Friday Review: Gravity

I'm certain about one thing went it comes to Gravity - director Alfonso Cuarón and his technical team earned every one of those Oscars they won last year.  The film is a technical marvel, seamless and incredibly real, particularly given that all but the last few minutes take place in space.

But beyond that - well, I'm conflicted.

Because, here's the thing - aside from the visuals, there isn't a whole lot else going on.  This is either a bold rejection of most storytelling conventions, in which case props to Cuarón, even if it doesn't quite work, or it's yet another example of a movie that's all about on-screen dazzle at the expense of things
like characters, plot, and the like.  Just because the visuals are used to bring to life something realistic and dramatic, instead of (for an example) giant robots that transform into easily sold commodities, doesn't give it a pass.

A regular flick, I suspect, would have given us some scenes on the shuttle before the big accident, or even on the ground during the run up to the mission, to get to know the characters.  As it is, only through some clumsy dialogue while they drift in space do we learn anything about them.  As a result, we can't really engage with them on an emotional level.  Yes, it would be tragic if they died while in space (as with the rest of the redshirts), but aside from that, why care?

But on the other hand, I respect that choice.  I have a short story where the main character escapes from many years of captivity.  One of the notes I got on it from my crit group wondered if he needed something more specific to "get back to" as motivation.  I didn't see it that way - he was a prisoner, for fuck's sake - but I can see the point.

I've often heard that short stories are better for adapting to movies than novels.  They have less material to start with, of course, so a director doesn't have to worry about cutting great swaths of material to tell the whole of the story.  Gravity feels like a short story, reminding me of something like "The Cold Equations," where it's less about the characters and more about the situation they struggle against.

Ultimately, it's hard to fault Gravity for not being the kind of movie I would make.  It's a visual showpiece, a true movie - something that would be nearly impossible to pull off in another medium.  In that way, it's a bit like 2001, which doesn't have the world's greatest script, either.  So that's good company to be in.

Gravity isn't much more than a trip, but it is one hell of  a ride.

The Details
------------------------
Gravity
Released 2013
Directed Alfonso Cuarón
Written by Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón
Starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney

Friday Review: The Postman

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on.

 - Mark Twain (maybe)

You can lead with all new lines

If you believe in what you say

And life can be just as you make it

Believe the lie and it will all come true

 - Umprhey's McGee (definitely)

Yeah, OK, so sometimes the lie is easier to tell than the truth.  But what happens when the lie is a noble one, one that (to borrow from The Simpsons) embiggens your fellow man?  And what happens if the lie gets out of control and takes on a life of its own?

That's the basic idea behind The Postman, by which I mean the lauded David Brin novel, not the critically savaged (hello Razzies!) Kevin Costner flick that sprang from it.  Gordon Krantz is not actually the titular postman - indeed, there are no such things in the post-apocalyptic world Brin lays out (in what is now our actual past). But he claims to be one, just to survive.  Then, shit happens.

Brin does an interesting thing in The Postman because instead of taking us through the apocalypse and the initial postlude of survival, he drops Gordon (and us) in 16 years after everything went to hell.  That's allowed the world to settle a bit, although it's settled into a world full of dangers, from mundane bandits to leftover pre-war survivalists with a philosophy that's very like Ayn Rand on steroids. It's while escaping from those kinds of bandits that Krantz comes upon an abandoned USPS truck, complete with dead driver inside.  He nicks the uniform purely for warmth and grabs a bag of mail for reading (and presumably other) material, no real intent to pull a scam on anybody.

The scam, such as it is, unfolds slowly and does require a bit of a stretch, that being that after nearly two decades of there being no such thing as the United States, much less the United States Postal Service, people are overwhelmed at the idea of getting mail service back.  Krantz's attempts to slip away from the first small town he comes to are complicated by people trying to pay him to take letters for them.  From there, Krantz builds an entire facade of being an official of the Restored United States and begins to forge some connections between the scattered Oregon settlements.

That's part one, in which Krantz falls into and embraces his scam.  Part two adds a nice twist.  He comes to the town of Corvallis (home of Oregon State University and a prime location for the post-apocalyptic Dies the Fire series), where society seems to be holding on pretty well and surging toward a brighter future.  It's precisely the kind of place Krantz has been looking for all these years, a place to settle down and help rebuild the world, but he's now trapped by his own lie.  He's unable to give up the postman game because of how much the lie has taken root behind him.  Thrown in another nice twist in the form of a still functional (maybe) super computer and this middle section of the book is a highlight.

The third part (perhaps not coincidentally, the part that wasn't originally published in stand alone form)doesn't fare so well.  There's an invading army of Randians threatening the struggling civilization, which Krantz decides to stay behind and fight, rather than flee.  Which is a shame, because when the big showdown comes - between genetically enhanced soldiers who have played no real part up to this point - he's watching from the sidelines.  Add in a weird bit of extremist feminism that seems more like parody than anything else and the book ends with a bit of a thud.

Naturally, this being Brin, it ends on an uplifting (ha!) sentiment.  He's big on science fiction as an inherently positive endeavor, showing how mankind will keep on keeping on in the future.  It's a hard fit for a post-apocalyptic tale, so it has to at least suggest that happy days are on the way to being here again.  Having said that, there's at least enough uncertainty in the world of The Postman to not make it feel like a cop out.

The Details
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The Postman
by David Brin
Published 1985
Winner Locus Award, Aurthur C. Clarke Award

Friday Review: The MaddAddam Trilogy

A couple of weeks ago it was announced that award winning director Darren Aronofsky has been tapped to adopt Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy for HBO.  Seems like a good choice.  After all, Aronofsky's last movie was about a petulant being who nearly wipes all life from the Earth because he gets pissed off. Basically, the MaddAddam trilogy is the same thing.

Which is not to say Aronofsky won't have his hands full.

Most literary trilogies - most sci-fi (and it is, dear reader, regardless of what Atwood would tell you) ones, certainly - tell linear stories.  The story starts in the first volume, continues in the second, and then is resolved in the third.  MaddAddam doesn't play the same game.  Yes, there is a continuous story being told, one of a post-apocalyptic world and the few people left to deal with it.  But the focus of each novel is on the past, not the present, as we learn just how this world came to be the way it is.  Which is good, because the flashbacks are, generally, much more interesting than what's going on in the "present."

