In a recent #MindMeld column, the beneficent SF Signal Irregular Paul Weimer posed the following question to a glorious and resplendent cavalcade of sci-fi and fantasy media figures (and, also, me):
We all know that one guy who claims to love science fiction but throws a galactic hissy fit if any story involves faster-than-light travel. But is that FTL-snob typical of science fiction in a way that, say, historical swordcraft experts are not typical of epic fantasy?
Seriously, in 1998 I cowrote a movie script with David Goyer (and seven other people). Back in the day, TNT had a pretty fun website called Roughcut.com, whence I drew inspiration for my movie rating system. In late summer of '98, Goyer participated in a sort of exquisite corpse crowdsourced screenwriting contest at Roughcut, and I was one of the lucky few to earn a spot in the script rotation.
After my recent trip to Boskone to see -- among others -- Bruce Schneier and talk about data that survives the death of people and websites, I was reminded that Archive.org probably has some saves of Roughcut from 14 years ago.
The script is rather painfully '90s, but I still find it a lark to read, even after all these years. My contribution is part seven.
Ironically, I almost didn't know I'd won a spot in the contest, as my selection was announced as I went off to my senior year of college, and a snafu with my school's IT department had me locked off the web for about two weeks. Once I got back online, I had a string of desperate emails from the contest producer asking where to send my prize money.
I still have the $100 money order, uncashed, as a keepsake. It was the first occasion where I was "paid" for my creative writing, and the first inkling I had that I wasn't just better than most of the kids at my school in the fiction skills, I might actually have a shot at making a living stringing words together.
Image by Mykl Roventine via FlickrAnother Saturday, another horrifying example of my radio non-talent, courtesy of TechTalk WRLR in Chicago. This week, I enthrall listeners with the knowledge of which medieval poet and author is responsible for the modern day celebration of April Fool’s. Thankfully, the show is rescued from my pedantry with a discussion of how to recycle your old cell phones in service to a good cause. Give a listen.
Image via WikipediaRobert A Heinlein is considered one of the most influential writers in the history of science fiction -- but are Heinlein's works still relevant today? Thus is the question posed (and, ostensibly, answered) in my latest SF Signal podcast appearance.
Image via WikipediaI have been frustratingly unavailable to participate in these of late, but suffice it to say, the SF Signal Podcast is audibly awesome. Should you have some perverse need to hear my spoken opinions on various sci-fi topics, you can do so via the following SF Signal episodes:
Bugs Bunny's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I am once again snowed under with work, but since today is Bugs Bunny's 70th birthday -- the rascally rabbit debuted in the cartoon short A Wild Hare on July 27, 1940 -- I figured I'd rely on a Bugs-centric Geek Trivia column to fill my usual Truly Trivial column space.
As difficult as it may be for you Merrie Melodies fanatics to accept, Bugs Bunny is not the most artistically accomplished cartoon character in the Warner Brothers stable of animated icons. Using the Academy Award for Best Animated Short as a measure, Bugs is woefully underrepresented when it comes to Oscars on the mantle.
... Bugs Bunny [was] the fifth and final Warner Brothers cartoon character to win an Academy Award, and he’s tied for third amongst his fellow Merrie Melodieans in number of statuettes, as Sylvester has three, Tweety has two, and Bugs, Speedy, and Pepe are all tied at one apiece.
If that seems a grave artistic injustice, Bugs Bunny fans, take heart. The infamous rabbit has one distinction that no other cartoon character can match: an official rank as a member of the U.S. armed services.
Sensawunda (n.) - Sci-fi slang term for sense of wonder, used to describe emotionally stirring or intellectually stimulating concepts depicted within speculative fiction. Golden Age science fiction is often lauded for its surplus sensawunda, with point-of-view characters constantly amazed at the scope, scale, and strangeness of creatures, locales, and technologies featured in these sci-fi stories. A.E. Van Vogt's Empire of Isher series is often cited as a classic example of a sensawunda tale, as are the various Heinlein juveniles like Rocket Ship Galileo and Farmer in the Sky. To this day, the original Star Wars is held up as the paramount cinematic example of sensawunda, even if its various prequels utterly failed to live up to this standard.
