Category Archives: Cool Things

Cool enough to be a category and a tag.

Cool Things: The Kingdom of Jackals

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What do you get when you combine satire, comedy, steampunk-sci-fi and a grouchy old steamboat captain?

Why the Kingdom of Jackals, author Stephen Hunt’s crazy, tongue-in-cheek romp through adventure, human nature and Science! The Kingdom is a far cry from many steampunk stories in the themes it chooses to look at. While many steampunk stories are obsessed with Progress or Science!, Jackelian stories are a different beast. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of steam powered robots, airships, scientific societies and more to tickle your neo-Victorian sensibilities, but they’re not the focus in Jackals. Rather, Hunt turns these things into subtle (or not so subtle) metaphors for modern culture.

Some struggles in human history are timeless, and by setting them in a place that never existed he manages to both show us the extreme forms of some historical and sociological themes and let us enjoy watching fun, engaging characters deal with them using gratuitous quantities of coal powered, pressure gauge studded, improbable technologies.

Jackals is full of weird but entertaining ideas. It’s the Republic with a King. The state religion is the Circlist Church, which worships reason and math and views the word “faith” as blasphemy. Groundquakes periodically send huge sections of the ground floating into the air unless worldsingers can calm the pressure in the tectonic plates. And that’s just day to day living, before the evil cults, chosen wielders of ancient, thinking weapons, lost civilizations, alien invasions and displaced nobility is taken into account.

As I said last Friday, Hunt makes excellent use of his characters in these novels. There’s nothing exactly like a main character in the series. Although some characters, such as Molly Templar and Jethro Daunt, are the focus of more than one book, the closest thing to a central character is actually Commodore Jared Black, the only character to make an appearance in all six novels to date. While never a central character in any of the stories he manages to be consistently among the most surprising, engaging, human and personable. Among the wild tales of aspiring authors, outlaws, famous detectives and belittled archaeologists, Jared manages to be the voice of the Everyman – and that while harboring some impressive secrets for himself.

Steampunk is many things to many people. It is commentary on the Victorian era, a time of unprecedented progress and struggle. It is a reflection on the relationship between knowledge, reason and the human soul. And it is a great excuse for huge quantities of gratuitous cogs, gears and pressure dials. If you want all that, with a healthy dose of thought provoking ideas for today, then the Kingdom of Jackals might be a place to think amount visiting…

Cool Things: Potter’s Field

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“There’s a cemetery on Hart Island at the western end of Long Island Sound. Unidentified corpses are buried here under plain stone markers at the rate of around 125 a week…” 

-Jordan Halpert, Potter’s Field 

Kind of chilling, isn’t it? In the city of New York, 125 people die nameless and friendless every week. That’s about 500 a month. 6,500 a year.

Who are they? How did they die? Does anyone really care about them?

I’m not sure how accurate that statistic is, but by opening his comic noir tour de force Potter’s Field with it, Mark Waid manages to ensure that he has our attention from minute one. After all, who want’s to die nameless and forgotten? The least dignity we could be offered is a tombstone with a name on it. Yet to the people of the Hart Island cemetery, the only indication of who they might be is a cold, impersonal number.

But there is a man. A man who hates that fact, who cannot stand to just walk away from those empty stones. So he walks the length and breadth of the city, piecing together the clues no one else has the time or the resources to find, and finding the names for these people and recording them in stone for all to see.

Like the people he serves, this man has no name to give to others, so they call him John Doe. To us, and to the people who help him, he is as much an enigma as the corpses he names. He seems to have no family, no friends, no history at all. And yet, there must be something that drives him to live alone, in abandoned buildings, eating canned food and sleeping on cots. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what the real mystery is – John or the people of in the potter’s field.

Or perhaps, as his name suggests, John Doe is just another one of the nameless dead who hasn’t given up on moving around just yet.

Potter’s Field is the polar opposite of the last Mark Waid titles I mentioned. Where Irredeemable and Incorruptible are quite possibly the greatest superhero titles ever written, Potter’s Field is a tribute to the mortal man. John’s not superhuman in anything but his ambition. He scrabbles about for clues, risks his life every time he crosses with the criminal underworld and very nearly becomes a real John Doe on more than one occasion.

But, as Greg Rucka says in his introduction to the first collection, he still shows us Waid’s favorite kind of struggle. That of a man who stands on the side of what’s Right , opposing what is Wrong. The fact that he does it without spandex, superpowers or a second thought from the press and public only makes him more of a hero, not less of one.

