The Pulp Arbiter

Genre cinema, right vs. wrong

2010-08-04T12:48:00.001-05:00

I've watched the movies Surrogates and Inception recently. Inception was quite good, while Surrogates was quite bad, so I'd like to compare the two of them a little bit. This isn't the world's most obvious comparison, as the two movies are pretty different in their premises and themes. Nonetheless, I'd say that they both fall under the "science fiction" heading, so the comparison is handy for looking at how to do it right and wrong in the genre world.

I'll start with Surrogates, whose opening ten minutes or so had such promise and the rest of which was just terrible. The premise is that robotics and telepresence have been perfected and made insanely cheap, such that pretty much everyone has at least one substitute body (surrogate) and sits at home, interacting with the world and with each other through their idealized robot selves. I was awfully excited by this, since there are some great possibilities for messing with ideas of self, ideas of gender, ideas of race, and doubts about which characters are on screen at any given moment.

Seriously, it would cost the script literally zero disbelief capital to have the audience constantly guessing which surrogate might be inhabited by which person. And the unshaven, overweight, bespectacled, and otherwise imperfect meaty original selves of our characters are pretty good shorthand for "ok, you can probably trust this iteration to actually be this character".

Of course they did almost none of that. There was one character, alive on screen for maybe two or three minutes, who didn't look like an airbrushed version of themselves. Such a failure of vision or ambition is pretty stunning. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, though - this is, after all, Hollywood. And the same myopic, agoraphobic outlook controlled the plot arc as a whole. The movie that began with such promise made a pretty crushing u-turn and drove itself into an uncapped landfill where it spent the rest of its time writhing in the trash.

To explain: the opening expository narration informed us that the surrogate revolution had transformed the world into a utopia. Murder had disappeared (opening up on a crowded stadium amounts to no more than destruction of property when it's just a bunch of robots), disease was a thing of the past, etc. Yet somehow the whole point of the movie is:
"Science and technology are bad, and everything would be ok if only we were hunter-gatherers again."

I'm not kidding. According to the movie itself, the invention and widespread acceptance of surrogates fixed pretty much every problem in the entire world. But, sadly, they're still bad. Here's why:
The protagonist's son was killed in a car accident some years before. Ever since then, his relationship with his wife has fallen apart (they live in seperate rooms in their apartment and never encounter each other in the flesh). When the global surrogate network is shut down and everyone is forced to emerge, blinking in the sunlight and trying not to smell the funk contained in their bathrobes, the protagonist and his wife hug each other in their son's pristinely preserved room.

I'll remark only briefly on how unlikely this seems to me. The movie casts the wife as the more profoundly broken member of the marriage, and I'm no psychiatrist, but somehow I'd be surprised if kicking her crutch out from under her is going to leave her standing taller. This could be forgiven, however, if it weren't so narratively unforgiveable. The wife barely has a name, has no personality traits other than "broken by her son's death," is alienated from the protagonist and viewer, and gets half or less of the screentime that the hero's police partner gets.

Oh, and that partner? The only person our guy seems to have any emotional connection to? She's abruptly killed 3/4 of the way through the movie and no one notices or cares. Her murderer takes over her surrogate and is able to emulate her mannerisms so flawlessly that her partner doesn't have the slightest intimation that anything is wrong. I guess I shouldn't complain, since this is pretty much the only time the movie makes actual use of the possibilities of deception inherent in the premise, but it's such an emotionally blind and deaf move. We're supposed to care more about the cardboard cutout with "wife" scrawled on it in marker than we are one of the few things in the movie approximating a human character.

So that's Surrogates. Inception's premise is that someone has figured out how to delve into the subconscious in the form of invading dreams. This allows them to steal secrets from the invaded brain, in the form of metaphor made real. This Scrooge McDuck comic is actually a decent primer on the concepts in play in the movie, including the nice touch that the best way to wake someone up from a dream is to induce the feeling of falling. Who hasn't had a falling dream wake them up, after all?

In general, the movie establishes a set of ground rules about how dreams work, and then it sticks to them. This is one of the torpedoes that sink genre work pretty frequently, the inability to follow its own rules. Suspension of disbelief is far more delicate when you're working in fantasy, and it snaps pretty easily when you break a rule that you established. Inception does a good job of exploring the implications of those rules, unlike Surrogates where a central plot element is the invention of a weapon that kills people by zapping their robots (despite several characters remarking on the impossibility of this).

Anyway, it's hard to say as much about a good movie as it is about a bad movie. Inception was tightly plotted, packed with great acting, the action choreography was imaginative and the motivations of the protagonist were believable, sympathetic, and satisfying. Much of the tension and danger in the movie come from the fact that he is consumed by guilt over his wife's suicide and regrets over the way he felt he had to leave his children behind and roam the world. The audience explores this internal life in the most literal way possible, through his dreams.

It's definitely genre work, and it's definitely great. Now if only Hollywood could stop making the same tired (so tired) mistakes that it made with Surrogates and learn from the success of Inception.

Also: I liked this post about Inception a lot.

Distilled Escapism

2010-01-28T14:09:00.007-06:00

Avatar is the first movie I've ever wanted to see twice in theaters.

In fact, it's quite possibly the only movie I have seen twice in theaters, and it's certainly the only one where I've seen it on two consecutive weeks. I really, really loved watching this movie.

I think the reasons for loving it are pretty straightforward. Everything on the entire planet glows softly during the night time, while during the daytime it out-rainforests the Amazon basin; not only does everyone that lives there get a pony, they get a flying pony; lizards turn into technicolor whirlygigs when startled; and so on.

