Friday Review: The City and the City

Think of a city. Now, think of another city, one nearby whose culture, economics, and general life are completely entwined with the first one. Your mind may go to someplace like Minnesota's "Twin Cities" or perhaps Cold War Berlin, but think a little harder. What if the two cities actually overlapped each other so they shared the same physical space.

That's the basic idea underlying The City and the City.

One day a dead woman's body is found in Besźel, a city state somewhere in southeast Europe. Besźel shares some of its physical location with another city state, Ul Qoma. In some areas the two cities overlap (are "crosshatched"), requiring the citizens of each to learn to "unsee" the evidence of the other. A street in Besźel may be the same as a street in Ul Qoma, but the drivers in each city navigate it differently. Movement from one city to the other is restricted to a single border checkpoint. Murder is one thing, but the most serious offense in either city is to breach - to cross over to the other without permission - a taboo enforced by a shadowy organization known, coincidentally (and somewhat confusingly), as Breach.

Needless to say, the death of the young woman - from neither Besźel or Ul Qoma - requires our hero, a Besźel detective named Borlú, to dive into the mysteries of the two cities and, ultimately, of Breach itself. In other words, he winds up questioning the very fabric of his reality. China Miéville does a great job getting inside Borlú's skull, showing both the ingrained importance he ascribes to avoiding breach and his growing suspicion that it's all a bit daft.

There is, potentially, another city involved in all this, a city between the cities called Orciny. The murder victim is fascinated with Orciny and, just maybe, finds evidence that it exists and that's what got her killed. Only we wind up learning that the reason she was killed was much more mundane - a corrupt politician in bed with outside business interests - and the whole Orciny thing was just a means to string her along.

Similarly, Miéville kind of does the same to the reader. His premise that is inherently fantastic - as in a fantasy literature sense - yet he takes it and deconstructs it. However amazing the co mingled lives of Besźel and Ul Qoma are, there is nothing supernatural about their relationship. The citizens in each city merely learn not to see citizens in the other. Our brains have a powerful ability to not see what we don't want to see, but once the illusion is over it's over for good. Hence why Borlú, who gets as close to truth as there is in these places, can never really go back. Even Breach itself, which begins as some kind of "other" presence (possibly alien) turns out to be a sort of NSA plus SHIELD organization on speed.

By the end of things, to be honest, I felt as jerked around by Miéville as the victim had been by her killers. The only difference is that I loved every minute of it.

The Details
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The City and the City
by China Miéville
Published 2009
Winner Locus Award, Aurthur C. Clarke Award, World Fantasy Award, & Hugo Award (shared with The Windup Girl)

Friday Review: Under the Dome

The situation in which regular people find themselves basically stripped of civilization and the comforts of our modern world is a classic fictional trope, from the English school kids of Lord of the Flies to the few survivors of some planetary disaster in The Road or A Canticle for Liebowitz. Generally, those stories take people who may or may not have any prior relationship to one another and throw them into a world of anarchy and chaos.

Stephen King’s Under the Dome turns that trope on its side in two crucial ways. First, the characters in the book are all from the small Maine town of Chester’s Mill, population 2000 (in the off season, as it is in the book) and thus not only know each other but have a complicated web of alliances, bitterness, and business interests (legit and otherwise) connecting them. Second, although the titular dome throws life in Chester’s Mill into utter higgledy-piggledy, there’s no anarchy or absence of leadership. In fact, what’s so terrifying about what happens in Chester’s Mill is that the political machine that’s run the town for years functions perfectly once crisis hits, which leads to apocalyptic disaster.

Overseeing this mess is “Big” Jim Rennie – used car salesman, obnoxiously loud Christian, and gargantuan meth dealer. If Under the Dome is supposed to be King’s meditation on the United States after 9/11, Rennie is the stand in for Dick Cheney as the power behind the throne. Although Rennie is the second of three selectman (one is actually a selectwoman) who govern the town, he wields all the actual power. The analogy doesn’t quite fit – nobody ever voted for Cheney directly, while Rennie had won numerous elections to maintain his seat. If anything, Rennie seems to be King’s warning that, while we focus most of our attention on national politics, the office holders with the most power to really fuck things up are locals and we ignore the low-level political offices at our own peril.

Having said that, to the extent that King is trying to do something more than tell a compelling, terrifying story, he misses some opportunities to explore some interesting grey areas. For example, once the dome comes down, new cops are quickly recruited to brace against chaos and lawlessness. It would have been interesting to see one or two good people in these positions, honestly dealing with the competing concerns of security and liberty. Alas, since Rennie is the one doing the choosing, the new cops are all his henchmen (including his murderous son) and proceed to do precisely what you’d expect henchmen to do given that kind of power.

Another missed opportunity is the lack of any exploration of the Chester’s Mill body politic. The novel’s cast of characters is impressively large and King does a good job of working them all together, even if the individual characterizations are pretty shallow. However, they divide neatly into the obviously evil – Rennie and his flunkies – and obviously good – the couple dozen citizens who oppose him. King isn’t really interested in the rest of the unwashed masses, which is a shame because they’re largely the ones who voted for Rennie again and again. Why had they? Why were they so willing to believe any bullshit story he told them? After all, Rennie’s claim to power is that “the town” is behind him, but “the town” remains nebulous and unexplored.

As for the dome itself, it’s a wonderful literary invention. Although the word “dome” and some of the initial interaction with it would bring to mind the giant glass bowl dumped on Springfield in The Simpsons Movie (with which Under the Dome shares a passing similarity), it’s not a solid barrier. Instead, it’s a somewhat permeable force field of some kind, through which plot devices like speech, heat, and (in a very limited way) air can move but people, vehicles, and explosives can’t. It effectively seals the town off, but allows for some contact with the outside world.

To his credit, King doesn’t just plop the dome down and let it go all McGuffin on him. He provides an explanation for it, one that drives the final hunk of the book. Unfortunately, that explanation is neither all that interesting logically or dramatically. It leads the end of the book to be a real let down.