Contemporary science fiction is often criticized for lacking sensawunda, especially as concerns fashionably cynical or jaded protagonists who are never amazed or inspired by their objectively fantastic and extraordinary experiences. Many critics have cited this sensawunda deficit as the reason why fantasy has overtaken science fiction in mainstream literary success, with the Harry Potter phenomenon -- and its willing embrace of sensawunda -- serving as exhibit A. Moreover, many modern characters are meta-aware, often acting as if they know they are in a fictional setting and using their knowledge of standard spec-fic tropes to navigate and outsmart the challenges of their own stories. This has the effect of being alternately hilarious (in the case of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series) or diminishing of the story; if the main character does not take it seriously, how can the reader? Iain Banks and John Varley have consciously tried to recapture the sensawunda flair of these classic sci-fi tales, with Varley explicitly channeling Heinlein juveniles in his Red Thunder and its sequels, and Banks engaging in gleeful Golden Age romanticism in his novel Feersum Endjinn.
I bring it up because: Today is the 51st anniversary of the incorporation of NASA, and if ever a real-world entity attained and then lost a sensawunda, it's the American space agency. While NASA is objectively doing faster, better, cheaper space exploration today with its advanced satellites, deep-space probes and robot rovers, it has lost the pioneer flare (and bottomless Cold War budget) that captured the imagination during the heady days of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. The upcoming Project Constellation and its Ares V rockets and Altair and Orion spacecraft harken back to the golden age of manned spaceflight, but no one is certain they will ever actually get built and, if they do, whether they'll feel just like a remake of a classic tale that has, sadly, loss it originality and sensawunda. Let's hope the critics are wrong, because the world is a brighter place when our reach exceeds our grasp, and the sky is filled with manned rockets daring for the stars.
The gang over at Futurismic finally addressed the elephant in the room as applies to the future of short fiction publishing: Is patronage the only way short fiction will survive? This is the main question I've been wrestling with in my own sci-fi magazine 2.0 concept, because it's become pretty apparent that people just won't pay for short stories in the traditional, buy a magazine site unseen and hope what's in it is good sort of way. It's especially true online, where nobody wants to pay for anything not developed by 37signals.
(For those that don't recall the specifics of Magazine 2.0, the idea is this: Rather than query editors for publication, authors query readers directly. They synopsize a story, post the synopsis online, and list a price for which they are willing to publish it. The readership can donate in whatever increments they like until to a set query deadline, and if the price is met, the story is "unlocked" and published. The zealous fans will do most of the bidding, and thus will pay the freight for the majority who refuse to spend money on content. The 90-9-1 rule is thusly observed and monetized.)
Now, the Futurismic folks don't distinguish between celebrity endorsement and outright underwriting, as both rely on a patron to either pay for the content outright so others can enjoy for free, or for the patron to endorse a product so the fanboys will support it as a show of fealty to their fandom crush. In both cases, the content is a supported charity, not a product. This is what Elizabeth Bear calls the "public radio guilt model" and lots of hallowed institutions (public radio, for example) and a few sci-fi magazines are coping on this system. And Bear would know about online publishing, what with her cofounding involvement in Shadow Unit.
Thus we arrive at the glaring hole in my Magazine 2.0 idea -- audience size. As io9 pointed out a while back, the main reason Baen's Universe online magazine is shutting down is that it couldn't grow its audience fast enough to ween itself off of the fiscal teat of its associated fan club membership dues. It was dependent on a specific type of patronage and when that patronage faltered, the magazine was doomed. You must cast your income net to a diversified group of sources so as not to die when when one of supporters stops supporting.
My magazine 2.0 concept can't work before an audience is built, because there is no money in the bank to publish stories on spec as a means of building an audience. Old-fashioned loss leader publishing startup principles won't work here. Magazine 2.0 presupposes an audience who will look at synopses and bid on stories, but it needs stories in order to build that audience.
The answer, I believe, is distributed patronage. I don't want just one John Scalzi using his powers to save Strange Horizons, I want fifty or a hundred John Scalzis bolstering a couple dozen magazines every month. (In this case, Scalzi may be a bad example, as he is a sufficiently bankable author that he only works on commission these days, rather than on spec; most authors are not so lucky.)
Specifically, when Author X submits a story synopsis to Magazine 2.0, it generates a code snippet for a Donate Now button that Author X can publish on his Web site. Thus, Author X's audience becomes Magazine 2.0's audience, even if only for a brief while. Meanwhile, Blogger Y wants a story from Author X on his blog, so he signs up as a Magazine 2.0 Reprinter, and thus gets the right to reprint Author X's story on his blog as well. At the same time, Blogger Y gets his own code snippet to promote donations to unlock Author X's story. (Or, Blogger Y could just pay the unlock cost himself to get the story immediately.) Thus, Blogger Y's audience becomes Magazine 2.0's audience, even if only temporarily. Any Web site that publishes a donation widget that contributes to publication earns simultaneous reprint rights. If you want exclusive online publishing rights (or, more precisely, exclusive except for Magazine 2.0's own copy), you'll have to pay the whole freight yourself.