Book one, Oryx and Crake, begins with Snowman (aka Jimmy), a post-apocalyptic hermit who lives nearby some very strange nouveau humans, to whom he is a kind of protector and prophet.  Through flashbacks, we learn that Snowman was friends with Crake (aka Glenn), an all around genius.  They were both in love with Oryx, who may or may not have been a girl they first discovered via only kiddy porn (See?  I told you the flashbacks were more interesting).  Crake's genius, as it happens, is tempered by his disdain for what humans have do to the planet, so he uses his skills to (a) engineer a virus that wipes most of humanity off the planet and (b) engineer the nouveau humans, called Crakers.

The second volume, The Year of the Flood, focuses on two women who survive the virus, Toby and Ren.  Their back stories intersect with each other via a environmentalist cult called God's Gardeners (they also intersect with Jimmy and Glenn, as it happens).  The Gardeners preach about the need to return to nature and of the coming "waterless flood," which will wipe humanity off the map (thus allowing the big bad from Aronofsky's movie off the hook after promising no more floods).  This book is interrupted, in numerous places, for sermons from the Gardener's founder, Adam One, and songs of worship.  For the audiobook, the songs are actually performed, which was neat at first, but quickly got old.  If we need hippified love-Gaia kind of tunes, couldn't they have called up Steve Hilliage?

The final volume, MaddAddam, picks up where the first two converge and goes forward from there, but also backwards.  This one focuses on Zeb and his brother, Adam (aka Adam One), and their role in the waterless flood.  This is all told, in flashback (naturally), to Toby, who then has the unenviable task of translating it for the Crakers, who continue to want to know how they came to be.

With any trilogy, there's a sense of diminishing returns.  No sequel, no matter how skillfully done, can replicate the fun of being thrown into an entirely new world that you get from the first volume.  The MaddAddam trilogy suffers from this more than others, thanks to its format.  Each book essentially tells flashback versions of the same story, but from different points of view.  It's more effective than you might think, but by the time we dive into Zeb's story it's less a matter of learning new information than finding out how characters we've come to know from earlier volumes fit into the narrative.

The "old" world that Atwood fleshes out in the flashbacks is fascinating, chilling, and hits just a little too close to home.  Corporations have become supreme, not by buying into government (like they do now), but by setting up their own heavily armed fiefdoms.  Those who don't work for the corps are stuck in violence and poverty plagued "pleeblands."  The seas have risen (New York City is gone, replaced by a new version in Jersey) and various kinds of genetically grown critters - hybrids of, say, lions and lambs (it's a religious thing) - roam the earth.  I won't go so far as to say that Atwood sets up a world that's worth destroying, but that argument could be made.

The only thing in the new world that's half as interesting are the Crakers, the nouveau humans created by Crake as the replacements for our kind of humans.  Made with a heavy dose of genetic engineering, they're vegetarians (the graze), run around naked but can stand the warming sun, and mate only every so often in weird rituals that involve gang bangs and waving blue penises.  Unfortunately, the Crakers are also exceptionally annoying, because Crake did not bless them with a mind as advanced as our own.  The interactions between the surviving humans and the Crakers are sometimes amusing, but often are only annoying.

The dullness of the new world is most evident in the closing volume.  For one thing, Atwood lets Toby, a character who has survived on her own for months and was clearly a strong person, devolve into an older variant of a moody high schooler.  She spends entirely too much of our time worrying about whether Zeb's out fucking other women, based purely on speculation, and, generally, becomes a very passive personality.  I'll assume Atwood had a reason for doing this, maybe some comment on the way we fall into old communal habits even in the strangest of circumstances, but it was hard to take.

Similarly, there's very little threat to the characters in the new world.  Since this was a biological apocalypse there's lots of spare materials to use for survival.  Yes, life for these characters is harder than it was before, but I never had a sense that they were truly eking out a survival (nobody succumbs to a mundane injury/illness, for example).  One potential menace from the earlier books, creatures called "pigoons," loose their power to frighten.  Originally created to produce spare organs for humans, they're the most advanced sci-fi swine since the piggies of Speaker for the Dead.  But, as it turns out, the Crakers can talk to them and a deal can be struck to keep everybody safe.  Bleh.

That leaves as big bads for the humans, Crakers, and pigoons to face a pair of black-hat killers, refugees of a pre-flood punishment game called painball.  Painball is so ruthless and violent that anyone who survives it is turned into a heartless psychopath bent on rape and murder.  It makes them scary, but it doesn't make them interesting.  For one thing, it's never clear why Toby and the group see the painballers as such a threat - they have them outnumbered and outgunned, so why don't the painballers just go elsewhere?  For another thing, the group of survivors shows little rational thought when it comes to what should be done to the painballers, even worrying that their offspring might be murderous psychopaths (which makes no kind of fucking sense).  The final big confrontation is saved only by a nice switch in narration that gives the whole thing a distant, mythical gloss.

If that makes it sound like I'm down on the whole trilogy, it shouldn't.  Atwood's style and way with prose goes an awful long way to making the entire thing worth reading.  It's dark territory she's exploring, but there are bursts of humor and satire that stand out.  The only thing that really goes wrong is that the entire enterprise runs out of steam in the end.  That stings (see the US collapse against Portugal last Sunday), but it doesn't invalidate everything else.

But it does mean that Aronofsky has quite a bit of work ahead of him.

The Details
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All by Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake
Published 2003

The Year of the Flood
Published 2009

MaddAddam
Published 2013

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
------------------------
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: The Half-Made World

We often talk of making the world over in our own image, but at the end of the day, the world is what it is.  Any transformation is mostly metaphorical and, on a cosmic scale, brief.  But what if the world itself was still in the process of being made?  And what if human expansion is what finally tamed it?  That's the background for The Half-Made World, an entertaining mix of steampunk, alternate history (sort of), and "weird" tales.

The eastern portion of The Half-Made World looks a bit like Europe or the eastern United States in the Victorian age.  Out west, over the mountains, is a country in the process of being settled, sort of equivalent to the American west of the same time period.But further west, beyond that, things get wild.  Part and parcel of that is a native population that is more in tune with the unmade world than the more "civilized" parts of it.

Our journey into this world comes with the aid of Liv, a practitioner of the budding field of psychology who, leaves her life in the east to work at a hospital on the edge of the settled west; Creedmore, the agent of one powerful faction who kidnaps her and one of her charges; and Lowry, commander of another power faction trying to track all down.