The plot has that peculiarly American strength and weakness of moral absolutism. There's no question at all whatsoever that the local golf-loving corporate manager and his snarling jackbooted Colonel are evil. At the same time, the Na'vi and those humans in the avatar program that they've converted are righteous paladins serving only the forces of good. It's funny comparing the visual and moral palettes of the movie. The art direction and execution are just stunning, with every infinitesimal slice of the visual spectrum involved, while the ethical landscape is a pure and brilliantly white room with a single wide and pitch-black abyss set in its center.

The point that I'm rapidly drifting away from is that, typically, that sort of ethical outlook grates on me. I don't think that's how the real world works and I get angry when people reduce it to that point. But sometimes - and Avatar is such a time - it's nice to let go of the real world. I think that some people recoil from media as escape, and I think that's a mistake. The mind and body need to sleep and dream to stay healthy, why shouldn't the spirit?

There are a number of valid complaints about the movie. There are characters that serve no purpose in the plot, while characters that do often have little to no motivation for their actions. The fact that Jake's a paraplegic serves no dramatic purpose. Jake is, like Kevin Costner, a better native than the natives themselves. Honestly though, my listing them off here is pointless. Instead, if you're interested, go read this. It's funny and largely accurate, albeit accurate in the way that cynicism is.

At the end of the day, I'm fine with all that. I like that everything glowed at night. I like that we got to watch Jake and Neytiri fly through the rainforest on their dragons. I like that the girl saved the boy and they lived happily every after. I like it all. Honestly? The only thing it's missing - the thing that would make it perfect - is if Tim Curry sang a showtune for it.

Splendid exhange

2008-11-01T14:38:00.005-05:00

Some time ago, my uncle sent out a family email about A Splended Exchange, a lay primer on the history of international trade by William Bernstein. It had come out recently to some excellent reviews, and my uncle was proud of his involvement in the book (he does permissions and some editing-related stuff, I believe). I thought it sounded neat, so I wandered down to the local library and checked out a copy.

I really enjoyed it quite a bit. I suppose some may accuse the author of ideological bias in favor of free trade, but I don't think that's true. He rests his arguments on evidence rather than rhetoric, and while he pulls no punches with regards to protectionism, nor does he pull them for free trade. He is unflinching in his examination of the losers in free trade, just as he is unflinching in his argument the loss they suffer is worth the aggregate gain.

His prose is clear and engaging, and it was particularly fun for me to encounter his take on the Cairo geniza, an archive of a medieval Jewish family's trade (and other) documents that I first encountered in Ghosh's In an Antique Land. It was fascinating to me how Bernstein's take, though of course abbreviated and differently focused, mirrored my memories of Ghosh's book. That trade is distinctly (and wonderfully) human activity is something that Bernstein delights in, and the stories of merchants from ages past are related here in a charming and anecdotal style.

Indeed, the essentially human nature of trade is the theme and ultimately the surprising argument of the book. I was surprised to discover a thesis in the closing chapters, but it was a pleasant discovery. Bernstein makes a moral and ethical argument for free trade that should give clear-thinking protectionists pause, especially readers in the United States.

Soon: more Jo Walton! And maybe other things.

2008-07-29T11:37:00.005-05:00

I usually write the tags for a post before the post itself, but it simply wasn't practical to do so for this one. There are too many things I've been wanting to mention in one way or another, that I've put of for too long, to try to guess too accurately at things before they're done. To begin with, The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. This one is mildly touchy, as it was recommended to me by my boyfriend, who also happens to own one of the few physical copies of the self-published run of the book. He liked it quite a bit, and I didn't like it very much at all. I think part of it is that my boyfriend hasn't encountered the same background of Asimovian assumptions that both myself and, clearly, Roger Williams have. The laws themselves and the implications thereof are all things I've encountered before, and I didn't find them terribly interesting. The implications of brains-in-jars cosmologies are also ones that I am, mostly, familiar with. It is perhaps somewhat troubling that science fiction tends to be judged by its ideas first and its prose, characterization, and plotting second, but then I also think that it's often written for its ideas before its other qualities.

When I was talking to him about it, I also mentioned that it felt like some of it was just bad porn. Not just porn, either, but weird torture and snuff porn. Perhaps some of this is my innate squeamishness, as I've never particularly enjoyed time that a story may spend dwelling in lurid detail on torture. It bothers me in a way that accidental death and dismemberment do not. The human body is exquisite and fragile, and that there exist persons willing and eager to defile it is an ugly, boring truth. We all know that there is evil, and especially since Hannah Arendt wrote about Eichmann, we have scant excuse for any shock or surprise. That said, I've fallen afoul of a couple problems here, both of which came up with when talking about it with my boyfriend.

First, if it is porn, so what? Talking about an author's motivations instead of what she or he wrote is boring and useless. Second, no one sane likes the "what is art?" debate. It generally ends up telling us very little about ourselves and even less about art.

I shall, therefore, adopt a different tack. I think the torture porn scenes were stupid. They are several pages long, festooned with more detail than virtually any other scenes in the book, and do astonishingly little to advance the plot. The effort expended on them is out of all proportion to anything else in the book. If the human race were reduced to brains in bottles, it may indeed be the case that some segment of the population would produce and watch something of the sort, and however interesting that may or may not be, it does not warrant several pages of gore.

Whew!

I also went and saw the new Dark Knight flick. When I first heard the title I thought it might perhaps be a film adaptation of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns graphic novel. In fact it wasn't, but I think it took more than a couple hints from it. I guess the reasoning is that if you've got Christian Bale available, why would you try to hunt down someone who's a good actor in extremely good shape in his late 50s?

It was an entertaining action movie, except for the scenes with Ledger's Joker in them. Then it was chilling, compelling, and unflinchingly good. Nicholson's joker in the original Batman movie, lo these many moons ago, was good. Ledger's was from a very, very scary alternate dimension. The more I think about it, the more I'm astounded by his performance and saddened by his death. He was terrifying, hypnotic, and probably right as often as he was wrong.

