Way Station

The great Clifford Simak experiment continues.

After reading a "forgotten classic" by Simak, The Goblin Reservation, and then a collection of short stories, Skirmish, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of Simak's writing style. But what I haven't been able to figure out is why a number of fellow readers I trust feel so strongly positive about Simak's writing (cf. http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2009/08/skirmish.html). So, in a final effort to understand his appeal, I turned to Simak's Hugo-winning novel, Way Station, to try to find it. Given that the Hugo is a fan-voted award, it would seem a likely place to find the characteristics that make him so appealing. And given the novels that it beat to win the 1964 Hugo—Glory Road by Heinlein, Witch World by Norton, Dune by Herbert, and Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut—it would have to be pretty darned good.

What I found is a novel rich in potential with a startling scenario that develops some of that potential but is diminished by the ham-handedness of the writing, the same issues I have found with the other Simak I have read in the past couple of months. Imagine: soon after the Civil War, a weary Union soldier back at his home (probably in Wisconsin) is met by the emissary for a galactic confederation, who has decided to put a transfer station in their galactic transport system on Earth. For nearly 100 years, Enoch Wallace has been the sole representative of humanity to a galactic culture, and by all accounts is doing well; transportees apparently seek his station out in order to talk with him and his walls are lined with the gifts of thousands of visitors. Wallace has also taken some effort to learn skills to make him more effective at his job: he has learned the languages of some of the alien races that come to visit him and he has studied the philosophy of some of those races as well. And even when tragedy strikes, the accidental death of a visitor, he acts with care and grace, quickly meeting the mores of the alien culture. By all accounts, he is a model station master.

But Wallace's own earthly surroundings act against him. Given that he has been alive and apparently unaging for over a century brings him to the attention of the CIA, who have started monitoring his every activity (what few there are outside his home) and even go so far as disinterring the inhabitants of the family graveyard. Their concern is stoked by the ongoing cold war, so that the very oddness of Wallace stands out as either a threat or as the potential for a new weapon against American enemies. At the same time, Wallace's neighbor severely beats his deaf-mute daughter, who then seeks asylum with Enoch, sparking the ire and spite of a hillbilly clan. They attempt to force their way into Enoch's home in search for their missing Lucy, only to find that its alien composition is proof against their every attempt. Suddenly their suspicion is raised and they finally recall that Wallace hasn't aged in 100 years and so merits some level of suspicion anyway; they start muttering and gather together with their drinks, forming plans that Wallace is warned will turn into a lynch mob. And as he harbors the neighbor's daughter, Lucy, he discovers that she has some sort of ability to heal those around her.

And then the troubles on Earth seem to leech over to his interactions with Galactic Central. The CIA has disturbed the gravesite of the alien Wallace has buried, raising serious questions about ability of humans to appreciate different cultures and causing a move to have the way station removed from Earth to begin. Wallace uses high-level social mathematics on the cold war and determines that there is no solution that will not result in the Earth being destroyed by its angry inhabitants. Wallace discusses this issue with his best friend an alien he has named Ulysses, who tells him that the confederation might be able to help with its ultimate corrective technique—they can make the entire race stupid, so stupid that they will fall into a dark ages for generations and perhaps arise from it with a newfound appreciation for each other. Finally, the coping device that Wallace has been using for his solitude, an alien tool that allows him to create ghostly friends of any type and personality he wants, goes dreadfully awry such that his constructs—in the form of human companions—have developed sentience and no longer wish to exist only at Wallace's beck and call. To top off what is most likely the worst day in any individual human's experience, Wallace learns that his view of a peaceful harmonious galactic culture is completely wrong; the culture he has worked for and admired for nearly a century is just as fractured and factional as much as Earth's, and Wallace is actually employed by a faction that is slowly losing favor in the opinion of the rest of the galactic culture.

Every bad thing that can happen to Wallace, short of his own injury or death, happens in a single day. Leading up to this bad day, Simak introduces the oddity that is Wallace by letting his audience listen in to the CIA briefing someone about their investigations. This device actually works really well, evoking the strangeness and potential wonder that surrounds Wallace. And then just as we meet Wallace, he has the day from hell; Simak brutally piles up calamity after calamity on Wallace and thus the reader, so that there is a crushing weight of expectation on everything. Wallace actually spends most of his day in solitude and the few interactions we see with other characters, human or otherwise, indicates that he is basically a good person with a strong ethical center. But the calamities that befall Wallace cause him to have to become more independent, re-enforcing his solitude, such that large portions of the book are made up of extended passages of Wallace thinking. And while Simak describes action sequences well, even if that action involves two people having a conversation, when he turns to internal monologue (as he often does in his works), the writing becomes dramatically weaker. Unfortunately, the fairly strong premise of the novel, despite the piling on of catastrophe, forces Wallace to have no one to interact with except himself, in turn forcing the long-winded internal ramblings that we get.

In the moments when Wallace remembers, thinking back to the events that have led him to the situation he finds himself in now, Simak is able to continue to provide action, his strong suit. Simak uses fairly simple declarative sentences, a structure reflecting the relatively straightforward movements of the participants. But the passages when Wallace contemplates his options are also written in the same way, which imply a lack of depth in his thoughts. And since the events that have befallen Wallace are pretty much beyond his control, no solutions are forthcoming, so that we get short declarative thoughts that go around in circles, generally centered on despair at the events which have befallen him. And those passages go on and on, dragging down the tension created by all the calamities until I found myself just pleading with Wallace to do something, anything.

Lying just under the surface of these events is a contemplation of the role of man in a universe made at once more vast than previously imagined and also smaller because of its similarity. Wallace waffles back and forth between leaving Earth behind if the station is closed down and remaining on Earth. But if he were to leave, how would he cope, a lone human in a giant galactic civilization, more alone than any human ever had been before? But if he stays on Earth, how can he cope with having tasted the wonder of a galaxy filled with newness but having it cut off from him forever? And what is Wallace's responsibility to humanity when it seems hell-bent on destroying itself? And is humanity special, somehow different in its individuality or is it just another different species in a wide galactic civilization, not more or less deserving of consideration despite it being our species? These are huge questions, which in the hands of other writers might lead to long thoughtful treatises. But Simak makes such contemplation impossible because the protagonist must deal with his worst day ever, and by the rapidly approaching deadline of nightfall, when the lynch mob intends to arrive at his door.

And then everything gets resolved. I won't spoil it, but thoughtful readers should see the threads of the resolution in the narrative, but it is no less a deus ex machina solution for being foreshadowed. Nearly every single problem Wallace has is resolved in one fell swoop, and the last few pages are spent tying up the loose ends, until we are faced with Wallace's most personal problem, which remains inexplicably unfixable. Simak chooses to resolve the most human difficulty that Wallace faces by asserting human weakness over strength after humanity triumphs in the solution of all else. Simak strives for poignancy in this moment, but fails because his writing style does not allow for poignancy—poignant is not often found in short declarative sentences. The moment reinforces the dichotomy of humanity (or really any race) in this new culture, different but ultimately alone. But it is based on such a clichéd moment from other genres that it is ultimately unsatisfying and an unfortunate choice for the final moment in the novel.

