Ghost in the Shell

Mrs. Speculator and I are pretty big fans of the anime movie and series, Ghost in the Shell. Sure, there are probably people who know far more about the franchise than we do, but compared to the average American movie goer, we are probably in the top ten percent of folks with knowledge about the plot and characters. But like most franchises with which we are familiar, the new Ghost in the Shell is not for us. That should not preclude any fan of science fiction, especially fans of cyberpunk, to see it. It is absolutely gorgeous to look at—the cityscapes are spectacular. The soundtrack is delightful—I have fantasies of putting it and Daft Punk’s soundtrack for Tron: Legacy in infinite loop. But the only similarities between the movie and the GitS franchise are in pieces of the backstory, the characters’ names, and their general appearance. 

I’ve discussed in the past how being fans of a piece burdens the viewer as they take on an interpretation of that piece in another medium. David Lynch’s Dune was probably my first exposure to this; I walked out of the theater before the movie had ended on opening night, because the film ends with a thunderstorm. As I’ve grown older and more experienced in studying narrative, I can figure out why some narrative changes are made: sometimes to save time, sometimes to placate a less nuanced audience, and sometimes …I just can’t explain why. But no matter the reasons for the changes, the onus is on the viewer to set aside any preconceived ideas about the piece and to accept that what is being viewed is just a different thing. Then the critic’s job (or the viewer’s responsibility as they think about what they have seen) becomes split: does the new piece do justice to the spirit of the original and how good is the new piece independent of the ties that bind it to the original piece.

The creative staff thinking about a movie adaptation of Ghost in the Shell were faced with a couple of daunting tasks. First, the setting of the franchise is well-defined over a loved comic series, a gorgeous couple of animated movies, and several well-received TV series. How can a movie with an estimated two-hour run time hope to capture all of that? I imagine the creative conversations become a matter of choosing which elements to keep and which to not deal with and also which to modify and how to modify them. And then with a property as dense and complex as GitS thematically and philosophically, the same questions have to be asked for mainstream audiences who notoriously reject movies that require deep thought. For instance, Ghost in the Shell makes a pretense of pondering the individual’s role in an increasingly technological society—the driving question of the franchise. During the first half of the movie, Major (Scarlett Johansson) has her brain inserted into a “shell”, an advanced cybernetic body capable of some really cool tricks, but she spends a lot of her alone time staring into mirrors and looking at her appendages as if they are not a part of her. Her coworkers in Section 9 assure her that she is human, but she is not so sure, especially since her savior/constructor, Dr. Ouelet (Juliette Binoche), can erase her memories and personality with a few keystrokes. But cyberpunk navel-gazing is not going to make most American viewers want to see your movie, let alone love it, so action sequences must be inserted. Instantly, the mood of the movie goes from contemplative to free-for-all, and any strong ties the movie might have had to the original franchise are forgotten in the big budget SF aspects.

The other characters in the movie are not even two-dimensional, which is also a departure from the rest of the franchise. A little effort is given to making Batou (Pilou Asbæk) more rounded, but it is cliched, so blunt and trite all at once. Togusa (Chin Han), the character from the franchise who remains cybernetically unenhanced, offers the movie a foil for Major’s meditations. Sadly, he is dramatically underused, having a speaking role in perhaps two scenes in the movie, and so the opportunity goes untaken and the movie devolves into standard SF special effects slugfest.

So the first part of the question about remakes (or re-imaginings, the term marketing folks use to give themselves wiggle room when the complaints come rolling in about the differences from the source material) is a definite no—this movie is not a good adaptation of source material. And yet, and yet, it is still a decent SF movie if you can get past its ties to the original. Its setting and atmosphere are perfect for a cyberpunk story; the music is alternatively brooding and ethereal. The city that is the setting for the story owes more to Blade Runner than its own source material; nevertheless, it is gorgeous to look at. And truly, the make-up and CGI work that went into the cybernetic enhancements of the characters is just stunning. This has the feel of what real people would do with the ability to modify and adapt their parts both for esthetic reasons and functional. The viewer is simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the peripheral characters and extras.

Unfortunately, the plot is not very deep either. If you’ve seen two or three big-screen science fiction epics, you should be able to solve the “mystery” pretty quickly. And if you can’t figure it out, the plot doesn’t hesitate to beat the viewer over the head with obvious clues and even revelations. It’s typical fare (so far away from the depths and power of the source material) and okay for escapism. But if you want more from your science fiction, save your money for a matinee or until you can see this on demand. While the cinematography and effects are gorgeous, they do not give enough reason to pay full price for this movie, unless you have more money than you know what to do with.

The jarring dislocation between the source material and this latest incarnation just lead me to wonder “why?” It’s a decent science fiction movie. But if it is going to be so removed from its source, why bother to use the source at all? Why not make a truly independent thing, with its own characters and plot? I suspect the answer has to do with money and the inability of the “real fan” to not see the adaptation. “Real fans” just can’t stay away, so it’s guaranteed income for the movie. And if the non-fans can be sold on the worthiness of the movie, those people will come also. And that explanation saddens me because of just how cynical it is. The love a viewer has for the source becomes merely a tool for those trying to profit from it.

Subgenres in Gravity

Recently I ran across a review of the excellent movie Gravity in which the reviewer announced that the movie was not actually science fiction. In his own words:

Gravity features no aliens, no interstellar space travel, no time travel, and it doesn’t take place in the future. In fact, given that it involves a space shuttle as its method of travel into space, it would seem to be set in a past. (http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/opinions/gravity-is-not-sci-fi.php)

Another similar review goes like this:

Gravity is not a science fiction film. […]There is no great speculation about future technologies. No aliens arrive to inconvenience Ms Bullock. Yes, it takes place in space. But so did Apollo 13. Was that science fiction? (http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/screenwriter/2013/10/09/gravity-is-not-a-science-fiction-film/)

My first impulse is to nitpick the rationale that each critic bases their decision on, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader even though I find it particularly galling that for some reason both writers seem to believe that science fiction can only exist if there are aliens involved (Gattaca? The Truman Show?). Instead, I’d like to introduce a subgenre of science fiction to these critics.

Gravity uses today’s science and technology as the core to its plot, which may be what is throwing off these reviewers, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t science fiction. Science fiction can generally be divided into two general spheres, “hard science fiction” and “soft”. Allen Steele describes hard science fiction as “the form of imaginative literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone”; science fiction that doesn’t have this foundation is generally termed “soft”. Unfortunately, 99% of science fiction film is soft, with barely a glance at the fundaments of physics as they strive for better and greater special effects and costumes and make-up. As a result, in the popular imagination, science fiction is identified by those elements—big-ass spaceships firing on things, weird aliens, impressive technology with lots of lights. But in the history of written science fiction, hard stories are a healthy minority with a long rich history, and writing it requires something of a specialist’s touch. Writing hard science fiction requires two difficult skills—an understanding of scientific principles and their applications in reality and the ability to communicate those principles and applications in an entertaining way (Arthur C. Clarke is considered one of the masters of hard science fiction). Unfortunately, neither attribute is very applicable to cinema, where the audience generally has a short attention span and wants to be wowed rather than lectured to. Part of the power of Gravity is that it succeeds despite the potential pitfalls of its choice of genre.

Gravity also taps into a smaller subgenre of science fiction storytelling that is not often used in cinema, that of the “problem story”. In a problem story, the protagonist or protagonists are faced with some sort of crisis in exotic circumstances that can only come from the science fiction genre—an astronaut crashes into the lunar surface and has to figure out a way to communicate with his base, for example. The roots of this kind of story are clearly related to science fiction’s own roots in the adventure story: similar stories have been written in the western and action genres where cowboys run out of water crossing a desert or an expedition member gets cut off from his party in the deep Amazon. It could be argued that because other genres have similar kinds of stories, perhaps the problem story belongs in its own classification outside of genre silos. That isn’t an unreasonable idea, but the individual stories differ by the problems that are being solved, which in turn are based almost solely on the setting of the story. And if we presume that the setting is a good bit of what determines the genre, then we have to take genre into account. In Gravity, Sandra Bullock’s Ryan Stone faces the problem she faces exactly because she is travelling in space. And in turn, those problems are directly related to established science.

One of the most widely beloved science fiction short stories of the pulp era is Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”, a problem story of the first rank (I have actually found it online at http://www.spacewesterns.com/articles/105/).  In the story, Godwin establishes a very precise set of circumstances: a colony is suffering from a deadly plague and a messenger ship races to it with the cure. The ship itself is stripped to the bare essentials in order to maximize its speed, and every bit of weight has been calculated to ensure that only the exact amount of fuel needed to land on the planet is onboard. The cold equation is that acceleration is dependent on mass, one that we have yet to figure out how to work around. But after the situation has been laid out to the reader, Godwin throws a wrench into the works—the pilot discovers a stowaway, a young girl who thought it would be a simple way to visit her brother on the planet, unaware of the crisis the ship and its pilot are trying to avert. With the girl’s extra weight, the pilot is faced with either a doomed attempt to land or perpetual orbits around the planet, never able to get down safely. What will the protagonist do—how will he deal with the hard science of physics and its remorseless effects on his mission? The solution is what sets “The Cold Equations” above most of its peers. At the time of its release, in Astounding Science Fiction in August 1954, I don’t think anyone solved the problem nearly the way that Godwin chose to.