Writing this thing as poorly and infrequently as I have is increasingly leading me to respect the craft of the columnist. Lord if these things aren't difficult to open, write, or end with any grace whatsoever.

More Stardust?

2008-06-27T18:01:00.002-05:00

I found the actual book for Stardust lying about the place the other day. Since I still hadn't read it I thought I'd give it a quick look-through, and quick it certainly was. Didn't take me but three or so hours to read the whole thing. Everything I said about the movie is essentially unchanged: I don't understand why they changed the things they did, and I think a closer adaptation would have been superior, but it was still charming.

I also read through Coraline, a sort of goosebumpsesque young adult thing he won some awards for. Fun, and I could imagine it being quite creepy for a kid with a sufficiently active imagination. The illustrations were nicely done, but they gave things away and drawings have a hard time trying to compete for scariness with the mind's eye.

Still plugging through the book of varied and divers Celtic myth. It's getting to be a bit of a slog at this point, but I'm far enough along that I think I'll probably finish it.

Celts and trolls

2008-06-23T02:56:00.004-05:00

I've been working through a book called the Chronicles of the Celts, by Peter Ellis. He seems to be writing the stories from a sort of strange double-ground. On the one hand, he's clearly a scholar and has spent years invested in the research of oral traditions, manuscripts, incunabula, landscapes, and so on. On the other, he's also clearly someone with a great deal of what I'd almost term tribal pride. This results in odd notes in the tales where he continually says something like "and this took place in Such-and-such, which today is Co. Suchsuch." The clunky wording there being used to sort of replicate how he'll first name a place in transliterated celtic, Welsh, Manx, or Irish and then modern English. He also adds the occasional epilogue-style paragraph at the end of a story, noting how, as time went on, the old gods and goddesses became known as merely fairies. I suppose I can understand his temptation to annotate things, especially if he's hoping to open his readers eyes to the majestic figure that degenerated into the leprechaun. Over the course of a fairly thick book, however, it grows tiresome.

The tales themselves are... Hm. I'm not sure what to say to them. They're none of them longer than, oh, five or six thousand words. They're all as mythy as you might expect them to be, with brave warriors falling in love with beautiful maidens for no other reason than that they're beautiful. For the most part my favorite moments have been the most outlandish ones. A monster in a lake conceals its soul within an egg within a trout within a dove within a hind, and the egg must be crushed in order to kill the monster. Further, when the hero gets his hands on the egg, the monster attempts to bargain for its life by returning the hero's kidnapped wife. As soon as the monster fulfills its end of the bargain, the hero kills it anyway. Although the most sensible course of action, it wasn't exactly what I'd been expecting. It's hard to come up with some sort of encapsulating statement about it: myth is myth. I've read the bible, the Baghavad Gita, an English version of the Lotus Sutra, and so on. They all have sort of a similar feel when one is reading them, and except for Ellis' glosses within the text, these are no different.

I've also been spending a fair amount of time playing WoW. I'm in sort of a strange position with regards to the game. Probably my favorite part of things is raiding, which is to say: getting together with 9 or 24 other people and cooperating to kill powerful bosses. Unfortunately, I'm on an RP server (although I don't really RP) as well as in a small guild. I've been progressing through Zul'Aman recently, and just a couple nights ago we got Zul'Jin down for the first time. Alas, the group I've been going through ZA with is not, in fact, my guild. Myself and my boyfriend have been raiding with a sort of regular semi-pug of people, something that makes me sort of sad because I originally joined my guild because I liked the people. However, since we're so tiny, when problems conspire such that two of our people can't show, we can't really do... anything. We'd also be hard-pressed to recruit anyone new, because before difficulties we weren't having any troubles fielding 10.

As a small, casual guild we also can't really ask people to do better. We can try to gently hint, but we simply wouldn't survive the drama caused by anything stronger. It's also hard to really try to push progression all that much: the new expansion will be coming out some time soonish, and it's hard for anyone to get really excited about seeing T5 content when it's going to be obsolete so soon.

I also have further thoughts on having killed Zul'Jin, but I'll save those for later.

Voltaire and also not-Voltaire

2008-06-15T22:03:00.002-05:00

I hadn't read any Voltaire since reading Candide in, I think, high school. My boyfriend and I recently moved in together, so I was poking through his piles of books and found a book with Candide and about 700 other stories, fables, snippets, and essays by Voltaire. I thought I'd read through it, especially since even if it did have a million things in it, it was quite slim. Candide was just as fun as I remembered it being, although I did groan and lose patience with him a bit when he elected to leave El Dorado. The next story, Zadig was disturbingly similar. Instead of a young Frenchman, it chronicled the adventures - or more accurately, the misadventures - of a young Babylonian. There was a great deal of pontification on how miserable the race tends to be towards itself, the suffering of privations, and despite the sarcasm a fairly lofty moralizing tone. By the time I was getting towards the end of the paperback, my patience for Voltaire was wearing somewhat thin. In the final not-really-a-story, his characters converse amongst themselves and quote things that he's written as examples of stunning wisdom.

I'm fairly certain that this would be viewed as poor form in even the most depraved of internet fan fiction sites, but I may be exaggerating. In the end, Voltaire's still witty, and although I don't disagree with most of his sentiments, they really are fairly trite. I can't help but wonder if maybe the high society that he so scorns in his books might have first scorned him for being a boor.

I wish I'd structured this little post better. I've reached a point where I want to mention The Picture of Dorian Gray but, as I haven't yet, there's no smooth way to do so. Rough it is! Because, you see, Voltaire's vehement dislike for society is mirrored by Wilde's love of it. And yet, as Dorian Gray concludes, Wilde is offering us much the same moral as Voltaire was trying to. My boyfriend told me about Wilde's thoughts on the novel, and it turns out that he conceived of the characters in the following way:

He wished that he was Dorian, he thought that he was Hallward, and everyone else perceived him to be Wotton.