As to why A-list authors like Scalzi would play this game: Publicity. As Cory Doctorow repeatedly points out, anonymity is the greatest enemy to author success (which is why Doctorow gives away so many loss-leader free ebooks of his stuff). Magazine 2.0 casts the audience net as wide as possible, meaning Scalzi could make his commission rate just as easily under Magazine 2.0, but theoretically be seen by more people as the donate widget spreads to multiple venues. Moreover, for a select list of authors, Magazine 2.0 could be adapted to solicit for commissioned work, rather than spec work. (Scalzi would write the story only after and unless the donation cost was met, not before.)
Magazine 2.0 is thus a meta-magazine, one that houses all the stories it has unlocked for perpetual online consumption and reprint. It is also a platform for enabling other online venues to acquire short fiction (or, conceivably, any) content, and one that co-opts the audience of each venue and contributor as an ever-shifting, distributed donor base.
The launch obstacle thus becomes publicizing and enlisting the use of the platform by authors and venues, but that's a much less steep hill to climb than bootstrapping a magazine audience. Essentially, magazine 2.0 is a crowdsourced marketplace for authors to sell their spec content, and a method for audiences and publishers to acquire said content. Crazy, but I think it can work.
Image via WikipediaZombie apocalypse (n.) - An end-of-civilization scenario wrought by an outbreak of zombies that rapidly converts or consumes the vast majority of the human population, thereby leading to global societal collapse. Basically, any story where zombies take over the world.
While apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction have been established subgenres of both speculative and conventional literature for decades -- the Roland Emmerich big-screen cheesefest 2012 and Cormac McCarthy's critically acclaimed book-cum-movie The Road being but two of the most recent examples -- the zombie apocalypse is a genre, a setting, and pop cultural movement unto itself, particularly on film. Put another way, you can be a fan of zombie fiction and/or zombie flicks without being a fan of any other genre or subgenre of speculative fiction.
We owe much of this standalone zombie popularity to George Romero and his schlocky but commentary-ridden Living Dead movie series, which has enticed devoted fans for decades. Zombie apocalypse fandom is growing steadily more mainstream, with no better example of the phenomenon than the near-ubiquity of zombie walks -- wherein dozens to hundreds of zombie cosplayers shamble through a public area en masse -- across the United States each year.
I bring it up because: First and foremost, Robert Kirkman's seminal zombie apocalypse comic book series The Walking Dead has been recently placed into production as a television series by AMC, with fans clamoring for a Mad Men-quality serious treatment of the highly thoughtful and successful zombie franchise.
Secondly, because some oddball Canadian mathematicians have modeled the zombie apocalypse and calculated exactly how small the time-window for containing such an outbreak would really be. (Verdict: We're hosed.)
Thirdly, because zombie fiction has begun to consume the classics of literature, as is the case with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a retelling of the Jane Austen novel with an account of a Victorian zombie outbreak integrated with the original text. (It can't be any more painful than Clueless.)
Now, if only we could foretell the likelihood of the World War Z movie ever getting made, let alone made well. Frankly, we're more likely to confront an actual zombie apocalypse first, in which case we'll each need a copy of The Zombie Survival Guide(thankfully, also by the author of WWZ).
Mundane (n.) - A slang term from science fiction fandom which describes all non-fans. In many instances the term is used as a perjorative. Mundanes is also a term adopted for similar usage by other related subcultures, including goths, who use it to describe non-goths, and the Society for Creative Anachronists, who use it describe anyone who isn't a participating member of the SCA.
The term mundane, sometimes shortened as mun or mundie, is also used within works of science fiction and fantasy. For example, telepaths in the Babylon 5universe refer to all non-telepaths as mundanes and in the Fables graphic novel series, all characters that do not orginate from fairy tales or folklore are referred to as mundies.
Moreover, there is a subgenre of science fiction known as mundane sci-fi, which adheres to highly realistic and plausible settings and plot devices within its stories, eschewing the more fantastical and extraordinary tropes more often associated with mainstream science fiction, particularly space opera.
