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1) A Hundredth Name, Chris Green (Abyss and Apex)

Click the link, you know you want too. No? Okay, let me convince you then. You should go read Chris Green’s story at Abyss and Apex because the man is freakin’ talented and understands things like brevity and leaving empty spaces for the story to breathe. I’ve critted Chris a bunch of times and it’s a bloody hard thing to do, because he crams more story into two thousand words than there should actually be allowed and he fits the damn things together so tight that pulling one segment out causes the whole damn thing to unravel in your hands.

You should read his story because he’s one of the few people I know who manages to give the impression of being genuinely, fearlessly interested in everything and somehow manages to filter that down into his fiction, even though his bailiwick seems to be horror rather than any of the forms of SF where being fearlessly interested in everything would be a useful trait in an author (not a slight on horror authors, but you guys need to understand fear and I’m not sure Chris does). You should read it because he can usually nail one image that makes you cringe, or cry, or wince with pain, and yet there’s still something beautiful in the stories he writes. You should read him because he’s one of my favourite-writers-who-doesn’t-get-published-enough (a distinction he shares with Ben Francisco), primarily because he seems to spend too much time at his day job and not enough time producing fiction. And despite this, he seems to believe that every time he gets published it’s a fluke, despite the fact that it isn’t.

You should also read it because Chris owns cooler footwear than you ever will. Yes, you included, even though I’m sure your shoes are fairly damn cool. I’ve seen Chris step out in boots that’d make a gothic shoe fetishist cry with envy. Come to think of it, his beard is cooler than yours too. And he owns a t-shirt featuring my favourite Buffy quote ever.

2) The City and the City, China Mieville

While I’d certainly recommend reading this as a blood good read, this isn’t meant to be a review (for that I’d send you over to MacLaren North’s fine write-up over on ASIF) and I’m not going to avoid spoilers. I’m not going to intentionally spoil the book either, but I’m primarily going to talk about the book based on the decisions that interested me as a writer and that’ll probably slip over into spoiler territory pretty quickly.

China Mieville’s always had a knack of creating interesting settings, but if you’re a writer then The City and The City is one of those books that’s worth pulling apart and figuring out because it takes that extra half-step beyond “interesting setting” and into the realm of “fuck, how’d he do that.” In fact, lets call it a case study is awesomeness on the setting front for its ability to make a theoretically impossible setting seem possible and logical.

The central conceit of novel’s setting is that there are two European cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, that overlap one another while remaining entirely separate in the minds of their inhabitants. Tensions between the two cities are strained, at best, and crossing from one to the other is handled via heavily patrolled borders. There’s nothing particularly mind-breaking in that set-up, at least when you start the book, but as the narrative progresses we realise that parts of the city occupy the physical space. Characters sitting in Beszel simply choose not to see residents of Ul Qoma, a fire taking place down the street is ignored because it belongs in the “wrong” city, and an upmarket Ul Qoma suburbs occupy the same physical locations as Beszel slums. In short, the separation is cultural rather than physical, ingrained by years of practice by the citizens of both cities, and various terms that are dropped early in the book -  crosshatched streets, or breaching – take on different shades of meaning as the setting comes into focus.

This is the kind of setting that fantasy fans probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid at if it was being explained away using magic (and would probably see me and Karen Miller on a panel having a brisk discussion about whether it’s fantasy, slipstream, or magic realism). This isn’t. There’s no hint of magic in The City and The City, because with the exception of the setting it plays it like a straight police procedural and the separation between the two cities is largely a matter of cultural conditioning and clever writing on Mieville’s part.

Which is why this book fascinates me as a reader – what starts as a patently absurd concept ends up slipping into the story as a natural, plausible setting. And because I’m a writer and a genre geek, my natural inclination when faced with a setting like this is to start pulling the novel apart and trying to figure out why it works (excluding, of course, the obvious explanation of “Mieville’s freakin’ smart and a very good writer”). At the moment I’ve got a rough bundle of thoughts floating around, so I figured I’d throw a few of them out there and see if anyone whose read the novel agrees

My first thought is that a lot of the effect has to do with with setting the book in an Eastern European city, irrespective of whether it’s made up or not. The opening chapter reads like a straight police procedural and has plenty of slang terms thrown around that aren’t related to the split-city conceit, so seeding concepts that are important later in the book slides in naturally alongside explanations of Fuluna (think Jane Doe) and Feld (a local drug). Combine the learning-curve expected when coming up to speed on the ‘exitic’ setting with the split-city conceit means we’re constantly giving Mieville narrative space, and by the time we realise what’s going on we’re too caught-up in the book to give a damn. In the earliest moments when our protagonist is caught in the interstitial space between the two cities, noticing a woman he shouldn’t have, it’s a slippage that’s treated like an embarrassing faux-pass that gets even less explanation than the drug of choice of the local teens.