The factions are a pair of ruthless forces that are more ideology than physical things.  The Gun favors chaos and destruction, wrought through its agents who are controlled (to a greater or lesser extent) by demons that live in their firearms.  The Line, on the other hand, preaches mechanical progress (it's main instrument are engines, which appear to be sentient trains) and converts everything in its past to a world that sounds slightly like a predecessor to Terry Gilliam's Brazil (that the Line's commander is named Lowry is surely not a coincidence).

The Half-Made World has two things really going for it.  The first is the world in builds (so to speak), particularly the way it turns an age old order/chaos conflict into the running battle of the Line and the Gun.  There isn't much time spent on why each faction does what it does or where they come from - I kind of like the ambiguity.  Instead, the book focuses on how out west everyone's lives are controlled by their relationship to one of those two factions (ally, foe, or wary neutral).

I also wonder if the way the Line and the Gun are meant to be a metaphor for American anti-terrorism activities in the 21st century.  The Gun are the ultimate terrorists, causing damage and death for the heck of it.  The deeds are committed by scattered agents that number, perhaps, in the dozens, as opposed to a kind of formal militarized force.  The Line, on the other hand, is precisely that kind of militarized force, deploying a formidable array of clever weaponry that obliterates basically everything in its path.

Early on, as the Line is in pursuit of Creedmore before he arrives at the hospital, he winds up in a small town, Kloan.  When his identity is revealed a firefight ensues that leaves most of the town's prominent citizens dead and much of the town on fire.  In spite of all that, Creedmore escapes.  What's left behind is a town now under control of the line, one that was truly destroyed so it could be saved.  If that echo of our anti-terrorism policies abroad wasn't intended commentary, it's a hell of a coincidence.

The other thing The Half-Made World really has going for it is Creedmore.  He's the only of the three main characters who really stands out in your mind.T he Line commander is just a cog in a wheel, easily replaceable, which doesn't make for great characterization.  And Liv, while fully realized in her own right, just doesn't have a lot to do.  Creedmore, on the other hand, has a fascinating past - he fell into a life of crime only after trying just about every do-gooder organization in this world (abolitionists, advocates for the native "hill folk," religious groups, etc.).  But he's a good criminal, which is what attracted him to the Gun in the end.  But now, a long way down a life extended by the Gun's magic, Creedmore is having second thoughts about his master, with whom he has nearly constant running discussions.  I appreciate that the book presents all this as an ongoing matter and dodges the easy cliche of a "bad" man who turns "good."  Creedmore is much more interesting than that.

Unfortunately, there's an awful lot of chasing that doesn't add up to a whole lot.  The unmade part of the world isn't as interesting as the Line/Gun lands.  This shift about and are generally "weird," but not all that dangerous.  As someone else pointed out elsewhere, there's still air to breathe and food to eat.  Still, the chase comes to an end, so that means something, right?  Not really.  The great secret that all parties have been chasing is never explained, although it's hinted at.  More importantly, the main characters don't seem to have arrived at any sort of end point in their stories. The book ends like it's the first of a series, but although there is a second book set in this world it isn't a direct sequel.  So the lack of a hard ending is a big disappointment.

Not big enough to avoid recommending the book, however.  The world is inventive and it's worth spending time with Creedmore as the action spills out over the west.  That it might have been better doesn't stop it from being very very good.

The Details
------------------------
The Half-Made World
By Felix Gilman
Published 2010

Friday Review: Dying of the Light

If you only know George R.R. Martin thanks to Game of Thrones (and the Song of Ice and Fire books upon which it's based), you should know two things.

First, he is not your bitch.

Second, he wrote stuff before A Song of Ice and Fire, some of which was really pretty good.  When your debut novel is nominated for a Hugo award, you're no slouch.

Which is not to say there aren't some parts of Dying of the Light that sound a bit familiar all these years on.  It's set on Worlorn, a rogue planet that's spent about 60 years in a place where it was habitable.  As a result, it hosted a festival that became a kind of World's Fair on steroids for the neighboring planets, but, as the novel starts, the festival has ended and the world is growing slowly colder and colder.  That's right - winter is coming!  There's also a typical Martin focus on detail (what everybody's wearing, eating, etc.) that, at some point, goes from interesting background detail about the world into overkill.  Oh, and did I mention that one faction that comes to the fore in the second half of the book has a wolf's head as a sigil?  Only they ain't Starks.

Our hero (of sorts), Dirk, comes to Worlorn at the urging of an old lover, who may or may not need his help.  As a result, he's dropped into some first rate culture shock when he finds out that said lover, Gwen, is now married (after a fashion) to a guy, Jaan,  who is also in a long term relationship with another man (his "teyn"), Garse.  It's complicated, but Martin does a good job of fleshing out the culture of High Kavallar (where Jaan and Garse come from) and its honor-based economy.

The other thing Dirk finds himself in, of course, is the middle of a planet that's dying.  The most effective part of the book for me was the first third or so, during which Gwen shows Dirk around the planet, taking him to several of the different cites set up by the various cultures that participated in the festival.  Those include a still fully active (and sparsely inhabited) city run by computers and the haunting Crying Lamia, an entire city designed as a musical instrument played by the winds.  The music it makes is so melancholy that it drives people to suicide.  Kind of like Magma (kidding!).

This exploration also gives Martin a chance to dig into the rich relationship between Dirk and Gwen.  To say Dirk holds a torch for Gwen is putting it mildly, although it's not clear that she has any real affection for him.  She takes him to task for holding onto a memory of another version of her that he basically made up (and gave a different name - names are big in Dying of the Light), but isn't certain whether she's in a better position in these days than those.

I thought the second half of the book was less interesting, mainly because it turns into a standard (if well done) series of chases, double crosses, and reveals of middling effectiveness.  And as the running occurs there's an inordinate amount of Kavallar dick swinging that, along with everybody going by their full several-words-long name, gets old fast.  Martin wraps everything up by not really wrapping up anything, with an ending that is either cleverly open ended or downright maddening (you'll have to judge for itself).

It's worth keeping in mind that Dying of the Light, for all its charms, is a creature of its time.  As this review notes, Gwen is "more than a McGuffin but not much more."  She's the only woman in the novel and, although she's not merely a damsel in need of rescue, the book mostly revolves around how the men in her life scheme over her.

The Details
------------------------
Dying of the Light
By George R.R. Martin
Published 1977

Friday Review: Earth Abides

If Isherwood Williams is the future of the human race, perhaps best just to let it go and call it an eon.

I sometimes have a problem coming to things too late.  By the time I saw The Godfather and its sequel, the culture was so saturated in mob stories - from Casino and Goodfellas to The Sopranos (did I mention I came to it late?) - that it didn't seem fresh or all that interesting.  That's not a knock on its quality, just that it didn't really do it for me.