And it gives one new hope in the potential of funnybooks to tell stories. For that alone it’s worth your time. Pick up your copy now and maybe someday you’ll be able to show it to your children one day, and say, “This is one of the titles that started the revolution. This is what made comics a force in our culture.” And really, how cool is that?

Cool Things: October Daye

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With a main character named October Daye, you just know a series is going to bring a slightly different perspective to things. Of course, whether you’re going to enjoy that perspective or not is a matter of taste, but I highly encourage you to give it a shot anyway.

Seanan McGuire‘s excellent urban fantasy series is an exploration of modern day faerie. October, or Toby to her friends, is a changeling, the daughter of a faerie woman and a human man. To most of the supernatural community changelings are outsiders, the addition of mortal blood to their faerie nature dooms them to outlive most of their mortal friends, but the fact that they still age and die makes them an uncomfortable reminder of mortality to the ageless fae. Worse, if they choose to live their lives as part of faerie they are expected to maintain the masquerade that the fae are gone, so they cannot live honestly with their human friends.

It’s a hard life that Toby and her friends must face, and she hasn’t had it any easier than others. It’s true that she was taken in by an honest to goodness Duke, and made a knight in his court, but even there she’s not entirely respected or treated fairly. And then the Duke’s twin brother conspires against him, kidnaps his wife and child and turns Toby into a goldfish for fourteen years.

No, Toby doesn’t have an easy life at all. But when she finally gets over being a fish (which apparently takes longer than recovering from being a newt) her trials aren’t over. In fact, they’re just beginning. In spite of the things she’s already suffered in Duke Sylvester Torquille’s service Toby keeps finding herself entangled in the politics of the Faerie Court. Between murders, conspiracies and confronting her own doppelgänger, it’s a wonder she can find time for anything else at all. But she keeps it up, if for no other reason than to save the children. Really, one of these days they’ll just stay put with their parents, but in the mean time the faeries of San Francisco continue to rely on Sir Daye to track their kids down when they turn up missing.

The two greatest selling points of Toby’s adventures are their pacing and their solid grounding in the rich legend of the British Isles. All the books maintain a breakneck pace that introduces Toby to clever and dangerous problems. As the only trained private investigator the Faerie Court has to draw on (they’re a very old fashioned people in some respects), it’s only natural that she wind up involved, even if the people who hire her don’t always care for her much.

McGuire does an excellent job evoking the feel of British myth, even in a story set in Southern California. While it’s hardly faithful to any one particular interpretation of the  myth that actually serves as a strength, allowing McGuire to add, subtract and improvise the stories to suit her own needs.

Oh, and every book’s title is taken from a Shakespeare quote. How great is that?

If you’re into urban fantasy, I highly suggest checking it out.

Cool Things: A Little Princess

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For those of you who’ve never heard of it, A Little Princess is a children’s novel by Frances Burnett about a little girl who lives a life of comfort and privilege, only to loose her father and fortune all at once. It’s a story about dealing with change, the importance of character and enduring times of trial.

While those may seem like heavy subjects for children’s literature, there are few things as dependable in life as change and trail, and few tools for dealing with them as powerful as character. As such, A Little Princess was and is an important piece of literature for equipping young people, and especially young women who are not as represented in literature as they might be, for dealing with life.

A Little Princess is also the latest production by all for One productions. Full disclosure: Like the last such production I mentioned, I will be appearing in this play.

If you’re interested, and particularly if you have a young daughter, this is a great play to check out. Performance dates are February 22-24 and March 1-3. Play begins at 8:00 PM on Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30 PM on Sundays, with doors opening half an hour beforehand. Full ticket prices and ordering information can be found here.

If you live in the Fort Wayne area, I hope to see you there.

Cool Things: “Chinese” New Year

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According to the Chinese Zodiac, the new year begins on February 10th, 2013. Like all great Chinese traditions, this has pretty much ignored any contradictory Western traditions, such as our having our own calendar that’s used pretty much world wide. There will still be huge celebrations in may places across Asia as the Year of the Snake officially begins.

