Blogging the Hugo Winners

2009 Saturn Fantasy – WATCHMEN

2012-02-09T20:31:00.000-08:00

Before Before Watchmen, there was....Watchmen!

Amazingly, this is the first review of an adaptation of a work I’ve previously reviewed. Many of the award-winning novels here have been adapted into films, including a fair number of Hugo and Saturn nominees, and many of the films have come from acclaimed sf&f novels, but this is the first time the twain have met. It’s fitting then that it’s a work that’s status as an adaptation has always been the main story.

As I said, Watchmen is the consensus pick for greatest superhero comic of all time. That alone made its adaptation controversial, and it took over a decade and a few lawsuits to get this film made. Then, writer Alan Moore asked to have his name removed from the film, more due to previous wrongs than this film in particular, but still. Finally, there’s the fact that the sprawling multimedia multigenerational superhero epic that pushed the boundaries of sequential art as a medium doesn’t particular lend itself to the feature film format… Well, add it all up, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

It’s not quite that, though I wouldn’t call it a rousing success either. It received mixed critical reviews and disappointing box office revenues. Is it any good? I’d say it depends on what you’re looking for. It you love the graphic novel and you want to see Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons's vision realized with first class special effects, you’re in luck! If you’ve never read the book, I imagine this won’t make much sense. If you’re looking for a movie that can stand on its own as a solid piece of filmmaking, I don’t think this qualifies.

The first problem is that it’s just too damn literal as a remake. For all the hubbub about whether the film would do service to the classic graphic novel – it does, to a fault. Director Zack Snyder made a name for himself with a very literal adaptation of Frank Miller’s Battle of Thermopylae graphic novel, 300, and he brings the same ethic to this work, directly borrowing almost all of his visuals from Dave Gibbons’ panels and almost all of his dialogue from Alan Moore’s word balloons. The mid-1980s setting, contemporary when the book originally came out, must have been fairly alienating for a lot of the young people who’d make up the majority of the potential audience for a superhero blockbuster. I’m not saying that I want to replace fifth term Nixon with third term Dubya and the USSR with China or Al Qaeda, but the book is very much of its time; the film is not. More importantly, the book is paced brilliantly as a twelve part monthly series, not as a three hour film, but that’s the pacing that Snyder ends up with by default. The film does manage to convey some of the rich history of the comics, but it never builds any momentum. The film’s pacing would better fit a tv mini-series.

The second problem is the acting. Jackie Earle Haley is fantastic as Rorschach, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan is perfect as the Comedian. It’s all downhill from there. Patrick Wilson and Malin Ackerman are likable performers, and they do fine as Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, though they don’t seem as damaged as the characters in the comic. Billy Crudup isn’t particularly convincing as Dr. Manhattan, and Matthew Goode is just plain terrible as Adrian Veidt. Those two characters play a crucial role in the story, and the actors’ wooden performances really damage the climax. Watchmen is a character-driven story, and this mixed bag of acting undermines it in some significant ways.

It’s not all bad though. By sticking so closely to the original story, Snyder doesn’t lose any of Moore’s fascinating world-building, and the opening credits that track four decades of superhero history are a highpoint (though "the opening credits are a highpoint" really isn't a great sign). Most of the visuals are very well-realized. A direct translation of Gibbons's panels may not have been the best choice, but that doesn’t make it easy, and I think Snyder has accomplished something very interesting here. Again, as a supplement to the book, it’s not bad at all. But that’s pretty faint praise for such an ambitious sf film.

Grade: C+

2008 Saturn SF – IRON MAN

2012-02-07T20:55:00.000-08:00

Superhero films have dominated that Saturn fantasy awards for most of the decade, but Iron Man bounces back to sf, which makes sense. This film is about as science fictiony as superhero movies get; not that it’s rigorous, hard sf, but it is much more interested in technology, and the implications thereof, than most entries in the genre. And, it wouldn’t be surprising if creators Stan Lee et al were heavily influenced by Starship Troopers, which came out just a couple of years before Iron Man’s first appearance.

Billionaire playboy Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) inherited his father’s arms-manufacturing corporation. He’s a mechanical genius himself, but he spends most of his time partying. His faithful personal assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) struggles to keep his life together. After a weapons demonstration in Afghanistan, Stark is kidnapped by terrorists and asked to make them weapons, instead he makes a chest implant to protect him from a possibly-fatal wound and a suit of powered armor that he uses to escape. Upon his return, he refines the suit and uses it to fight some of the wrongs caused by his company’s weapons. His business associate, Obadiah Stane (an uncharacteristically evil Jeff Bridges), wants Stark Eterprises, and he builds his own suit it get rid of Tony.

Stan Lee made a few innovations to superhero comics in the 1960s that served to make Marvel the leading comic company. One of the most important was the idea that all of his heroes had to have a flaw. Iron Man was one of his weakest inventions, I think. Stark’s flaw was that he needed the suit to live due to injuries to his chest. There are some interesting implications there, but they never get explored, and it really just became a cheap device to keep the hero down for a bit, a la kryptonite. Later writers developed new flaws for Stark, womanizing and alcoholism, that made him much more interesting, and highlighted the contrast with his steel exterior. The film does a great job of capturing that take on the character.

I remember that before this film came out in the spring of 2008, there was a sense that the Renaissance in superhero movies was coming to an end. In the two previous summers, there’d been a string of failures, maybe even embarrassments like X-Men 3, Spider-man 3, Fantastic Four 2, Ghost Rider, and Superman Returns (though they were still making money). On top of that, Iron Man was not a big-name character, and it seemed to some like Marvel was scraping the bottom of their intellectual property barrel. But, this film made a surprising amount of money and garnered a lot of critical praise. Jeff Bridges later reported that director Jon Favreau shot most of the movie without a script, and that may be a big part of its success. The film rides on Downey’s charisma and charm, and his ad libs work brilliantly. It’s a fairly simple formula – take a charming and talented star, give him a fun character with some intriguing flaws to work with, and surround it all with some solid effects and action, and you get a very entertaining superhero flick. I think it’s a lesson that more superhero movies, and science fiction movies in general, might profit from following.

Of course, a couple of months later, another superhero movie came out that took the exact opposite approach, The Dark Knight Returns. It’s a better movie, and one of the most thrilling I’ve seen. It got a Saturn Action award (I’m not adding another category, and I don’t have much to say about it that hasn’t been said). Both it and Iron Man were nominated for the Hugo, but neither won (nor should they have, but more on that in a couple of weeks).

Grade: A-

2008 Nebula – POWERS by Ursula K. LeGuin

2012-02-05T20:29:00.000-08:00

Reflecting broader trends in the publishing world (mainly, that mostly only kids read books now), two completely different Young Adult books won both the Hugo and the Nebula in the same year. Of course, this is also a record-breaking fourth Nebula win for LeGuin. Powers is the third entry in her YA Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, which is very much in the vein of her fantasy classic Earthsea.

Gavir is a slave in the city-state of Etra. He and his sister were captured from the Marsh people, who are rumored to have special powers. Gavir, for example, has an incredible memory, and can even, on rare occasions, remember the future. As he narrates his childhood, he explains his unquestioning loyalty to his owners, who give him an education, but the abuses of the system are apparent from early on. His sister is given to one of his master’s sons as a concubine, while another of the sons murders another slave without punishment.

Gavir eventually runs away, and we get a series of episodic adventures. He joins a band of runaways, and, again, we begin to see the inequalities and sexual abuse within their social system. In the book’s most interesting section, Gavir returns to his people’s homelands in the Marshes. In Etra, we get the typical faux-medieval society, but in the Marshes, LeGuin gets to use her anthropological talents. The Marsh people fish for subsistence and practice strict separation of the sexes. LeGuin manages to make it seem fairly idyllic while also making it clear that it’s far from perfect and that Gavir does not belong.

A lot of the ethnographic details are nice, and LeGuin’s prose flows as nicely as ever. LeGuin never talks down to her YA audience; the proceedings are very dark and some of the material on gender is fairly subtle. The novel eschews some of the expected dramatic resolutions. We don’t get final confrontations between Gavir and many of his oppressors, or a touching reunion with his biological parents. And, Gavir really uses his powers – the fact that he has a printed book makes more of a difference to the plot than the fact that he can occasionally see the future. On one hand, I like that LeGuin avoids clichés. On the other hand, the novel can feel a little aimless, and some of the early characters don’t have much point in the long-run.

I feel like I’m becoming a broken record with these Nebula winners. Once again, this was a decent book that I enjoyed, but I don’t think it would’ve been my choice for the best novel of the year. That said, LeGuin’s talents are still clear, and I can’t think of a writer more deserving of the record for most novel Nebulas.

Grade: B

2008 Hugo Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – STARDUST

2012-02-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

Neil Gaiman’s had a pretty good decade at the Hugos. Something written by Gaiman (or adapted from something written by Gaiman, in this case) won in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, and 2009, he received nominations in 2000, 2007 and 2010, and he declined a nomination in 2006. I guess he took 2005 off. Anyway, there’s been some grumbling about this, and even a New Yorker profile of Gaiman spent most of its space mocking his rabid fanbase. So, when you see a movie like Stardust, which did mediocre box office then promptly disappeared from most of the world’s consciousness (my wife claimed to have never heard of it*), well, it’s easy to chalk this up to Gaiman’s fanbase tipping another Hugo vote. Thing is, it’s actually a very cute movie.