No, Gravity doesn’t have aliens or time travel. What it does have, however, is a solid foundation in the traditions of science fiction. And as I watched Gravity, the knowledge that a much-beloved area of science fiction that doesn’t get much attention was getting a spotlight made it that much more enjoyable.

A Writer’s Dilemma: Superman Syndrome and Almost Human

Mrs. Speculator and I have been enjoying the new Fox series, Almost Human. On the one hand, there is the really strong chemistry between the lead actors, Karl Urban and Michael Ealy. In addition, the writers have given some fairly serious thought to potential future technologies and their use (and abuse in the case of the criminals our heroes pursue every week). They have even managed some little things, like carrying minor plot points over into consecutive episodes, rather than make each episode act like a silo with only the macro story arc (the “mythology” in X-Files terms) connecting them. In fact, if there’s much of a weakness right now, it’s in Almost Human’s lack of a mythology. But the series is just starting out—it has to be given time to establish its rhythms and characters. Even massively mythology-driven shows, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, had to take a while to introduce and frame the characters and standardize their interactions. Mrs. Speculator and I generally give new shows that we are interested in three episodes to sell us. In most cases, when we have that third-episode discussion, rarely do we talk about the over-riding story arc at that point. (In fact, here’s a corollary—if a series is pounding on its mythology that early in its run, it often will not make it past the first season, if it in fact makes it that far.) Unfortunately, Almost Human seems to have written itself into an unfortunate plot loop with its latest episode, “Blood Brothers”, and I’m curious to see if they did it on purpose to delight the viewers or if they are aware of what they did.

You may be familiar with the popular phrase that has been long associated with Superman: “Faster than a bullet, stronger than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound…”. If you’re not familiar with the history of Superman, you may not be aware that this was originally a description of the upper limits of his powers. Superman could jump real high or real far, but flight was not one of his abilities. He could race a bullet and catch it in mid-flight, but he couldn’t travel at the speed of sound. So how did he get to the power levels he has in the popular imagination now? Think about it from a writer’s point of view: what kind of story can I tell about Superman that doesn’t seem exactly like every other Superman story? When Superman started out, he fought thugs and government corruption. But eventually, the readers are going to want something more, so the writers introduce villains that challenge Superman. What if Superman had to fight a villain who could also jump over buildings? There are two ways to overcome this—the hard way, which involves imaginative story-telling and creative use of the power set, or the easy way, by increasing Superman’s powers. Generally, the easy way wins out, so Superman strains a bit and then discovers that instead of being able to jump, say, a quarter mile, he can now jump a mile. And then a little while later, it’s five miles, then 20, and it grows and grows until eventually someone comes up with the idea of flight. During the late 50s and early 60s, the writers of the various Superman stories played with this idea by giving him ridiculous powers, like Super-ventriloquism. I’d like to believe that the writers were mocking themselves as they did this, and the stories are often a great deal of fun. But it may well be that this period was just a long detour down the easy path.

It’s this kind of power creep that I refer to as “Superman syndrome”, because eventually the problem circles back on itself—now that Superman can fly through space near the speed of light and can withstand having mountains dropped on his head, what kind of villain poses a challenge to him? The writer either has to keep amping up Superman’s powers or really buckle down and tell the story in a different kind of way or perhaps tell a different kind of story. It’s at this crux that the really good writing shines through, as the writers begin to move off into different kinds of story-telling. Alan Moore’s great “For the Man Who Has Everything” is a sly wink at the Superman syndrome—how do you challenge the man who has all those powers? Moore’s solution was ingenious, and the story-telling was well-conceived and implemented.

The point of all this? The writers of Almost Human, and especially the 9 December episode, “Blood Brothers” put themselves into a Superman syndrome loop, less than ten episodes into their first season. And, again, I’m curious to see if they attempt to resolve it. I want to believe that they have plans to address it—because again, that’s an impetus for really strong writing. But I’m also dubious.

==SPOILERS FOLLOW==

The show introduced a minor character who acted somewhat as a plot advancement tool in the episode. Maya Vaughn (Megan Ferguson) is a witness to a murder and is scheduled to appear in a trial. She also has had an operation that increases her use of her brain’s capacity, but it has had an interesting side effect—she can talk to dead people when she touches an object that they have touched. (You could do some really interesting story things with this—what happens when she goes to the store and grabs a shopping cart?) The other witness to the murder is herself murdered, and Maya touches her scarf and begins communing with her. The android, Dorian (Michael Ealy) appears to believe that she now possesses what is usually termed a supernatural power, while the human, John Kennex (Karl Urban) does not believe her (that’s heavy-handed irony…). But by the end of the episode, and because of a few other interactions with her that have no real bearing on solving the murder case(s), we are made to believe that Maya really can talk to the dead.

So what’s the problem?

Given that the show is really a police procedural set in the future and that the show’s stars are a police detective and his android assistant, the writers have now made it possible for the police to get substantial help for every murder they investigate and every crime in which someone is killed. The police have been handed a tool, and since part of the premise of the show is that the police are falling behind in the technology race with organized criminals, they should use it at every opportunity. If there’s ever an episode where they spend the whole time trying to figure out a murder without consulting Maya, then the writing is questionable.
While the introduction of Maya closes off some obvious storytelling paths, it also opens up some really cool ones. Consulting an actual medium is not exactly the kind of logical progression of evidence that most courts would allow in a trial, so if Kennex ever does go to Maya to discover the identity of a criminal, part of the plot has to be about coming up with sufficient evidence to convict outside of Maya. Such a plot could lead to some interesting turns and twists. Or what if a connected criminal finds out that Kennex consulted Maya and tries to use that conversation in court to throw out a trial—tainted evidence, hearsay evidence? And Maya’s witnesses are dead—exactly how reliable are they after time spent in whatever happens to people after they die?

So now, in addition to the things I already like about Almost Human, I’m also going to be watching to see what they do with this development. I’ll try to remember to update the blog if anything comes of it.

The Great Science Fiction Stories 9 (1947)

The ninth in this anthology series, this volume contains stories that were being written and revised soon after the close of World War II. It’s obvious that the shadow of that war and its ending hangs over the stories, as more than the usual number are concerned with the after-effects of atomic warfare. It’s a stereotype that science fiction is inherently optimistic, and a number of stories show the reality opposing the stereotype.

“Little Lost Robot” by Isaac Asimov (Astounding) – I admit to not being very fond of Asimov’s famous Robot series. It’s not that I don’t like them; it’s just that I don’t think they are as amazing as is generally held. For me, this story is a great example of their weakness. There is no denying the impact of Asimov’s robotic laws both on fiction and in developing technology, but that doesn’t mean that all the stories that used those laws are necessarily good. While a lot of science fiction uses aliens as the gimmick on which to write other genres of fiction, Asimov instead used robots.

“Little Lost Robot” is, really, a mystery, a tidy little logic problem based on the premise of the robotic laws. The characterization, often a problem with Asimov, is decidedly flat. Asimov actively makes the characters share animosity towards one another for no reason that is apparent in the story itself, while the story implies that they should get along, not just for a common purpose, but because they are smart and thoughtful people. The story ends up being ingenious, but not really “great”. It makes a terrific example of what was good about the writing of that time, but I have a lot of trouble making it signpost of the best science fiction has to offer.

“Tomorrow's Children” Poul Anderson (Astounding) – Given the current interest in post-apocalyptic stories, Anderson’s first story in this anthology series might be interesting to modern readers. I find it interesting that the story comes out of Astounding, whose editor John Campbell believed in human exceptionalism and the ability to rise above any obstacle. Then again, the story does go to an interesting place if only because it is far more realistic than most of the current post-apocalyptic stories. Still, it’s a bit over-long and flat in its delivery, making it a little difficult to read. However, given that it was Anderson’s first published work, it serves as a sign of what was to follow in a long and brilliant career.

“Child's Play” by William Tenn (Astounding) – There seems to be a running motif, usually found in stories by Kuttner and Moore, of toys from the future coming back to wreak havoc on contemporary characters. This is another of those stories by a mostly forgotten writer, William Tenn. The motif allows the story to dance along the edge of whimsy and dread, but they usually end up strongly on the side of dread. This one cuts a little harder, since it involves biogenetics, and the narrator may not be entirely sane as he plays with a child’s science kit from the future. While the ending is telegraphed pretty early on, it is still an evocative piece.

“Time and Time Again” by H. Beam Piper (Astounding) – Piper is probably best known for his Fuzzy novels, which are enjoying a resurrection among modern readers. “Time and Time Again” is an interesting twist on a time travel story, probably fairly ground-breaking in its day but a little clichéd now. If you could travel back into your own past, how would you change things? Piper chooses to use an altruist as his protagonist, so his interest is in changing rotten history rather than just making his life easier. It’s a departure from the Piper I know and so valuable for that alone. The story also makes an interesting introduction into the possibility of time travel, forming an interesting resonance with the recent move Looper.