As the child of mixed heritage (is that politically correct?) I’ve always had an interesting relationship with the Chinese New Year. It’s not a holiday my immediate family had any special traditions for, beyond occasionally visiting relatives. On the other hand, to my father’s side of the family it was frequently a time to touch base, enjoy good food and company and generally do everything that Americans generally associate with Christmas (including gift giving!) On the third hand, I could typically mention it to my friends and get nothing more than a blank look.

Ah, the good old days.*

Now there’s this thing called Wikipedia, and it has a table that not only tells you when the Chinese New Year falls, but what the technical term for the Chinese Zodiac is and which of animal’s year we’re about to embark upon (for those wondering, mine is the Year of the Rat, something my sister has always found most appropriate). The Internet and other forms of media are becoming more aware of these and other, similar, cultural events and my own home town of Fort Wayne, Indiana even has a Chinese Association that will be honoring the holiday in grand style.

So what happens on Chinese New Year? Well, a lot of things.

Traditionally, you set if firecrackers and do other rituals to ward off evil spirits. In spite of their relative modernity, the Chinese are still rather superstitious and there’s a while string of activities to ensure good luck and ward against bad luck that are most effective if done on New Year’s Day. Whether they’re continued for their stated purpose, or just to give people a chance to dress up in gaudy clothing and do the Dragon Dance is anybody’s guess – and it probably varies from person to person.

It’s also a time of family. Partly because this was a time to go back to the ancestral home and honor your ancestors – and again, some people probably still do that. But in part because the act of going back to the ancestral home brought everyone back together at the same time. And let’s face it, no matter how tough things are between people, when you cram thirty or forty of them into one house relationships have got to improve somehow – unless there’s a homicide, which probably doesn’t help anything. But anything short of that only serves to build family solidarity.

These days it seems like it takes weeks of planning and a military logistics team for families to get together in any way, shape or form. Sometimes you need an excuse to convince people it’s worthwhile. So go ahead, celebrate Chinese New Year. Go out and eat, cram your entire family into one house and give each other great, huge wads of cash so you can all start the year of in prosperity. And who knows? Maybe next time you won’t need an excuse.

But if you should, my mother’s side of the family can trace its roots back to Germany, where they have this funny little tradition called Oktoberfest…

 

*This statement is intended to be sarcastic. In case you are one of those people who misses these kinds of things.

Cool Things: Calvin and Hobbes

Posted by natechen on

The other day I mentioned the wondrous sport of Calvinball to a guy just a few years younger than I am and got a blank reaction. It was depressing and enlightening at the same time. My family and I are big fans of Calvin and Hobbes, the classic comic strip by Bill Watterson, but it’s coming up on twenty years since the strip went out of print.

That’s kind of sobering. I know I wanted to learn to read so I didn’t have to bug my older sister to read Calvin and Hobbes to me when the newspaper came each day. Calvin and Hobbes was a classic comic strip rivaled only by Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, and, just like Peanuts, it offered a lot of cool things crammed into three or four black and white panels a day. So if you’ve never heard of Calvin and Hobbes, sit down and I’ll enlighten you! If you’re already a fan, join me in a bit of wistful reminiscing.

The main characters of Watterson’s comic strip are the eponymous Calvin and Hobbes. No, it’s not a comic strip about philosophers and theologians, although Watterson did sometimes ponder the deeper questions in an effort to bring a little class to the mostly practical or even flat and uninteresting “funny” pages. But the wild, hyperactive six year old Calvin and the sardonic, laid back stuffed tiger Hobbes were named for philosophers and theologians, and from the beginning hinted at something different about this little comic.

Many things about Calvin and Hobbes made it cool. Calvin was a wild child and a firebrand, constantly raging at any and every problem in the world around him, no matter how small or trivial. He would assault them with vigor and imagination, displaying a vocabulary light-years beyond most children the age of six, making one wonder how he could consistently get such bad grades in school. In addition to his clever verbal rants, Calvin also approached problems with a great deal of creativity and well applied tools, such as his sled, red wagon and cardboard boxes.

Watterson fearlessly delved into Calvin’s imaginary worlds, showing us Calvin’s many alter egos and the real life circumstances that inspired his flights of fancy with equal whimsy and enthusiasm. He might appear as a dinosaur, a space faring explorer or a hard-boiled detective, inserting the people he knows into whatever role is appropriate at the time (although the school teacher, Ms. Wormwood, was almost always a monstrous space alien.)

