Pandora's Longbox

The Great Science Fiction Stories 6 (1944)

2012-02-01T15:18:00.001-05:00

1944 is the year of Clifford Simak and his City series, with three entries in this volume. Isaac Asimov admits to Simak being one of the important role models for his own writing in the introductions to the individual stories in this volume he co-edited with Martin Greenberg. This may be another lesson in how we are losing the roots of the science fiction that is available today; I seriously doubt City or any other works by Simak (who by the way has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America) are available outside of used bookstores. If you read my blog regularly, you'll recall I've had some issues with Simak—I don't think his prose has aged particularly gracefully, which may also be a cause for his being shunted aside for more modern things.

"Far Centaurus" by A. E. van Vogt (Astounding) This story describes man's first exploration of other solar systems as an experimental ship is sent to the star Centaurus, moving near the speed of light so that centuries pass outside the ship while only months seem to pass inside. However, when the explorers reach Centaurus they find that they lost the race to their own descendants, who came up with a faster mode of travel. The explorers then have to deal with their own alienness in a culture not like the one they know.
This story was a little disappointing to me because it sets itself up as a very cool locked room problem with a great structural twist—that the characters only wake up from their frozen sleep every few months and never interact except by the messages they leave for one another. But this set-up is cast completely aside in order for the ship to reach Centaurus and find humanity's future. The denouement is something of a silly race to return to their rightful time, and lacks any of the potential that the story began with.

"Deadline" by Cleve Cartmill (Astounding) This is the first time I have ever come across a story by Cleve Cartmill, although ISDB lists him as publishing short stories from 1941 to 1956 and a series of novels from 1949 to 1975(!). This particular story may be the weakest in this collection, as it is a not too ambiguous allegory of Allied resistance infiltrating Germany in search of atomic bomb secrets. The author does away with the task of coming up with names for cities, countries and people by merely reversing them—so Germany beomes Sixa and its people the Sixans. Confronting them are the Seilla. We get to follow our hero Roby as he accidentally confronts and then falls in with resistance leader Ylas in an effort to reach the Sixan capital of Nilreq. I suppose the adventure aspects are interesting but it seems worn out by the time I read it in the 21^st century, and I find its preachiness and the whole name thing to mark this as monumentally flawed.

"The Veil of Astellar" by Leigh Brackett (Thrilling Wonder Stories) Brackett also belongs to that school of "weird science fiction" that I believe has its roots back in H. P. Lovecraft. Oftentimes, she is more concerned with creating an atmosphere of strangeness than with advancing a plot, but she generally keeps it under better control than C. L. Moore when she writes solo. But Brackett does always come back to the plot, and this one concerns a terrible secret that is making liners that ply the space between the planets of the solar system disappear with all hands and passengers. Brackett makes this a personal story with an interesting turn in narrative focus (how often is the narrator, especially in the 1940s, the antagonist of the story?) with even more Lovecraftian touches, as we discover a "race" of space vampires. How can humanity survive?

"Sanity" by Fritz Leiber (Astounding) When I first came to this story, I was surprised, given my fondness for Leiber and his general regard among critics. However, I had to remind myself that Leiber is better known for fantasy (which of course led me to wonder if there is a market for a similar anthology series but with a fantastic focus). Checking around, I find that "Sanity" is also included in The Best of Fritz Leiber, indicating that the editor of that collection also felt it was good, though it seems to me to be far weaker than a lot of Leiber that I have read. It's a fairly simple plot regarding the relative madness of humans as individuals and as a society, with what I have come to think of as a Twilight Zone twist that is telegraphed way in advance of the conclusion of the story.

"Invariant" by John R. Pierce (Astounding) A very short work with an interesting premise but flawed execution. Again, I have never heard of John R. Pierce, and ISFDB lists sporadic output from 1930 to 1973. The premise is that a scientist works out a formula to retard aging by causing human tissues to return to the state they were in before he undertook the treatment. This means that no matter his injury short of catastrophe, his cells return to their original state, healing his body along the way. Unfortunately, this has some unexpected side effects, given that memory is created by altering neural pathways with each new memory. This is a fascinating idea that could have been expanded much further and made into something more gratifying than five pages.

"City" by Clifford D. Simak (Astounding) Simak posits a fascinating future for humanity as automation and technology make the need for cities obsolete. With the growth of the suburb (a relatively new idea in the mid-1940s) and with the advance of hydroponic agriculture, farms are no longer needed either. As a result, there is a glut of cheap land available outside the cities, which leads to a vast emigration to the pastoral. Those that remain in the cities struggle to maintain the lifestyle they know so well—what good is a chamber of commerce when the city and the businesses the chamber supports are gone? Simak's solution is ingenious though perhaps not entirely plausible. Interestingly, given recent demographic trends, at least in the US, it seems the opposite of what Simak foresaw is happening—people are returning to the cities in large numbers.

"Arena" by Fredric Brown (Astounding) Fans of the original Star Trek series may recognize the name of this short story, given that the classic episode of Kirk creating gunpowder in a battle against a representative of the lizard like Gorn race is a fan favorite. However, the source for the screenplay is decidedly different than the TV episode in pretty much every way (and to say more would be to give too much away). "Arena" is an interesting puzzle story—the protagonist has to solve a problem for some important reason—with an ingenious climax. Sadly, the alien is big ball of fur with claws rather than the beloved Gorn. Nonetheless, this is a fascinating story to read both for its insight into the philosophy guiding the writers of the mid-1940s as well as providing insight into how screenplays are written (another would be "Farewell to the Master" by Harry Bate which became the classic movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, to which the story bears very little resemblance other than the name Gort). This story is also in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

"Huddling Place" by Clifford D. Simak (Astounding) This short story is also included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, marking it as one of the best science fiction stories between 1938 and 1963. I'll be blunt here—I pretty much detest this story, and given it is the third time I have read it in the past couple of years, it makes my skin crawl. Granted that the premise of most speculative fiction is, well, fantastic in nature, it takes some willing suspension of disbelief. The whole premise of aliens or super-science requires imagination, and sometimes lots of it. But in "Huddling Place", the premise is that a single man holds the future of humanity in his hands, if only he can follow the oath he took as a doctor and travel to Mars to save the life of a Martian scientist—who also happens to be his friend. But given all the reasons to do so, he cannot be convinced to make the trip, thus dooming humanity. Given Astounding editor Campbell's penchant for showing man at his best and overcoming all obstacles, this story feels like an anomaly. And though the story desperately tries to make the protagonist as sympathetic as possible, I've always had trouble buying it—he comes across as a foolish and selfish git. If anyone can explain to me why this story is supposed to be so good, I'd love to know.

"Kindness" by Lester del Rey (Astounding) In this story, del Rey ponders what it would be like for the last homo sapien in a world filled with the next step in evolution. Del Rey trod similar territory in his 1939 short story "The Day is Done", a somewhat maudlin meditation on the last Neanderthal in a world of home sapiens. This story is less sentimental, perhaps because its hook is fairly obvious just a few pages in. We often think of evolution moving in broad swaths, though extinction events capture our scientific attention at the moment. But someone had to be last, and these kinds of story humanize important moments in human history—its beginning and end. Science fiction, especially the stereotypical pulpy kind, often reveled in the coming race of supermen, but this is the only story I have ever read that doesn't measure its cost on the race but instead its cost on the individual.

"Desertion" by Clifford D. Simak (Astounding) This is my favorite of the City stories by Simak, showing as it does the potential of humanity as he deals with other species (as opposed to inexplicable flaws as in "The Huddling Place"). Explorers on Jupiter use advances in the biological sciences to remake themselves into creatures capable of exploring Jupiter without added equipment, duplicates of the native lifeforms there. But when explorers are sent out, they do not return. This story follows the last explorer and his faithful companion as they go out to learn the source of the disappearances. There is a nostalgia to this story that is touching, and it is powerful for its depiction of human relationships—often missing in the City stories. If I had had a vote, "Desertion" would have been in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame rather than "The Huddling Place."

"When the Bough Breaks" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ] (Astounding) "When the Bow Breaks" is a fascinating counterpart to "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" by the same authors in 1943. This time, instead of the children accidentally discovering future "toys" that advance them beyond the capacity of their human parents, this time tutors from the future are sent to train a six-month old child by that child's future self. It turns out the baby is the next stage in human evolution but until his greatness presents itself, he's going to be a miserable child and teenager. So his future self takes pity and seeks to speed up his growth. Unfortunately, his thoroughly modern and sublimely happy parents are ill-prepared for the changes being wrought upon their child. Kuttner and Moore again stock the story to its brim with whimsy, and this time the humor is not balanced against terror at all, unless it is the mild terror all new parents feel for the new alien in their midst. It turns out that those future superhumans aren't as smart as they think they are.

"Killdozer!" by Theodore Sturgeon (Astounding) Something of a cult classic among fans of science fiction, this story details mankind's first encounter with aliens as a construction crew tries to build an airstrip on a South Pacific island during World War II. In many ways, "Killdozer!" (note the exclamation point) defines the plot and structure of the great alien encounter stories and movies that follow it. There is some distraction as the technical descriptions of the construction tools and their use get in the way of advancing the plot—I get totally lost in the technical names and parts of steam shovels and dump trucks—but when the action happens, it's awesome and terrifying. This is a story that all fans of action and horror movies really should read, because there is nothing more terrifying than a possessed bulldozer.

"No Woman Born" by C. L. Moore (Astounding) Martin Greenberg, in his introduction to this story, praises it as the deepest of stories about the cyborg—the melding of man and machine. Rather than adhering to the stereotype, reveling in the awesome power that machinery could bring to the human form, this story ponders what happens to an entertainer tragically injured in a fire and brought back to life inside a metal shell. Perhaps it is the insight of a female writer that moves this story beyond the traditional, but "No Woman Born" contemplates the cost of such advancement both on the person and her closest companions. It also wonders if being better is perhaps a good thing if it only results in loneliness. I could not help thinking of Frederik Pohl's award-winning novel Man Plus as I read this short story.

The Great Science Fiction Stories 5 (1943)

2012-01-29T09:42:00.001-05:00

I'm going to try a different approach with this anthology than I have with earlier books in the series. It seems to me that there is something of value to talking about all of the stories in the collection (though I may feel otherwise by the end of this posting). For some feeling it feels different that a "best of" book for an author, where I can talk about trends and movements in a small selection of an author's output. The stories in this anthology series have been picked as the best science fiction output for an entire year by renowned editors Martin Greenberg and Isaac Asimov, thus they all seem to deserve some discussion. I also happily admit I am being influenced by Jamie Todd Rubin's excellent ongoing blog, Vacation in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the link for which you can find over there on the left side under "My Links."

Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore appeared to have dominated 1943, at least in the eyes of editors Martin Greenberg and Isaac Asimov. Not only did they get four co-written stories in the list of the best of 1943, C. L. Moore also got one in by herself. I think that there is a lesson here about current readers knowing their roots—I seriously doubt there are a lot of fans for Kuttner and Moore, either together or individually, in the world today. A good reason for that is the difficulty of finding any of their works. Bear in mind, I am buying these books used (or getting them from Paperback Swap), and while each author has a collection in the Best of anthology series from Ballantine in the mid-1970s, they too are difficult to come by. Fortunately, Planet Stories has been reprinting some of their series in a piecemeal fashion over time, but I don't believe any of these stories are contained in those volumes. One wonders how much of a market there is for such works.

"The Cave" by P. Schuyler Miller (Astounding) This story is a fascinating account of the accidental interaction between human explorers and native alien life. In it, Miller posits a fascinating ecology for an alien world, where Man is tolerated until he has proven he can be trusted or not. The human interloper in this case is a greedy selfish rascal, not representing the best of humanity, providing an interesting plot point as human exemplars are not used to make us appear infallible. Instead, it is the fallibility of man that is the focus and how that may well be the face of humanity that gets projected to the universe rather than the one we'd like to be our representative.

"The Halfling" by Leigh Brackett (Astounding) "The Halfling" acts as an accidental counterpoint to Miller's "The Cave" since it offers another aspect to the idea of man interacting with and surviving alien ecology. It's not a fair trade-off since Miller uses sentient aliens while Brackett is mostly concerned with climate and environment as adversary. But the end result is much the same: to be successful in exploration, humanity cannot strive to conquer—which is a more appropriate stance for the stereotypical pulp stories, perhaps of an earlier age—but must adapt. And the children shall lead them.

"Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ] (Astounding) This story is also in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame as one of the greatest short science fiction stories of all time. Kuttner and Moore give their writing a whimsical air as they deal with potentially awful stuff. In this case, a far future scientist experimets with his new time machine by sending toys into the distant past or, as we call it, the mid-1940s. Children get hold of the toys and are educated quickly to the point where they would be average children in that future, but placing them far far in advance of children and even adults of the contemporary time. The whimsy Kuttner and Moore use acts as a counterweight to the real fear and desperation the children's parents feel as they watch their children become something literally alien. I have to wonder if Arthur Clarke was familiar with this story when he wrote Childhood's End, a novel that has many of the same themes (and given Clarke often wrote to the letters column of Astounding, it seems likely he was).

"Q. U. R." by Anthony Boucher (Astounding) Given the "best of" nature of most anthologies from this time, very often stories that involve humor are not included in order to make space for weightier fare. So it's pleasant that a story like "Q. U. R." has been included, showing that science fiction wasn't just drama all the time. This story masquerades as a biographical account of the birth and growth of the most powerful corporation in the world, the eponymous Q. U. R. But there are real science fiction elements here as well, such as robots who start to attain a mentality and emotions. Perhaps more interesting to a modern reader is the cause of the crisis which pushes the story—flawed design and interface, a subject that readers of the 1940s probably did not have much knowledge or need for but which resonates with every release of the latest pad or smartphone today.

"Clash by Night" novella by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lawrence O'Donnell ] (Astounding) This story is very much like modern military science fiction than what is stereotypical for the pulps, it can be seen as something of a forerunner forth explosion of that subgenre for today. Like military science fiction, this story follows the exploits of a soldier fighting a future technological war, focusing more on the characters than the technology. Kuttner and Moore do offer some exoticness to the mix by setting the story on a marine Venus, so that the weapons are sea-based, especially including submarines. The story doesn't bog down, moving as it does through rapid changes of locales and engaging many characters. Unfortunately, the conclusion of the last battle is symptomatic of the general weightlessness of the story—it really is what I call "popcorn fare"—and leaves nothing very memorable after the story is finished.

"Exile" by Edmond Hamilton (Super Science Stories) I'm hard-pressed to decide if "Exile" is funny or sad; perhaps like the very best comedy, the humor is based on a sorrowful subject. This is the shortest story in the bunch and involves a science fiction writer who discovers that he can transport himself to the worlds he writes about. A lot of the humor in the story derives from the audience of the narrator who mock him and think he is setting up some elaborate joke, but the final few paragraphs push this story into Twilight Zone territory, providing a pleasing gotcha that causes the reader to sit back and ponder the ramifications.

"Daymare" by Fredric Brown (Thrilling Wonder Stories) Brown ponders the use of hypnotism (still called by its original name, "mesmerism") as a weapon in "Daymare."The story is rather alarmist in its proposition, hypnotism supplemented by technology such that it can be used on masses of people rather than just individuals. Of more interest is the society that Brown has set up as the background for his musings—a nearly perfect culture, where murder is mostly unheard of—but one that is achieved with radical censorship. The exposition about this culture is used to advance the plot that the protagonist uncovers and tries to quash, so it fits nicely into a narrative that is otherwise a crime procedural. Except for the use of technology rather than magic (and honestly, magic is a better explanation for a mass-delusion weapon), "Daymare" feels very much like an early example of the vibrant modern sub-genre, urban fantasy.

"Doorway Into Time" by C. L. Moore (Famous Fantastic Mysteries) What a strange story and yet how very typical of C. L. Moore. A vastly powerful entity that collects beautiful objects uses his viewer that somehow can rip through the fabric of space and time to see…what? We're not exactly sure, but two humans stand in the way of his retrieving his latest objet d'art. Typical of Moore when she wrote alone, a great deal of the story is atmosphere and not very long on action—in fact the plot is fairly basic "man meets super-powerful alien yet comes out alive by total luck" fare. But this is an exemplum of the "weird" aspect of science fiction, especially from such writers as Moore—the universe is a big place and we don't know what is out there. And when we run into it, we may not know what to make of it. Such writing always seems to me to harken back to H.P. Lovecraft for obvious reasons, though in the end, our intrepid humans somehow overcome forces they should not be able to resist. I've read elsewhere that Campbell insisted on the supremacy of man in the fiction he published in Astounding, and that had a ripple effect on the work published throughout the industry.

"The Storm" by A. E. van Vogt (Astounding) This odd story feels very disjointed to me, comprised of two halves that do not fit together very well. The first half is concerned with the idea of a galactic meteorological society, responsible for predicting the path of "space storms" across inhabited portions of the galaxy much as fronts move across the United States and can be tracked on weather maps. Unfortunately, van Vogt is really talking about storms rather than, say, the path of a gamma ray burst across space. This quibble aside, the members of the weather service are highly respected and valuable members of the culture, revered for their efficiency and honesty. And then one of the members is asked to lie to a visiting dignitary from another civilization, suspected of being a scout in advance of an invasion—if the scout and his ship could be made to disappear, perhaps in the wake of a freak storm, then the protagonist's region may seem too inhospitable for invasion. The second half deals with the repercussions of this plan and includes a female captain of a warship accidentally caught up in the plot and lost when the visitor's ship is lost. Modern readers may find it appalling that such a strong female character is quickly turned into a quivering dependent mess by her "love" for the enemy. It's all rather a narrative mess, filled with implausibility heaped upon implausibility, the hallmark of bad science fiction rather than the kind that this series is intended to celebrate.

"The Proud Robot" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ] (Astounding) Another story with humor, "The Proud Robot" doesn't try to make weighty points, but just entertain with an amusing story about a drunken professor and the robot he creates while inebriated. When he comes out of his alcoholic fog, he cannot remember what the robot was invented for, and so the story is a rollicking mystery with absurd characters trying to solve a puzzle from both ends. The solution is clever both for its ingenuity and because the writers had hidden it in plain sight of the readers all along. Unfortunately, the protagonist is a little too one-note for my taste and begins to grate a little bit by the end of the story.

"Symbiotica" by Eric Frank Russell (Astounding) Russell's story of interstellar exploration falls in line with the themes of the first two stories in this collection—human perspective can be dangerous since it has no experience with the truly alien. While Russell focuses on the alien ecology of a new planet as the threat, he also suggests that humans can be as dangerous to one another as any alien can, when stupid and lazy actions by the crew endanger the entire party. The bizarre ecology the ship comes up against is never fully explored, but since the focus is one human frailty, its details really don't matter so much. The final sentence of the story sums up the mood of the whole thing nicely: "When you travel the void, never mind the ship—pick the guys who're going to accompany you in it!"

"The Iron Standard" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett ] (Astounding) Rounding out what appears to be an unintentional theme for this volume, "The Iron Standard" describes the near-tragedy of a human exploratory ship running into a culture that is not aggressive but frankly couldn't care less about their presence. Kuttner and Moore spend a lot of time setting up the premise—humans' first visit to Venus, only to find a highly regimented civilization that is are resistant to change. Humans represent dramatic change and so are ignored: treated as sentient creatures who must abide by the restrictive laws of Venus and failing that, simply pushed aside. Unfortunately, the humans are running out of food, which the Venusians have in plenty but are unwilling to share without a price, and the humans haven't anything the Venusians value, so they begin to slowly starve. Setting aside the incredible implausibility of a ship being sent out without enough food to last the entire mission (the explanation of which is finessed away unconvincingly), Kuttner and Moore show humans at the ingenious best—finding something they can do or make that they can sell in order to buy the supplies they need. It's a little ironic that the humans fall to tactics that represent arguably the worst side of human nature, and it's unfortunate writing that they discover that there are natives who secretly support the human point-of-view, but it's all told with a humorous tone so such trivialities generally pass by without comment. To damn this story with faint praise, it struck me more as cute than good, primarily because of the implausibility with the supplies—a poorly used plot device.

Polaris

2012-01-23T09:10:00.001-05:00

When I was in a book group, we would often pick the first book in a series and then never go on and pick another book in the same series. Having just finished the second book in Jack McDevitt's Alex Benedict series, I've determined that practice may well have been a mistake. Granted, there are aspects of the transition from first novel to second novel in this series that are unusual—none that I can remember encountering before. And those aspects make for some compelling thoughts on the nature of the writing craft.

Like the first novel, Polaris involves Alex Benedict trying to solve a historical mystery in the far future, in a galaxy-spanning civilization. The introduction of the novel sets up the premise: a few decades in the story's past, the entire seven-man crew of the Polaris disappeared from the ship without any trace, appearing to have just stepped out from their normal tasks—meals remain half-eaten when the ship is discovered and books remain open. The shipboard AI has no recollection of even being turned off, so the novel is set up as a classic locked room mystery. The rest of the novel follows Alex Benedict as he first is accidentally ensnared in the mystery and then sets about solving it, with his assistant Chase Kolpath.

One of the biggest differences that jump out at the reader is that the first book of this series, A Talent for War (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2012/01/talent-for-war.html) is written from the point of view of Benedict, the protagonist of the series, while the second novel is told from the point of view of Kolpath, his assistant. The contrast is obvious—instead of dealing with the protagonist's thoughts and self-deception as he solves an archeological mystery, we instead get the point of view of his Watson surrogate, a narrator who knows the protagonist and is not deceived by the airs he puts on for himself or others. This point of view is deepened by the effects of Benedict and Kolpath also being former lovers; there is no one who knows treasure hunter Benedict as well as Kolpath, and while she is not snarky, she makes it clear that she both admires Benedict and also finds some of his mannerisms annoying.

At the same time, it's also important to note that the two main characters are also much more fully rounded in Polaris than they are in the first novel. Given that 15 years passed between the publication of the two books (and I can't think of another speculative fiction where there was as much time between first and second books), it seems apparent that author McDevitt grew in his writing. While Benedict in the first novel is witty, Benedict in Polaris is urbane, using wit as a social tool. Kolpath also goes from being a relatively flat girl Friday to a character whose opinions differ from Benedict's not for the purposes of advancing the plot but in order to both fill out her character and to emphasize the importance of what the two find themselves eventually pursuing.

Another important difference is the structure of the plot. While A Talent for War is forced to spend as much time developing the setting for the galactic civilization as developing its history—since the mystery being investigated is hundreds of years old, Polaris doesn't feel quite so forced. As a result, instead of infodumps—long periods of exposition that make very little narrative sense—the exposition of information is handled much more like traditional mysteries, with clues arriving in the most unlikely places, scattered throughout the novel. And for fans of mystery, Polaris is much more satisfying since, unlike the first novel, the reader has an opportunity to solve the mystery at hand. In many ways Polaris is a mystery with an exotic setting while A Talent for War is an exotic setting where a mystery takes place. At any rate, the mystery can be worked out, unless like me, you become so wrapped up in the action and characters of the story that its solution is something of a letdown, because it means the characters are going to go away until the next book.

Like the first novel, the science fictional aspects of the novel act mostly as trappings than as a thematic source. Once again, the various planets that Benedict and Kolpath visit while chasing their puzzle could as easily been exotic parts of call on a single planet. But, unlike A Talent for War, in which the mystery allows the novel to make platitudes about the nature of war and its effect on individuals, it turns out that some of the background of the missing persons in Polaris allows the book to contemplate issues that are generally associated with speculative fiction. One of the crew of the Polaris was a biotechnology expert, and was working on methods for extending productive human lifetimes beyond the current 120 years or so. In pursuit of their mystery, Benedict and Kolpath read some of his writing and the writing of others in response to him, and then debate for themselves the cost and benefit of unnaturally long human lifetimes (in fact, part of the debate is whether such extensions would be "unnatural" at all, representing as they might the next step in human evolution). Does life become more or less valuable if it is extended to hundreds of years? How do people keep from becoming bored? Can we really expect people to remain married for hundreds of years, or will that social convention have to be modified? What other conventions might become different? And then, most important of all, wouldn't such a technology cause a population explosion, leading to devastating effects throughout the civilized worlds as resources become used up by a population that cannot die but only grows larger and larger? The denouement of the novel reveals the characters' positions on these questions in remarkably demonstrable ways.

While A Talent for War was a fine and engaging book, Polaris reflects significant growth from McDevitt as a storyteller and provides a fine example of the mixing of genres to good effect. Given that the third book in the series, Seeker, won the Nebula Award for best novel, it would appear that McDevitt's success continued on.

Pogo: Through the Wild Blue Wonder

2012-01-10T09:17:00.001-05:00

It is a delight to be able to write this review.

When I was seven or eight years old, I was spending the night at my grandmother's house when I found a dog-eared copy of I Go Pogo, a collection of Walt Kelly's comic strips detailing the run for president by a possum from the Okefenokee Swamp. It turned my life upside down: I discovered that those funny strips in the Sunday paper—the only newspaper I had use for when I was that young—could be used to do something other than just make jokes. Those strips could be a real force for social commentary as well. Much later, when I could begin to appreciate such things, I saw that those strips could also hold within them some amazing artwork by some very talented artists. Pogo: Through the Wild Blue Wonder is a definitive example of both aspects of the best comic strips—both Kelly's social commentary and his lavish art are on display for both those who remember the old strip fondly and those who like the best of current strips but are interested in exploring their roots.

It's about time: these are the first words in the collection, and they couldn't be more true. This first volume of a planned 12-volume archive of every daily and Sunday strip of Pogo has been long-delayed; I first read about it becoming available some four or five years ago. One of the introductions describes the delay—the publishers struggled to find source material good enough from which to make clean reproductions. Eventually they did find them though, and the result is a book lovingly put together and annotated. Jimmy Breslin writes a short introduction that includes his best memories of creator Walt Kelly. Biographer Steve Thompson includes a longer introduction that offers a view into the life of Walt Kelly. And then the glorious strips begin.

From the very first panels, it's clear why Pogo is remembered so fondly and how it affected the writers of the best strips that followed: Breathed's Bloom County and sometimes Opus, Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, and Smith's Bone. What readers generally remember best are the characters in a strip, and Pogo has a cast of hundreds. Pogo Possum himself and his friends Albert Alligator and Pork Q. Pine stand out best, but every character, whether they are named or show up for just a panel or so, is given a full personality and sometimes voice. Kelly also used dialect to humorous effect, using a bastardization of Deep South grammar and phraseology that is funny (sometimes hysterical) without being insulting. Particularly charming is the characters' habit of extending words, especially words ending in –ble with an extra syllable (or "syllabobble" as they would say it).

Also memorable are the situations that the characters find themselves in, reflecting Kelly's plotting and writing skill. Within the first few strips, lovable but dull Albert the Alligator has accidentally swallowed both a jar of swamp water and the tadpole within it that has been vouchsafed to Pogo for babysitting by Miz Frog (in the interest of full disclosure, in the course of this single volume, Albert swallows at least three critters accidentally and is accused of devouring another). By the fourth page, a worm who cannot be convinced to go into Albert's stomach to retrieve the lost tad hollers, "People don't swallow other people by accident!" Truer words probably have never been written in a comic panel, and they provide a clear maxim for how to live one's life. The efforts to retrieve the tadpole are excruciatingly funny and perhaps utterly annoying to other people in the room who want to know what it is you are laughing so hard at (the impulse here to repeat jokes and plotlines is very strong—must be strong…).

Pogo: Through the Wild Blue Wonder also includes the Sunday strips with a valuable introduction by Mark Evanier that describes the differences between producing a daily strip and a Sunday strip. Kelly and other creators had to face the challenge of different papers requiring different formats with only one strip. And so, the first row of panels could be thrown away by individual newspapers, and the writer to ensure that that row would be both entertaining but not crucial to the plotline of the strip. Similarly, the middle panel of the middle row was often deleted by newspapers that broke the strip down into more into fewer panels per row. This "knockout panel" also had to remain valuable to the readers who got it but not be crucial to the storytelling since it would often be missing. With this information in hand, the reader can peruse the strips themselves to see how a writer could handle such an onerous structure and then find themselves suddenly lost in an Okefenokee Swamp richly colored. While the daily panels exhibit mastery of black and white artistry, Kelly used the Sunday strips to experiment with color. Generally speaking, those experiments were tremendously successful, and the strips included are lavish and require more than a quick read-through to appreciate.

Also included in this volume is the short-lived first run of Pogo in an independent paper, The New York Star. Pogo had been published as a comic book for a while, but The New York Star was where it was first attempted as a daily strip. Modern readers can see the gradual evolution of the look of the characters (especially Pork Q. Pine) and also see where gags and jokes were first attempted and then expanded in the syndicated run that is included in the first half of this volume. When The New York Star went out of business, Kelly sought and found syndication and began writing the strips that make up the majority of this dense book.

And finally, R. C. Harvey provides an invaluable commentary about the cultural references in the strips. Recognizing that readers may not be aware of the minutiae of American culture from the 40s and 50s, and that even those who lived through I may have forgotten, Harvey talks about what Pogo and his friends are talking about—the allusions and references that Kelly used in his strip. These details add a deeper dimension to the already delightful work that is collected.

Pogo: Through the Wild Blue Wonder is a reminder of the power of a dying American art form. Pogo itself has had lasting ramifications on American culture, both through its influence on those that followed—comic strips and other forms of entertainment (Pixar movies anyone?)—and directly as it affected the dialogue of the United States ("We have met the enemy and he is us"). But most important of all, Pogo: Through the Wild Blue Wonder, is deeply and heartachingly funny, a reflection of what we sometimes perceive as a simpler time while reminding us that it was more complex than we perhaps remember or know. To any fan of comics, any fan of animation, any fan of American comedy, any fan of gorgeous art or deft writing, any student of cultural studies, I cannot recommend this book enough. This book should be a cornerstone of many many libraries.

A Dramatic Turn of Events (or, what’s this?? a music review!)

2012-01-05T10:57:00.004-05:00

My friends know that I love prog rock. For some listeners, prog rock carries over into kitsch, feeling like a sort of aural masturbation, as artists go off into the weeds. For me, that describes freeform jazz or "performance rock" which drives me nuts when nothing seems to tie together to a common sense of purpose in a piece of music. Good prog rock (and the jazz that I do like), has a structure and sets about achieving it, in part, by throwing off the shackles of the pop song time limit and by embracing all sorts of other musical genres—classical, jazz, rock. The best prog rock distills the best of those other genres for an effect, and is mindful of that effect as it moves. I imagine that in concerts, prog rock bands might go off in the weeds, a la Spinal Tap, but the studio music is evocative. And often, the practitioners of prog rock are classically trained and tremendous musicians.

As you might expect, especially because of the length of its songs, a lot of prog rock doesn't get airplay and so its practitioners fly under the radar of those who only listen to the radio. So bands like Dream Theater don't have a lot of mainstream recognition, though among those who know of them, their following is rabid. Dream Theater has been recording since 1989, and allmusic.com says A Dramatic Turn of Events is their 11^th album. Originally formed by three students at the Berklee College of Music, Dream Theater has undergone some lineup changes over the years, none more potentially devastating than the unexpected departure of founding member and drummer Mike Portnoy, a critically acclaimed and much beloved virtuoso, to be replaced by Mike Mangini. Perhaps the title of album is a small acknowledgement of the dramatic change.

In a lot of ways A Dramatic Turn of Events seems to distill a lot of the essence of the Dream Theater that I like best, meshing the best of prog—the soaring instrumentation and wacky lyrics—with some pop sensibilities. The musicianship is just ridiculously good, as it always is with these guys, and there seems to be no fall-off with the new drummer at all, which is a pleasant surprise. This album seems to be playing up the keyboards a little more than in the past, sometimes to the detriment of the bass line, but when the bass is allowed to come through, John Myung just blows me away. To be fair, Jordan Rudess's keyboards do seem to somehow have gotten better, and John Petrucci's guitar work just kicks major butt. And though I sometimes make fun of James LaBrie's vocals, it's all relative. He's a good singer, showing a range throughout the songs on the album, but he just cannot compare to the spectacular performances by the instrumentalists. It really isn't fair, and maybe I should consider listening to his upcoming solo album to hear him where maybe he can come to the fore. The album sometimes feels "orchestral" especially when there is a depth to the many things going on at once, and when those depths include organ or a chorale, it feels really big—a staple of prog. I like it. J

Track 1 – "On the Backs of Angels": With the introduction to this piece, it's clear that Dream Theater is going back to their roots a little bit, balancing on the line between pop and prog, pulling in audiences of both.