Thus, usage of mundane within fandom is somewhat recursive, referring at various times to characters, stories, non-fans, or as a derogatory term for fans that are perceived as inferior or lacking sufficient devotion to fandom in general or an individual franchise in particular. Mundane as a fandom descriptor has fallen somewhat out of usage in recent years in favor of the Harry Potter-inspired (and thus currently more widely recognized) term muggle.
I bring it up because: Today is the first day of the 2009 World Science Fiction Convention, whence come the Hugo Awards, and if any place is likely to illustrate the varied usage of the word mundanes (to say nothing of the obvious dichotomy between fandom and the mundanes) it's WorldCon. Moreover, today is the 75th birthday of author Piers Anthony, whose obscenely long Xanth series of fantasy novels includes one of the most popular invocations of the term mundane, which in his context describes any normal human not born of the fictional world of Xanth. We commend either occasion as an excuse to reach out to any of the Mundanes in your life and share a little bit of the joy of fandom with them. Or just point and call them a mundie. Whatever leads to joy, really.
Spec-fic (n.) - An abbreviated slang form of speculative fiction, which is itself an umbrella term for science-fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction, as well as the various subgenres contained in, and shared by, each. It's also a very loaded term in nerd circles. Some see spec-fic as the parent category of all truly imaginative literature, encompassing any setting, plot or character that includes or involves objects, events, or effects not found in the conventional world. Thus, Hamlet -- what with its prominent inclusion of a ghost-king -- would qualify as spec-fic under this usage, which for some is the problem.
The counterpoint to the broad, almost aspirational definition of spec-fic is the what might be called the geek brand of spec-fic, wherein the term is used to classify works that don't neatly fit into one classic genre or subgenre. For example, Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South posits what would happen if time-travelers gave modern weapons to the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War. This is quite obviously a sci-fi tale, as the time travel points out, but the novel also focuses on clear historical events and consequences, making it very much an alternate history tale. Spec-fic is a term that bridges the gap between the genre divisions that fandom (and book marketers) often use to segregate nerd-worthy literature.
I bring it up because: Today is author Cherie Priest's birthday, and her career is a fantastic example of the straddling of (false) genre divisions that fans love and expect (and drives book marketers a little nuts). Her debut novel, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, is a southern gothic, modern fantasy, and horror tale. Her most recently released novel, Fathom, is a combination historical fiction, southern gothic, mythpunk-slash-Chthulhu-slash-pirate tale. Priest's upcoming novel, Boneshaker, is set in her new Clockwork Century universe, which crosses alt-history Civil War fiction with steampunk, Weird West, horror, and maybe a little sci-fi for fun.
And if you think Priest's bibliography is a tad difficult to classify, try China Mieville on for size. I think his Perdido Street Station has about 57 genres and subgenres contained within it, and that's before you even get to the poetic, murderous, reality warping spider-god (who is a side character, mind you). You might also enjoy Charles Stross's Jennifer Morgue, which is a postcyberpunk-Chthulhu-spy-fi meta-satire. With a heroic mermaid succubus as the female lead. Lots of that doesn't show up on the cover blurb, as you might imagine.
Thus we have yet another reason I wish my local bookstore (and my new favorite online bookstore) would have multiple overlapping genre categories -- because spec-fic is too broad a term for most of what I love, and lots of the books I read fall into so many subgenres that they defy description, but certainly not enjoyment.
Image via WikipediaMultiverse (n.) - Simply put, multiple universes that are linked together. More specifically, a set of interrelated parallel realities, usually involving characters that jump between universes to visit and interact with alternate versions of themselves and/or their history. While this term has been extended to any parallel universe story, like that found in The Chronicles of Narnia, it is most often associated with comic book franchises, particularly the DC Comics universe, which had its multiverse grow so expansive and unwieldy that it destroyed it in the seminal Crisis on Infinite Earths (and has since brought it back -- sort of -- in the recent Infinite Crisis).
I bring it up because: June 30 is Superman's 71st birthday -- he first appeared in his modern form in Action Comics #1, which came out on that date in 1938 -- and nobody is a better example of the multiverse than Superman, as he has appeared in more alternate versions than virtually any other character in history. In fact, Grant Morrison turned the joke in on itself, creating a Superman Squad of parallel-universe and time-traveling Men of Steel that regularly team up to battle interdimensional threats. (Just for fun, ask a Supes fanboy whether he prefers the John ByrneMan of Steel origin for Superman, or Mark Waid's Birthright; sparks will fly. Or better yet, ask him which Superman Elseworlds story is his favorite. Not superfan can fail to have an opinion. Personally, I'm a Speeding Bullets guy.)