I end up desperately wanting to like Way Station, wanting Simak to expand the possibilities by removing some of the disasters and giving Wallace and the readers time to think about the doorstep they find themselves on. Instead, it's compressed and rushed, written in a style not conducive to deeper thought. The result is confusion, a hurry up and wait pace that is resolved through the actions of no one in particular, and the desperate wish that all of it could be given more time to come together.

Flood

You may recall that after my review of The Sword-Edged Blonde, a conversation with a reader led me to realize I really haven't read much noir or crime fiction after Chandler and Hammett. I solicited advice about good stuff to read to get a feel for the genre more recently, with the results that I have read Robert Parker's Spenser novel Ceremony and just finished Andrew Vachss's novel Flood as well.

Vachss's protagonist, known only as Burke, is a completely different animal than Parker's Spenser. Where Parker is confident and somewhat brash, Burke is the most paranoid character I have ever read about, including the works of Philip K. Dick. There are hints that his paranoia has some basis in his experiences, but the reader is never given details of those experiences (at least in this novel). Whatever the rationale for his fears, Burke is constantly concerned that someone is going to come after him and takes highly unusual precautions to prevent it. For instance, he has trained the guard dog for his office to not eat until given a specific command in order that a burglar or assailant cannot feed her drugged food. And the command to eat is counter-intuitive, so that said burglar more than likely cannot stumble across the exact word—no one expects a dog to eat when you to tell it "speak." Burke goes into tremendous detail to describe how he gets around not only being tapped on the phone but also keep from paying for phone service; the hook-up of bouncers and receivers across New York City to serve his purposes reads like a description of a circuit diagram and accentuates his efforts to thwart pursuers that are never seen in the course of Flood.

Those moments also reflect Burke's tremendous attention to detail which extends to every facet of his life, a life the majority of which is spent working for his clients or protecting himself from unknown stalkers. The passages where Burke pours over the various racing forums in order to pick his horses could be tedious, but Vachss turns them somehow fascinating in the near continuous ramble that is Burke's narration. When Burke travels through New York City, it often feels like the description of moving through a labyrinth, but again, his narration is somehow compelling.

Readers generally know very little about the protagonist's past in noir and detective fiction: the novel is set in the eternal present and usually the narrator has no interest in reliving past successes or failures. Burke feels even more reticent, perhaps because of the supporting characters he has gathered around himself. They practically demand explanation: Max the Silent, the deaf and mute brother whose very presence terrifies gang members into complete obeisance; the Mole, a stunted mechanical and electronic genius so twisted by his own past that he may be even more paranoid than Burke; and the Prof (short for Prophet, not Professor), a street-smart wise-cracking source of information for Burke who also somehow holds some sort of power over street denizens. But Burke is not forthcoming, perhaps because telling their stories would end up revealing more about himself to complete strangers—the readers—than he is comfortable doing.

And so the star of the novel, really, is its author, Vachss. Despite the many potential barriers between the reader and the narrator, it is difficult to put the book down for any length of time. Perhaps it is because of a desire to see how someone so apparently socially stunted as Burke can get along on a day to day basis, or a sort of unspoken demand to know more about this crazy cast of charcters. But for me, part of the allure is just to feel Vachss's power over words and the plot, enjoying the little nuggets from Vachss which provide a distinct reality to the madness of Burke's world. For instance, Burke has a quirk of using language that implies that objects perform actions on their own which is repeated throughout his narration, so that instead of saying "I turned the car around the corner" he says something like "The car turned the corner". This type of phrasing happens over and over and hints at tiny details about his personality—that perhaps part of Burke's fear is a sort of belief that objects hold some kind of power. Burke also uses short declarative sentences when he writes and when he talks, giving the novel a sort of sing-song feel as it moves along. The result is a fully realized and believable Burke, an expression of Vachss's craft and skill.

Into this well-written world comes Flood, a potential client for Burke, looking for a man who has hurt her in the past. Burke, while attracted to Flood, initially turns down her job offer because he senses that no good can come from finding the man and fears that the result would put him in the spotlight—somewhere he decidedly does not want to be. But something about Flood makes Burke realize that she will potentially try to resolve the issues on her own, thus putting herself in danger, and so he begins his own independent pursuit. What follows is a diary of not only his investigation but the day-to-day workings of Burke in a culture he is ill-suited for, but in which he apparently succeeds often, given the friends beyond his immediate circle he can call upon to help him. Burke actually isn't a very good investigator, but what he does is doggedly follow each lead he gets until it completely peters out, showing patience and determination beyond most people. This is the generic framework of noir novels, a basic procedural gussied up to become something greater than the repetition of tired tropes and clichés. And along the way, we get his wry observations about the way the world works and the people in that world, neither of which he thinks too highly. It becomes clear over the course of the novel that his peculiar friends and outlook are a coping mechanism for a man ill-suited to his surroundings, but he is also a man who has made a family for himself and has no desire to hurt them or leave them.

Flood is some good stuff. The paths that Burke follows lead into some very dark places, and there is irony that we rely on a protagonist so completely flawed to get us back into the light. But Vachss's mastery of the craft does not really permit questioning until the book is set down and the reader can reflect on what a strange place he has just visited. I would argue that, like some of the very best speculative fiction, Vachss rises above all the dross that comes from writing in a genre and attains a level beyond. It is compelling and frightening and fascinating to travel along with Burke. And I have to recommend taking at least one ride through the tough city with him.

Inglourious Basterds

After the many commercials and the trailer for this movie, I was prepared to come away from it truly hating it. Quentin Tarantino generally dances along the edge of smarminess, fully aware of his post-modern referential style and near-terminal hipness, and probably pretty aware that he is on the edge as well. The mixed opinions about the body of his work come, in good part, from where the individual viewer stands in relation to that edge. For myself, I enjoy films that are smart in that way, but I don't want the movie to become a vehicle for that, but instead attempt something greater and use Tarantino's specialties to push the greater goal. His half of the Grindhouse movie, Deathproof, failed for me because it was interminably talky and the characters had given me no reason to care about what they had to say. The other tool that Tarantino sometimes overuses is the shock of violence, making blood spatter ironic and, as in the case of the Kill Bill movies, a little humorous (think of the Black Knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail if you don't think violence can be funny). And from what I had seen in the trailers, Inglourious Basterds was going to go too far towards violence with attempts at witty banter to keep up the humor.