The English town of Wall lies next to a giant stone wall that divides our world and a magical land called Stormhold. Tristan Thorne (a relative unknown named Charlie Cox) is a teenager who works in a shop in Wall and loves a girl named Victoria (Sienna Miller), who prefers the wealthier Humphrey (Clark Kent). To prove his love, Tristan promises to recover a falling star from the other side of the wall, then learns from his father that his long lost mother may be on the other side as well. Tristan finds the star personified as a young woman named Yvan (Clare Danes) and leads her back to the wall. Meanwhile, an evil witch (Michelle Pfeiffer) hunts the star so she can consume its heart and regain her youth, and the surviving princes of Stormhold search for a necklace she wears so that they can ascend to the throne. Matthew Vaughn directs and manages to keep things light and make everything look good despite a moderate (though by no means small) budget.

When I saw the film in the theaters, I walked away with the impression that it was a bit of a mess. There are a couple of minor continuity errors and some awkward voice-overs that suggested a lot of late tinkering to me. There are also a couple of obnoxious celebrity cameos. I like Ricky Gervais, but he seems to be playing a parody of himself in a couple of brief scenes. Robert DeNiro has a bigger part with a few surprises, and I honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or look away in embarrassment for most of his screentime. It’s a good idea (that I won’t give away), but the humor's a little too broad, and DeNiro doesn’t entirely succeed. I’ve never liked him in a comedic role, and this film didn’t buck that trend, even if it’s not as bad as the Fokkers stuff.

Those are really minor issues though. Everyone else does quite well, despite much of the main cast being a mix of unknowns and used-to-bes. Gaiman’s plot is charming as hell, Vaughn’s touch is light but effective, and, overall, it’s a very sweet, fun film. I hardly noticed the minor errors this time, and I think my impression from my first viewing was just off. The film flowed quite smoothly, as long as you’re not being hypercritical.

So, as I said, very cute movie. Normally, “very cute” doesn’t necessarily make for a worthy Hugo winner, but when you look at the rest of the field…yeah. Harry Potter 5 was decent, but Golden Compass was very disappointing, Enchanted doesn’t really rise above Disney kids fare (though I’ve only seen pieces of it on cable, and Heroes season one was fascinating, but flawed (and its reputation was sunk by the awful seasons to follow, so it’s good it didn’t win). This is actually the one year where I’d support Jo Walton’s contention that “no award” should win Hugos for Dramatic Presentation more often, but Stardust is the best film of the lot, and I don’t mind it being on the list of winners at all.

Grade: B+

*but she watched it with me this time and really enjoyed it.

2008 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Short Form – “Blink,” DOCTOR WHO

2012-01-31T20:16:00.000-08:00

Another year, another Steven Moffat Doctor Who script win in this category. That’s three in a row.
With each season the cast and crew seem to get more confident and self-assured, and Tennant has settled into the role wonderfully; he’s the favorite of many Who fans, both new and old. The Doctor also has a new companion, a young medical doctor named Martha Jones, who I prefer to Rose in almost every way. She has a crush on the Doctor, which maybe isn’t quite as interesting as the mutual attraction with Rose, but it seems to suit the dynamic of the show better and the actress who plays Martha, Freema Agyeman, is far more charismatic and talented (and attractive, for that matter) than Billie Piper. She’s great. In my opinion, the two nominated storylines of season three are two of the best Doctor Who stories ever.

So, things keep getting better all around. *Most* of this season is darn near perfect. The Doctor and Martha meet-cute with alien rhinos on the Moon in “Smith and Jones,” there’s a fun spaceship hurtling towards the sun suspense story in near-real time called “42,” and I have an unreasonable affection for the first Doctor Who episode I ever saw, “Gridlock,” which is about a decades-long flying-car traffic jam on a distant future colony of Earth. Even some of the throw-away stories like “Lazarus Man” and “The Shakespeare Code” are miles ahead of some of the lame season two episodes, though a Dalek two-parter in Depression-era Manhattan is appallingly bad. And then there’s the “whonimees,” which appeared back-to-back in the second half of the seasons:

“Suddenly Human”/”The Family of Blood” – Another Paul Cornell story with good focus on character, this time the Doctor, though Martha gets several good moments as well. To hide from evil aliens called the Family of Blood, the Doctor disguises himself as a human at a British boarding school in 1913. Even the Doctor can’t know his real identity, but his pseudonymous John Smith personality falls in love with the school’s matron, making for a tough decision when the Family attacks and Martha feels that she needs to return the Doctor’s true identity. The Doctor’s love story is interesting, the show plays with some issues of class, gender, and race with the disguised Martha, World War I hangs in the background of the story in some brilliant ways, and the last few moments are brilliant.

“Blink” – Steven Moffat knocks it out of the park with one of the greatest hours in science fiction television history. Maybe I’m overhyping it, but it is universally beloved. The villain is creepy (though it doesn’t always entirely make sense), and there’s a fun "timey-wimey" plot. The Doctor isn’t actually in the episode all that much, but Academy Award-nominated guest star Carey Mulligan carries the show fantastically.

Following these episodes, the Doctor and Martha go trillions of years to the future in “Utopia,” a creepy episode with a great cliffhanger reveal. Then…we go into a not-so-great finale where Russell T. Davies’ one-upsmanship gets out of control and things get pretty rough. But, take out that Dalek two-parter and replace the finale two-parter with something that makes more sense and hangs less on clapping for Tinkerbell, and it would’ve been a perfect season.

Season 4, by the way, is even more consistent in that it has even fewer dud episodes, but also fewer truly great ones. Of course, the Steven Moffat two-parter “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead” is great. It’s nominated next year, but it did lose (for once).

Grades: “Suddenly Human”/”The Family of Blood” A
“Blink” A
Season A-

2008 Hugo and Locus, 2007 Nebula – THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION by Michael Chabon

2012-01-29T20:38:00.000-08:00

Michael Chabon is a talented writer, and perhaps the literary establishment's greatest defender of genre fiction. As a result of a few brilliant essays on the subject, serious-minded sf fans, like myself, have a lot of goodwill for the guy. His Kavalier and Clay reimagined the creation of Superman by Jewish immigrants in the 1930s with a little bit of magical realism added in for good measure, and won him the Pullitzer Prize. Thus, when Chabon returned with a novel with some mild speculative fiction elements (an alternate history), the sf awards took notice in a big way. It was a regular occurrence in the ‘70s, but this is the first award since the early ‘90s to get the Hugo, Nebula, and the Locus.

In the world of The Yiddish Policemen's Union, the Roosevelt administration followed through with a plan (just briefly considered in our world) to resettle Jewish refugees from the Nazis in an Alaskan colony. Israel, no longer the sole refuge, was destroyed in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which of course created more refugees. The Jewish-Alaskan colony of Sitka is semi-automous, but is on the verge of reverting back to U.S. control as a conservative President plans to reassert authority (and possibly expel the Jews). Like Dick in The Man in the High Castle, Chabon never clearly explains his alternate world. The reader has to gather clues throughout the book (there are other tantalizing hints: JFK married to Marilyn Monroe?).

The background may be a speculative fiction alternate history, but the plot is pure noir. Alchoholic homicide detective Meyer Landsman stumbles across the murder of one of his neighbors, an odd chess-obsessed drug addict. Landsman and his half-Jewish, half-Tlingit partner Berko Shemets investigate, against the best wishes of the new police chief, who also happens to be Landsman's ex-wife, Bina Gelbfish. The department has higher priorities than a drug addict's murder, as she is trying to close out all open cases in the few months before Reversion to the United States. The investigation soon brings them into conflict with a Hassidic mafia, and eventually leads to a larger conspiracy that links the dead man with Landsman's recently deceased sister, Jerusalem, and the United States government.

Chabon is a fantastic writer, and I thoroughly enjoyed the novel. My one complaint is that the plot is a bit byzantine and sometimes feels a little contrived. There were moments when it felt more like James Bond than Sam Spade, what with the giant conspiracy and secret military training facilities. The novel is at its best in the quieter moments between Landsman, Shemets and their families, or when its revealing little everyday facets of Chabon's intriguing alternate history. The action set-pieces and the big mystery reveals felt more like distractions than thrilling plot-movers. Also, I think the more you know about Jewish culture, the more fun you'll have with the novel. I probably know a little bit more than the average goy, but I felt like I was still missing some subtle "easter eggs."

Grade: A-

2007 Saturn – CLOVERFIELD

2012-01-27T07:55:00.000-08:00

This is the first movie I’ve covered here in a long time (since Alien Nation, I think) that I’d never seen before. I wasn’t actively avoiding it; I just never got around to it. The film was most famous for its mysterious marketing and the involvement of geek-God J. J. Abrams. I’m not a big Abrams guy, and the mystery thing didn’t hook me, so I stayed home. But, I was intrigued, and I liked screenwriter Drew Goddard from his Buffy work…so I was kind of surprised to discover just how much I hated this.