Which, as it turns out, was pretty accurate in my case. Wilde, however, was much funnier and far less tiresome than Voltaire.

Finally, fair warning: I've picked up a World of Warcraft addiction, and I'm going to be talking about it occasionally.

The Golden Compass

2008-02-18T01:37:00.001-06:00

I have never felt particularly compelled to read any of the Harry Potter series, despite their status as a cultural phenomenon. My own father became somewhat enamored of them, as well as several of my friends. To be fair, I went to see the movies as they came out and did not find them disagreeable. I think, however, that I am likely to be most happy with the series at this remove. There is, however, another series of young-adult fiction that I've been significantly more drawn towards. It hasn't occupied anywhere near the same share of the pop culture attention span, but what I saw looked a great deal more appealing. That series is "His Dark Materials," by Phillip Pullman.

I will confess that some of the appeal came from the controversy that sprung up regarding it. By Mr. Pullman's own statement, the series is to at least some degree hostile to organized religion. I am hesitant to throw in my hat with that sentiment, mostly because of the persons that I then become associated with. It's troublesome because I am, in fact, a little hostile to organized religion. Alas, many of my compatriots in that hostility are vapid idiots, and so I risk sharing their (well-earned) label if I share their banner. But, so be it! I shall demand of myself at least that modicum of courage necessary to admit these things on an anonymous website.

I will also say, in my own defense, that I was not solely drawn to Mr. Pullman's work because of its reported enmity for religion. I read - and I apologize, but I can not remember where or by whom - a glowing review of the first book in the series. According to this reviewer, the plotting and the characterization were both stirring. The prose was said to be lucid and enjoyable, both commodities sorely lacking in young adult fiction since The Wind in the Willows was written. When I saw a trailer for an upcoming cinema adaptation of the first book, I resolved that I had to read it before that movie came out.

This I did, and in large part I agree with the review that I read so long ago. The controversial elements, while there, are certainly not the focus of the book. That honor belongs to young Lyra Belacqua, a young lady whose company I found myself enjoying a great deal. She is, notably, a she, a startlingly rare creature in the fantasy genre. Nor is she written as a boy who somehow seems to be mistakenly referred to by the wrong gender throughout the book.

That was a club-footed phrase; let me try again.

So often in the fantasy genre, an author determines that he shall differ himself from his fellows: he shall captain his book with a female protagonist. And this female comports herself in all ways as a man, she has every appearance of one, and is distinguished in her gender solely by pronouns. Lyra is not such a girl as these. She is brave and bright and adventurous and still identifiably a girl, one that young girls could, I think, identify with.

In general, the book proceeds rapidly and fairly logically, things feeling neither rushed nor drawn out. Things happen in their good and their bad and are dealt with accordingly, and the first book reaches its unsettling yet satisfying conclusion. A conclusion the movie mysteriously dodges in favor of thin pabulum. The movie, to be complete, is in all ways inferior to the book. All of the novel's gifts of pacing and emotional involvement are squandered in favor of something that's in a great hurry to get nowhere in particular, seeing nothing interesting along the way.

I have read the second book, but will not see the second movie.

Veterinary medicine, the universal anodyne

2007-10-08T11:51:00.000-05:00

I found myself, as I finished off Collapse, peering at the cover of Kindred with a good deal of weariness. Between the strange noir book I'd read, Diamond's treatise on failed societies, and the misery and blood of Laurence and Temeraire's most recent adventure, I simply didn't think I'd be able to handle the trials of a modern black woman in the ante-bellum South. Still, I didn't have anything else to read, so I gave it a shot. It doesn't start off too harshly, she teleports back in time and saves a small child from being drowned before going back home. The next visit ends with her being nearly beaten to death, and the visit after that outlasted my ability to continue reading. Luckily, right as I was reaching the end of my rope, I came across a cardboard box of free books. Resting indulgently on the top, the soft edges of its cover-art serving to camouflage it amongst the romance novels it had so carelessly been lumped with, was James Herriot's (née Alfred Wight) All Things Bright and Beautiful. As I'm sure you've guessed from the title, it's the second in the collections of vignettes Mr. Wight wrote about his time as a country veterinarian in Yorkshire in the 30s. Originally published serially, they're mostly self-contained, reading as quickly as such things often do. I finished it the same day that I picked it up, and found myself marvellously uplifted.

I suppose that certain persons would be likely to have trouble with aspects of Mr. Wight's tone. Every three to four vignettes he tends to have a moment where, as never before, he realizes that he's awfully lucky to be living in the English countryside where he can lie down upon the heather and watch the sky. I would remind these persons that, again, these were originally published serially as well as in a variety of publications. When reading them one right after another it might seem a bit off, but one every couple months would be a different story. I trust, too, that most of us have experienced such a moment? I would be astonished indeed to encounter the staunchest of atheists who had not had an experience most easily described as "spiritual," when she or he looked out upon the world and felt connected and at peace.

I'm sure Mr. Wight was no saint, that he had his cranky mornings and his blowups and tantrums, and if his ruminations on the selection of a wife might rub against our modern grain, then so would he mourn our lack of proper courting. His stories are, for me, a balm for nerves immersed too long in the astringent bath of cynicism. Keeping in mind that his stories are mostly from the 30s and 40s, note that the quite-probably gay Mr. Partridge is an object of his expressed admiration just as the hardy country farmers were. And how many of us would, honestly, be able to suppress our irritation at the meddling old women who casts aspersions on our practice so she can peddle her patent dog shampoos? How many of us would see her as the perfect match for a neglected dog after her own dog was killed by a car?