“Tiny and the Monster” by Theodore Sturgeon (Astounding) – Science fiction of this time is stereotypically known for its alien invasion story, but Sturgeon turns that trope around a bit. The gimmick ends up being a little bit hokey, but Sturgeon’s writing is fun and breezy. Sturgeon shows off his ability to build characters in this story as well, adding straightforward humor to a story that otherwise could be considered twee.

“E for Effort” by T. L. Sherred (Astounding) - This is a fairly well-known piece, reprinted in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. It’s an interesting take on time travel, imagining that instead of physically moving backwards in time, the characters can merely see into the past. They decide to use this technology to make movies, and the story becomes an interesting view into mid-century moviemaking with a slow progression to something bigger. The writing is very much like Robert Heinlein’s short stories, with a mildly cynical take on culture and human nature. Its climax comes fast and requires a few re-readings to fully understand, but it’s powerful in its delivery. I’ve thought about this story often recently and was delighted to uncover it again.

“Letter to Ellen” by Chan Davis (Astounding) – One of the characteristics of some of the best short stories from this general time period is the attempt to put a human emotional face on technological changes. Science and invention were blossoming at the end of World War II, and the best science fiction stories attempted to put an emotional element on those advances, weighing if they were perhaps not worth their cost. “Letter to Ellen” is an interesting story about technology that we’ve really only begun to explore to its full potential in the past decade, so there is a predictive element to Davis’s writing. However, he points out a bias that grows because of the use of the technology, a bias that doesn’t feel logical but I’m sure would happen if our science reaches the state described in the novel. Interestingly enough, it’s a similar question raised by the novel Frankenstein, but from a different point of view.

“The Figure” by Edward Grendon (Astounding) – This story is very much like an episode of Twilight Zone: short with a twist ending that leaves the audience dangling to find out what happens next. While it is fun, the twist is unfortunately telegraphed early and often. It may well be that decades of watching Twilight Zone and similarly themed and paced TV shows has made it easy to spot the twists of such things.

“With Folded Hands . . .” by Jack Williamson (Astounding) – This is perhaps the most well-known story in this collection. I’ve also come across it in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, so it is fairly well regarded by readers and critics.

I think this story is a nice counterpoint to the Robot stories by Asimov, wherein the three laws of robotics generally force the robots to be relatively docile and benign. But Williamson extrapolates the idea of telling a near-perfect machine to help man to ironic but plausible extremes. Given the near-universal understanding that the greatest threat to man is man itself, it’s fairly amazing that no one attempted to write this story before. In addition, the story has Williamson’s knack for placing a contemporary man of the 40s into a future that is easily recognizable, but different enough to allow there to be space for the story. While a lot of science fiction projects a future where the world is far less complicated, Williamson also recognizes that no matter how automated the world might become, the nature of people is less likely to change quickly.

“The Fires Within” by Arthur C. Clarke (Fantasy) – This is a strong example of Clarke’s own puzzle stories, involving characters trying to solve a mystery. To me, Clarke does this much better than Asimov, especially because his characters are far more believable. Clarke also doesn’t fall back on the clichés as models for what he writes. The framing device for this story is fairly unique, definitely unpredictable, and a delight when fully revealed. The final few paragraphs may seem trite, especially to an audience familiar with the twists and turns of The Twilight Zone, but that ending is merely Clarke’s nifty way of closing out his story, rather than the shocking purpose for the story in the first place. It’s not a weighty story and not Clarke’s best, but it is a good example of what he does when he truly excels (see “The Star” and “Nine Billion Names of God”).

“Zero Hour” by Ray Bradbury (Planet Stories) – “Zero Hour” is a great example of Ray Bradbury’s ability to take the mundane and turn it into something terrifying. The story focuses on fairly generic children’s games based on imagination, but as it proceeds, the sense of lurking dread grows and grows. The story begins with the adults laughing on the childish games until coincidences begin piling up. Bradbury pulls off a neat trick, allowing the reader to know exactly what is going on, so the horror comes not from our discovery of the truth but of the slow realization by the adult characters about what is going to happen. I’m reminded of the lengthier “Something Wicked This Way Comes” in the story’s basis on the usually innocent, but the the brevity of “Zero Hour” compacts and condenses the chill.

“Hobbyist” by Eric Frank Russell (Astounding) – Eric Frank Russell is a mostly forgotten writer from the 40s and 50s, but whose admirers think he deserves a revival. “Hobbyist” concerns an explorer who ends up far from human culture with no fuel. His lone companion on the planet he finds himself on is a macaw named Laura. Russell spends some time justifying choosing a macaw, but I’ve never been a fan of pet birds, so the explanations ring hollow. But it does give the lead character someone to talk to and to provide a second reaction to the story’s events for the reader.

The planet the explorer finds himself on is lush and lively, but something about it unsettles him. It was pretty clear to me what that something was, but it takes the trained explorer a while to figure it out. And just as he struggles to understand the cause of his concern, the action accelerates and gives the explorer an extremely deus ex machina way home.

Russell’s writing has a fine style and subtle humor, more subtle than the story that follows it, for example. Russell also raises some huge questions, especially in the last few paragraphs, but his handling of those large questions feels a little trite. Nonetheless, the story is engrossing despite the macaw and the “sense of humor” she displays.

“Exit the Professor” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (Thrilling Wonder Stories) – It’s astonishing how small a role humor plays in longer fiction. “Exit the Professor” is another of Kuttner and Moore’s outrageously charming stories where the science fiction takes a backseat to making the reader laugh. The story is based on a fairly common premise—a few individuals have taken the next step evolutionary step, but the story imagines them being brought up as, for lack of a better word, rednecks. And when their difference is uncovered by a visiting professor, all sorts of mayhem ensues as they race to keep their secret from the world at large.

“Thunder and Roses” by Theodore Sturgeon (Astounding) – Asimov makes the point that atomic destruction certainly seemed to be on everyone’s minds as reflected in the stories of 1947. With the dramatic end of World War II and the revelation of the resources available via atomic power, there was perhaps reason to be fearful. Sturgeon’s story is a powerful piece set after the United States has been devastated by a surprise attack. The narrator stumbles across an important secret and must weigh whether to use it, balancing his instinct against the request of an unexpected companion. The writing is contemplative and compelling, and it’s difficult to not feel for the narrator as he puzzles through his final days in a city dying from fallout.

Leviathan Wakes

It strikes me that space opera is the epic fantasy of science fiction. That is, you expect vast settings and a large cast of characters, all moving about their little narratives that eventually get tied up by the end of the book/series and somehow weave together to overcome the threat that imperils the solar system/galaxy/universe. Even if you are fairly unfamiliar with either subgenre, you can most likely do a quick comparison of the Star Wars (I’m thinking of the original trilogy mostly) and Lord of the Rings movies in your mind. They both have their avatars of oppressive evil—Darth Vader and  Emperor Palpatine versus Saruman and Sauron. They are both far-flung, moving through planetary systems quickly and several countries in Middle Earth respectively. They both have a number of characters whose stories have to be maintained and which come together at the climax to thwart the evil avatars and their attempt to dominate everything and everyone. Therefore it is something of a delight to find a novel that is clearly space opera, but succeeds in escaping these tropes to do something innovative. Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey (the pseudonym of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) is that novel, finding a crevice in the stalwart tradition of space opera and exploiting it with a compelling story.

While the scope of Leviathan Wakes is the entire solar system and while the threat does involve something extra-solar “invading”, the scope is smaller by magnitudes than the galactic milieu of most space opera and especially smaller than the universe-sized setting of the earliest space opera. The novel still makes it clear that we are talking about vast stretches of distance and time, larger than most people truly comprehend, but it also is satisfied to only deal with the solar system from the asteroid belt in. The novel also doesn’t posit a far-distant future where the science allows people to move freely around spacecraft that exceed the speed of light; rather, the science of Leviathan Wakes is not that far advanced from what we currently have now. This also results in delayed communication as participants in the conversation wait for their parts in a conversation to travel at light speed. Thus the setting that the novel inhabits is grand, but doesn’t require the suspension of disbelief of most space operas.

This realistic approach is enhanced by the novel’s focus on really just two characters, James Holden and Joe Miller. Holden is the executive officer on the Canterbury, an ice miner plying the asteroid belt. Holden is sent with a small crew to discover the source of a distress signal, but he ends up witnessing the destruction of the Canterbury by unknown forces. Joe Miller is a nourish private police officer on the asteroid Ceres, who notices strange goings-on among the criminal elements before being given a scut assignment to track down the missing heiress of an Earth industrial mogul. Both characters pull on the threads that are left to them as disaster after disaster strikes—a war breaks out between Earth, Mars, and the largely independent asteroid belt—and both characters try to minimize not only the damage around them but their own unexpected responsibility for the events shaping the war. While there are a few other minor characters that play parts in the ongoing story, Holden and Miller alternate the story’s point-of-view, even as they end up together on the same ship.