The film is presented as found footage of a giant monster attack (that’s a kaiju attack, for my many Japanese readers). Some dudes are filming their friend Rob’s going away party when Manhattan is attacked by a big slimy thing from the sea. It throws the Statue of Liberty’s head at them, and eats people with its spider babies. You know, the usual. Eventually, douchebag-dude Rob, camereman-dude Hud, his crush Marlena, and hot-chick Lily, go into the heart of the attack to look for Rob’s friend-with-benefits-chick Beth. I wish I didn’t have to reduce all the characters to such simple descriptions, but that’s about as deep as the film gets, despite spending a fair amount of time on them. Maybe they’re just really shallow people?

The core problem here is that the film tries to have it both ways, as cinema verite AND Hollywood blockbuster. Unlike, say, the Blair Witch Project, there’s a slickness to the production that belies its conceit. The most obvious manifestation of this is the unrealistic hotness of all of the characters. Look around the early party scenes; it’s quite clearly a room full of young actors and actresses. The performances aren’t particularly naturalistic either. I never bought the “realness” of the footage, which meant that shaky cam, jump cuts, and the lengthy early party scenes accomplished nothing more than annoying me. I do wonder if it might have been better in the theater, but I don’t think that’s much of an excuse (although, I should note that, in a weird bit of synchronicity, my Netflix Blu-Ray disc got kind of jumpy in the last ten minutes or so as the camera was malfunctioning. I guess that just enhanced the effect, right?)

There’s a good idea here: a small, character focused film about a very big natural disaster. If the characters had been more interesting, and the production had committed more to making the film seem “real,” it could have been amazing. As it is, I’d call it an annoying waste of time.

Grade: D

2007 Clarke and PKD Winner - NOVA SWING by M. John Harrison

2012-01-24T20:13:00.000-08:00

In the year 2444, in the city of Suadade, Vic Seratonin is a tour-guide. He takes clients into The Anomaly, an impossible place of weird, reality-warping physics that spews out black and white cats. A new client, a femme fatale named Elizabeth Kielar, leads Vic to a new artifact spewing malignant "code" that can infect people like a virus. This begins a chain reaction, spilling out to the other characters in the novel and changing their lives. We spend much time with detective Aschemann, who wears the body of an older Einstein and mourns his dead wife in an age when death is a thing of the past. We learn about Vic's mentor Emil, and his daughter Edith who's trapped taking care of the dying man. We meet former space pilot and current bar-keep Liv Hula, a crime boss named Paulie, his minion Fat Antoyne, and a prostitute (Mona) named Irene. We get evocative descriptions, in noir style, of all of their exploits on the fringes of the Anomaly.

As this novel progressed, I found myself repeatedly asking "what's the point?" That probably sounds ruder and more dismissive than I want it to; I asked it sincerely. There's enough material about trampled dreams, being down and out, sex, and loss to point to the idea that Harrison wants to say something, but it's all presented in noir cliches within an amorphous, dead-ending plot. If it's supposed to be a character study, why present the characters as recycled tropes from old movies? There are interesting moments with each of the characters, but they tend to get overshadowed by the familiarity of everything. In some ways, most of the book reads like an epilogue, as Harrison is constantly summing up their thoughts and the directions of their lives, without letting them breathe as people or act for themselves. If it's not a character study...well, there's not much plot to speak of. The world-building mixes elements of space opera, cyberpunk, and Weird in interesting ways but leaves a lot of questions as well (since I finished, I learned this was a sequel. Maybe reading Light would have helped me?) Even the surrealism was dull. The prose is very strong, and Harrison does a very good job of establishing the mood, but there just wasn't anything new about the story, characters, or world to engage me. In a lot of ways, this novel seemed to hearken back to all the worst features of the New Wave - shallow, trite observations about the human condition and a focus on style over substance.

Grade: C-

2007 BSFA – BRASYL by Ian McDonald

2012-01-22T20:10:00.001-08:00

McDonald returns to the same formula he used in River of Gods (and later in The Dervish House) and places interesting speculative concepts in the context of a developing country. I think I’ve already made it clear that I’m a fan of this formula: it forces sf writers to confront issues of historical and cultural context that I’ve complained can be absent from the genre. A book like Rainbow’s End isn’t really that different from McDonald’s work, but McDonald’s settings give his novels a liveliness that is absent from Vinge’s familiar SoCal. That said, whenever an author employs a formula like this, they have to be wary of using it as a gimmick. In Brasyl, McDonald is a lot closer to falling into that trap than in his other works.

McDonald tracks three different stories throughout the novel. One takes place in roughly the present day (2006) and involves a reality show producer in Rio de Janeiro named Marcelina Hoffman. Reality programming is a weird phenomenon that feels like something out of sf satire from the ‘70s, so it fits in rather well. Hoffman is the purveyor of the especially dangerous, edgy and salacious type of reality show, and as she works to get a show on the air that would humiliate a geriatric footballer, she begins to notice that someone with her likeness is sabotaging her. In 2032, we meet a young cyberpunk named Edson, who works out of the favelas (slums) of Sao Paulo, and trades different identities to commit petty crimes. He falls in love with quantum computing anime girl and also notices a weird doubling that throws his life into chaos. Finally, we swashbuckle into the early-eighteenth-century Amazon with a Jesuit priest named Luis Quinn and a French scientist named Robert Falcon. Quinn is on a mission to find another missionary who has gone Kurtz with some of the Indians upriver, and he encounters an Amazonian plant that seems to allow people to see into other realities. The stories do eventually interconnect (via some quantum theories that McDonald seems to be found of) into a vast conspiracy that hints at something every bit as vast and epic as River of Gods.

It’s a fun story, and, if you’ve read my Stephenson reviews, you know I’m a sucker for the cyberpunk meets history angle. In fact, this does feel at times like a Stephenson knock off – a blend of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle – but a really good one. McDonald even shares Stephenson’s frenetic and irreverent prose style. If you’re a Stephenson fan who’s looking for more, go read this novel right away.
Still, because it felt a little derivative (albeit, of something daringly original…this book still feels very different from 99% of the sf out there), and because I never quite engaged with the characters (I’m just never going to be able to sympathize with a reality show producer, no matter how well-drawn she is as a character), I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as River of Gods.

Most importantly, I feel like the setting is wasted a little bit. Brazil has taken knocks in the past for not living up to its vast resources and geopolitical advantages; McDonald often quotes the saying that “Brazil is the country of the future and always will be.” So, as a failed “country of the future” there should be a lot to say about the country’s future. We never get much of a sense of that. There are vivid details of the beautiful settings from Rio’s dramatic hills to the big cities’ gang-controlled slums (the great film City of God is referenced heavily) to the majesty of the Amazon. It’s all there, as is capoeira, and samba, and football. But, you could still rewrite it into the US without any significant alterations to the plot. It all feels a bit like window-dressing. I guess I wanted something epic on a world politics level in the same way that River of Gods was.

I feel like I’m doing the thing again where I spend my whole review complaining about a book I really liked. There’s a ton of fun action here, the setting is cool, and there’s some high-level existentialist quantum-physical sf stuff before it’s all said and done. I enjoyed this book a lot, and it’s my clear favorite of the three books I read published in 2006 (the others being Rainbow’s End and Nova Swing). It’s just overshadowed by some of the other landmark novels of the decade, including McDonald’s own.

Grade: B+

2007 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – PAN’S LABYRINTH

2012-01-20T06:30:00.000-08:00

The 2007 Long Form nominees are probably the finest class the Hugos ever had. This is the first time I’d take the Hugo film nominees over the Oscar nominees. It’s great that Scorcese finally got an Oscar, but The Departed is not his best film, and if you want a brilliant and twisty tale about identity, I’d go with The Prestige first. The best foreign language film about conflict in the ‘40s might have been Letters from Iwo Jima…but Pan’s Labyrinth is a lot more original. I didn’t see Babel, but I’ve heard it’s a ridiculously depressing tale by a Mexican director, and I doubt it’s as good as Children of Men..also a depressing film by a Mexican director. Little Miss Sunshine may be quirky and fun, but it can’t be as quirky A Scanner Darkly, though drug-induced paranoia isn’t half as freaky as child beauty pageants. And, who needs a meditation on the ambiguous duties of the modern British monarchy like The Queen, when you can just cheer for blowing up the British government in V for Vendetta? It’s an across-the-board sweep!

It’s also interesting that we had three dystopias and a fantasy set in the real-world dystopia of fascist-controlled Spain. It’s a dark set of movies, and Pan’s Labyrinth is a real contender for darkest of all. In 1944, a young girl named Ofelia moves in with her new stepfather at an isolated estate in Spain. Ofelia’s mother is pregnant, and her new stepfather is a monstrous captain in the fascist military that has seized control of the country in a long Civil War. The Captain is rooting out one of the last bands of resistance fighters, and much of the movie is concerned with this fight. Ofelia’s best friend in the household, a servant woman named Mercedes, is in love with one of the resistance fighters and secretly aiding them.