But it turns out the trailers and commercials lied to the viewers. Maybe the plan was to entice viewers by banking on their most base instincts—blood and laughs—and then show them a film that aspires to something far greater. Inglourious Basterds is made up five chapters, and two of those chapters contain none of the namesake team at all, so the team of guerillas is not the primary focus of the movie. In some ways they are secondary to the most important plot of the movie, more facilitators than protagonists and ultimately serving as a distraction for the climax of the film rather than prime movers.

The movie begins in an unexpected place: the hillsides of France where a lone farmer and his three daughters are visited by a party of German soldiers at their home. The soldiers are led by Hans Landa, played by Christoph Walz, one of the two major acting finds for American audiences in the film. Landa is at the farm to verify the reports of where the Jews in the area have gone, appearing engaging and mindful of the interests of the farmer's family: he appears to recognize he is intruding and thus is exceedingly courteous, despite being part of the occupying force and the stereotype the Nazis carry with them in media. He even graciously changes the conversation to English since the farmer does not speak German and his own French is weak. However, the conversation quickly turns ugly when Landa reveals he knows that one of the Jewish families thought to have escaped are hiding in the basement, and that he has chosen to speak English because he does not believe the family can hear him. The result is the massacre of the hidden family with only one member escaping, the teenaged Shoshanna.

Thus are the events that make up the movie and its climax set up. Shoshanna grows up on the run and eventually ends up in Paris, running a movie theatre. She is played by another newcomer to American film, Melanie Laurent, a sublime actress who acts as a counterpoint to the usual over-the-top movements that characterize the actors in a Tarantino movie. Hauntingly beautiful, her face conveys subtle nuance of emotion without the necessity for words, a skill that is played up wonderfully in her lone scene with Waltz's Landa, as she confronts the man who has killed her family and expects to be killed herself at any moment.

We also get to see the origin of the Basterds, watching Brad Pitt delightfully chew the scenery as Lieutenant Aldo Raine, a native of eastern Tennessee put in charge of a squad of Jewish Americans, whose only purpose is to terrorize the German armed forces, especially the Nazis. The commercials and trailer make clear how the Basterds achieve this goal, and there is some delightful story-telling surrounding the description of the Basterds' techniques. Pitt clearly enjoys his role as the pragmatically sadistic Raine, who only allows survivors to leave his grasp with a swastika carved into their forehead so that even when they remove their uniforms, everyone will know what they are. Pitt steals nearly every scene he is in, so it's important to note he never appears onscreen with Laurent's Shoshanna. But he does appear on screen for some time with Waltz's Landa, who is so patently evil and manipulative that Raine just sits back and lets Landa do all the heavy lifting. There's a sort of coda to the movie, where Landa and Raine clash one more time, and if its conclusion is a surprise, then you just weren't paying attention in the rest of the movie.

After the two threads are established, they are mixed together as each party independently decides to firebomb the movie theatre at the premiere of Goebbels' next film. Shoshanna and the Basterds have no knowledge of each other but they share a goal, that of destroying the highest echelons of the Third Reich at the movie, including Hitler, who has decided to attend for his dear friend Geobbels. Each of the last three chapters deal with different aspects of their individual plans and then they move forward together in the final chapter, most of which takes place in the theatre itself.

Of course, being a Tarantino movie, there are relatively set scenes where there can be nothing but dialog, including an English spy receiving his orders with Winston Churchill in attendance and Shoshanna's terrific interview with Landa, now personally responsible for Goebbels' security. In the case of the latter, the tension is palpable both because the audience knows things the characters don't and, again, because of Laurent's acting skill and Waltz's previous scene where we know just how deadly a man he is. However, perhaps the most fascinating set piece takes place in a tavern in France where the Basterds are to meet their German mole. Nothing in a Tarantino film ever seems to go as planned and the Basterds find themselves playing drinking games with German soldiers. While the explicit conversation seems banal, lurking just underneath it is the tension of the audience knowing things some of the characters don't and the characters figuring out what the audience knows. The tension grows until it becomes more explicit than implicit in the conversation, fascinating the audience with dread for what they know must happen. And then, after the violence explodes, Tarantino continues the tension by further pushing the idea of games among those who survive the conflagration, with questions that demand answers not for the sake of the rules of a game, but for the preservation of the Basterds' mission.

So while this movie follows a relatively straightforward "espionage in war" arc, others of Tarantino's touches are all over it. He picks the music that seems right to him, no matter if it is contemporaneous or not, so we end up with a great deal of the music of Ennio Morricone along with the odd song by, for example, David Bowie. I sometimes find such temporal mash-ups to be disconcerting, but the choices in this case always effectively set the mood for the scene, either by ramping it up or playing its counterpoint and calling the emotional quality of the scene into relief. Similarly, Tarantino makes references to other films to build up the density of context and expectation. The audience thinks they know what is going to happen, and part of the delight is having those expectations overturned. Only once could I foresee exactly what was going to happen, and it made for a pleasing emotional period for both me as a viewer and for the audience.

One thing about Tarantino's movies that shows how well he keeps the user on edge is how the audience reacts. I was struck by the number of times in Inglourious Basterds people laughed at scenes that were expressly not funny, where offhand humor is used by a character to express shock and relief. And yet at times where the humor was pretty stark, a lot of the audience wasn't sure how if it was safe to laugh at those moments. And with an audience so malleable to the movements of the picture, the director can do amazing things.

The final chapter is explosive, troubling and yet satisfying all at once. Especially powerful is how Tarantino uses Shoshanna's face, usually so masterfully controlled but now contorted into a frenzy of emotion. Those few moments are haunting but made especially so by the combination of Tarantino's light touch (which is remarkable considering his sometimes very heavy hand) and and Laurent's acting. And at the end, the audience is torn between whether the movie is a comedy or tragedy, reflecting that pretty much no one's life is uniformly one or the other, as all the while Tarantino takes the biggest World War II movie trope and turns it on its ear.

Tarantino goes for something much bigger in Inglourious Basterds than small stories about unusual people. He sets his sights on telling an epic World War II movie and very nearly succeeds at that epicness. The end result is, shocking to me when I left the movie, very good and worthy of many viewings to pick out the nuance hidden behind the huge gestures. While the film is at timers bloody, the core story of revenge is deftly played. I'd like more of this from Tarantino as soon as possible. And I definitely want more from Waltz and Laurent as soon as possible.

Space Vulture

When I was around 11 years old, I started working on an outline for a novel that would parallel the writing of my favorite author at the time, Edgar Rice Burroughs. You can imagine how derivative it would have been: boiling down dozens of Burroughs novels to their most basic parts and then regurgitating them in a poorly imagined setting that reflected not so much on my originality but on how often I had read Burroughs's books. Unfortunately, Space Vulture feels much the same, lacking originality in its attempts to recreate the writing that amused the authors as kids. The authors of Space Vulture, Gary Wolf and Archbishop John J. Myers, write parallel prefaces in which they describe their long-term friendship and their adolescent love of pulp space operas and planetary romances. They also are unabashed in their attempt to recapture the storytelling style of those stories in their novel. I've read enough pulp writing recently to know that the school they follow is not some of the more original writing in the genre; it certainly is not on a par with C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, or Harry Kuttner. Instead it contains all the tropes and clichés that have given science fiction the reputation it has among those who don't read it.