Track 2-"Build Me Up, Break Me Down": This is perhaps my favorite track on the album, perhaps because of the hewing to some of the best of hard rock. LaBrie's vocals alternately soar and growl, and each instrument is given time in the spotlight. By itself, this song provides a solid introduction to what Dream Theater is all about. Petrucci provides a different flavor to the way his guitar usually sounds, alluding to some heavy metal settings, reflecting the song's title and lyrics a little. But each instrument eventually gets put through its paces, evoking the very different kinds of sounds that appear throughout the album.

Track 3-"Lost Not Forgotten": While I like the music of "Build Me Up" a great deal, I just love the lyrics of "Lost Not Forgotten", with its veiled references to Ozymandias in lines like

I am not immortal
I am just a man
A power-craving tyrant
Beyond the shadows in the sand

Again, it feels like a throwback to the roots of prog rock, with its pomp and mysticality, but Dream Theater's instruments rescue it from being borne down by the weight of such themes. The song also has another common element for prog rock, a long playing time (coming in at more than ten minutes) but it's not even the longest track on the album. And oh my word, the ridiculous changing time signatures!

Track 4 – "This Is the Life": A change of pace to a slower, gentler ballad, with acoustic guitar and lyrics that reflect the meditational sounds. In some ways, it's a palate cleanser for what follows.

Track 5-"Bridges in the Sky": The track begins with tone shaping and hints of themes often associated with American Indians (also reflected in the song title). When one thinks of American Indians in rock, Kansas should come to mind, and this song often evokes Kansas with its chords and phrasing—Dream Theater's debt and love for Kansas has been made clear in earlier albums. Another element that Dream Theater excels at, dramatic changes of tempo and tone, are all over this 11-minute song: there's something remarkable about a Petrucci guitar solo lifted out of hard rock side by side with an organ solo from the best 1970s Kansas.

Track 6-"Outcry": It may not be the intention, but "Outcry" feels very much like a piece set aside for Rudess to just show off. And strangely enough, the introduction evokes Evanescence with a piano solo blown up by a bombastic multi-layer battering ram that includes growly bass at the bottom and an angelic chorus above it all. And, as one might imagine, when the singing starts, the song is set on a battlefield:

Somewhere overhead
Distant thunder roars
The revolution has begun
The war to end all wars

And while the other instruments weave in and out, the keyboards always come to the forefront and Rudess tears it up over and over.

Track 7-"Far from Heaven": Another change of pace, a slow ballad, cleansing the palate one more time for what is about to follow.

Track 8-"Breaking All Illusions": Again, the song starts with the sounds of Kansas and then moves on to interweave some Queensryche instrumentation as well. The song is an anthem, and if "Outcry" is the Rudess showpiece, "Breaking All Illusions" is Petrucci's moment in the spotlight. The various guitar solos in the song are breathtaking, especially when Petrucci attaches relatively generic blues chords and phrasing to prog rock that borders on hard rock. This song competes hard with "Build Me Up, Break Me Down" as my favorite.

Track 9-"Beneath the Surface": A final slow ballad, to let off the pressure of the previous song ease and to bring the album to a contemplative, thoughtful conclusion. There is irony in the lyrics, especially as the trappings of a love ballad are balanced with the lyric that is made to stand out: "I stopped caring." Rudess evokes Emerson, Lake, and Palmer with moog synthesizers, and Petrucci's acoustic guitar is clean. Perhaps the song on the album that best fits the standards for release as a single, both for its length and its content, it is also a counterpoint to all the creative energy that has gone before.

Put simply, I'm falling in love with this album, reminding me why I own every Dream Theater album there is. First and foremost, every musician is astounding, and the album is filled with breathtaking moment after moment. Second, they know their roots—they know prog back to its earliest days and its history, calling on its best and brightest in service to their music. At the same time, they also know hard rock and are willing to call on its repertoire in their music as well. And finally, they recognize how silly prog rock can be, with its airs and pretensions to classical music and epic literature. But they never let their own music slip into goofiness, even with lyrics that make me smile; over and over, the musicianship transports the songs to something greater. This album serves as a brilliant introduction to the potential of prog rock, especially in modern hands, as well as to the majesty (yeah, I said it—it's hard not to get carried away) of Dream Theater.

A Talent for War

2012-01-01T16:58:00.002-05:00

Somewhere in my regular reading about speculative fiction, I read an interesting summary of the Alex Benedict series by Jack McDevitt, of which A Talent for War is the first book. Sadly, I can't remember what that summary was or where I found it, but I was able to get the book, published in 1989, via Paperback Swap, so I'll have to provide one of my own to give you a flavor: Alex Benedict is a mildly unscrupulous archaeologist in the far future, researching human civilization's past as he tries to answer the biggest historical mysteries of his time. When I got this book, I really didn't care so much about the speculative fiction aspects of the book so much as the premise just sounded fascinating.

It turns out that A Talent for War is engrossing, explaining why it is the first in what is now a six-book series, but the speculative fiction is just window dressing and has very little to do with the actual goings-on of the novel. Set some thousands of years in our future, the backdrop is a civilization that spans solar systems and dozens of planets, up to the point of having met an enemy that is daunting not so much for its implacability but for its strangeness. Of course, this means that civilization has a method of transporting people and goods across the galaxy, but like most space opera, its working is very vague and imprecise, leading to the disaster that starts the novel.

Alex Benedict's uncle, Gabriel, has disappeared along with the liner Capella, and Alex has been named his sole heir. The first portions of the book concern Alex's ability to deal with the memory of the man who raised him and how they separated, but it turns out he and Gabe shared a passion for archaeology so old wounds are healed over nicely as Alex tries to figure out what Gabe was doing on the Capella. What follows is a mystery wrapped in science fiction clothing: Alex does the same kind of work that a modern archaeologist would do today: he researches source material before making a move toward his target. OF course, given the mystery surrounding Gabe's work and death, Alex doesn't know what his actual target is for most of the novel.

Like most space opera, A Talent for War could be set on Earth, using "domestic" exotic locales and names as settings for the places that Alex must visit as he investigates the mystery. In fact, if you can momentarily forget that he is travelling from planet to planet and think of the Ashiyyur as just another nationality, A Talent for War feels very much like an adventure movie a la Indiana Jones or the more recent Adventures of Tintin. I make this point, however, not to denigrate the novel—to hold it up as somehow unworthy of reading by speculative fiction fans—but instead to make it more accessible to readers not necessarily interested in speculative fiction at all. The twists and turns and false leads that Alex takes as he tries to solve the puzzle are worthy of the best adventure stories, with the sole caveat that the action may be sparse for some (but when it happens, it happens hard!). And my own reflection on its lack of speculative fiction depth did not come until after I had finished reading the novel, so engrossed I was in finishing it and determined to get to the end to see it all worked out.

Alex Benedict is a fine protagonist and narrator, even though his narration does dampen the most dangerous scenes a little since he must survive them in order to be telling us his tale. We learn the highlights of his life and career, with enough hints and allusions to other episodes to make him a strong lead for a series as well. But along with the character, author McDevitt also establishes a thoughtful and rich historical background for his storytelling. Because Alex must delve so deeply into his own history in order to solve the mystery at hand, McDevitt had to carefully contrast that history—and not just in a linear straightforward fashion, as if it were a hand-drawn timeline. Since the novel is a puzzle, that timeline has to also include false leads and hazy facts—legends and stories about historical events that may have no truth in them at all or, worse, conceal only a few true details. The result is a rich setting with depth not often encountered in any genre; the closest I can think of is the monumental world-building that some epic fantasies go through. That depth and Alex's voice make A Talent for War a compelling read, and as I tried to indicate above, one that even non-genre fans will enjoy. The trouble may well be in trying to find a copy of it to read. You'll likely hear more about this series, as I intend to find more of them to read; that would be an indication of how much I enjoyed reading A Talent for War.

Suicide Kings

2011-12-30T12:40:00.002-05:00

Suicide Kings is the 20^th book in the Wild Cards universe. As one might imagine, there is a ton of baggage associated with being a part of long-running series. Fortunately, it is only the third book in the "reboot" of the series by Tor. Frankly, few of the characters in the new books can live up to the older ones, the ones who rarely appear in the current stories. Nonetheless, Suicide Kings is the final book in the first arc, a sound conclusion to a trilogy that make the shared universe accessible to readers who don't have the time or interest for the other 18 books.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the Wild Cards universe was that it did not start out contemporary with our own—books published in the 80s were about an alternate universe set in the 40s. This allowed the writers to expand on the alternity of the setting and the readers to revel in the historic changes: Castro pitching in major league baseball instead of ruling Cuba, for instance. But with the reboot, the books are firmly placed in the present, giving the writers a soap box from which to preach to their audience. And Suicide Kings is the most preachy of the Wild Cards books, dealing as it does with the horrors of children soldiers in Africa, including a postscript by editor George R. R. Martin rallying the readers generically to the cause. Fortunately, the preachiness mostly lurks in the background until that postscript, allowing the general strengths of the Wild Cards books to come to the fore—the characters.

(A quick background for those unfamiliar with the Wild Cards—in the 1930s, an alien race uses the Earth as a proving ground for a virus that has devastating effects upon those that are exposed to it. 99% of those affects draw the "Black Queen" and die immediately in horrific ways as their bodies undergo instantaneous transformation. 90% of those that survive draw the "Joker" and survive their transformations, becoming Escher-like manifestations of randomness: from transparent skin to having a squid's head for one's own to just about anything you could imagine. The remaining survivors draw an "Ace" as their transformations bring them superheroic powers. This setting allows a viable background in which superheroes can exist while also creating tensions that have driven the stories for decades.)

In Suicide Kings, the United Nations has sanctioned an international group of heroes known as The Committee to act in their behalf. The current hot spot is in Africa, where the People's Paradise has garnered support from the descendants of victims of colonization and are expanding across the sub-Sahara and towards what we know as Saudi Arabia. The Middle East is mostly controlled by a Muslim government called the Caliphate who feel they must protect the Muslims in the area that the People's Paradise are moving towards. The People's Paradise is supported by many aces, including The Radical, believed to be the most powerful superhero alive, someone with the powers of Superman and more. And while the People's Paradise espouses goals of equality and modernism for the formerly oppressed, The Radical is becoming unhinged because of a mystery that goes back to the 60s. His actions are becoming more and more violent, and the United Nations is trying to broker a peace agreement between the two sides in part to contain the ravages of the Radical. In an earlier novel, the Committee confronted The Radical and won a minor victory, but the cost of the lead-up to that confrontation and its aftermath was too much, and the Committee has become fractured.

The story follows individual members of The Committee—Wally Gunderson, Rustbelt, and Jerusha Carter, The Gardener—as they try to track down Rustbelt's lost pen pal in the People's Republic. The two make an unlikely team; Wally is a young man from Minnesota, not at all worldly and Jerusha is a savvy young woman of color that is looking for something to set her soul at ease. Wally has no idea of the peril he is walking into, his sole experience of Africa being the Tarzan movies he watched as a child, while Jerusha is all too aware as she takes on the leadership role in their partnership. The Gardener's power to control the growth cycle of all plant life is useful in Africa, while Rustbelt, a huge man with steel for skin and the power to rust any ferrous metals he comes in contact with, generally slows them down.

When they get to the People's Paradise, they find that the supposedly benign president is actually injecting children with the Wild Card virus in order to create his own ace army, thereby killing 99% of those given the virus and then also murdering any child who draws the Joker. The few resulting aces are then indoctrinated into his beliefs and led by The Radical, becoming violent and monstrous killers, weapons whose reach is usually greater than the target they are aimed at. Appalled at what they find and enraged by the discovery that Ally's friend is dead, they begin a crusade across the People's Paradise to put a stop to the slaughter.

Other threads wind about his central plot: an ace detective trying to figure out the mystery of The Radical, another ace having visions of a young child pleading for help in the People's Paradise, and a third ace using his special abilities to plot the downfall of the People's Paradise. As one might expect, all of these threads get wound together by the end of Suicide Kings, and a good bit of the draw of the story is how they are all brought together. Each character's story has been written by a different author, but Martin's firm hand as an editor makes the transitions between the segments fairly painless-it would be easy to imagine them all being written by the same author.

The Wild Cards books do not pretend to any sort of literary greatness, but their strength truly is in the characters and their interaction. Suicide Kings is no exception, featuring interesting studies in the humanity of those with great power, as well as those who have been abused by man and nature in truly horrific ways. The story is also a fun adventure yarn, denser than what might expect from stories based on comic book fare but not so deep as to lose readers. In other words, it's popcorn fare, escapism ratcheted up to superhero proportions. Suicide Kings may be penetrable if you've not read any of the other books, but it really does act as the third part of an arc and I would recommend starting with those first. And remember, the Wild Cards are soon to be a major motion picture, so you could impress your friends with inordinate geeky knowledge when the movie comes out.

Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol

2011-12-29T11:12:00.003-05:00

The standard formula for an action movie generally begins with an introduction in which most of the main characters are revealed and we get to see some of the prowess of our protagonists. Then there is a first act where we see more skill, but there is generally a failure, not usually due to the actions of our protagonists. The second act is either an attempt to fix the failure or the first step in a plan to fix it, usually with mixed success so that there can be a third act. The third act is usually the hardest, but against the worst odds, the protagonists usually succeed at the last possible moment. There follows a sort of coda where everything winds down, and there is some sort of reveal—a secret given or a plot twist revealed. Within this framework, the characters are developed as we go along, and the twist in the coda generally has to do with something about the characters that we thought we knew. There's also a formula for the cast—four members of the team are usually best, with the biased veteran, the relative newbie, the one with issues, and the enigma. Actually, usually everyone has some sort of issue that comes into play during the fulfilling of the story, but someone usually has issues that are obvious, like just having lost a loved one in some way that factors into the story being told.

Perhaps it's cynical to reduce the plot down to this kind of formula, but we know the formulas of the genres and we rely on them. And when the formula is done well with some surprises, we think that we've partaken in a good but not great story, and we say "That was fun." Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol is exactly that: it's fun. It follows this formula down to the finest detail, surprising the audience not so much with plot twists but humor. While Tom Cruise returns as the gruff Ethan Hunt, not growing the character at all, the real heart of this movie turns out to be Simon Pegg's Benji, a gearhead who has finally gotten permission to do fieldwork. His wide-eyed wonder at the tasks he is asked to perform reflects what the audience should be feeling, the gee whiz of spy movies and all their gadgetry. He is not cynical but earnest in his belief in his equipment, even as it fails repeatedly, and the rest of the cast generally only surfs along in his emotional wake. Of course, Paula Patton's Jane is the one with issues, having just lost her boyfriend to an assassin that the IMF team must use in its mission, so she is not much for levity. But there is some humor in her attempted seduction of an Indian media magnate, when Jane's pain keeps bubbling up to the surface of the seductress role, and fortunately the magnate seems to like a little hurt in his amorous connections. This leaves Jeremy Renner as Brandt, the enigma, an analyst who knows far more than he reveals.

Ghost Protocol lays this likable group on one of the most used plots in spy movies—stolen Russian nuclear codes that a madman named Cobalt plans to use to start World War III. The twist here lays in Cobalt's rationale: his goal is to hasten the evolution of humans with a man-made extinction event. And in his theft of the device capable of using the launch codes, he is able to pin the theft on IMF and Ethan Hunt's team, making them also responsible for the collateral damage of what remains of the Kremlin after a series of explosions hides his escape. So Hunt's team has been disavowed (again, I think) and the IMF disbanded to mollify the angry Russians. Therefore they are left to their own devices (literally) as they both escape capture by the Russians and pursue Cobalt.

While Ghost Protocol is predictable in its broad strokes, it is the small strokes that keep it from being too repetitious, and the credit for this lies mostly at the feet of Brad Bird. Given his pedigree, working first on the Simpsons before directing The Iron Giant and then going on to join Pixar for The Incredibles and Ratatouille, it's seems right that humor, irony, and some irreverence will creep into the storytelling, enlivening it somewhat. Again, most of the humor circulates around Benji and his gadgets, but it is pervasive. For example, as the team plots an escapade inside the Burj Dubai, one of the tallest buildings in the world, they look out the window to see an approaching sandstorm. Amazed and appalled, they decide that it's too far away to come into play with their mission, but the audience just chuckles, knowing full well that it will somehow play a part. Similarly, when Benji and Brandt are discussing the technical aspects of another caper, Brandt can't wrap his head around Benji's belief in his gadgets, especially given their record in the rest of the movie. Benji's assurances often fall a little short, but Brandt allows himself to be convinced, even though the audience knows better. And when the gadgets do fail, the audience is given a feeling of smugness in their own surety even while Brandt dangles, literally, in mid-air. Perhaps the loudest guffaw comes from the final circumstances of the nuclear missile rushing down on an unsuspecting San Francisco; in that single scene, Bird pushes credulity further than it has been in the movie and winks at the audience, enjoying the ride nearly as much as us.

All that said, it should be clear that Ghost Protocol is not brilliant by any stretch; I'm sure there are more important and better crafted movies available. But Ghost Protocol is not ashamed of what it is, a diverting two-hour romp with humor that raises it a little above the standard action movie fare. And for us, in this week between holidays, that made it perfect for an outing with friends.

The Adventures of Tintin

2011-12-22T20:44:00.002-05:00

Mrs. Speculator and I were able to get out to the local movies again this week (twice in two weeks—what's up with that?), and so we went to see a movie she had been pining for since she first heard about it: The Adventures of Tintin. What attracted her was not so much the storyline, of which she honestly knew nothing, but the names associated with the crew—directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by Peter Jackson, written by Steven Moffat and Edgar Wright (or as I like to think of it, Sherlock meets Scott Pilgrim vs. the World)—are a veritable who's who adventure movie-making. With that kind of firepower, what could possibly go wrong with the movie?

I'm happy to report that nothing did. The Adventures of Tintin is a fine action movie that's good for the whole family. Fortunately for American audiences, you don't need to know much about Tintin and his adventures to enjoy the movie, and the background is delivered without too much exposition as a part of the main plot and in background scenes, so that a relatively attentive audience member can work it out. Young kids who care may need to have a few details spelled out to them, but they probably are not there so much for the plot as they are the whiz bang effects, the occasional humor, and all the action sequences.

Tintin is a boy reporter of indeterminate age, who according to his press clippings travels around the world on strange adventures, a la an adolescent Indiana Jones, and Snowy is his canine companion. At an outdoor market, Tintin buys a model of a three-masted sailing ship, the Unicorn and has to fend of other buyers trying to buy it from him. Curious about the interest in the Unicorn, Tintin goes to a local naval library to do research, then returns home to find his rooms ransacked and the model missing. Thus he and Snowy are drawn into the legend of the Unicorn, its captain Sir Francis Haddock, and the treasure that was lost at sea when the Unicorn was sunk. His investigations eventually lead him to Captain Archibald Haddock, the sole remaining heir to the earlier captain, and together they try to solve the mystery of why someone would go to so much trouble to steal the model.

Along the way there are innumerable chase scenes and fight sequences, all created with the latest 3D technology and filmed using motion capture. The end result is an often incredibly lifelike animation with a flair for quantity of effects, rather than quality. This is not to say that the effects are not good; instead, The Adventures of Tintin are about the really big picture (as one would expect of a film about a globe-hopping adventurer) rather than the tiny details of a personal film like Kung Fu Panda, where every hair is given lifelike movement. Individual hairs do not move on Tintin (or Snowy's) head, nor do they need to—they are not often in close-up and so do not require that effect. But the scenes are lavish and lovely: the chase scene in Bhaggar is breathtaking for all of its twists and turns, not only of direction but in progress toward the purpose of the chase in the first place. The most terrific scenes regard flashbacks to a sea battle between the Unicorn and a pirate ship, both on fire and with their masts tangled as they circle one another in a heavy sea.

And yet strangely, The Adventures of Tintin feels more understated than the best of the action-adventure movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think this difference comes from two sources: first, John Williams's score is not as bombastic as is most often used in the adventure movie genre. Again, this is not a complaint but rather a detail I noticed as I watched and listened. Second, the movie never quite lets you escape from the notion that it is animation, thus never quite able to leverage the idea that the characters are actually in danger. It's unfortunate too, because so much of the animation is very lifelike, especially the settings, but so many of the characters look not quite right that you cannot get immersed. This is not a function of the uncanny valley, but instead a reliance on the part of the filmmakers to stick close to the caricatures of people that Herge used as he wrote and drew the Tintin stories, such that Haddock looks inhuman next to Sakharin. And the Thompson Twins look like iconic stereotypes of British buffoonery beside the realistically drawn Tintin. It's an interesting decision that is not distracting, just a subconscious impediment to complete immersion.

The other technology, the 3D, is of dubious value. For most of the film, it is used much like in Avatar without calling attention to itself but to literally add depth to the scenes. But at one point, it gets abused, like the very worst of 3D movies, with objects being poked out of the screen at the audience, as if to show the viewer why they were forced to pay extra to rent the glasses. The best use of the 3D is how objects were used to act as transitions between scenes, at once both illustratively and narratively ingenious. At my local theatre, only one in eight showings a day were in 2D, so we didn't have a lot of choice in our viewing mode, but you sure won't be missing anything important if you choose not to see it in 3D so it may be worthwhile to find a 2D showing.

Like most adventure movies, the mystery is impossible to solve, but this does not distract from the romp in getting to the solution. And like most adventure movies, The Adventures of Tintin is left wide open for a sequel or sequels—there certainly is enough source material for more movies. I enjoyed the movie a good bit; it doesn't pretend to literary qualities it does not possess. Rather it is just good fun that adults and children can enjoy, and delightfully appropriate for the holiday season.

(And my fervent wish is that the international success of The Adventures of Tintin leads both to a wider knowledge of European comics and more movies of similar material, say an Asterix and Obelix movie.)

The 2011 Fictive Speculator Awards

2011-12-20T17:00:00.004-05:00

It's that time of the year when people create awards lists to celebrate the year gone by. I've always felt it was a little bit odd to name the best of the year when the year isn't even over yet, sort of like bands putting new songs on their greatest hits albums—a bit presumptuous. But I'm feeling compelled for some reason. And so I present to you the first annual awards given by my blog. There is only one criterion for selection: the nominees have to be new to me in 2011. That means if I see a film or read a book that is decades old for the first time in 2011, it is eligible. So without further ado (to borrow a cliché from awards shows):

Book of the Year

I had the book picked out, and then I went back and looked at my reading list and it turns out I read a lot of good stuff in the past year. It's just that they have become dimmed over time with the weight of books read later. Here are the nominees:

Horns Joe Hill
To Say Nothing of the Dog Connie Willis
Embassytown China Mieville
The Wise Man's Fear Patrick Rothfuss
Who Fears the Devil? Manly Wade Wellman
The Magicians Lev Grossman
Reamde Neal Stephenson
Bridge of Birds Barry Hughart

And the winner is Embassytown by China Mieville. All of these books have much to offer, but Embassytown edges out Who Fears the Devil? because of its taking the tropes of space opera and updating them, taking the subgenre to thought-provoking places it has never been before. The world-building is staggering and the implications are breathtaking. Embassytown should easily push Mieville over what little divide remains between him and mainstream acceptance, and it is a novel that should be read by fans of the power of literature, no matter their genre preferences.

Movie of the Year

I won't bother listing the nominees here, because only one movie stands out so much in my memory that I proselytize it to anyone who will listen. While The Muppets is a wonderful movie that I hope brings back a franchise, my personal movie of the year is 1951's People Will Talk, starring Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain. Cary Grant is my all-time favorite actor, and two of his movies seem to alternate for my all-time favorite movie (North by Northwest and His Girl Friday). Others of his movies stop me in my tracks when they are on, including Bringing Up Baby, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Only Angels Have Wings. I had thought I knew just about every one of his movies until Netflix offered up People Will Talk as a recommendation based on other films Mrs. Speculator and I had watched.

While it seems to have some of its roots in screwball comedy, it has a lot more heart than that. Grant plays Noah Praetorius, a professor at a medical school who also runs his own clinic. His bedside manner is non-traditional and disarming, and Grant's apparent easy charm comes through in spades, as nearly everyone he meets adores him. And yet a rival tries to drum him out of the school, leading to the most unexpected turn I think I have seen in any movie, or heard tell of. And Cary Grant pulls it off with savoir faire, so that the twist and the denouement don't feel ridiculous at all. I purely love this movie, and if you find yourself in the mood for an old-fashioned feel good movie, you should hunt this one up.

TV Series of the Year

The nominees:

Luther, season 1
The Hour
Justified
Fringe
Whitechapel, season 1
Sherlock

I think it's telling that this category is dominated by original dramas being shown on BBC America. I am constantly in awe of the chances these series take in their storytelling—most of which I cannot describe without giving away spoilers that would cause irate villagers to attempt to tear down my home with fire and pitchforks. Suffice to say, if you have not seen any one of these series, you need to do what you can to rectify that situation.

But, having said that, the winner is Justified, just edging out Luther and Sherlock. Created by Leonard Elmore and starring Timothy Olyphant as a federal marshal who must return to his home in rural Kentucky, the first season was eye-opening. But the second season went further, filled with stellar performances, two of which were nominated for Emmys and one that won (Margo Martindale). Walton Goggins is a revelation in every episode, and his conflicted character Boyd is a delight. Olyphant's Raylan is probably my favorite character on television right now (closely followed by John Noble's Walter Bishop on Fringe). Filled with the snappy dialog and deep and rounded characters one expects from Leonard, Justified is destination programming, and I am nearly counting the days until the new season starts in January.

TV Episode of the Year

"The Great Game", Sherlock
"Episode 1.6", Luther
"And Those We Left Behind", Fringe

"The Great Game" is the final episode of the first season for Sherlock and ends the season on a tremendous cliffhanger. Sadly, knowing that there is a season 2 indicates how the cliffhanger is resolved. "And Those We Left Behind" is another time-based episode on Fringe, where it becomes clear that time-travel is a tool for exploring the nature of relationships and obligation on that TV series, following as it does in the shoes of "White Lily" from the season before. But the winner is the unfortunately named "Episode 1.6" from Luther. All the issues that have been coming down on Luther's head through the previous episodes come to a crisis at the same time, and Luther has to rely on unexpected allies to help him through. Idris Elba shows his acting chops in this episode as a detective inspector who is ravaged by his own faults and the circumstances that those faults have created in his life. Alternately too trusting and paranoid, Luther finds out the cost of misplaced trust in a scene filled with such rage and sorrow as has been rarely seen on television. And, really did anyone see that conclusion coming?

Ongoing Comic Series of the Year

Fables
Unwritten
Batwoman

Nothing has excited me so much about the new DC 52 as Batwoman. The plotting and the art, and their masterful intersection in the hands of J.H. Williams III, is a signpost for what the very best in modern comics can do. And that it is being done in the superhero genre just speaks volumes about what Williams is capable of. Fables and Unwritten are strong contenders and should receive regular praise for what they bring to the table, but Batwoman takes my breath away in every issue. I really can't praise this work enough except to say that even non-comics readers should hunt down the first Batwoman collection once the story arc is complete.

And a music selection

I honestly cannot remember all the music that was new to me this year, but only one really jumps out at me as something that needs to be shared: Black Country Communion. If you are a fan of blues rock, you need to know about this band that describes what may have happened to Led Zeppelin had they remained together. Fronted by Glenn Hughes of Deep Purple, with lead guitarist blues master Joe Bonamassa, keyboardist Derek Sharinian, and drummer Jason Bonham, this band's self-titled first album rocks along the lines of bands that have been together for decades. They have a second album which is also particularly strong, but for me its lows are lower than the first album, and so that first album gets my pick. I'm astounded by the vocal range of Hughes in every track, and Bonamassa has already proven himself an artist in his solo work. But what also makes this album strong is their knowledge of the foundations of the genre they are working with. The style is always blues rock but the influences range from Led Zeppelin to Stevie Ray Vaughan to deep tracks of early Journey. I listened to this album for five days straight, and I desperately want ot see them live. I can think of no higher praise.

So, happy holidays to my readers, and I look forward to sharing more of my discoveries from next year. And who knows, given the political importance of 2012, maybe some political commentary might make its way here.

More on Prophets of Science Fiction

2011-12-13T09:24:00.003-05:00

Earlier, I posted my short review of the wonderful series, Prophets of Science Fiction, broadcasting on Science Chanel (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2011/11/viewing-alert-prophets-of-science.html). Slate has also posted a strong review (http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/12/ridley_scott_s_prophets_of_science_fiction_reviewed_.html). Unfortunately, the reviewer makes a quibble on the definition of "prophet" in the last two paragraphs that is exceedingly fine. If that really is the only complaint the reviewer has to make about the show, I'm not sure it really deserves mentioning. Or maybe it should be expanded so the point can be made more clear.

At any rate, a good review for a very good series. You should be watching it if you aren't already.

The Muppets

2011-12-12T10:51:00.003-05:00

A caveat: the first episode of Sesame Street aired on 10 November 1969. I was four years old and sitting in front of the TV watching it. I religiously watched The Muppet Show when it aired original episodes and repeated the jokes to my friends. I own DVDs of the seasons.

Similar to the conversation I had about DC Comics relaunching its titles, an attempt to revive the Muppets franchise has to play a balancing game between two competing audiences: an audience familiar with the Muppets and a new, probably younger audience who is learning about the Muppets for the first time. I should think one of the problems that the Muppets creators would have to deal with is making sure the Muppets don't seem uncool to that younger audience.

I've had an ongoing conversation with friends about the death of the variety show, that staple of 60s and early 70s television. The gist of the conversation is whether or not such a genre would be feasible for today's audience and usually centers on shows like The Carol Burnett Show or The Ed Sullivan Show. I always end up thinking that they are not feasible for today's audience, not because of anything inherently wrong with the format, but because the kinds of people who guest-starred on them are a rare breed in today's modern celebrity. While we may feel Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme, or heaven forbid Jim Nabors, are kinda of kitsch today, I have trouble thinking of modern celebrities who are capable of doing the number of things that "old-time" celebrities could: sing, act, and even if needed put on a little soft-shoe. Granted I am a card-carrying member of the "Get Off My Lawn" club, but it seems to me most celebrities now are famous for being famous rather than having any kind of talent. There are a few exceptions, like Neil Patrick Harris, Justin Timberlake, and Hugh Jackman for instance, but trying to book talent to a variety show would be a difficult undertaking. And if you could find guests, what would be the reaction to such a show hosted by Muppets? I see the new movie The Muppets as something of an experiment in this regard.

At a high level, the plot of The Muppets is fairly standard—an evil oil baron threatens to take over the old Muppet Studios in order to dig for oil, so Kermit has to call together the old gang to put on a telethon to raise the money required to keep the studio safe. Everyone is willing to come back except of course Miss Piggy, who has made a life outside her stage career after her advances have been spurned so often by Kermit, adding some romance element to the movie. But the writers of the movie recognize they are falling on a well-worn trope and add another layer of narrative as a framing device: Gary (played by Jason Segel) and Walter (a muppet) are brothers who travel to Los Angeles with Gary's girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) during spring break. They discover the plot put together by Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) and reveal it to Kermit. But each of the three feels tensions among them driving wedges into their relationships: Gary is torn between devotion to his brother and his love for Mary, Mary is jealous of Gary's devotion to Walter, and Walter is torn between remaining with his brother and fulfilling his lifelong dream of joining the Muppets.

As always, the Muppets are irreverent, including repeated breaking of the fourth wall—for instance, after the movie's opening number featuring singing and dancing from Mary, Gary, and Walter, the chorus and dancers that make up the population of their hometown collapse to the ground in relief at their departure. In a later scene, when the three beg Kermit to save Muppet Studios, he declines, forcing Mary to look at the camera and declare "Well, that makes for a short movie." But the Muppets' humor is also gentle, picking on each other's foibles with grace and love—even Statler and Waldorf's ongoing heckling does not keep them from hanging out with the rest of the Muppets. The movie even knows that its subject matter may not be cool enough for modern audiences and reflects that concern with the Kermit's visits to TV studios to air his telethon and then competed headbutting with studio executive Veronica (Rashida Jones).

And there are always sight gags going on behind the main action as well, uproariously funny when they are spotted.

Also critical to the success of any Muppets venture is the strength of the guests. After Segel and Adams, there are many cameos that add flavor to the proceedings, and the casting of Jack Black as the kidnapped guest host is inspired. Also inspired is Dave Grohl, drummer for Nirvana and lead singer and guitarist for The Foo Fighters, as a member of a Muppet tribute band. Part of the joy of the movie is trying to pick out who is making appearances both in the foreground and in the background.