We tend to think the best of ourselves, that when faced with crisis we’ll rise to the occasion and do the right thing. Truth is, some folks will do that, while others will use the anarchy to enrich themselves (in different ways) and still others will simply be passive observers, numb from the shock of their world going to shit. King grasps that. So long as Under the Dome focuses on life under the dome, it’s a pretty compelling read. Bigger explanations, not so much.

The Details
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Under the Dome
By Stephen King
Published 2009

Friday Review: The Exorcist

Yes, I know, I’m 39 years old and I’m only just getting around to seeing The Exorcist. In my defense, I’m not much of a horror movie fan in the first place. Plus, I do own a copy of Tubular Bells, purely for its musical exploits. That must count for something, right?

This is a hard movie to evaluate with a fresh eye in 2013. It’s become so much a part of the culture, referenced and riffed upon so many places, that it’s difficult to separate expectation from the movie itself. I had a similar problem with The Godfather – by the time I got to it I’d seen so much of it elsewhere that it didn’t land much of an impact on me.

I’ll not go so far as this review, written in 2000 when this “version you’ve never seen” was released in theaters:

It's good stuff but, basically, "The Exorcist" is a museum piece, something to be enjoyed for its historical value, its datedness and its almost quaint shock value. It's so low-tech! Those once-vaunted special effects, in which Regan apparently levitates into the air, were done by hidden pulleys and cords. Nowadays, that would all be achieved by computer-generated effects.

Sad to say, various crucial moments in the film made me think if comedic connections instead. The actual exorcism scenes bring to mind the Saturday Night Live parody. The demon involved, Pazuzu, leads me to Futurama. Even the famous “spider walk” scene, added for this 2000 version, brings to mind not abject horror, but rather Family Guy (Fonzie be praised!).

What makes the film still worth watching today, even if the effects creak with age and things sometimes verge on parody, is that it takes its own sweet time setting up the characters involved. As a result, although it’s nominally a horror flick, it doesn’t fall into the usual horror flick trope of having gory things happen to a bunch of cutouts you don’t really give two shits for. That’s particularly true of Father Karras, the young priest who first investigates the possession and then aids in dispatching poor Pazuzu. He’s a deeply conflicted, interesting character wrestling with his own demons (ha!) who has to be dragged into the central conceit of the movie, rather than rushing into it with enthusiasm and something to prove. If anything, in spite of the collar, he’s more Scully than Mulder.

Just yesterday I was writing about resisting the need to change nonfiction works just because the facts reported in them have been called into question. Likewise, it can be tempting for purveyors of fiction to go back and “fix” things in a finished work. Based on Roger Ebert’s review of the 2000 version, several of the changes, particularly the ending, were for the worse. Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m lukewarm about The Exocist.

Still and all, it’s worth a watch. Even after all these years.  Is it the scariest movie of all time?  No, but there is nothing wrong with that.

The Details
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The Exorcist
Released 1973, "Version You've Never Seen" in 2000
Written by William Peter Blatty
Directed by William Freidkin
Starring Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Linda Blair, et. al.

Friday Review: Dies the Fire

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel . . . bored.

To be fair, Dies the Fire starts off with a bang. Or, rather, a flash, as some unexplained event centered off the east coast of the United States (there’s an entire other series that deals with what happens to Nantucket as a result) occurs rendering anything vaguely electrical – from electric gadgets themselves to gunpowder – inoperative. After “The Change,” as it’s called, life suddenly gets both a lot more simple and a lot more complicated.

That’s particularly true for Mike Havel, one of the book’s two heroes. A pilot, Havel is flying a family to their ranch in a remote part of Idaho when The Change happens. That means the plane crashes, but, in a foreshadowing of things to come, Havel makes the best of a bad situation and everyone on board survives. That small group evolves into a large group of absurdly skilled quasi-mercenaries called The Bearkillers (‘cause Havel kills a bear, naturally), who pretty quickly adapt to the new world.

The other main thread of Dies the Fire involves Juniper, a woman who doubles as Celtic folk singer and Wiccan priestess who is interrupted mid-set by The Change. After navigating the fiery ruins of Corvallis, Oregon (set ablaze by planes falling out of the sky after The Change), she and her friends and fellow Wiccans convene at a Juniper’s cabin in the woods, where they, too, start rebuilding and coping with the new reality as best they can.

Of course, the Bearkillers and Juniper’s clan come together (quite literally, in one instance) and by the end have forged an alliance that will probably bear more fruit later in the series. I don’t really know or care, since Dies the Fire didn’t convince me to continue on with it.

The problem with Dies the Fire doesn’t lie in its setup or characters so much, although both of the main characters have their own annoyances. Juniper, for instance, is constantly spouting words of wisdom in Gaelic, which she then translates for the rest of us, like an Irish fortune cookie. It’s beyond annoying. The real problem is that Stirling setups up this nasty world and then makes it entirely too easy for our heroes to survive.

For example, although there are lots of detailed discussions about how to do things after The Change, including such necessities as feeding yourself, neither group we follow through the book is ever in danger of actually, you know, starving or anything. This isn’t The Road, in which the two main characters struggle to survive on every page. Particularly in Juniper’s neck of the woods, where her clan settles down and builds, life actually sounds pretty good.

That’s partly because nearly every character we meet who is absorbed into the two groups miraculously possesses some skill that makes them particularly suited to surviving after The Change. People pop up who have experience farming, sword fighting, breaking and training horses, and other useful skills. Nobody’s ever useless or in need of the care of others. Sure, there are children around, but after their initial absorption into either group they’re shuffled off into the background.

Which could be all right – The Road is a fairly depressing read, after all – if there was any kind of conflict happening within the clans themselves. Don’t get me wrong. Stirling gives Havel and Juniper plenty to do with regards to conflicts with black-hat wearing outsiders, from roving bands of thugs to “eaters” (of human flesh, of course) to a megalomaniacal history professor (you read that right) who has set himself up as the ruler of Portland. Those sequences are well done and exciting, if a bit predictable by the end.