Ofelia, horrified by her stepfather and neglected by her mother, discovers/retreats into a fantasy world that she reaches through a labyrinth on the estate. She meets an ancient faun who tells her that she is a lost princess from a fantasy kingdom, and after she completes three tasks, she can return there. The tasks pit Ofelia against funky cgi creatures. At first, her adventures cause some slight friction with her family as she disappears and returns covered in muck, but they seem far removed from the violent conflicts of the region. Slowly, however, they force Ofelia to respond to and confront her stepfather’s cruelties.

I can’t say that I liked this film better than Children of Men or The Prestige, but I do think it’s a fitting winner because it’s essentially about the politics and ethics of fantasy. The film is the brainchild or director/writer Guillermo del Toro, who made some mainstream genre films for the US, including the Hellboy movies. Del Toro grew up steeped in comics and fantasy, and his works are all very much in that world. He’s kind of a fanboy. He also has an incredible imagination, and his designs for some of the creatures are what first captured attention for this film (see the trailer for how).

Guillermo del Toro is as familiar as anyone with old accusations that genre fiction is escapist, and somehow, therefore, less worthy than realistic fiction. Pan’s Labyrinth is a powerful statement on this subject (mush like Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which came out a few months later), as we see the importance of escapism in Ofelia’s life, as well as the role that fantasy eventually plays in undermining the captain. It’s a sharp and personal testimonial from del Toro, wrapped up in a beautiful and affecting package. The Hugos could hardly go wrong with this set of nominees, but I’m especially happy with this result.

Grade: A-

2007 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Short Form – “The Girl in the Fireplace,” DOCTOR WHO

2012-01-18T09:01:00.000-08:00

The Doctor Who reboot wins this category for the second year straight in what’s becoming something of a tradition. For its second season, most of the cast stays in place, but the Doctor “regenerates” from Christopher Eccleston to David Tennant. I mentioned before that I wasn’t a fan of Eccleston’s performance. Well, I think Tennant is brilliant in the role, and that alone makes this season a significant step up.

Once again, the season received three of the five nominations in this category (it’s received two or three of five in every year of its existence). So, on to the Whominees! ….sorry….

“School Reunion”: In the present day, the Doctor goes undercover at a school that is brainwashing British children into supercomputers to control the universe. As weird as that sentence sounds, this is a very generic Who plot, and Anthony Stewart Head is somewhat wasted as the alien headmaster. The real attraction here is the return of (the late *sob*) Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, a long-running and popular companion of the Doctor from the ‘70s incarnation of the show. This causes all sorts of jealousy between current companion Rose and Sarah Jane and prompts several conversations about exactly why the Doctor abandons his companions every couple of years and never mentions them again. The obvious answer is that actresses/producers want to move on, but this episode manages to use the old conceit to enrich the characters. There really is some good development there, and the reunion is very welcome. It’s too bad the damn monster-of-the-week plot has to get in the way.

“Army of Ghosts”/“Doomsday”: The two-part season finale takes us back to contemporary England, where ghosts start wandering around the planet on a set schedule. The Doctor spends most of the first episode trying to puzzle this out, and runs across a secret government organization called Torchwood. Turns out the ghosts are harbingers of an invasion from another dimension. Meanwhile, Rose and her mum have some mother/daughter class tension that feels real enough to be a bit annoying. Then things get really crazy in the second episode. Torchwood comes off as comically evil (and the episode should lose points for inspiring the mediocre-to-bad spin-off as well), and the ending is pretty melodramatic (and it cheats!), but the episodes are pretty fun. Russell T. Davies goes right up to the edge of ridiculousness with his action finale one-upsmanship, but he doesn’t quite go over that edge until season three’s finale.

“The Girl in the Fireplace”: And, once again, the Steven Moffat script for the year wins the big prize. The Doctor finds himself on a brokedown spaceship that is using all of its energies to open a variety of windows into the life of Madame de Pompadour, the intelligent and beautiful mistress of King Louis XV of eighteenth-century France. The ship has clockwork robots that dress as creepy French aristocrats and harass Madame de Pompadour, hiding under her bed and generally acting scary and planning to harvest organs. The Doctor jumps into various parts of her life to save her from them, and she falls in love with him. I thought it might dilute the episode somewhat that Moffat has gone back to the “Doctor meets someone as a child then adult” well a couple of times in his own run on the show, but this episode isn’t about that aspect nearly as much as it is about the Doctor’s loneliness, and the bizarre temporal maze of the spaceship. It’s quirky, fun, and mindbending like all the best Who, but it also manages some character development for the Doctor and some real poignancy.

So, overall, it’s a significant improvement over season one. The production is much more self-assured, and Tennant brings a ton of charisma to the roll, without losing any of the nuances (like the hints of sadness and fury) that Eccleston brought to the character. There are a couple of really terrible episodes: the deadly dull “Idiot’s Lantern” and “Fear Her,” as well as the much-hated “Love and Monsters” (I kind of like it, but it really does have some bizarre/awful moments). These episodes bring it down some, but the rest of the season is quite strong, and having a finale that’s only mostly insane rather than completely bonkers (like seasons three and four) helps to compensate somewhat.

Grades: “School Reunion” B+
“The Girl in the Fireplace” A
“Army of Ghosts/Doomsday” A-

Season 2 Overall B+

2007 Hugo and Locus SF – RAINBOWS END by Vernor Vinge

2012-01-15T20:09:00.000-08:00

Near-future sf is tricky business. It’s hard to spot the right trends, and it’s easy to over-estimate the pace of technological change. My past encounters with Vinge have been space operas tens of thousands of years in the future. In this entry, he switches gears and gives us a 2025 wherein pretty much every bit of preliminary research circa 2006 pays off to make a very different world. Today, if you watch your average thirty-something try to text, then watch your average twenty-something do the same, you’ll notice a pretty dramatic difference. That is a testimony to how quickly younger generations can adapt to new technological trends. On the other hand, we’re talking about texting here. I know there are people who think twitter solely responsible for the downfall of autocracies across the globe, but, in many ways, incredible advances in computing power and connectivity have led to only superficial changes in society. However, I come here not to judge Vinge as a futurist (I’m pretty sure he blows it, but I think that's been my verdict on every near-future novel after Stand on Zanzibar), but as a thrice-winner of the Hugo for best novel.

In Vinge’s future, there are “wearable” computers that plug people into global networks. You can interface visually through special contact lenses, and even overlay visuals onto the real world to create “augmented realities.” Vinge does a great job looking at some of the cultural implications of this. Many people live in fantasy worlds, from Discworld to MiddleEarth to RowlingSpielberg (I'm not sure I get the connection there) to the fictional bibliophilic fantasy world of Jerzy Hacek to the Pokemon-like Scooch-a-mout. Hackers can also control interfaces and hitchhike on users from worlds away. For a point of view character, Vinge uses a great new twist on Rip Van Winkle. Since 2010, famous poet Robert Gu has suffered from Alzheimers. A cure is administered, and Gu returns to this new world. He’s so far behind that he has to go back to high school, and there he hangs out with his granddaughter Miri, a boy named Juan Orozco, and a few fellow senior citizens. They all get roped into a massive international conspiracy involving the Great Powers and experimental mind control.

Mind control is an odd choice for Vinge. He used it in his last Hugo winner, and it’s also been popular in a few other sf entries (a lot of Whedon’s later material; hey, I just rewatched Serenity the same day I finished this novel). I guess it’s a natural outgrowth of our greater understanding of the human brain, and another way to look at issues of free will. I just think the timing is odd. I’d think the lesson of the ‘00s is not “beware new technology and mind control,” but rather “mind control isn’t necessary because people will still do extreme violent things for the old motivators: nationalism and religion.” Vinge does comment on this latter theme as well though – Vinge’s world is a place where weapons of mass destruction are far too easy to obtain, and even small extremist groups must be feared. Actually, now that I think about it, mind control is less of a theme in this novel, and more of a MacGuffin.

The setting is genuinely fun and intriguing, even if it is a bit hard to buy for less than two decades (I’ll be sure to post a retraction of this review in 2025 if I’m proved wrong). The characters are less exciting. There’s a good start with Robert Gu – he was a cruel but talented man before alzheimers, buy now it’s no longer clear if he is as cruel or as talented. That said, he’s still a cog in Vinge’s plot more than he’s an independent character – and he’s by far the most developed of them all. The rest of the characters fall very flat, and Vinge’s teenagers feel like adolescents. And there’s a particularly important character named Rabbit whose character is never really explained, and yet it’s also not as mysterious as it could have been as it seem to rely on an old cyberpunk trope (and the characters basically say as much). Rabbit is supposed to be a trickster character, but he’s not quite convincing or interesting enough. The plot is even worse than the characters. There’s the MacGuffin, and characters are manipulated by omnipotent hackers into running around looking for it. The entire second half of the book is a repetitive sequence in the UCSD library, that involves a lot of telling and not much showing. We’re back to what annoyed me so much about A Deepness in the Sky.