And, of course, there's the music. The movie's creators take two paths, both creating new music for the movie as if it were a traditional musical, but also including versions of existing music, the staple of the old variety show (and of the new breed of musicals as well). "Muppet or Man" is a brilliantly funny duet/quartet between Gary and Walter as they try to figure out who they want to be in their lives, questioning if they are "a very manly muppet" or "a muppet of a man". And when they each get alter egos—Gary's reflection is a muppet and Walter's is another brilliant cameo choice—the poignancy of their decision is mingled with the laughter of such a ludicrous scene based on real musical clichés. And counterpoised with that is the scene of Camilla and her barnyard friends (chickens all of them) performing CeeLo Green's "Forget You" and Rowlph, Link Heartthrob, Sam the Eagle, and Beaker performing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as a barbershop quartet to the plaintive cries of Jack Black, tied up and screaming "you're ruining one of the greatest songs of all time!"

Laughter continuously rippled through the audience. And while it's obvious this is not necessarily high-brow humor (though the more you think about it, chickens singing "Forget You" is VERY meta), it's not mean either. It's not garishly unhip either, even though you can be pretty confident you know how every plotline is going to end up. The result is synergy, a presentation that may be as uniquely American as Monty Python is uniquely British. The old characters and the old format have not lost their charm and can be used modern music and modern sensibility. If this was indeed an experiment for a revival of The Muppet Show, by all indications it was a soaring success—so much so that Mrs. Speculator and I talked about eventually owning this in the new age of digital media delivery.

Wild Cards movie follow-up

2011-12-09T10:40:00.002-05:00

Back in October, I posted some thoughts about a movie being proposed to be based on George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards books (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2011/10/wild-cards-movie.html). In that article, I thought some about what causes superhero movies to be a success and postulated that the movie either had to be a character that is widely known or have a big-name star to pull the audience in. To support this hypothesis, I went to a box office Web site, Box Office Mojo, and looked at the top 10 and 40-50 domestic grossing superhero movies of all time. I also lamented my inability to see the list based on numbers adjusted for inflation.

Well, Box Office Mojo recently upgraded their Web site, and now we can see the list based on adjusted inflation figures. The list reads as follows:

The Dark Knight
Spider-Man
Batman
Spider-Man 2
Superman
Spider-Man 3
Iron Man
Batman Forever
The Incredibles
Iron Man 2

The two that fell out of the list were X-Men: The Last Stand and Hancock, to be replaced with Superman and Batman Forever. I think this more accurate list strengthens my hypothesis about the audience for superhero movies. Again with the exception of the Pixar movie—and I think it could be easily argued that Pixar acts as a big name for theatre-goers and promises good entertainment, the characters in the list are limited to Superman, Batman, Spider-man, and Iron Man. And I think Iron Man is there because of Robert Downey, Jr (how many people who don't read comics regularly know much of anything about Iron Man?).

These more accurate numbers also increase my confusion about why anyone makes comics movies and makes me wish I knew where to do research about the thought processes behind movies being greenlighted. It'll be an interesting case to follow if Wild Cards actually does get filmed.

Bridge of Birds

2011-12-08T16:35:00.002-05:00

This past summer, I was engrossed by Manley Wade Wellman's Who Fears the Devil?, a collection of speculative fiction set in the mountains of Appalachia. Though I didn't write about it, it was among the best things I read this year. Wellman studied and explored the Appalachians in North Carolina and nailed not just their dialect but also their storytelling patterns, then mixed them in with the weird, elements used most successfully by H. P. Lovecraft and his followers. The result was endearing and thrilling all at the same time, a collection that was difficult to put down. Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart follows the same pattern—setting a story of the supernatural in a culture most readers are not familiar with and delighting the reader by revealing both the culture and the story in measured doses. However, instead of the rural United States, Hughart set Bridge of Birds in historic China (around 640 AD according to the narrator) in what the subtitle to the novel describes as "An Ancient China that Never Was."

When the children of his village are stricken by an unknown plague, Number Ten Ox (whose given name is Lu Yu) goes to Peking to hire a scholar to help the children and their grieving families. He finds Li Kao in a shop with the sign of a half-closed, and Li Kao takes the case because it gives him an immediate income with which he can buy wine. Li Kao admits to Ox that he has a "slight flaw in his character," but his low rate of hire is all Ox needs, and they set off to find a cure for the plague. What follows is a rambling tour of medieval China and its mythology, alternately funny and thrilling as all great legends and myths are.

What makes Bridge of Birds excel is its wonderful characterization. Number Ten Ox and Li Kao are distinct characters, well-rounded, who develop during the course of the story. Li Kao is an elderly man, so his development comes in the form of gradual revelation to the reader. Ox, on the other hand, is a young man, and he grows through the course of the novel. In addition, they have two distinct voices and bounds of chemistry between them, offering differing perspectives on the events that take place in the course of the novel. Ox is actually the narrator, though he writes in a third-person style, but he is careful to note his own naivete and assumptions through the novel. As may be expected, it is the moments when those weaknesses are most exposed and when Li Kao steps that are the most humorous.

In addition, minor characters are fully worked out as well. Hughart plays on the contradictory traits of both simplicity and insight of the stereotypical Chinese story, so you can get a good idea of the personalities of characters like Miser Shen, Henpecked Ho, and Key Rabbit just by their names. But they grow in the course of the novel into something beyond their stereotypes—valuable players in the story that unfolds.

That story follows the rough structure of the detective story, but there is no way that the reader can solve the mystery of who started the plague in Ox's village and why. This is not to say that you can't figure out elements of it, but putting it together requires pieces that aren't given to the reader until the climax. And that's okay, because while the format is one of mystery, it should not be the first reason to read Bridge of Birds. It's the intricate and lovingly crafted story and the full, wonderful characters.

I think one should also be careful in assigning Bridge of Birds as strictly a speculative fiction novel. There are gods and a little magic, but they are elements of the setting more than the focus of the storytelling. In that way, Bridge of Birds reminds me of the novels of Guy Gavriel Kay, with their emphasis on storytelling in different cultures more than adherence to any kind of genre rules. In fact, when I finished the novel, I immediately wanted more and began doing research to find the other two books in the series. That research led to my discovery that this novel won the World Fantasy Award in 1985 for best novel. And I also learned that Hughart stopped writing the series after the third book because he didn't want to become pigeon-holed:

It's simply that I'd taken it as far as I could. Oh, I could come up with more ingenious plots and interesting characters and so on, but the Ox/Master Li format had become just that, a format, and no matter how well I wrote I'd just be repeating myself. Many writers are content to settle down with an endless if predictable series, but I'd be miserable… (http://www.subterraneanpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=hughart&Category_Code=B&Product_Count=53)

That kind of insight into the writing process is, to me, indicative of the thoughtfulness that Hughart put into Bridge of Birds, making it a novel to be treasured and reread on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, such a recommendation comes at a price: Bridge of Birds is available new for the price of a new paperback, but getting the other two books can get a little pricey. However, if you have a Kindle or an app that uses Kindle, you can find the whole series in one omnibus edition on Amazon for a little more than the cost of the first book in paperback (yet another argument for ebooks). And I thoroughly recommend that you read as much of this author as you can. Bridge of Birds will delight you in numerous ways…and then when you're done, go pick up Wellman's Who Fears the Devil? also.

R. I. P. Darrell K. Sweet

2011-12-06T06:29:00.002-05:00

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/12/darrell-k-sweet-1934-2011

The linked article says, "A Sweet cover promised an adventure to be had." Many trips to the bookstore in my youth were fulfilled by finding a Sweet cover, before I even knew who he was. The world is a slightly less vibrant and colorful place for his passing.

The second trailer for John Carter

2011-12-01T13:24:00.003-05:00

So take a look at this: http://disney.go.com/johncarter/.

A few months ago in this very blog (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2011/08/ignominious-and-perhaps-constructive.html), I expressed some concerns about the first trailer. It seemed to me that the trailer was playing up the romance aspect of the Barsoom books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but I did express hope that it was a marketing ploy, that perhaps the trailer was playing up the romance to attract an audience it might not find otherwise. But there were enough other stylistic choices that gave me pause about the whole thing, fearing another crushing cinematic retelling of a story that I love, like The Spirit or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

This new trailer on the other hand makes me very excited.

First, this trailer plays up the adventure aspects of the original novel, Princess of Mars. I've never had a conversation about the Barsoom books in which people talk about the romance aspects—what they remember is the battles and the unadulterated joy of being able to leap yards without trying, of fighting great white apes in a gladiator pit. And this trailer seems to indicate that these moments will be in the movie. We even get a quick glimpse of Woola, John Carter's faithful calot, which just made my fanboy hackles stand on end.

Second, there is more color and pomp in this trailer, a counterindication to the dolorous feel of the first trailer. No doubt this is due in part to the inspired music choice, again. The first movie centers on Peter Gabriel's remake of "My Body is a Cage", but this one has chosen a choral reinterpretation of Led Zeppelin's classic "Kashmir." Perhaps there is no more stately and moving rock anthem than U2's intro to "Where the Streets Have No Name" but the rhythm that drives "Kashmir" would have to be a close second. And then when the choir opens up, again the music selection just gave me goosebumps. It fits the images in the trailer extremely well.

I still have nits about some of the stylistic choices—the youth of the protagonists, Carter's long hair, the reluctance to give the native humanoid Martians copper skin—but I'm much more willing to accept them when this trailer shows how much more deeply the creators have embraced the story than I had originally believed. The two trailers in combination give me a great deal of hope for the movie, such that now I have to worry that my expectations are getting too high. Nonetheless, 9 March 2012 is circled in bright red in my mental calendar. Heck, I might even splurge and go IMAX on this one.

Viewing Alert: Prophets of Science Fiction

2011-11-25T10:26:00.003-05:00

I probably should have brought this to readers' attention before now, but the third episode of this series on the Science Channel convinced me that it is well worth watching.

The premise behind Prophets of Science Fiction is simple: an examination of the great writers of science fiction and their best stories, of what motivated them, and how what they wrote predicted and affected future technology. While fans of science fiction may well be aware of the importance of the writers and their works, it is still fascinating to see not only other writers talk about how influential these writers are but also the leading scientists in the world talking about their research and how those writers influenced them and the path that scientific development took.

The first episode centered on Mary Shelley and of course, Frankenstein. Mixing reenactments of Shelley's life with scenes from performances of Frankenstein, the episode talked not only about why Shelley wrote what she did—including the loss of her infant daughter and her unending feeling of being haunted—it also spent time talking about the ethical dilemmas surrounding advanced biotechnical research. The second episode was about Philip K. Dick and was brutally honest about his drug use and psychoses. But it also spent at least half its time on the advances in cybernetics and memory that Dick predicted, discussed by leading scientists in the field.

And while those episodes were pretty good, the one that clenched my proselytizing the series is the most recent episode, on H. G. Wells. While a lot of series on a similar theme would be content to talk about the predictive nature of Wells's fiction, the episode also spent time talking about the social issues that lay at the heart of his best novels. And pretty much none of his most important work was spared examination: War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The World Set Free, and even his movie, Things to Come.

There remain five episodes in the remainder of the season, episodes dealing with Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, Robert Heinlein, and George Lucas. I have to admit to being dumbfounded at the inclusion of Lucas among the luminaries of science fiction writers; no doubt Lucas's work is important to the history of science fiction, but he really isn't a groundbreaking writer—I am not aware of much of his work that is predictive or original. Nonetheless, Prophets of Science Fiction is well worth finding on the Science Channel. New episodes air on Wednesdays and there are repeats of earlier episodes scattered throughout their weekly schedule.

Astounding!

2011-11-21T09:00:00.002-05:00

I have become the proud guardian of a short run of Astounding magazine from 1937 to 1940. I've written often about my interest in digging in to the foundation of speculative fiction and have mentioned the Golden Age of science fiction, which critics identify as starting in 1938, when John Campbell took over the editorial duties at Astounding. So you may well imagine my excitement (giddiness would not be an inappropriate descriptor) at owning these ur-texts. I've been reading them over the weekend, delicately because they are over 70 years old and pulp paper is notoriously unable to stand up to much use as it gets older, and had considered that I would write about them.

Unfortunately, I can't—I'd be stepping all over someone else's intellectual property. And so I direct you to a wonderful series of articles entitled "Vacation in the Golden Age of Science Fiction" by author Jamie Todd Rubin (http://www.jamierubin.net/misc/vacation-in-the-golden-age-of-science-fiction/). I've exchanged emails with Jamie about how much I admire what he is doing as well as how jealous I am of his ability to get ten years' worth of Astounding. He's a good guy, and I recommend his articles if you have any interest in the time period in question.

Now if there were just someone with deep enough pockets to reproduce facsimiles of these wonderful magazines.

A Question of Style

2011-11-18T10:02:00.002-05:00

Last January, I wrote about the qualities of literariness and goodness, both in terms of books and television (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2010/01/some-have-greatness-thrust-upon-them.html). It's something of a ramble, but I eventually end up with perhaps one distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction, that of denseness of narrative. I also stated out loud (wrote out loud?) my firmly held belief that the idea of literary fiction is made up, a marketing ploy to entice readers to read things they might not otherwise be interested in and perhaps also to mollify authors who don't wish to be pigeonholed. However, having written this, I am still vexed by the question…or perhaps I'm more vexed by the rigidity with which such an artificial distinction is imposed.

A good friend and regular reader recently pinged me with his own question along similar lines. Determined to better learn the storytelling craft, he had picked up what has long been regarded as a classic literary novel but was feeling less than satisfied in its greatness: "why is this considered a classic?" he asked me. I was momentarily stymied because I had to admit that I hadn't read the novel so couldn't speak to its merits, but he filled the pause with his own idea: "The story seems pretty straightforward, so maybe it has to do with the style?" And I immediately thought of my old straw man, Mad Men, a critically acclaimed and award-winning TV show that seems to me to be pretty mundane when it comes to the story but all about style.

There's a danger here, though, in talking about style as if it is the same for all works in a genre; style is patently not static. So it's difficult to pin down attributes of the classics or current literary fiction that characterize those genres, though there do seem to be some common elements—robust language and meaning-packed sentences (whether they are short or long). But if you read any genre fiction, you know there are works that have these elements as well, which is one of the reasons I have long held that the distinction between literary fiction and genre is totally artificial. But my friend's other distinction is important as well, that the classic he was reading wasn't a great story in his mind whereas most of the genre fiction he has read has great plots, as if the emphasis was on storytelling. And I think we need to make a distinction here regarding quantity and quality of plot—in the blog entry I cite above, I talked about the complex plots of a lot of literary fiction, that is, the interweaving of a number of plots. As a reader, I sometimes find that entertaining, but that speaks nothing about how interesting those individual storylines are. What is often more compelling is fewer but more engrossing plotlines in a story, and very often genre fiction is single-minded in its plotting.

To be fair, I don't want to swing over too far the other way by generally declaiming literary fiction as not being interested in storytelling, because there are many examples that prove otherwise. But is there more emphasis on style than on plot? That's an interesting question, one that would probably require a lot more reading and a lot more space than I have here to work out. But let's assume for a bit that it is generally true.

One of the things I noted in the earlier blog entry was the feeling that I am supposed to think that something is good as I am reading/watching it. I still find this a difficult concept to pin down but I do think it has to derive from the style. It's easy to see when a plotline deals with portentous issues and have that fact register on the conscious checklist we keep as we read or view things. But style is supposed to be more subtle, working nearly subconsciously, so that the construction and choice of words move you to feel one thing or another. And perhaps because I enjoy paying close attention to such influence, I am better able to perceive that effect taking place and so somewhat feel the piece telling me that it is employing its style. And having associated effective use of style with good writing, I "feel" the piece telling me that it is "good." I'd be interested to know if anyone else has ever felt this effect.

So why don't I feel this effect when I'm reading/watching good genre fiction? Again, plot is not as subtle as style, so it's easy to see the good stuff—an obvious good quality will obscure a subtle good quality and even conceal a subtle mediocre one. Or, to say it less obtusely, a ripping good story carries me away so I don't pay close attention to style issues. And when the plot isn't so good, I do see the style working itself out and appreciate it.

But all this makes me just circle around to my opinion that the genre-ness of a work shouldn't make any difference to perceptions of its quality. I was rereading a blog entry from Steven Grant from a few years ago, and I found this to be particularly strong:

Genre is milieu. That's it. There isn't one genre that's not wide open with possibilities or places any inherent restrictions on literary quality, except where they attract adherents who aren't interested in such things and enforce a self-censorship based on tradition and fannish fixation. (http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=22513)

In other words, good writing including good style can appear in any genre. A little earlier he says

Whatever the genre, the associated trappings, not the ideas or execution, become the genre, though most book editors insist on at least a minimal level of literary competence…. This is the exact opposite of literary fiction, where idea and execution are both paramount….

Genre is the setting. I could quibble with that, but I think it's true enough that the quibbles themselves are based on the setting as well. And if literary fiction is, purportedly, genreless, then it can only rely on execution. But here's the truth that sticks in the craw of proponents of literary fiction—it can't be genreless (no fiction can be) and so sometimes end up using settings that move it into a genre. And there's another movement taking place that also disrupts the argument that those proponents try to make: the authors themselves openly talk about their indebtedness to genre.

So I've resolved this whole issue to my satisfaction, and like most epiphanies, it seems so obvious. But at the same time there are heretics who will not be convinced, as always. And for those, I feel a little sad since it's likely that the value of what they enjoy is more wrapped up in its perception than any of its inherent qualities.

Babel-17

2011-11-15T17:07:00.003-05:00

I don't often review books that I am rereading, not so much because of a lack of interest among potential readers, but because my impression is mostly based on memories of earlier readings, and those are difficult to write about. I could get around this sometimes with my little reviews of selections from my book group but we haven't met in months due to catastrophically clashing schedules. So without the input of new books to read from the book group, and because a lot of the books I am interested in reading have reached a format I want to have them in, I went back and re-read a book I have fond recollections of but about which I could not remember many details, Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany.

Babel-17 has an interesting place in my personal speculative fiction chronology: after taking a science fiction course in college—my first exposure to looking at the genre as a serious literary form—I decided to find all the Hugo and Nebula Award winners for best novel and read those. I figured this would be a tremendous jump start to reading the best the genre has to offer. Early on, I found a first edition of Babel-17 in a used book store and read it. My own interests in science fiction and linguistics provided a rich background for my enjoyment of the novel, but after decades all I could remember of the book was that it involved linguistics and that I had really enjoyed it. Pondering it recently as I searched the shelves for something to read, I wondered if it would still hold up for me.

That I am writing this blog entry may provide something of a clue for how it succeeded. And yet, I seriously doubt the book is very well known outside a small circle of older readers and critics (including wannabe critics like me). And yet a lot of people had to believe it to be a good book: it was a Hugo finalist in 1967, losing to Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and it tied with Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon for the 1966 Nebula award. But its reputation has not survived nearly so well as Heinlein or Keyes's work.

Part of the rationale may lie in the experimental nature of the novel, lying as deeply as it does in the New Wave that swept through science fiction in the 60s and 70s. The New Wave was interested in experimentation in plot and narration as well as the soft sciences, in opposition to the stereotype of most science fiction (and which indeed Keyes and Heinlein were a part). The protagonist of Babel-17, a poet-linguist named Rydra Wong, has been asked by the space forces of Earth to help them decipher what they believe to be a coded message that always arrives just as acts of sabotage are being performed on important military installations defending humans from the Invaders, a succinct if not very informative name for the aliens humans find themselves at war with. Wong figures out early on that it is not a code but a unique language, and her linguistic analysis of it gives her an indication of where the next act of sabotage is going to take place (plot quibble—tell the people who hired you so they can stop the attack!). It turns out she is correct, but she is unable to stop the attack with her hired ship, and then they suffer an attack of their own from a traitor amongst her crew. At a high level, this seems pretty stereotypical stuff, but a closer examination of the book indicates not only that the book is firmly placed in the science fiction tradition but is an important milestone for the books that follow it.

The description of Wong gathering her crew and the accompanying description of how humans travel through space is deeply indebted to Cordwainer Smith, who is among the first authors I know that apply a mystical element to travelling through space. Delany imagines that his ships' crews must include three "discorporates," essentially three ghosts that can see spacetime in ways that living humans cannot. Furthermore, navigation must be performed by a trio of navigators who not only are very good working together but also must be in love with one another, willing to die to keep one another alive by plotting the most accurate course through spacetime. Both are interesting conceits, but Delany builds on them and gives them solidity that might be missing if they were treated lightly. Such a construction goes hand-in-hand with Cordwainer Smith's ideas about a space pilot needing a companion cat to guide the pilot through space, forming a supernatural bond between pilot and cat. Again, it can be read as silly on the surface, but the writing takes it seriously and weaves it into the universe of the story so that the reader accepts it and only questions it after the fact.

The crowning achievement of Babel-17 is the development of the idea of language that shapes the perception of the users of that language. While it was a given in linguistic studies when Babel-17 was published that language shapes perception*, such an idea is not usually used as a tool in storytelling and especially not questioned when the language is an artificial one that is used as a weapon. For instance, Wong meets The Butcher, a young man whose language does not contain the concept of "I" or "you", and Wong has to figure out how best to communicate with him as well as understand his world-view (universe-view?) without such ideas that are at the very base of who we are as humans. And eventually Wong discovers that the language she has been hired to study is in fact the sabotage weapon itself because its very nature precludes certain ideas and thus forces its users into actions they might not otherwise have taken. Babel-17 is thus a predecessor of such works as Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and the more recent Embassytown by China Mieville, works that are generally accepted not only as stand-out science fiction but also works that are worthy of mainstream appreciation for the ideas they contain.

The crew of Wong's ship, Rimbaud, also partakes in outrageous cosmetic surgery, such that the pilot Brass is described as an eight-foot manticore with brass plates for armor and brass claws for weapons. Such surgery reminds me of Iain Banks's Culture books, where surgery and reconstruction have become so easy that bored and youthful people radically change their appearance and biology so that they can only be roughly described as human. Delany's universe also includes aliens that are so different from human that communication with them is near impossible, and humans end up mostly tolerating them as they try to understand them. This too is reflected in Banks's Culture books, filled as they are with indecipherable alien races (and AIs). In fact, the style of Babel-17 reminds me a great deal of Iain Banks beyond the plot touches as well.

So Babel-17 worked for me on two levels. On the one hand, it is an interesting story that goes places not often gone to by other authors. There are moments when it has not aged well, but they pass quickly and do not hinder enjoying the book. But on another level, now that I am far better read than I was when I first opened the book, I enjoyed making the connections from the history of science fiction through Babel-17 to current writing. Seen this way, Babel-17 is an important book, one that merits more attention than it currently gets. Finding a copy may be very difficult, but I think it rewars the hunter admirably.

*I should point out here that the idea of language shaping perception, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or linguistic relativity, has been refuted at the macro level by linguists in the last few decades according to what I can find with my Google fu. However, linguists believe that a "weak" version of the theory may be valid.

Wild Cards movie?

2011-10-31T09:42:00.007-05:00

I found this article this morning on my daily news run.

With author George R.R. Martin's HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones one of the hottest things on TV right now, it's fitting that another Martin-penned project has caught Hollywood's eye.

Syfy Films, the theatrical division created in December 2010 as a joint venture between Syfy and Universal Pictures, has acquired the screen rights to Wild Cards, a superhero anthology edited, co-created and co-written by Martin. (http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/game-of-thrones-george-rr-martin-wild-cards-254382)

The idea of a Wild Cards movie, done right, is exhilarating….for fans of the series already.

(I need to point out that the intention is for a theatrical release, not a Syfy network movie. Syfy has already proven it doesn't know what to do with good writing when it comes to their TV movies and mini-series. For reference see Dune, Earthsea, and Riverworld [twice!].)

I have to wonder, safe in a comfy chair far away from the decision-making process, what these folks are thinking. The only movies that do really well (at the box office) are those that involve a hero that most everyone already can recognize, such as Spiderman, Captain America, Superman, or Batman. Movies that involve characters most people barely know, like Ghost Rider or Green Lantern or Hellboy, can get a nice initial bump from the die-hard fans and then they die miserably over time. I'm willing to admit I don't know what the sales are like on the DVDs, and perhaps sales and marketing folks are expecting solid revenues from those sources as they measure the potential profit, but from a purely box office revenue point of view, using unknown characters is dicey at best.

It can be argued that it helps if the movie is actually well-written and well-crafted; such proponents point to Iron Man and The Dark Knight as examples of what thoughtful superhero movies can do in the box office. But I would counter with the Hellboy movies again, the first one of which I found to be just delightful and also relatively true to its source. I'd also point to Watchmen which had attention paid to the source material and was a tremendous production (despite the ending they just could not film). But fans and non-fans alike were turned off by the story in a visual format, more concerned with Dr. Manhattan's giant anatomy than with the smart and thoughtful story. So, I have to fall back on theatre-goers generally wanting to see movies about characters they recognize.

Let's look at some numbers! The following table is total box office receipts for the top 10 and numbers 40-50 movies in the "superhero" genre per the Web site Box Office Mojo (boxofficemojo.com), organized by domestic receipts.

	Title	Domestic	International	Total	Release
1	The Dark Knight	$533,345,358	$468,576,467	$1,001,921,825	7/18/08
2	Spider-man	$403,706,375	$418,002,176	$821,708,551	5/3/02
3	Spider-man 2	$373,585,825	$410,180,516	$783,766,341	6/30/04
4	Spider-man 3	$336,530,303	$554,341,323	$890,871,626	5/4/07
5	Iron Man	$318,412,101	$266,762,121	$585,174,222	5/2/08
6	Iron Man 2	$312,433,331	$311,500,000	$623,933,331	5/7/10
7	The Incredibles	$261,441,092	$370,001,000	$631,442,092	11/5/04
8	Batman	$251,188,924	$160,160,000	$411,348,924	6/23/89
9	X-Men: The Last Stand	$234,362,462	$224,997,093	$459,359,555	5/26/06
10	Hancock	$227,946,274	$296,440,472	$524,386,746	7/2/08

40	Hellboy II: The Golden Army	$75,986,503	$84,401,560	$160,388,063	7/11/08
41	Blade	$70,087,718	$61,095,812	$131,183,530	8/21/98
42	Sky High	$63,946,815	$63,946,815	$127,893,630	7/29/05
43	Superman III	$59,950,623	not found	$59,950,623	6/17/83
44	Hellboy	$59,623,958	$39,695,029	$99,318,987	4/2/04
45	Spawn	$54,870,175	$32,969,867	$87,840,042	8/1/97
46	Blade: Trinity	$52,411,906	$76,493,460	$128,905,366	12/8/04
47	The Crow	$50,693,129	not found	$50,693,129	5/13/94
48	Kick-Ass	$48,071,303	$48,117,600	$96,188,903	4/16/10
49	The Rocketeer	$46,704,056	not found	$46,704,056	6/21/91
50	The Legend of Zorro	$46,464,023	$95,936,042	$142,400,065	10/28/05

I'd love to see these adjusted for inflation, but that part of the Web site seems not to be working and is premium besides. I'm curious, but probably not curious enough to potentially have to pay for a one-time look-up.

Let's look at the outliers from my expectations. #7, The Incredibles, is a Pixar movie. Anything that Pixar makes is box office magic, and so the name alone will overcome any resistance to a movie featuring characters no one has heard of. #10 is Hancock and stars Will Smith, a huge name when it comes to box office draw. Perhaps big names will somewhat thwart ambiguous knowledge about the story. On the other end, a movie starring Superman would seem to go against my hypothesis, but remember, this is the abysmal Superman III, which gets a sad 24% positive review from Rotten Tomatoes (compared to 94% and 88% for the first two in the series). Plus Superman III is the earliest movie in this selective list, and it might be somewhat higher if I had access to inflation-adjusted numbers. And I'll be darned if I know why Zorro is even in the superhero category…. Bearing in mind I just don't know what "good numbers" are for a movie, this breakdown seems to give my hypothesis some weight, at least as far as comparison between films within the genre goes.

So, a superhero movie needs to either be about characters people know (and perhaps like already) or star some name actors. Wild Cards has no characters that anyone might recognize, and since it is actual a series of books, the story goes to some non-traditional places that will likely go against popular expectations for what superhero stories are all about. How would the standard movie-going audience deal with people receiving superheroic powers as a result of alien weapon testing on Earth? Or the virus that gives people powers actually killing 90% of whomever comes into contact with it and hideously deforming another 9% so that life is completely miserable? How would they feel about heroes whose powers include magic based on tantric sex rituals? Or the non-discriminatory nature of the powers—anyone can get them—such that truly vile and reprehensible people receive the powers? How would they feel about a protagonist that is not only alien but gay? These sorts of plotlines work in books, and maybe in comics directed to adults, because the audience for them generally self-selects. But when it gets to adult ideas being treated in a movie, the overall record is not too good (see Watchmen again).

While the technology to make a nice-looking and visually accurate Wild Cards movie exists, if it is used, one of two things is going to happen. The movie can be a faithful adaptation of the story, resulting in a movie popular with the people who know the story but not very successful "mainstream." Or the movie could not be very faithful at all, resulting in a movie that just antagonizes the fans (see The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or The Spirit). And if I were to be connected creatively with the production, neither of those options seems very good to me.

What seems far more palatable is the current explosion of long-form drama series on cable television, such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad (on AMC), Justified and The Shield (on FX), or the series that probably got people thinking about Wild Cards in the first place, Game of Thrones. If the creators could be given the time to tease out the characters and plots for an adult audience as these examples do, the results could be really good. But I don't think anyone is willing to take that much of a monetary risk. So, once again I find myself nervously excited about the potential for a story I enjoy being made into a movie. Sometimes they get it right, but it seems too often something important is given up to appease one audience or another. For every The Dark Knight there are lots more Blade: Trinity.

Memory and Storage

2011-10-27T12:02:00.002-05:00

Whenever I envision my dream home, it has a library in it. In my mind's eye, it always had two levels with a rolling ladder and great windows targeting the light on a couple of overstuffed chairs accompanied by an ottoman. I didn't really need a fireplace, though I suppose it could be kinda keen. And then I made my first trip to the Biltmore House in Asheville, and I found the library I wanted….(http://www.beautiful-libraries.com/library%20photos/home%20libraries%20grand/3041a.jpg). Granted, as I got older, I realized I would never have enough books to fill that magnificent space, but it was a target. Now I see something a little more modest but still downright comfortable as being more practical (http://www.beautiful-libraries.com/library%20photos/home%20libraries%20modest/1001.jpg - how cool is this Beautiful Libraries Web site??).

But in the past 18 months or so, I've been thinking really hard about technology and libraries. It's a cold hard fact—though I have hundreds of books now (and more than thirty long boxes of comics), unless a miracle happens, I will not have an heir to inherit them and enjoy them as I have. Instead, they will become a discouraging weight that will have to be boxed up and moved when I move, eventually becoming a burden to whomever has to make final decisions about their disposition.

And so I'm pondering the unthinkable, moving to an electronic format for my books and comics. It's been a big hurdle for me, in good part because I really like the sensations that go with reading—the smell of aged paper and the feel of it against my fingertips as I turn actual pages. But there have been other issues that I've been considering as well. For instance, just how good are the graphics on whatever tool I would be using? It seemed to me to defeat the purpose of putting comics on a device if I couldn't appreciate the art. And related to that, I also read books about art, and how would those look on an e-reader of some kind? But I recently had a friend with in iPad install Comixology, the most popular comics reader, and we did some tests. I'll be honest—the art was fantastically reproduced, and I really liked that I could zoom in on panels and images to get a better feel for them. So that concern was set aside and I had visions of saving a chunk of money a month by being able to get rid of my storage unit where my back issues of comics sit. Or at the very least, perhaps not continuing to add to what is already in there.