The characters are more like caricatures. There's Space Vulture himself, who is the archetype of the super-villain: smarter than a thousand computers, the handsomest man alive in the universe, and evil beyond measure. Self-assured and cocky, he is the perfect foil for the Victor Corsaire, the self-made Space Marshall whose reputation is as great as Space Vulture's, which irks the criminal no end. Cali Russell is the fiercely independent widow, raising her two boys in all the best ways despite basically living on a giant frontier. And Gil Terry is the down-on-his-luck criminal who faces up to the events that led him to a life of crime and overcomes them as he grows to care for Cali's two boys. None of the characters grow at all, and Cali even loses some of her independent spirit—which generally shows up in the most infuriating and least productive ways—to the irrepressible do-goodery of Corsaire. The only character who has any growth is the slimy Terry, and even the path of his growth is pretty obvious and clichéd. I desperately hope his great background reveal towards the end of the novel is not meant to be too big a surprise, as its foreshadowing is less shadowy than starkly obvious.

Other aspects of the writing are just flat as well. There is far more telling than showing through the course of the novel; the writers use an omniscient third-person narrator who has to info-dump throughout in order to introduce the reader to each exotic and far-fetched idea. The reader is not gently immersed in this future galactic society, but neither is he tossed in to figure out what's going on through interpolation. Instead, when information has to be shared to get around a plot point, or to make a plot point, the story just stops and whatever is necessary is piled up in front of the reader in long paragraphs closer to technical writing than creative. And when there is action in the story, it is ham-fisted and abrupt.

Every now and again, I go back and read Burroughs or another of my favorite authors, E. E. Smith. I've grown enough as a reader and as a writer to recognize the flaws of that writing and try not to repeat them. At the same time, if I were to try to write an homage to either, I would like to think I would be able to build on the strengths of those novels and take the ideas to original places. Space Vulture does the opposite, making the same mistakes as their original matter and doing nothing new. I admit I expected some camp for Space Vulture but it goes beyond camp, earnestly removing tongue from cheek and moving tediously forward without any self-reflection. There is very little humor in Space Vulture, and what there is not referential, but just as clumsy as the serious portions.

I look at the covers of the Space Vulture and I see glowing recommendations from the likes of Paul diFilippo and Gene Wolfe. I recognize that nostalgia is based purely on our own experiences as children. Perhaps Space Vulture is a brilliant homage, but I can readily admit that I have no appreciation of the kind of writing that it imitates. Perhaps real fans of pulp science fiction, readers whose memories of such stories are wrapped up with the happy days of their childhood, will just fall in love with Space Vulture. Alas, this book was no trip to Pellucidar or adventure in one of the Skylarks.

District 9

Since I walked out of the theatre yesterday afternoon, I've done a great of thinking about this movie, so the very least I can say about it is that it is thought-provoking. However, I don't believe I am thinking about the things the movie's creators wanted me to think about. Directed by newcomer Neill Blomkamp, the movie has tremendous aspirations of becoming a classic and tries ridiculously hard to achieve that goal, but the stress of trying is readily apparent, and the movie ends up falling short. Instead, I find District 9 to be somewhat thin, a worthy first effort to be sure, but with gaping holes that wear away at the Theme of Overwhelming Importance that seems to be filling the minds of viewers and reviewers alike.

The movie begins as a false documentary regarding the events that surrounded an attempt to move 1.8 million aliens (called "the prawn") from one containment area to another. To provide the background to the events that we are going to see unfold, the documentary recounts the history of the prawn, including their arrival in 1982 in a giant ship that hovered stationary over Johannesburg, its holds filled with sick and filthy prawn with no apparent leadership. The prawn are brought to camps that rapidly become slums, and the prawns, separated not only by their different culture and language, but their extremely alien appearance, rapidly become the lowest class of citizens. These are not the aliens of Alien Nation who at least appear somewhat human; these look walking arthropods and they speak in a language that human mouths can't possibly duplicate (somehow, though, humans are eventually able to understand them without translation—and they understand humans). Criminals prey on the prawn, especially because of their weapons, weapons that appear strangely powerful but can only be used by the prawn because of some kind of DNA lock. The film then alternates back and forth between the documentary format and a sort of third-person omniscient point-of-view, causing the viewer to see events that the documentary crew has no access to. Yet the movie always returns to the documentary narrative style, especially when it feels that its ethical points are not being made clearly enough.

And yet it would take someone with the emotional maturity of a brick not to get the point District 9 tries to hammer home. The allegory is obvious, especially couched as it is in South Africa: people, both as individuals and a culture, have a terrible capacity to treat anything different from themselves with contempt and prejudice. Even those previously mistreated are not above inflicting the same horrible actions on a newly discovered class that is lower than themselves. It's not a subtle observation, and District 9 does not play it out subtly. At the same time, however, it offers only one solution for the problem of prejudice and fear of the unknown, instead harping on repeated instances of abuse and prejudice and human foibles until it can no longer.

Meet Wikus van der Merwe (played by Sharlto Copley), a mid-level manager appointed by the head of a major multi-national (named MNU) to lead the effort to evict the prawns from their current camp to one hundreds of kilometers distant where they can no longer instill fear into the people of Johannesburg. Van der Merwe is competent in his company's exploitation of the prawns, obviously familiar with the laws that govern their living space and their interaction with humans. But it becomes clear that he has been given the job because he is too stupid to fail; he has the compassion and ethical maturity of office furniture. Sent into the camp to give the prawns 24-hour notice of their eviction and their signatures on a form, he satisfies himself at one point with the blood of a prawn on the form when it resists too hard and van der Merwe's accompanying guard enacts his displeasure. We look on in horror as he uncovers a nest and gleefully shows the documentary crew how the larval prawns scream when their nutrients are pulled from them and how they make popping sounds as they are set on fire. In many ways, van der Merwe is The Office's Michael Scott sent out for National Guard training. And just like Scott, it is sometimes difficult to watch just how bumbling van der Merwe is, especially since his ineptitude leads to the death of presumably innocent sentients.

And then the movie pounces; van der Merwe's ineptitude causes him to be exposed to an unknown fluid and within hours he is in the hospital, his left arm now the left arm of a prawn and the rest of his humanity slowly leeching away. Immediately the multinational he works for springs into action: they now have a creature with a balance of human and prawn DNA, and the weapons they have been unable to understand suddenly show their awesome power in the tortured hands of van der Merwe. We are given scenes of the experiment chambers of the multinational, filled with rotting prawn corpses, and the documentary tells us that MNU is mostly interested in the prawn not for humanitarian reasons but for the potential weapon applications that they carry. Van der Merwe's father-in-law makes the fateful decision to kill him and use his half-human, half-prawn parts to backwards-engineer the weapons. Terrified, van der Merwe escapes to the only place he can seek safety—District 9.