I get the same vibe from Earth Abides.  It is one of the first, if not the very first, examples of the post-apocalyptic "last man on Earth" subgenre of science fiction.  Published in 1949, it's won its share of acollades, including inaugural International Fantasy Award.  Heck, the version I read/listened to was even introduced by Connie Willis, no slouch herself.

So why doesn't Earth Abides do anything for me?  No, scratch that - why did it encouraged in me a positive loathing, at least at times?  Certainly part of it has to do with the genre itself having been played out ad nauseum over the ensuing decades.  The vistas of empty cities, decaying landmarks, overgrown lawns, and the like are all fairly common now.  Same for the struggle to survive in a world where the conveniences of modern life are gone.

That's certainly part of it, but a large part of my negative opinion of Earth Abides is that it is deeply entwined with its lead character, a hero who really is anything but.

Said hero, referred to as Ish for most of the book, is at an isloated cabin in the woods near San Francisco when some kind pandemic hits that wipes most of humanity off the Earth.  How he escapes that fate isn't really explained (it may have something to do with an infection from a rattlesnake bite he was fending off), but that's not important.  What is important is that when Ish comes down from the mountains to rejoin society, society's pretty much gone.

Early on Ish cites his background as a geographer and his termperment as giving him the perfect tools to observe how the planet will reclaim itself without mankind around to mess things up.  While this leads to some interesting digressions into the survival (or not) of particular environments or critters, it also, unfortunately, highlights the fact that Ish (and the author) are much more interested in watching than doing.  In fact, my main problem with the book is that we're trapped in Ish's head most of the time, even when he describes events that could serve as narrative jumping off points for some real drama.

A perfect exmaple - the book is divided into three main parts and covers over fourty years.  However, most of those years are blazed through in a pair of chapters in which Ish simply ticks of things that happend, including births and deaths that impact the makeup of the little tribe that just might be the future of the human race.  In addition to giving short shrift to those kinds of events, this allows Ish (and the author, by extension) to ignore lots of potential conflicts that could arise among a few dozen people trying to make a go of it after the world goes to shit.  There's very little dialog and even less tension, since everything is filtered through the lens of Ish's perception

Which is a major problem, because Ish is, sad to say, pretty much an asshole (I haven't disliked a main character this much since I read The Magicians).  His stand offishness doesn't come off as a chacater trait that will make it difficult to integrate with the new world, a barrier to overcome (which might have been interesting).  Instead, it's part of a smug superiority complex about himself compared to the rest of what's left of humanity.  Most of the first half of the book is taken up by an epic transcontinental journey during which Ish meets some other survivors, none of whom measure up to his standards for companionship.  Once he returns to the San Francisco area and settles down things get no better.  He repeatedly puts down the others in his little group as being stupid, not interested in intellectual matters, and generally inferior to him.  None of them are up to the task of rebuilding civilization, which Ish thinks is important, but not important enough to ever do anything about.  All of this wouldn't be so bad if we had something other than Ish's word to go by, but since we rarely see anybody else in action it's hard not to think he's just an elitest prick.

It doesn't help that Ish is very much a creature of his time.  The women of his little group (again, by his description only) are good for little more than house keeping, baby making, and a generic sense of "strength" in the face of even more generic adversity.  The one exception is Evie, a grown woman with some kind of mental deficiency or developmental disability.  For the most part she's simply an other, always kept apart from the tribe's subgroups when Ish feels the need to give us a census.  He even muses about killing her simply to be done with her and the problems she presents.

Evie's only part to play in the story is when an outsider, Charlie, comes to town with two of the younger men who have made another (aborted) transcontinental journey.  He's immediately "trouble" and starts to move in on Evie, probably giving her the only real attention she's recieved in years.  Ish is concerned and it's easy to see why - it looks like Charlie intends to take sexual advantage of a woman who's not metnally competent.  Good for Ish.  Only, it turns out, Ish's real concern is not for Evie's individual rights or bodily integrity, but that the resulting offspring would be idiots and, thus, drag the tribe down.  When Ish and a few others decide to off Charlie, it's less out of a sense of protecting an innocent than from some misguided low-tech eugenic concern.

It also doesn't help matters that Ish constantly changes the way he feels about the world lost and the world as it might be when he's gone.  On the one hand, he belittles some of his companions for holding onto memories of things from the old world that won't return for a long time, if ever.  On the other, he extols the virtue of books and the need to consume the knowledge in them, even if he never finds anyone worthy of his pursuit of that knowledge.  He wants someone to rebuild civilization, but it's never clear why as he didn't seem to have much fondness for it.

Which, oddly, counts for the greatest strength of Earth Abides.  For all its faults, the story itself is not the stereotypical one of surivovors picking up the pieces of a shattered world and trying to rebuild it.  Instead, Ish and his fellows just live, for years and years (all to easily, if we're honest), without undertaking great quests or schemes for rebuilding.  That's not the direction most works in the genre it helped spawn take, so kudos for that.

I recognize the prime place Earth Abides has in the genre's history.  And I recognize that, read at an earlier time with a more open mind, perhaps it would have a great impact on a reader (as it has to many others).  But on the verge of 2014, I have to admit that I just don't get it.  Earth may abide, but I don't think I'd be able to abide Ish for very long.

The Details
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Earth Abides
By George R. Stewart
Published 1949
Winner, International Fantasy Award (1951)

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

Keeping Copyright Meaningful

Over the weekend, Scott Turow had a column in the New York Times about the “death of the American author.” Although it begins with a jab at the Supreme Court for its recent decision strengthening the first sale doctrine (link), his broader point is that various forces – illegal downloaders and pirates, in particular – are weakening the real value of copyright. In baser terms, the situation is making it harder and harder for authors to get paid.

I’m sympathetic to Turow’s larger point. I dream, someday, of actually getting paid for writing fiction, so I’d like to think the legal apparatus to ensure those (equally fictional, at this point) payments will roll in. But I’m not sure the targets of Turow’s ire are quite correct. He points to various search engines that, when you search for an author or book title, will pull up numerous places to illegally download said titles. That’s troubling, but what else do you expect search engines to do?

The bigger problem is that there’s a market out there for people who want to access books (or other copyrighted materials) without paying for them. Putting aside cheap bastards who will always take a free version of something rather than paying for it (and who will always find a way to do it), why are people willing to go through the hassle (not to mention the legal exposure) or downloading something illegally from the Web rather than pay for it?