Hobbes, part time stuffed animal full time tiger, was an interesting example of this. Calvin finds Hobbes in a “tiger trap” he dug outside his house. Neither of his parents see Hobbes before Calvin drags him in over one shoulder. To most of the cast, Hobbes looks like an ordinary stuffed animal, but to Calvin he’s a living, thinking anthropomorphic tiger who frequently displays more good sense than Calvin does. In one of the clever moves that gave Calvin and Hobbes it’s defining flavor, we’re never really told exactly what Hobbes is. While only Calvin sees him as anything other than a stuffed animal, we frequently see Calvin in situations he couldn’t realistically have gotten into without the help of someone else. And that stuffed tiger is the only other one around…

Calvin lives in a world with varying levels of definition. For example, his parents are never named, and most people he knows have either fist names or last names, never both. Character who threatened that ambiguity, like Calvin’s Uncle Max, were quickly removed. Calvin, it seems, has the potential to be any hyperactive child we meet. Perhaps a warning to those of us who have gotten older and forgotten the days when scientific progress did, indeed, go “boink”.

But to me, the seminal moments in Calvin and Hobbes were always when the Time Fractal Wickets were taken out and they’d play Calvinball. There rules were simple – make it up as you go along and never use the same rule twice. It was a mad, slap-dash sprint through a dozen different sports with the ultimate goal of having fun and pushing your creativity. Just watching them playing it made your creative juices flow better.

Through the course of it’s ten years of publishing (interspersed with sabbaticals by the author), Calvin and Hobbes  introduced us to all sorts of weird and wonderful things. The G.R.O.S.s. club, dedicated to the annoyance of Susie Derkins (the only major character with a first and last name!), dozens of different kinds of weird snowmen (some of which moved around on their own and propagated the species!), and the cardboard box Duplicators and Transmogrifiers. We went up and down hills, around rocks and trees and into bushes while being taken on kinetic meditations on politics, philosophy and human nature. And at the end, we watched our friends sail off into the snow, crisp and clean like a blank sheet of paper. I have no doubt their adventures there were and are just as great as the ones they shared with us.

Watterson was very critical of the relationship between comic artists, newspapers and syndicates, and he felt that as long as the medium remained constrained by their demands it wouldn’t grow and would most likely grow stagnant and die. Two years after the disappearance of Calvin and Hobbes, Pete Abrams started publishing Sluggy Freelance and Illiad joined in with User Friendly just a short time later. As two of the longest running webcomics in existence in many ways they mark the beginning of the end of syndicate/newspaper domination of comics. Fifteen years later, they continue to thrive. Many others have come and gone in that time and, while none have the whimsy or imagination of Calvin and Hobbes, maybe for Bill Watterson it’s enough to have a step in the right direction…

Cool Things: Columbo

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Lt. Frank Columbo, played by Peter Falk, was the police detective with no first name. He solved cases involving the cunning, educated and frequently wealthy people of the LA upper class. It’s been about ten years since the last mystery featuring the rumbled, occasionally mumbling, always absentminded police detective aired on ABC. Some people these days may never have heard about him, or be familiar with how his stories typically unfold.

When you sit down to the typical murder mystery you meet the protagonist, who is typically a detective of some sort, be it police officer or hired investigator, the victim (sometimes) and the suspects. The murder may have occurred already, or maybe you’re given some time to watch the characters in their natural environment. Regardless, a corpse turns up and we watch the detective and his associates gather clues, piece them together, interview suspects and eventually pin the crime on someone (usually).

The typical episode of Columbo, on the other hand, opens with the careful preparations of the murderer. We know who he is and we see most of what he does to commit his crime and create an alibi. For the most part we don’t see Columbo until ten or fifteen minutes into the show. Then he arrives on the scene, spends approximately fifteen seconds looking around and notices it. That one detail. The one thing the murderer didn’t think of, or forgot in their hurry. And from that moment, Columbo knows, just as well as we do, who will go to jail at the end of the story. He just needs to prove it.

What follows is a series of escelating confrontations between Columbo and his prime suspect. Columbo conducts seemingly wandering interviews where he’ll ask a series of seemingly trivial questions and usually gets distracted by something at least once, and then start to leave. As the murderer begins to relax he “remembers” to ask the most significant question of the scene. At first his strange anecdotes about family members, open eyed wonder at the accomplishments of his victims and suspects and absentmindedness (whether real or affected) puts the suspect at ease, but it eventually becomes clear that Columbo is getting close to the truth. The dance gets more complex as people begin using social connections against him, which Columbo frequently counters with his good reputation on the police force and high esteem in the eyes of his captain, allowing him to close the case and put his suspect in jail.