As he wanders the camp, van der Merwe runs afoul of the gangsters there taking advantage of the prawns, and who have come to believe that eating prawn meat gives the power of the prawn to the eater. Why this story is believed is never really clear since the prawn are loathsome, comedic figures most of the time and only fearful at best when they are drunk and rioting. They have been portrayed as horrible dregs and leeches on society, so I'm not sure what potency one could expect. So of course the Nigerians want to eat van der Merwe's arm. As he escapes from them, he stumbles over the smartest prawn we get to see, one who had a plan for the prawns beyond subsisting on human forbearance. It is this prawn, named Christopher Johnson, who was responsible for the fluid that has changed van der Merwe and who, with a little help from van der Merwe, can get him to the medical facilities on the mother ship and change him back to human. Van der Merwe agrees to help Johnson and his child, but only because it will heal van der Merwe of his condition.

And then the movie falls apart, becoming an extended action sequence with humans pursuing van der Merwe and Johnson. As they fight their way into and out of Johannesburg and then across District 9, the movie makes two important plot points: first, Johnson (of course) is the only "person" we see who shows any dismay at the torture and death of the prawn and second, van der Merwe finally stops acting selfishly (maybe) and comes to Johnson's defense when he is captured and in the hands of particularly vile military forces, the leader of which gloats that he is paid to do a job he already loves, killing prawn as gruesomely as possible. But even the rescue could be ascribed to ulterior motives for van der Merwe; if Johnson dies, there really is no hope of van der Merwe returning to normalcy at all. And these two nuggets of plot advancement are buried in the extended chase scene, where buildings and people are blown up indiscriminately in buckets and sprays of gore.

So the massive allegory that the first half of the movie sets up arrives at only one conclusion for resolving the hideous prejudice it describes: become the alien. I suppose this is meant to be an example of practicing empathy but it is taken to extremes and the movie actually offers no hint as to whether this actually resolves anything. Instead it ends with an amazingly clichéd scene, attempting to once more yank on the heartstrings of its viewers in an attempt to …motivate them? I'm not really sure. Any effort that the movie has made to be socially relevant has been destroyed by the extended violence.

Only one character is remotely developed in the course of the movie, that of van der Merwe. I give the writers credit; he is a fairly realistic character that is difficult to like and Copley plays him well. But by the end of the movie, I really still do not like him very much, felling only sympathy for the situation he finds himself in. He makes no strides towards resolving his own horrible prejudice, does nothing to act out against the oppressors. The documentary returns to make it clear that the fate of van der Merwe spurs other people to act out on their conscience, and the plans of MNU are uncovered. But the documentary also makes it clear that the prawns are really not treated any differently as a result. As a result, as the movie concludes, it still feels tremendously unresolved, but only because it has made such great effort to paint the allegory in the first place. Unfortunately, the writers spent so much time making their allegory, part of the practical framework of the movie falls apart: the events of the movie make it clear that the action that started the whole crisis—van der Merwe's exposure to the fluid—never had to happen, that the prawns could have left long before Johnson began to make the effort. It's clear that the allegory is where all the weight of the movie resides and everything must serve that message, even if it s incomplete and diffused beyond recognition by the stereotypical action sequences.

I've read and seen viewers who talk about how this movie shows the potential that science fiction has in cinema, how it can be used to make broad sweeping observations about the nature of being human or some such. I see District 9 trying to make those kinds of observations, but I also see it failing in the end, as it resorts to the clichés that have marked science fiction in movies for the past few decades, since Star Wars. It turns out that District 9 does only one real science fiction-y thing that has been missing in movies all along: it presents a culture and race so alien as to be nearly unidentifiable. Science fiction series have the advantage of being able to develop these cultures over time and yet generally fall into their own tropes of using humans with facial deformities as their aliens. Finally, the mystery and possibility of what else is Out There has been shown on a movie screen, and District 9's creators are fairly smart to try to make this otherness into a point about humanity. It's a shame that the movie fails to deliver on the insight such a step forward as the prawns represent.

I'm torn on whether or not to recommend District 9. The vast majority of reviews claim this is a great movie, and I can see the potential for greatness. It is definitely not for the squeamish, and if you have any doubts, I think you could get away with not seeing it. But as an experiment in science fiction cinema, simultaneously hinting at the potential while choking on the clichés that have mired the genre, it is a fascinating work. It offers hope for the future of the genre, especially since the acclaim is so loud. I just hope that other creators using this as a guide see the potential in the genre rather than some sort of value in repeating the mistakes of past films.

Permanent Damage on Genre

One of the Web sites I go to over and over (such that it is on my group of links over to the left) is Steven Grant's Permanent Damage. It first got my attention because of its commentary on comics, going beyond a review of current issues or trends, but talking about why the industry does certain things and offering a refreshingly realistic view of what is going on in the comics world with a historical background.

In this week's installment, Grant sets his sights on something a little different, something that I have annoyed my friends with as I have thought about it out loud: "literary" fiction and the apparent assumption that "genre" fiction is absent literary quality. He focusses on SF and crime fiction as he makes his arguments, not even talking about comics until his last paragraph. I wanted to share this and will hopefully write a blogging response to it in the near future.

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=22513

It's really good stuff if questions of genre interest you.

Julie & Julia

Light and fluffy as a well-made soufflé.

Sometimes, the trailers for movies give away everything about the movie. In the case of this movie, starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as Julie Powell, a devoted fan, there really aren't any spoilers for the trailers to reveal. What you see is what you get: two stories intertwined, one about Julia Child struggling to find a goal for her life in France and then fulfilling it and the other about Powell attempting to cook every one of Child's recipes in Learning the Art of French Cooking in a single year. And it should come as no surprise that both principals succeed at the quests they give themselves and with only mild trauma.

Streep's Child is simply fantastic; she seems to embody the easily-caricatured chef so that as we begin to delve into the private life of Child, the one that most people never even considered to exist, we are alternately shocked by her potty mouth and pleased that, deep down, she is really One of Us. Child was an outsider in so many ways in France--tall, American, and distinguished by the nasal voice that has become her signature over the years—and in the Cordon Bleu, the legendary cooking school, she is also a woman. Madame Brassard, the head of the school, plays the stereotypical snooty Frenchman, determined it seems, to keep Julia from succeeding, even though the movie makes it quite clear that everyone that interacts with Child just adores her. The viewer is also given scenes of her achieving some sort of expertise in the culinary arts, but we already knew this about her, or we likely would not have gone to the movie in any case. The period pieces with Child are nearly worshipful, and she really is the heart and soul of the movie.