One reason might be that when the general public hears the word “copyright” they don’t think of the authors or other creative types whose income is tied to the protection of their intellectual property. More likely, they think of huge faceless corporations who wield copyright as a sword, not to protect the creative types, but to boost their own bottom line. Think of the old Napster lawsuits by the RIAA, bringing down the full force of the law and the Lord God on teenagers and college students who downloaded a few songs.

Or, consider the tale of Jayne’s hat.

Even in the world of sci-fi fandom, Firefly – a show that only produced 13 episodes, only nine of which were ever broadcast – has developed a fierce, loyal following.* That following has never particularly liked Fox, the network that originally aired it and, in the eyes of most, handled it in a way to ensure its early death. That the show is even talked about today, 11 years after broadcast, has nothing to do with Fox’s bungling and everything to do with the cast and crew that produced the show.

In one episode, Jayne – a gun thug with a heart of tin – gets a package from his mom. It’s not the most interesting package in the episode (two other character are gifted with what appears to be a dead body), but it’s a nice character moment. Jayne’s mom made him a hat:

Nice hat, yes? Many fans of the show thought so. As a result, after the show went off the air and the film sequel Serenity came and went, various crafty people made some and sold them on the Net (for a very detailed explanation of all this, see here). Everything’s good, right?

Except that Fox, after years of doing nothing, has allowed a company to license the hats and sell them. As a result, the DIYers have gotten nasty letters from Fox lawyers:

Turns out in the last few weeks many of them have received cease-and-desist letters or have simply been banned from Etsy for producing DIY Jayne Hats. This communal endeavor, it seems, is coming to a close, and fans of the show are asking themselves why. Isn't the whole point of the Jayne hat that it be homemade? Doesn't it mean anything that the hats are often auctioned off at charity events? After 10 years of nothing, isn't it unfair for Fox to suddenly force lifelong fans to cease production of something they love?

It’s all perfectly legal, of course:

And the answer, for now, is that Fox owns the license and that's that. The fans who are mad that the hat was licensed for mass production are the ones who are closest to hitting the nail on the head. The fact is, Fox now has a legal obligation to its shareholders -- they have to chase down anyone producing and selling a licensed product without permission. Ripple Junction holds the license, the fans do not.

But isn’t it kind of a dick move? Here’s the megacorp that killed the show in the first place, showing up a decade after the fact to capitalize not on its own success, but on the cult that thrived in spite of Fox’s neglect.

For most people, most fans, most consumers of entertainment products, that’s the face of modern copyright law. It’s not about authors, musicians, or artists trying to get paid for their work. It’s about corporations like Fox cracking down on fans and Disney lobbying Congress to extend copyright terms every time Mickey Mouse nears the border of the public domain. Is it any wonder that they see finger wagging about illegal downloads as more of the same?

One of the things I learned in laws school – I assume Turow did, too – is that sometimes the best advice a lawyer can give his client is to not fully pursue their legal rights. Sometimes there are other concerns – public relations, long-term planning, just plain doing good – that weigh against treating every problem like a hammer that needs to be relentlessly pounded.

Maybe Fox and the other corporate copyright holders should play a longer game and worry about what they’re actions do to the public’s perception of copyright. Ultimately, that may do more good than inveighing mightily against overseas pirates and the potential customers who frequent them.

* That’s because it’s fucking awesome!

Friday Review: The End of Eternity

I am generally loath to put “spoiler” warnings on things, particularly when discussing a book that was first published while my parents were in college. Regardless, if you’ve not read The End of Eternity, I urge you to do two things. First, go get it and read it, as it’s really quite good. Second, get the hell out of here before I ruin it for you!

Now, with that said . .

I’m not a huge fan of time travel in science fiction. The problem of paradoxes and alternate realities and such things makes my head hurt and, more often than not, squelches any real sense of drama. Maybe that’s why the stuff that works for me when it comes to time travel is the light (Dr. Who, in all its timey-wimey goodness) and comic (Futurama, in which the main character does, in fact, become his own grandfather).

The End of Eternity manages to sidestep those issues, thankfully, perhaps because it’s so submersed in time and travel through it, rather than the “real” world. Eternity itself is a collection of technicians, Eternals, who exist outside of time, traveling “upwhen” and “downwhen” with ease and impunity well into the future. Eternity exists outside of regular time and exerts its influence on “real” time when the Eternals make subtle changes to reality in order to produce a more peaceful, less chaotic human existence.

What Asimov does with the Eternals is rather clever. Instead of the main character, Harlan, being a rebel out to topple a controlling, autocratic system, he comes across as someone who really has no qualms with the system. In fact, there is no real dissent among the Eternals about the fundamental nature of what they do.  They are humble technocrats, nothing more.  That changes when Eternity messes with Harlan’s personal life, in the form of a woman plucked out of time named Noys, with whom he falls in love. To get her back, he’s willing to do anything, including destroy Eternity itself.

One painful thing about some of the old Asimov books is that they are very light on meaningful women as characters. Though he provides an explanation of why there are no women in Eternity, it’s not very satisfying and steeped in the misogynistic attitudes in place when the book was written. Thus, Noys is the only woman in the book. To Asimov’s credit, she becomes quite more than the bland love interest she appears in the beginning.

Ahead there be spoilers . . .

In fact, it is Noys who turns the whole thing around for a brilliant, stomach punching ending. We tend to read sci-fi set in the future involving Earth as being our future. It’s a reasonable assumption to make. What we learn at the end of The End of Eternity, as Harlan and Noys travel back to the 1930s, is that assumption in this case wasn’t true. As it turns out, Noys belongs to a group of even more sophisticated time travelers who don’t agree with the way the Eternals mess with the past to make it less chaotic.  Chaos drives innovation and the human desire to reach the stars (yes, Babylon 5 fans, this dichotomy sounds familiar).  She convinces Harlan not to make the change he was sent back to make. She then makes her own adjustment, sending a letter to a man in Italy encouraging him to “begin experimenting with the neutronic bombardment of uranium.”

That’s right – the entirety of The End of Eternity takes place involving a future Earth that is not our own. Harlan’s act, or decision not to act, along with Noys’s letter (sent to Enrico Fermi, presumably) gives birth to our own reality, complete with the atomic bomb, global warming, and (the big prize for Noys and, one suspects, Asimov) space flight. It’s a well earned twist that lands like a punch in the gut.