At least the library setting looks cool and science fictiony:

There’s also something very farcical about the plot – this novel actually feels like Vinge trying to write a Neal Stephenson-style action-comedy, and the book is poorer for the comparison. The humor is more forced than Stephenson’s, the action’s duller, and the ideas just aren’t as sharp or interesting. I’ve also mentioned accessibility issues with the past two Vinge winners. In the ‘00s as a whole, the Hugos have gone to books pitched at broader audiences than ever before…but this is the exception. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone not very well versed in sf ideas.

There’s a solid start here, especially with Gu and the wearables, but I wasn’t as engrossed by the final product as I could have been.

Grade: B

2006 Saturn SF – CHILDREN OF MEN

2012-01-13T09:36:00.000-08:00

I discussed the ‘70s filmic obsession with environmental collapse and dystopia at length. It kind of feels like it’s due for a comeback. The Green Revolution made things look a lot better, but we’re still headed towards 10 billion people and we’re increasingly butting up against the limits of water, soil, and energy. Children of Men is a great way to bring it back, as Alfonso Cuaron’s adaptation of a PD James’ novel is the finest entry in the genre yet made.

It’s 2027, and, for some unknown reason, no children have been born since 2009. In the meantime, the world has fallen apart due to warfare and terrorism. Britain is relatively stable, but immigrants have flooded in from the world’s warzones, and a fascist government has created brutal immigrant camps. Large numbers of refugees sit in cages on the streets with armed guards. As in Soylent Green, there are advertisements for commercial suicide-assistance (“Quietus: You Decide When”). Like all great sf, the film really is a commentary on our own world of terrorism and intolerance. The film opens with a bombing and then takes us on a tour of a dilapidated London with our point-of-view character, Theo Faron (Clive Owen).

Theo is contacted by his ex-wife (Julianne Moore) to help escort a young refugee woman named Kee safely out of England. Things go wrong, and, when Theo learns that Kee is nine-months pregnant, he must try to protect her himself.

He doesn’t make a lot of films, but I think Cuaron might be the finest working director. He takes what could be a standard, depressing dystopia and brings it to life in a way that makes it impossible to look away. He works in several long tracking shots that put the viewer in this world. Without cuts to distance the viewer, it feels like POV work. You’re there, looking over Clive Owen’s shoulder. These shots are made all the more impressive by the fact that they tend to take place during action scenes or large crowd scenes. There’s a near five minute shot filmed from inside a car as it’s ambushed and attacked by a group of thugs. It’s technically amazing and completely gripping.

On top of all of this, the film is quite beautiful. The color palette is bleak and gorgeous at the same time, and Cuaron finds all sorts of odd juxtapositions. Theo’s cousin works for a government program attempting to save the world’s great artworks, and Cuaron stages a surreal dinner scene in front of Picasso’s Guernica. These flashes of bleak beauty suit the film’s message, which is hopeful, despite the horrors depicted.

This movie is just plain brilliant. The only thing I can say against it, is that it’s so good, so real and dark, that it can be damn hard to watch. It ends with an extended battle in a refugee camp, and by the time it's over, I’m usually emotionally worn out.

Grade: A

2006 World Fantasy Award – KAFKA ON THE SHORE by Haruki Murakami

2012-01-10T18:25:00.000-08:00

I was wavering a bit way back when I decided to include the WFA winners, and I'm pretty sure that the inclusion of this book on the list is what decided the matter in the end. Haruki Murakami is a fantastic Japanese writer who creates metaphorical stories about lost souls in the modern world. Some people might compare his work to magical realism, but Murakami's magic is less subtle and often feels more sinister.

Murakami tells two parallel and related stories. The first is that of the fifteen year old Kafka, who runs away from his home and oppressive father in Tokyo and comes to live in a small private reserach library in Takamatsu. He falls in love with the distant librarian Miss Saeki and also grows close to a hermaphrodite named Oshima. In the other story, a mentally handicapped man named Nakata has the ability to talk to cats. He helps people in his neighborhood find lost cats by asking around for them, but one such quest exposes him to a horrific ritual that leads to a murder. Nakata then heads off on a mysterious quest with a curious but decidedly unintellectual truck driver named Hoshino.

There are some very surreal scenes along the way, including an extended sequence with Colonel Sanders as a spirit guide. There are also several pairings and twinnings rich with metaphor (Kafka's lost sister, his father, and the connections between Nakata and Kafka, or Nakata and Miss Saeki) and it all leads to a timeless world on the edge of reality. It's an evocative but highly readable novel that's also an exciting (but perhaps unsolvable) puzzle.

Grade: A

2006 Locus Fantasy and BFS - ANANSI BOYS by Neil Gaiman

2012-01-08T22:16:00.000-08:00

Oh man, is this blog still going? If you're still out there, we're in the home stretch folks.

Anansi Boys was actually withdrawn from Hugo competition by the author. Based on the nominations it received, it might have given Spin a run for its money, and Gaiman might have racked up another novel Hugo. It's nice of him to share the wealth, and, considering that this is a much lighter read than American Gods (and that Gaiman had another novel Hugo coming before the end of the decade), it was probably for the best.

In fact, Anansi Boys almost feels like a discarded subplot from American Gods; it shares a character in Mr. Nancy, who is actually the African trickster spider-god Anansi. At the beginning of the novel, Anansi dies, and his son, Londoner "Fat Charlie" Nancy goes to the funeral. As a result, he meets his brother, the current incarnation of Spider, and (remember, this is a Neil Gaiman novel) gets drawn into a mythical world of gods and mischief.

Gaiman goes for a much lighter mood in this novel than many of his others (outside of Good Omens), and it almost had the feel of Tom Robbins or Douglas Adams...without the virtues of their best novels. In fact, this novel was a little *too* lightly comic. Tricksters walk a fine line between clever and annoying, and Spider ends up on the wrong side of the line quite a bit. So, not my favorite Gaiman book, though still fun.

Grade: B-

2006 Hugo for Dramatic Pres., Short Form – “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances,” DOCTOR WHO

2011-12-22T22:17:00.000-08:00

The original Doctor Who ran on BBC from 1963-1989. The premise, if you’re somehow unfamiliar with it, is that an alien Time Lord steals a time machine, called the TARDIS (forever stuck in its camouflage as a 1960s London police box) and travels randomly through space and time with various companions. When an actor wants to retire, the Doctor “regenerates” into a new body with a slightly different personality. It was originally conceived as an educational children’s show with alternating history lessons (travels to the past) and science lessons (sf stories), but the producers quickly dropped that premise when campy adventure stories (usually involving the alien-mutant-cyborg Daleks) garnered big ratings. The show ran forever, and became iconic in the UK. As I understand it, Doctor Who in the UK is a lot like Star Trek in the US – pretty much everyone watched it at some point as a kid and gets the basic references, but fandom is considered a sure sign of extreme geekiness. From my internet experiences, I’d say that Trekkies have nothing on hardcore British Who fans.

Also, camp. The show operated on cheap BBC budgets, and us full of campy effects and overacting. This is what many people love about the show, but it’s a real challenge to any modern version. A 1996 revival coproduced by Fox tried to decampify the show and failed miserably. Their only success was hiring Paul McGann to play the Doctor. Russell T. Davies produced this 2005 revival, now past its sixth season, and he does a decent job making the show modern, integrating some of the season arc and character arc formats of Buffy for instance, while keeping some classic elements (even, occasionally, veering into embarrassing camp).

This is the first time ever that Doctor Who received a Hugo nomination. I guess that’s not all that surprising – classic Who was shown too inconsistently on PBS for the show to gain a solid US fan base, even among WorldCon types – but I’m still surprised the likes of "City of Death," a classic episode written by Douglas Adams, didn’t get a nod. Even if WorldCon hadn’t created a Short Form category, I think some episodes of the revival would have won the Dramatic Pres. Hugo. The first season of the revival, starring Christopher Eccleston, got three episodes nominated and beat out the hugely popular Battlestar Galactica.

First, the other nominated episodes: “Dalek” is the last good episode starring the Doctor’s most arch-nemesii fascist cyborgs. The premise of the new series is that the Time Lords and Daleks have wiped each other out in a massive “Time War.” In this episode, the Doctor meets the “last surviving Dalek” (so far…) in the collection of an eccentric American billionaire in 2012 (the distant future!), which makes for a fairly tense confrontation. It nicely avoids all of the excesses of many Dalek episodes and actually manages to ask some decent moral questions about how the Doctor should deal with a terrible foe that’s been laid low.

“Father’s Day” was written by Paul Cornell, a fan favorite, and it deals with the consequences of wanton timestream altering. The Doctor changes history in almost every episode, but this time his companion tries to alter her own past by saving her father in front of her own eyes and creates a wound in time. Everyone around ends up hunted by creatures in a weird time loop. The soundtrack sounds ridiculously cheap, and the monsters are some pretty bad cgi (though the design is interesting), but it’s still a very strong episode. The key is that it’s character-centered – most of the episode is taken up by characters chatting while holed up in a cathedral. It also adds a great deal of depth to the family of the Doctor’s new companion, Rose – something that the classic series never bothered with.