What flummoxes me about the book is the way it borrows a trait from fantasy – moving between ‘worlds’ as a demarcation of important plot-points – and yet manages to avoid coming off like a fantastic setting or book. While you could probably make an argumentfor Slipstream in association with The City and The City it does a remarkably good job of playing it straight as a police procedural despite the quirks in its backdrop. While there are plenty of non-SF narratives that have used this kind of narrative relocation as a means of dividing up a story at similar points, it seems like an obvious tip-over given Mieville’s past novels (all fantasy) and the improbability of his setting. Especially since the solution to the novel’s murder revolves more and more around the split between the cities and what may lie between them.

Another possibility may come form Mieville’s decision to shine of light on its absurdities before they come important, bringing in the American parents of the murdered girl at the centre of the novel’s mystery to interact with the protagonist and comment on the conceit before the genre boundaries are stretched to breaking point. This choice, cleverly, allows for the reinforcement of the cultural aspect of the separation given the tendency towards parts of the English speaking world to be somewhat…clueless and insensitive…when it comes to other cultures. We are, in essence, shamed into accepting the conceit of the setting before we can reject it…

And I might leave it there, for the moment, because this is already getting out of control, but it’s probably the starting point I’ll use when I go back and re-read the book with an eye towards identifying how it bloody-well works.  I suspect there will be another post on this, sooner or later.

When I was fifteen a friend gave me a tape featuring a fair mix of punk bands, including three Misfits tracks (Astro Zombies, I Turned Into a Martian, and something else I can’t remember). I ran the hell out of those three songs, but unfortunately the tape came sans info about who did what so it was about six years before I realised who the Misfits actually were.

I suspect that many lads of a certain age who read this journal will have just had a sudden moment of “oh, yeah, I remember then,” before wandering off to youtube one of their other videos. I say this because I spent about two years with Transvision Vamp’s first album on the tape-deck of my car in my mid-twenties and every male friend who got a lift would hear the opening bars of I Want Your Love and get an immediate flash-back to their adolescence.

And yet once you get past the gratuitous objectification of Wendy James, there still something fascinating about Transvision Vamp. I have a moderate fascination with Andy Warhol and his relationship to celebrity that was heavily reflected in the band’s first album (Pop Art, which included a song about Warhol’s death). I’m intrigued by the number of former punk musicians who ended up playing pop-rock in the background (including former members of the X-Ray Specs and the Partisans). I’m freakin’ amazed that James’ post-Vamp solo-album was written by Elvis Costello, and moderately bummed that I never actually tracked it down in a record store. I’ve spent years trying to work out whether they were a punk band who got coopted or an experiment in controlled branding that used capitalism against itself, and I’ve never realy come up with an answer.

I really do need to go find a copy of Pop Art on CD though.

Today is one of those “living in the future is damn cool” kind of days.

Case in point: Y Can’t Tori Read (aka the eighties incarnation of Tori Amos) – I saw this clip on Rage once, in the very wee hours of the morning, and found it amusing given the direction Amos’ career took in afterwards. Today marked the second time I’ve seen its entirity, but I looked for it for a long time when I was a Tori Amos fan in my early twenties. The closest I got, after catching it on Rage, was seeing the vinyl single when I was walking past an intimidatingly cool record store in Fortitude Valley (I didn’t go in).

Then I saw the new Tori Amos album in the shops this week, remembered the existence of the eighties Tori, and thought “I bet that’s on youtube.” And lo, there it was.

I would have killed for youtube in my early twenties.

The Dancing Monkey challenge from lauragoodin: “write a blog post about being on a Brisbane ferry. At night. And it’s raining. And you’ve spent your last money on the fare.” I suspect it’s not what Laura intended, but every time I read that request all it translates into is “please tell me what it was like being twenty-three.” It’s all the qualifiers to the original request that do it – when I was twenty-three I’d just finished my honours year in which I wrote a lot of poetry, just moved to Brisbane for the first time, and just started my PhD. Being at the tail-end of my love-affair with goth as a movement, I was prone to attaching all sorts of significance to thing that happened in moments of poverty, rain and night.