Asimov has always been one of my favorite authors, but I was ignorant of The End of Eternity until it was rereleased a couple of years ago. Is it “his single greatest novel”? I’m not sure, but it’s certainly one of the greatest. A must read if you think of yourself as a sci-fi fan.

The Details
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The End of Eternity
By Isaac Asimov
Published 1955

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

On Genre Snobbery

Stephen King certainly doesn’t need defending by the likes of me, but sometimes the guy doing the attacking is flailing so miserably that you just can’t help but join the fray, even belatedly.

I should start out by saying that I’m not a particular fan of King’s stuff. My initial exposure to him was the bad movies that were made out of several of his books while I was around high school age (Cujo and Pet Sematary, for instance). They all seemed so stupid (full disclosure – horror’s not really my bag to begin with) that I couldn’t imagine the books were much better.

In college, however, a couple of friends who were fans suggested I actually try reading some of his books. So I scarfed down Misery and The Stand and a few others. I quickly figured out why movies based on King’s books turned out so lousy – his strength as a writer was in description, set up, and cultivating a powerful feeling of dread. You just can’t take that kind of thing, plop it on the big screen, and expect it to work. It’s probably not a coincidence that my favorite King on film work is Kubrick’s version of The Shining, which King himself disliked so much he made his own TV version many years later.

That being said, back to the flailing lashing out man. In this case, it’s Dwight Allen, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books back in July (via). It’s a long, tragic tale of how, after decades of not reading any of King’s stuff on principle (Allen litters the piece with the names of the literary gods whose work he does read, don’t worry), he finally gave in and picked up a few of King’s lesser works. Not surprisingly, he doesn’t much care for them, although I’m not sure how anyone going in with this kind of attitude would have reached a different conclusion:

I thought I’d try another King novel, a later one, to see if his writing had changed over the years. I was avoiding, I admit, what was then King’s very latest, 11/22/63, in part because it is so long (more than 800 pages) and despite the praise it had received in, for instance, the New York Times Book Review (the editors decided it was one of the five best books of fiction of 2011) and The New Yorker (‘a deeply felt and often well-realized work, which extends King’s dominion over fantasy to the terrain of the historical record,’ Thomas Mallon wrote).

So I went to the library and took out The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999), which ran to a mere 220 pages. I liked the title — I am a baseball fan — though I wondered how many readers (diehard Red Sox fans aside) picking up the book in 2012 would recognize the name Tom Gordon (a.k.a. Flash Gordon, a relief pitcher who thrived in the nineties)

To be fair, Allen eventually does get to 11/22/63, but by that point the damage was done. It’s a bit like saying “I really ought to give Beethoven a try, but those symphonies are so gosh darned long. Maybe I’ll try a piano etude.” You’re setting yourself up to fail.

Which would be perfectly all right, if Allen was content to say, “this isn’t for me,” and walk away. Instead, he loudly protests that he’s not really a snob about this stuff, when he pretty obviously is. Thus, we’re no longer dealing in matters of taste, but in metaphysical battles of quality. Any doubt is wiped away in the last paragraph:

My son, George, who is now twenty-four, read a little King in high school, but he hasn’t gone back to him since then. After you’ve read Roberto Bolaño and Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, as my son has, why would you return to Stephen King? King may be an adequate enough escape from life, if that’s all you require from a book of fiction, but his work (or what I’ve read of it) is a far cry from literature, which, at its best, is, sentence by sentence, a revelation about life.

See, unlike you, dear reader of genre fiction (or, horror of horrors, purveyor of it!), George has evolved to a higher state of being. He no longer reads for the joy of it, but only to uncover revealed truths about life. He is, along with his father, a better class of human than the rest of us.

Buried deep in the piece, we find that Allen’s problem with King may stem from the fact that King tends to write genre fiction. We can assume Allen is not a fan:

I dabbled in science fiction, if Stanislaw Lem and Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood can be counted as science fiction writers.

Oh, yes, why would an author whose best known work is about scientists exploring a distant planet that appears to be sentient qualify as “science fiction?” Or whose best known work involves time travel and alien abductions? Or even one whose best known work is a vivid portrayal of the kind of dystopian theocracy that seems to shape so many modern right-wing fantasies? As I’ve written before, it’s sci-fi, deal with it.

I think that, at bottom, is what wound me up so much about Allen’s critique and others like it. As a genre writer myself, I’d like to think that anyone reading my stuff doesn’t give it two strikes out of the gate just because of that fact. If it’s not your thing, that’s fine. Just don’t shit on others for whom it is. Or worse, try to redefine the stuff you can’t avoid liking as something that it’s not.

Besides, if you only read stuff that is “sentence by sentence, a revelation about life” how do you get around in the world? Aren’t you too busy being transformed to actually, you know, work for a living?

Friday Review: Redshirts

As the saying goes about film or TV, there are no small parts, only small actors. That is, of course, horseshit. Every story has its bit players, those characters who do little more than fill in the shot, offer a terse, short line of dialogue in response to one the main characters, and generally get used at all because the plot needs them. There’s no shame in this. After all, everybody’s a bit player in somebody else’s life, right?

In the sci-fi realm, there are no more popular bit players than the usually nameless, and certainly never before seen, schmucks who accompanied Kirk, Spock, and such on away missions on Star Trek. They died at an alarming rate, you see. Given that they were usually security personnel and dressed in red, they’ve given a name to the whole enterprise (so to speak) – redshirts.

If Redshirts was just a Trek-like tale told from the perspective of the small folk, it wouldn’t be much to write home about. It’s been done, after all, from the classics (think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) to sci-fi TV (Babylon 5’s “A View From the Gallery,” among others). What Scalzi does is both more fun and more interesting.

Yes, the main characters of Redshirts are the small folk, in this case new crew members on a starship called the Intrepid. And, yes, their lives sound suspiciously like what you’d imagine the lives of Trek’s small folk to be like. But here’s the twist – Scalzi’s characters are smart enough to figure out that something’s up. They notice the terminal stupidity of the command staff and how the more senior members of the crew avoid them at all cost. They notice that things happen conveniently and for no explainable reason (there’s even a magic box that helps solve problems).

What they realize is that they are slaves to the Narrative, which appears to literally seize control of the actions of those around them when it suits it. It all leads to only one conclusion – that they are, in fact, living in a sci-fi TV show. Worse, it’s a bad one. Put another way, the Narrative is like God and God is a hack. Armed with that knowledge, they try to do something about their inevitable fates as mission-of-the-week cannon fodder.