In modern America, Adams's Powell struggles with far less difficult obstacles: she's nearing 30 and her friends are far more successful than she (if you measure by cell phones), and she feels she has lost the track to fulfilling her potential as a writer. So she starts a blog in order to record her progress with her Julie/Julia Project. Unlike Child, Powell is not universally adored, but then she lives in a harsher time and in a harsher city, New York. But both Child and Powell are blessed with near-perfect husbands who believe in their wives and help to carry them through any obstacles to achieve their goals. Stanley Tucci's Paul Child is, as most roles that Tucci chooses, marvelous. He and Streep share a very strong chemistry on-screen, and he moves the audience with his sardonic wit and protestations of devotion to Julia. Unfortunately, Chris Messina, as Eric Powell, doesn't have the strength in his role that Tucci has in his. But since Adams doesn't have as much power in her role either, they sort of go together, sort of bumbling along through the course of the year. They have a tiff at the crisis point in the movie, and various issues rise up, but they generally handle them with the aplomb reserved for sitcom spouses. However, to say that their chemistry is weaker than Tucci and Streep's is not to say that they are bad in their roles—rather, their roles don't ask much of them, and what they do ask is delivered without as much art as by the other actors.

One might think that the emphasis of the movie is on cooking, but cooking is only the vehicle for the real thrust of the movie, that one should pursue one's dreams with passion and energy. The cooking scenes are stepping stones to each character getting to their ultimate goal. Child is passionate about her cooking and Powell is passionate about cooking Child's recipes and writing about the experience. They both get some luck in their quest, and they both have a few stumbles. But ultimately, Child's quest feels like the more important one, as we are told over and over again how she will change the world with her book. Powell's goal is not quite so selfless, but she chases it undauntingly.

And so, there ends up not much to say about the movie. The highs are not terrifically high, and the lows don't go down very far. While individual incidents are relatively unpredictable, the ultimate destination the movie achieves should come as no surprise, as pointed out ironically by the written coda that has become de rigeur for movies that even come close to biography. I hear and see the term "popcorn movie" used more and more often with action-packed thrillers where the audience is best served by leaving their brains behind at the door to the darkened theater. In many ways, Julie & Julia is also a popcorn movie, minus many multiples of explosions. But it does have one powerful feature those action movies don't: the stellar acting of Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci and their chemistry that lights up the screen.

Torchwood: Children of Earth

When last we encountered the Torchwood show, Mrs. Speculator and I were not very optimistic about our seeing it down the line (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2008/04/torchwood.html). A year has gone by and the creators decided to try a five-episode mini-series, something that we felt would be fairly tightly managed and a departure from the episodic nature of the first two seasons. And the memory of the Captain Jack from Doctor Who was still with us, so we recorded the whole series while in San Diego and only just sat down to watch it this past weekend with high hopes.

From a high level, there are moments in the mini-series that are some of the most powerful in the Doctor Who/Torchwood franchise. The premise was compelling: an alien race (which humans have named 456) announces their impending arrival on Earth using all the human children as a sort of speaker for their intentions. And it is quite chilling to see all the children stop at the same time and with absolutely no affect announce "WE ARE COMING" before careening off into their normal routines as if nothing had happened. As it turns out, the 456 are coming back, and the nature of their return is the crisis the mini-series centers on. The shockwaves of their return force a compelling examination of the nature of being human, and being a part of a human society. And the show's creators do everything they can to paint a depressing view of the depths to which humans can fall.

When the world's children announce the return of the 456, Great Britain's Home Office undertakes a massive cover-up their first visit. Part of the target of this cover-up is Captain Jack, who begins the mini-series his normally genial self, trying to work out the implications of being a couple with Ianto, who it turns out has not completely considered what it is like to be in a relationship with a man who cannot die. Everything is mysterious on the part of the government with only momentary glimpses into their plan intermixed with life as usual at Torchwood, where Gwen considers a new doctor to join the team while Jack and Ianto begin to investigate the strange announcement by the children. These moments are the general strength of the franchise: extremely interesting characters interacting. But as the mini-series goes on, the weakness of these characters makes itself felt; Jack is not a very good leader, prone to frenzied bursts of energy without much positive effect. Ianto eventually ends up standing around, becoming more and more of observer or hanger-on, like the engineering crew on the Enterprise: on screen and busy but only providing plot points for everyone else to act on. And by the end of the mini-series, the strongest character on the team, Gwen, is completely ineffectual as she runs from hiding place to hiding place instead of leading the team as she is most suited to do.

The end of the second season was frustrating in that it existed in some ways just to push Jack to his physical limits, and the first two days of the mini-series falls back to that pattern while barely advancing the idea of the aliens returning. Instead the plot focuses on killing Jack in as final a way as can be imagined and making him come back again. Meanwhile the back story of the 456 is being pieced together in small discoveries in the workings of the Home Office as it works with the Prime Minister and in the flashbacks that plague a homeless man named Clement. But that story languishes as most of the emotional direction is on Jack's useless death and the efforts to find him and get the team together. In hindsight, I think those two days could have been squeezed down, especially by forgoing Jack's death and resurrection and focusing on who is pursuing them and why.

If the viewer doesn't figure out for themselves, the mini-series makes it clear: the 456 arrived on Earth in 1965 and asked for twelve children, which the British government obligingly gives them, using orphans that "no one would ever miss." The 456 delivers the cure to a strain of influenza as their part of the deal, and the British never ask what the children are to be used for. Clement was one of those children; he escaped the 456 but suffers from horrible flashbacks and other emotional damage at the idea of what he went through. And the government wants Jack dead because he was one of the children's guards when they were turned over to the 456. Now that the 456 are back, the British government wants no one to know that they have dealt with them in the past, especially since such dealings involved the morally ambiguous surrender of children.

The British government is represented by Home Office minister John Frobisher who, while not involved with the original exchange, is tasked with keeping it under wraps, to the point of lying to the British people and to the rest of the world. Frobisher is portrayed by Peter Capaldi in what is the strongest acting performance in the mini-series, showing up the regular cast shamelessly. Frobisher is torn by his duty to the government and his duty as an official of that government. On the one hand, he recognizes the international backlash that will assail Britain if the world finds out its secret, but on the other, he grows increasingly terrified of what the 456 are doing to his daughters who are forced to speak for them along with the rest of the world's children. Particularly telling is an interview Frobisher has with the Prime Minister where he is told that the Prime Minister will not take any responsibility for what happens and that Frobisher is utterly expendable. The Prime Minister, played by Nicholas Ferrell, is exceedingly selfish, uncaring of the effect his decisions will have, so long as he is not personally touched by them.