Lets not make this *all* about nostalgia though. Instead lets talk about exactly how lucky you are if you live in a city with a decent public transport system, because I’ll admit that my first few years in Brisbane was largely spent listening to people bitch about the buses, trains and ferries while resisting the urge to shake them and scream “what the fuck are you complaining about.”

Everyone I’ve ever met is adamant that the public transport system in their home city is the worst available, but I think I can mount a safe argument for the Gold Coast (aka the city that I spent most of my teenage years growing up in) has one the worst of the lot. Part of it is an infrastructure problem – the Gold Coast bus service is privatized and the city expands faster than pretty-much everywhere else in Queensland. Part of it is cultural – the Gold Coast is a tourist city with a lot of beaches. But the basic gist of the Gold Coast public transport system is this – if you don’t want to travel along the highway that rarely strays further than a block and a half from the shoreline, you’re screwed. In order to catch a bus to uni as an undergraduate (a 30 minute drive), I used to have to hike out to the highway (about twenty-five minutes) and catch three transfers at various tourist malls in order to travel along what was, more or less, a straight line (about two hours, maybe longer if the drivers were feeling fickle or you missed a service). All this was, of course, essentially impossible if I had classes that started before nine (a surprisingly common occurrence, given that I was in an arts degree). Add in the Gold Coast’s tendency towards continuous roadworks and the once-a-year insistence on spending a month setting up an Indy Car race track in the heart of the tourist district (which *every* bus in the city passed through) and you start to get a pretty good idea why I look at buses, even Brisbane buses which are comparatively well-run, with a look of disdain and horror.

So when I was twenty-three, broke, and moved to Brisbane where there were options such as trains and ferries, lets just say I went a little crazy with the options. Hence it’s nearly impossible for me to separate the ferry from that particular age. Between twenty-three and twenty-four I spent a lot of time on the trains and ferries, often purchasing tickets with fistful’s of spare change that was scavenged from desk drawers and couch cushions. By the time I was twenty-five I’d fallen out of the habit – I started working back on the Gold Coast regularly and many of the fellow Brisbanites with whom I car-pooled stopped, so I was basically driving everywhere instead. It’s only within the last year or two that I’ve really started working to break that habit and make a concerted effort to use the trains again.

(Yes, I realise there really isn’t much to this, but truthfully I’m a much bigger fan of Brisbane’s train system than I am the Ferry system. I think people tend to fixate on one form of transport in particular depending on where they live, and I’ve primarily lived in Brisbane suburbs where the train is your best choice for getting anywhere you need to go).

A steady trickle of blog topics rolling in response to my offer to be a Dancing Monkey this week (though most come, as most of my comments do, through the livejournal feed). Pushes my thoughts in interesting directions, it does, with enough random writerly nonsense included to keep me going for a while. Logically they should happen in order, but I’m going to start with something relatively easy (because it’ll feed into a couple of other topics folks have suggested). To whit, Adam demanded ”a public rave about the awesomeness of The Middleman.”

This I can do, with bells on and a cherry on top. I can’t, apparently, do it without swearing and unleashing hate upon the world. Consider yourselves warned.

My rave starts thusly: Go and watch The Middleman in whatever form that’s available, you fuckers, because the fact that they’ve only made one season of this show makes me cry.

You should know before I go any further that I’m not a fan of most forms of Geek TV: I loathe Star Trek with a fiery passion; I see Stargate as the malignant legacy of an already stale genre tradition; I walked away from the new version of Battlestar Galactica three episodes in because I could see the clusterfuck of stupidity that was coming and it bored me unbelievably. And that last one still hurts, because I really liked the original mini-series they did to launch the revamped franchise. In fact, I was downright excited and my basic rule of thumb is that I. Don’t. Get. Excited. About. Geek. TV.

And as with most people who are unfeasibly angry at particular genres it’s because I actually love it and am therefore primed for great acts of dissapointment. Thus The Middleman makes me happy in a way that very few TV shows ever have.

Mostly, it does this by refusing to treat me like an idiot.