So what made Columbo cool?

Well, a lot of things. Probably the biggest was his incredible ability to challenge those who thought they were his betters with humor, humility and grace. He never claims to be a man of great learning, and he’s frequently impressed with the many worthwhile accomplishments of the people he must eventually send to jail. He takes the time to learn from them and learn about them. And he does it all with a friendly demeanor.

Not that he’s harmless. Far from it. Columbo’s adversaries quickly come to dread his constant appearances, asking just a few more questions in the hope that they can help him sort out those nagging little details that he can’t get quite straight. The same years of experience that let him spot a single out of place detail in a busy murder scene help him sift through the details of a death and find the parts of the story that don’t line up quite right. And the same mind that goes to great lengths to learn more about the people he meets goes to great lengths to learn more about the murders he’s come to unravel.

Underneath his friendliness and strange habits is a cop who knows a great deal about how the world works, who has the cunning to set traps and force people to give up more and more evidence he can use and who won’t let the fact that a person is likable or even pitiable stop him from reminding them of the importance of justice.

Yet in contrast to the many hard-boiled detectives, Columbo remains friendly, good natured and pleasant. He’s mastered his job, it hasn’t mastered him.

Peter Falk was a great actor, and Columbo is one of his best loved characters. If you’ve never had the pleasure of watching them at work, I highly suggest you check them out.

Cool Things: Fables

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There’s a lot of takes on the Urban Fantasy genre, but one of the best and longest running is undoubtedly Bill Willingham’s Fables. Created and based on the enduring legends of Europe and the Middle East (and possibly even farther, more exotic places), Fables asks a simple question: What if all the characters we once knew and loved from the storybooks of our youth had to leave their simple, low tech, magical worlds and move to New York City?

I know it’s a question that has kept many of you awake at nights.

Well apparently Bill Willingahm has struggled with it too, because on a fairly unremarkable day over a decade ago the first volume of Fables was published, and a new benchmark for quality in the comics industry was set. In Fables, the story takes first place, as you might expect from a series that takes its name from a form of narrative. Further, while the story introduces many new elements to what happened after familiar stories ended, Willingham never changes the familiar narratives and, when dealing with the less familiar stories gives the reader enough to understand the story without causing clutter.

In this way Willingham sidesteps two of the most frustrating barriers to entry in modern American comic books, their tendency to stretch franchises out ad naseum, with no regard for where they ultimately intend to go with their characters, and their tendency to rely heavily on backstory established three to five decades ago which can be difficult if not impossible for new readers to find. There are other ways Fables is a nice change from the norm. No one character is constantly at the center of the story, and so they can’t become tiresome or require constant reinvention to keep them interesting. Neither is there constant narration to expound on the things that should be told to us by the artwork or dialog. While many comics forget they are visual media, Fables never does.

However, Fables also remembers that it’s there to tell a story. Willingham keeps things moving with drive and zest, moving quickly from establishing his setting to showing the dynamics of the Fable community, to exploring the threat from the Adversary, all while also managing to make stories very personal and character driven. While the bulk of the story takes place in New York in the modern day, he also gives us glimpses into the histories of his characters and the worlds they came from, as well as the extraordinary circumstances that brought them all to the world of refuge they now call home.

One of the most charming points of Fables is Willingham’s clear love for the forgotten stories. No Fable is sure why, but their life stories somehow became known to the people of the world they live in, passed from person to person until the details became blurred. And curiously enough fame translates to increased vitality and strength, making some Fables very difficult to kill. But it’s often the Fables without any fame, who you might not even have thought of when writing a story about storybooks, who step forward and surprise you. Little Boy Blue, the Frog Prince and even Snow’s mostly forgotten sister, Rose Red step forward and show us what their made of and, frequently, prove to be more personable, likeable and relatable than their better known costars.

If you like magic in the modern world, if you like clever writing and great characters, or if you just love a good story that’s written for the sake of good story, I suggest giving Fables a go.