Aside from the happy uplift of the stories themselves, the prose is bright, lively, and humorous. Mr. Wight was possessed of a fair degree of self-awareness, and his charmingly avuncular voice is well-suited for his subject matter. The person who can resist his jovial tale-spinning is, perhaps, not really a person at all but rather an invading pod-person.

Addendum: I've elected not to write too much about Collapse. It's as persuasive and involving as anything Mr. Diamond writes, his unsightly affection for the words "much" and "big" notwithstanding. I thought it was fairly tightly argued, and is explicitly far more resistant to criticisms of "why, that's just geographical determinism!" than was Guns, Germs and Steel. It's also, in spite of his attempt to end on a hopeful note, pretty depressing. Certainly worth reading, you simply may want to lay in a store of your preferred spirits before you do so.

Napoleon's... dragons?

2007-10-02T18:56:00.000-05:00

I first introduced myself to Naomi Novik while on leave from Afghanistan in early 2006. The donated books to be found overseas fall predominantly into three categories:
1. Romances
2. Thrillers
3. Christian devotional texts
Some volumes, of course, cross-pollinate between these categories to varying degrees. There were a few gems: a copy of Elliot's Middlemarch, and - well, I'm sure there were some others. And in any event they were free, the literal product of a grateful nation, and it is small of me to cavil at the selection. In fact! I can no longer remember his name, but I found a book of short stories from some exceedingly obscure contemporary author whose tales brought me some enjoyment, and there's a group of people at Books for Soldiers that sent me Salih's Season of Migration to the North as well as Sacks' Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, at no expense to myself, and for which I'm still grateful.

Returning to the point, however, Mrs. Novik seems to have appeared from nowhere and become quite the celebrity. I had never even heard her name whispered from afar before I walked into a chain bookstore and saw the second book of her Temeraire series faced out, its shelves bordered with red card-paper, evidently a much-anticipated new release. I read the blurb on the back and, intrigued, slid down the shelf a ways to find her first book. Released in the UK simply as Temeraire, the slightly weightier American-market title of His Majesty's Dragon was, to me, irresistible. I took it home and devoured it that night, curled in the comfortable nest of this enormous leather chair in my parents' house. I returned to the store the next day to purchase the second, and enjoined my parents to buy me the third and ship it to me as soon as it came out. I found myself, however, quite unable to wait and purchased it in an electronic format, quite the novelty for me. I am not accustomed to reading entire books on the computer screen, and even with LCDs I find it something of a strain, but I was so absorbed in the lives of Laurence and Temeraire that I couldn't resist.

Should you be unfamiliar with the series, it is the tale of Captain Will Laurence, a captain in the English Navy who has the peculiarly good and bad luck to capture one of Napoleon's ships as it's carrying a dragon's egg from the Chinese empire. Although England's Navy is as superior to its French counterpart in Novik's book as it was in history, Napoleon's air force is quite the equal and perhaps even the better of the two, such that no dragon may be wasted. Upon realizing that the egg is to hatch soon, then, Laurence determines that he and his officers should undertake to befriend the creature immediately upon its hatching, as this is the only reliable way to secure a dragon's service to one's country, to bind it in a tie of affection to a citizen of that country. The hatchling of course shows a preference for Laurence himself (and who wouldn't? He is tall and rugged, terrifying in battle while decent and gentle in peace), quite ruining the latter's Naval career and drafting him perforce into the Aerial Corps.

The series then follows their adventures and travails. They grow together as people, they repel an aerial invasion of the Isles, they go to China, and in this latest they travel to the Dark Continent in search of a cure for a plague killing England's dragons, quite probably originating from the New World. A New World that, by the by, is far more resistant to the colonization efforts of Europe, dragons serving as an admirable force equalizer. The Incan empire still stands, and the ever-increasing blood and fury of the Temeraire series continues in Africa. One of the reasons I was so sucked in to the first book was its being an essentially light book. It had pain and war and death, to be sure, but it was more about Laurence and Temeraire growing to love one another, the gap in species allowing for openly expressed affection without any erotic overtones. Both of the pair even take sexual partners, to be sure, but they become the emotional cores of each others' lives.

More and more, however, things are coming to grim extremes. I won't go into specifics, as I really didn't expect the extent to which Novik went, and the surprise was part of the effect it had on me. Suffice to say that, while I still stayed up late and read this book mostly in a single sitting, the emotions that gripped me were far different. And although I never had any great faith in Novik's fictional government, I didn't expect the end of this book either. She may wear me out, may Mrs. Novik. I am finding that I can only handle so much war, and I use that specific term deliberately. The phenomenon of organized mutual slaughter is driving me increasingly to distraction in general, not just in books, and the clash of armies is becoming something I dread.

Laurence has even met Napoleon, now. Wouldn't it be grand if there were peace between him and the English? Wouldn't it be nice if the series drew to a close without a climactic battle? At this point I'll buy and read them, regardless, but if the exponential increase of violence continues as it has been doing, I may put the last one down with a sigh of relief rather than of regret.

Librarians: Mother Nature's way of being awesome

2007-09-23T17:38:00.000-05:00

I was introduced to Librarian Chick recently and was instantly consumed in the fires of love. Especially since I just started Collapse by Jared Diamond and that's going to take me a while, I can find smaller morsels in Librarian Chick and fill in the gaps until I'm done with Collapse.

With this goal in mind I took a look at Classic Shorts and picked the first story by an author that I recognized: Beyond the Wall, by Ambrose Bierce. I was decidedly unprepared for a ghost story, as the only other thing of Bierce's I've read was his Devil's Dictionary, his famous collection of acerbic bon mots. It seems even shorter than the just under 3500 words that it is, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. It surely is a ghost story, but it's more wistful than spooky or thrilling. The prose is possessed of that singularly nineteenth-century precision that I enjoy so much. It seems written to be read aloud in a lecturehall by a person of distinction, rather than by a grimy nerd that's been wearing pyjamas all Sunday. And hey, it's free!