Finally, the two-part winner: “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances.” Of course, Steven Moffat’s first Doctor Who episode wins a Hugo. As usual with Moffat, there’s a lot going on here; the episode introduces rogue time agent Captain Jack Harkness from the 31st century, who leads the Doctor and Rose to London during the Blitz. Once there, they meet a group of street urchins who take advantage of the blitz to find food, and they discover a weird alien plague that possesses people then makes them grow a gas mask over their face and wander around saying “are you my Mommy?” Yes, creepy. It ends with a surprisingly redemptive moment that is a nice change of pace in what’s a fairly bleak season and really pushes the episode to the best of the season.

As for the season overall, it has its ups and downs, but it’s generally pretty strong. As I mentioned, some of the cgi is dodgy, and the music can be quite awful (recorded with a lone Casio?), but the scripts are solid, and the increased character focus and inter-episode continuity are welcome improvements on the original series. As for Christopher Eccleston, I think fan consensus is that he’s not as good as his successor, but he did a great job at the time. I, on the other hand, actively dislike him. He’s probably one of my least favorite Doctors. Eccleston plays the Doctor as manic, cranky, and he wears a broad grin at odd times. Overall, these choices make the Doctor a bit edgier and more alien, which I appreciate on an intellectual level, but find off-putting in practice. I can’t say that Eccleston played the part wrong; I just didn’t particularly like it personally. And that drags the season down a bit for me.

Grades: Dalek: B+
Father’s Day: A-
Empty Child/Doctor Dances: A-

Season 1 Overall: B

And now...I'm on a break for a week or two.
Happy Holidays!

2006 Locus SF – ACCELERANDO by Charles Stross

2011-12-21T06:59:00.000-08:00

Am I really supposed to take this singularity thing seriously? Really? Advanced AIs and a proposal to Von Neumann factory the moon out of existence, set in the 2010s? Like theology, the sort of techno-optimism that proponents of singularity back is fun to talk about, but it can quickly and effortlessly segue into the ridiculous. Stross’s saving grace is that he doesn’t seem to take the singularity seriously either. I get the impression that he is a believer, but this novel is about 30% serious speculation and 70% running wild with speculative concepts. I do like that Accelerando embraces the ridiculous. I just wish it had embraced plot and character with equal fervor.

This is especially true in the first part, where we have at least some contemporary reference points to ground us. The novel begins with Manfred Macx, a man filled to the brim with tech ideas, but, due to a general dislike of wealth, he usually gives them away to make other people rich. He also has a lot of conflicts with his dominatrix/wife Pamela. He helps to kick off the rapid push towards singularity by sending software copies of lobster brains that have collectively achieved intelligence into space. From there, we get this accelerating technology developing through singularity. Stross occasionally interjects with a summation of the latest changes; by the 2030s, the solar system and the human lifecycle begin to become unrecognizable. From there we get a generational epic. Manfred’s daughter Amber explores an alien wormhole network, his grandson Sirhan works with other family members to try to find an independent niche in the new solar system, copies of the original generation pop up, and the family robocat, Aineko, has a fairly big role to play in everything.

Where does all this wacky speculation leave character and plot? Nowhere to be found, really, as might be fairly obvious from that vain stab at summarizing them. Manfred has some presence (though even he’s straight out of a Warren Ellis comic). Everyone is either so dull, on the one hand, or so wild unpredictable, on the other, that I couldn’t really tell you anything about them. The fact that there’s no plot is underlined by the fact that there’s no end. Maybe the sequel Glasshouse carries things to a more satisfying conclusion, but this novel just peters out.

Also, going back to our old accessibility discussion, this book . . . no. Not at all. Stross throws out concepts at a dizzying speed, and he rarely stops to explain them. Do you know what a Von Neumann machine is? A Matrioshka brain? I did, but I barely kept up. I don’t really see the reason to not define terms like these. One of the great things about sf is the “sense of wonder,” and I guess that’s what Stross is shooting for with this assault of Big Ideas. However, Big Ideas have dimishing returns, as far as I’m concerned, and the Idea-per-page highwire act in this book got boring for me by the mid-point. When the characters spend all of their time discussing how much computing power there is in the solar system and how very impressive that is, it’s hard to care about anything.

A whole lot of writers in this decade, and, from what I’ve seen, Stross may be the worst offender, are working to make science fiction a more insular conversation. If you don’t have a solid grounding in foundational texts and you don’t follow the right science news sites, don’t bother showing up. And people wonder why readers are turning to fantasy and steampunk?

So, if you are the type of reader who’s up-to-date on sf terms and concepts, especially relating to the singularity, and you’re more interested in Big Ideas and being amused than plot and character, I think you’ll have a great time with this book. Obviously, lots of readers have. Otherwise, go nowhere near it.

Grade: C+

2006 Clarke and 2005 BSFA – AIR by Geoff Ryman

2011-12-19T08:23:00.000-08:00

The last time I read Ryman (1989’s The Child Garden), I enjoyed the work quite a bit, but I was somewhat put off by his combination of a very sincere and warm humanism with bleak subject matter. Well, I have much the same to say about Air.

In 2020, the world is prepared to install a global wireless system that links directly into people’s minds, called “Air.” It sounds like a pretty great technological development, but when it comes to some of the more isolated areas in the world, areas like Ryman’s fictional central Asian republic of Karzistan, where villagers have little exposure to tv, let alone the internet-in-the-brain, the people are not ready. The first test is disastrous, leading to many deaths throughout rural Karzistan, including two in Kizuldah, the village that Ryman focuses on. Chung Mae is a middle aged fashion consultant in the village, and she gets trapped in Air during the test and has one of the test’s victims fused into her brain. But, she comes out of the experience determined to prepare her fellow villagers for the changes to come. A variety of forces within the village oppose her at different turns, due to petty jealousies and some controversial behavior on her part, but she continues to succeed with big heapings of peasant pluck.

In this era of expanding internet and globalization, it’s certainly a timely story, and Ryman has a lot of fascinating ideas on the subject. It’s a great topic for a book, and Ryman’s heroic humanism is well-suited to the setting – we see each of the villagers' hidden strengths and flaws, and even when they seem to be acting incredibly stupidly or viciously, Ryman gives us believable and even relatable motives for their actions. On that level, the novel works quite well.

The village does feel a little too perfect perhaps, and I do suspect that Ryman oversells central Asian isolation, if only by a little. I don’t think I’d call the book patronizing, but it can get…cutesy. Ryman also can’t help but get into some surrealistic and absurd imagery. It’s dialed way back from The Child Garden, but it’s still there (especially in one very bizarre plotline that I won’t give away), and it clashed with the social realism of the setting and its problems. Maybe Ryman’s shooting for magical realism, but the balance just doesn’t seem right, even if that’s case.

Still, it’s a well-written book with intriguing and relevant themes, and Chung Mae is a fascinating character. There’s a lot to recommend the book, I just felt like there was some clutter (and a pretty slow beginning to boot).

Grade: B

2006 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – SERENITY

2011-12-15T19:00:00.000-08:00

Firefly ended with a whimper in December 2002 when Fox finally broadcast the pilot. Yippee. Just in time. The last episode produced was a very well-made, tense episode written and directed by Joss Whedon and full of existentialist philosophy. It’s good, but not much of an ending, especially since a guest star steals most of the scenes from the regular cast. Luckily, Firefly did well enough on DVD that Universal gave Whedon the chance to make a feature length film that wraps things up quite nicely.

The differences from the regular series are rather dramatic. The lighting is better, the effects are superior, and the stakes are higher. Generally, all of these changes are for the better…though there’s now sound in space battles. The film dives into the central unresolved plotline of the series: what exactly has the Alliance government done to the girl River, and what will be her and her brother’s fates as runaways from the powerful interplanetary government. The government hires an assassin (the excellent Chiwetel Ejiofor) to track River down, and he draws her out by triggering her to beat up a bar full of people. Mal and the Serenity crew go on the run, and stumble upon a secret colony and hints about the origins of the brutal, mindless Reavers that plague space. It’s fast-paced and full of action. On its own, the fact that character moments tend to be overwhelmed by the fighting and the chasing and the shooting and the stabbing would be a problem. But, as the pay-off of an entire season of a character-focused show, it’s perfect.

So, it’s a great capstone. I know a lot of people who have watched the film without the show and enjoyed it find, but I think it comes off best as an over-sized, bigger-than-television series finale for a show that clearly deserved one. It’s not perfect – there are a few clichéd absurdities (people always live long enough to give a dying speech; an impossible to reach piece of equipment straight out of Galaxy Quest), but I found them pretty easy to overlook. My only real problem with Serenity is that there’s no more material with these characters (well, except for some comics).