But there is no kind of conflict within the groups themselves. Nobody ever suggests that Havel might be wrong to keep slogging through the wilderness rather than setting up a more permanent camp (or throwing in with folks they meet along the way). Nobody ever suggests that Juniper is wrong to fight bad guys on behalf of others based on some Wiccan version of karma. Hell, nobody even stirs shit just because they’d rather be in charge! Add to that the near total absence of any minor real life conflicts like petty thefts, sexual jealously, or good ole’ fashioned hate and Stirling’s world looks damned near utopic.

The single exception proves the rule. One of Havel’s recruits is branded as no good from the beginning, since he’s a drunk and a wife beater. After he does what drunk wife beaters do and is punished for it, he betrays the Bearkillers for no particularly good reason and with a just desserts result. Even that attempt at some sort of internal conflict winds up black and white and pointless.

Which is a damned shame, because Stirling obviously put a lot of work into the world he built and the details of how to survive in it. He would have been better off chucking one of the two main story lines in favor of some other group of characters who are having a more difficult go of things. Things might have been more interesting in a city, with multiple factions stacked on top of each other struggling for survival and authority. Alas, that’s not the story Stirling decided to tell.

It’s never a good sign when, two-thirds of the way through the book, a character writes a fictionalized, Tolkien-inspired narrative of events so far and the main character, concerned that future generations will accept it as history, muses that at least it was “ more colorful than the dirty, boring, often nauseating reality.” You know, the “reality” we’ve been reading about thus far? I wouldn’t call it nauseating, but I won’t argue the boring part.

The Details
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Dies the Fire
By S.M. Stirling
Published 2004

Friday Review: Clockwork Angels

Over the years, Rush hasn’t shied away from the epic. Back in the 1970s they cranked out three album side-long suites. A little later they spread a four-piece collection of songs over four albums released 21 years apart! But for all that, the band had never done a full-on concept album, giving the whole project over to a single idea.* I suppose they were waiting until they had enough experience under their belts to make it work.

And, boy, did the waiting ever pay off.

I was pleasantly surprised when the band came back with Snakes & Arrows in 2007, their best album in decades. Clockwork Angels takes the basic blueprint of those tunes, stretches them out a bit more, and wraps them around the story Neal Peart wanted to tell. It’s their proggiest work in a long time, sublime riffage and epic arrangements carrying a tale of wonder through the world that Peart conjured in his head.

I’ll admit that Clockwork Angels didn’t immediately grab me like Snakes & Arrows did, which is partly down to the lyrical content of a lot of that album. But the new one’s grown on me, hard, over the past few weeks. Is it Rush’s best album, as I’ve read in places? Probably not, but when you consider the scope of the band’s career and just how long they’ve been at it, the ability to crank out something this good at this time is really special. In a year of kick ass new albums, Clockwork Angels will be near the top of the heap.

But, as Ron Popeil might say – wait, that’s not all!

Author Kevin J. Anderson, a long time Rush fan, collaborated with Peart on a novel for Clockwork Angels, taking the basic story from the album and fleshing it out. The result isn’t all that great and is a good data point in the argument for leaving musical stories alone in that form (see also, Ken Russell’s version of Tommy or the film version of The Wall).

As a book, Clockwork Angels is essentially Candide, with an overlay of Rush’s own “Hemispheres” suite, or maybe the Shadow War portion of Babylon 5. Our young, naïve, dumb as a box of rocks protagonist Owen Hardy travels through his world, pulled between the autocratic Watchmaker and the “freedom extremist” known only as the Anarchist. It’s order versus chaos, Apollo versus Dionysous, Vorlons versus Shadows.

Unfortunately, neither Anderson nor Peart are Voltaire. Where Candide was a scathing satire on the world in which Voltaire lived, Clockwork Angels is just a story, set somewhere other than here without any connection to the real world. I’ve got no problem with that – I write other world fantasies, after all – but you lose something in the relocation. The end product is a fairly routine coming of age story, even if it does involve airships and alchemy.

Nor is Owen a Candide. Voltaire’s hero was sheltered and naïve, but I don’t remember him being stupid. Owen really takes his time to figure certain things out, clinging desperately to the propaganda phrases the Watchmaker has fed him all his life. It’s like you can hear the clockwork mechanisms grinding away in his brain. His need to ponder everything he experiences leads to Anderson essentially going through most incidents twice, without really gaining anything in the retelling. Also, to be blunt, Owen’s trevails are much more of an “adventure” in the positive sense, compared to Candide’s experiences of war, death, natural disaster and religious persecution.

The world into which Owen is dumped has some interesting steampunky features, but some of the more tantalizing ones are left hanging. There’s apparently some kind of parallel universe structure at work, but it’s not deeply examined. The Watchmaker runs Owen’s home country, Albion, through the use of alchemy and precision clockwork. Yet the other places Owen goes seem to have the same technology. Why? Does the Watchmaker trade the tech to other nations for resources? Does he play favorites? Albion is basically a superpower – what does the rest of the world think of that? It’s simply not discussed.

Two other things seriously impeded my enjoyment of the book. For one, Anderson decided at some point to pepper the book with phrases from Rush lyrics, not just from this album but from lots of others. I found that really distracting, both because Peart’s words don’t always sit easily next to Anderson’s and because it just seemed like too much of an in joke. The other problem, which played into the lyric dropping, comes from Peart. Of course, I digested the book in audio form, which is read by Peart. Unfortunately, Neal sounds like he’s reading a story to a group of kids and doesn’t really work as a narrator. And he hits those lyrical Easter eggs like a bad comedian hammering a punch line, in most instances.