Another issue I had to consider is that I don't only buy and read books that are coming out, but also books that have been out for some time, even decades. And while buying new books in an e-format would address some of my storage concerns, I might never be able to find a lot of books that I enjoy now, that I get from Web sites like Paperback Swap and used bookstores. And then, there was an announcement last summer that just excited me no end. Hachette UK, under their Orion Publishing Group imprint, was going to open a Web site they named SF Gateway, in which they would make available not only their excellent series of Science Fiction and Fantasy Masterworks but attempt to recover out-of-print books as well. As they say themselves:

The SF Gateway was established specifically to rescue classic SF & Fantasy titles from their mostly-out-of-print status and make them available again to a wider audience. Their are [sic] many sites and publishers whose raison d'être is to facilitate the eBook publication of new and/or self-published authors, and it is not in our plans to join them. (http://sfgateway.com/)

How awesome is that? A sort of back library of books, available in e-format! While it would not meet all of my needs, it was a fantastic start. As soon as the Web site officially opened, I went and poked around. They already have a great list of titles, and their plans to go deeper and broader just thrilled me. And then, I dug just a smidge deeper—trying to see what the prices were like, I clicked on a book, only to find that it wasn't available to the US. I tried a few more with the same result. And then I poked around on their Web site some more and found this:

We have acquired rights to the SF Gateway titles from the authors or their estates, and in many cases the rights they were willing or able to grant us were only for the UK and Commonwealth countries (excluding Canada, which is usually bundled with USA rights). It's not that we don't want to allow you to buy the books; it's outside the terms of our contracts.

However, there are many titles - approximately one-third - in which we have World English Rights, and these will be available everywhere, subject to retailers' ability to sell them.

And so my enthusiasm has been tempered somewhat as I hope that someone in the US has thought to do the same kind of thing, but it seems that the technology has begun the process that will allay my concern. So the only thing left is the part of the process that will take me the longest, figuring out what tool to use. And even though I am huge fan of science fiction, with its emphasis on gadgets, I'm still astounded at the kind of decision I am about to make. To top it off, I read this week where SD cards, those little things I put in my first digital cameras, are likely to have a 1 terabyte (1000GB or 1000000MB) capacity by 2014. A library in a piece of plastic small enough to get lost in the palm of my hand! And yet, no one is offering me a jet pack yet.

An Evil Guest

2011-10-24T09:44:00.002-05:00

Gene Wolfe brings a fascinating combination of genres together in An Evil Guest, creating a novel that challenges the reader's expectations and skill. Elements of space opera, Lovecraftian horror, noir, and backstage romance come together for a challenging read that dances along the razor-thin borders between genre fiction and "literary fiction."

I've written in the past about how golden age speculative fiction often leaves a great deal unsaid, forcing the reader, if they so choose, to try to fill in the gaps of the plot by inference. I had not thought to make the same evaluation of noir stories, but after finishing An Evil Guest and reflecting back on its genre roots, I realized that a lot of the action in noir is dialogue-driven with many many levels of understanding. Characters play games with one another, alternately searching for and hiding the truth, making their own inferences and determining their validity based on interview and, sometimes, actual physical clues. With roots in both these genres, An Evil Guest is almost entirely dialogue, forcing the reader to weigh the truthfulness of what is said by evaluating the morality of the characters in the story. This process is made that much more difficult when we discover that the protagonist both does not trust her own observations and is more observant than the average character at the same time.

Our heroine is Cassie Casey, an actress who finds herself asked by the secretive Gideon Chase to help him with some detective work. We know very little about Gideon Chase other than he appeared to turn down the invitation to work on the case for which he solicits Cassie's help earlier in the novel. But here he is, promising her a large amount of money and to use what can only be described as his magic powers as a payment for her assistance. She accepts his offer, and high upon a mountaintop in the middle of the night, he promises to make her a star. Her assignment is to meet and shadow the nefarious William Reis, suspected of alchemy and thus leveraging the gold market to his advantage and then report his activities back to Chase. After studying photographs of Reis, Cassie learns that he is also known as Wallace Rosenquist, the angel for her next big production, Dating the Volcano God. And as you might imagine from the noir background, Reis/Rosenquist has his eyes set on Cassie as well.

The setting for An Evil Guest is a mix of fantasy and science fiction. Set apparently near the end of the 21^st century, part of the plot's intricacies deal with the string of ambassadors to the only intelligent alien race humans have yet to encounter. While most of the descriptions of the urban settings feels like it could be lifted from the 1930s and 40s, every now and again the reader is reminded of current technology with cell phones and also future technology—"hoppers" or private space vehicles that can be used to travel to the other side of the Earth in minutes and even into space. At the same time, as Chase and Cassie look for evidence against Reis, they also have conversations about the existence of traditionally magical elements such as spells and shapeshifters.

The real meat of the story, however, is following Cassie's daily life as she works in the theater preparing for her new show and deals with the bouncing relationship she has with chase and Reis. There is a sort of instant chemistry between Chase and Cassie, one that is played up like a minor version of Bogart and Bacall with hints and allusions in their every conversation. But Cassie also feels an attraction for Reis despite her initial fear and distrust of him. It's later revealed that Reis and Chase know and respect each other, further cementing the triangle that is the heart of the novel. Eventually other agencies get involved in the complex plot, trying to impose their own will on the triangle and forcing unusual responses from Reis and Chase. On one level, the novel flows speedily past, made primarily of conversations that are entertaining on their own. But trying to piece together not only the interconnections between the characters but also following the crime aspect is daunting and multi-layered, forcing the reader to be attentive and dig beyond the surface enjoyment of the narrative.

Through it all, because of the apparent contradictions that the characters seem to resolve before the reader even becomes aware of them, the reader constantly asks himself "What's going on?" When Reis invites Cassie to become his high queen, and the true scope of what that means is revealed, the question is magnified severalfold. And then, when the repercussions of Cassie making her decision are played out and the novel takes another hard turn into a different genre altogether, the novel forces the reader to accept that the low levels of just enjoying the ride and the deeper levels of working it all out are really one and the same. Viewed from a higher remove, some aspects of the novel are ludicrous, including the deus ex machina (or would it be dei ex machina?) that drives the crisis of the novel. But that very ludicrous nature also allows Wolfe to play his narrative and genre games and impels the craft and pleasure the novel bears.

An Evil Guest is a challenge and will not satisfy a lot of readers, readers unwilling to set aside expectations and just go for the ride. Its craft is not so much in its language or style but in how Wolfe wedges in what are otherwise contradictory aspects of several genres. But as I finished, I found that I wanted to know more about this universe and especially about Cassie Casey, sure signs of the success of the novel.

The Best of Robert Bloch

2011-10-18T10:01:00.002-05:00

It seems to me that the genre of science fiction is, by its nature, generally optimistic. The general movement of plots is such that a challenge is met and overcome. To be sure, there are exceptions to this generality such as Brave New World and 1984, but I think these may be exceptions that prove the rule. Most dystopic science fiction ends up with the protagonist finding a way to a better life for himself, his loved one, or even the culture at large. And it is the unhappy conclusions of the other novels that give them so much power (and I have to admit that the conclusion of Brave New World is one of my favorites in all of literature). But for the rest, some intrinsic characteristic of man helps him to succeed, making the story something of a triumph

At the same time, I think horror writing is generally pessimistic: while the majority of the plot is spent trying to overcome some supernatural or horrible thing, and sometimes the protagonist succeeds, there is usually an indication that all is not really well and that the horror goes on. Again, there are exceptions—Dracula comes to mind—but generally there is implied that there are more Bad Things out there, coming to get us. The best Twilight Zone episodes, for example end in that fashion: the horror may have been temporarily stymied, but it's still there. H. P. Lovecraft's stories merely have the protagonists survive, because what humanity is fighting against is more powerful and more awful than can really be explained.

And so it is an interesting collection that includes stories from a writer who is so masterful at both genres, Robert Bloch, and observing how these ideas bleed into one another in his stories is fascinating. Let me be frank: this collection, though engaging and well-written, is not uplifting. But Bloch doesn't fall back on dystopic tropes; his stories are packed with a careful examination and evaluation of life in the mid-20^th century (and with numerous parallels to our contemporary life) and decides that rather than deserving acclaim, man and his culture generally leave a lot to be desired. I don't often recommend such things, but it seems to me that Bloch's own afterword is better served by being read before the stories in the collection, since it explains the process he went through to select the stories he did.

The collection begins with two of his most popular stories, "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" and "Enoch." Both of them are more horror than science fiction or fantasy and both of them are suitably chilling. But after these stories, the collection moves more towards science fiction and we can begin to see the melding of the two viewpoints of the two genres, perhaps mingled a little with a little cynicism that we all feel as we grow older and world-weary. The two stories that stand out best in this regard are "The Funnel of God" and "Learning Maze."

In "Funnel", the main character is born in South Africa, on the edge between the modern white culture and the traditional black culture that has its own legends and mythology. As a child, Harvey Wolf meets a figure out of African legend, the Black Skelm, who greets him as a fellow seeker for truth. He tasks Harvey with going out into the world and discovering Truth and then returning to him so they can share notes. After Harvey's parents die, leaving him a fortune, he travels the world and creates a bleak catalog of human hypocrisy and failed attempts to rise beyond the mortal weights that weigh down man's soul. On the one hand, Harvey's visits with great thinkers and his repudiation of them is interesting, but as it goes on and on for pages, it becomes clear that the truth is that man is self-deluded and vain. Harvey despairs and returns to the Black Skelm, and together eat from the seed of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, choosing to give up on humanity and try to find a better existence as gods. And then Black Skelm makes a momentous decision.

Similarly, "Learning Maze" catalogs man's foibles in a thinly veiled allegory. Humanity has realized that all of our problems come from the inefficient and ineffective relationships formed between child and parents and so children are raised entirely by machines with logic and ration as their guides. The machines understand and promote emotion, seeking to bring out the very best qualities of their wards as they interact in a physical labyrinth. Children are taught by examples on televisions and practice their lessons until the machines allow them to advance to another segment of the labyrinth or, alternatively, decide that the child is not meeting the conditions for moving and is subsequently dropped through a hole in the floor to never be heard from again. As the children mature, they are allowed to interact with the opposite sex and practice domesticity, apparently in preparation for their release from the labyrinth. But as the main character progresses, he becomes stymied near the end of the labyrinth as he watches groups of other inhabitants performing bizarre tasks which make no sense to him. To the reader it is obvious that these are representations of the kind of work that people participate in as adults but Bloch reduces them to their most absurd, hinting at the futility and unhappiness that underlies most of the workaday world. Finally Jon approaches the exit from the labyrinth but is asked to explain his discoveries in order to escape, but though he succeeds, he finds that his escape isn't everything he hoped. The climax to the story is a sharp denunciation of the kind of life that we accept as normal in the Western world.

This is not to say there is no humor in Bloch's stories, but that humor is generally a little black given its origin in horror. In "The Plot is the Thing", the heroine escapes from the real world by watching TV incessantly, to the point where her health is affected by her lack of eating. She is rescued from this trap by well-meaning doctors who examine her and then prescribe treatment to acclimatize herself to the world she should be living in. But as she travels that world, she finds uncanny symmetry between it and the horror movies she used to use to escape, ultimately finding herself a character in not one horror movie, but all of them. Perhaps the most humorous story in the collection is the Hugo-wining "That Hellbound Train", which describes a young rascal's deal with the devil (appearing as a train conductor) and his lifelong attempts to foil the devil's plans for him. The story has a surprising and funny twist at its end, turning away from the way that most deal with the devil stories end.

Optimistic or pessimistic, nearly every story in this collection is engaging. Bloch honed his craft over decades of writing hundreds of stories, plots, and screenplays, so the stories grab the reader quickly and flow without wasted word. I found them fascinating of themselves but also as mirrors of our expectations of how far advanced our culture and thinking is than that of a half-century ago (truthfully, it turns out we haven't changed much at all except in the details). And of course, they do also offer a different way of thinking about science fiction and its generally optimistic premise, a difference that is being exploited more and more by the stories that are perceived as more literary, in part because they just don't follow the expected path. In short, The Best of Robert Bloch serves the purpose I expected of it—it offers a relatively short but strong view of one of the genre's seminal and foundational writers. For me, that alone is enough to recommend it.

Reamde

2011-10-11T19:17:00.003-05:00

Mrs. Speculator and I are fans of the BBC America program, Top Gear. She is a big fan of cars, especially high-end ones, and they are what Top Gear specializes in. For myself, while I can appreciate a high-performance vehicle, I don't lust after them as she does. It's not really the cars that cause me to watch the show, nor what has made it into a hit international television program, available in (they claim) 170 countries.

Three things bring me back again and again to Top Gear. First, there are the presenters—three wildly different men, each with their own likes and dislikes, trying to get along with one another through the course of each episode. A large portion of the delight the show inspires is the unnatural chemistry the three men share with one another and the camaraderie they share as they present their pieces about the cars or attempt their weekly stunts. The bonhomie is so deep, the viewer feels like they are a part of the group on screen. The second is those near-weekly events, which range from driving a group of second-hand cars across the Kalahari to trying to build their own space shuttle out of a used hatchback. These stunts also quickly pull the viewer in, but viewed from a higher level, they are generally silly and somewhat head-scratching in their ludicrousness. But the one thing that brings me back to the show again and again is the stupendous BBC cinematography. Even when just driving down London streets, the photography is on a par with Oscar-nominated movies, both for content and framing. Imagine the photography standards from a high-end BBC documentary like Blue Planet placed on a weekly car show, and you have an idea of how beautiful and skillful the camerawork is.

Neal Stephenson's Reamde is very much like Top Gear. The fairly twisty thriller is a delight to follow but examined from a high level, it seems ridiculously silly. Beginning with Richard Forthrast, a game development millionaire shooting rifles at a Thanksgiving reunion in Iowa, the plot pulls in seedy hackers, closed-door accountants, MI6 agents, Russian gangsters, and black Welsh terrorists (to hint at just a few of the characters). The setting itself travels all over the west coast of North America and into the Rockies, then back west into China and the Philippines. It's convoluted and twisted and while undeniably silly, breathtaking in its rambunctious helter-skelter pace. There are gunfights and buildings that blow up, and major internecine warfare on a scale only an electronic role-playing game can offer. And it's simply delightful; though I recommend trying to explain the plot to someone who has not picked up the book yet to get a feel for just how impossible it is.

A great deal of that delight comes from the rich and full characters that Stephenson uses to populate his world and then throws together in outrageous circumstances as they pursue their individual goals. Taken on her own, the concept of an Eritrean orphan raised in the farmlands of Iowa and now employed at a software company is enough to satisfy most any other author, but Zula Forthrast has depths that go beyond merely her background. And when she finds herself kidnapped not once but twice, the reader is given the opportunity to not only appreciate her resourcefulness but to empathize with her for every decision she has to make. A similar level of detail is given to Sokolov, a Soviet security expert from Toronto who finds himself being hunted by Chinese police after he mistakenly uncovers a nest of Islamic radicals. Stephenson doesn't just play favorites: pretty much every named character is given enough attention (and quirks!) so that they are not remotely flat but instead likable in their fullness even if they are despicable curs. And then the plot just throws them all together in seemingly random combinations, at times feeling like a global version of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World as they race in many different paths toward the same final destination, asserting their humanity—their richness—in ludicrous and trying circumstances.

But the real draw of Reamde, as it is with most of Stephenson's books, is the economy and elegance—and pure beauty—of his writing. Part of me is always angry when I read a Stephenson novel;his every sentence feels so effortless and yet there are no wasted words. His descriptions of places are practical and yet comely, combining important information for the advancement of the plot with beautiful style and word choice. But it all happens with tremendous ease—the words and sentences flow off the page with no hiccups other than the occasional lexicographical errors that the copy editors missed. Unlike his most recent work, Anathem, very little of Stephenson's talent and text in Reamde is devoted to world-building, so he can directhis resources to the craft of putting word to page instead of imagining the place he seeks to describe. In fact, there is practically no world-building at all, and it would be overstating the case to describe the novel as science fiction. At best it is a techno-thriller, ultimately concerned with how computers have established themselves in every aspect of our lives, from gaming to transportation, and how sometimes those helpful devices get in the way of real work.

There is irony here, as we watch Richard deal with an unexpected and massive war between factions of players in his MMORPG at the same time as most of the rest of the characters are trying to hatch or thwart a terrorist plot. Stephenson also uses the magnificent landscape of British Columbia, Washington, and Idaho as a stark contrast to the relative clean landscapes of interacting with other people online. Information is always at hand in the computer age, except when it isn't, and it is those moments when Stephenson's characters and plots shine the brightest. And all of it is organic and compelling: the book nearly refuses to be set down once it is picked up.

It's tempting to describe the novel as popcorn fare, since the events and characters stretch credulity. But if it is light entertainment, it is the Citizen Kane of popcorn books, crying out both for haste in reading and meticulous study of every sentence. I'm pretty certain that, once read, this book will delight and haunt the reader reflecting upon it such that it has to be reread on a regular basis.

City

2011-10-03T12:19:00.002-05:00

Cleaning up another one of my experiments in speculative fiction—trying to get a grasp on Clifford Simak—has led me to this "novel", considered by many to be his best work. My problem was this: here is Clifford Simak, a five-time Hugo nominee and one-time winner (but City was released before either major award had been established and so could not even be nominated), but I barely know his work and am troubled by his popularity since I find what work of his that I have read to be somewhat pedestrian. And yet that work has to be pretty good: when his Way Station won the Hugo, it beat out a veritable who's who of speculative fiction greats—Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, Frank Herbert, and Kurt Vonnegut. So my plan is that if I read the very best, perhaps I'll understand the reputation.

You'll note above that I used quotes around "novel" to describe City because it is actually a collection of short pieces with some interstitial material that is intended to try to force it all into a single narrative. The book pretends to be a collection of legends of old Earth describing the eventual disappearance of man from the planet, and the narrative between the stories is a scholarly analysis of the story to follow. It becomes apparent quickly that the scholar is a dog relying on the scholarship of other dogs as he tries to determine the provenance of the stories I the collection. Are they relics of early dog civilization, myth-like stories that describe the clearly impossible creature called Man? Or are they perhaps actual fragments of a history so lost in the past that they appear to be only legends or fables? The unnamed canine scholar never comes down on one side of the question or another, but he is also interested in the lessons that the stories teach as well as their potential insight into the time before dogs were literate.

Given the recent genre interest in apocalypses (again), Simak's City offers a different twist on the end of the world scenario, mostly because the world has not ended. Instead, parallel to Clarke's Childhood's End, mankind has evolved past caring about terrestrial issues and moved out into space. The world he has left behind is populated by the results of his scientific experimentation: animals given the power of speech and reason, led by the dogs. The dogs even have a sort of mythology about how they achieved this status without having the ability to use tools, since they each have a robot companion that can act as their hands and tools: the robots reproduce themselves in sufficient numbers for future generations of animals who need them, so clearly at some point, one dog was able to create the first robot and teach it to make more of itself. It's hard not to look at our own history and wonder if we have deluded ourselves about its finer points, but of course this is part of Simak's point.

But despite mankind's evolution to a better state, there is a whimsy to the stories that describe man's departure: City mourns the loss of what makes man essentially human as it recognizes that those same traits drive mankind to war against itself. By the end of the collection, the stories are suffused with a sort of unspoken melancholy regarding the path mankind could have taken rather than this radical branch in artificial evolution. Simak doesn't attempt to rectify these contrasting emotions; instead the stories lay out the circumstances and stir up the emotions in the reader.

By far the strongest story of the bunch is "Desertion", a story I've spoken of earlier (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2009/08/skirmish.html). Put into the context of a future history and then followed up with a sequel, "Paradise," "Desertion" loses some of its power. The relationship between the protagonist and his dog receives commentary from the scholarly critic, who briefly describes how such a relationship while perhaps impossible still has resonances with the dogs in their literate state. But together, the two stories from the turning point of City, where mankind realizes that it will destroy itself if it stays in its current state. The process of becoming a new life form described in "Desertion" and the kind of life that it promises in both stories provides the escape man needs. Again, the melancholy of such a decision is not deep beneath the surface—man will fail unless he becomes something completely different, so different that it requires machinery to reach that state. It's hard to say whether the premise is an argument for the potential for humanism or a chilling renunciation of its limits.

Also weighing heavily on man's failure is "The Huddling Place," a short story selected for the Science Fiction Writers Hall of Fame. "The Huddling Place" was difficult because I cannot imagine the situation that the protagonist finds himself in, and I'm not sure if that is a failure on my part or Simak's. John Webster, an acclaimed physician and specialist in the treatment of the recently discovered Martians, is summoned to Mars to save the life of a dear Martian friend who also happens to have used advanced Martian ethics to determine a way for Man to escape the downward spiral of animosity that Simak describes. It doesn't take much cynicism for a citizen of the mid-20^th century to recognize the ongoing historical pattern—war follows war and only some force applied from the outside would appear to be sufficient to break the cycle—and Simak continues the pattern into his future history. But one Martian has found a way to break the pattern, and all Webster has to do to save mankind from self-destruction is heal him. And it's unclear what happens next, except that Webster doesn't do it. Is it because Webster suffers from agoraphobia so badly that he cannot leave the house? Or is it because his robot servant misunderstood Webster's orders? It's not completely clear, and it doesn't really matter—with the survival of humanity at stake, one would think nothing should stop Webster from doing his work. And he just fails—to err is human after all. And it's in that space, at once showing the potential of mankind but balancing it with our propensity to mess up, that the book situates itself.

City is thoughtful and somewhat stately in its description of the disappearance of man. I suspect the book would be far stronger without the scholarly interludes. It's pretty clear the stories succeed each other, especially since characters are repeated and a family name is used throughout. But it's not like a lot of science fiction in that it doesn't come down on the humanist view of man as being able to accomplish anything he sets his mind to. While it is an easy read—if you can get through the stories without pondering the larger questions they ask, you'll finish it quickly. But it is those questions, the ones lying just beneath the surface, that given City its heft.

Killer Elite

2011-10-02T12:46:00.003-05:00

Mrs. Speculator and I made it to a movie theatre this past week. There is a new Jason Statham movie out, so of course we had to go see it.

If you've seen the trailer or any commercials for Killer Elite, you already have a pretty good idea what's going on: Jason Statham and his mentor, Robert De Niro, up against Clive Owen. The trailer is full of Statham performing martial arts at a rate not unlike his Transporter movies and some piercing stares from Owen, all of which we've come to expect. And honestly, how they end up in this situation is not terribly important; the movie even teases the viewer by telling us it is based on a true story, and there is the ubiquitous printed epilogue before the final credits, but it's just padding unless the backstory gets your hackles up and you decide to use your google fu. In a nutshell, Statham is an assassin who has given up the life because he is tired of killing, but De Niro is kidnapped and to free him, Statham must perform three more assassinations. Owen is a self-appointed protector of Statham's targets and has a volunteer organization supporting his efforts.

The movie works on a lot of levels—as you would expect, the fight scenes are exciting and well-choreographed as they almost always are with Statham. But the movie allows for twists in the fairly standard formula, such as each of Statham's targets must appear to have died in an accident, so there is a caper movie element regarding the machinations Statham and his crew use to get to the victims. And the commercials and thumbnail description above strongly imply that Statham is just a mercenary while Owen is on the good team, but the backstory throws that all into doubt: Statham's Danny is the more thoughtful and perhaps more ethical of the protagonists since he is only doing what he has to do to save his friend. And the backstory makes it clear that the men he is hunting are deep into gray ethical territory. So Owen's Spike is actually more ambiguous that Danny as he single-mindedly pursues Danny and his team. The movie even bludgeons the viewer with the moral twist: given two protagonists named Danny and Spike, who is usually on the side of the angels?

Killer Elite is not all chasing and fighting as the PR makes it appear. Instead, Statham and Owen work to push their characters beyond the stereotypes that lure viewers into these kinds of movies. Statham especially must persevere his rather clichéd character and ends up somehow making it something more; as his mentor tells his girlfriend (played by Yvonne Strahovski), "Everyone likes Danny." The writing of his character is firmly entrenched in the "assassin with the heart of gold" mode, but Statham falls back on the physical and facial acting that served him so well in the excellent The Bank Job to give his character depth that the words he has been given cannot convey. Owen's Spike is more unconventional, a fervent believer in the cause, and his monomania dominates the screen when Owen lets it out. By himself, Spike is not intimidating, but the force of his belief is frightening by the end of the movie. And when Danny and Spike are together on the screen, the chemistry is amazing as the dialogue snaps and crackles with their electricity. This kind of face-to-face scene is along the lines of what was expected of Al Pacino and De Niro in the otherwise amazing Heat.

Another delight is Dominic Purcell's Davies, a sort of sidekick of Danny's. The movie is set in the early 80s, and Davies seems to exhibit every attribute of the macho Brit stereotype from that time. His moustache is just ludicrous and his carefree abandon belies the smart assassin that lies beneath. I enjoyed Purcell's work in John Doe lo these many years ago and really had no interest in anything he's done since (whether it be Prison Break or Primeval), but he certainly goes beyond the fairly flat John Doe to a rich characterization that offers a Falstaffian foil to Danny's brooding.

But to be clear: once the slightly convoluted framework for Killer Elite is laid out, it follows out the clichés nearly to their bitter end. Danny really doesn't have a lot of time to brood on his ethical quandary, and any screen time that could be spent on that is used to make sure that we understand he has a girlfriend who proves he is better than the life he has led. In fact, Strahovski's Anne really is nothing more than a serial plot device: first she is used to show Danny's compassionate side, then as a threatened target to ensure he does what he is told to do. Crisper writing would have gotten her character out of the movie altogether, making for a tighter movie. There is something of a minor twist in the final scene, but it is not fractious and not terribly unexpected given the characterizations of the protagonists throughout the rest of the movie.

Mrs. Speculator and I walked away from the theater deciding we had enjoyed the movie. Though it is far longer than the stereotypical action picture it markets itself as, I never felt bored. Like most action pictures, one should not go in expecting great acting. But Killer Elite does enough—especially allowing Statham, Owen, and Purcell to fully inhabit their characters—that it rises above the usual assassin/action movie fare. It's not beautifully filmed and the soundtrack does not overwhelm, but it is still something more than a summertime popcorn movie and worth finding if you have a couple of hours to spare.

The Dying Earth

2011-09-19T10:16:00.002-05:00

As you may recall, I've been trying to understand the acclaim accorded Jack Vance. He's often praised as a great writer that transcends the fantasy genre, and I've tried to read a number of his things to first be exposed to this hidden treasure and then later to understand the praise, since I am finding his works to be somewhat less than advertised.

Recently, a tribute to Jack Vance was published, a collection of short stories written by various authors including George R. R. Martin, Robert Silverberg, and Neil Gaiman. A New York Times article was written as an accompaniment, describing the reviewer's love for Jack Vance but without ever really talking about the source for that love. Intrigued, I sent an email to Neil Gaiman's Web site, asking if he had any suggestions for this poor soul who just doesn't get Vance. His response was to read the book on which the homage was based, The Dying Earth. It took some searching to find an inexpensive copy of the book, but I finally did and plowed through it pretty quickly.

The setting is an Earth thousands of years in the future, one in which mankind has lost all its technological knowledge and fallen back into a stereotypical fantasy world, Middle Ages or Renaissance in the broad strokes but not nearly so dirty or pestilential. It turns out not to matter so much where the stories are set; while the narrative often invokes the fact that the planet is coming to its end and the sun shines red in its cooling rather than the yellow we currently know—and sometimes even the characters mention the planet's slow fade—it's just window dressing. The fact that the Earth is dying has no bearing on the pith of the stories at all; they could just as easily take place in any other simply constructed fantasy setting. And though this is described as a novel, it really is a collection of loosely connected short stories and novelettes and a novella.

The stories are quick reads and the characters somewhat memorable for their depiction despite their lack of roundedness. They tend to be especially strong in one or two facets of their characterization: Guyal is curious and Liane is a rogue, for example. Their stories are fascinating journeys into the crux of the stereotypes of golden age fantasy: characters go on quests for magical knowledge or on the run from evil sorcerers. Bad people often do stupid things and end up meeting their demise, while good people win through, sometimes on sheer pluck.

Of more interest is the high language that Vance uses, primarily in his descriptions. He mixes exotic terms with names he has made up to sound exotic, spinning them about until it is unclear which might be real. He spends paragraphs describing the scenery that surrounds the characters as they act, pulling the reader into his world through both provocative description and sheer mass of words.

As I read, I was reminded over and over again of the classic fantasy cartoon, Thundarr the Barbarian, and who's to say that the show's creators weren't exposed enough to the genre that they weren't aware of Vance's work? (Given the writers include Mark Evanier, Steve Gerber, and Roy Thomas, I would not be at all surprised.) I do not mean the comparison to be mean; I enjoyed Thundarr and I did actually enjoy The Dying Earth as well, more so than any other Vance work I've read. And while the comparison seems obvious, especially regarding a setting of an Earth far in the future where sorcery has returned, the similarities run somewhat deeper. Bear in mind that Thundarr was a cartoon of the 80s, its purpose nothing more than to tell engaging stories in a fantastic setting in a 22-minute format. And as such, the stories in this setting have to be immersive and somewhat fast moving, leaving little time for character development. In many ways, they must become distillations of the tradition of fantasy storytelling.

And this is what The Dying Earth is to me, a breakdown of all the constituents of good fantasy storytelling into especially pure but short-lived elements. The general mood of otherness is set immediately by the book's title—The Dying Earth is evocative without any aid whatsoever—and Vance's flowing style and extensive descriptions constantly bolster the knowledge that this is not a place with which the reader is familiar. And then through the setting pass characters who are so distilled that could be arguably described as clichés by readers with a depth of knowledge to fall back on. Nonetheless, they are engaging and somewhat whimsical, even when they are evil. Their adventures are familiar to readers of fantasies and even those whose fantastic experience does not extend beyond fables and fairy tales. While it's somewhat easy to predict how the stories are going to end, there is some fun in the journeys to those endings.

Another way I look at The Dying Earth is as a companion piece to Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars. If you are past a certain age when you first read Burroughs's stories of Barsoom, they will strike you as ludicrous and juvenile. But if your first reading is at the right age, then every time you read those books, the memories and joy in the series come rushing back. There is more value in the Barsoom books than nostalgia but it's not obvious and forces the critic to accept as a premise that what they are reading is good in the first place. So it goes with The Dying Earth—if you already have some fondness or curiosity for the stories, they are charming and fun. But if you are beyond that, expecting great things from your stories as they move you to moral consideration, it simply is not available here. The stories in The Dying Earth are well-packaged whimsy, at their core the essence of the origin of all speculative fiction, whether science fiction or fantasy—a means of escape from our mundane lives.

The Magician King

2011-09-14T12:05:00.002-05:00

I've long argued that one of the distinguishing marks of fantasy is an ongoing of what it means to be human, usually by placing humanity beside the fantastical. What Grossman has done with these two books is to have that same sort of conversation by placing irrevocably human characters beside the literary stereotype of humanity from the fantastic genre. This is the power of genre-busting, a necessary cleansing of the tropes and clichés to get back to the roots of the power of the genre. As the foundation of speculative fiction grows broader as well as deeper, the current generation of writers have that much more history to work against. In the Golden Age, it was simply enough to ask a different "What if" question than had been asked before. Not that every question has been answered by the genre, but those types of stories become formulaic, and the works of authors like Grossman (and Mieville and Banks and so on) remind us of that history as it works to build something new from it.

As I mentioned in my thoughts on The Magicians, the protagonist of The Magician King, Quentin Coldwater, dances on the line between likeability and not so much. He is not utterly unlikeable, like Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, but he is a hormonal and self-doubting young man who morosely questions nearly every move he makes—the opposite of the forthright hero of the fantasy genre. in The Magician King, however, Quentin is balanced by a long-time friend, Julia, who suddenly appears with as much magical skill and power as Quentin, if not more. Her history alternates with the ongoing thread of Quentin's adventure, providing a compelling view of magical powers gained by the most unorthodox of means, allowing Grossman to do more genre-busting from a different direction. Julia is a far more likeable character as she is a lot of things that Quentin is not, decisive and forthright, willing to do whatever it takes to reach her goals. She does face uncertainty at times, but it is because of questions posed on her by forces outside herself, while Quentin is continually handed everything he could want and still ponders his navel.

Together with an interesting cast of side characters, Quentin and Julia decide to travel the eastern sea of Fillory, Grossman's Narnia surrogate. The adventure feels very much like C. S. Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (book, not movie), complete with whimsical rationale for travelling. But after the adventurers complete their trivial task, they uncover an old legend and set about on a far bigger quest. And when that one goes all to heck, sending Quentin and Julia back to Earth with no way to return to Fillory, everything takes a decidedly more serious turn.

Grossman's writing is compelling; again I found it difficult to set the book down for a more than a few minutes. It's not just the story he tells, but he has so mastered the voices of his characters that you can feel them in your head as they narrate. Part of the complete "rightness" of the voices is they are products of their culture and time. Pop culture references abound, not because it's cool to reference other media in narration, but because young adults in their mid-20s would obviously have cultural signifiers that they would all be aware of. Heck, in my conversations with my mid-40s friends, the cultural references pile up like snow in Buffalo. Ironically, these references actually make the characters more accessible for me though years down the road, when a new reader doesn't know the same references, the narration will lose that level of familiarity. I nearly busted a gut at the perfectly appropriate Friends reference in the middle of a vital conversation. The content and context clash beautifully and realistically, setting up expectations and knocking them down, like the rest of the elements of the book. And Grossman's humor is wicked in other ways as well, piling up another reason why this book is just fun and capable of sustaining eventual rereadings.