Grade: A

2006 Nebula - SEEKER by Jack McDevitt

2011-12-14T09:52:00.000-08:00

It says a lot that I often feel obligated to explore the motives of the SFWA committee that chooses the Nebula winner. In this case, we have a novel that’s about as standard as could be, and I’m tempted to say that the SFWA is rewarding an older author for being a good member of the community…

Seeker is the third novel following the adventures of daring space archaeologist Alex Benedict. It's narrated by his assistant, interstellar pilot Chase Kopath (I'm not sure if she narrates the other novels or not). Alex and Chase are space archaeologists and artifact dealers. They discover a plastic cup that may be a relic of a 9000 year old lost colony, and Chase has to follow a number of leads to track the cup back to its origin - the colony ship Seeker. If Alex and Chase can find the colony, they'll make a fortune, but along the way they must contend with rival archaeologists, the family of the survey team that found the cup and hid it existence, the brutish robber who last possessed the cup, and the telepathic alien "mutes" who unwittingly have a important clue.

From top to bottom, this novel just screams genre. There's the simple, propulsive prose with some noir stylings. There's the formulaic, linear plot, in which each encounter yields a clue that advances the investigation. There are the required action scenes, that exist for no particular plot reasons. There are mysterious sub-plots, and even over-the-top villains, whose violent tendencies clash a bit with their staid occupations and idealistic aims. The setting is simple but rich with possibilities for action and mystery stories; just take an interstellar republic 10,000 years or so in the future, add simple faster-the-light travel, and stir in an alien race and lots of artifacts. It's really right out of the golden age. And, you've seen all of the plot elements before too. It's genre fiction through and through.

And, there's nothing wrong with that. The plot is interesting enough (though maybe a bit too predictable), and who doesn’t enjoy the archaeologist-adventurer character? And, it’s got a great structure, where each episode in the plot moves the mystery forward and adds a new hook. On the other hand, the characters are dull as bricks. Alex is a cipher here, Chase is generic, the villains are awful and inexplicable, and the ancillary characters are straight out of the stock genre file. There isn’t much in the way of ideas either. We get some discussion of Earth’s dicey political fate over the millennia to come, and the utopianism of the lost colony adds a little spice. Meanwhile, we also get some simplistic demonization of cultural protection movements in the artifact trade…which seems like a big fight to pick in an adventure novel.

All in all, I was entertained, but I’ve come to expect more from these award winners. This might have felt newer sometime before Gateway…but that was thirty years earlier. I had some issues with Spin, but it’s operating on a whole other level. The Nebula slate this year (which is, unusually, completely different from the Hugo slate) looks pretty thin anyway, so I guess I'm glad McDevitt got the recognition.

Grade: B-

2006 Hugo – SPIN by Robert Charles Wilson

2011-12-11T16:31:00.001-08:00

There’s a recent trend in science fiction to push further and to go bigger that goes along with Big Ideas like singularity. Why worry about life in a thousand years, when we can imagine a billion years in the future? I have mixed feelings about this trend, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s not an approach that tends to spotlight character, which was never sf’s strong suit anyway. In Spin, however, Wilson’s come up with a very ingenious way to tell a personal story that spans three billion years.

Our narrator is Tyler Dupree. He grows up on the estate of an aerospace entrepreneur named E. D. Lawton, and hangs out with E. D.’s twin prodigies, Jason and Diane. One evening in the early twentieth century, when they’re all adolescents, the stars go out. It soon becomes clear that the Earth has been enveloped in a bubble by mysterious “hypothetical” forces. The bubble protects the Earth and slows the passage of time within, so that millions, then billions, of years begin to fly by on the outside, in a phenomenon people call “spin.” Unfortunately, this means that the sun’s death throes will destroy the Earth in decades rather than billions of years, and humanity has to contemplate its doom within a human lifespan. Jason becomes a brilliant scientist and develops plans to understand and even fight the hypotheticals. Diane joins a new strain of Christianity that devolves from neo-hippies to a millennium cult. Tyler tries to live a quiet life as a doctor, but he loves Jason, he’s in love with Diane, and he keeps being drawn into their struggles with the spin. This is my second Wilson novel…and the second one with a narrator slavishly devoted to a smarter, better, yet aloof hero. I don’t know if this is a device Wilson is overly fond of, or a personal issue for him.

There are obviously big sf ideas here. Besides the spin itself, Jason’s plans usually involve using the time differential to jumpstart technology. His coolest plan involves seeding Mars with life and seeing what a few million years of evolution can pull off. Nevertheless, it is really a character-focused story, as we spend all of our time with Jason, and we hear as much about the Lawtons’ familial disputes as we do about Martian super-technology. The problem is that I didn’t like the characters all that much. Tyler is defined almost entirely by his relationship to the Lawtons, Jason is obsessed with solving the spin to the exclusion of all else, and Diane is so damn frustrating. I have sympathy for people who are victimized by cults, but I think I’d find it a bit of a turn off. Cult-Diane treats Tyler terribly and herself even worse, and there’s nothing here to give any indication as to why the narrator is so in love with her.

So, kudos to Wilson for spotlighting character drama over Big Ideas, but, unfortunately, I enjoyed the Big Ideas a lot more than the character drama in this specific novel. I still liked it overall though.

Grade: B+

2005 Saturn – STAR WARS III: REVENGE OF THE SITH

2011-12-08T19:33:00.001-08:00

Let me start by making three points: 1) I’m glad that the Saturn Awards gave me this opportunity to discuss the Star Wars prequels, and thus round out my Star Wars coverage. As much as I complain in the following review, I am well aware that I inflicted this upon myself. 2) Lots of people, including rambling, misanthropic serial killers, have already covered what’s wrong with these movies, in incredible depth, so you might as well skip my thoughts. 3) Before you skip this, however, you should know that I got quite buzzed before rewatching/blogging this movie. I’ve had four beers, and I’m sipping brandy from here on out (“beer before liquor, you’re in the clear”! Right?) I’m not claiming that I’m blogging Sith drunk….but I kind of am. I’m “semi-live-blogging it buzzed,” at least. Also, note that I’m too drunk to care about spoilers for once.

These opening space battle shots above Coruscant are pretty darn cool…

So, yes, I think I’ve made it clear that I like the original trilogy (episodes 4-6), a not-so-controversial opinion, at least until the Ewoks show up. The prequel trilogy, which George Lucas gave us in 1999, 2002, and 2005, on the other hand, is utter crap. Again, this is not a controversial opinion. When Episode I: The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, everyone felt obliged to love it for a couple of months, then collectively realized that it was awful. To this day, I’d say it still stands as one of the worst science fiction films ever made. Three things, in particular, made it awful: 1) Comedy slapstick racist-against-Jamaicans cgi alien Jar-Jar Binks, 2) crappy child actor Darth Vader saves the day, and 3) midi-chlorians, a pseudo-sciency explanation for Jedi manipulation of the formerly-New-Age concept of the Force. There was a really cool light-sabre battle in there, and someone tried to save it with the so-called “Phantom Edit;” my personal “Phantom Edit” would probably be about 15 minutes long and would be all Qui-Gon/Darth Maul/Natalie Portman-looking-pretty. All three of the original trilogy won Hugos and Saturns; the prequel trilogy received this one Saturn and nary a Hugo nomination.

Ugh, Hayden Christensen acting is really ruining this opening space battle.

2002’s Episode II, the awesomely-named-if-it-had-been-ironic-but-it-wasn’t-so-it’s-terriblly-named Attack of the Clones was a fair sight better, and had some genuinely cool action sequences. Unfortunately, the whole thing leans rather heavily on the love story between Anakin Skywalker (Christensen) and Padme Amidala (Natalie “super-awesome-Oscar-winning-actress-clearly-slumming-it” Portman). At least one of these two is an amazing actor, but both of them come off as more wooden than a duck decoy [I’ve lived in Minnesota too long]. I blame George Lucas, who directs actors about as well as he writes dialogue (ie, not very well). After all of this, we’ve barely started on the path to episode IV. Anakin still needs to knock up his girl with twins, turn into Darth Vader, fight his teacher Obi-wan, and betray the Jedi order….which leaves a lot of ground for Episode III.

Which brings us to this film, Episode III, released in 2005. Padme is pregnant, Anakin is nervous about said pregnancy, and is being manipulated by Senator Palpatine, whom we all know to be the main villain of the whole series. Meanwhile, Anakin and his teacher, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan MacGregor, the one actor able to come out of these movies looking halfway decent) are knee-deep in the clone wars, in which a separatist alliance using slapstick-loving droids fights the Republic’s clone army, which came from some complicated and conspicuously-unresolved plot-point in the second movie. This film begins with a major battle between Anakin and Obi-Wan and separatist generals Grevious (cgi) and Dooku (Hammer Horror/LoTR alum Christopher Lee). Then, Anakin worries that his secret wife Natalie Portman will die birthing Mark Hammill and Carrie Fisher, which allows Palpatine to manipulate him.

Which is where I am in the film right now. Blah blah blah; talkie talkie. “I wanna be on the Jedi Council, wah!” whines the future Darth Vader. I guess we know where Luke “I was gonna go to Tashi Station to get some power converters, wah!” Skywalker gets it, at least.

I need more brandy.

At the time, the commentary on the Bush administration (fear leads to totalitarianism!) felt rather significant. In hindsight…not so much. Bush’s approval ratings were already in steep decline in mid-2005, and they never recovered. The one aspect of this film that made it seem more relevant than the others sort of faded away in hindsight.