Psychohistory (n.) - A field of study that uses advanced mathematics to accurately predict the future. Specifically, it's the use of sociological statistics to predict the collective behavior of large groups of people, like galaxy-spanning empires. Isaac Asimov is credited with coining this connotation of the term in 1951 with his Foundation series, which itself is considered required reading by most traditional sci-fi fans. There is a real field of study called psychohistory, which is about analyzing the psychological motivations behind historical events, but most sci-fi fans are either ignorant of this fact, or simply curse its existence when it muddles up their Asimov-related Google search results.
I bring it up because: A mere 58 years ago this week, the first UNIVAC I was dedicated into service at the U.S. Census Bureau -- June 14, 1951. (1951, coincidentally, was also the first year that Asimov's original Foundation stories were collected into book form.) UNIVAC was America's first successful commercial computer, and it made famous the notion of statistical prediction of major events when the fifth UNIVAC I unit successfully predicted the outcome of 1952 U.S. Presidential election based on early poll returns. This practice is now common, and is in some ways the real-world analogue of Asimov's psychohistorical notions. Asimov, in turn, took the UNIVAC name and ran with it, creating the Multivac series of stories about a perpetually evolving supercomputer. The most famous of these is the short story"The Last Question," which Asimov described as perhaps the favorite of his own works, wherein Multivac is asked to "solve" the heat-death of the universe.
Unobtainium (n.) - Snarky term for either a scientifically impossible substance that makes some fantastic device or process possible, or an exotic real-world substance that is conferred with implausible or impossible properties for the sake of a story. The classic examples are Cavorite, a metal that creates antigravity fields as first imagined by H. G. Wells in The First Men in the Moon, and scrith, the impossibly strong material from which Larry Niven's Ringworld was built. A more contemporary example would be dilithium, the crystal from Star Trek that regulates matter-antimatter annihilations and makes warp drive possible.
Science fiction fans (and, more importantly, critics and editors) refer to these blatant wish-granting elements and minerals as unobtainium, as they are unobtainable in the real world. Equivalent phrases include: Unattainium, wishalloy, buzzwordium, handwavium (for technical handwaving), and element 404 (as in Not Found).
I bring it up because: 14 years ago this week, the first pure Bose-Einstein condensate was synthesized. A BEC is an extremely weird state of matter with behaviors that cannot be fully explained by current science--including a propensity to spontaneously crawl out of containment vessels. Bose-Einstein condensates are often used as contemporary stand-ins for classic fictional unobtainium in modern science fiction stories, as it "sounds" more real and the author at least has the flimsy cover of "science doesn't understand it" to explain how BECs can turn raw matter into a Jovian mooncastle using only a souped-up inkjet printer (I'm looking at you, Charles Stross's Accelerando.) Plus, Bose-Einstein condensate is just fun to type, even if it sounds vaguely like the residue from a lightspeed subwoofer.
Canon (adj.) - Describes the accepted, official, sanctioned events and elements of a fictional universe, as opposed to all the stuff that fans and tie-in works have made up. For example, persons, places, things and occurrences that appeared on the actual Star Trektelevision series are considered canon; stuff from Star Trek tie-in novels, comic books, video games? Not so much. (Though the new movie may have reset Trek canon; that's a discussion for future nerd words.)
I bring it up because: May 22, 2009 would have been Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 150th birthday, and Doyle pretty much made the study of fictional canon necessary. Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, whom everyone knows wore a deerstalker cap and often prefaced his famous modus ponens deductions with the catchphrase "elementary, my dear Watson." Except that Doyle never described Holmes as wearing a deerstalker cap or saying "elementary, my dear Watson" in any Holmes work he wrote; those aspects of the character are assumed parts of Holmes' description based on popular illustrations and derivative literary, stage, film, and television adaptationsbut are non-canon. There are actually more non-canon Holmes works than canonical ones, so it's easy to see how the popular conception of the character has been stretched beyond its original canon. And the new Sherlock Holmes movie is going to stretch it even further.