It's tempting to say that the genre-busting that Lev Grossman practices in The Magicians is transformed into blatant cynicism in The Magician King, but I don't think it goes that far. The difficulty lies in the nature of the genre that Grossman is busting, the young adult fantasy novel. One of the distinguishing characteristics of that kind of novel is that the path they take is generally optimistic—there may be threats and villains to deal with, but given the expected audience, the outcome is always positive. Some people may be injured or die, but the protagonist comes through at the end if not unscathed then a better person than how they began the story. It's not at all clear that this is the case by the conclusion of The Magician King (or The Magicians either for that matter).

I've seen mentioned elsewhere that these books are part of a planned trilogy, the final book of which I look forward to reading upon its release. But true to his writing skill, Grossman ends this book in such a way that it doesn't need a sequel and yet the door remains open for one. I can honestly say I have no idea where he will take these characters next because I have utterly failed to predict how any of them have turned out in these first two novels. How delightful is that?

The Eyre Affair

2011-09-12T18:50:00.002-05:00

Recently, NPR asked its readers to nominate and then vote on the top 100 science fiction and fantasy novels (http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-books). It's a fascinating list as indicative of the general taste in speculative fiction as much a guidepost to my own. For in the top 100 books, I had read most of them, at least heard of all the rest except for a single book, The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. I did a little research and liked the few synopses I read of the book, so I asked for it for my birthday and received it.

The Eyre Affair is squarely set in the speculative fiction genre, being an alternate history, where Wales is a communist country separate from the United Kingdom, England and Russia have fought the Crimean War for over 100 years, and England itself is run not completely behind the scenes by a megalithic multinational called Goliath Corporation. It should come as no surprise that those last two items are linked: as long as England can remain at war, weapons manufacturer Goliath can maintain control over the English economy by its weapon sales…and also sell those same weapons to Russia, thus prolonging the war even further.

We are introduced to this world by Thursday Next, an intrepid agent for Secret Operations, an English police organization with 30 levels. Thursday is a LiteraTec, low on the totem pole and responsible for preventing and solving crimes against literature, such as stopping the sale of fake manuscripts and stopping the performance of bad interpretations of great plays. She is very good at her job despite the demons from her past that haunt her, and so she gets temporarily promoted to help capture a former professor of her, the vile master criminal Acheron Hades. At a stakeout intended just to gather evidence that will eventually lead to Hades, the antagonist himself shows up and makes a shambles out of all the SpecOps forces arrayed against him, demonstrating superheroic or supernatural powers while killing nearly everyone involved in the stakeout. Only Thursday survives, somehow immune to Hades's extraordinary powers. SpecOps also believes Hades to have died in the battle, taking with him the original manuscript of Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, so Thursday decides to return home to the English countryside to recuperate from the disaster of her last case as she works for the far less volatile SpecOps office in Swindon. Of course, as you might imagine, the adventure is only starting for her as more and more evidence makes it clear that Hades is not dead and actually in the Swindon area himself.

There are some wonderful ideas in this novel, especially when it comes to the inventive uses of texts and manuscripts. In this parallel universe, the written word has another kind of magic than the one it carries in our universe: the stories are actually happening in pocket universes and Thursday's uncle invents a way to get into the stories…and bring characters out of them into the real world. Time travel is also possible in Fforde's universe; in fact, Thursday's father is a chronocop who stops by to visit her at the most awkward times, asking questions that indicate he is somehow mixed up in a timestream that seems remarkably similar to our own. But Fforde only plays with these ideas, not giving them much depth and instead making them the background for mildly humorous moments. A fairly serious evaluation of the powers that Acheron Hades wields quickly indicates that is potentially the most dangerous man on that planet, but he chooses to be (or is written to be) farcical, rather like Cesar Romero's Joker in the old Batman TV series as opposed to the sociopath as Heath Ledger portrays him in The Dark Knight.

Too much of the book is based on authorial decisions like this, going for the cute rather than the even mildly thoughtful, resulting in a novel that while fun to read and a page-turner is really very slight. As I read, I found myself longing for the Bob Howard stories by Charles Stross, a series with a similar idea as its background and, while humorous, more thoughtful as well. Perhaps there is something fundamentally more thought-provoking about Stross's universe, where the creatures of H.P. Lovecraft are real and perpetually trying to take over the world, but Stross also goes out of his way to set his writing at the intersection between speculative fiction and spy novels. The Eyre Affair, on the other hand, seems a random set of circumstances that pushes the plot along. The result is that most disheartening of investigation novels—coincidences solve the crime rather than the skill of the detectives.

The Eyre Affair also feels torn as to what kind of book it should be. While there is a somewhat steady movement towards the solution of the crimes at hand, Thursday is often distracted by the return home—an invitation to speak at a pro-Crimean War rally that she feels no obligation for, dealing with one brother who she despises and the memory of another who was killed in a modern version of the Charge of the Light Brigade, and alternately dodging and dating her ex-boyfriend for whom she has carried a torch for ten years. In more skillful hands, these kinds of interludes offer background and cast a spotlight on attributes of the protagonist. But Fforde continues to play it cute, so that these other things fall into the story like boulders dropped by giants, impeding the progress of the primary storyline rather than complementing it. Thursday's narrative voice potentially is a strong point; she does seem an interesting character and Fforde has made her a vibrant female lead in stories usually reserved for men. But that voice is lost in the cuteness of it all and never lives up to its potential.

The Eyre Affair is a popcorn book, easily read and curious, but quickly dismissed when the reader sets it down. There are a number of other books in the Thursday Next series, providing the stereotypical week's worth of reading for vacations at the beach. I don't think of myself as dour, and this book did make me smile at times, but I prefer my humor to be used as a tool to get to deeper things. It was a fun sojourn, but I'll be spending my time in other worlds instead.

The Magicians

2011-09-11T10:43:00.002-05:00

"Harry Potter for adults."

Nearly every review I read for this novel from Lev Grossman contained this little snippet of laconic summary. And I suppose on the surface, it contains an essence of the book, as though you were trying to convince someone in five words or less why this book is worth reading. But those four words carry so much connotation and weight that they overwhelm the power and artistry of what Grossman accomplishes in this thoughtful (and FUN!) book. Yes, the main character, Quentin Coldwater, receives an invitation to take an entrance exam for Brakebills, the North American school for magic that no one knows anything about. But the similarities end there.

First of all, Brakebills is a university rather than a high school, so the characters are older and thus offer a different dynamic than those of Harry Potter and friends. The students at Brakebills are young adults, arriving with personalities already mostly formed, whereas Harry and friends are shaped by Hogwarts. And, again, the characters in The Magicians are young adults on the verge of going out into the world and being responsible for themselves. Like college students everywhere, they are at least as interested in alcohol and sex as they are in their studies. And whereas Harry Potter takes seven increasingly large novels to even get out of Hogwarts, Quentin graduates from Brakebills' five-year program in half the novel.

This is because Grossman isn't telling a parable to children, he is asking a somewhat more meaningful question about how a world of magic would interact with the mundane world we live in. Harry Potter's mundane world is populated by single-dimensional symbols, people who are flattened because they know nothing about magic. Quentin's "real" world is Brooklyn, and the people he knows in it are multi-dimensional and at times inscrutable, just as the people who populate the readers' lives are.

Digging deeper, Quentin is also a far more complex character than Harry Potter. In fact, Quentin is not a very sympathetic character at all: he is dour and prickly, a far more realistic representation of teenaged boys than anything Harry Potter has to offer. The decisions Quentin sometimes makes are self-destructive and impossible to predict, much like those we ourselves make as we are trying to make our way into the "real" world. It just happens that Quentin's real world includes magic and not only does he have to deal with the politics of entry into adult life, he also has to deal with the politics of a world he did not believe existed and for which very people can offer him reasonable guidance. Grossman knows, as Quentin finds out, that college is just made to give its attendees the skill sets to succeed in the adult world, but how we fare depends almost solely on how well we use those acquired skills.

But Grossman doesn't rely on the clichés of Hogwarts alone as a starting point for his own work. Drifting through the first half of The Magicians is Fillory, a Narnia-surrogate that Quentin uses as a touchstone for what he expects of magic and also as an escape as he comes to grips with his mistakes and failures in the real world. Grossman's novels-within-the-novel are well-developed, including the story of the author and the children who supposedly visited him to tell their stories of the magical land of Fillory, hidden in a grandfather clock in their estate in the Cornish countryside. And soon after Quentin graduates from Brakebills, he discovers that Fillory isn't a fantasy—it's a real place that even most magicians didn't expect to exist—and he and his clique of fellow magician graduates, bored with the ease of the magic life in the mundane world, make plans to visit it. And what they find there, while somewhat similar to what they read about as children, turns out to be far more complex than the simple childish storytelling of children's books could possibly convey.

The power of The Magicians lay in its reality, a generally unspoken truth about the best fantasy novels. The fun of the Harry Potter and Narnia books lays in their escapism, in the underlying belief that everything is going to turn out well at the end. But there are no such assurances in The Magicians, as the characters' decisions have real effects on them and their lives. And being young adults, they don't always make the best decisions. Yes, magic pervades everything in the novels, but Grossman, and by extension his characters, still have to deal with it like real people: making and testing assumptions and dealing with the repercussions. And those friends are diverse, resembling more the wide lifestyles represented in The Breakfast Club than the surface differences in those that attend Hogwarts.

This makes The Magicians a much more compelling coming of age story, refusing to brighten the maturing process into a fairy tale. When Quentin and his friends fail, people can be hurt (and often are). Potentially, this kind of story could end up depressing, but it is actually worlds of fun. Life at Brakebills isn't that of a monastery—studying magic requires outrageous and sometimes silly activity. Quentin provides a wonderful voice to describe all this: cynical and unhappy but desperate to believe in something other than the slow death he sees in a mundane life. Grossman's language and style are engrossing, pulling the reader in as much by their exuberance about the story as by the events they describe. I really never did want to put The Magicians down until I had finished the last word.

If there is a weakness in the novel, it lies in its coda, the story of Quentin's life after he returns from Fillory. Disgusted with the magical life, he decides to go full-bore in the opposite direction, to become fully mundane and live a normal life. Except Quentin is merely deluding himself—he finds himself a high-priced consultant at a powerful company, a job for which he has absolutely no training, since Brakebills doesn't teach accounting and other mundane skills. His magical background gives him the best life most mundane people can imagine, and he has done nothing to earn it, flying the face of his decision to escape the effects of magic. His subconscious appears to be attempting to deal with the hypocrisy while he consciously avoids it himself, whiling away his hours in a worse mundane death than the one he envisioned in his youth—he does nothing important and any self-worth he might've gained during his magical escapades is slowly draining away. But in the final few pages, magic comes forth again to save him, and Quentin blithely accepts his savior. In one sense, if The Magicians is about how real people would deal with magic, Quentin's running away to magic at the end can be seen as a typical response: everyone, magical or otherwise, looks for the easiest way through. But part of what has made Grossman's story so compelling is the constant reminder that nothing comes without a price, so Quentin's escape seems to fly in the face of that moral. However, a bigger reality is what drives this authorial choice—it sets us up for sequels to The Magicans.

This book is much more than a more mature version of Harry Potter; it is a thoughtful and sometimes deep examination of the process of emerging into adult life with the trappings of a fantasy novel. I have seen this book appear on lists of books for kids who are ready for something after Harry Potter. I can see its inclusion in such lists, but you best be sure of the kids. There are moments in The Magicians that are depressing, not just sad. And there is sex and hardship and death, all components of the real world. I know some teenagers who could handle The Magicians, but they are the exception. If they are in high school still thinking fondly of Rowling and Potter, then this book might be good for them. And it's definitely the kind of book that thoughtful readers of fantasy will appreciate. And to be clear, again, if I have given the impression that this is all gothy emo stuff; it's not—this book is provocative and thoughtful and downright fun. (Just a note—I am more than halfway through the sequel, The Magician King, and I can forgive the wimpy conclusion to The Magicians, if only because it allows this other to be written. Thanks, Eric, for giving me both of them for my birthday!)

A Little More than a Week in the New DC Universe

2011-09-08T16:12:00.002-05:00

As mentioned earlier, DC decided to reboot/revamp ("reboot" being what the fans call it and "revamp" being what DC calls it) by resetting their universe so that everything we think we know from over 75 years of continuity may or may not be true any longer. Starting on 31 August, other than one title, all their comics would go back to issue #1. DC promised big change and stellar writer/artist pairings in a tidal wave of hype that lasted for a good two months. In the meantime, store owners were troubled by how to order these new comics—do you base your orders off the numbers of whatever titles were restarting (and if so what do you do with brand new titles?) or do you just go with your gut? More difficult was planning for the second issue—how do you predict what titles were going to do well and which weren't…and how do you compare that to initial orders that you were making based on hope and a prayer?

On some levels, DC's restart was a tremendous success—the interwebs were abuzz with theory conjecture and, yes, more hype. Even mainstream media bought into it as articles sprang up on USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, and the New York Times. May of this year was the first month since probably the 40s when no single comic book, from any company, sold more than 100,000 copies, and yet one of DC's titles had over 200,000 preorders and several more were over 100,000. At the same time though, attention was being turned away from the existing comics—new readers weren't going to pick up series that were about to end and long-time readers were being pushed to focus on the new stories as well. And for the final few weeks, the stories really suffered, making long-time readers wonder why they even bothered: Justice League of America featured single-page synopses of story arcs that would have taken place had the comic continued in its original path. Teen Titans featured a special 100^th issue—a major milestone for most comics—that cost more than "regular" issues did but wrapped up the ongoing story arc in slap-dash and hasty fashion while padding the rest of the issue with single-page pieces of art showcasing someone's love of the Titans.

And so the great experiment began on 31 August, and DC had to balance attracting new customers with keeping returning customers happy. How'd they do? (I should note here I am only reviewing the titles I bought, so there was a little weeding out prior to my purchases. There were some titles that I just could not be convinced to buy.)

31 August

Flashpoint #5 – The last comic book from the "old" DC Universe. Like almost every other recent big event from DC, this was written by Geoff Johns and featured a lot of action, some average dialogue, and a "meh" ending. How exactly the Flash caused the universe we have long read to be completely be replaced by another, of which we have had pretty much no indication, remains unresolved. And there was the expected hard yank on the emotions as Bruce Wayne gets a letter from his father-surrogate from another timeline. We even get to see the Batman weep as he reads his not-father's heartfelt words. Average storytelling at best, and the only real value lay in it being a portal to the New DC Universe. At least Andy Kubert's art had some nice cameos.

Justice League #1 – Here it is--the new universe itself! With a cover featuring Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and Cyborg in their newly redesigned new universe costumes. Unfortunately, only four of those characters appear in the issue itself, one of whom isn't even the hero he appears to be on the cover, and the biggest sell, Superman, only appears in the last panel. This story probably means far more to ongoing readers than new ones; Batman and Green Lantern, the two characters in the focus, are extreme examples of how they have long been portrayed in their own titles. Batman is totally by himself and when the police and military see him, they try to shoot him down. Green Lantern is a gung-ho hothead, convinced he can do anything with his magic ring. He is also cocky beyond belief, even when Batman continually shows him up. Early on, we are told this story takes place "five years ago" so we must assume these are younger versions of the heroes that will eventually be involved in the stories. New readers are very likely to be confused by the characters' differences from their reputations and perhaps also a little dismayed by the lack of other characters and very little Superman. But then, this mirrors the Marvel deconstructed story, a concept those same new readers probably have very little knowledge of. Jim Lee's art is pretty, but again, the story rates a "meh."

7 September

Action Comics #1 – A relatively young Superman/Clark Kent tries to make his way in Metropolis as a hero and reporter. Again, new readers are likely to be disturbed by the movement away from what they think they know about Superman: he is wearing jeans, Lois Lane doesn't know who Clark Kent is, and they even work for different newspapers. This story by Grant Morrison is also actually set in the past of the new DC continuity, but there is actually nothing in the comic itself to indicate that. And while ongoing fans probably know this from the numerous stories about it on various comic news sites, the new reader is just going to be lost. A little introduction would go a long way to make those readers happier. For long-time readers, this is actually some quite good Grant Morrison. His writing is crisp and connected, as opposed to the evil Grant Morrison who writes with gaping plot holes that the reader is supposed to somehow fill in with guess work. And as always, the artwork of Rags Morales is just splendid. This one gets a thumb's-up, especially in the depiction of the new Luthor and his twisted plots, but I worry that it will not do a good job keeping new readers.

Batgirl #1 – I will read anything that Gail Simone writes; she has won me over with tight scripting and dazzling storytelling for years now. And she does not disappoint with Batgirl either. There is a major bump in the road for long-time readers, since Barbara Gordon has been crippled for decades in the old continuity. Simone has a couple of choices, devoting a lot of a first issue to how she got better or finessing it, and she chooses the latter, making a smoother story, if not one that satisfies the fanboys. Barbara Gordon has just started her secret life as Batgirl, and she makes rookie errors in this issue. But Simone has never written flawless heroes; what makes her characters excel is their humanity and their ability to overcome their flaws. Batgirl is vibrant and filled with life, just fun to read despite the continuity passover. And Ardian Syaf's art is pleasant. This one also gets a thumb's-up.

Detective Comics #1 – Wow. Just wow. This one is the pick of the week. Batman is apparently still pretty new in his hero's role, he has to deal with the character that was his arch-nemesis in the old continuity, the Joker. Joker is written a little closer to the character in Christopher Nolan's epic The Dark Knight but writer and artist Tony Daniel still give the Joker some psychopathic wackiness that the always-serious movie version lacked. Batman is completely outclassed by the Joker and realizes it, and yet is so new at his job that he doesn't realize that the Joker's capture was far too easy. The last three pages of this issue could be used to teach graphic story-telling, especially the last panel, a full page, that turns both the expectations of the old-time reader and the new reader completely on their ear. This one is a keeper and one to share with people who are unsure about reading comics.

Hawk and Dove #1 – And then there's the stinker of the week. My caveat—I love Hawk and Dove. I have every issue of every comic that is about them, going back to their first appearance in the 60s. The series in the 80s is still a favorite, one that a good example of solid storytelling that remained fun, until it got blown away by poor decisions in DC editorial. This series harkens back to that earlier series both by circumstance—Hank Hall has been Hawk for a while and has just lost his brother Don, the original Dove, replaced by Dawn Granger—and by creative team. The original artist in that 80s series was one Rob Liefeld, who performs art duties here too. And that's where it all ends. Liefeld has become a horrible artist, a parody of himself with no real sense of proportion and grace. He tries to restrain himself through this issue but the moments when he fails are so excessive that it makes the entire comic really painful to read. Sterling Gates's writing is okay, though there were overarching decisions I just do not understand—why are they the avatars of War and Peace rather than Order and Chaos? Unfortunately, the entire issue is a lot of build-up, that might have been better handled by an artist who appeared to give a damn, leading to a big splash page at the end that doesn't reveal and surprise so much as confound. I SO want this series to succeed, and I'll give it a few more issues, but this is just not a good start.

(If you are unfamiliar with the egregious nature of Liefeld's art, I delightfully point you to http://www.progressiveboink.com/archive/robliefeld.html.)

Justice League International #1 – Between veteran writer Dan Jurgen's clean storytelling and Aaron Lopresti's lovely art, this is a fine primer for people new to comics reading. JLI is the best at merging old expectations with newcomers' explanations and it does so the genre of storytelling that works best most often in comics—the team book. Several disparate characters are introduced and brought together. They squabble as they try to find chemistry and they go fight. Most of the characters in this story will be complete blanks to newcomers and so don't have to carry the weight of mainstream expectation. There are also subplots galore, along with humorous moments, especially those between Rocket Red and August General in Iron. Newcomers may be excused if they keep expecting "One punch!" and who knows?—maybe this title will give us that extra-special moment in comics. This one is definitely a keeper.

Stormwatch #1 – This was a terrific comic, but again I fear that readers new to comics will be completely lost. The original Stormwatch series was a sort of third generation comic, building on the storytelling shorthand of the golden and silver ages to bring modern sensibility and thoughtfulness to over-the-top adventure. This version of Stormwatch does this also, making it treacherous for newcomers. At least the characters in JLI might be a little familiar; I'm pretty sure that most of America has never heard of Jack Hawksmoor, Jenny Quantum, Apollo, or The Engineer. The characters all know each other and so the story has to assume that we know them too; there is no reader-friendly set piece where everyone gets introduced. It's no help that one of the main characters is a shapeshifter as well. But for fans of good comics, and especially fans of the original series, this is darned good stuff. Writer Paul Cornell has gotten the flavor of those original stories down, even though he's changing up the characters a bit. And while artist Miguel Sepulveda's panels can be cluttered at times, most of the issue's art is a throwback to that original series. This issue even has an editorial note referring the reader to an event in a comic that has not been released yet. Even long-time readers will read this one slowly and enjoy it, and I just have to recommend new readers hang on if this ends being anything like the original series.

The tally? A decidedly mixed bag. I think one severe weakness is that the issues are a victim of their own hype. It was hard not to be disappointed with a summer-long promise of "everything changes" even though I knew that it would be just about as valid as it is every time a comic company says it. But DC actually seemed to be going through with the motions by restarting every title and so I believed. By and large, it mostly felt like I had picked up a week's worth of independent comics, featuring writers and artists I know and characters I was only slightly familiar with. The whole experiment may go very well, but DC has to resist the urge to give winks to the old continuity and treat every story as if it is a new one. I'll be fascinated to see in December and January what titles will get axed first. And the sales numbers of month 2 are going to be fascinating.

The Best of Raymond Z. Gallun

2011-09-02T18:29:00.002-05:00

A little more than a year ago, I happened upon a Web site that specialized in providing all the books in a given series. As I was poking around that site, I discovered a series of anthologies from the mid-70s published by Del Rey and purporting to be a collection of the best short fiction by important foundational writers from the golden age of science fiction. I have already written about a number of these books, the subjects of which are indicative of the kinds of names the editors were striving to collect: C. L. Moore, Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, and L. Sprague de Camp for example. But as I read through the list of titles, one name jumped out at me.

Raymond Z. Gallun. Z for Zinke.

I had never heard of this writer, not in any collection I have ever read—The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, the first three Great Science Fiction Stories, not in a lot of anthologies that purported to collect the very best science fiction of that era. Granted, in 1939, my parents weren't even born yet, but I still consider myself to be somewhat well-read for that period and getting better as my quest to find the best of that era goes on. I asked a few people about the name and the people I most trust on such matters had no idea who he was, except for my one friend who actually had the Del Rey collection, The Best of Raymond Z. Gallun. Nonetheless, I added it to the list of books I periodically search for and recently found it.

I was further perplexed by the author of the introduction of the collection, one J. J. Pierce, another name I had no knowledge of. The other volumes I had read from the series so far had other "big names" writing the introductions, and here was a volume about a man I had never heard of with commentary from another stranger. With a mix of curiosity and trepidation, I began reading.

If you're one of those folks who likes to skip to the last page of a novel, let me give you a spoiler here—Raymond Z. Gallun's writing has not held up well over the years.

The collected work show some real thoughtfulness: the ideas that drive the stories are insightful and provocative--a human effect story depicting the growing divide between those who can and do travel in space and those that choose to remain on Earth in "Prodigal's Aura"; a serious study of the emotional effect of tremendous human longevity in "The Restless Tide"; another serious evaluation of the effect of colonizing other planets on the colonists in "Return of a Legend." There are also some page-turners about interacting with alien races and other space opera yarns. But all of the stories have one serious weakness: they are not written very well. They have very little style and what style they do have is not very good.

When I finished the book, I began doing some research on Gallun and discovered he was fairly prolific, with over 120 short stories published between 1929 and 1942. So clearly he must have been doing something right to make that many sales; that is, I'd like to think if the issues of a magazine didn't sell well, the editors would notice and not include him so often. But I also discovered that Gallun's day job was as a technical writer. And with that discovery, the veil of dissatisfaction was…not necessarily lifted but its existence was explained.

You see, I'm a paid writer too, also of the technical sort. When I put pen to paper—metaphorically now with the use of digital processing and media—to earn a salary, I am writing requirements and usage documentation for software. There is no place for stylishness in enterprise-class software documentation: someone has paid a lot of money to install the software as quickly as possible in order to begin to use it so that it can begin paying for itself. An ordered set of instructions for the installation of software doesn't have a lot of space in it for flair anyway, nor does an unordered list of viable operating systems for the software. And when I do find myself working on content that resembles prose instead of lists, I still have to be careful of language, style, and word choice in order to both make the content easily understandable and usable and to not give our translators fits. So when I sit down to write things for pleasure, whether it be this blog or the fiction that sits in a quiet corner waiting for my return to it, I'm well aware of that technical voice and constantly fighting against it, lest my prose come out…well, like Gallun's. I spend at least seven hours a workday trying to sound nothing like a human in my writing, and it's difficult to get out of that mode when I do any other kind of writing. Gallun didn't often succeed in escaping that straightforward style of writing in the stories collected in this book, and as a result, the stories are difficult and sometimes tedious to get through, masking the inventiveness behind what drives a lot of them.

I have also said it quite a few times on this blog: I love the masters of style. Current writers like Iain Banks and Neal Stephenson make me giddy with their inventive prose workings. At its base, I think this love comes from a joy in the English language, its sound and its meaning, the twists of which can carry the reader far away from the mundane world far more quickly than an intricately plotted narrative (though to be sure, I appreciate those as well). Unfortunately, Gallun resides at the other end of the spectrum—straightforward writing with not very dense plots. Neither the language nor the events of the stories give any special twists. And so it takes a reader who goes deeper than the surface to see that the ideas are really quite powerful, especially given the time period in which he was writing. This insight into Gallun's writing also offered up an insight into that golden age, that may well be true today as well—we remember the very good writers but there are a great many passable writers who advance their craft and the genre as well. The stereotype of the golden age is the pulp hack, with bug-eyed aliens and torn bodices on beautiful girls. What reading this series, and other series along the same lines, has taught me is that the stereotype simply wasn't true for the best writing of that time. And in the case of Gallun, not very true of some of the passable writing of the time, either. As I should have expected, the stereotype hides the truth.

The article about Gallun in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction concludes with the following epithet: "The best of the pre-1939 sf writers who failed to remain well-known." That's a tough sentence to parse and pretty difficult to write as well. As the breadth of the genre of speculative fiction grows larger, the depth available to readers, especially of the earliest parts of it, must grow more and more shallow. I really appreciate this book, shining a light as it does on a writer just beneath that top tier, reminding me that there were impressive depths to the genre pretty much at every point in its history; it's just that those depths had been increasingly difficult to find. Perhaps with the rise of the electronic media, some of the stories can be dredged out to see the light of day again.

An Ignominious and Perhaps Constructive Return

2011-08-17T11:49:00.004-05:00

So I accidentally took a couple of months off from updating this blog. I had lots of things to write about—seeing Captain America and not seeing Green Lantern for instance. I've still got a rough draft describing my discoveries after watching four seasons of Babylon 5 for the first time. I've read some absolutely brilliant stuff and some other that wasn't quite so great. And of course, there's the great changeover at DC, as a new universe is about to be born and I find myself at a dreadful crossroads as I consider giving up on comics altogether or, if I keep getting them, going to an electronic format. In fact, two weeks from today, DC's new universe starts and, for now, I'll be participating in it.

At the highest level, I needed a break in order to recharge the writing cells. I found myself reading sequels of books and struggling to find something interesting to say about them. But even worse, I found that I was reading in order to write about what I was reading rather than for the pure joy of reading. I never made it to a tenure-track position at an institute of higher learning, so I can only imagine that this feeling as I was reading—this ongoing critical conversation in my mind that was sucking the joy out of what I was reading—might have been what those teachers go through. And over a month and a half, I actually read a great deal and saw some fun movies, but I just absorbed them and was readerly more than critical. And it was good. I think I learned some things in this time, and I hope that as I pick up the writing mantle again, I can try to maintain a separation between those two states, or at least tone down the critic until the reader has had his say.

And so I return with what has become known as a "WTF? moment."

If I haven't made it clear elsewhere, I am a huge fan of the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I own pretty much every book the man ever wrote outside of the Tarzan series, and the first science fiction novel I read was A Princess of Mars. I return to it every few years, and it rekindles the joy that I felt upon my first discovery of it. Those books have become a kind of touchstone for me as I use them to evaluate the readings and thoughts of fellow readers of science fiction and fantasy (I'm reminded of what became cliché in military movies, but instead of asking the potential spy who won last year's World Series, I ask them their opinion of Edgar Rice Burroughs). You can imagine that I was therefore tremendously excited by the idea of a movie based on these books, and even more so with the later reports that it would be directed by Andrew Stanton, whose movies include Wall-E and Finding Nemo and the screenplay was coming from Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Chabon. I felt certain that these big-time names would have the cachet to keep the movie true to its roots and not try to modernize it or go too far away from the source material…you know, like David Lynch's Dune or the dreaded Starship Troopers.

The first bit of worry came when they changed the working name from A Princess of Mars to John Carter. Such a move doesn't make a lot of sense to me from a marketing perspective: they took an iconic name that would resonate with fans of the books and would give some idea of what was going on to people who did not know the story and changed it to a name that has very little meaning at all. A movie entitled John Carter could be about pretty much anything at all. The next bits of worry came from the casting—the actors playing the lead roles, those of Dejah Thoris and John Carter, seemed way too young in my mind. But I had seen no pictures and I had faith in the director and writers. I just had to be patient—they were going to prove me right in my faith. And then the first teaser trailer came out--http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rf55GTEZ_E.

And now my worries have become very big concerns. Granted, there are some great things about the trailer in regard to its relation to the source material. The movie is apparently going to use the framing device used in the book, that the narrator is the nephew of John Carter and is told of his death at the beginning of the story, which acts as a launching point to telling Carter's story. The time period appears to be about right, and letting the terrestrial part of the story take place in the West is good too. And honestly, using Peter Gabriel's remake of Arcade Fire's "My Body is a Cage" is just brilliant: it perfectly describes Carter's state at the end of A Princess of Mars when it says "My body is a cage that keeps me from being with the one I love."

But the trailer seems intent on making this a romantic movie, something along the lines of star-crossed lovers who can never truly be together, a la the Twilight movies. I understand that this is just the trailer, and it may be couching the movie in those terms in order to entice a wider audience, but the original novel is actually a romping adventure story with romance as a sideplot. The color palette for Mars just feels wrong, too. Barsoom is a dying civilization but it is a glorious one, filled with rich colors and architecture and jewels despite its moribund state. Certainly events take place in the desert, but in the trailer everything is just covered in dust and not very opulent at all.

And then there are the actors; they really are far too young. For instance, the description of John Carter from the novel:

He was a splendid specimen of manhood, standing a good two inches over six feet, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, with the carriage of the trained fighting man. His features were regular and clear cut, his hair black and closely cropped, while his eyes were of a steel gray, reflecting a strong and loyal character, filled with fire and initiative.

This is the description of Dejah Thoris, his beloved:

And the sight which met my eyes was that of a slender, girlish figure, similar in every detail to the earthly women of my past life. She did not see me at first, but just as she was disappearing through the portal of the building which was to be her prison she turned, and her eyes met mine. Her face was oval and beautiful in the extreme, her every feature was finely chiseled and exquisite, her eyes large and lustrous and her head surmounted by a mass of coal black, waving hair, caught loosely into a strange yet becoming coiffure. Her skin was of a light reddish copper color, against which the crimson glow of her cheeks and the ruby of her beautifully molded lips shone with a strangely enhancing effect.

John Carter is completely off (I'd always imagined Brendan Fraser or a younger Josh Brolin in this role) and while the actress portraying Dejah Thoris is "girlish" (in the later books, she loses this girlishness and is very womanly indeed), the crew made a creative choice and changed her copper skin to a henna tattoo. I've long struggled to find someone who could play Dejah Thoris—who do you get to depict the most beautiful woman of two worlds?—but I recently saw a noir movie from the 50s starring Gene Tierney. I applied some google fu and found this picture.

That is Dejah Thoris.