Cool Things: Braid

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It’s been a while since I mentioned a video game in this spot. In fact, other than my first Cool Thing, Dungeons of Dredmor, I haven’t mentioned one at all. You can gather a few things from that. For one, I don’t play many video games. That’s mainly because I’m a writer busy with this blog, a job and occasional theatrical appearances. For another, there aren’t many games out there that really strike me as cool. I have standards. After all, I’ve played Contra and Ikaruga. It takes real work to measure up to stuff like that.

But Braid… Braid is special.

Braid is a 2D platformer, a la the original Super Mario Brothers. However, unlike the plumber chronicles, Braid is a puzzle game. The controls are incredibly simple. There’s a button for each of the game’s six primary functions, move left or right, climb up or down, jump and reverse time.

Yeah. Reverse time. I told you this game is special.

Everything about Braid is about manipulating time. The player can’t even really die. If you get injured or fall down a pit the level doesn’t reset, the game just waits for you to press rewind and back up to a point before you messed up. But backing up time is about more than just undoing mistakes. It’s also your primary problem solving tool.

You see, Tim, Braid’s hero, has discovered how  to reverse time and used it to smooth the problems from his life. Unfortunately, Tim now finds that he must wield his new-found powers to rescue a princess and crosses paths with a number of obstacles, monsters and weird time phenomena along the way.

What’s most impressive about Braid is not it’s visuals, which are beautiful 2D sprites, nor is it the game’s catchy soundtrack, which sounds good both backwards and forwards. It’s not even the story, which is both original and moving. No, what’s really impressive is the creativity and originality the game both shows to the player and demands of them.

Over the course of Braid’s six levels players will be confronted with places where time moves forward if they move to the right and backwards if they move to the left. They will find things that won’t be rewound no matter how hard Tim tries. And they will even find places where the actions they’ve taken leave echoes in causality, forcing the player to partner with shadows of himself in order to advance. No other video game in recent past has demanded so much of it’s players in terms of thought, planning and out-of-the-box creativity.

However, for those exact same reasons Braid is not a game for everyone. It’s not action packed, there’s not scoring system (although there is a time trial mode unlocked once you clear the game initially) and there’s no compelling sense of struggle between Tim and his situation. It’s amazing, but at the same time it can’t appeal to everyone.

Still, if you love innovative gameplay, clever mechanics or straight up challenge, Braid is a game worth your time and money.

Cool Things: The Protomen

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Time for something a little different! The Protomen are an indie band that produces rock operas (and occasional covers of Queen). Now even if you don’t like opera and Queen isn’t your thing, the Protomen have a lot to offer you.

You see, the primary focus of The Protomen is Mega Man. Yeah, the video game character. Okay, that’s not entirely true. The primary inspiration for The Protomen is Mega Man.

For those not familiar with the general gist of the Mega Man storylines (yes there are more than one) they’re about a plucky blue robot and his epic battles with the mad scientist Dr. Wiley. A number of characters, including Dr. Light, Mega Man’s creator, and Proto Man, an earlier model of Mega Man and the source of the band’s name, are featured.

Most Mega Man stories revolve around Dr. Wiley, a former associate of Dr. Light, building a number of powerful and intelligent robots, providing them with armies of much less intelligent but still dangerous robots, and tasking them with taking over the earth. Mega Man foils these plots by defeating Dr. Wiley’s robot masters and exploiting the similarities in their construction to turn their own weapon systems on their creator.

This kind of stuff is now fairly standard video game fare, but fortunately the Protomen don’t dwell on that part of the Mega Man franchise.

The Protomen are two albums into a three album story cycle. The first album, titled “The Protomen” but perhaps more accurately thought of as Hope Rides Alone, introduces us to a dark, dystopian world ruled by Dr. Wiley and his armies of evil robots. Here, The Protomen introduce us to many of their major themes.

And it’s in their choice of themes that they really set themselves apart. They mull over what heroism really means, to what extent we must take responsibility for the evils we see and act. And it reminds, in Mega Man’s own words, “hope rides alone” and often, doing the right thing means standing alone.

In “Act Two: The Father of Death”, The Protomen take us back in time to meet the young Drs. Light and Wiley, and introduce themes like discerning use of technology and the value of work in a mechanized society. They also give one the feeling that one of the two doctors at the center of their story isn’t entirely sane. Here’s a hint: It’s not Wiley.

It’s true that on occasion The Protomen can border on the melodramatic. But that’s not often, and hey, it’s opera, right? They’re entitled to be a little melodramatic.

If you want to hear what they sound like, here’s a link to their preview track from The Father of Death.