The two main characters are pretty deeply flawed, which is a twist on space opera’s general insistence on paragons, or characters who overcome their flaws to become paragons. This is not to say that Holden and Miller are not good people, because they are. But they are fully rounded characters, existing on a continuum rather than a binary. Holden is something of an idealist, expecting that people will do the right thing especially in the cold light of truth. Miller on the other hand is a cynic, expecting people to only act in their self-interest unless forced to do otherwise. This dichotomy causes real friction between them; even though they have the same goals, their respective methodologies disturb each other. And this lies at the heart of space opera—as humans explore the vast expanse of space, the very enormity of their endeavor highlights and intensifies the humanity of the characters. Paradoxically, it is against the largest setting, when individuals appear the smallest, do the characters excel the most.

The large backdrop also exacerbates the worst qualities as well. Given such a large arena in which to succeed, when failures happen, they are often spectacular. In Leviathan Wakes, it is human folly which enables the circumstances that drive the story: the war between the planets is a façade, a ploy setting ignorant militaries at each other’s’ throats in order to hide a corporate power grab, which in turn potentially endangers the entirety of the human race. This is the crux on which Miller and Holden’s differences lie.

Despite its differences from the stereotypes of the genre, Leviathan Wakes remains clearly a space opera. The action is relentless and on a large scale. The questions are big and the answers that Holden and Miller uncover in their search are bigger. And like well-written space opera, Leviathan Wakes is engaging and fun, difficult to put down once started. I’m pleased that there is a sequel and potentially a series.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Part 1

In 1986, DC Comics unleashed two of the most important series in comics history, broaching the possibility of mainstream superhero comics as literature. The stories are packed with all the accoutrements of what supposedly makes for good books: symbolism, philosophy, thought-provoking commentary on the human condition. One of those two series, Watchmen, has recently been made into a movie, attempting to take 12 issues and condense the images and words into something like a feature length movie. Audiences who didn’t know the story were put off by the storytelling, in part because of the denseness that faithfulness to the original required. They were also put off by its darkness: people with power are not any better than those without, they just have more ability to do the things they want to do. This is not the stereotypical view of superheroes, supposed paragons of virtue.

While Watchmen has garnered acclaim from mainstream audiences, it actually was the second of the seminal series to come out in 1986. The first, Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, was also groundbreaking and arguably had more impact on the comic industry than even Watchmen. I’m not aware that there has ever been any conversation about making a live action movie out the series, but DC has been quietly animating their best storylines of the past 30 years or so, and their latest project is an adaptation of this story of a retired Batman coming back to the service of his city.

Part of what makes The Dark Knight Returns so innovative is its setting; superheroes generally seem to live in the eternal now, always youthful and in fighting trim. But Frank Miller and this adaptation posits a time when Batman has been retired for a decade and the effect this has both on Gotham City and the people who interacted with him. Commissioner Gordon is on the verge of retirement, Harvey Dent (Two Face) has been rehabilitated and is returning to society, and the Joker sits wordlessly and catatonically in a ward in Arkham Asylum, destitute with no Batman to fight. But Gotham City is not at peace—a new gang called the Mutants has risen, and their only interests seem to be anarchy and mayhem. Batman himself is merely a legend, and the criminals in Gotham City have very few fears. Bruce Wayne really is the idle rich now, a powerful figure in the community, gray-haired but still possessing a presence, racing cars for sport in his leisure time.

After the Mutants murder the parents of a young boy in the streets and their leader openly targets Gordon for assassination before his retirement, Wayne feels the urge to put on the Batman costume again, to return to his city and fulfill the promise he made when he first put it on, “Never again.” The narrative dances along a tenuously thin line here: does Batman exist because of some altruistic desire to serve his city or is he ill, emotionally crippled when not in the costume and compelled by delusions into taking on the role of a messiah? The story also does not answer the question; instead it hangs there as a backdrop as a ruthless Batman sets about saving the things he cares about. The story also plays with the question of the violence that Batman uses to fight crime; while he doesn’t kill, he is not beyond a little torture or temporary maiming to get what he wants.

To fully bring these questions into the foreground, the story uses the device of interspersing news reports from television as segues into scenes. Those reports tend to focus on the average citizens’ response to what is taking place in the city with some people calling Batman a hero for his actions while others think he exacerbates and perhaps causes any problems that may occur. The TV segments come to a sharp focus with an ongoing debate between Bartholomew Wolper, a psychologist who believes that anyone can be rehabilitated but that the Batman is sick and provokes sick responses from his villains, and Lana Lang, a reporter who praises Batman’s efforts to clean up the city, arguing that the hero is a symbol to the people, that anyone can rise up against those who oppress them. It’s important to note that Miller’s original story is decidedly a product of its time, an exploration of the attitudes of the Reagan years in American history and of the idea that certain moral positions demand to be acted upon no matter the cost, and its corollary that might makes right. But these topics do not feel dated at all and have just as much potency as they did when Miller first brought them up.

Peter Weller’s voice jars in Batman’s mouth, especially for animated fans who have had years of Kevin Conroy playing the Dark Knight. But Weller is able to add a tone of weariness to Wayne and Batman, a note that is generally missing from Conroy’s portrayal. To be honest, the other voice actors are okay (even though the talent used is generally of the highest quality), but they are meant to be more complementary to Weller’s Batman and they serve that role well. The animation is a fine dance between the highly stylized artwork of Frank Miller’s original, and the more mainstream animation style that DC Entertainment has developed over the years, based on a mixture of anime sensibilities with Western lines. So, while there is nothing so dramatic as Miller’s figures, there are echoes of his lines in everything. And of course, the animators know their source material, so famous panels are used to send chills up the spines of longtime fans.

Of particular note is the soundtrack by Christopher Drake. The work is at least as compelling as Hans Zimmer’s work on Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and I pine for the soundtrack much as I do for those of Hans Zimmer. Even after the movie is over and your mind works over the implications and questions raised by the movie, the soundtrack remains in the background, an integral part of the story that this movie tells.

Quite frankly, this is the best Batman movie of the year, multi-layered and complex, with ideas that are impactful after the movie is over. It is much closer to the power of the brilliant The Dark Knight than the actual sequel from this summer, The Dark Knight Rises. It is also the best of DC Entertainment’s animated movies, which is also saying a great deal since the quality of those has generally been excellent. Unfortunately, the storytelling is so lush and dense that the full adaptation has been broken in two, and fans will have to wait a few months to get Part 2. I don’t know if there are any plans to eventually make it into a single package, but if so I don’t know if I can recommend waiting that long to see the brilliant work that DC has done.

Empire State

I keep a list of books that I want to read, mostly gathering it from reviews from all over, including the Internet and magazines. I also look at forthcoming book lists to see what my favorite authors are doing, usually putting their next offerings on my to-read list. The list is fairly large, so it sometimes takes me a while to get to things on it, and when I come to a first book by a new author, I’m generally hard-pressed to remember what it is that attracted me to the book in the first place. Was it a review, an advertisement? Did I like the cover art? Such was not the case with Adam Christopher’s Empire State. Just looking at the blurbs, I had no difficulty remembering what had grabbed my attention about this book. Alternate history 1930s New York City with superheroes? I’m there!

It starts out promising enough, a small-time gangster named Rex, on the run from a rival mob, crashes his car and escapes into a crowd watching New York’s two superheroes, the Skyguard and the Science Pirate duking it out against the backdrop of an uncompleted Empire State Building. Both heroes use rocket suits (a la The Rocketeer) and their battle lights up the sky. One hero wins decidedly and the crowd’s mixed reaction allows Rex to slip away unnoticed. But the events have consequences that nobody on the scene could have imagined. The story jumps to detective Rad Bradbury, a fairly stereotypical private eye from the period—living out of the back room of his office and avoiding divorce papers from his wife—who takes on an attractive female client, looking for her missing partner.

The novel becomes even more noir, as Rad’s narrative reveals that his city, which he refers to as the Empire State, is in perpetual Wartime with an unseen enemy, forcing rationing and prohibition laws. It’s always raining in the Empire State, and fog and clouds restrict sight of anything more than a few miles away from the island city. And for some reason, it’s almost always night. The phone in Rad’s office rings often but he is never able to get to it before it stops. Christopher evokes the same suspenseful texturing as the underrated movie Dark City, with something just as disturbing at its core. However, Christopher begins to lose control of that texturing, building convoluted level after level that eventually confuses even his characters, so that while the action is thrilling and the ideas interesting, the reader really has no idea what’s going on. We just have to trust that the private dick with the heart of gold is going to work it out.

In some ways this is no different from the best noir stories, which seem to involve a number of characters whose real goals and purposes remain obscure to the reader. And somehow the detective can piece them all together due to his innate, nearly supernatural, ability to read character and motivation in the people he meets. But Empire State suffers because the characters and their motivations are complicated by the revelation of an alternate dimension with doppelgangers of dubious motivation who apparently move back and forth across the dimensional divide with less difficulty than what might be imagined. And every time the characters provide a rule set for how something works, whether it be the culture of the Empire State or the physics of the dimensions, that rule set ends up being broken. And of course, like the best noir stories, characters perform double- and triple-crosses, again made more complicated by the doppelgangery as well as the supposed motivation not being clear in the first place.

Some characters want the dimensional rift closed for reasons that are never made completely clear. Other characters want to keep the rift open because they feel that destroying it will destroy the cities on both sides of the rift. And then some characters do contradictory things, working at their own purposes and which only seem somewhat tangential to the existence of the rift in the first place. Of course, there are allusions to the world that we know as well, further clouding the circumstances as the import of those allusions is never played out—there’s a cult based on a book entitled Seduction of the Innocent, but why that book and its hysteria regarding comic books is never made clear (let alone why people would follow it).

