernatural-agents, although not much of it makes these kind of connections outright. This very blunt statement of it is taken from The Psychonaut Field Manual, Third Edition by Bluefluke the Arch-Traitor.

Ultimately, companies are often prepared to believe very superstitious things, and their tendency to go too far and create cultish structures is already well-discussed. I don’t mean to discredit it entirely when I call it “mysticism”, though, because even guesswork systems of the human mind can accomplish a lot when enough money and effort’s poured through them, and you don’t need a neurologically accurate picture of your customer to make them want something. I just think it’s important to understand that this is a very messy, groping-in-the-dark method of understanding people, and that ultimately it leaves a big gap in the way advertisers understand the world. Whether closing that gap and giving them a truly effective brain-model is a good idea is a question for another essay.

Capstone, Week 1: Finalizing the Concept - Problems, Solutions, Thoughts

I'm afraid I'm caught between a rock and a hard place in terms of what I want to create.

Ultimately I came into Shepherd because I wanted to get all I could out of its creative writing concentration, and I quickly moved from that into the Communications department when I realized that English wouldn't teach me anything that three dozen writing guides and personal experience wouldn't solve eventually. I chose this route because I wanted to be able to write anything and everything, to be the kind of jack-of-all-trades that every self-respecting desperate freelancer should be. I want to do justice to that.

Things are hectic, though. I'm taking six classes, and working a part-time job around 20 hours a week, and I can feel my circumstances tempering me but it still feels too often like there aren't enough hours in the day to do anything substantial. I hope it won't be considered lazy if I write something like a research paper instead of doing a project involving lots of people and moving parts and scheduling conflicts, but if I do that I need to have a place to submit it to.

And there are the idealistic and fun ideas, like building an alternate reality game or working with some other fledgling medium to prove that I have the basic principles down and I can intuit the patterns behind new modes of art and communication. ARGs are wonderful, but to have meaning with such a small audience one would need to be strongly tethered to the real world, and on a cleanly college campus bustling with young adults I can't think of many ways to integrate a game-narrative with the real world that wouldn't immediately be smudged / cleaned / graffiti'd over / destroyed accidentally / moved / replaced.

I should note that if I had complete control of the guidelines and my own time, I would write a book of essays about various media, find some way to tie those media into it, and either publish it at a small press or try to serialize it through a news-site somewhere. My tenacious English minor's showing, I'm sure. Given that, whatever I choose - and I will before the next few days are over, because I need to - the hard work of it's bound to mostly be writing, and I imagine the final product will be, too.

Jake Johnson and the Case of the Philosophical Visitation

Out of all the things about her visit, I was most interested in Ms. Corsetto’s manner. It’s very difficult to explain, but in my eye there has always been a vague demarcation between being a student artist and a true one. There’s something which confers successful creatorship which you can feel in an individual, the spark that differentiates class projects and creative writing workshop entries from published masterpieces.

It seems intuitive, that the world should act this way. Even if the spark manifests differently, there are people who just seem to have it. Neal Stephenson, Lawrence Miles, and J. G. McCrae all possess the aura of a creator. This isn’t actually a good thing, given that it’s hard to attribute a spark to people you know, especially yourself. I don’t think that I exude writer-ness, and it’s rare to find anyone else in this university who seems to, even if they have true talent. 

And yet Danielle Corsetto doesn’t feel like a creator, and she’s made a fortune by art standards. My map is full of holes, and it doesn’t match the territory, and her existence in my field of view helped me notice that. Being a success in a creative industry is something which can be accomplished without a prerequisite feeling, in much the same way that plenty of newly-minted adults don’t feel terribly mature.

(N.B. I've read Poorcraft now, and I have to say that it's an invaluable book.)

Comic Plans

For my 16-page comic, I'm going to cover an event in my life, rather than a friend's: my trip to Ocean City last summer. This was a week-long vacation taken by myself, my younger brother of 3 years and my mother, and it was in the wake of my father's death.

For him, a four-year battle with cancer ended when it spread to his brain, and because his last wish was to die in his home, the family basically revolved around him, and his mother and father came to help take care of him. I spent my nights staying up, sacrificing sleep to pace the basement and get a little peace of mind, but I was eventually found and put on the night shift, sleeping a few hours a day and spending the dark hours near a baby monitor, checking to make sure he was still breathing.