Ultimately, the difference between the album and book were driven home to me while listening to “BU2B,” short for brought up to believe, which deals with Owen’s “education:”

Believe in what we’re told
Until our final breath
While our loving Watchmaker
Loves us all to death

From Owen’s mouth (or Peart’s), those lines are rote recitation, nearly meaningless, spoken by someone who’s never really thought about them. On the other hand, belted out by Geddy Lee in a song full of rocking syncopation, they come across as biting, somewhat angry, and cynical. That Owen Hardy would have been a much more interesting protagonist than the one Anderson ultimately delivers.

In the end, the book’s primary failing is that it is merely adequate, while the album upon which it’s based kicks all manner of ass. My recommendation – leave the book on the shelf, throw the album in the car, and crank it up during a long drive.

* I’ve seen some references here and there to things like 2112 or Hemispheres being concept albums, but they aren’t. One side got the suite, the other had songs that were completely unrelated.

Details
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Clockwork Angels, by Rush
Released 2012

Tracks:
1. Caravan (5:40)
2. BU2B (5:10)
3. Clockwork Angels (7:31)
4. The Anarchist (6:52)
5. Carnies (4:52)
6. Halo Effect (3:14)
7. Seven Cities Of Gold (6:32)
8. The Wreckers (5:01)
9. Headlong Flight (7:20)
10. BU2B2 (1:28)
11. Wish Them Well (5:25)
12. The Garden (6:59)

Players:
Geddy Lee (bass, bass pedals, vocals, synthesizers)
Alex Lifeson (guitar, additional keyboards)
Neil Peart (drums, percussion)

The Details
------------------------
Clockwork Angels
By Kevin J. Anderson (story by Anderson and Neal Peart)
Published 2012

Friday Review: The Martian Chronicles

When Ray Bradbury died back in June, I realized that I had read very little of the man’s work. A lot of it I felt like I knew through osmosis, but when it came to sitting down and dealing with the words themselves, I hadn’t done a lot of it. So I dedicated myself to going back and rereading Fahrenheit 451 (and rewatching the Truffaut film) and finally getting around to reading (well, listening to) The Martian Chronicles.

The Martian Chronicles is an odd duck in a couple of ways. First, although it’s frequently referred to as a “novel,” it really is a collection of short stories. A few characters recur here and there, but for the most part the only constant from one story to the next is the setting (and even that is tenuous) and the shared future history of which they are a part.

The other oddity, at least for a 21st-century audience, is that despite the title and general plot about the human settlement of Mars, The Martian Chronicles isn’t science fiction (Bradbury said the only long form sci-fi he wrote was Fahrenheit 451). In an introduction to the written version I have, Bradbury asks:

[W]hat is Chronicles? It is King Tut out of the tomb when I was three, Norse Eddas when I was six, and Roman/Greek gods that romanced me when I was ten: pure myth. If it had been practical technologically efficient science fiction, it would have long since fallen to rust by the road.

Of course, The Martian Chronicles was written in a pre-NASA age when we didn’t really know what Mars was like in any tangible sense. It’s hard to go back to that space in your head in the 21st-century, when we’ve got rovers all over (although George R.R. Martin and others are going to try). However it’s classified, The Martian Chronicles does have, as a through line, a commentary on humanity and how it interacts with its environment.

It’s not a flattering commentary. On Mars, we wipe out the native population due to diseases we bring with us, so at least it wasn’t intentional, although it was careless (we’re more careful these days). We then promptly begin to turn frontier Mars into a pale simulacrum of the Earth left behind (well, to be fair, of the United States), complete with run-down roadside diners and meddling bureaucrats. Meanwhile, back on Earth, things chug inevitably to a nuclear war that basically destroys the place.

In other words, everything we humans touch turns to shit. In fact, Bradbury’s view, which is even more cynical than mine (*shudder*), seems to be based on the assumption that the ideal world is the one in which he grew up, small-town middle America in the years before the Second World War. That yearning comes through clear in not only some of the stories here (“The Third Expedition,” most specifically), but even in Fahrenheit 451 (the heroes escape the cities for the countryside) and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Regardless of the overall tone, since The Martian Chronicles is a short story collection it, by definition, rises and falls in terms of quality from one story to the next. To be certain, there are some absolute gems. In “The Earth Men,” the second batch of humans to arrive on the planet are met not with any fanfare or acclaim, but with shrugs (for a very interesting reason). In “The Martian,” a lone native’s ability to be all things to all people leads to a tragic end. And, of course, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” an elegy for the destroyed Earth. Alas, there are some clunkers, too. “The Silent Towns,” for example, is dazzlingly sexist. But the balance is firmly tipped toward brilliant.

I mentioned watching Truffaut’s film version of Fahrenheit 451 earlier. The Martian Chronicles also was produced for the screen, albeit the small one in a 1979 NBC/BBC production. It’s not as bad as you might think, although it looks horribly dated. Richard Matheson (of I Am Legend and countless Twilight Zone episodes fame) wrote the script, which tried to tell a more cohesive story, tying together certain stories that really weren’t related. It didn’t really work, partly because the attempt was too forced. Besides, Matheson left out my favorite story, so I took that a bit personally.

The other reason the TV version of The Martian Chronicles ultimately failed is that Bradbury is a writer who demands to be read (or listened to). He writes with a style and beauty that is mostly lost when the plots and ideas are translated to another medium. It has a musical quality, the kind you simply can’t put into words yourself in order to describe it.

Thank you, Ray, for your words. We will continue to enjoy them for a long time coming.

The Details
------------------------
The Martian Chronicles
By Ray Bradbury
Published 1950

Friday Review: Palimpsest

At the core of Palimpsest is an intriguing idea: people enter a truly weird otherworldly city (called Palimpsest, naturally) by having sex with others who share the same mark – something like a tattoo, but that is actually a map of one particular part of the city. Whom you plook determines where you go in Palimpsest.

But that’s not quite right. That’s sort of like saying that the core of Tommy is a story about a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who loves pinball or that at the core of Brave is a story about a mute girl wandering on a bridge. Since those are both concept albums, the real core of them is the music. The stories (such as they are) are secondary.