And so the British government is shocked when the 456 arrive and announce that they are back for ten percent of all the children on Earth. Finally it is clear to the rest of the world that Britain has treated with the 456 in the past, so they demand to participate in negotiations. Ironically, Americans are portrayed as moral stalwarts, appalled at Britain's past actions and the attempts to cover it up. The world at first tries to negotiate with the 456, asking what the need for the children is. I won't reveal this major spoiler, but it is horrifying, more chilling than I could have imagined, and the people involved with the negotiations are further appalled. Then the British haggle with the 456 and are rebuked—10% or the entire world will be destroyed.

During these important plot moments, the members of Torchwood have been scurrying about, gathering the pieces that allow them to witness and record the negotiations. Much time is spent watching Torchwood watch the negotiations on a computer monitor, which only serves to dull the horror of the intentions of the 456. And once they have all the information they think they need, Jack storms the building where the 456 are located and confronts them with human stubbornness. We never see the 456, only hearing them in the voices of the children of the world or in a monotone from the speakers that surround their noxious quarters. So when Jack tells them that six billion humans will not stand for this blackmail, they respond that they will demonstrate their powers in a dead tone. They then shut down the building they are in and kill everyone inside it, including Jack. Once again Jack tries to use a grandiose gesture to solve an achingly terrifying issue and fails, horribly.

The last two days make up the strongest part of the mini-series, as we watch the British government work out how they will determine which children are going to be given up. The conversations are numbing, mostly because it is all too easy to imagine that they portray exactly how such a plan would be worked out. The lowest levels of the human emotional spectrum are made clear: "Of course the child of anyone in this room will be exempt from this process." And then, as they decide their methodology for determining who will be given up, the viewer is plunged even lower as the same people discuss the method by which the culling will take place. Again, I'll not spoil the details here, but the conversations are heart-breaking and cold and all the more powerful for the ineffable calmness by which they determine how they will sacrifice other people's children to save their own. Even our shaky moral compass, Frobisher, cannot resist the temptation to save his own children. And when Frobisher is called upon to sacrifice his own children as an example to the rest of the British people, I nearly wept as he finally acts as a desperate father and yet makes the worst decision imaginable.

So, for the final two days, the most important plot moments belong to characters not in Torchwood, who are relegated to audience members, ineffectual at everything they might attempt. As the children are being gathered, Gwen and her husband Rhys try to save Ianto's family and friends, only to fail miserably at that as well, finally caught. That last day is hard to watch as the countdown moves inexorably on and no solution presents itself. Eventually, parents figure out what is happening and try to save their children. but it is far too late, and they are outgunned by the British military.

Then in the last fifteen minutes, the government is forced to give Jack another chance at defeating the aliens, and in that space of show time, he puts together all the various clues that have been dropped through the mini-series, creates a weapon that takes advantage of his deduction, and then defeats the aliens. Seriously, it happens just like that. The mini-series tries to introduce some personal trauma into these salvation scenes, but it is lost in the utter stupidity of everything being resolved so easily. One character even asks Jack, "Don't you think we've been trying that?" only to be amazed at Jack's prowess in overcoming all difficulties in those 15 minutes. And so this intensely thoughtful and poignant story is punctuated with an exclamation point of the worst cliché in science fiction. In many ways, the emotional climax is Frobisher's heart-rending personal decision and his acting on it. The clunky coda that is the world's salvation is necessary from a storytelling standpoint but just disappoints.

The end result is that I wish the mini-series had been two days shorter and had not involved Torchwood at all. The story is powerful enough to be told without the touchstone of the familiar characters of the Torchwood team who end up adding pretty much nothing to the sweep of the plot. If the writer was going to pull a deus ex machina out of his hat, any character would have been a good rabbit; it didn't have to be Jack. Ultimately, Torchwood just distracted from some of the most powerful moments I've seen in science fiction television. Any fan of the genre really should persevere through the mini-series just to see those moments, and I promise it won't be easy to watch—a sure sign of thought-provoking storytelling. And I apologize in advance for the flailing about that the characters we already knew go through and also put the viewer through, providing some of the worst moments in science fiction television.

And now, Mrs. Speculator....

Mrs. Speculator is working on her own blog and brings a point-of-view to Comic-Con that Ican't possibly share. Read for yourself...

http://autocucina.blogspot.com/2009/08/little-off-topic.html

Skirmish

A respected reader of the blog suggested that I was being perhaps too harsh on Clifford Simak with my review of The Goblin Reservation. He fursther suggested I read a collection of Simak short stories, for which he was willing to loan me his copy of Skirmish, subtitled The Great Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak. Recognizing that Simak has been awarded a Grand Master award and that my friend and I tend to agree on golden and silver age SF, I dove into the book.

There are some strong stories in the collection, including Simak's Hugo-award winning novelette, "The Big Front Yard." This story follows what feels like a fairly typical golden age plotline—enterprising human Hiram Taine discovers someone or something living in his house which in turn creates a gateway to another world before disappearing, and then Taine is left to deal with the consequences. Part of the strength of the story is the Taine is more developed than the protagonists in a number of other Simak stories. Taine is described as a Yankee trader, going out to the households near his home and trading for what his neighbors feel to be worthless junk which Taine is able to rehabilitate and sell for profit. We never really get to see Taine performing this skill but we get to see the results of it a number of times. In addition, we get to see that Taine is devoted to his dog, Towser; ironically, Towser is also more fully developed than a lot of the protagonists in the other stories. Simak gives Towser very human reactions to the stimulus around him and he and Taine are devoted to one another. Another character, Beasly, is also somewhat developed, but also serves as a plot device: as the story develops, it is apparent that although he is somewhat lazy and shiftless, he has the ability to communicate with animals, exemplified by the messages he passes to Taine from Towser. And when Taine and Towser come across the aliens inhabiting the world that suddenly appears outside his front yard, Beasly's gift allows him to serves a mode of communication between our ambassadors and the aliens. But others of the characters in "The Big Front Yard" are fairly flat, especially Henry and Abbie, Taine's neighbors who constantly strive to take advantage of Taine and everyone else they come in contact. They twist the truth, even to one another, and are generally the amicable Taine's foils in the action of the story, going so far as to antagonize the likable Beasly, further indicating their status outside the circle of "good people."

Another part of the strength of the story is that the aliens actually play a relatively minor part, ultimately becoming part of everyman Taine's overcoming the people around him who try to take advantage of his easy-going nature. While this could be seen as a weakness, it distills an important component of a lot of the best science fiction stories, that of describing human relationships. The fact that Taine finds aliens in his front yard isn't nearly so important as finding something that the people around him want to take advantage in the same way that they try to take advantage of Taine and Beasly. And then good instincts and honesty take over, helping the everyman to succeed when those socially or intellectually above them are struggling to cope with the huge changes about to overtake their world. This runs parallel to a relatively common idea in episodes of Twilight Zone: when aliens come to Earth, there is no guarantee that they will first run into the intellectual and economic upper class, and we may be better off in the long run if they deal with average humans first.