Apropos of nothing: I wish seasons of TV shows weren't so expensive. I really want to watch House M.D., but I can't really justify spending $50ish on it. Tragic, non?

The apotheosis of the delightfully cheesy

2007-09-22T20:56:00.000-05:00

Really though! "Delight" is the best word to describe my reaction to this:

Noirboiled

2007-09-22T19:01:00.000-05:00

The first thing I do for these posts is fill out the tags. Or "labels," I guess blogger likes to call them. I've got a few standard tags to use: the author's name, genre, the variety of media (books, movies, whatever), that sort of thing. Then I toss a few others in there too, just whatever occurs to me in relation to the particular thing. I like imagining how maybe, in a year or two, I'll be able to click, for example, "noir" and see links to stuff I haven't thought about in a long time. Especially because noir detective stuff isn't something I typically seek out, and it might be neat to see the sorts of things I chose to apply that label to.

I picked up 9Tail Fox solely because of its cover design, to be honest. I didn't even read the little blurbs, and in fact if I had I would have been given pause. Charles Stross, it would seem, called Mr. Grimwood "...the only real heavyweight ... of orientalist post-cyberpunk fiction." Really? Orientalist post-cyberpunk fiction? Do we really need to partition our genres that finely? And honestly, reading the book, is that even accurate? Now, I like Mr. Stross' work. I read Iron Sunrise not too long ago and was fast enmeshed in the intrigue and drama of his tale of planetary genocide. But I can do little but hope that this particular quote of his was taken entirely out of context, a hope that the elision mercifully encourages. Although its title is a reference to a variety of spirit common to Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Korean folklore, the part played by the eponymous creature is in fact quite minimal. It's mostly a device used to set up the book's premise, helpfully spelled out along the bottom of the cover: "a dead cop must solve his own murder!" Oh, and the protagonist is half-Chinese. Hardly deserving of the near-epithet "orientalist." Nor is it a "cyber-thriller," as Starburst apparently called it. There is nothing cyber about it. Bobby Zha is resurrected in the body of an unreasonably wealthy coma patient by means of magic and that's all there is to it.

Somewhat more accurately, Rick Kleffel says that it's "full of grit," and that it is. I will confess a taste for fluffier, happier fare, and so I was somewhat dismayed as I continued to read and came across refuse-strewn alleyways and a grimly detailed sex scene. Bruises, brothels, and blood: all the signifiers of a city's seedy underbelly. Zha himself spends most of the book being unliked and unlikable. He does manage to stumble into some degree of redemption, though, and Grimwood makes pretty good use of Zha's undercover infiltration of his own life in that he suddenly has to deal with honest appraisals of his character by people who of course have no idea that they're talking to him.

The backplot (yes, I know that's not really a word) he uses to provide an antagonist against which the plot can work is a good deal less engaging than the main plot, but that's ok. Former KGB agents now working for the Russian mob are something of a standard lego brick in contemporary crime fiction, whether or not it has fantastic elements, so they fill their niche well.

The prose is fascinating. This story is told very much in the tone of a procedural, with the same attention paid to the edges of a jagged throat wound as to the particulars of a twelve year old girl giving false testimony as to the evidence of abuse on a woman's body. And yet it's not a procedural. Motives aren't revealed through any real process of detection or deduction, and anyway whodunnit isn't the point. Hell, even before he died, Zha wasn't an especially good cop. The real story is about Zha trying to fix his own broken psyche and, more importantly, provide some balm for those he hurt even as he loved them.

So this wasn't something I'd typically read, and I couldn't glide through it in an afternoon. It is, at times, a little oppressive in the ugliness of its main characters, but the story at its center is believable and satisfying.

Talking Dogs!

2007-09-16T19:53:00.000-05:00

The 3-for-2 table at Borders is, I think, the "Mongolian Barbeque" of book consumption. If you're unfamiliar with those things, they're this odd variety of Americhinese cuisine where the customers pile noodles and uncooked meats onto a bowl, buffet style, and their idiosyncratic creation is then seared on an enormous conical griddle-thing shared by a two or three cooks. Oddly, for an institution with "Mongolian" in its title, I've never heard the cooks speak anything other than Spanish, but this poorly-conceived metaphor is threatening to consume this post, so I'll have to cut it short. The point is that you're presented with an array of mysterious choices, acquired at substantial discounts, all making quite-possibly fraudulent claims of scrumptiousness. This being, of course, why I love them both. I must say I visit the Borders a great deal more frequently than any Mongolian BBQ, though.

My most recent acquisitions from said table were Collapse by Jared Diamond, Kindred by Octavia Butler, and Walking in Circles Before Lying Down, by Merrill Markoe. I picked up Collapse because I've read a couple of Diamond's other books and liked them, Kindred because I saw it mentioned and discussed at length in an article somewhere recently, and Circles because I love dogs. Oh, and because the plot summary on the back of the book promised talking dogs. To expand: the book's notional protagonist, Dawn, starts hearing her dog Chuck talk to her after her asshole boyfriend du jour leaves her. This promised a somewhat more whimsical take on the whole "dysfunctional girl meets dysfunctional boy" genre, and I'll be damned if I can resist some whimsy. It also occurs to me that certain persons would likely bridle at my application of the dirty word "genre" to pretty mainstream fiction. Possibly even the author, I think I may detect hints of eau du MFA workshop here, to inject a little snideness into this post. I can do that because I sure as hell don't have anything I've written on the shelves of Borders.