And then things get really interesting. Using a hoary sci-fi trope, time travel, the real crew returns to our time to interact with the creators of the show and the actors who play them. This shifts the story from one of simple parody/homage, to a deeper and more thoughtful meditation on the creative process and how it impacts people. In the end, Scalzi writes more about writing than about spaceships, pulse guns, and ice sharks.

In other hands, the lane change into meta discussions about creativity would leaden and die, but Scalzi’s breezy and direct style lets him cut to the quick, most of the time. It helps that the book is funny, too, and will have any sci-fi geek nodding her head (or shaking it in exasperation) as things move along.

This is not to say it’s perfect. In my opinion, Scalzi is at his best when he’s being light and snarky. I became a fan of his blog before I even read one of his novels and prefer the funnier stuff to the hard-core military sci-fi that’s made his reputation. There’s a point in the last third of Redshirts where Scalzi adds a serious thread to the proceedings that bogs things down a bit. He revisits this more maudlin side of things in two of the three codas (codae?) at the end of the book. I just don’t think they work as well as the rest of the book.

But speaking of codae, the first one kicks major league ass.

In the end, Redshirts is terrifically fun, entertaining, and goes just deep enough to provoke a little thought. What more can you ask for? If you’re any kind of sci-fi geek, go grab yourself a copy right the hell now. Or else the ice shark will get you!

The Details
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Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas
By John Sclazi
Published 2012

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.

Friday Review: Destination Moon

In his penultimate column for FilmCritic.com, John Scalzi laid out nine sci-fi flicks “you should see that you probably haven’t.” I was pleasantly surprised to have either seen all of them or have them in the Netflix queue, with one exception. I knew the name Destination Moon, but had no idea it was a George Pal production and was co-written by Robert Heinlein. With that kind of pedigree, I immediately hit Netlfix and put it at the front of the line. So, was it a journey worth taking?

I think so, although more for archaeological purposes than sheer entertainment. Made in 1950, Destination Moon has a hilariously overwrought “American industry, fuck yeah!” setup that makes you wonder if Ayn Rand, in addition to Heinlein, had a hand in the script. After a governmental rocket program is scuttled by sabotage (done, probably, given the times, by filthy commies!), private industry takes over. A rocket is built to take a crew to the moon (the mechanics of which are explained by Woody Woodpecker). Meddlesome bureaucrats try to stop the launch (due to concerns over its nuclear propulsion system), which proceeds just steps ahead of a court injunction. Really.

Once the rocket launches, things really get off the ground, so to speak. From there on out, Destination Moon is a solid piece of 1950s hard sci-fi, complete with mathematical calculations and legitimate concerns about the safety of the whole enterprise. Of course, some of what is on screen we know now is wrong – laughably so, in some cases – but given where we were at the time, it’s pretty solid.

Unfortunately, the focus on hard science makes for a somewhat dry dramatic arc. Our heroes reach the moon, but this isn’t the moon of Georges Méliès or H.G. Wells?. There are no natives who take our heroes hostage. Not even any man-bats or what have you. Only rocks, dust, and a spectacular view of the Earth. Supreme credit to Pal and his crew for not trying to create excitement at the expense of accuracy. Shame it makes things a little bloodless.

More to the point, it forces us to focus on the heroes themselves who are, to put it mildly, barely defined at all. The notable exception is the second-string radio operator, the walking stereotype of a Brooklyn dimwit, who becomes the audience surrogate when things need explained, in spite of the fact that we all saw the damned cartoon not too long before. He’s hammered in as comic relief that just doesn’t work.

Thus, when drama finally arrives on the Moon, in the form of a variant on “The Cold Equations,” it’s really hard to care that one of the four crew members might have to get left behind to die, especially if it’s the annoying guy from Brooklyn. In perhaps the only real sop to story ahead of realism, the crew has a “Eureka!” moment and figures out a way to leave the Moon safely. So nothing’s really lost, for all that.

If only they would actually get home. It’s ironic that Destination Moon ends with the rocket on its return journey to Earth, but before reentry. We know from Woody that the rocket will deploy a series of parachutes to slow its descent before landing. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have addressed the problem of reentry temperatures and, thus, it seems that our heroes are destined to escape from the Moon only to burn up upon return to the Earth (or die in a fiery crash). Again, it’s likely they didn’t know any better at the time, but still.

While Destination Moon lacks quite a bit as a film, one thing going for it are its exquisite visuals (it won an Oscar for visual effects). It’s clearly dated to 21st Century eyes, but they do a fantastic job of servicing the story and providing some unique views of places nobody had ever been before.

Destination Moon is a odd one. It’s got a cheesy 1950s B-movie sentimentality, but it’s visually impressive and scientifically rigorous (given the times). We rarely see that in modern sci-fi. So maybe it’s more impressive than I give it credit for.

The Details
------------------------
Destination Moon
Released 1950
Directed by Irving Pichel
Written by James O'Hanlon, Robert Heinlein, Rip Van Ronkel
Starring John Archer, Warner Anderson, Tom Powers, et. al.

Friday Review: Le voyage dans la lune

If you’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (which is pretty damned good, by the way), then you know of Le Voyage Dans La Lune. Produced in 1902, it’s generally regarded as the first science fiction film ever made. It’s floated around for decades in grainy black and white, admired nonetheless for its groundbreaking effects and whimsy.

But grainy black and white wasn’t the way Georges Méliès intended Le Voyage . . . to be seen. In what must have been a truly pain in the ass process, Méliès and his collaborators colorized the original black and white print – painting it by hand. In 1993, a full-length version of the color print was found, but it was in terrible shape. It took nearly 20 years for it to be restored to the point where it could be shown again in public.

The premier took place at the Cannes Film Festival last year. To mark the occasion, the French electronic duo Air was commissioned to do a soundtrack (Le Voyage . . . is a silent film, after all). When I heard that, it was like a perfect storm of geekiness – a classic old film refurbished, a landmark piece of sci-fi, and a new electronic soundtrack? Sign me up! I figured I’d wait a few years before Criterion or Kino made the whole thing available on DVD.

So imagine my surprise when I discover a new album by Air called Le Voyage Dans La Lune, which takes the soundtrack for the 16-minute film and stretches it out to about twice that length (still pretty short for a modern day album). And, oh by the way, it comes with a bonus DVD that contains the film, in all its restored glory. Needless to say, I jumped on it, with more interested in the DVD than the album itself.