One of the most defining traits of noir fiction is that the detective doesn’t move from clue to clue as in true detective fiction, like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. Instead, the detective is led around by the nose, getting kidnapped or beat up and following leads down blind alleys, somehow gleaning scraps of important information from the people he interacts with. I’ve always felt that the detective is a surrogate from the reader, making manifest the reader’s role in most detective fiction—being led from place to place without any real control over direction and picking up what clues they can through observation. But with Empire State, the framework is precarious and the reader is especially aware that they are being led about without much real hope of figuring out what is going on. None of the characters are given very much depth, usually another hallmark of noir fiction, so after a while I felt like I was being batted back and forth by characters I didn’t care much about one way or another. This ended up making a book that began with potential and strong ideas become a trudge, a tedious quest to find out how it all gets resolved, in the hopes of it getting better.

What Empire State needed more than anything else was a good edit, a tightening up. Noir stories generally move fast, but this one gets bogged down in its own complexity. The potential for a strong story was there but was never met. Adam Christopher shows promise—and has several more books on the way, including a sequel to Empire State—and he clearly knows comics and science fiction tradition. I look forward to the growth from this flawed start.

The Quantum Thief

I'm not sure there is such a thing as bibliographic karma, but there are moments when the right book appears at exactly the right time. I've long been a fan of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series, and I was saddened by Harrison's death this last 15 August. That series details the antics of Slippery Jim DiGriz, the eponymous Stainless Steel Rat and the galaxy's best thief. The Quantum Thief is a proud follower on the trail that Harrison blazed; Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean de Flambeur is a worthy successor to Slippery Jim now that his stories have ended.

This first novel by Hannu Rajaniemi, a Finn living in Scotland, is both a challenge and a delight. The delight comes from following the exploits of a thief just rescued from prison and obliged to help his benefactress, Mieli, on a mission/quest of a dubious nature: one does not break a thief out of prison without usually desiring his talents. Unfortunately, de Flambeur's memories of his felonious ways have been carefully locked up in a Martian city called the Oubliette, so he has to steal his own memories back from a city that is walking across the Martian desert. The challenge comes from the far future setting that Rajaniemi creates; his world-building is elaborate and immersive, and his narrative throws the reader into the action without any guidance whatsoever. Much as in Steven Erikson's Malazan books, exotic names and ideas are bandied about without explanation, forcing the reader to glean meaning from context and repetition.

The world Rajaniemi has created is chock full of the big ideas that are the stereotype of speculative fiction. Especially fascinating is the culture of the Oubliette, hinging as it does on dual axes of time and privacy. On the one hand, the citizens of the Oubliette use a currency of time, paying for items with seconds counted out from their personal Watches. Anyone who has seen the movie In Time (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2012/02/in-time.html) or read Harlan Ellison's "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman" will recognize this conceit, but Rajaniemi changes it somewhat so that when a citizen's time runs out, instead of dying he serves a stint as a Quiet, a cyborg unit doing menial labor for the city. The citizen retains all his memories but performs service for a period of time before being allowed to be reborn into a new body with all his memories intact. The process takes for granted the ability to communicate consciousness and thought from body to body, and sometimes to machine. 

The second fundamental concept of the Oubliette also takes advantage of this capability: privacy is paramount to all the Oubliette's citizens, and every interaction includes a contract that details the extent of how much can be revealed or even remembered by the participants. Imagine a night on the town with the contract that stipulates that you could only remember that you had a good time but can remember no details of what you did or who you did it with. Such manipulation requires a monstrous computer that works on a quantum scale with interfaces to each and every citizen and a security protocol that guides how much can and cannot be remembered. People also share messages via co-memories—you receive a message from a friend that is actually a memory; you remember a conversation that you never had, because you have agreed that messages from the sender will allow the security program to shape your memory that you had it all along. The concept raises all sorts of fascinating philosophical questions, but Rajaniemi only touches on them in passing, allowing the reader to wander into that labyrinth on their own. Instead, The Quantum Thief focuses on how such a system could be manipulated by artists and thieves, both of which describe Jean de Flambeur. As is the tradition with the great literary thieves, de Flambeur is also something of a trickster, and so recovering his own memories is a task made more complicated by a sense of humor he doesn't entirely remember having. 

Rajaniemi deftly interweaves de Flambeur's story with that of Isidore, a young Martian architectural student whose daily life provides a great deal of the explanation of how the Oubliette culture works. The story follows him as he tries to work out his relationship with Pixil, a member of a culture based on 20^th and 21^st century gaming culture. Pixil's people are supreme crafters and technicians who are the most adept at the quantum computing required by the Oubliette, but they are just barely trusted, treated much like gypsies. Isidore is also getting something of a reputation as an amateur detective which is the source of his conflict with Pixil, who wants him to devote more time to her. But Isidore suspects he is being groomed by the Oubliette's tzaddikim, superheroes who act as voluntary police for the city and beloved by its citizens. And of course, if Isidore is a detective, then his path must somehow eventually cross de Flambeur's. But instead of being clichéd, Rajaniemi surprises the reader by letting their stories run parallel for a good bit before winding them together in unexpected ways. There are also outside forces that appear to be guiding the lives of the characters in the story; Rajaniemi fortunately only mentions them, letting them appear only very briefly—just hinting that their roles will be much bigger in future books before assuring it in the final chapter.

All the pieces come together in a whirlwind of storytelling, pushing the reader pell-mell across exotic locales and big ideas. Rajaniemi is an exciting new voice in speculative fiction, and The Quantum Thief promises more excitement and big ideas in future installments.

Zoo City

One of the most tried and true forms of modern narrative is the detective story. It’s been used so often that audiences interested in the art of storytelling can often determine who the criminal is based on plot lines and character appearances rather than using the evidence provided by the story. Two of the guilty pleasures of the Speculator household are Castle and Bones, television programs that follow the basic premise and structure of most mystery stories. And generally, we’ve solved the crime (usually murder) of the week after about ten minutes of viewing, based totally on metafiction. We eliminate suspects based on their being too prominent in the storyline (“that would be too obvious”) or because it’s too soon in the hour time slot for the criminal to be revealed. There are rules to these stories, you see, and if those rules are broken, you lose the audience’s trust and eventually patience. For instance, it’s not fair to have the villain be someone that has never been introduced in the story; if that happens, the audience has no chance to solve the crime. Disguising the villain, putting them on the fringe of the action but not so far on the fringe that they are not relevant is an art—see the recent movie Poe for a master class in disguising the villain (the movie Seven comes to mind also, but it’s not really about solving the crimes after all). But Mrs. Speculator and I are not really watching these specific shows because of the mysteries the characters are solving; in fact, we watch despite those crimes. Instead, we watch Castle and Bones for the character interaction and development, including season- and series-long arcs for the characters. Characters are one of the methods by which storytellers push mundane and often-used plots into a new place. And if the characters and their stories are really good (or really consuming), then the mystery part gets a pass.

Another method of disguising timeworn narrative is setting. In the past I’ve reviewed some of Alex Bledsoe’s Eddie Lacrosse books; while Bledsoe is also interested in developing good characters (with some success, I should add), his bigger twist is on the detective format since his books are set in a medieval world. Part of the success of the Dresden series by Jim Butcher is the ongoing development of his characters, but on a novel-by-novel basis, especially as the series started, a lot of the strength lay in the exotic setting of a modern Chicago where magic works. Exotic setting also allows the writer to add wrinkles to the mystery that make it somewhat more difficult for the reader to solve.

Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City follows the traditional mystery plotline using a number of the tropes associated with noir, but it succeeds despite the relatively obvious mystery component because of the strength of its characters and setting. The novel is set in a contemporary Johannesburg that I suspect most South Africans would recognize but which is somewhat exotic to Western readers. Beyond the unfamiliar setting, Beukes has added a twist that goes beyond the kinds of bumps that are traditionally used to enliven detective stories: the main character, Zinzi December is a “zoo”, that is she has a sloth that is emotionally and mentally attuned to her and provides her with a psychic ability to find lost things. Oh, and if the sloth dies, December dies a horrible death within a mysterious black cloud called the Undertow. She has been “animalled”, mystically attached to a suddenly appearing creature that seems to be called by a tremendous amount of guilt. In December’s case, she did something that led to her brother’s death and is a recovering drug addict. Beukes does a tremendous job of explaining being animalled by example and by the technique of interspersing the early chapters of Zoo City with reports and accounts of others who have been animalled and the history of the plague. Zoos suffer nearly instant prejudice upon the arrival of their animals and are often treated as secondary citizens despite having perhaps lived exemplary lives. They live in slums and tenements and have to rely on their own underground community to survive on the fringes of a society that does not understand the source of their plague and thus shuns them.