Palimpsest is kind of like that. It’s about words – lots of words – more than it is about the characters and what happens to them. It’s not surprising that Valente, in addition to writing a lot of fantasy and sci-fi prose, also writes a great deal of poetry. Palimpsest is, from beginning to end, a feast of words, of descriptions of the bizarre city and the people who are traveling there (not to mention how they’re getting there).

Language is clearly Palimpsest’s strength. Unfortunately, it’s also its biggest weakness, at least for me. Valente gets so wrapped up in descriptions and baroque prose that it’s easy to get lost in the words and skimp on meaning. As a result, character development suffers, as does any kind of real plot momentum, which greatly ramps up with about 1/3rd of the book left, as if Valente suddenly realized she had to actually do something other than have the characters wander around Palimpsest.

Which is understandable, because Palimpsest itself is an easy place to get lost in. Think of the most bizarre kind of world ever visited by Doctor Who, multiplied by a few levels of magnitude, and then given form by animator Hayao Miyazaki. Seriously, it is completely weird in the best sense of the word. For readers, anyway. For the residents there – including a cadre of mute wounded veterans of a war that may or may not be over – and our visiting main characters, the city tends to have some pretty rough edges. When the four characters decide they want to stay in Palimpsest forever, it doesn’t seem like a natural consequence of their nature, but rather a necessary engine to drive the plot.

Ultimately, what left me most unfulfilled about Palimpsest is the questions that I had about the world Valente created, both as it applies to our “real” world and the fictional city. Valente calls Palimpsest a “sexually transmitted city,” but is it the most communicable STD of all time (all four characters begin the book without the mark, sleep with one other person, then have it – a 100% transmission ratio)? Or is there some kind of volition involved in giving it to someone else? What is it about sex that opens the door to Palimpsest? What happens if the person with the section of the city on their body where you want or need to go isn’t attractive to you? What if you’re straight and that person is of the same gender? Three of the four characters are conveniently bisexual, which removes a potential area that would have been interesting to explore. Why do all four have to agree to go permanently for any of them to do so (another quartet had a member die and is permanently shut out)? And how exactly does Palimpsest work, anyway, with its combination of purely magical mythology and steampunk mechanics?

In the end, the word that jumps most to mind when thinking about Palimpsest is one that gets thrown at things like Brave and Tommy, too – pretentious. In and of itself, that’s not a bad thing – I love Tommy and Brave, after all. But I suspect how much one enjoys Palimpsest will come down to how enamored they are of Valente’s verbose style. It keeps me from being truly wrapped up in the book. But there are enough interesting ideas and audacious imagery that it made me think a bit. And that’s never a bad thing.

A final note on something I don’t comment about much when it comes to books. As with lots of books I “read,” I actually listened to Palimpsest via Audible. I’ve never really gotten thrown off by the reader/narrator, but this one really had some issues. Particularly when it came to one character who is Italian, whom she gave an outrageous “that’s a spicy a meataballa” accent (until, near the end, he thankfully lost his tongue). From a quick search in Amazon’s “look inside” feature, the dialogue doesn’t appear to be written that way. If that’s correct, it was a horrible off-putting choice on the reader’s part.

The Details
------------------------
Palimpsest
By Catherynne M. Valente
Published 2009
Nominee, Best Novel – 2010 Hugo Awards
Winner, SF/Fantasy/Horror – 2009 Lambda Literary Awards

Does Genre Matter? Sould It?

Let me tell you about a movie I watched recently . . .

It’s about a 17-year old girl, A, who is on the verge of big things, about to go off to a very prestigious college. She makes a grave mistake, driving drunk and causing a car wreck that leaves a man, B, in a coma and kills his wife and young son. A few years later, after A is released from prison, she seeks out B in order to atone or apologize or . . . well, maybe she doesn’t quite know herself. B, a shell of his former self due to the accident, doesn’t know who she is (juvenile records are sealed, remember). Predictably, yet improbably, they bond, until the awful truth is revealed. A makes one last gesture seeking forgiveness. The end.

If I asked you what genre that film would fit in, what would you say? Drama, broadly, and possibly tragedy, in the classic Greek sense. It’s also a small indie film, of the kind that focuses on only a few characters and their relationships with each other. So far, so good.

Now, let me add a little twist.

The story of A and B play out against the backdrop of a superbly improbable event – the appearance in the sky of a second Earth that, by all accounts, is just like ours (down to having the same people on it). And the last act of forgiveness A does for B is to give up her spot on a spaceship to the other Earth to B, so that he might find his alternate wife and son there.

OK, now what kind of genre are we talking about? It sounds like science fiction, except that the movie almost goes out of its away to avoid any “science,” ignoring the real world calamities that might arise if another planet suddenly appeared very near to ours. Fantasy then, maybe? Or maybe just the general rubric of “speculative fiction” – a simple “what if?” story, without any grander world building ambitions?

The film I’m talking about is Another Earth, a low-budget indie that took Sundance by storm a couple of years ago. It’s very good – the slow dance of the two main characters, although fairly predictable, is very well done – but I’ve seen more than one person up in arms that it dares to call itself sci-fi. Not just in a “this isn’t marketed the right way” sense, but in a “this isn’t sci-fi, therefore it’s crap” sense. As if they feel they’ve been duped. Does that make any sense?

In one way it might. If something is presented to a reader/viewer/listener as “science fiction” or “progressive rock” (to use another genre with hotly contested boundaries) that triggers some particular expectations in their mind. If those expectations aren’t met, they’re disappointed. I understand that. I’ve got albums in my collection that came out of the prog world but don’t really fit the genre, if we’re honest. It took me a little while to let go the “but they’ve got the wrong label!” observation and just get down to the music.

Similarly, while Another Earth is sold as sci-fi (by some, at any rate), it’s pretty clear early on that it isn’t really interested in any of the scientific ideas or problems raised by the sudden appearance of the additional Earth. It’s more of a big blue metaphor, hanging in the sky promising a second chance for our characters. I could understand the frustration if they had tried to deal with the scientific stuff and did it badly, but where that is so clearly not the focus of things, why get hung up on it?