Needless to say, Le Voyage . . . is almost a completely different beast from movies being made 110 years after its debut. There’s no real narrative flow, just a series of connected scenes. The original film has no credits whatsoever (the restoration crew and the band get some added on). And, what’s most striking to me, is that there are no interstitial bits with written dialogue or explanation, as later silent films would have. It really is a completely visual experience.

Having said that, it’s really a hoot. The color palette has a lot more in common with animation than the real world (or even Technicolor), which would give the whole thing an otherworldly vibe, if it wasn’t already there thanks to, you know, it being about a trip to the moon. It’s easy to see why it caused such a sensation and stirred such wonder in the people who saw it on the screen. It’s also easy to imagine that with the first sci-fi film no doubt came for the first sci-fi fan nitpicker, who would deride the scene in which the massive cannon fires the “craft” towards the moon with no recoil whatsoever.

But this, technically, is a review of the album, not the movie, so what of the music? It’s good. As a soundtrack, it doesn’t mesh particularly well with the film until the first scene is over, which is a little off putting. Otherwise, it works quite well. The score itself is all instrumental, but the extra material on the album includes a couple of vocal tracks and some spoken word bits. They sustain the mood and feel of the film in fine fashion (the music on the album is not sequenced in the same way as the film). I’ve found Air’s output to be a little hit and miss, and while this is no masterpiece, it certainly qualifies as a “hit” in my book.

Bottom line – this is a pretty cheap way of owning a part of cinema history. And you get a pretty good album in the bargain, too.


Details
------------
Le voyage dans la lune, by Air
Released 2012

Tracks:
1. Astronomic Club (3:12)
2. Seven Stars (4:22)
3. Retour sur terre (Back on Earth) (0:45)
4. Parade (2:31)
5. Moon Fever (3:50)
6. Sonic Armada (5:06)
7. Who Am I Now? (3:03)
8. Décollage (Takeoff) (1:39)
9. Cosmic Trip (4:10)
10. Homme lune (Moon Man) (0:27)
11. Lava (3:03)

Players:
Jean-Benoit Dunckel (vocals, Mellotron, Wurlitzer, piano, synthesizer, organ bass, Solina, vibraphone, drums)
Nicolas Godin (guitar, harpsichord, synthesizer, timpani, bass, vocals, piano, Mellotron, electric sitar, percussion, drums, banjo, electric guitar)

with
Au Revoir Simone (vocals)
Victoria Legrand (vocals)
Vincent Taeger (drums)
Alex Thomas (drums)
Isabelle Vuarnesson (cello)

Friday Review: Hyperion/The Fall of Hyperion

One of the hazards of any series – of books, movies, or even a TV series – is that the various installments invariably get compared against one another. If you’re lucky, things get better as the series progresses. More likely, things tail off a little bit as the series moves on, but it remains interesting and compelling. Spare a thought for Dan Simmons, then, who knocked it out of the park so hard with the first novel in his Hyperion Cantos that even a very good follow up pales by comparison.

Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion are, in essence, two halves the same book that tell a unified story. In fact, Hyperion ends rather abruptly in the way that really infuriates me when it comes to individual books in a series. Having read both books now, I can see why such an abrupt transition was necessary. Each novel is so different from the other in terms of structure that it would have been impossible to tell the story in the way Simmons did in one continuous narrative.

The Hyperion Cantos (there are two other novels, plus some short stories that make up all this) take place in a far future where the Earth is gone (victim of the Great Mistake) and humanity has spread amongst the stars. Along with the humans are a super advanced network of artificial intelligences that help bind the human race together via interstellar communication and travel. Most important are the farcasters, portals through which people and material transfer from one spot to another. Think of Star Trek’s transporter system fused with the Internet and you kind of get the picture. Planets linked to the farcaster network are part of the WorldWeb, in fact. There’s an existential threat to the WorldWeb, the Ousters, who live outside the reach of the network and its AI managers.

One of the interesting things Simmons does with the farcasters is that he takes a completely fantastic technology and makes it utterly commonplace. They aren’t only used for quick transit between distant planets, they’re used for quick transit from one room of a home to another. The truly wealthy, in fact, have homes with so many farcaster portals that each room is on a different planet. Makes any gold-plated mansion Trump comes up with look like an outhouse.

Against that background, Hyperion adopts the structure of The Canterbury Tales to set in motion a catastrophic change in the universe. It tells the story of seven pilgrims on their journey to Hyperion, a planet that lies outside the WorldWeb and sort of off on its own. Hyperion is home to the Shrike, a demon/god/monster that impales people on its metal tree of thorns near a clutch of artifacts called the Time Tombs. A church or cult has sprung up around the Shrike throughout the WorldWeb. An odd number of pilgrims, it is said, seek out the Skrike. All but one is killed. That one may have his or her request heard.

But Hyperion is less about all that than it is about the pilgrims making the journey. The Canterbury Tales frame format allows Simmons to essentially tell six separate short stories (one of the pilgrims disappears before we hear his tale), in varying styles, about these characters. As it turns out, all have been touched by the Shrike in some way, from the poet who thinks the beast was his bloody muse to the father whose daughter, upon encountering the Shrike during a research expedition to the Time Tombs, is now aging backwards. Each story works on its own merit and serves to make you care deeply about these people.

In the background of all that is an impending invasion of Hyperion by the Ousters and what that might mean for the WorldWeb. And that’s where the big shift happens between the two books. In Hyperion, the galaxy spanning war and intrigue plays a back seat to the character stories of the pilgrims. In The Fall of Hyperion, things get flipped. Via a couple of new main characters (including a AI simulacrum of John Keats – no kidding!), the focus shifts from the personal to the epic.

That transition isn’t completely successful. Simmons has enough interesting ideas to keep things afloat in the second book, although it becomes increasingly messianic as things go along. Unfortunately, all those people we grew so attach to in the first book aren’t left with much to do. They all deal with the Shrike, in their own ways, and so there is a sort of closure. However, they all essentially end up for the good at the end of things, which diminishes some of the horror and dread surrounding the Shrike built up in the first book.

In the end, The Fall of Hyperion fails mostly because it is inextricably entwined with Hyperion, which is a masterpiece. Had the tables been turned, had the merely good come before the great, it would have made perfect sense. As it is, The Fall of Hyperion comes off more as a wasted opportunity than a grand sequel.

The Details
-----------------
The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
First published 1989
Hugo and Locus award winner – best novel

The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
First published 1990
Locus and British Science Fiction award winner – best novel