Perhaps my favorite story in Skirmish is "Desertion." Again, the main characters are developed nicely, especially Kent Fowler, a human officer at a planetary outpost on Jupiter. Fowler is tasked with exploring Jupiter via a tool that allows humans to take on the form of the dominant Jovian life form: people are refashioned to survive in the Jovian atmosphere without any machinery, but as a native life form. As the story opens, Fowler is sending out his fifth "volunteer" to explore; the previous two teams of two he has already sent out have never returned. When the fifth man does not return, his coworkers fear and despise Fowler for sending people out to their dooms, and the station nurse, Miss Stanley, typifies their reaction to him. For a good part of the story, it feels as if the conflict is going to be between Fowler's sense of duty to his employers and to the people he works with. Instead, Fowler resolves that conflict fairly easily by volunteering himself on the mission, undergoing the process. Part of the enjoyment of the story comes from Fowler's relationship with his dog (also named Towser) that he has had forever and who is in his waning years of a full life. When Fowler undergoes the process to become a Jovian life form, he puts Towser through it as well, giving Towser new life. And when they first meet up on the surface of Jupiter, Towser starts talking to him using the previously unknown communication senses the Jovians possess, so that the two best friends can explore together.

What they find, and the cause of the disappearance of the other explorers is fascinating. It doesn't matter that the tool Simak uses that allows Fowler and Towser to make their discovery is impossible. If a machine existed that could refashion humans and dogs so completely as the one in the story does, the scientists who run it should have an indication of what the explorers discover on their survey. The power of "Desertion" lies in the vision of the human place in the universe. Fowler discovers that Towser is a far better companion than he could ever imagine, hinting that humans are a special creature for the love they inspire in such devoted creatures as dogs. But immediately following that discovery, Fowler learns that humans are in fact very very small in the grand scale of things. It is this dual sense of wonder—that we barely know who we are in any dimension that delivers the power of the story; Simak feeds our sense of wonder for the universe at large and at what humans are capable of at the same time.

The weaker stories in Skirmish do not have this same development of character, and so I found myself less invested in the outcome of the story; typical of this is "The thing in the Stone." Frankly, I feel Simak has too much on his plate in this story. Pity poor Wallace Daniels: he has lost his family in a car accident and has bought land in rural Wisconsin to try to recuperate. During his recuperation, he discovers that the accident has affected his brain such that he finds himself often displaced in time, but only backwards, travelling into the past and seeing the various early ages of life and their effects on his property. As if that weren't enough, these travels cause him to discover that something is buried deep in the rocky caves near his home, but he cannot determine its exact nature. This seems a workable premise, but Simak takes another step further by giving Daniels a nasty neighbor, Ben Adams, who is both lazy and jealous of those who work and succeed. Adams first calls out the sheriff to accuse Daniels of being a chicken thief, and when the sheriff refuses to believe the complaint after talking to Daniels, Adams turns to a murderous plot to get rid of Daniels. However, Daniels is a cipher; he evokes the reader's sympathy with his tragic tale of losing his family and by having to deal with Adams's evil scheme, but ultimately we don't learn anything about Daniels. Unlike Taine and Fowler in the other stories, there is nothing to remark the protagonist beyond being caught up in extraordinary events. And the only other character who could really use development, Adams, is more of a plot device than anything else. He complains to the sheriff, which leads to the dialogue that is the introduction of Daniels to the reader. And then he tries to kill Daniels in a horribly ill-thought out fashion, which forces Daniels to confront the thing he has found in the caves. Then, worst of all (plotwise), Adams relents and calls the sheriff out to help him rescue Daniels, who he has stranded, which in turn provides Simak the opportunity to give his denouement. Granted, Daniels finds something while he is snared in Adams's trap, fortunately travelling back in time and wandering out of the area where his trap lay, but the nature of what he finds is so horribly ambiguous that it offers no satisfaction to the reader at its discovery. There are moments in "The Thing in the Stone" where Simak writes evocatively of the geography and ecology of his native Wisconsin; these are some of the strongest moments in the story. But those descriptions do nothing to advance the movement or them of the short story and thus are mostly wasted. And the result is a weak story with all of its infrastructure showing, such that I am not transported by the story at all but saddened at the creaky bits that try to move the story.

One of my biggest complains about The Goblin Reservation was the way that characters have long internal dialogues that lead to incredibly accurate extrapolations/interpolations of the events that surround them, which in turn provide impetus for the plot to move along. This technique is useful in short stories—characters make incredible leaps in logic to advance the plot, and since the format is shorter, the author doesn't have time to waste by having characters think about alternatives to their decisions, at least not at any length. The novel form does have the space to allow this, and some interesting storytelling opportunities are presented when the character intuits badly and acts on that intuition (this would seem especially useful for mysteries). The main character in The Goblin Reservation was never wrong, thus stretching my readerly credulity. There are stories in Skirmish that use the same device, with a little more success."Good night, Mr. James" is one such story, using this kind of narrative tool nearly exclusively; in fact, Henderson James, the protagonist, knows absolutely nothing when the story begins and talks to practically no one through the course of the story. As a result, James must reason out every detail that he discovers by talking to himself. Unfortunately, how he reaches the conclusions he does are incomprehensible though they are never wrong. As I read, I was frustrated by this repeated process, feeling the author stick his finger into the plot with very little disguise and stirring things up, rather than using better writers' tools. It was merely confusing the first couple of times it happened, but eventually it feels like the machina of a terribly intrusive deus and just becomes annoying. When James finally figures out who he is, it would be a shocking and satisfying conclusion to an unusual mystery if the reader could have been included in the logic of how everyone got there. But with such mechanical intrusion, I only felt relief that it was over and agitation that it could have been better. It's no surprise that this story was used in a TV anthology series along the line of The Outer Limits, but I have no idea how such heavy-handed internal decision-making could be carried over to TV effectively.

I'm glad I have gone on to read more Simak. He's horribly frustrating to me because it all feels horribly uneven. His strengths seems to lie with developing stories that deal with what it means to be human and stretching those boundaries. When he goes for the shock ending that is fairly typical of the golden age science fiction, he appears to give up all his storytelling skills in service to the big surprise. Those stories have their place as well, but they are also fairly common and are part of what has led to speculative fiction getting the reputation it has among critics. It's the other kind of story, the thoughtful and insightful mediations on bigger things, that prove that speculative fiction can reach beyond the clichés that entrap it. Simak stands with one foot in both schools, making it a crap shoot for which kind of story you're going to get.

(A minor confession: I have read and own Simak's Hugo-Winning novel, Way Station. However, I have no recollection of it at all. I fear that it may have some of those same traits I didn't like in The Goblin Reservation, but I'll pull it out and go through it again, a vastly different reader than I was twenty years ago when I first read it.)