He lost the ability to speak properly, then the ability to speak at all, then the ability to communicate, then consciousness. I think the last thing he ever said was "No."

So, in short, we needed a break. My mother braved a gigantic metal bridge and we all put up with carsickness in order to travel to Florida while it was still bearable. We received the highest corner hotel room on the best hotel available, so big it cast shadows across the beach.

And the beach...

The water in the beach is all composed of the same type of atoms moving at roughly the same speed. It's connected to every river and ocean in the world, and if you wade into it you're touching millions of people by proxy. That water is the same water as rain, the same water as drinking fountains and soda, the same water as blood and urine. That water is older than living organisms, and has comprised all of them. The water in your body was in rainstorms that battered Rome, the guts of dinosaurs, and the roiling seas before the first cells. It comes from meteors and obeys only the moon, and when you see the way it moves you understand why cultures near large bodies of water seem calmer and simultaneously you feel like it's reaching out for you and you remember the dangers of being pulled out to sea by a current.

And then you see the sky and there's nothing else to make it seem closeby or dome-shaped, no clouds to give it distance or depth, but it rises from the horizon higher than you can see even though there's nothing in your way it's all there but you can't comprehend it just like the water there shouldn't be that MUCH of it there and it's so unnatural even though it is Nature and

I finally understood agoraphobia.

I slept on the couch, because there weren't enough beds to go around. And that week, I read On A Pale Horse by Piers Anthony, which sounds symbolically fitting, but I though it was very flawed for a masterpiece. After the couple hours I spent on that, I spent the rest of the week reading all (at the time) 102 chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It was 600,000 words, difficult to describe without sounding silly, and one of the three best things I've ever read.

Especially this.

Ironically, I never swam. I did try, during the evening, but no one told me that all the shells came in as the sun waned.
I couldn't step into the tide without being shredded by them, and eventually I had to give up and head back to the hotel. Walking the boardwalk was pretty fun, though, and so was the area in general. There are some great pictures of it in wintertime, where the whole area's closed and covered in snow.

That was one of the big seeds, I think, in my turn to travel. I'd love to go back there, someday soon.

Maus and Truth

In Maus, Art Spiegelman records the experiences of his father, Vladek, an old man who lived through the Holocaust. This book is regularly referenced as the reason that comic books began to be taken seriously as a medium, instead of being seen as a childish pursuit. The reason for this is obvious- saying that Maus doesn’t mean anything means criticizing the account of a Holocaust survivor, and so even people who loathe comics must change their opinions of them at least slightly to accommodate it.

Holocaust survivor stories are, by their nature, brutally honest, and Spiegelman makes the decision (at least, as far as the reader knows) not to keep anything off of the page. This doesn’t just extend to the account, however- although it first seems to be a framing device, the author and his father continually break immersion into the story to talk about tangential topics or to do other things which they did at the time of the interviews.

This raises the less obvious, but still challenging problem for Spiegelman of portraying his father as he really is. Vladek is prone to complaining and penny-pinching, something both his son and wife acknowledge in the course of the book. More than that, he’s overbearing and, at times, tries to manage his son’s life. People expect a Holocaust account to be full of graphic details and tell a truth they don’t really want to hear, but it’s another level of brutal honesty entirely to show that someone can survive these events and have a story to tell, but may not be a likeable person.

What’s more, Spiegelman shows his own family drama, the sort of things that even a memoir writer might choose to keep quiet, including Vladek’s relationship with his wife, or a comic book Spiegelman wrote following his mother’s death. These are uncomfortable, but not in a way we’ve been primed for. Plus, the controversy so big that it’s mentioned within the story itself:

Maus is a story that cares enough about honesty that it’s willing to seem completely racist in one of the worst possible contexts in order to tell its story properly. At this point the only question of ethics left is the question of whether it’s better to publish all of this or to hold back on some of it and save the risk to one’s reputation, and it’s clearly already been made. The very publication of the book is a serious statement, and as an attempt at getting uncomfortably close to reality, it succeeds all too well.