It certainly appears I am not the target audience for this movie. On the one hand, I know too much about the books and am not happy with the artistic decision I see being made. On the other, I may just be too old in general. And ironically, if I actually knew nothing of the books, this trailer would be that much more appealing to me. So now I wait for another trailer, hoping to show that this was just an angle for marketing, that the movie will be so much more than this trailer makes it appear to be. In a summer when Captain America is released and proves to be tremendously faithful to its outdated source material to good effect, I find I wish the same for John Carter.

Embassytown

2011-06-10T09:25:00.002-05:00

Prior to his latest novel's release, China Mieville said he was going to do space opera. And to be fair, Embassytown does contain some of the classic elements of that sub-genre: ships that move faster than light without any sort of explanation as to how they can do it, a very large multi-system civilization, and Earth has been lost in the dim reaches of history. But I think it can be argued as well that Embassytown also draws a great deal from the planetary romance subgenre as well, with its emphasis on humans interacting with aliens usually on the alien homeworld, fighting to survive their encounters both with the aliens and with the environment.

But like the best authors, those that stretch beyond the genre elements, Mieville only uses them as a framework and a springboard into a thoughtful consideration of language and communication. While it's something of a science fiction trope that humans have to develop a method of communicating with alien cultures, it generally gets passed over fairly quickly with just a knowing nod ("and after the usual five or six hours of study, the universal translator worked well for us"). But Mieville first imagines the Ariekei (or Hosts as they are colloquially called) as truly alien—that is, they don't think in the way that humans do and so some sort of paradigm shift has to take place either in human thinking or in the aliens, and then he centers that alien-ness in their language. Granted, his very brief descriptions of the aliens highlight their differences: hairy multi-jointed legs that end in hooves, a "giftwing" and a "fanwing" neither of which appear to be useful for flight, and two mouths. But the essential strangeness of the Ariekei is that they speak simultaneously with their two mouths and cannot understand any species that does not also. And while humans can hear the distinct sounds each mouth of the Ariekei makes as it speaks, the Ariekei simply cannot hear two humans speaking simultaneously, so that those humans have to be connected at least empathically. This leads to genetic manipulation by the humas to create ambassadors to the Ariekei, two individuals linked genetically and empathically and scrubbed every day to keep them from growing apart either physically or mentally. Even more interesting, since the Ariekei are "reading" the empathy behind the words being spoken, they are unable to tell lies.

The humans that live on the Ariekei planet are completely dependent on the biomechanical prowess of the Hosts. The atmosphere of the planet is toxic, but the Ariekei use their expertise to create "areoli" zones that contain breathable air for the humans. They also grow pretty much everything they use, from houses to vehicles to furniture and weapons. They even have modified some farms to grow food that the humans can live off of which becomes the primary food source for the humans since they are so far removed from the nearest human worlds.

Mieville's narrator, Avice Benner Cho, acts at first as a guide through the weirdness of the Ariekei world, eventually becoming a simile—performing an action so that the Ariekei have a truth on which to base their comparisons. But as Avice grows older, she falls into politics and learns some of the underpinnings and subtle machinations of the humans that govern her part of the world, detailing them for the reader as she uncovers them. And while the Ariekei are fascinated with the possibility of learning to lie, to take a step beyond just simile, those leaders make a catastrophic mistake which threatens to bring down not just their part of the Ariekes world, but all of the Ariekei civilization.

There are moments in Embassytown where Mieville's descriptive power is evident, mostly in his descriptions of the alien architecture and landscape. But the real thrust of this novel is in the ideas and an exploration of the power of language. And in this exploration, Mieville reminds me of no one so much as Ursula K. Le Guin, especially in The Left Hand of Darkness, as she insists on seeing the details of the differences between human and alien rather than glossing over them as decoration and trope. Of course, such an examination not illuminates the alien, it also brings the human sharply into focus as well. In many ways, the interaction between the characters in Embassytown surpasses that of any other Mieville novel because so much emphasis on the alien forces the human characters to stand out and carry the narrative weight.

The novel's exploration is a delight even though a world is at peril. The aliens are very alien, reminding me of the best of Vernor Vinge and, again, Le Guin. Though the mostly descriptive opening feels plodding as the scene must be set, when the plot starts moving, it rushes at what feels like breakneck speed, making it difficult to set the book down. The resolution is both heart-breaking and exhilarating, maintaining the realistic sensibility that drives the insistence on aliens that really are alien.

Again Mieville demonstrates why his books are always near the top of my to-read and to-find list. Recent months have seen increased discussion of the literary merit and quality of genre fiction. Embassytown demonstrates that, even from the lowest roots, something thoughtful and powerful can arise.

Kung Fu Panda 2

2011-06-08T09:10:00.002-05:00

If you're looking for a lot of story, this is not the movie for you. While there are interesting developments that might keep the attention of an adult, most of the plot is fairly low-level and child-sized, which you should probably expect from most animated movies not coming from Pixar nowadays. It does have some historical significance, as the evil Lord Shin (voiced by Gary Oldman) discovers that the gunpowder used in the fireworks the people used to celebrate can also be used to make powerful weapons, the likes of which have not been seen. Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) receives a vision of the impending danger if Shin is allowed to go about his plans unchecked and so sends Po (Jack Black) and the Furious Five out to stop Shin's villainy.

Tucked into this main plot is the nice side story of where Po comes from, why he's a panda whose father is a goose. Somehow Po is wrapped up in a prophecy that guides Shin's plans, all of which lead to Po being orphaned in the first place. At any rate, the plot is mildly complex, enough to keep a child's attention between vigorous set pieces of kung fu goodness and appealing to adults, if a little predictable.

Why adults should want to see Kung Fu Panda 2 is the brilliant animation that drives the movie. The animators and art directors did simply brilliant work that sometimes challenges the best of Pixar. Several elements stand out; at the most basic, the color palette precisely matches the mood of the movie moment by moment, ensuring that the audience feels what the creators want them to feel and sometimes even offering a hint that everything is not as it appears. The choreography of the fight scenes is filled with style and vigor, but accurately reflect the near-insanity of the best martial arts pictures. Those scenes also sometimes use humor to punctuate the organized chaos—not just the humor of an unaesthetic panda attempting ridiculous martial art moves, but also bystanders participating and the unexpected introduction of tools and props.

Two other elements lift Kung Fun Panda 2 above the average animation fare. First, the background animation throughout the movie is just phenomenal. The first movie spends a lot of time outdoors or in a small village, but Kung Fun Panda 2 moves into a large Chinese city, allowing the animators to play with traditional Chinese architecture and colors. Every view of the city, whether the long shot as Po and his band first see the city or up close as the characters wander through it, is precise and beautiful. Some of the long shots of the city, especially during the night, are breath-taking and well worth the study.

The animators also chose to animate Po's flashbacks, the re-emerging memories of his original family, in classic flat animation using a style that appears hand-drawn and is based on traditional Chinese art. These moments are used to good effect, reflecting simplicity and immaturity while still possessing an artistic quality that is uncommon in most animated fare. Especially compelling is when the 2-D and CGI animation are used in the same frame.

Kung Fu Panda 2 succeeds on many levels. Kid will love it, and their parents will be entertained. But the real treasure is for the lover of animation, those folks who appreciate the elements that go into outstanding animation. In fact, Kung Fu Panda 2 is the first movie I have seen in 2-D that made me wish I had paid the full 3-D price. For its art alone, Kung Fu Panda 2 is worth the price of seeing it more than once.

DC’s Reboot

2011-06-01T15:57:00.004-05:00

I have been mulling writing a review of DC's new limited series Flashpoint for a while now, but had thought that I should wait until the second issue came out to really have something to say. Granted, a good deal of what I was going to say had nothing to do with the content of that exact title but with the direction it and its associated mini-series were taking, but still, I thought two issues of content would give me a solid footing for whatever opinions I might have. In the meantime, I was working up reviews of Babylon 5 and Kung Fu Panda 2 that would be coming out this week.

And then I got to work this morning and someone said to me—what do you think about DC rebooting their titles?

If only we were talking about this kind of Reboot.

Some background: DC decided to end their ongoing title Flash and follow it up with a mini-series called Flashpoint, in which something goes horribly wrong in time and Everything You Know Has Changed (comics trope #1). And while the main mini-series was being released, DC was going to have some ancillary mini-series as well, such as Flashpoint: The Canterbury Cricket (I am not making the title up) that would help establish the universe that was created when something had gone wrong with time. The problem was that there were TWENTY associated mini-series running three issues apiece! So, at $3 a pop, that's nine bucks for a mini-series, times 20…$180 dollars for the associated mini-series alone. Add that to the main mini-series, running five issues at $4 a pop and you end up having to fork over $200 before taxes to keep up with what is going on. And this doesn't include the regular cost of your monthly comics which were going to continue running as Flashpoint ran its course.

I, something of a monumental comic geek, hemmed and hawed. Of course I could obsess over owning all of them, but when it came to reading them, the quality could be all over the place. And given DC's recent editorial direction, they probably WOULD be all over the place. I finally decided I couldn't pay $200, even with my discount at the local store. So I subscribed only to the main mini-series at my local comic book store, much to the chagrin of its owner, and tried not to feel guilty about keeping money out of his hands and trying not to feel smug about finally fighting off my completist tendency.

And then DC announced that the final issue of Flashpoint would be one of only two books released that week (bearing in mind that most weeks see an average of around 10 books being released), and that they weren't talking about September yet because Everything Is Going To Change. As you might expect, speculation started immediately about what that might actually mean, and the leading contender was that DC was going to reboot some part of their continuity. For the comically ignorant, rebooting means relaunching a series, going back to #1 and assuming that a majority of what had happened has not happened. It's a way of sweeping away the detritus and inertia of an ongoing series, giving the creators free reign to do something relatively new with an existing character, without breaking all the continuity that has gone before. It's also a way to increase sales because, wouldn't you know it, the #1 issue of a comic book usually sells a whole lot. But the theory was that DC wasn't just going to reboot one title, they were going to reboot several.

And, as it turns out, they intend to reboot every single one of them that is in their main continuity, 52 titles in all. The new Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman would have some resemblance to what audiences know about them nothing should be taken for granted. To quote a related article (http://tucsoncitizen.com/usa-today-news/2011/05/31/dc-comics-unleashes-a-new-universe-of-titles/),

In September, an additional 51 first issues will make their debut, introducing stories that are grounded in each character's specific legend but also reflect today's real-world themes and events. Lee spearheaded the costumes' redesign to make characters more identifiable and accessible to comic fans new and old.

"We really want to inject new life in our characters and line," says Dan DiDio, co-publisher of DC with Lee. "This was a chance to start, not at the beginning, but at a point where our characters are younger and the stories are being told for today's audience."

Never mind that I already am a member of today's audience and I kinda like the characters the way they are…rather the way they were a couple of years ago. Oh, and to top it all off, DC also announced that they are going to add a digital format for all these titles, making the digital version available on the same day as the paper copies are available. So let's take a peek at the past and then conjecture a little bit.

I've made no bones about how much I think a lot of DC's work has sucked recently. I cut two thirds of my subscription list. I've complained about bizarre editorial decisions both here and in conversation. And now part of me wonders how much of that lack of (I just got to call a spade a spade) giving a damn about the product was based on the knowledge that it was all going away anyway. Superman goes walkabout in a "major change of direction" and, predictably, nothing happens. Wonder Woman gets mixed up in some sort of time thing and people forgot that she exists. And predictably, it's not very well written. Everyone thinks Batman has died, but now he's back and there are two Batmen, plus a whole corporation of international Batmen, and it just doesn't have any logic associated with it. The Justice League, supposedly the group of the greatest heroes in the DC universe, is now made of sidekicks, also-rans, and a gorilla. And I ask myself if creators were allowed to do this because it was the end of the titles and we'd be starting it all over soon anyway. As I write these things, I'm very cognizant of appearing as though I am wearing a tinfoil hat, but then I am reminded of one of the worst fiascoes of the last couple of years—a horribly disjointed comic titled 52. And how many titles are getting "relaunched" in September? 52. So while that may be a coincidence, it also puts an exclamation point on what has been a particularly bad run in the past few years, in an economic climate where people did not need much persuasion to spend their money on things like gas and food.

But what about going forward? If the above paragraph didn't make my point too clearly, the editorial decisions of late have just been abysmal, and I'm left to wonder why I should give a darn about this latest one. It's hard not to see this as yet another Big Event, and DC hasn't pulled off one of those in a long time. And now, instead of perhaps messing up just a few titles, they have put the whole line in danger if they are not more thoughtful about the editorial decisions being made.

And so, bearing in mind that I have been flirting with just dropping comics altogether, I've got to decide what to do next. If everything is being relaunched, August would be the absolute best time imaginable to cut the cord. I've also been pondering the whole digital comic issue—there is a great deal to be said for not having to store comics any longer; I've already got 32 boxes of comics in storage and every week just adds a few more books to the pile. If the comics are going to come out digitally ON THE SAME DAY and if they have the same price point (though I have heard cheaper actually), suddenly I could be in a position to avoid having to drive to the next city over to get comics, cut storage costs dramatically, and actually keep ALL the comics I buy on relatively inexpensive digital media.

What are the drawbacks to either plan? Well, if I drop comics altogether, all I can think about is the face of my local comic book store owner, who also happens to be a friend. It's not his fault that DC has made idiotic decision after idiotic decision, but he also will end up paying the price if I stop buying comics or purchase them in some other fashion. And, if I go digital, there really is something to be said for actually holding a book in my hands and seeing the full drawing in the format in which it was intended.

So, I have some really big decisions ahead of me, lifestyle-changing decisions. What do I think of DC's reboot? What I would really like is if DC backed up about four years and started from there, giving a damn about the stories they were writing and as a side effect keeping me interested. But that doesn't seem likely and I am left to decide, as I approach the ripe old age of 46, am I cool enough to appreciate the hip new things DC is trying to do?

Man I miss Reboot.

Escapement

2011-05-23T09:34:00.002-05:00

When I finished this novel's prequel, Mainspring, I wasn't so impressed with the storytelling of the novel but with its setting, something of a steampunk nirvana—an Earth with gears running about its equator guiding it on its track through the heavens. Just that idea and its effects playing out are fascinating, but only somewhat shallowly dealt with in the first novel, and so I looked forward to the second, willing to wade through clumsy characterization and dialogue to get more of an idea of this world. And then, as I read Escapement, it turns out that the characterization and dialog take a huge leap forward, making the novel enjoyable for those aspects as well as the setting that drew me in.

Instead of relying on a single protagonist, as is the case with Mainspring, Escapement interweaves the stories of three protagonists, each offering differing perspectives on the world around them. Paolina Barthes has grown up on the Wall, the massive mountain range that circles the globe at the equator in support of the gear threads. Because her community is primarily made up of shipwrecked sailors, her life has generally been miserable since they do not hold women in very high esteem. It's no help that she is gifted with incredible engineering insight, allowing her to build and repair tools that are a necessity for the life of her fellow villagers; rather than appreciating her skill, her community takes her for granted and expects her to work for their benefit without her rising the status of a worthless girl-child. So when a young English boy arrives in her village bearing a pocket-watch, her imagination is set ablaze with the power and potential of taking the clockwork that guides her world and miniaturizing it into a tool that can be held in her hand. And that work makes her want to travel to civilized lands, where such tools are commonplace.

Threadgill Angus Al-Wazir is the chief petty officer for a dirigible that crashed at the Wall and has just made his way back to England on a boat he built on his own. He finds himself summoned to the Prime Minister's office and is there recommissioned and ordered to return to the Wall to aid in efforts to build a tunnel through it to see what is in the Southern Hemisphere before the Chinese can begin colonizing there themselves. Stoic on the outside, he accepts his orders and heads back to the part of the world where he has suffered the most, serving Queen and empire.

Emily McHenry Childress is a librarian at Yale, an "old maid" whose life has been devoted to the books she cares for and the occasional efforts on behalf of a secret organization called the White Birds, whose goal is to maintain balance through the world's powers by use of knowledge and books. One afternoon, she is summoned to go on a journey for the White Birds, and so she gives up her safe life, the only one she has ever known, to travel to England and beyond.

Over the course of Escapement, these characters become well-rounded—especially Al-Wazir and Childress—as they travel about the world in order to meet what are, ultimately, self-imposed goals for serving the people they hold most dear. The structure of the novel is rigorously mechanical: each chapter is divided into three sections, one each devoted to the adventures of the three protagonists, and while that can sometimes feel restrictive, author Jay Lake does some interesting things with the plot so that often, within a chapter, the events in each character's life parallel the others. This could become somewhat heavy-handed when used by a less-skilled author, but Lake handles it delicately, so that it wasn't until halfway through that I noticed the pattern. And those adventures are a lot of fun, showing us more of the civilizations that inhabit the Wall, Europe, and even into China.

Even though the book is deeply ensconced in the steampunk tradition, through the character of Paolina, Lake is able to introduce fantasy elements that, again, could be jarring but end up working smoothly. For it turns out that Paolina is the most common of the archetypes of epic fantasy—the gifted outsider who strives to take her place within a more enlightened society. Like the peasant boy who discovers he has been touched by the gods and is destined to be king, Paolina finds that her immense engineering talent goes beyond the mundane into something of the mystical: the watch she makes with the English pocket watch as its model is so much more: instead of just recording the time and timing of the things around her, she can use it to effect those things as well. For instance, she is able to change the timing of the engines of a dirigible that follows her so that it turns the craft away from its pursuit and eventually destroys it. But being from the most backwater-y of villages, she suspects that all the civilized countries have wizards and tools with these abilities and so is determined to get more training by visiting these wizards. And when word of someone with these decidedly singular powers gets out, she becomes the object of worldwide hunt.

Unlike Childress and Al-Wazir, Paolina grows very little over the course of her adventures. Repeatedly placing her fate in the hands of someone she thinks she can trust turns out to be disastrous since those same people continuously break that trust. Nonetheless, this does not weigh down the plot since she is constantly on the run and not really given any time to be contemplative and nurtured, especially as she continues to discover the awesome reach and destructive ability of her power.

For whatever reason, this turned out to be a book I didn't want to put down. I was fascinated by the people and the world they inhabit and did not feel that the author threw any unwarranted curves. There are passages that might feel like they get away from what drives the story, but at the same time, when people live their lives, not everything in their life drives them to a single plot resolution. This picaresque nature is reflected in the narrative of Childress and Al-Wazir's travels and doesn't distract from the final chapters as everything begins to pay off. I look forward to the final book in the trilogy to continue the stories of these characters' lives and how they deal with the revelations that proceed from the conclusion of the book.

The Best of L. Sprague de Camp

2011-05-15T14:59:00.002-05:00

There's an odd thing about stereotypes: sometimes something fits them. And so I as I read short story collections of the old masters, it was only a matter of time until I found someone who didn't really write outside the stereotypical range that the mainstream has of the golden age of science fiction. And so it was with this collection of short stories by L. Sprague de Camp. This is not to say that the writing is bad per se, it just doesn't seem to stretch the ideas of what speculative fiction is capable, moving beyond starships, ray guns, and bug-eyed aliens.

In fact, the best single word I can think of to describe this collection is "slight." The writing is clean and the characters interesting, even while fairly flat, but there really is nothing going on thematically. The best example is the well-developed short story, "Nothing in the Rules" about a club swim meet in what appears to be New York City. Enraged that the opposing team has a ringer, a woman with slightly webbed hands which gives her an unfair advantage, Louis Connaught enlists a mermaid to swim for his team. There is a great deal of set-up as the opposing team makes appeal after appeal, and it becomes clear that de Camp apparently knows the rules for AAU swim meets backwards and forward, but nothing specifically denies mermaids from swimming. Funny set-pieces follow, including the unexpected effects of saltwater-based merpeople getting drunk in fresh water, and de Camp includes some development of the history and culture of the merpeople. But when the story ends, the reader doesn't need to waste thought on the repercussions of such shenanigans.

Similarly, "The Guided Man" seems more intent on focusing on the funny circumstances of an interesting technological idea than any exploration of its ramifications. The story introduces the idea of "telagogging," the procedure of letting someone else take over a person's body in order, ostensibly, to guide it through activities the original owner is unprepared for. In this case though, Ovid Ross hires experts to help him through job interviews and eventually a date with the woman of his dreams. Even though the telagogger, the rented pilot, is under contract to not let personal feelings get in the way of the request of the renter, Ross's pilot falls for his date as well and sets about sabotaging him. The story is funny and gently touches on a common theme of science fiction, the appropriation of amazing technology by those not so pure-minded as the inventor. But the story turns to farce as the date ends up in a romp through a nudist colony with enough sidestories of mistaken identity suitable for Shakespeare or an episode of "Three's Company."

I should have known it would be like that from the very first story in the collection, "Hyperpilosity." A viral plague sweeps through humanity causing changes in human appearance, changed anyone with an interest in etymology could guess from the title of the story. The story follows two paths, the narrator attempting and ultimately failing to cure the plague and also describing the social aspects of a disease that cause people to grow hair all over their bodies at ridiculous rates. Ultimately what drives the narrator is how to make money from his discoveries but he fails even at that. And while the social exploration is something along the lines of what the best science fiction does, it is brought to an abrupt stop by the silliness of the hairy plague and the author's inability to give it serious consideration.

The last two stories show a dramatic shift for de Camp to epic fantasy, which feels much more suited to his writing style than "hard" science fiction. "The Emperor's Fan" describes what happens when the emperor in the title loses the instruction manual for the ultimate weapon: humor and chaos in a medieval setting. And "Two Yards of Dragon" imposes modern economic theory on the traditional story of a squire striving for his knighthood. Again, both are funny, and made more so by the superposition of modern ethos on a Middle Age settings. The commentary on human foibles is wry and precise, but not really much deeper than "What fools these mortals be" which directly reflects the sort of attitude the science fiction stories have.

The collection also has three poems of dubious merit in them, more along the lines of bawdy ballads told at a convention than anything of deep value. Titles like "The Ameba" and "Little Green Men" only serves to strengthen the stereotype of speculative fiction writing rather than deflect it in any way.

So while the collection is fun, it's more an analog of the summertime popcorn movie than the Oscar nominee. And as I have established elsewhere, there's nothing wrong with that unless you are looking for something more. Given what I had found in others in the "Best of" collections by Ballantine in the early 70s, I was looking forward to something more substantive. There are chuckles galore to be found here, and indications of the breadth of speculative fiction in the golden age, so it's worthwhile, just not helping in my larger quest.

Maske: Thaery

2011-05-11T09:28:00.006-05:00

And so with a single post, I threaten my hard-won reputation as a SF geek.

For years, people whose opinion I respect have told me that I need to read Jack Vance, whose merits they all sang quite loudly. And I tired, I really did. I read three of his books and afterwards felt somewhat cheated as the expectations I had been given were not nearly matched by what I had read. And then, in 2009, the New York Times wrote a glowing tribute to Vance in the wake of the publication of a collection of stories by authors who admired Vance. The article opens with compliments that should make any read stand up and take notice (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19Vance-t.html):

Jack Vance, described by his peers as "a major genius" and "the greatest living writer of science fiction and fantasy," has been hidden in plain sight for as long as he has been publishing — six decades and counting.

The article goes on to quote authors I like a great deal, like Dan Simmons, Neil Gaiman, and Michael Chabon, all of whom praise Vance as a craftsman and master storyteller. So clearly I was missing something and resolved to try again. I did some research and found that the Dying Earth books, for which he is best known and about which the New York Times article was written, are exorbitantly expensive as they are out of print. More research led to another lauded book, Maske: Thaery which I was able to pick up fairly cheaply recently and so my renewed attempt at appreciating Vance was begun.

That same article says the following about Vance:

Reading Vance leaves you with a sense of formality, of having been present at an occasion when, for all the jokiness and the fun of made-up words, the serious business of literary entertainment was transacted.

And yet when I read him in the past and in this most recent attempt, I didn't find his formality to be a gateway to "the serious business of literary entertainment." I found his language to be stilted and unwieldy, often getting in the way of appreciating what he was trying to say. The best analogy I could think of was watching a dubbed anime movie, where the characters' mouths move and the poor translators have to get the relevant part of what the characters are saying in the space of how long the characters' mouths move. Sometimes, the English is much shorter than the Japanese and the translators are forced to make the characters say things in far too many words in order for the characters' voices to be saying something as their mouths move. The results are sometimes unintentionally funny and sometimes extremely off-putting. In the case of Maske: Thaery, it is a nuisance.

It's no help that the thrust of the story is a yokel trying to make his way into the upper echelons of a society that is highly regimented, but the stiltedness goes beyond the words they say to each other to the narrative segments between. Jubal Droad knows that he is intrinsically as good as the snooty people he deals with in Wysdor, and there is some humor in his repeated attempts to advance his fiscal and professional career. But the narrator is third-person, and so in the passages where Jubal is alone or interacts with others of his clan, the high-falutin' language and style is particularly out of place. It also doesn't work in the expository passages that exist just to describe the strange world the reader finds himself in.

Jubal ends up being pitted repeatedly against Ramus Ymph, a nobleman in Wysrod who appears to be breaking various Thaerian laws about interaction with other races and other planets. Jubal's new job as a junior investigator for the mysterious D3 is to investigate Ramus Ymph and report on his crimes to his superior, Nai the Hever. His investigations force Jubal to travel all over the world of Maske but also to a neighboring planet. Vance populates these locales with fairly flat characters, but the effort spent on defining their cultures, no matter how silly, is masterful. But again, the reader often has to fight through oddly constructed prose to get to the meat of it.

Vance also makes some odd structural choices for Maske: Thaery as well. For instance, the first half of the book is laden with footnotes to expand on Thaerian terms and culture. And when footnotes are insufficient, there are also a few pages of endnotes. The notes help to round out the culture that Vance has elaborately built up. But they also disrupt the flow of the narration, actually serving as asides with little narrative value beyond being signposts to Vance's worldmaking skills. Craftier writers have found ways to include the information found in the notes actually in the narrative so that it doesn't take away from the ongoing story. In addition there are two distinct points where the narrative skips over critical periods of time to begin again with Jubal having to recap the parts that were skipped over. At a low level, this is an interesting writing technique that breaks up a straightforward recitation of facts, but at a higher level it again serves as a distraction from the story being told. At the highest level, both the notes and the time-jumping call into question the effect that Vance is attempting to make with the story—is this a historical account, a reading indicated by the high language and style and footnotes, or is this a less rigorous retelling of the facts of Jubal's escapades?

All that said, Maske: Thaery is a simple read despite the contortions of style and structure. But at its end, I still don't get a feeling that I know any of the characters very well at all—what motivates Jubal is never very clear. The novel makes it clear his overriding issue is the acquisition of money and prestige but this doesn't offer much insight into why he makes the specific decisions he makes. And because the third-person narrator is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, we get very little insight into how Jubal's mind works. The alternative is that Jubal is a very flat character indeed, making him far less enjoyable as a character. And truly, no other character in the novel is built up as much as Jubal.

So while I can see Maske: Thaery as an interesting experiment in storytelling, I don't see it as much of a success. And given the praise that has been heaped on Vance, I expected a great deal more out of the novel. It may well be a matter of taste and I am just different in this regard. After all, I'm not overwhelmed by the grandeur of Mad Men and I find the original Hulk to be a fine bit of moviemaking. I'm reluctant to make a fifth attempt at Vance, but if I can find a fairly decent cheap copy of his reputed masterpiece, The Dying Earth, I'll work up the gumption to give him another chance.

Thor

2011-05-09T08:39:00.006-05:00

In case you hadn't heard, Marvel decided to make a movie about one of its properties by hiring a big-name director to lead a cast that includes a pretty much unknown actor as the title character, a popular actor everyone knows as the title character's father, and a gorgeous brunette that everyone recognizes as the romantic interest. And Stan Lee shows up somewhere along the way too. Audiences flock to see the movie in its first week, helping it to gross over $60 million in its first weekend, but then word of mouth gets out—all the exciting action scenes promised by the trailers and commercials are about the only action scenes in the movie. Instead, the big-name director has taken the comic property to its roots, telling the story of the hero's dysfunctional relationship with his family. And no one wants to go see an action flick that delves into how the characters feel about each other. As a result, word-of-mouth kills the movie and audiences peter out pretty quickly after that first weekend.

Of course, I'm talking about 2003's Hulk, directed by Ang Lee.

And yet Marvel seems to have started the same pattern with Thor, another movie that is long on feelings but doesn't contain the epic action sequences one would expect from a movie about when gods disagree with one another.

I went to the theater expecting something different; between the trailers and my knowledge of the worlds-spanning history of Thor and the rest of the Norse gods as told by Marvel, I expected Thor and the Warriors Three (and Sif) versus all sorts of Kirby-esque monsters. What I got instead was a real story, about how the jealousy of one brother for another leads to strife among many worlds. And that's okay, because honestly, I imagine that if you took a poll of people entering the movie to see if they could identify who Thor's brother is, less than a third would know his name, let alone their story, whether in the Norse myths or in Marvel comics. And so what action sequences there are actually have a reason to exist, rather than just action for action's sake.

Along the way, we get to see the development of Thor (Chris Hemsworth) from a reactionary thoughtless child into a young man (god?) recognizing that he still has a lot to learn about the world before he can assume his father's throne. And we get to see the evil that lies just beneath the surface of his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), so that when it eventually is made explicit, it is not a big surprise. Hemsworth and Hiddleston seem to thoroughly enjoy their roles in the movie, so their characters are vibrant and engaging. In fact, it might be argued that Hiddleston's Loki is played too smoothly, so that when he openly revolts against his father and Thor, it may be something of a surprise to a viewer not paying close attention.

Anthony Hopkins's Odin is not quite the Marvel version of the character, a judgmental father who sometimes seems to be looking for the slightest excuse to punish Thor by taking away his powers or giving them to someone else. But it turns out that Odin's plan in this instance is based on fatherly wisdom, more or less grounding Thor until he learns his lesson about compassion and leadership, then letting him get his powers back just in time to get some giant robot butt. Hopkins's Odin is inscrutable and well-played.

The humans that Thor meets as he strives to redeem himself are little more than ciphers. Natalie Portman's Jane Foster is a fairly stereotypical love interest, smart but soft, willing to take on anyone and anything for what she believes his right but then slightly agog at who her boyfriend really is. Stellan Skarsgard and Kat Dennings play the doubtful scientist who must be convinced and the loony sidekick well. The focus is so intense on the Asgardians that the humans are given very short shrift. An unfortunate result of this is that the romance between Thor and Jane Foster makes very little sense. Thor and Jane have very little screen time together where she is not just doubting everything he says, so that when they do fall for each other, it pretty much comes out of nowhere as far as the story is concerned (but is perfectly timed so far as movie stereotypes go). In fact, Mrs. Speculator looked at me and asked "Who knew a single cook-out on the roof of a building could lead to immortal love?" And honestly, that's pretty much how it happens.

Another qualm I had with the movie is how far it goes to make sure the audience understands that the Asgardians are not really the Norse gods but aliens that early Norsemen assumed were gods…and the Asgardians never really told them otherwise. Such meanderings don't really serve the movie at all but instead make sure that the movie is in the right political/religious space so that it will not be the subject of protests about paganism or some such.

I also wonder if less knowledgeable viewers understood how Heimdall (Idris Elba) is. It's clear that he is the guardian of the bridge to Asgard, and Elba plays him wonderfully. But it is only ever implied that he can see and hear everything that happens in the universe so long as he focuses his attention on it, and viewers may be confused when he looks out into the starry night to tell Thor that Jane is doing okay without him. But this could also be a facet of my own bias that I brought to the movie: I wanted something that hewed more closely to the Marvel stories or the Norse myths rather than something that had to explain itself to people unfamiliar with either. Along those lines, I really wanted Asgard to be a riot of Kirby's wacked out architecture instead of the stately golden city we get. I admit to memories of the fold-out maps of Asgard flittering behind my eyes as we swept over and around Asgard.

Ultimately, Thor is a fine summer movie, filled with enough big action sequences to perhaps justify the cost of seeing the movie. It certainly is not nearly so big as its trailers and commercials represented it, which makes me think again about that first Hulk and why reaction to Thor seems to be so much better than what that movie received. I suspect it's because everyone thought they knew Hulk from the TV series and wanted more of that, while Thor has the leisure to establish its own identity. It's a popcorn movie and not liable to stand up to a lot of inspection—but then what superhero property ever can?

Finally, I'd advise seeing the 2-D version. Given that the movie was originally filmed in 2-D and the 3-D effects were added later, spending extra money for what are essentially add-ons seems a waste. It was nice to see Kirby's speed lines and blurred hammer effects carried over from the comic medium, but I seriously doubt that making them 3-D would have made them any better.