I realise that I’ve just insulted many of the folks who read this journal and follow the shows I bestow hate upon above, but that’s the truth of it – I turned off most of them because they do something unfailingly stupid and ask me to go along for the ride. And I’ll do that, if I have to, as my consistent viewing of the new Doctor Who series demonstrates, but you need to build up a cache of credit with some awesome up front. Stargate figured it’d earn that cache by giving me misogyny and stock characters in its opening episodes, along with dialogue so bad I actually had to leave the room in order to stop laughing. BSG gave me terminally dull episodes and overwrought melodrama with a philosophical underpinning that struck me as out-of-date. Trek? Well, Trek’s a mixed bag, but lets just say I don’t think things such as Red Shirts help its case.

Every time I sit down to watch one of these shows I remember an interview J. Michael Strazinski did talking about the early days of Babylon 5, where he noted that Science Fiction television shows aren’t made for science fiction fans because TV executives assume that no matter how bad the program is the fans will show up and watch it because it has lasers and space ships. To a large extent I think the assembled hordes of TV fans prove them right - and while I have no real problem with people watching those shows if they’re getting something out of them, it does leave me with a large and profound feeling of hostility and alienation when it comes to TV-based SF (and, admittedly, it’s my problem; I don’t hold it against you if you love these shows, but I’m never going to be able to step up and enjoy them the same way you do). I can’t geek out over them or get drawn in unless they’re doing something I find new and interesting – B5 managed it with the stunning revelation of episode-to-episode continuity (despite its other flaws); Who manages it through some clever casting and the continued presence of Steven Moffat among the writing staff; The Middleman manages it by…

…well, lets put it this way: In its first episode The Middleman gave me snappy dialogue, a hyper-intelligent ape with a machine-gun, and more post-modern geek references than an entire season of Futurama. It had some clunky spots, sure, but the overall impression was that the people who were writing and producing the show knew the history of geek TV (and comics, and fiction, and computer games) and were happy to be a part of it. They were having fun in a very real sense, and it carried over into the program. More importantly, they weren’t labouring over the idea that this is what they were doing – they sat there and said “you know the genre as well as we do, and you know why this is funny, so lets not bother trying to explain it.” In short, it didn’t treat the fact that I was part of the Geek Tribe as an afterthought and actively tried to engage me as part of that tribe. It revelled in its geekyness, rather than trying to shrug it off and become something it wasn’t. More importantly, The Middleman remembered that part of the fun us giving you the space to “get it” on your own – it wasn’t constantly pointing at things to remind you of how smart it was.

There are other reasons to love the Middleman: the leads are engaging, the supporting cast is verging on excellent (and, dear god, how can there not be more Mouser in the world?), the entire thing is goofy and fun. The problems with the show are largely the stuff I find in most TV – dodgy computer-generated special effects and occasionally clunky acting. But it also has an episode in which the assembled horde of lucha-libre rudo’s take on a single masked martial arts master; it makes Bugbear references while naming its cars; and it teases you with zombie references for episodes at a time before the zombies make an appearance. 

The other point of genius in its favour: The Middleman is funny. Very funny. And unlike most geek-oriented humour, it was funny without picking on itself. The Middleman isn’t ashamed of being geeky and, more importantly, it isn’t trying to pass that shame of being a geek onto me as the viewer in the name of being funny. Given that I come from the gamer-oriented parts of geek culture that have lorded stuff like Fear of Girls** as the stuff of great humor, and that I’ve sat through conversations where people have espoused their love for shows like Big Bang Theory***, I tend to value those forms of media that aren’t primarily interested in saying “geeks, aren’t they weird.” It even gets bonus points for having characters who are blatent, obvious geeks without coming from an IT or science background (the science/tech-only vibe given to geek characters on television tends to be one of my pet-peeves).

So yes, The Middleman is glorious and weird and one of those TV shows I will miss horribly. I’m not alone in that. And while it’s probably too late to do anything about its cancelation, you should go order it from I-Tunes and pre-order the DVD sets and ensure that there’s enough desire for it out there to make people think “hey, in retrospect, this did okay – maybe we should do something like it.”