December was a journalist before her brother’s death and the arrival of Sloth, as she calls her animal, and her psychic ability seems tied to her former life. But other zoos have animals and abilities that are nearly random, and while the journalistic chapters of the book offer scientific analysis, the condition defies logical study. In the course of her job, finding lost items for people who see her fliers in stores and on public bulletin boards, she is approached by a couple of unsavory characters with animals of their own. The Marabou and the Maltese as she calls them (perhaps another allusion to classic noir) invite her to take a job for a reclusive music mogul. Despite her suspicions, December meets with Odi Huron and takes his job, to find one of his stars who has gone missing. The mystery plot generally goes as you would expect, including false leads and fake endings, but it is also interwoven with the zoos, evolving them and highlighting them in exciting ways.

As we’ve come to expect with most noir, there is as much attention, if not more, paid to the development of the main character and her supporting cast. December has the checkered past of all noir detectives and continues to feel the effects of her past transgressions. She also has street smarts and has friends who are willing to use their resources on her behalf. It’s these interactions that help to expand the concept of the zoos, and we grow to be fond of December despite her wisecracks, just for her sheer pluck. Underneath all that dross, as is always the case in these kinds of novels, is a Good Person.

When we discover that the plague has been around since the 80s, it seems obvious that it is a metaphor for AIDS. But if that was the intent, it is never explored. I think such a reading puts too fine a granularity on the device—it seems to represent just the next in the list of reasons society has used to repress those that are different. Zoo City could be cynical in this observation, but it’s more ironic since becoming animalled gives the zoo abilities that normal people don’t have. And of course, having special abilities further ghettoizes the recipients. Beukes also avoids the trap of explaining away the plague, describing the selection process that causes individuals to get which animals and which abilities. And while it could almost be taken as comedic to have to carry around a stork or an anteater, Beukes makes it clear that there is a cost as well when we watch a gang fight that targets members's animals and evokes the malignant Undertow, sweeping away the zoos that survive. The plague and the Undertow cry out to be metaphors but resist simple categorization.

Zoo City is grim and gritty, a real throwback to noir. Beukes has created a strong female lead in December, and her supporting cast and setting are fascinating. If there is any complaint about the story, it’s that it ends too soon—just as the reader begins to get a grasp on all that is going on, the mystery is resolved and the denouement closes out the novel. I hope that there is more story to tell, but even if there is not, Beukes is an engaging and thoughtful writer to look out for down the road.

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(I have to add one note, not about the story but about the ebook experience. The publisher, Angry Robot, is a relatively new undertaking and is aggressively pursuing strong new voices, which I applaud. However, the formatting of the ebook was error-prone and often got in the way of enjoying the story, confounding attempts even to parse the paragraphs. I look forward to more books from Angry Robot and hope that they can overcome these issues in the future.)

The Windup Girl and the Transporter

On the one hand, I lately finished reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel. And on the other, I read it on my new tablet, bought in part to ease the growing shortage of book space in my life.

First, the tablet, an ASUS Transporter Infinity. I can’t figure out a way to take a picture of it with its own built-in camera, but here’s a nice picture of one like it, along with the separate and way cool docking station: http://eee.asus.com/html/eeepad/img/tf700/common/visual-model.png. I found it interesting that there is an assumption on the part of ASUS that anyone who buys such a thing would automatically know how the interface worked. As a technical writer and editor, I was astonished that neither the tablet nor its separate docking station came with any kind of documentation, including something like a QuickStart Guide. Fortunately, I’ve watched enough other people use Android devices and seen enough commercials that I could muddle my way through my first attempts to use it. Though there were interesting paradigm-shift moments such as when I saw that I had a number of applications open and running but could not formulate a plan to close them. It was a good thing that Mrs. Speculator is more conversant with Android than me. There was also the humorous first few attempts to unlock the pad by sliding the lock icon; I discovered that 1) if you slide the lock to the left, you put the tablet in camera mode and 2) if you’re a little patient, the tablet will actually tell you the direction you really want to slide it in to use the tablet without going through camera mode first.

I decided to use a Kindle app on the tablet for ebooks. I’m not really sure I appreciate all of Amazon’s practices when it comes to publishing, but I already have an Amazon Prime account, which facilitated continuing to use their services. Again, there is an assumption that using the app is intuitive. I figured out how to go to the Kindle store and buy my book, and was told it would be delivered to my tablet via WhisperSynch. Eventually, I got an email telling me that it had been delivered…but now how to access it. I would open the Kindle app hoping to see the cover of my newly purchased book on the home screen, only to find nothing. A bit of poking around led me to determine that I had to go to another menu and tell the Kindle to synch itself up with the downloads. And then! I had the cover on the front page.

Reading my first ebook was not the experience I expected. I have not thought so deeply about the reading process since I was taking a class in literary criticism and we were covering the post-Modernists. For example, by default, the Kindle app gives you black text on a white background, simulating the experience of reading a book. But even though there’s a brightness control, the white that the app delivers is far brighter than the white of the paper in a book. So in the case of the first ten pages or so, I spent as much time reading and getting the beginning of a headache with the intensity of the images on the screen as I did fiddling with the controls to get the settings right. Fortunately, I have lately read a couple of books from the 70s with paper slowly turning brown, so I was reminded that sepia might be a better choice than pure white and eventually ended up with black print on sepia with the brightness turned down. Then I went back and forth between horizontal and vertical orientations for a few pages to decide which I liked better, eventually deciding to go horizontal and two columns. I spent some time trying to use the dictionary, only to discover that I had to download the dictionary and then discovering that a lot of the words in my novel based in Thailand weren’t in the dictionary. I guess the built-in dictionary is put on the tablet to accommodate folks who are reading outside of a network, but why take up space on an Internet tool to pack a dictionary when a Web search direct from the page makes so much more sense? Especially when that’s what I had to do anyway to find the meaning of a number of the words in the novel?

I was delighted to discover that the layout of the pages pretty solidly matched the format of a printed book. Having worked in companies where the electronic version of a text was an afterthought to the printed version, I was concerned I would be spending as much for a paperback book for less readability. And because of the intense graphics of the Transporter Infinity, the cover of the book is vibrant and gorgeous, though I really would like to magnify sections of it for detail, mimicking holding the book really close to my face to find a plot point nicely portrayed in the cover art. I know that comic book readers support the magnification of their images, so I’m not concerned about the art for when I start looking at comics with the tablet. It makes me wonder if the combination of a tablet and music might bring about the return of awesome liner notes included with albums.

The tablet is also very convenient: Mrs. Speculator did not wake up at all when I found myself unable to sleep one night and read for about a half hour. No bright lights from the nightstand and perfect readability in the dark. I understand that with the Kindle app, my books will be automatically archived after a certain amount of time passes without them being opened. In the archive, I will have access to them again as will anyone who uses my Amazon account, like Mrs. Speculator. I emphasize being told this because, again, there was no documentation anywhere and I had to search for information, finding forum responses mired with all the dross that goes with them and the report of a friend who also uses the Kindle app. I’m hoping for the best.

In short, I’m becoming hooked; at last I am the 21st century schizoid man that King Crimson used to sing about—I want to read books and hold and smell them but am satisfying myself with getting the latest releases via ebook (outside of a few exceptions like Mieville, Brust, Kay, and Banks).

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As for the book itself, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl is a real delight. It is set in a not-too-distant future where the combination of the effects of global warming and genetic engineering has visited a catastrophe to the world. Thailand hides behind massive sea walls as it slowly sinks below the world’s new sea level. Genetically modified grains spawn genetically modified diseases, killing grains and people alike. Use of fossil fuels is severely limited and infractions severely punished in attempts to halt the continued rise of sea level and perhaps to reverse it. Symbolic of these ills are the cheshires, domestic housecats originally modified so that they blend in with their surroundings, chameleonlike, as a marketing ploy to sell cats. However, the modification bred true, and the cheshires have replaced the domestic housecats and the feral ones around the world, a vastly improved predator.

Bacigalupi introduces a handful of characters to this setting—Anderson Lake, an American entrepreneur who acts as an agent for a multinational in a country where foreigners, especially Americans, are reviled for the havoc they have brought to the world; Hock Seng, a Chinese immigrant who has come to Thailand in order to escape Muslim fundamentalists and works for Lake as he plots to recoup the shipping corporation he lost in his flight; Emiko, a Japanese “New Person”, a genetically modified human, molded to be the perfect servant and unable to reproduce; and Jaidee Rojjanasukchai, the Tiger of Bangkok, a native captain in the Environment Ministry, tasked with ensuring there are no further incursions of non-native life in Thailand. Bacigalupi’s plot follows them each in their individual machinations to merely survive in this hostile new world that experimentation has created. The characters’ movement throught Bangkok and its environs allows Bacigalupi to build up a picture of a horribly broken world, and as one might expect, the more the reader interacts with the characters, the more broken they appear to be as well.

Emiko is explicitly the windup girl in the title of the novel, and her actions do set off the biggest crisis, a battle for superiority between the Trade Ministry and the Environment Ministry, with all of the expatriates caught between the warring factions and neither side offering them very much support. Emiko struggles against her very nature, having been bred to need to serve even when it goes against her strongest instincts. She constantly fights her own body’s responses to stimuli with varying and ultimately surprising results. Her story is an example of the tried and true plot device, nature versus nurture with the added quibble that her nature has been modified by corporations.