Edit: A few days later I realize the biggest difference between Thor and Hulk. Hulk tries to treat its subject mater seriously, trying to imagine a real-world scenario where the Hulk might exist and uses the dysfunction in the family as a method of grounding the story in "reality." Thor, on the other hand, just doesn't take it self very seriously, putting the characters in humorous situations both physically and emotionally, So, if an audience is looking for fun, as most are when they got to a movie based on a superhero comic, they will more likely find it in the humor of Thor than in the serious contemplation that drives Hulk.

Red Mars

2011-04-25T09:41:00.002-05:00

Kim Stanley Robinson's massive award-winning Mars trilogy represents interesting challenges for both readers and writers. I recently described a short story by Edmond Hamilton, "A Conquest of Two Worlds" in which Mars and Jupiter are initially explored, colonized and finally entirely subjugated, all in the space of around 60 pages. Robinson's trilogy, concerned about the colonization and terraforming of Mars, comes in at around 1700 pages because he is interested in the details and personalities involved in the process. And, as you might expect, it's the details that are the most troublesome.

Red Mars is the first novel that I can recall that took time to think about the exasperating conditions of long-term space travel (Poul Anderson's Tau Plus does somewhat, but not to the extent that Robinson does). Imagine a years-long process by which a pool of thousands of candidates is winnowed down to one hundred to travel to Mars. And then that team must work together, probably for several more years before they board the confined quarters of a ship for nine months. While Robinson does not spend time on the training efforts, by the time the colonists start to travel they all know each other and their relationship patterns have been mostly set. So by the time they are actually on board the ship and travelling, they are likely to grow ridiculously bored along the way. Such travel is monotony punctuated by exercise and simulation cycles, and Robinson forces the reader to feel that weight. As such, it is a risk for the author—how far does he go to realistically portray how boring that flight will be and yet not go so far as to bore the readers into finding another book? Robinson dances that line very well, relying as our imaginary space travellers would, on the interrelationships of the crew to entertain. Robinson also cheats a little by providing an introduction that takes place years after the start of the novel, an introduction filled with intrigue and events that suggest to the readers that their patience will be rewarded.

When the colonists arrive, led in part by Maya Toitovna, Frank Chalmers, and John Boone, themselves already a romantic triangle, they begin to build on Mars to suit their image of what Mars should be. Some see Mars as a place where they can refute all the prejudices that Earth carries and begin working on a free-form culture and architecture to reflect it. Some immediately begin working on making Mars as much like Earth as possible, beginning terraforming projects that may take as much as thousands of years. Others wish Mars to remain pristine for study and find the idea of terraforming to be destructive, And still others tire of the arguments and separate themselves from the colony entirely. It is the intertwining of these points of view that make up the bulk of the novel, as the original colonists and those that follow try to make and maintain choices about the future of Mars.

Robinson divides the narrative up so that sections of the twenty or so years that novel covers are described by different voices and thus different points of view. This is a real strength of the novel, especially in character development: the way one character sees events and their role in them is not the same way that other characters see them. The section of the novel dealing with the flight from Earth to Mars is narrated by Toitovna, the head of the Russian delegation. Through her eyes, we see her as completely rational, a product of her strict Russian upbringing and assured about the decisions she makes. But as the novel goes on, we see her from the point of view of three of her closest friends, and her self-described image doesn't hold up to their observations—she is emotional, at times to the point of ineffectiveness, and as likely to get in the way of progress as to help it along. These multiple viewpoints make for fascinating and realistically rounded characters, the forces that have to drive what cold otherwise be a long, dry novel.

As compelling as the characters are, the ongoing history of Earth as it falls prey to overpopulation, global warming, and exploitation by multinational corporations that hold no allegiance to any country is also fascinating. It is this troubled foundation which looks to Mars as the solution to all its issues, and which brings so much strife to the colonies there in repetition of patterns that readers know too well from their knowledge of contemporary history. The effects of the decisions of the corporations and governments are humanized by the individual points of view that Robinson provides. What could be treated as more news reports is made visceral as characters that we've come to know must deal with the consequences of greed and poor planning.

Robinson remains unafraid throughout the book to emphasize how slowly history usually moves. Characters spend days crossing the deserts of Mars alone in rovers, and the reader is there for nearly their whole passage. Life, often mundane and boring, goes on at its own pace even as world-changing events unfold. The result is that, as I set the book down, the first novel I thought to compare it to is Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, where the entire history of mankind is described through the lens of their place in the galaxy. Slow and uneven, Stapledon doesn't really have any characters, just historical movements that affect humanity's place in the universe. Red Mars sometimes feels similarly slow, but for reasons of realism and development. In fact, Robinson's novel starts the long process of forcing one planet to take on the ecology of another, a process that generally takes eons if it were to occur naturally. The stateliness of nature is being countered by the hand of man in this novel, so the reader must learn to forgive the pace for its breakneck speed, even if it seems slow from our fairly short-term perspective.

Red Mars is a powerful novel for its efforts to humanize and realistically portray the next great human adventure, travelling to our neighbor planet and beginning the process of asserting man's will on the cosmos. Nearly the entire history of speculative fiction has been premised on just such an expedition, and Robinson has masterfully presented it in both the terms of astronomical time and the limited perspective of a human lifetime. So in many ways, Red Mars culminates the tradition while opening it up to exploration from modern points of view.

Tehanu

2011-04-15T09:27:00.002-05:00

Reviewing a novel by Ursula Le Guin is always somewhat difficult for reasons I'll get to below, but this one is even more difficult for reasons that are my own, which I feel I must share as a method of pointing out my own bias. First, it has been an interest of mine for nearly twenty years now to find and read the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novels. Tehanu won in 1990, and so this book has been on my list for some time. You could easily argue that there is some selection bias already in play: I'm reading the book because it is an award-winner, indicating that it is reputedly pretty good. (Interesting side-note: there may not be so much bias as I first thought, since I generally only read books that I think are going to be good! It's just that one might expect the success rate for "goodness" to be higher among award-winners.)

Second, Tehanu is a particular type of book that I have come to loathe: the author returning to a series that had apparently ended. The third book of the Earthsea "trilogy" had been published in 1973, so there was about 15 years between the "completion" of the series and this new book appearing (ironically, despite Tehanu being subtitled The Last Book of Earthsea, another Earthsea book was published in 2001). Philosophically, there is absolutely no reason why an author shouldn't return to a series, a work that intrinsically represents a great deal of resources and investment. It's just that my gut tells me that usually those returns are not nearly as successful as the original series. I know this expectation comes directly from Piers Anthony and his Apprentice Adept series, which reached a lovely conclusion after the third book, only to pick up again five years later with such ridiculous storytelling that it trounced any happy feeling I had for the first three. (I seem to be tangential today, for which I apologize. If I could contain and adequately express my frustration, rage, and grief at the oeuvre of Piers Anthony, I think it would make an interesting blog article. Something to ponder.) I'm sure if I did research, I would find there have been many series that I enjoyed which restarted after an appreciable gap. But the vile taste from Apprentice Adept lingers on.

And so I approached Tehanu with slightly heightened optimism and pessimism. Having read the first three books of Earthsea some years ago, I thought I knew what to expect story-wise, but my own biases were sending all sorts of mixed signals. As it turned out, I devoured the book in about a day.

The difficulty inherent in reviewing Le Guin lays in her subtlety. Tehanu is a powerful story for all its mundaneness, a character piece about a character that has already experienced her best days, her days as a hero. Tenar is a heroine from the earlier books, but she had given up the magic life she had been living to become a farmer's wife and mother. Now that her husband has died and her children have grown up, she lives a simple existence with a small farm and sheep. She learns that the archmage Ogion, whom readers new to the books can easily determine is an old friend of hers, is dying, and she goes to him with her cruelly abused young ward Therru.

They story feels like it is written with children in mind, much as the first three books: the style is simple, the language plain. The dull repetition of daily chores and of making a life in something like the middle ages lulls the reader into a sense of security. But underneath this simple exterior roils the anger of a woman who was once a hero and who chose to be something else, learning too late that the common woman of the time has only a role in her society but no real place. The only disturbances in her routine come from the broken people around her. Therru was raped and hideously maimed as a young child, and a great deal of Tenar's resources is spent in trying to get Therru to participate in the world again. Therru's growth and its results make up the crisis in the novel. Tenar's life is also disrupted when her old friend Ged returns to her, bereft of all his magical powers and mourning their loss. And so Tenar includes him in her healing circle.

Most of Tehanu is split between Tenar's domestic interaction with the people around her and her memories and contemplations of her reduced role. There were times when I felt that Le Guin laid on the feminist meditation on too thickly, but I recognize I am not a woman and so not as affected by Tenar's position than if I were. But to make her points more concrete, rather than just use abstract musings about unfairness, Le Guin introduces two horribly vile antagonists to harass Tenar and her circle. The first is Therru's father, who apparently wants his daughter back either out of fear that she will tell what happened to her or because he wants to more of it. His very appearance counteracts over a year's worth of care from Tenar, shocking Therru into near catatonia. The second is the local wizard who, jealous of Tenar's former power and because of his belief in the reduced role of women in his society, curses Tenar with a growing stupidity; so long as Tenar remains in his area, she slowly loses the knowledge and skills that make her who she is, going down the road to becoming the perfect slave. Tenar, Therru , and Ged escape, but the structure of storytelling demands that these villains eventually be met again and thwarted.

But even through the horror of their encounters with these evil men, Le Guin's style remains slow and steady. There are very few scenes of panic or any other irrational activity—the threats are understated. Tenar doesn't realize she is becoming more and more stupid, she just does, and the narration absorbs that change until Tenar remembers enough to escape. Likewise, the threat of Therru's father is only manifest two or three times; what's more scary is the idea of him and the knowledge that he may still be around somewhere.

It would be easy for casual readers to treat Tehanu as light fare, deceived by the apparently sedate style. But closer readers and those who have an eye for writerliness will recognize the feat that Le Guin pulls off by disguising events that change the life and world of Tenar in this simple homely narrative. That juxtaposition, that ease of style while dealing with difficult or important ideas, marks a great deal of Le Guin's writing. My difficulty is that I get lulled into becoming a less critical reader by Le Guin's style, and I don't give the ideas behind her prose the attention they deserve. Over time, as I ponder her work, I begin to realize the experience her craft has guided me through, but it is not an immediate observation and so my feelings about the work generally move from ambivalence to praise.

I need to add a caveat: while the first three Earthsea books won numerous awards for children's literature, I just can't recommend Tehanu for similar audiences. The eventual revelation of what Therru suffered may be too much for young readers, and parents might have a difficult time explaining or comforting. On the other hand, Tehanu is a fine read for adults who are patient and observant.

To Say Nothing of the Dog

2011-04-06T11:33:00.002-05:00

Humor in speculative fiction is usually pretty heavy-handed. If you talk to regular readers of the genre and ask them to think of humorous books, the list usually includes Piers Anthony's Xanth books (with their complete dependence on puns), Robert Aspirin's Myth books (with puns and slapstick farce), and Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker books (zany British Monty Pythonesque storytelling). A more thoughtful kind of comedy, subtle and still effective, can be found in Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, which leads me to suggest Pratchett's Diskworld books should be on the list as well—but I honestly don't know anyone that reads them. To this short list we can now add Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog, a self-proclaimed comedy (the blurbs say it right on the cover!). Unfortunately for this reader, I had in mind the more heavy-handed books when I started the novel the first four times, and it finally took a concentrated effort to put those associations out of my head and appreciate Dog for what it is. It also took a viewing of the first season of Jeeves and Wooster, the BBC production of P. G. Wodehouse's classic series of stories about the perfect butler and his foppish dullard master.

Willis's work is a mash-up of several genres, none usually related to speculative fiction: there are elements of the stereotypical Victorian novel, what with manor houses and young men and women falling into and out of love regularly; the comedy of manners; and the 1930s detective novels, wherein the butler is generally the one who did it. A great deal of the charm of Dog is that the main characters, Ned Henry and Verity Brown, recognize that their ongoing circumstances also reflect those genres, providing a sort of meta-conversation that exists slightly above most of the plot of the novel. But underlying all the references and allusions to other genres is a strong time travel story that examines the repercussions of the ability to travel back and forth through time and ultimately poses some questions regarding free will and fate.

Ned Henry is a historian at Oxford University, which now has a working time travel machine. Unfortunately, the history department is propped up by the donations of an American who has married into British nobility, a Lady Schrapnell; because she donates the money, she gets to decide what research is performed. Her current project is to reconstruct Conventry Cathedral the way it was before it was destroyed by German bombing in World War II. To that end, she has sent out the historians to find out the most trivial information about the pickiest details of the Cathedral; Henry has been sent out to find the "bishop's bird stump," a vase of dubious artistic value.

The novel opens with Ned suffering from "time lag", a condition caused by taking too many trips in too short a span. He has trouble distinguishing sounds, is prone to waxing poetic about the littlest things, and is generally unable to trust his own faculties. It's no help that the time travel machine appears to be malfunctioning, sending historians to the wrong times and sometimes to the wrong location as well. Upon his return to the present, he is prescribed two weeks' bed rest, which given Lady Schrapnell's wishes, is not likely to take place if he stays where he is. So his department sends him to Victorian England to rest, so long as he fixes one minor problem: returning a cat that should never have gotten through the time travel to its original place in the space-time continuum.

Much of the humor of the first parts of the novel is based on Ned's inability to function well since his time lag makes it impossible for him to trust everything he sees or hears. Propelled into Victorian England, and into the arms of the upper class vacationing along the Thames at Oxford, just adds to the fish out of water scenario, as he struggles to not be caught out as being out of place and returning the cat, Princess Arjumand, to her rightful place…even if Henry can remember where the cat is. Along the way, Ned meets stereotypes of British culture that are familiar even to American audiences: Terence St. Trewes, dapper Oxford student smitten by upper class ingénue Tossie Mering; absent-minded Oxford don Professor Peddick, whose theories about history clash with those of his rival, Professor Overforce; and long-suffering bulldog Cyril, the only creature that Henry can confide in as he tries to recover his wits and then accomplish his task.

After the humorous patterns are established, however, they move to the background as Ned and Verity fear that they have inadvertently corrupted the time-stream: by allowing Terence and Tossie to get engaged, a series of events is begun that appears to have allowed the Nazis to discover England's possession of Ultra, the code-breaking device used to such devastating effect in World War II. Since saving the time-stream they know is based on breaking up the two young lovers, there remain comic moments, but when they are not plotting, Ned and Verity try to work out how time travel really works. Brown herself is a historian specializing in the 1930s, and she uses the detective novels of the time period, especially Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot books, as guides to solving the mysteries with the time-stream. And while the question is not asked overtly until the last half of the novel, Ned and Verity's assertions about the fragility of their timeline implies free will but the scientists who run the time machine feel otherwise—that the time-stream, and thus destiny if you will—is fixed.

The book never gets serious about this question and is mostly concerned with solving the smaller issues of finding the bishop's bird stump and somehow getting Tossie married to the mysterious Mr. C in order to fix the space-time continuum. But the question will sit in the back of thoughtful readers' minds, especially when Ned and Verity stumble upon the solutions to all their crises and how they tie together to resolve the issue of the slippages in maneuvering about the time-stream.

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a rambling fun read with some interesting genre questions lying just under the surface. It exemplifies what a thoughtful writer can do with speculative fiction, mixing it with other disparate genres. Allusions to other books might become tiresome, but I think Willis does a strong job of explaining such references and tying them into the novel so that they are not merely prizes thrown out to the watchful reader. While there are sequels of a sort (nominated for Nebula for Best Novel, incidentally), it would be interesting to see more adventures for Ned and Verity, perhaps set in different times and working with different genres.

Horns

2011-04-05T12:10:00.002-05:00

A year after his girlfriend is raped and murdered and the morning after a night spent mourning the anniversary in his own drunken way, Ignatius Perrish wakes up with horns growing out of his head. The most he can remember is that he did some "awful things" while incapacitated, but he finds his horns give him two strange new abilities—people around him are compelled to tell him their innermost guilty secrets and he is able to convince them to act on them. Joe Hill's novel dances along the edge of many genre boundaries—mystery, thriller, horror—and it is a taut and compelling read. For a day and a half, I did not want to put the book down, and its narrative has stayed with me since I finished it, even as I have been reading other things.

At first Ig struggles with the horns and their powers. He is horrified by what people tell him, the dark secrets that most people barely admit to themselves. As Ig staggers out of his bedroom, his roommate confesses that she wants to eat an entire box of stale doughnuts and then proceeds to do so, nearly choking on them in her haste to consume them. When Ig goes to an urgent care center, he is confronted with a mother and her unhappy child, and the reactions of the other patients and the receptionist to the wailing girl. Ig fights to control the people, to keep from inadvertently pushing them into doing the horrendous acts they want to perform. And when Ig goes home to his beloved family, he discovers that they secretly believe him to be the murderer of his girlfriend and hate him and how they are all now perceived in their quiet New Hampshire town. Eventually IG discovers who actually did murder his girlfriend, Merrin, and the novel becomes a revenge story as Ig becomes determined to make the murderer pay for what he has done by taking advantage of the new abilities his horns offer him.

The horror of Ig's discoveries is balanced with fascinating flashbacks of Ig's youth and his life with Merrin. At first the flashbacks are bucolic enough—teenagers looking for something to do in the doldrums of summer. But over the course of Horns, the flashbacks become creepier and creepier as layers of falsehood (or perhaps layers of youthful perspective) get peeled back to reveal cold hard truth. Hill's story makes clear that we really don't know the people around us, even the ones closest to us. And after it is clear, the lesson is repeated to horrifying and suspenseful effect.

Taut and suspenseful as the story is, Horns also exhibits a command of language and style which makes it that much more engaging. Hill's sentences are both delicate and powerful, natural and artifice; they push the reader into a false state of security and normalcy until the blackness that lies in the souls of each of the characters is revealed. The character of Ig is similarly well-crafted—he is completely believable in every scenario that the novel places him in, from waking up with the horns to his youthful shyness when he first meets and gets to know Merrin, even to confronting her killer. He is entirely sympathetic, and his portrayal as well as Hill's language compels the reader to feel every nuance of the torture that Ig undergoes in his quest. Though most of the novel is in third-person, there are other characters that have segments devoted to their narratives; to reveal who those characters are would be to spoil the novel. I'll only say that Hill is adept enough at his craft that he can make even sociopaths seem sympathetic.

Hill is also deft at constructing the plot. Like any good mystery, every clue that the reader needs to solve the series of mysteries that the novel sets up is available in the text, so that part of the joy of reading the book are "aha!" moments when the reader works something out or it is revealed in the novel itself. Hill's timing is wonderful, including such cinematic effects as peals of thunder when something is revealed and yet those moments do not feel cheesy at all.

There might be two minor quibbles with Horns that might feel off-putting to readers. The first is the insistence of a supernatural element that borders on the miraculous, essentially a magic tree house. Just saying it without context makes it seem more childish and off-putting than it is in the book, but Hill sets it up beautifully. The real quibble lies in the contrast between the gritty earthiness of the rest of the novel and the tree house. But after some thought, I remembered that what sets the story off is, in fact, the miraculous growth of a pair of horns on a human's head. In such a world, the miraculous nature of the tree house should pose no problem, and because Hill does situate it so easily in his story, my qualms dissipated easily.

The second quibble is with the last chapter, which is a radical emotional departure from most of the rest of the novel. The chapter is jarring, especially given the places the novel takes the reader, but when it is compared with the more idyllic chapters concerning Ig's childhood, it is actually very similar in tone and style. And so that chapter jars with reason: it is directly a comparison to the suspense that has built up in the rest of the book, and since it acts as a denouement, it reflects that the story has returned to a more innocent place.

Horns is a wonderful book, a splendid reintroduction to the genre of horror and thriller. I feel constrained from going into too much detail because this book has become one of those that I will proselytize to anyone who will listen. Only rarely have I felt so moved by a book, the most recent example being China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. This is a book that I will return to again and again, one that I will offer to fellow readers as the rare combination of excellent story and style.

Tiassa

2011-04-01T08:46:00.004-05:00

Tiassa is the thirteenth book in the Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust. That one sentence is packed with a couple of connotations that require unstuffing.

1. The Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust is popular; there are enough people buying the books that there is a market for at least thirteen installments. And why shouldn't there be—the hero of the series is Vlad Taltos, a wise-cracking human assassin living in a world primarily inhabited by what we might call elves and he calls Draegerans. They're tall, extraordinarily long-lived, and capable of sorcery, and Vlad is decidedly out of place among them. But over the course of the series he has made friends in very powerful positions, and his character has gone from being something of a pet amongst the Draegerans he knows to a valued companion. He has probably saved the Draegeran Empire several times over, and the Empress has given him a title and rank in her court.

A little google fu also indicates the popularity of the series. It started in 1983, so Brust has been publishing books in the series for almost 30 years. There is also a second series closely associated with it—the Khaavren Romances—that is set in the same world but at an earlier time. Brust also has a phenomenally popular Web page, and there is an active wiki for his fictional world.

2. While popularity does not equate with quality, the fact that I have read 13 books in an ongoing series should be indicative of how I feel about it. I do not believe there is a better writer of dialogue currently in speculative fiction than Steven Brust. He is aided in this task by his creation and evolution of wonderful characters, the foremost being Vlad Taltos himself. Vlad is a smart-ass, but he is constantly aware of his own limitations, including hubris and the aforementioned wiseassery. Vlad is also a keen observer of people, a characteristic that has helped to keep him alive in his job as an assassin and in the years that follow his self-exile from his home city, on the run from the criminal element he formerly was a part of. He is accompanied by his faithful companion, Loiosh, a jhereg—a sort of miniature dragon—that can communicate with Vlad telepathically. Loiosh has become the perfect foil for Vlad, and their mental conversations are delightful and often hilarious. And still, beyond these main characters, all the characters Brust works with, even the new ones or the ones who only appear for a few pages, are fully composed and alive, with distinct voices and personalities.

Vlad usually narrates his own stories, and through his eyes, Brust has realized a fascinating world and culture that is layered and complex as any other fictional world. And when Vlad isn't narrating, Brust throws himself into the voices of those narrators as strongly as he does Vlad. Most notable is Paarfi Roundtree, a loquacious and perhaps prolix historian who cannot keep from inserting himself into the stories he tells, the Khaavren Romances. While Vlad laughs at everyone, including himself, Paarfi cannot do either, and ends up forcing the reader to laugh in his stead.

Given this history, then, is Tiassa a worthwhile addition to the series? Unequivocably, the answer is yes.

You can imagine that after 12 books, there is a lot of storytelling inertia built up. Connections are made and questions get asked that lead off onto tracks that the narration may not get to. Vlad is a rapscallion who seems aware of his audience, and he enjoys teasing them by making implications and deferring information, sometimes to other books. Brust is also building a complicated world and complex relationships within it, and so questions get asked that also don't get answers until later in the series. So, for 12 books now, while there have been some answers, there have been a lot more questions, and with Tiassa's arrival, a lot of those questions begin to get answered. Of course, more questions get asked as well.

Tiassa also is something of a narrative experiment for Brust: the book is divided into three sections with three different narrators—a third-person neutral narrator, Vlad himself, and Paarfi Roundtree. Each narrator is used in a different section of the tripartite story of a jeweled broach: a silver tiassa or winged tiger. Vlad's section, as one might come to expect, involves a complicated con job he runs on characters that seem vaguely familiar and are eventually revealed to the forgetful or uninitiated reader. Of course, if the reader truly is uninitiated, the revelation would have little value to them. The third-party narrator tells the story of how the silver tiassa is sought in order to repel an invasion by aliens (yes, extra-Draegeran entities). And Paarfi tells the story of how the broach ties into a beating that Vlad receives and its relation to an issue of national importance. And because Paarfi narrates, some of the characters from the Khaavren Romances become main characters in a Vlad story, which has not happened before in Vlad's own stories.

The result is a delight for longtime fans of the series: stories from three different periods in Vlad's life and a huge cast of characters that until now have had very little interaction. It is also a tour de force for Brust, showcasing the strengths that make his writing so appealing—characters and narrative flair. Because of the depth and breadth of the overarching plot of his series, readers approaching the series for the first time are going to miss out on layers of complexity, and yet I think the storytelling is straightforward enough that an interested reader can follow what's going on treating these as brand new characters. But the layers truly are so very rich that those new readers would be missing out on a lot of wonder and fun.

Honestly, new readers just need to bite the bullet and go find a copy of Jhereg, the first book in the series, and dig in. Fortunately the Vlad Taltos books are not long and so are packed with the crazy splendor that is Steven Brust's writing. And fans of the series need to get this latest addition as soon as they can.

The Snow Queen

2011-03-30T12:39:00.002-05:00

Joan Vinge's 1981 Hugo-winning novel dances on the line between science fiction and fantasy. On the one hand, it contains the elements of space opera: faster than light communication and travel through black holes to a galactic empire, an empire that is living on the shreds of its more advanced past and in which conspiracies abound. There's also some hints of planetary romance, especially when we find how deeply Vinge has worked out the history and culture of the planet Tiamat. But through all that there remains strong strains of fantasy as well—young lovers swear their love for one another and then are driven apart by their separate destinies. There are even magical creatures like sibyls and merfolk. Fortunately, Vinge is able to bundle these threads together into a thoughtful story that emphasizes the power of individuals even in the galactic or worldly settings that inform the genre of speculative fiction.

Tiamat orbits a black hole that is used by the remains of a faltering galactic civilization to transport ships from other regions to Tiamat. For reasons that the novel doesn't make entirely clear, the black hole is only usable for 150 years before becoming unavailable for the next 150 years. Over generations, contact with other races has led to a bifurcated culture on Tiamat—the Winters, pro-technology and forward-thinking, rule while the black hole can be used for transport, while the Summers, agrarian and stable, rule when the rest of the cycle. Tiamat appears to offer nothing of any importance to the rest of the culture they are a part of, except for the blood of a race of creatures called mers that are never fully described but seem to be a mix of dolphins and merpeople. Their blood is used as an anti-aging agent, and its regular use appears to guarantee near immortality. As a result, during the winter phase, the other races of the culture exploit Tiamat shamelessly, all in an effort to get mer-blood. But when Summer comes, the other races leave and destroy all their technology, throwing Tiamat back into a bronze age and giving themselves a ridiculous market advantage when they return with the coming of the next Winter.

The novel opens with Tiamat approaching the end of the Winter cycle, and the current Winter Queen, Arienrhod, setting in motion a plan to ensure some sort of continuity so that Tiamat will no longer continue to be exploited with the next Winter. Her plan involves ensuring that a clone of herself wins the throne of the Summer Queen, mistakenly assuming that a clone will grow to think and feel as she does. Of course, Moon, the sole surviving clone doesn't, since she is raised as a Summer and has no idea of technology or anything about court politics.

What follows is really two stories: Arienrhod developing her plan in the face of defeat when she thinks Moon has died, and Moon growing up and learning about the culture Tiamat is a part of. Over time, she does become as indignant about Tiamat's being exploited as Arienrhod already is, but because she actually makes it off-planet, she also learns more about the cause of the exploitation. As you might imagine, given the emotional connotations of "winter" and "summer," Arienrhod is set up as the villain of the novel, even though she and Moon share the same goal and outrage. For great swaths of The Winter Queen, Arienrhod is presented as ruthless and driven, characteristics that dramatically oppose Moon's pastoral calm and surety. And taking a step back from the narrative, the real difference between the two of them is their methods for attempting to right the wrong they perceive in their planet's and their people's treatment. I would argue that during those same segments of the narrative, Arienrhod is a remarkably sympathetic character, using the tools of the trade she has been brought up in—politics—to achieve a noble end. When she is compared to Moon, of course she looks bad, but that same comparison also makes her look that more sympathetic—for in Moon, we can see who Arienrhod might have been had she not been forced to grow up in the court of the Winter Queen.

There are a number of minor characters, a lot of whom interact with both Arienrhod and Moon. Strangely, there are no really happy characters in The Winter Queen; no one, not even the offworlders who exploit Tiamat are satisfied with their lot. Typifying these characters is Sparks, Moon's "pledged." Born of an offworld father and a Summer mother, Sparks straddles the line between the pro- and anti-technology stances of the Summers and Winters. He and Moon swear their love to one another at a young age, before they have any exposure to the world outside their little island, even though Sparks pines for a different life and chafes at the restrictions placed upon his people. And when they are exposed to the rest of the world, indeed to the galaxy, their juvenile beliefs are shaken so badly that Sparks loses his. Eventually, believing Moon to be dead, he finds his way to the capital city where Arienrhod appears to delight in corrupting him to her manipulative ways. But their moments together make it clear that as much as Arienrhod is hardening Sparks up for a different life, Sparks is softening hers in another indication of who she could have been.

While the characters are not happy, they are sympathetic; Vinge does a very good job of developing the minor characters into interesting reflections of and refutations of the galactic culture and individual races they rise out of. And by the end of the novel, those characters that survive are on the road to happiness they didn't know they could have. The conclusion of The Snow Queen rounds out the fantasy threads of the novel—the questor successfully fulfills her mission and receives all that she is due. There may be some question of her eventual success down the road, but there are hints that she has the strength and the people around her to bring Tiamat out of the technological backwater it has been relegated to.

If The Snow Queen were published today, I'm not sure it would not be considered a "YA" (young adult) novel. It seems to have all the characteristics of those types of novels—straightforward if not simplistic writing, youthful main characters coming of age, and some despair along the way to a generally happy ending. This is not meant to denigrate the novel in any way, just to further characterize it for readers uncertain if it is the type of book they would enjoy. There is not a lot of depth to The Snow Queen but there is a lot of breadth.

Sucker Punch

2011-03-28T08:04:00.002-05:00

When the first teaser trailers for Sucker Punch were released last summer, I couldn't help myself: I watched and my mouth dropped open. It was just so stupid big. We know Zack Snyder doesn't do things by halves after seeing 300 and Watchmen, but this one was just going to be way over the top. And I could accept that—rather I was happy to accept that—given the potential of the ideas that were being displayed. I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog that I really like storytelling on the edge of genres, such that it spills over. One of the hot things in speculative fiction right now is steampunk, the mash-up of Victorian literature with contemporary technology; I've been a fan of the genre since Sterling and Gibson released The Difference Engine in the early 90s. And in the action sequences shown in the trailers and ads for Sucker Punch, I thought I was seeing a film taking those kinds of risks: biplanes in the air with dragons and giant samurai robots. Really…what could go wrong?

It turns out that the rest of the movie does. Accept for a moment the popcorn, over-the-top nature of huge action sequences; there is something freeing about armored suits in the trenches of World War I fighting Austro-Hungarian steam-zombies. It just makes you want to giggle. And if Sucker Punch had kept its tongue firmly planted in its cheek and just gone for the ride, it would have been a blast, a stupid huge action flick that you could just sit back and enjoy without having to think about it. But Sucker Punch isn't that; instead it tries to have a moral that ends up getting all muddled, primarily because Snyder doesn't seem to be resolute in what he is trying to say.

If you've seen the commercials, you pretty much know the set-up: young girl gets sent to asylum by despicable father figure for apparently fighting off his advances. I don't recall ever knowing the character's real name—perhaps we see it quickly on a form or something—but she is referred to throughout the movie as Baby Doll (Emily Browning). It turns out Baby Doll's stepfather is more heinous than the commercials make him appear: she and her younger sister are the heirs to their mother's estate, and step-dad's first plan is to (continue to?—there is a real implication in the movie) abuse his step-daughters. Baby Doll protects her sister by brandishing a gun at her tormentor, but she does not brandish well as the gun goes off and her sister is killed (compare to how well the fantasy Baby Doll uses guns later in the movie). And so off to the asylum she goes, while slimy step-dad pays a healthy chunk of money to a member of the staff named Blue (Oscar Isaac) to see that Baby Doll is declared insane and receives a lobotomy. In one of the explicit images of the lack of female power in the movie, this plan is discussed where Baby Doll can hear it, and so she knows she only has a week to escape.

What follows is a strange cross between Inception and the classic short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." To escape the horrors of the stereotypically disgusting asylum (why are asylums never clean or in full repair in movies?), Baby Doll sinks into a fantasy world where she and her fellow inmates are actually living in a nasty cross between a dance hall and a bordello, and the owner, Blue, has promised Baby Doll's virginity to a character we only know as The High Roller (Jon Hamm) at the end of the week. Almost the entirety of Sucker Punch is told at this narrative level, except that when Baby Doll first performs a dance for the club's choreographer, she is transported to the bizarre world that is so engaging in the commercials: her dance is her battle against the chaotic forces in her secondary visions.