Jonbar Hinge (n.) - An event in history with two (or more) distinct possible outcomes, one of which leads to our familiar present, and the other which leads to an appreciably different world. A Jonbar Hinge is usually (though not always) small and unappreciated at the time, and its consequences are usually only felt in the distant, subsequent future. The term comes from the Jack Williamsonshort story "John Barr," wherein the protagonist's choice to pick up either a magnet or a pebble ultimately leads to either a utopian future, or global tyranny. And you thought the soup versus salad option at dinner was irelevant.
In what can only be categorized as an act of insane hubris, I've decided that the Written Weird is going to in fact host a follow-up to my late, lamented Geek Trivia column called the Nerd Word of the Day. It will be a small hybird of my previous trivia work and my glossary of science fiction words.
My initial goal is to make these entries brief, timely, snarky--and to do them every weekday. Whether I can pull that off remains to be seen, but if ever I was to do a sequel to Geek Trivia, this would be it. It should start tomorrow, so stay tuned.
The X-men got big in the early 1980s. So did glam metalrock. That probably expalins why so many X-men codenames sound like the Saturday arena playbill at the New Jersey State Fair. Seriously, if you weren't a comic book fanboy, a line-up of Storm, Havok and Nightcrawler sounds like three acts that could open for Poison or Motley Crue.
Don't believe me? Take a gander down this list of 25 names, each of which is either an obscure X-man or an '80s hair metal band--and in some cases, both. See if you can tell which is with before scrolling down to see the descriptions.
Great White - 80s hair band famous for the single "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" and for killing 100 or so people when their pyrotechnics display burned down a nightclub in 2003. Despite the death count, they should not be confused with the Batman villain, who appeared in the same year.
Marrow - X-man grows bone-spurs through her skin that she can rip out and throw like daggers. Is that '90s enough for you?
Maggott - X-Man who has two giant pet maggots that, when they eat anything, give him super-strength. Seriously. Also the nickname for Slipknot fans, but the less said about that, the better.
White Queen - X-man Emma Frost, a diamond-fleshed telepath who used to be a villain until she started boning Cyclops.
White Lion - Glam metal band known for the hits "Wait" and "When the Children Cry."
King Kobra - Hair metal band famous for recording the title song from the movie Iron Eagle. Not to confused with the DC comics supervillain cult leader Kobra or the Marvel Comics supervillain cult leader, Cobra .
Lifeguard - X-man capable of generating whatever power is needed to solve a problem, thanks to lame writing from Chris Claremont.
Caliban - X-man who can sense other mutants; too bad he's a hideously ugly albino. There is a band called Caliban, but they're a German metalcore group and very much a product of the '90s.
Vixen - All-girl glam metal band known for the single "Edge of a Broken Heart." There is a superhero named Vixen , but she's a DC property and Justice League member.
Red Queen - X-man title shared by many, most notably of Madelyne Pryor, an evil cone of Jean Grey. Also an alternate universe Jean Grey. And an alternate universe Psylocke. There are a lot of Red Queens, okay.
Omerta - X-man of Italian-American descent from Brooklyn who, when he discovers he is super-strong and invulnerable, tries to take over the local mafia. Somehow, this endears him to the X-men, who recruit him.
The Stepford Cuckoos - X-men group of invulnerable mutant quintuplets who share one hive-mind, bereft of emotion. Yeah, this is pretty obviously a Grant Morrison thing.
Nocturne - X-man daughter of Nightcrawler and Scarlet Witch from an alternate reality. Yes, there are lots of parallel universe X-men love-children. Why do you ask? Also the name of many songs and a 90s metal band.
Jetboy - Glam band who got famous by having three singles on The 'Burbs soundtrack, "Bloodstone", "Locked in a Cage" and "Make Some Noise."
Penance - X-man that was really a hollow invulnerable teenage-girl body that housed the minds of three separate teenage-girl X-men. Strangely, not a Grant Morrison invention.
Stryper - Christian glam metal band from the '80s known for mainstream hits "Calling On You", "Free" and "Honestly."
Stringfellow - X-man ally with the ability to temporarily turn your bones to spaghetti. Somehow this is scary.
Nitro - Glam metal band known for lead singer Jim Gillette's ability to shatter wine glasses with his voice. There is a Spider-man villain named Nitro, be he isn't a mutant or an X-man.
Helix - Canadian metal band known for the single "Rock You." There is a supervillain team called Helix , but they're from the DC universe and have never met the X-men.
Giant - Glam metal band and one hit wonders known for the single "I'll See You In My Dreams."
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