At the end of the day, however, a movie, book, or album stands or falls on its own merits, not how its described, packaged, or sold. To say negative things about a movie because it doesn’t conform to your preconceptions of what you thought it was going to be is awfully closed minded. That doesn’t mean you have to like it – art is subjective, after all, and what moves some people will seem pointless to others. Fair enough. But unless you reach that conclusion with the blinders removed, it doesn’t really count.

At best, genre labels and descriptions are signposts that might guide you to art you would like. If you’ve seen movies X, Y, and Z and they fall under the heading “film noir,” you might want to explore other movies with the same label. But that label doesn’t guarantee quality. Sturgeon was right (or perhaps too generous) – 90% of everything is crap – even within your own pet genres.

I’ve written before about how frustrating it is when writers from outside the genre dip their toes into the speculative fiction pool but furiously deny that’s what they’re doing. It suggests that they have negative preconceptions of what science fiction or fantasy is – pulpy, poorly written, simple escapism, etc. – that they don’t want linked to their work. It’s unseemly and reeks of snobbery. Readers or viewers who do the same thing, and link genre purity with quality, aren’t any better.

Beware the Flying Snowman

There’s a scene in Dogma, Kevin Smith’s religious satire, where Rufus, the overlooked thirteenth apostle, explains to Brittany, the film’s heroine, that she is the last descendent of Christ. She objects:

Bethany: Jesus didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Mary was a virgin.

Rufus: Mary gave birth to Christ without having known a man's touch, that’s true. But she did have a husband. And do you really think he'd have stayed married to her all those years if he wasn’t getting laid? The nature of God and the Virgin birth, those are leaps of faith. But to believe a married couple never got down? Well, that’s just plain gullibility.

That’s the first thing that popped into my head when I read this post by John Scalzi. It stems from the kind of argument only a geek could love – whether the way Gollum dies in The Return of the King lacks realism because the lava that consumes him doesn’t work the way physics says it should. Scalzi makes the reasonable objection that, in a movie filled with fantastic elements that don’t exist in our world, what is it about lava that goes too far? He calls such moments The Flying Snowman (for reasons you’ll have to read the post to understand).

Scalzi is not arguing that just because a story is fantasy (or science fiction, for that matter) that you just switch off your brain and ignore things that don’t seem quite right. Rather:

if you’re going to complain about one specific element as being unrealistic, you should consider the work in its totality and ask whether in the context of the work, this specific thing is inconsistent with the worldbuilding.

I think that’s a fair demand, so I’ll deploy it to analyze one of my personal Flying Snowmen – vampire sex. Regardless of whether we’re talking about the dark brooding Angel type vampire or the sparkly douchebag variety, everybody agrees that vamps are dead. Or the “undead,” whatever the hell that means. As a result they have no pulse. Blood does not circulate through their veins. Yet this seems to not put a damper on their sex life (other things do, but that’s not relevant to the point). So my question is, how they hell do undead beings with no pulse or circulation manage to get erections? It just doesn’t make sense.

Until you apply Scalzi’s analysis. After all, by digging into a story about vampires, you’re already buying into a lot of stuff that’s simply explained by some magical hand waiving. If they’re dead, how do they move at all? How does an inert digestive system evolved to subsist on regular food make energy out of blood? What’s with the no reflections in the mirrors and such? By the time you get to undead boners, “magical Viagra” really isn’t that much of a stretch.

Everybody, I suspect, has their own Flying Snowmen when it comes to fiction. The question becomes whether it’s something that just makes you snicker or completely throws you out of the suspension of disbelief needed to enjoy speculative fiction. It also asks broader question about how readers should approach fictional worlds that are clearly not our own.

One approach is to assume the world is like our own, except when specifically shown otherwise. That’s easier said than down when dealing with modern urban fantasies (like the aforementioned Angel) than heroic or high fantasy, since we know how the world around us operates, but it’s possible. For example, the medieval world into which the heroine of Doomsday Book is dropped behaves just like our own, although she got their via time travel. With such an approach you wind up looking for oddities and things unexplained by the narrative.

The other approach is to say that since we’re in a fantasy world all the rules are off the table, unless otherwise demonstrated. Assume you have a world populated by non-human sentient creatures. One gets hurt, maybe thrown from a great height onto solid ground, in a way that would render a human out of commission for a long time. This creature recovers quickly, however. There’s nothing “wrong” with that, assuming we haven’t learned somewhere else in the story that these creatures are as frail and breakable as humans. Maybe that story element doesn’t work on its own merits, but that’s a different issue.

Which approach works best? It depends on the story, of course. I’ve got one epic fantasy kind of thing with no humans at all (ready for a second draft in 2012!).  It’s a completely alien world.  I’ve got another one percolating that will have exclusively humans involved.  It’s different, but it looks a lot like what we know of the world. I’ll think about those differently as a writer. I’d expect a reader to do the same.

In the end, everybody’s Flying Snowmen moment is different. It’s impossible for authors or directors to be able to anticipate every area of expertise that a reader/viewing might be able to bring to bear on a story. Difficult as it can be, perhaps it’s best to heed the words of the MST3K theme song

repeat to yourself it’s just a show / you should really just relax

Although, in the case of Gollum’s fiery demise, I suspect it has less to do with worldbuilding or the mystical nature of Mount Doom than it does with a very real phenomenon: artistic license. Sometimes, you don’t let the real world get in the way of a good story.

Friday Review: The Magicians

I’ve read lots of books and seen lots of movies and TV shows with characters that are less than stellar. Heroes, even, who are deeply flawed and, in many cases, assholes. I get it. A complex and tortured protagonist makes for compelling drama. But in all of my life, I’ve never wanted to haul off and hit a fictional character.

Until I met Quentin Coldwater. If I ever, somehow, ran into Quentin, I would no doubt pop him in the mouth on general principles. Quentin is the hero and main character of The Magicians, which more than one reviewer dubbed “Harry Potter for adults.” Quentin is also a complete, utter, and colossal douchebag.