The movie spends most of its time bouncing back and forth between these two levels of hallucination, while Baby Doll and her band of freedom fighters try to gather together the tools they think they will need to escape the bordello (and one is led to assume, the asylum itself, back at the "reality" level of the movie). The result is an ongoing juxtaposition of images of women in roles of power—warriors and heroes—versus slaves and whores struggling to escape their oppressors. And I have to admit I'm troubled here by writing in the terms of the feminist movement; on the one hand, the very ideas of Sucker Punch scream out for evaluation in terms of empowering women, but on the other, its treatment of those ideas is so clumsy and juvenile that I wonder if the movie really intended to deal with them at all. I've actually seen one critic describe Sucker Punch as a vision of the power of women from the point of view of an adolescent boy, but I'm not sure that the perspective isn't just genderlessly immature.

As a further example, most of the freedom fighters also apparently have no real names: Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), and Blondie (a decidedly brunette Vanessa Hudgens), are joined by Amber (Jamie Chung). And yet their nicknames have nothing to do with their actual characteristics. The girls don't trust each other and are at first reluctant to follow Baby Doll, but as they appear to succeed, their confidence grows. And for each of the first three trinkets required for their plan, Baby Doll dances seductively, weaving a web of childish eroticism over her viewers as the girls ply their charms to steal what they think they need. Woven around the movie is a fascinating soundtrack, led off by a remake of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),"all of which adds to the otherworldly visionary quality of the story being told.

But it all comes crashing down, as we finally forgo the fantasy levels of the film and "reality" sets in. I don't want to go into spoilers here, but the generally positive message of empowerment is completely lost in how hard it all crashes. From a story-telling perspective, the audience is given very little clue how badly it all ends up being, and so it feels like a turn out of nowhere. Even though there is a bit of a comeuppance, it is a very tiny bit and completely unsatisfying. And then, finally, as if the confusion at the conclusion isn't unsettling enough, the final credits roll, and intermingled with them is a Baz Luhrmann-esque rendition of Roxy Music's "Love is the Drug" performed by the girls' oppressor Blue, their would-be savior Madame Gorski (Carla Gugino), and the freedom fighters, minus Baby Doll….all dressed as they were back at the bordello level of the movie fantasy. Why no Baby Doll? How could they sing about love being the drug, when it was perverted forms of love that the girls were trying to escape from all along? It just becomes a sordid mess with nothing really available to help make sense of it all.

So parts of Sucker Punch are a lot of fun: the action sequences are very nice and action-y, but it is clear they are two steps removed from the reality of the story. The rest is depressing, not just for the story being told, but also because of the apparent potential of a storytelling opportunity lost. If there is a message hidden somewhere in the mess, it is lost. And if it is just supposed to be a joyride, it fails utterly there as well.

As I left the theater pondering the movie, I was reminded of its title. The trouble is, I can't remember there being a sucker punch in the entire movie. And then I began to wonder if perhaps the sucker being punched by this tangle isn't, at the end, the person who took the time to see it.

Paul

2011-03-25T10:20:00.002-05:00

There were all sorts of laughter going on during my viewing of Paul: tittering, snorting, giggling, even a guffaw or two…and those were the sounds just coming from me. Mrs. Speculator made some noise too, and the rest of the audience as well, but I think I was the noisiest other than the two underage girls who snuck in late and sat in the back talking through the whole thing (my lawn, get off it!). Paul makes no bones about what it is; its advertisements are deception-free. Two British nerds travel through the American Southwest and pick up an alien who has escaped from his holding facility after decades hidden away from the public. What the commercials and trailers don't show is how aware Paul is of classic science fiction and how much of an homage it is to Steven Spielberg.

But then, you had to imagine it would be the case. Written by and starring two well-known British geeks, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, Paul has the pedigree. And lest there be any mistake in their devotion, the movie opens with their Graeme and Clive visiting Comic-con in San Diego, where they shill their "Nebulon award winning" novel that features Graeme's illustration of an alien with three breasts on the cover. Nerd culture is an underpinning of Paul but it is not essential to the story-telling itself; much like picking up on visual cues on TV's Big Bang Theory, the references add some flavor to the story but do not dominate it. Admittedly, there were moments when only Mrs. Speculator and I laughed, but those moments seemed fairly esoteric and did not take away from the rest of the audience enjoying the rest of the movie.

More interesting was how tightly the movie tied itself to Steven Spielberg. Some references are easy to spot, most notably Paul's fondness for Reese's Pieces and a flashback where Paul offers some guidance to the director himself, while some were not. Especially delightful to me were the references to Duel, Spielberg's first full-length wide-release movie. However, Paul doesn't just mimic and refer to Spielberg's work, it builds off of it and the expectations set by Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET. Nearly any adult audience member will recognize these and appreciate the comic rifts on them.

It turns out that the comic center of the movie is in that space between the expectations for Spielbergian (if I may coin a term) aliens and the reality of Paul himself (voiced by Seth Rogen). While he may look like what has become the stereotype for aliens visiting Earth, he acts far more human than those stereotypes provide for. He smokes, he farts, he curses like a sailor. And he delights in these things, rejoicing in the visceral nature of being alive and who he is. If there is a moral to this story, it would lie in there, a sort of extraterrestrial "don't worry, be happy." But even suggesting that there is a moral to this comedy is giving Paul more layers than it probably warrants. In fact, as the movie concludes, Paul himself reminisces on what moral the companions may have picked up on their adventure and decides that there probably wasn't much.

Especially funny are the reactions of a fundamental literalist Christian family that Paul and his rescuers run into. The stereotype is thick and heavy, but the logic is ruthless: the Bible does not mention aliens and so they must not exist. And how would Bible-toting evangelicals react to the most effective demonstration of their mistaken beliefs? With disbelief and, according to Paul, with slapstick humor. Kristen Wiig plays a suddenly disenfranchised Ruth, the evangelical who is convinced of her mistakes and now furiously wants to make up for lost time.

The only weak point in the movie is a single joke that falls astonishingly flat at the end. It's a horrible pun, apropos of nothing in the rest of the movie, and the characters themselves laugh at it with far more gusto than it deserves. But other than that, Paul is a delightful romp. Charming and witty, in other hands it would be fodder for a sequel, but I hope that the creators show as much grace now that the movie has been released as they did as they were making it.

Pondering Fringe and Sharks

2011-03-17T09:52:00.003-05:00

I'll warn you up front: there's going to be spoilers here for the latest episodes of Fringe, "Subject 13" and "Os." If you don't want to know, stop reading.

I've been fairly delighted with Fringe carrying the banner of speculative fiction on network TV. It's been edgy and thoughtful, and the cast has gelled tremendously such that there is a marked chemistry between them all. John Noble continues to amaze in his dual roles, and kudos to the writers for giving him a chance to shine by allowing the alternate Walter to show some signs of humanity in "Subject 13." It really is wonderful to have a speculative fiction show on the air that goes beyond the common perception of what the genre is all about: there's no spacecraft and no aliens. Instead, Fringe deals with the SF idea of an alternate universe and what happens when elements of that universe intersect with our own. This is familiar ground to readers of SF, but like Heroes for comic book tropes, Fringe offers up the ideas via media that makes it more acceptable to people who aren't familiar with the ideas.

But the last two episodes have been troubling, such that the Speculator household has been mentioning sharks and people that jump them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark). In "Subject 13," we are given some backstory on Olivia and Peter. On one level the story makes a lot of sense, portraying Olivia's time as a young test subject for Walter and Peter's initial refusal and then eventual acceptance of his new life in a universe not his own. And yet the episode ends with the two of them meeting as children and having a long meaningful conversation as the result of an explosion and fire at the research center (that Olivia's untamed powers appear to have caused). It all makes sense and seems appropriate given the general theme and direction of Fringe, but it appears to ignore details that have been established earlier in the series. For example, Olivia didn't know Walter when the Fringe cases started, but this episode makes it clear that Walter is a hugely important person in her young life, especially because he was the one who convinced her stepfather to stop abusing her. Similarly, Peter at first refuses to believe Walter's story that there are alternate universes, except that he originally believed that himself, knowing somehow that his current parents are different from the ones he had been living with. Most importantly, Olivia and Peter don't remember meeting each other and their important conversation. All of this feels odd, given how intelligent their characters are—how does one forget these important and traumatic experiences? But having been pleased with the writing thus far, I just assumed it was a detail that would be explained later.

The latest episode, "Os," is not so easily explained. As Walter becomes more and more aware of the consequences of his meddling between the two universes, he also has begun to despair that he is smart enough to fix them. As a result, he wishes he could talk to his deceased friend William Bell, with whom he invented so much of the fringe science that the show revolves around. In "Os," he finds Bell's old files and discovers that he had been working he termed a "soul magnet," a device that would cause the soul of a dead person to move into a container of a living soul, allowing the dead person to effectively possess the living person and then manifest its personality. The soul magnet has to be triggered, probably by a sound of some sort, and Walter remembers that Bell has bequeathed an actual bell with his name on it to an employee of the company that he founded. Walter strikes the bell, expecting Bell to manifest in the employee, Nina, but nothing happens. The scene jumps to a conversation between Peter and Olivia, and suddenly Olivia is talking with the cadence and rhythm of Leonard Nimoy, who played William Bell.

My first reaction was to slap my forehead and groan, thinking of sharks and water skis. But in days since, I've been able to step back some and examine why this was my response. Simply put, the show has been all about "fringe science": portals to different universes, shapeshifters, time travel, and so on. Why should this particular science bother me so much when the others didn't? To be honest, the scene was setup over a year ago when Olivia met William Bell, who for some inexplicable reason tolled a bell in her presence. Clearly, in hindsight, he was establishing her as the physical link for his soul when he died. And yet, it still annoys me.

One issue is that we've gone beyond science to metaphysics and belief. Alternate universes and time travel are technological feats and feel well within the purview of what Fringe has been about. But when it comes to the idea of a soul, even though it is explained away as a remnant of the electromagnetic forces involved with life and consciousness, we're talking about something that is qualitatively different. And beneath the mumbo jumbo used to explain it, it still feels hokey. One could make a strong argument that the show has been evolving into a conversation about the role that belief and emotion play in technology, especially given the reasons why Walter brought them together in the first place and his recent despair at what he has wrought. And there has also been an element of emotionality in the pseudoscience as well, since we have learned that the doomsday machine planted in our universe by our alternate foes is powered by a decision that Peter must make between Olivia of our universe and the Olivia of the universe he left behind (referred to in the show as Fauxlivia). But even that emotionality made my skin crawl a little as well—how could an emotional decision power a device that would destroy a universe? Even so, I am somewhat willing to accept the Fringe concept of a soul, and if so, that it can be gathered by technology. It feels a little dicey, but like the questions raised by "Subject 13" I'm willing to give the writers space to make it work.

What's more troubling to me is that it felt cheap, an explicit jerk on the emotional strings of the viewers. Until now, the show has been delicate about dealing with emotionality, causing the viewers to empathize with the characters and thus understand what drives them. The very best example of this was an episode from last year, "White Tulip" (which for some reason was unjustly overlooked by SF awards), wherein the pursuit and capture of a time traveller intertwines beautifully with the beginnings of Walter's guilt about kidnapping Peter to replace his own lost son. The viewer empathizes and the power of the story is realized. But in "Os", we finally have Peter and Olivia involved romantically after a season of intrauniversal problems keep them apart. They are being loving and open and honest about their feelings and what kept them apart, a solid portrayal of a real loving relationship would growing under the bizarre circumstances of Fringe. And just as Olivia was about to tell Peter something vitally important, she is suddenly no longer Olivia, but a vessel for the disembodied spirit of William Bell.

From a writing standpoint, as I say, it was set up beautifully. Not only does it have to be Olivia because she is the only person from our universe that Bell had any time to interact with, but the right foreshadowing cues were put in place. But it is jarring and unsatisfactory, as we have been made to empathize with Peter and Olivia through their trials and coming together—we're desperately rooting for them to succeed in the face of a danger probably greater than any ever shown on TV before. And all the subtlety and purposeful evolution is shattered with the equivalent of a carny trick, a stunt pulled in bad soap operas. It is that clash that made me slap my forehead and literally howl.

I suppose the writers should be gratified that we have invested so much energy into these characters that the sudden break of the soul transfer is painful to watch. And they should be further happy that we'll continue to watch, because we have been shown for the majority of three seasons that these are gifted powerful writers. But where before there was certainty, there is now some doubt creeping in. And the fault for that also lies in the writing for the show. Rumor has it Fringe may not survive this season, so the writers only have a few episodes left to smooth over the awkwardness of these last two episodes. And even if the show is renewed, the writers need to move fast to explain the jarring events in a way that will not put off viewers next season. I think they can do it; I hope they will--they really need to carry on the pattern of strong effective storytelling this series has offered to its viewers.

The Best of Edmond Hamilton

2011-03-13T12:25:00.002-05:00

This book is the last of my first leg of the series of "Best of" anthologies from Ballantine and Del Rey from the mid-70s. If it weren't for the imposing stack in the to-read pile, I would've gone out and found more of them straight away, based on how exciting and thought-provoking this book alone was. I've always heard Edmond Hamilton spoken of in reverential tones by fans better versed in the golden age than myself, and now I understand why.

The first story in the collection, "The Man Who Evolved," seems fairly typical of expectations for the time. A framing device separates the narrator from the action and thus giving the story both deniability and plausibility. The narrator is the fortunate survivor in an experiment that was intended to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, but the researcher suffers from overweening hubris and for some reason, neither the narrator nor his companion have the physical or moral strength to stop the experiment that is being attempted. And, of course, the hitherto untried experiment is being performed on a human—this time the researcher himself. The title of the story gives away what was being attempted—somehow forcing a human through human evolution, fifty million years at a pass. Hamilton's ideas about the various stages that humans will pass through now seem a little cliché, but I'm willing to bet that this story, published in 1926, was one of the first times the ideas had been deployed and so was fresh in its contemporary readers' minds. And, as one might expect of a story published in Weird Tales, the final stage of evolution is cataclysmic, resulting in a destruction that destroys all evidence that the experiment took place except in the narration of the story. However, while the story represents the stereotypes so well, it remains charged and tightly written, a powerful first effort by a young writer and hinting at the promise of much more.

The second story, "A Conquest of Two Worlds" delivers that promise. On its surface, "Two Worlds" is a fairly bland historical accounting of mankind's first interplanetary travel and the conflict that inevitably erupts between man and the natives of Mars and Jupiter, the two planets we first explore. But Hamilton does perform one nifty narrative trick on that clichéd surface, focusing his narrative on three boys who join the space forces and rise through its ranks together. But just below that surface, by having one of those boys (and later men) question why they are colonizing in the way that they do, Hamilton opens the accepted trope to some serious consideration. For modern readers, Mart Halkett's eventual mutiny against his fellow humans because he opposes our tactics, seems rather familiar, especially for readers who also viewed 2009's Avatar. But for the contemporaneous reader, the idea of negating human exceptionalism and manifest destiny was unheard of. Early writers of speculative fiction thought of exploring and eventually colonizing other worlds in much the same way that Europeans narrated their histories of conquest. Europeans felt that they had the right to colonize and even destroy other civilization because they were inherently better than the backward natives. It's taken hundreds of years for even a minority of people to question that kind of value system, so it seems a fairly obvious narrative strategy for stories of exploring space. Hamilton loads his deck somewhat by having both natives of Jupiter and Mars appear backwards compared to humans, so the story proceeds apace, with the occasional red flag waved by Halkett's protests. Finally, after Halkett's court martial and sentence lead to his return to Jupiter to lead the Jupiter natives in open "rebellion" against the humans, the story strand moves to the fore. His childhood companions, now generals in the conquest, must deal with their belief in their lifelong friend and what his mutiny represents. And while Hamilton doesn't spend much time exploring the consequences of the decisions that are made, it haunts the reader even after reading the story is finished. It's a powerful piece, in part, because of the historical position on the conquest that it takes and the exact understated position of Halkett. The questions remain even after the page is turned.

Also taking something of a contrarian position against both history and the stereotypes of speculative fiction is the powerful "What's It Like Out There?". The narrator has just returned from the second expedition to Mars, where he has been injured. Finding himself back upon Earth after his recuperation, he feels compelled to meet with the families of fellow soldiers who died in the expedition. Hamilton places the narrator squarely between the forces of popular imagination and reality. Interplanetary travel is romantic (or it used to be—it's interesting to consider what the global or national reaction would be to a real attempt to go to Mars would be) and its practitioners are heroes and role models. And the narrator not only doesn't want to be a hero, he doesn't believe he has done anything to deserve such treatment. Systematically through four different recitations of misfortune, the last being his own speech to the homecoming crowd that awaits him, we see him carry out a humanitarian goal of consoling his fellow soldiers' families while remembering the actual accidents that before his friends. As a result, the reader sees the reality behind the façade: space travel is not glamorous; it's hard, deadly dangerous, and dirty work. And it will always eventually have a cost in human lives. The narrator can never say this to the families he consoles, because he implicitly and eventually explicitly understands that they really don't want the truth. They want to know that their sons died for a good cause. And if this point is not clear enough by the end of the story, the narrator runs into an old friend who is a veteran of World War II who says much the same thing about battle. This has been said often enough about war that it has begun something of a cliché for that genre, but I honestly can't recall a similar presentation about space travel and so was amazed not only at the audacity but also the power with which the message is conveyed.

The story that immediately follows, "Requiem," dances along the line of cliché but is powerfully written such that the cliché doesn't mattered. In the far distant future, Captain Kellon helms a ship returning journalists to an Earth first frozen as the sun burns itself slowly out to a white dwarf and now plummeting into the sun after a passing body alters the orbit. Kellon is frustrated since civilization has so obviously passed by the old mother world, and he would prefer to be out exploring new worlds. He is also frustrated by the human foibles that surround what is basically a press junket to the destruction and all the politics that must be played. Absenting himself entirely from daily operation of the journalists once they arrive on the dying Earth, he sets about exploring the region outside New York, where his city has landed. It's only when he accidentally discovers the remnants and memories of individual residents that he begins to perceive the beauty and power of what is about to be lost. This story is quiet and sedate, even at its end as the world plummets into the sun, and Kellon's eventual revolt against the furor surrounding the publicity is powerful for its simplicity. Embedded in this story is the question of how far we are lost when we have publicity about publicity, such that the power and impact of the important events becomes lost in the shuffle. That such a statement is made about the death of a home we've not yet left makes the story that much more iconic.

Such is the effectiveness of this collection that I am looking about for more collections and perhaps some novels by Hamilton. So the book has fulfilled its two primary functions—to introduce novice readers to the oeuvre of a speculative fiction master and compel the reader to go out and find more. But this book also stands as the best testament I have found thus far of how powerful the often maligned golden age really was. Even though the clichés still drift in and out of the stories in this collection, Hamilton rises above them to offer something more, something distinct. This book stands in powerful contrast to the puerile Captain Future stories I read at the end of last year and exhibits early strains of the literature that helped to reshape our world.

Startide Rising

2011-03-09T11:01:00.002-05:00

Since this novel was selected by a member of my book group for discussion, I'm not going to discuss this in as much detail as I would other books. No need to give away all of my conversation points before the actual conversation….

The premise behind Brin's novel is a fascinating one, especially given my current spate of reading golden age speculative fiction. Brin imagines a galactic federation loosely associated cultures, a sort of staple of early pulp fiction. But unlike those pioneers, Brin doesn't imagine man's place in that confederation to be founders or leaders. This kind of human exceptionalism is pretty much taken for granted, and given that the thrust of much of the early writing is to show us mastering the universe around us, it makes sense. Given also that the audience for a lot of that early writing was a younger audience, and it seems to be a function of what is now termed YA literature to push its readers to better themselves, it makes sense that humans would play an important role in the galactic federations that it finds itself in. This trope is even repeated in such well-known speculative fiction as the Star Trek universe—the Federation is man's idea and though other races are older and wiser than ours—such as the Vulcans—they accept the leadership role that humans take on. And sure, the leadership of the Federation seems to move about the various races of the Federation, but remember where Federation and Star Fleet headquarters are located, on Earth.

But Startide Rising ponders an existing galactic culture that allows humans to join it, and while humans are central to the story, they are not central to the galactic culture. In fact, humans are rather despised because they fall outside the natural order of the culture: usually a race is genetically manipulated to sentience by existing members of the culture, while humans appear to have no such benefactors and have evolved to sentience naturally. This represents a different type of exceptionalism, of course—humans are the only ones who are naturally sentient--but this exceptionalism makes them targets to other races rather than models. It's not often that speculative fiction offers a galactic milieu in which humans are at least roughly equivalent to other races, let alone dismissed as inferior.

An interesting tangent to the racial artifacts of Brin's setting is the characterization of races. I, a child of the civil rights era, was troubled as I read the sweeping stereotypes of entire races of creatures that Brin employs. Races are categorized as good or evil by other races, and the few individuals we see from those alien races seem to bear out the stereotype. And yet the Earth races represented, primarily dolphins and humans, are shown all across the continuum. It should be noted, though, that when a human or dolphin performs a malicious act, it's most often because they are misguided but good at their core (with one notable exception). This terra-centrism (to coin a term, I think) is difficult to get away from, given that the audience is, of course, terran-based. But it grows grating in its continued use, especially when compared to the alien races that are just uniformly bad.

Mostly, however, this is just a nit, and one I can understand. But it does point out to me some of the difficult decisions and elements to be considered in such a sweeping novel as Startide Rising. And it also allows me space to think about the variations on the trope of humans in a galactic civilization. These in turn should indicate just how powerful a book Startide Rising is, since it forced me to think about such things. Despite these few foibles, I see it as worthy of the Hugo and Nebula awards it received.

The Best of Jack Williamson

2011-03-07T13:19:00.002-05:00

I've sought out and read so much complex speculative fiction, especially in the last few years, that I had taken some of the roots of the genre for granted. This is why I am trying to make up the deficit by hunting down Ballantine's "Best of" series and also reading The Great SF Stories series. It's easy to appreciate the quality of what is currently being produced, but it strikes me as being important to go back and read the pioneers, the groundbreaking authors who blazed the trail that today's writers are following. Such as Jack Williamson.

What strikes me the hardest about the stories in this collection is that in many ways, a modern audience would see them as terrifically flat. There is little character development and very little work on heavy thematic issues. The stories excel, however, in their plots, in their development of a story that is constantly moving forward into sometimes unexpected areas. This seems nearly tautological in its obviousness: pulp stories of the 20s, 30s, and 40s were not read by eager teenaged boys for their examination of the human condition—they were read because they were exciting and fast-moving. It's only with the supposed wisdom of advanced years that readers might come to expect something more, and eventually speculative fiction has been able to produce it. This is not to say that Williamson's writing is not good; in fact, some of the stories are engrossing and difficult to put down. But they seem to fit more closely into the stereotype of what pulp stories were all like, which I'm coming to learn is not for various reasons such a bad thing at all. Finding and reading the "good old stuff," as one book's title describes it, is enabling me to more closely study the stereotype itself and reaction to it.

The anthology opens with a juvenile "The Metal Man" that carries with it the air of Weird Tales, of forces beyond not only human control but human understanding…the transcendentally eerie. A great many of the classic tropes associated with speculative fiction are used—an awkward framing device of the narrator reading to his audience a letter from the protagonist of the story, an explorer finding a hitherto unknown lost tract of land, and the awful results of blundering madly into the unknown. In the case of "The Metal Man," those results are pretty apparent after the first couple of pages: the inert metal sculpture in the title is in fact the protagonist of the story. The introduction to the anthology makes it clear that this story is the first that Williamson ever published, and it shows a lot of potential even as it follows the pattern established before it. But it also stands as the most stereotypical of the lot: fun but shallow.

The story that follows immediately after, "Dead Star Station," is more creative: a sparsely populated space station with a brand new commander finds itself called for emergency action as a passenger ship is captured by pirates. The build-up to the action which motivates the story takes up a little too much story space: the story must introduce the setting, and then introduce, Gideon Clew, the likable old veteran who lives at the station technically against the rules of the space agency, and then finally introduce the young girl for whom he acts as an adoptive grandfather. Like "The Metal Man," this story would be far better served if it were begun in media res and assumed that the reader is smart enough to put together the pieces. But such writing requires a more experienced writer and perhaps a more mature genre. Tension is established with the arrival of the new base commander, still green and, we are constantly told, so new that he doesn't realize that out in the wilds regulations are more often guidelines than rules. Immediately he takes a dislike to old Clew for his rule-breaking ways, a dislike that is so pervasive that it becomes pretty clear what the result will be. After the big crisis happens, it's also pretty clear what each step of the resolution is going to be, but the story rolls right along, pulling its reader right along with it.

And so the early part of the collection goes, oscillating between stories that stick to the tropes fairly closely and stories that show some creativity but seem predictable now, perhaps because of those that followed in the steps that the original stories established. A much more successful story, and one with a reputation in speculative fiction circles, is "With Folded Hands." In it, a small town is invaded by robots whose only desire is to serve and protect humans, removing difficult and potentially dangerous tasks from people. The problem is one of degree: while it may be nice for a robot to prepare meals every now and again, it becomes cumbersome if the robots prepare every meal, even removing the responsibility from people who enjoy cooking. In addition to losing the right to cook for themselves, potential chefs are told that cooking is too dangerous a task since it involves heat and utensils that can damage unwary or incautious users. Williamson takes this scenario into every facet of life until humans are left with nothing to do but play with rubberized toys. Even reading is not allowed since unwary minds may be troubled by especially emotional writing. What then is the recourse of the served, when the servants take over? Fortunately, Williamson gets away from the pat answer, doing something pretty original, especially for the time period the story rises out of, setting a mark that writers that followed strove to meet for themselves.

"Breakdown" and "The Equalizer" both envision different Earths with a similar problem—an economically-based totalitarian regime has taken control of the world/ In each story the regime looks and acts like the representations of early 20^th century political machines are reputed to have worked, almost purely on the basis of who knows whom and which way favors have been passed along the network of peers. Both stories also represent the downfall of those hierarchies, one for a more utopian structure and the other for we're not sure what. The downfall of each also is caused by different elements—one political and the other technological.

There are also a couple of other stories that seem to exist in the same setting, "The Peddler's Nose" and "The Happiest Creature." These stories find Earth to be the origin of a political system the rules the galaxy, but Earth itself is as you would have found it in the 50s. It turns out that the founders of the galactic culture were the Atlanteans, who moved out into space and colonized, such that the culture is human in form but far advanced compared with contemporary Earth. In fact, that galactic culture is warned to stay away from Earth as it is backward culturally and technologically, such that interaction would contaminate contemporary humans and retard their natural development. And all of this more than a decade before Star Trek and its Prime Directive!

The feeling I was left with as I finished the last story in the collection was that The Best of Jack Williamson acts as a solid signpost for what the early days of science fiction were like. From it, a curious reader can mark important moments in movements in the evolution of the genre. And yet there is still much in the volume that offers itself up to casual fans of science fiction, those looking for an entertaining and page-turning read.

The Great SF Stories 3 (1941)

2011-03-03T10:34:00.002-05:00

I'm finding that writing a review of this anthology series is pretty difficult. Most anthologies include stories that have something in common, whether it be thematic or genre, or even as simple as all of them having the same author. Instead, as noted earlier, this anthology is made up of what two people have decided constitutes the best short stories of a particular year. And in this case, it may as well be a random decision since the parameters of that decision are never defined. There's also the problem of an editor being forced to consider his own material for "Best of" anything, and so the 1941 volume ends up with two Isaac Asimov short stories. Granted, having a "Best of 1941" book without Asimov's "Nightfall" would be nearly criminal, but there is something a little sleazy about Asimov having to comment on his own stories as a selection. Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately), Asimov's commentaries remain personal remembrances of the story or author in question, sometimes embarrassingly personal, so we are not forced to see Asimov critique his own writing. But why his co-editor, Martin Greenberg, refuses his own commentary on Asimov's works while providing historical and bibliographic information about every other short story escapes me.

And though I have said it about the first two volumes of this series, I have to say it again…not having any Robert Heinlein in these volumes comes close to a crime as well. At least the Heinlein stories the editors would have included had they been able to are listed and commented on.

And then, once you get beyond these flaws…what an amazing collection of great speculative fiction! Leading the class is the aforementioned "Nightfall," selected by the SFWA as the best science fiction short story up to 1968. Asimov's introduction does not mention the apocryphal challenge between he and Heinlein, and a Web search does not give me any hits on it either, such that I wonder where I heard it. Reputedly, John Campbell was in the habit of coming up with ideas for stories and summoning writers to him to let them riff on his thoughts. So he summoned Asimov and Heinlein and told them to write stories where "someone sees the stars for the first time." The results are Heinlein's "Universe" where the viewer greets this first glimpse with wonder while Asimov's viewers in "Nightfall" are terrified. Given that "Universe" was published a month before "Nightfall," I can understand where such a story might have its origin (and ironically, "Universe" would have been included in this volume had Heinlein's works been used). The point of all this is to say that Asimov's story of a civilization in a star cluster, where night only comes every few hundred years, is a masterpiece not only of setting but in its evaluation of human foible. A great deal of the strength of the short story comes from the various reactions and expectations of the characters to what they think is about to come, and the slow build-up of terror among them as what does happen is so much more than what they expect. Part of the tension comes from the dramatic irony of the reader knowing exactly what the night looks like and raising his eyebrows at the idea of the night sky holding as many as "dozens" of other stars. But the real power comes from Asimov not fully exploring the terror, only building it up to a climax and then leaving the effect of revelation to the reader's imagination and the inertia of the story itself with a simple sentence:

The long night had come again.

Another powerful story in the collection is another Hall of Fame recipient, Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God." There are some echoes of Frankenstein in this short story, as a research scientist gets so wrapped up in the act of scientific discovery that he never fully realizes the consequences of what he has done. However, while Frankenstein deals with the manipulation of a single creature, Sturgeon's story follows James Kidder as he toys with an entire race. And again, though his motives are explicitly pure ("advancing science") there is an implied selfishness as the accolades rain down upon the researcher and not the subject of the research itself. And while Frankenstein is swept up with the terror of the monster, the tension of "Microcosmic God" is far more sedate, especially because it remains an unrevealed threat. After being tortured by Kidder in order to develop invention after invention in, it's far more effective to have them wrap themselves in an impenetrable opaque dome than to act out in any kind of way. As the narrator himself says, "When I think of that I feel frightened."

A sort of counterpoint to Sturgeon's story is "Mechanical Mice" by Maurice A. Hugi (Eric Frank Russell). In it another inventor discovers a way to see into the future and sets about making his fortune out of "inventing" things that he spies with his voyeuristic device. Often though he does not know what it is he is building until it is complete, and such is the case with his latest theft. When the machine he builds sits silently, he asks a friend to aid him in figuring out what it does. Their investigations remain fruitless until a series of strange thefts begin around the city, and the strange device is found to be a "robot queen" that harvests mechanical parts to build workers and drones (and other queens as it turns out) in a what is originally a fairly passive plot to take over the world. The threat is never implied since the story has scenes of thwarted robots summoning fighters to come and defend them and the reader is allowed to glimpse the possibilities of the takeover. The story follows the ensuing hunt for the robots and ends triumphantly, with man conquering the enemy and the common-sense lacking inventor destroying his device.

There are a few humorous stories in the collection that have varying degrees of success. Sturgeon's "Shottle Bop" is ultimately fairly silly and a little trite, while Kuttner and Moore's "A Gnome There Was" is an interesting take on those creatures of long-lived legend. The most successful humorous story is Anthony Boucher's "Snulbug" in which an inventor researches the dark arts and summons a demon to help him make his fortune so he can develop his device to aid man. The humor arises at first from the anti-stereotypical demon that is summoned and how he is put upon by his summoner, but that fades as the inventor fails to take advantage time and again of a newspaper from a day in the future brought to him by the demon. Also funny is Lester del Rey's "Hereafter, Inc" in which a man concerned about how his every action will affect his afterlife finds that it was his patterns that had more effect. But the humor of "Hereafter, Inc." is much thinner, acting as a patina for issues that cause a thoughtful reader to do a thorough self-evaluation.

Really, the only story in this collection that has not aged particularly well is Robert Arthur's "Evolution's End," a ham-handed retelling of the Genesis myth. I think it is the exception that proves the rule, however; the volume is a fine collection of Golden Age speculative fiction well worth reading.