Hah! That last paragraph was getting a little embarrassing and socially awkward wasn't it? Oh lord he's - god why do I keep bringing him to parties? Why do the rest of you people let me do this? We know he's just going to start singing that stupid Lenny Kravitz tune and in ten or fifteen minutes he'll stumble outside and puke on the cement. Never again, I swear to god.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yes, MFA workshops. Merkoe's got this very odd thing going on in this book, where she's framing it in terms of the plotting advice contained in some internet guide to writing a novel. Dawn herself is an aspiring novelist, and the presumably abortive first chapter of a novel is contained within the narrative of the real book. I'm really, really, really not sure why she does this. I found it jarring and disconcerting, especially since the first-person narrative makes it look like Merkoe is trying for a "no seriously guys this is real" feeling. If so, Dawn's infrequent hints that maybe she's hearing voices are possibly there to help it along. Because hey it could be true if the dogs aren't really talking and she's just hearing them in her head, right? And she takes care to note that the voices are in her head, she's not seeing doggy lips move or anything. Even if so, it still puts at least part of this narrative square in the realm of writing-about-writing, something I've never been too much of a fan of.

Luckily, in contrast with a great many writing-about-writing writings, it moves along quite briskly. I picked it up yesterday, finished it tonight, and had a fun time with it. That last is a fact that's almost surprising, actually. None of the characters were all that likable, even the dogs, really. Dawn's dad was relatively cheery, and brightened up every scene he was in. Her mother was shrill and just mean. The flashback to a decades-old apology for being a shitty mother, and how unsatisfying and unhelpful that apology was, serve just as well to summarize the ostensibly humanizing moments for her in the book. I cringed every time I saw her. I wanted a mute button for Dawn's sister. Dawn herself was a doormat, and after a while I want to scream at her to stand up for herself. Of course she'd probably look chastened and sniffle a little and say "ok" in a very small voice, and I'd have wasted a bunch of calories I could have used on something useful, like learning to sew. Seriously I just dropped off a bunch of stuff with a Korean lady with the last name "Raible," and to get a few pairs of pants and a single Banana Republic button-down altered was $75. $75! Cheaper than new stuff, but still!

On the other hand, my bibliophagic habits are way more expensive than my not-being-naked habits, so whatever. Even though I got this thing at the 3-for-2 table, it was somewhere in the $7-9 range for a few hours of entertainment, and I still have quibbles to quib! They're minor ones, though. Merkoe's characters here could almost drown in extraneous traits, if she did anything besides breeze past them in a moment of wild expository abandon. Eating disorders, failed marriages, failed businesses, broken leases: all things that get mentioned in passing, like the color of a forgettable tie. I know she's shooting for light humor, here, and to an extent she succeeds. She also succeeds in painting a surreal backdrop, peopling her landscape with lumpy foam mannequins, and placing mysterious yet brightly colored props in the hands of her cast. Considering the material, it makes for something akin to fairly inappropriate children's theatre.

And apparently Strunk & White have a new section on how the description of spooning with a dog must of necessity contain the word "apostrophe"?

Good lord this is a snarky post. I'm not sure how that happened. Maybe this isn't the best novel ever written. But who cares! It's honestly quite fun, it has talking dogs, and an endearingly breathless enthusiasm. I have no regrets.

Stardust

2007-09-04T12:47:00.000-05:00

My boyfriend said that I had to see this in theaters. I didn't really think I'd be able to: not only is it not in the single theater that's in the mini-hamlet I live 10 miles away from, but I really hate going to movies alone and I don't especially have any good friends up here. The aforementioned boyfriend is a good 1,300 or so miles away, or I'd've seen it with him in the first place. Luckily, I remembered that I have a friend in New Jersey, a mere five and a half hours to the South. Well actually I've been meaning to see her all summer, and this weekend being labor day and her last before moving to Texas (the horror... the horror..!) it seemed writ in heaven that I should visit. So I did.

Thinking about writing this has given me some respect for professional movie reviewers, who attempt to give some sort of substantive opinion of the movie without absolutely spoiling the plot. I've decided to just not worry about it for this one, at least. The movie has been out for quite a while, and it's not as if anyone reads this anyway!

To begin with, I should state that I really liked the aesthetic of the movie as a whole. The costume designers, the casting, the set designers - everything was cohesive and delectable. It was a sort of heady mixture of 19th-century England and the adventure tales of the era, as well as something of a more modern fantasy sensibility. Michelle Pfeiffer did an absolutely amazing job as the witch Lamia, up to and including getting me to buy a moment near the end that I'm sure a great many people would find hard to swallow. I'd also congratulate the casting director on the selection of Claire Danes for the role of the fallen star. I think that a lot of people might perhaps have gone for someone more "ethereal" in her beauty, although beauty is hard to quantify and I think she's gorgeous. She has a fabulous and delighted smile, and I think the sort of defining trait of her character was that she was a naif despite exhaustive knowledge of the travails of the earthbound. That's awfully nuanced, and she pulled it off extremely well.

I think DeNiro did as good a job with his character as was possible, but I'm not at all sure why that character existed. He was apparently not in the book, his name was a weak gag, and he was yet another instance of Gay Man as Lame Comedy Foil. He was used to pointlessly emasculate a barely existent almost-rival of the male lead, humiliate that rival's bride (also pointlessly), and whose sexuality served absolutely no purpose for the plot. Even if they decided they really needed a kindly sky-pirate captain (never did I see them engage in actual piracy, they seemed to be more like hard-working lobstermen), why did they make him a queer hairstylist who's caught flouncing in a dress and defeated in an instant?

Sigh.