*yes, I know, and now it’s cancelled, thereby proving this might not have been the smartest choice. Shut up, okay? Shut up, shut up, shut up.
** and a quick note for my gamer friend – stop sending me links to Fear of Girls or trying to convince me it’s funny. Just like most forms of Geek Humour that rely on poking fun at our tribe’s social disfunction, I tend to find it mildly abhorent at best. You have a greater chance of convincing me to watch Original Trek.
***which I’ve watched, yes, and enjoyed it during the episodes where they aren’t being relentlessly negative, but I still hate myself for being drawn in by the show.

There’s been a bunch of debates about Gender and SF of late, all of which seem to end up with someone defending themselves with a variation of “I filled all the spots on project X with men because I was choosing on the basis of quality, not gender.” This answer flummoxes me every time it’s trotted out; not because the people who use it are not bad people or knowing oppressors, but just because it often reveals itself as a blind-spot in the approach of someone whose work I’d otherwise respect. And, to be honest, I just don’t get how people can’t question that statement, since SF itself has often been denigrated and ignored using the same excuse.

Think about that moment that all SF fans seem to share – that moment where you’re talking to someone who doesn’t read the genre, and you reveal that you do, and their response is a muted “oh” followed by a look that suggests you’ve actually just revealed that you mutilate kittens. It’s a power-play between you, the reader of a non-mimetic pulp genre, and the other person (who, if you’re lucky, will not follow their momentary scorn with the next salvo of “I only read stories in which real things happen”).

The reason that “oh” moment exists is because quality is a social construct, and like many of our social constructs it’s been inherited from a predominantly white and male (and, for that matter, educated) point of view. From that point of view the final arbiter of quality is Literature, in which works are loaded with metaphorical meaning and fancy language use. SF, to borrow the phrasing of China Meiville, has a habit of literalizing its metaphors – the dragon in a story may be representing capitalist greed, but it’s also a physical dragon that exists within a secondary world of the narrative. The un-literalized metaphor – aka the metaphor that’s actively presented as metaphor rather than inherently real – is one of those quality markers that separated literature from everything else. It’s a class distinction more than anything, as a quick look at the pulp roots of SF should show – the literalized metaphor is for the populace mass, and the un-literalized metaphor is for those trained to read for such things by their grounding in the classics. This is one of the reasons SF fans had to reclaim works like 1984, The Handmaids Tale, and even seminal texts like Frankenstein as part of our genre; the default assumption of the authors and readers of these texts lie in their metaphorical power rather than the sense-of-wonder that marks SF. It’s nice to think that we know better than that now, but when Peter Straub was editing the New Wave Fabulist issue of the Literary Journal Conjunctions a few years back he was still put in a position where he was arguing Fantasy’s way into the literary field during his preface (and, for that matter, to address his own status and the status of many of the authors as populist writers).

And lets be honest for a moment here – some SF fans like it this way. I’ve had enough arguments with people who decry any attempt to apply literary theory to SF to know that the intrusion of metaphorical readings of a text are occasionally unwelcome; to suggest a deeper meaning, or an critique that seems unguided by authorial intent, is the stuff of sacrilege in some parts. At its best this impulse leads to a means of reading against the positioning implied by that “oh” – but more often than not these outcries are an act of complicity in keeping SF denigrated. I do it myself – every time I refer to my love of ‘Trashy SF’ I’m contributing to an understanding of SF that’s beneath other understandings of literature, but occasionally salvages my reputation as white, intelligent male (oddly, I do this primarily when talking to people within the genre, to keep my love of a metaphorically active Kelly Link story separate from my joy at watching a pulpy action film like, say, Underworld or Conan the Barbarian; obviously my own relationship with this issue is as complicated as anyone elses, and as a white male I have more than enough of my own blind-spots).

Now SF has primarily been a boy genre (and I stress the boy here, since SF is traditionally presented as an adolescent genre and thus excluded from the importance that texts written for white adult genres). Writing aimed specifically at women (soap operas, romance novels) copped a much greater shellacking, often because it had the potential to address notions that were inherently subversive to a patriarchal culture (an awareness of  female desire as an active force, rather than passive, for example) and thus needed to be completely disempowered by accusations of being shallow, cheap, and devoid of metaphorical meaning. Again, it’d be nice to think that we’ve moved beyond that, but there is still a cultural conception that a narrative addressing feminine desire is still addressing primarily female concerns rather than an issue of general interest. I could go search for a bunch of academic and social examples to back this up, but lets just go with an example that’s personal and handy – when you walk into my flat the first thing you see is the big shelf full of DVDs and CDs. The first things people tend to comment on (in a “why do you have these?” kind of way) are my collection of Gilmore Girls or Sex in the City DVDs. If we live in a world where a single male owning such things is a cause for comment, then it says something specific about the perceived audience for those shows are and it doesn’t suggest the wide and diverse audiance that good work in any genre is supposed to be able to attract. Literature is supposed to have common appeal, something to say for everyone on the matter of being human (read: human in a patriarchal setting); SF and Romance and all the other pulp genres are often denigrated *because* they speak to only small groups of society, and often with the social expectations of a white male voice behind them.