Quentin is an about-to graduate high school student who is whisked away to an exclusive (and invisible) college in upstate New York, where he will study instead of Princeton. During his years there he, along with his friends and rivals, learn to be magicians. To what end? Well, there isn’t really one. There’s no great battle against evil for which they are being trained. Further study of the actual mechanics of magic is discouraged, as it tends to make people go crazy (allowing the author to skirt the issue of how magic in this world actually works – either a clever sidestep or a cowardly dodge, I’m not sure which). Although we’re told that magicians work around the world behind the scenes of governments and other power centers, the world of The Magicians is, in terms of history and society, exactly like ours.

Which is why, for the last hunk of the book, after Quentin and crew have graduated, they spend most of their time in another world, where their training comes in handy. Called Fillory, it’s a lot like C.S. Lewis’s Narnia with the serial numbers filed off. In fact, according to a comment to this review, it was originally supposed to be Narnia but Lewis’s lawyers put the kibosh on that. Exciting things happen in Fillory, and lessons are learned, but none of it really carries much weight.

That’s because Quentin is such a colossal douchebag. He begins the book as the stereotypical moody teenager, completely disaffected with the world around him. And by the end of the book . . . he’s exactly the same, only older (horribly lame attempt at a happy ending/sequel setup notwithstanding). I get the point being made (Quentin is constantly looking for meaning anywhere but where he is and is never able to find it), but it doesn’t make for a protagonist that I can really care about.

Take, for instance, the time Quentin spends in New York City after graduating from college. He reunites with some friends who graduated a year earlier. Unlike his dour home in Brooklyn, they live in Manhattan. They don’t have to work, have mastery over the elements, and spend their days planning lavish dinner parties. They drink too much and fuck (too much, too, as it turns out). All the while, he’s got a girlfriend whose only real problem is that, for all her brilliance, she can’t see what a douchebag Quentin is. With all this going for him, Quentin is still a miserable shit. Seriously? He’s not even the 1%, he’s the 0.01% and he’s still a mopey twit? Arghh!

Given all that, I can’t say I really liked The Magicians, obviously. However, it’s got an episodic feel to it and some of the individual set pieces are worth the trip. Others aren’t, such as the laughably bad ending. It’s definitely a mixed bag.

There’s a sequel, as I mentioned, which I already have to I figure I’ll get around to reading it at some point. I only hope that, a few years on, Quentin’s learned to enjoy himself a little bit. Or I’ll have to pop the douchebag in the mouth.

The Details
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The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
First published in 2009

Behind the Scribbling: “The Last Ereph”

Over the weekend, the final edition of The Absent Willow Review went live, which includes my short story, “The Last Ereph.” You can read my story here. Be sure and check out the rest, too. Some of them look pretty good. Thanks again to the AWR folks for publishing my story, and my condolences on going out of business.

That said, I thought I’d provide a little bit of background on that story.

I actually started this story out the old fashioned way, longhand. I took a pen and notebook with me to ProgDay in 2010, figuring that the rustic setting and downtime between sets would provide some good inspiration. Why I didn’t think to take my netbook, I have no idea. My handwriting is legendary in its awfulness and my hand cramps up after a few lines. Regardless, it jotted down about the first half of things in the shade at Storybook Farm, appropriately enough. The rest came together at home, with invaluable editorial assistance from K. Any particularly brilliant turn of phrase is probably due to her. Thanks, honey!

The inspiration for the story came, oddly enough for an atheist, from some sympathy for a dying religion. I read an article a while back in the New York Times about Zoroastrianism and how it was on the verge of dying out. Now, the Zoroastrians were monotheists way before it was hip, worshiping one god in Persia before even the Jews came on the scene, must less the late arriving Christians and Muslims. That being said, they should be legion, yes? Not anymore. From what I remember from the article (caveat – I could have it completely wrong), Zoroastrians don’t prosthyletize, don’t claim an exclusive in to the truths of the universe, and don’t frown on things like intermarriage with folks from other faiths.

What I took away from the article was that the Zoroastrians were disappearing because they were open minded and non-confrontational, which really struck me as kind of a shitty fate. So I decided to write about it. In the universe of “The Last Ereph,” people belong to “cult houses” like people today belong the churches. They’re more philosophical than religious, although there are those about (I guess – maybe we’ll find out sometime later?). The semi-hero, Kol, stumbles into a decrepit house of a cult with only one remaining member. Will it stay that way? You’ll have to read it to find out.

As for the perhaps most critical question, asked by my parents: “how do you pronounce ‘ereph’?” I have no idea. That’s one of the beauties of writing fantasy – I get to make up words and not give a damn what they sound like out loud. I’ll leave the film/television/audiobook adapters to worry about that.  And individual readers, of course.

That's it.  Enjoy!

Friday Review: A Dance With Dragons

George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire got off to a fast start, relatively speaking. The first three books appeared in only four years, which, given their doorstop size, is pretty impressive. No surprise, then, that legions of fans were hooked in those years. Things slowed down, considerably, with book four, A Feast For Crows, taking five years to hit the shelves.

Feast was disappointing, partly because three major characters from the earlier books were entirely absent. But no fear - Martin explained in an author's note that Feast as originally conceived was too sprawling for one volume. Rather than split it chronologically, he split it up by location. Those three characters would return in the next book, which was well on the way to being finished, anyway.

That was six years ago. Was it worth the wait? Does Dance measure up to the hype? Yes and no.

The good news is that we do get lots of those three missing characters. Tyrion Lannister, the hard drinking, smart ass dwarf, has his adventures, while the dragon queen Danerys and Night Watch commander Jon Snow deal with the problems of rule in their distinct lands.

The bad news is that, all things considered, the overall plot of the series hasn't advanced all that much by the end of the book. It would be wrong to say that nothing happens - lots of stuff happens. But our main characters spend the book dealing with specific problems, only to have the rug pulled out from under them in the end and essentially reset everything. What happens along the way is interesting enough, but it seems like filler when it has very little payoff in the end.