But there is a second windup girl in the novel also—Kanya, the Tiger of Bangkok’s trusted lieutenant and protégé. Slowly, the reader learns Kanya’s back-story and discovers she is not all she seems to be either, fighting her own battle between two masters. While Emiko’s development and conflict drive the opening narrative of the novel, Kanya takes it over in its crisis and drives it to its unexpected and harrowing conclusion.

There is no room for optimism in The Windup Girl. In an analogy of our world today, the problems of Bacigalupi’s world are manmade, and rather than working at solving the issues, the smartest and most powerful people struggle to find ways to profit, to make their own lives that much easier. There are several scenes where foreign entrepreneurs sit on the balcony of a local bar during the hottest part of the day in order to better catch what breezes there may be and completely about their hard lives while the people in the street below suffer and struggle. It would be very easy to strip The Windup Girl of its power and suggest it is an anti-Western novel, but it doesn’t take much close reading to see that the Thais are just as complicit in their troubles as everyone else, despite their blame for the rest of the world.

In a number of ways, The Windup Girl reminds me of Brave New World, with its interest in genetic manipulation and unrelenting cynicism. While the endings are somewhat different, there remains a sympathetic character in both novels who is not in the world of the novel by their own choice. Bacigalupi’s writing is perhaps more accessible than Huxley’s while Huxley’s characters are more fully realized. This is not to say that Bacigalupi’s characters are not fully formed; Huxley’s are just more memorable.

The Windup Girl is a powerful novel, deserving of the Hugo and Nebula awards it has won. It’s one of those novels that we may look back on in a decade or so and recognize as being incredibly important not only for its writing but for its message. It likely should transcend its genre to become something of interest to mainstream readers as well.

The Dark Knight Rises

The last film in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy leaves me terribly conflicted. On the one hand, I recognize that it intends to be a thoughtful provocative movie that rises above the genre it is a part of, but I still come away from it feeling that it is somewhat flawed. Similarly, I have tried with all of my critical faculties to think of The Dark Knight Rises as its own film, but I continue to be unable to separate from its predecessors in the trilogy, especially The Dark Knight but also at crucial moments, Batman Begins.

The overall subject of the movie is redemption, which should not come as much of a surprise since that is generally the subject of the third segment of most trilogies. Given the way that The Dark Knight ends, it should be obvious that one of the characters most in need of redemption is Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale). While the audience and some of the primary characters in the movie know that Batman is not the villain whose role he was forced to take on, some years of silence have made Wayne a hermit I his own huge estate and Batman something of an urban legend, used to threaten misbehaving children. But the movie's opening scenes also make it clear that Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is also suffering from the decision to demonize Batman. Despite prosperity for Gotham City in the wake of Harvey Dent's "sacrifice", Gordon suspects that it is all a sham since it is based on a lie. The logic surrounding this is not clear: while Dent's name and the laws that were enacted at his death have led to the renaissance of Gotham City, there is no indication that in and of themselves, those laws are unconstitutional or immoral. Smart people can recognize that good can come from a tragedy, and not enough attention is paid to why these laws are necessarily a bad thing. But this plays an important part in where the movie goes.

A new character is introduced, Catwoman/Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) who is consistently portrayed as a good woman forced to do bad things for reasons that are not altogether clear. Catwoman is regularly called upon to rise above her criminal background, to strive for something better…to redeem the belief that Batman has in her. And then there's the villain of the movie, Bane (Tom Hardy), whose motives are slowly revealed over the length of the picture, a woeful story of redemption as he tries to rise above his terrible and ignominious birth.

As Bane enacts his convoluted plot to separate Gotham City from the rest of the world, we are often subject to his tirades about the inequality of society, about how the wealthy spurn the needs of those who are not so fortunate. It's an interesting motivation, garnering the attention of the press and politicians alike. These jeremiads mirror the best speeches of Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight, but what political commentaries seem to overlook is that it's all a lie. Bane makes it clear to Batman that his motivation is to hurt Batman for his destruction of the League of Assassins in Batman Begins, and the best way to do that is to incapacitate him and make him watch as his beloved Gotham City is slowly destroyed. The result is that the powerful and chilling speeches by the Joker are blunted when Bane speaks them, not only because they are not what he really thinks but also because of the gimmick of his talking through a breathing mask (for some barely explained reason necessary for his continued survival), which makes it extremely difficult to understand his words at some points in the film. This is particularly frustrating because Bane actually speechifies a lot, and I can't help but feel that we are supposed to be as chilled by the truths he speaks as we were when the Joker ranted in the previous movie. The power of what he says is blunted by how obviously he does not believe what he says, and so we get long portions of movie where he talks with difficulty about things that aren't really crucial to the movement of the film.

There's also the somewhat unbelievable method by which Bruce Wayne recovers from the horrendous injury that Bane puts upon him. I'm trying very hard here not to give any spoilers away, but if you keep up with cultural events, you may remember the press when Bane did the same thing to Batman in the comic books in the 90s. At any rate, Batman's recovery is nothing short of miraculous, even blowing away how quickly he recovered in the comics.

Thus far, it appears that I am disappointed by The Dark Knight Rises, but it really is only in comparison with what its predecessors did. A lot of the ground covered in this movie feels like it has been done before and better, though some of the effects are spectacular. Even the huge plot twist in the last act is foreshadowed by the exact same trick in a previous movie. But standing by itself, The Dark Knight Rises is better than most superhero films outside its own series. I've been asked by a number of folks to compare it to The Avengers, but to me that's like comparing a summer action movie to a drama vying for Oscar consideration—they both have their strong points and do what they set out to do well, but one is intended purely to entertain while the other has depth and thoughtfulness. Honestly, most of the action sequences in The Dark Knight Rises are just sidenotes, the working out of issues that have been explored by other methods throughout the movie. They verge on spectacular but could have been given shorter shrift since the focus is never on the cool toys (and there are some cool toys). That Nolan decided to not treat them as incidental is a testament to his storytelling—giving all the parts of his story the same masterful treatment.

One of the strengths The Dark Knight Rises shares with the earlier films is a stunning score by Hans Zimmer. Zimmer's collaboration with director Christopher Nolan has been powerful; Zimmer has never been a slouch, but his work on the Batman trilogy and Inception are models of how movie scores should be used to inform the story on the screen. While it will always be difficult to not think of Danny Elfman as the creator of the Batman soundtrack, I have to recognize that it's mostly out of repetition I know it so well. Zimmer's soundtrack, while not as iconic, is I think much more powerful than the sum of Elfman's work.

The Dark Knight Rises also excels in its minor parts—Michael Caine continues to establish himself as the archetypal Alfred, Morgan Freeman is strong as Lucius Fox, and Marion Cotillard and Joseph Gordon-Levitt exude charisma in their underspoken roles.

The Dark Knight Rises is a good film, an important milestone in the history of the superhero genre in the movies. It just suffers from "younger brother syndrome": it has to work hard to get out from under the shadow of members of its own family who have gone before, and it never does quite enough to succeed in standing alone.

The Crippled God

You might imagine that it's difficult to write about the tenth and final book in a series without taking a step back and viewing the entire series as a unit. The inertia of over 3 million words and close to 11,000 pages just does not allow for no retrospection at all.
The Crippled God alone is a difficult book to read since it bears the weight of all the unfinished narratives in the previous nine volumes. In some ways, the nearly 1200 pages feel rushed, moving often from viewpoint to viewpoint sometimes after only a few paragraphs. Needless to say, I cannot with any conscience recommend that someone unfamiliar with the other books even look at The Crippled God; it would simply be opaque to all attempts to understand what is going on.
Nonetheless, The Crippled God typifies what has made the Malazan Book of the Fallen such an entertaining and thoughtful series. Despite the cast of hundreds (if not thousands), each character has a unique voice and backstory that is brought to the fore upon their appearance. And although most of the characters are soldiers fighting for causes they sometimes barely understand, the book steadfastly refuses to become cynical. It's too easy for world-weary fighters to think the worst of people, and Erikson refuses to take that path. Instead, his writing emphasizes the individual humanity of the characters, ticking through their foibles (sometimes with tremendous humor) and ultimately the family-like nature of their companionship as they work and fight for a common cause. The resulting emotion is the opposite of cynicism—it's one of tremendous hope, especially as the human armies gather more and more unlikely allies in their struggle. These allies recognize the strengths of being human—that same hope, but also perseverance and sacrifice—and it causes them to join when otherwise they might not.
Erikson accomplishes this by actually concentrating the narrative more on the individuals in the midst of the struggle than on the global effects of the struggle. Anywhere from a third to half of the novel is interior dialogue, characters thinking to themselves about their circumstances, their histories, and their future. This also has the effect of slowing down the reading, forcing the reader to follow the trains of through that are often more twisty than the action taking place in the physical sphere. It's powerful writing, much the same that endeared the reader to these characters and their stories volumes ago. It's just more than what we usually get.
The Crippled God is a fine capstone to a magnificent series, one that will influence fantasy writing for years to come. My first two reactions upon finishing the series are indicative of its power: for the last 25 pages or so I held back tears until I could do so no longer. These are characters that I have come to know and appreciate, fully realized and brimming with personality. To read the conclusions to their paths was emotional, and to recognize the appropriateness of each was even more so. I wept not just for the loss of the characters as the last book concluded, but for the mastery Erikson used to create and portray them. My second reaction was to go back and start over, to recapture the joys of discovery and to discover more as threads I had lost over the last decade of reading were brought back together. And I am confident that I will reread them all someday, perhaps not soon as my book stack has grown large over the past few weeks. But I'm sure thoughts of the story and the characters will return again and again until I pick the books up for another reading.