And realistically, all this is pointing to the one reason that people with a vested interest in real equality between the genders (and, for that matter, sexuality and race) call bullshit on justifications on cause of quality – the perception of quality has long been a means of control and denigration, and it’s usually come up the patriarchy’s way even when the text is marketed towards a group that isn’t white, upper-class and male (IE Romance). The participation of a non-anglo male audience does not necessarily free us of that – Romance’s social status as a guilty pleasure and SF fandom’s clinging to the notion of entertainment without reading for social/deeper meaning are both the voice of the audiance being complicit in their own exclusion. In short, if you’re going to go all-men on the basis of quality, then you need to think long and hard about where those standards of quality are coming from and how they exclude in their own subtle way, because you can be sure that the people who are asking questions are aware of its ability to do the same.

None of this is to say that I’m incapable of doing any of the above – I’m as culpable as anyone when it comes to using mockery and denigration to reposition myself and others – but I’ll also freely admit that a lot of what comes out of my mouth is driven by the fact that I’m an insecure asshole. It’s something I’ve tried to get better about over the years, but some days are better than others…

So Chris Lynch has posted a more-or-less up-to-date bibliography of things achieved by our Clarion South class since the 2007 workshop. He’s put this together, along with some thoughts, because the two of us are scheduled to go have a chat with the current crop of Clarion South participants about what it’s like to finish the workshop and go back to the real world. I have to admit that my first response to Chris’s bibliography was a panicked that can’t be right, but it is. The only thing he’s missed is the 100 word story I had in Brimstone Press’s Black Box e-anthology, although I start to feel a little better when I factor in the three forthcoming stories that don’t appear on Chris’s summary. Even taking into account the kind of low-key achievements that occurred around the publications, it seems like so little for two years of work once it’s listed like that, and its started me thinking about the difference between 2007 and 2008.

2007 was a year that’s been very good to me. It kicked off with Clarion, followed up with nearly twelve months of work-ethic and productivity, then ended strong with the Gauntlet run of crazy rewriting and submission with Jason Fisher (and others, but Jasoni remains my coach on the Gauntlet front) that saw both of us pick up our game and focus on what needed doing. At Clarion we spent a lot of time talking about the possibility of Clarion Burnout with various tutors, and I spent a lot of time making sure that I wasn’t going to let the real-life difficulties get in the way of capitalizing on the opportunities Clarion brought about.

2008 actually looks like a good year for writing on paper, but I suspect that a lot of that comes down to the carry-on effect of 2007. To borrow a metaphor, think of it like diving off a springboard at the beginning of swim – 2007 was a good dive, so I didn’t actually have to paddle that hard in 2008 to get to the other side. There were some good flurries of movement in there (Horn drafted and submitted, PhD creative project finished, stories sold in 2007 hitting publication) but overall I just kind of dog-paddled around and didn’t achieve much. 2007 was were all the work happened, but by 2008 the work-ethic was shot and I allowed myself to prioritize other things over writing. If 2007 was a year where I fought against the possibility of Clarion Burnout, I’d suggest that 2008 is the year that it snuck up behind me and stole my wallet.

Thus far, 2009 is feeling like the year I’ve given up on work-ethic altogether. That worries me. I’ve been fumbling towards the realisation for a few weeks now, but I think it’s finally sunk in that the little voice in the back of my skull that says “you suck, do more” has stopped being self-doubt or a goad to action and started being an actual instruction. Time to fix that, I think.

Today I write 2,500 words. I don’t sleep until that’s done. Lets have at it.

Things Disney’s Three Musketeers film has in common with the original Dumas novel:

• Character names
• Swords
• Hats
• France

Things that seem remarkably different upon re-watching the film for the first time since reading said novel:

• Everything else.