Thankfully, Martin throws in a couple of new faces along the way who (unlike the ones in Feast) actually make some impact on the plot. One, in particular, shows up with yet another claim on the throne of Westeros and takes some action to get it back.

In the end, it's hard for me to really get a handle on Dance. For one thing, I just came to the series recently, so I haven't been waiting six years for this installment to appear. I don't have the issues with Martin that some fans do. But, I'm deep enough into the series that it's like a favorite TV show - I'm happy to get back into the world and meet up with interesting characters, even if the end result isn't completely satisfactory.

The bottom line? The next book can't get here fast enough.

The Details
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A Dance With Dragons, by George R.R. Martin
Book five of A Song of Ice and Fire
First published in 2011

On Trilogies (and Beyond!)

Today's a big day in the sci-fi/fantasy world.  After years of waiting and several false alarms, volume five of George R.R. Martin’s dark epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, arrives in stores today (I’m downloading my copy from Audible right now).  A Dance With Dragons drops nearly six years after volume four, A Feast for Crows, even though in an afterward Martin promised that the next volume was practically already written. 

Obviously, it wasn't that easy.  The ensuing delay left a lot of fans pissed, both due to the teasing nature of updates about the next volume, but also out of a fear that Martin might go the way of Robert Jordan and never actually finish the series in his lifetime.  A Song of Ice and Fire is only scheduled to be seven books (compared to the sprawl of Jordan’s Wheel of Time series - 14 books and still carrying on posthumously), but still, with so many years in between, who can be sure?  The level of disgruntledness got so high that Neil Gaiman stepped in to inform everyone that "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch."

That’s part of the problems with books that are part of a series, particularly these days.  Although I'm enthralled by Martin's work, my one gripe is that the first four books in the series aren’t really self-contained units.  It’s more like the story progresses along until it reaches book length, find a stopping point, and that's it.  Sort of like a TV series that just keeps going without any rigid idea of where it’s going from season to season.

I got the same feeling during the book I just finished, Robert J. Sawyer's Wake.  First of a trilogy (naturally), it’s a pretty disappointing execution of a really neat idea (once blind girl becomes a mentor to a nascent consciousness that’s developed on the Web).  But more than that, part of the frustration was that Wake is really only interested in setting up the pieces to play around in the next two volumes.

As a reader, I find that very frustrating, particularly for something like Wake.  It's easier to overlook in something you really enjoyed and know you’ll continue on to the next volume.  But if the first book doesn't hook you but doesn't tell a complete story in its own right, it feels like a colossal waste of time.

As a writer, I hope I can do a little bit better.  The Water Road, my 2009 NaNoWriMo project (revision of which will be my big job for 2012), is designed as the first part of a trilogy.  But I hope it tells a story in its own right, while pointing the direction in which the second book will go.  If nothing else, when the movie rights get picked up but only the first version gets made because the box office sucks (a fantasy world with no humans in which one of the heroines beats her mentor’s skull in – it’s box office gold, Jerry!) I’d like to think it was "complete."  At least to a point.

But, anyway, I'm hardly one to talk from a position to authority.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I've got some dragons dancing over here . . ..

Winter Is Coming

Growing up I read a little bit of fantasy. Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain were a favorite. But I was more drawn towards science fiction. I completely skipped out on Tolkien (the most important Tolkien-related think in my life is Marillion, for crying out loud), for example. Even Dune, which reads more as fantasy than sci-fi to me, didn’t make much of an impact. I don’t know if it was that I perceived sci-fi as being more “realistic” or if I just had an aversion to magic and tales of great quests.

That’s change over the past few years, as I’ve dug into the work of a couple of writers who made me rethink what fantasy was and what a writer could do with it. One of them is Neil Gaiman, a name I knew of (he wrote the best season five episode of Babylon 5, for instance), but whose stuff I hadn’t really read until the girlfriend gave me a volume of Sandman for my birthday. He’s brilliant, interesting, and usually funny (although often in dark ways). But that’s not who I want to focus on.

The other writer is George R.R. Martin, a prolific guy most well known for his expansive (and ongoing) series A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s epic fantasy, all right, but not the kind Disney makes cartoons out of. As Andrew Leonard put it at Salon:

Martin's fantasy saga demands a literary classification almost all its own -- call it, for better or worse, realist fantasy.

'A Song of Ice And Fire' is to normal fantasy what 'The Wire' was to typical cops-and-robbers drama, packed with grit, complexity and flawed human beings making their way through a corrupt and intimidating world. Heroes die, villains triumph, peasants and slaves suffer horribly and knights are as likely to be plate-metal-encased thugs and hoodlums as they are noble icons of chivalry. Loosely modeled on a medieval-era England ravaged by the Wars of the Roses, Martin's world does not gloss over the starvation, rape and murder that follow in the wake of war. The class stratification and brute injustice of feudal society screams out of nearly every page.

* * *

His characters -- male and female -- are among the most fully realized in all fantasy. Heroes may die -- major protagonists, even! -- but there's still plenty of heroism. There are also moments of great drama and magic -- as well as horror -- that require entire volumes to set up, and unload upon the reader with all the power of two tournament mail-clad lancers crashing into each other.

I love the comparison with The Wire. As odd as it sounds, “realist” and “fantasy” can work together. Martin’s example has encouraged me to try and work in a similar realm (so to speak), but we’ll have to see how those efforts pay off down the road.

The point of all this is not just to pimp Martin – although that’s OK – but to point out that the HBO series based upon Martin’s series, Game of Thrones, kicks off this Sunday (previews and much else here).

If you’ve ever thought that fantasy is just silly fairy tales fit mostly for kids and those stuck in permanent adolescence, I urge you to give it a shot. It’s only an hour (and five minutes, apparently) of your life. The only danger is you’ll get hooked!