Additionally, the ending was disappointing. I don't understand why, in a movie consisting largely of fantastic travel over great distances by wondrous means, they decided to put the witches' icy mountain fastness a five-minute horseride from the bucolic village of Wall where the movie started. Further, I was entirely willing to believe that Lamia would have given up after her sisters had been killed. Indeed, it granted her that sympathetic touch of humanity, that little bit of her that I liked and could understand, that made her character much more real to me. It was also the only explanation for her decision not to bury her glass hatchet in Tristan's chest that made any sense. There was simply no way for her to get at Yvaine's heart while it was all aglow with happiness, and giving up the fight she'd already won so that she could cackle and break a few mirrors wasn't going to help.

Finally! I'd've preferred if they'd used the ending in the book. There was no reason to make Tristan immortal, and indeed an excellent reason not to: you don't gain immortality by getting a star to fall in love with you, you do it by cutting her heart out of her chest while it's still beating and eating it. Ok? Ok.

That said, I really did like the movie. It's just easier to talk about nitpicky stuff. As an overall experience it was wonderful and uplifting and it made me happy. Even the parts that weren't written very well were acted and directed with grace and emotion. I was absorbed in the world and the experience, and I'd like to see it again at some point. Preferably on DVD, while curled up on a couch next to my boyfriend.

Inaugural Post: Jo Walton's Farthing

2007-08-25T16:00:00.000-05:00

I'm going to launch this endeavor by talking about Jo Walton's fabulous book, Farthing. I've been hearing for years that I really need to read her books. But, as I'm sure most people who read books (or watch movies or listen to music) can understand, there exists a List. This List is largely in my head, and even if it weren't, I'm hardly going to remember to bring a copy of it on my impulse trips to the bookstore. The consistent pattern, then, is that I wander through the beige plastic sentries of the theft-deterrent system and am instantly at a loss. Bewildered, I wander from reference to poetry to science fiction to travel to the sale tables at the front. My eyes, skipping across the spines, are often capable of picking out only individual letters of the title or the author's name, or often as not they latch on to the brooch of the publishing house's imprint. This last tendency has come to serve me well, as I have become familiar with houses whose editorial palate suits my own better than some others. There are exceptions, of course: Tor, for instance, has the regrettable habit of publishing Terry Goodkind novels. On the other hand, I'm sure he pays the bills, so I can't really blame them.

They also, thankfully, published Jo Walton's latest, and by some miracle I picked it out, a single spine peeping from the mass of its fellows. I wonder if she sells poorly, for some reason? The much-lauded Tooth and Claw was published in 2004 after all, a mere three years ago. Maybe this is why it took me so long to remember that I'd been advised to try her out: she simply had nothing on the shelves of the major chains, and really that's all I've got access to at the moment.

Regardless! Peep it did, and in the dim recesses of my memory a light came on. I plucked it from the shelf, reflecting as I did so that the white-chocolate shavings swimming in the whipped cream of on my mocha were the height of sin. That's not relevant to the book or anything, you understand, I just feel that it was important to share.

I also purchased a couple other books (also from authors I've never read before; Connie Willis' Passage and Laura Resnick's Disappearing Nightly), but Farthing was the first I cracked open, I think because of the sharp and appealing cover design. That design is credited to one Howard Grossman of 12E Design, so: kudos, Mr. Grossman. The flat and muted overlay of a red field and blue swastika on an English country manor is classy and appealing while just slightly menacing.

The book proper opens with a couple quotes, one from Wystan Hugh Auden's poem Lullaby and the other from a column of Orwell's, published by the Tribune in 1944. It then leaps into the mind of Lucy Kahn, née Eversley, daughter of the Lord and Lady Eversley. In Walton's eminently believable alternate history, constellation of the aristocratic elite, centered around the Eversleys, gathered at their country estate of Farthing and engineered peace with Hitler following the battle of Dunkirk. In 1947, when Farthing takes place, Lucy then finds herself in a social milieu hostile to her marriage to David Kahn, a Jew. The first chapter is her recounting her snub and counter-snub by and of the lady Thirkie, and concludes with this:

"But anyway, when I heard that Sir James Thirkie had been murdered, that's the first thing I thought of, Angela Thirkie being mean to David the afternoon before, and I'm afraid the first thing to go through my mind, although fortunately ... I didn't say so, was that it well and truly served her right."

Lucy herself is delightful, and numerous times throughout the book she made me laugh. She was joined in the sphere of my affection with Inspector Carmichael, an industrious policeman called in from Scotland Yard to find the murderer. Although Lucy has been brought up to think herself quite dim, she's clearly possessed of a sharp wit, and her runaway trains of thought are a constant joy. Just so, the inspector's dogged professionalism in the face of truly unlikable people is delightful.

That said, I should point out that appearances to the contrary, this isn't really a murder mystery. Nor is it especially a political thriller. I have heard alternate history novels derided as "history's fanfiction," and there's an extent to which that's true. This, however, is not that either. I don't think Walton is a "fan" of the holocaust. I think that, like many, she is fascinated by the banality of evil. Horrified by the holocaust, she can nevertheless imagine it happening at home, and this book is that imagining. Which isn't to say that England's Jews are rounded up and gassed in Farthing. She's simply planting the seeds of atrocity here, concentrating on her two most likable characters. It's amazing, to me, that she was able to make me laugh out loud so many times while Lucy and Inspector Carmichael were progressively exiled or cornered. This book is very bleak and very funny: a rare trick, I think.

Apologies if you feel that my last sentence gives away the ending. It doesn't, really. And in any event, the "end" isn't really the point. I came to feel that I could be friends with some of her characters, and in fact that I almost was. The rising desperation of the final chapters was profoundly affecting, and I was grateful for what small mercies Walton granted me. I have nothing but admiration for her and this book, and I'm going to be finding and devouring Tooth and Claw at the earliest convenience. Until then, I've got the two books mentioned above, and the sprawling wonderland of the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion to frolic in. As well as a huge backlog of books, short fiction, games, and movies to talk about! This should be fun.