Brave

It's something of a back-handed compliment to Pixar that their latest offering, Brave, is not being lauded so lavishly as most of their other films. The worst thing I can say about it is that it's no worse than the best computer animated films coming out of other studios currently and a good deal better than the average. It just doesn't quite live up to Pixar's standards for reasons that, I fear, could easily have been fixed.

The plot is relatively straightforward—Merrida (Kelly Macdonald) is princess and heir to the throne of an unnamed kingdom that is maintained with a sometimes fragile truce between four clans. Her life is made up about six parts of royal training applied by her mother, Elinor (Emma Thompson) to one part letting her roguish side out—her father, Fergus (Billy Connolly) has passed on his love for fighting and the hunt to his daughter, and she is quite an archer and fighter for a teenaged girl. But these activities go against her mother's plan for her, to become the doting queen to the scions of one of the clans, thus keeping their kingdom together for another generation. But all of this is just high-falutin' political talk: Merrida wants to ride her trusty horse Angus over the countryside and her mother wants her to stay home to be a lady. And wouldn't you know it?—they bump heads. And after one final argument, Merrida rides off into the night, accidentally discovering a witch's cottage, where she asks for a spell to change her mother so that she'll understand. And you know witches, literal as the dickens when it suits them, so Elinor is changed but in a way that Merrida could never have expected. So of course it comes down to Merrida to save her mother.

There is a tremendous amount of joy in this movie—it's pretty clear to any viewer that this family is brilliantly balanced and that Merrida is an exceptional child. And the denouement of the movie is probably as you would expect; with the help of her three little brothers, Merrida learns what it means to be a member of the family and to appreciate what her mother is doing for her. And of course, Elinor learns that her daughter is her own person, in need of guidance, not domination. In many ways, if you imagine Uncle Buck set in the Scottish highlands, you'd have much the same film.

And therein lays the problem. Pixar's movies are generally very smart, rising above the clichés that dominate movies for kids and young adults, especially animated ones. But Brave doesn't do that. It has the saving grace of just being lovely animation, but the other studios are catching up to the work of Pixar pretty quickly; they just can't rely on superior animation to sell their movies any longer. And doing so would be a mistake—viewers can be indifferent about shades of animation talent when what they really want is great story-telling that relies on the unusual: Finding Nemo imagines that fish have their own culture and spends as much time exploring that culture as it does looking for the lost one, Monsters Inc has the ludicrous set-up of a monster culture run on the energy expended on children's fear, and Up is about a man who lifts his house up with thousands of balloons and sails off to find adventure with an unexpected stowaway. And Ratatouille—a rat that wants to become a master chef! The territory that Brave covers has been visited many times, especially by Pixar's new owners, Disney. (I am not going to blame Disney here—I think they are smart enough to give Pixar a lot of autonomy; they just cover similar territory here.) And really, unlike any other Pixar movie I can think of, Brave acts preachy for goodness sake, beating the viewer over the head with its morality. Part of this preachiness is delivered by the voiceover of Merrida hinting at and eventually delivering the smarmy moral at the end of the movie, as though anyone watching it would be dull enough not to have figured it out.

But when the crew lets Brave get away from the moral and just romp, it is a tremendous amount of fun. The set pieces not given away in commercials and trailers are wild and border on the ludicrous, but always extremely vibrant. And the characterization, another hallmark of Pixar productions, is deep and full. Merrida's three brothers steal every scene they are in, though they never say a word. The clan leaders and their sons are hysterical, their anger with one another as shallow as their camaraderie is deep, even though they tend to forget it. And the fantastic elements laid lightly over the whole plot are gentle, in some ways reminiscent of a novel by Guy Gavriel Kay in their power and seclusion.

And of course, the animation is just gorgeous, especially the long shots of the various areas of the kingdom, from the moors to the mountains, and the forests in between.

There is a great deal to like about Brave; it's just a shame that the creators had a lapse of memory causing them to use elements that pull it away from being the prototypical Pixar movie it could have been.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Science fiction and fantasy media are often scathingly described as "escapist", meaning they are intended to take you away from your world, and by extension are generally lacking any "depth." I've argued before that painting the entire speculative fiction genre with such a broad stroke is inherently unfair, ignoring as it does the pieces in the genre that do have depth and complexity. I've also admitted that there is a lot of the genre that fits the classification of "escapist", but I don't think I've argued, at least in this blog, that there's anything wrong with the occasional escape. And I'd hasten to point out that calling something escapist doesn't necessarily mean that no art has been put into its creation. The movie Snow White and the Huntsman is a vibrant example of the amount of art that can go into something that is fobbed off as trivial, as escapist. Snow White is a stunningly beautiful movie, lovingly crafted and filled with technical expertise that transport the viewer with a sense of wonder not often encountered onscreen.

At first glance, Snow White would appear to be another in the ongoing process of modernizing fantasy, making it more realistic (read "dark"). But most Western fairy tales have roots in the Brothers Grimm, which as anyone who has actually read the source material can tell you were dark all on their own. Most of what we read and see today are sanitized versions of the original stories, and while I can't claim that Snow White goes back to the original story, it's obvious that the film's crew were aware of the darker elements of its origin.
And while this latest movie is darker than most film versions of the story, nonetheless it still provokes a sense of wonder form its viewer. The causes are many; take for example the arresting cinematography. Even though the kingdom is in disarray, it is a feast for the eyes, especially when Snow White visits the lands of fairy. When the White Hart appears before Snow White and her companions, my breath was literally taken away by its majesty and beauty. The score also plays a part in the how Snow White transports the viewer from our mundane world, evocative and beguiling all at once.

A lot of credit for the wonder of Snow White and the Huntsman should go to the costuming and makeup departments. The wardrobes are fairly typical except for those of Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron), whose clothes change with nearly every scene. Even when the evil Queen is pretending to be good, there are hints of her evil in the tiny details of her clothes, hinting at what lies beneath the veneer of civilization she shows to those she attempts to beguile. And when she is in full-blown evil mode, her costumes are intoxicating in their maleficence. And since Ravenna's power depends on taking the life force—the youth if you will—from young maidens, her age in the movie careens wildly between around 25 to the 70s, often in a single scene. Of course, given the subject matter, that same make-up department had to create seven dwarves, probably building on the groundbreaking work of The Lord of the Rings, but perfecting it. I will be amazed if Snow White is not nominated for awards for its costuming and make-up.

Then, of course, there is the acting. It's ironic that the two title characters actually do not carry the emotional load of the movie, but I'm not sure that it's really asked of them by the script. Kristen Stewart, as Snow White, is stalwart and dependable, but her acting range is not huge. Nor does it really need to be—she is as often acted upon by the forces that drive the movie as she is the actor. Chris Hemsworth as the huntsman is also adequate, rarely asked to give any other emotion than grief and anger at the loss of his family. The movie seems to expect there to be chemistry between the two of them, but it really doesn't happen. In one of the climaxes of the movie, as Snow White lays dead waiting for a kiss from her prince, Hemsworth does show some more range, but it is an exception rather than the rule.

No, acting kudos go to the "side" characters in this movie. First and foremost, Theron's Ravenna is malicious intention incarnate. Ravishingly beautiful and seductive when it suits her but torn by a tragic childhood into a stupefyingly corrupt and revenge-filled malefactor. Even when she plays the "good" queen, the evil flickers in Theron's eyes, hinting at what's to come. And when she goes bad, her rage is tremendous to behold. The oly perso she loves is her brother Finn (Sam Spruell), who is not as twisted as his sister, but fairly repugnant as well. They have the chemistry in the movie, even if it is a tortured one and generally one-sided. And of course, there are the dwarves, who are not allowed to dominate the film, as these name actors easily could—Ian McShane, Ray Winstoe, Bob Hoskins, and Nick Frost to name just half of them. When they are introduced they are delightful, not descending to comic relief but still with humor around them. They even have a back story that makes them somewhat tragic as well.

Snow White and the Huntsman follows the story that everyone knows fairly well, adding depth by adding details. Snow White is not just fighting for her own life in this version; instead Ravenna's magic and evil are corrupting the very kingdom, and Snow White must overcome her in order to restore it to its glory—that's part of the grimmer aspect of this modernization. Characters die, one particularly in overly telegraphed tug at the heart—but it's nothing graphic. And the movie clearly knows its own cinematic roots as well—it draws on a number of the best fantasy movies: Ladyhawke, Legend, and The Lord of the Rings. But despite its flaws, which can be overlooked fairly easily, Snow White does what those other movies do as well, help the viewer to escape into a world of magical possibility. And it does so convincingly and appealingly. I feel confident this is going to become one of those cult films that picks up a larger and larger audience as it is replayed on cable and as people rent and buy the movie. And while it is not great, it is quite good, worthy of repeated viewing and praise.