I still think this is the best of the three prequels, but it does have four clear problems. None is as prevalent as the many crippling issues of Episode One or the one fatal flaw (love story fail) of Episode Two, but they add up to another failure.

There are angry drunks. There are sad drunks. Apparently, I’m a list-making drunk. On a side note, a special thanks to spell-checker for making me seem more sober.

Problem #1: Continuity. This is the nerdiest complaint, but I think it says a lot about Lucas’s lack of planning and general pandering. Why are R2-D2 and C3PO in these movies? Why is Chewbacca in this one? Their presence seems to contradict some of what we see in the original films, so why include them at all? Hint: it’s not because they further plot or character in any way.

Problem #2: Pacing: Taken individually, beyond its contribution to the Star Wars mythos, the film’s greatest sin is that it just sort of plods along. Most of what we get is foreordained by the original trilogy, so a lot of this is just filler, especially Obi-Wan’s entire second-act-dominating battle with Grevious. And then there’s that really long third-act battle between Yoda and Palpatine, which would’ve been pretty unimaginable in 1982, but looks mostly like cgi-dreck today.

Okay, switching to wine so that I don’t pass out.

Problem #3: Sad, pathetic Vader: Darth Vader is probably the most fascinating character of the original trilogy. His origin should have been very interesting, but Chistensen gives a very whiny performance that undermines the whole character. Even the dark moments – the previous movie’s Sand-Person genocide and this movie’s Jedi-child-killing – come off as moments of weakness rather than moments of rage or evil. And his journey here is all over the place as he bounces aimlessly between Palpatine and Master Samuel L. Jackson. In no way does this version of the character live up to what we saw in the original trilogy.
Of course, the worst moment has nothing to do with Christensen:
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Problem #4: Women are sad, sad, emotional trainwrecks: The original trilogy gave us one of the great female characters in sf in Princess Leia. When she’s “rescued” by Han and Luke, she immediately grabs a gun, kills a bunch of storm-troopers, and takes control of the situation. Sure, she ends up in a metal bikini in Jedi, but even then, she gets to kill Jabba and play a key role in the final mission on Endor. Meanwhile, Padme dies of… heartbreak?! Over Hayden Christensen’s Anakin???? Pathetic and insulting. This bothers me most of all.

Let me end on a positive note. The plots of the prequel trilogy are astonishingly lame, but the world that Lucas creates is pretty rich. I think it’s unintentional, but the lush, colorful, slapstciky world of the prequels ends up being a rather nice contrast to the stark authoritarian world of the original trilogy (especially if you can manage to get the non-adulterated-special-edition versions). It used to be a world of silly cgi Jar-Jars, and became a world of dirty space-bars and crappy-spaceships. In other words, the colorful, silly, kid-friendly world of the prequels can actually make the original trilogy better in contrast. Also, if you look at Genndy Tartakovsky’s prequel era cartoons, which are actually really great, mostly dialogue-free takes on the era from the creator of Samurai Jack and Powerpuff Girls, I think you really get an idea of the potential here. The world Lucas creates is a lot better than the films themselves, and it still adds to a rich mythos.

So tired….

Grades:

Phantom Menace: F

Attack of the Clones: C-

Revenge of the Sith: C-

2005 Arthur C. Clarke and Locus Fantasy – IRON COUNCIL by China Miéville

2011-12-04T19:54:00.001-08:00

I’m going to warn readers in advance that this review might dance the edge of spoilers. I’m not going to say much that you can’t get from reading the front and back cover, but Mieville writes this novel as if everything is a giant mystery. The entire first part involves a group of characters searching for a mysterious someone. Who is it? Mieville won’t say! It’s mysterious. And then, you finally discover that it’s…Judah Low, a new character. There’s a similar tease and reveal with the “Iron Council.” I think these sorts of mysteries for mystery’s sake are good examples of what’s annoyed me about Mieville’s earlier works. That said, as a whole, I liked this novel much better than the two previous novels set on the Weird world of Bas-Lag.

As I said, a group of adventurers from New Crobuzon are off in the wilderness looking for Judah Low. Among them is Judah’s lover Cutter, who exhibits some of the greatest character depth I’ve seen from Mieville so far. There’s not much more to him than his obsession with Judah, but Mieville handles that with a defter touch than I’ve seen in the previous works. Judah, in turn, is looking for the Iron Council, a revolutionary collective of former rail workers who stole the entire railroad (it’s sort of a stretch, but a fun one, and this is Bas-Lag we’re talking about). Judah can create magical golems, and he was one of the heroes of the revolution that created the Iron Council, which is narrated in the novel’s driving, exciting centerpiece. Judah left the Iron Council to connect with protest movements in New Crobuzon, but he now wants to return. Meanwhile, we also get the story of a brewing revolution in the city itself that parallels some of the history of the Paris Commune. We follow one of the revolutionaries named Ori, who has to navigate some conflicting motives from some of the movements’ leaders. Disenchanted with an ongoing war with the Tesh, and sick of the city government’s brutal oppression, the people rise up, and look to the fabled Iron Council’s return as their best hope of victory.

This is the first time that the story of a Bas-Lag novel felt big enough to match the majesty of the setting and epic enough to befit the significant page-length. Mieville is no longer dancing around the themes he cares about with obfuscated mutant bug metaphors; he’s a Marxist, and this book is about revolution. It can be heavy-handed at times, and I’m not sure I’d agree with all of Mieville’s politics, but it really does feel like THE story he’s been trying to tell. The word “history” echoes through the book, replete with all of the teleological connotations of Mieville’s beliefs – is it the inexorable expansion of industrial capitalism, represented by the octopus-like tentacles of rail, or is it the march to a workers’ utopia? Mieville uses these question as a backdrop that, most importantly, heightens the character drama, something that I felt was missing from The Scar and Perdido Street Station.

That’s not to say that this novel solves all of the problems of its predecessors. I’m not positive that Cutter and Jonah and their laconic love story, are that much richer than Bellis or Isaac. Maybe they just felt that way to me because I enjoyed the plot more. And, I did not connect to Ori, who did feel as passive and immaterial as the characters of the earlier books. The worst offender is Drogon, a susurrating vaquero. He has magical powers based on whispers, which is pretty cool, and his ranch-hand get-up adds to the vaguely western feel of portions of the book, but he doesn’t contribute much else. He arrives, makes a big splash with his power and aesthetic, and then disappears until he has a role to play at the end. It seems that Mieville has to force every bit of weirdness into Bas-Lag that he can; no need to develop the ideas into a coherent world/plot/character. I’m starting to suspect that I preferred The City & The City because the clarity and focus of the central concept forced Mieville to develop things a bit more, and maybe the same can be said about this book as well. The Revolution at the book’s core gives it a stronger structure and message than the bug hunt of Perdido Street Station or the vague unfinished quest of The Scar. I’m certainly not one to complain about a new twist on fantasy, but I have to declare Bas-Lag a slight disappointment. There’s a lot of new, but still not as much of the depth I’m looking for in fantasy world-building.

Grade: B+

2005 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Short Form – “33,” BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

2011-12-02T17:39:00.001-08:00

Following a successful SciFi Channel miniseries, this is the first episode of the ongoing remake of an early ‘80s Star Wars rip-off/cult classic. Most fans think the series went off the rail in the last season, though a vocal minority liked it from start to finish. I think I represent an even smaller minority that was never entirely smitten with a show that most would consider the decade’s finest sf on television. Whatever side of this debate you’re on, I don’t think there’s any question that “33” is a fantastic hour of television.

The Twelve Colonies (distant relatives of we humans) are recovering from a long war they fought with rebelling robot servants called cylons. Then, the cylons launch a massive sneak attack, annihilating all of the twelve homeworlds. Only about 50,000 humans survive in a small fleet of ships huddled around the titular space battleship (er, Battlestar) Galactica.

In this episode, the cylons pursue the fleet of survivors. Every time the fleet makes a faster-than-light jump, it takes the cylons exactly 33 minutes to catch up. It takes the fleet about that long to get ready between jumps…which means that everyone is pushed to their absolute limits just to tread water. Ship crews have to scramble to get the jumps ready, and fighter pilots have to fight regular rear-guard actions to help them get away. Everyone is pushed to edge of exhaustion (and sanity), which is just where this show likes to have its characters. In order to buy themselves some breathing room, the characters have to make a terrible choice (as usual). It’s an excellent introduction to the show’s themes and moods, even moreso than the preceding miniseries.

It’s easy to see why people loved the show. First of all, it looks amazing, especially considering it has only a basic cable budget. It borrows a few of the docu-style tricks from Firefly and benefits greatly from advances in computer graphics that make full cgi space battles and cylons look good. This may be the best-looking sf tv show ever. The show is full of fast-paced action, but also takes time for character moments. Mary McDonnell, Edward James Olmos, and Katee Sackhoff all deliver wonderful performances as major characters President Roslyn, Admiral Adama, and Starbuck (though after that, the cast is a lot more uneven). There are big twists, dramatic character deaths, and compelling mysteries. And, Star Trek TNG and DS9 Ronald Moore veteran brings his signature exploration of social issues (especially religion and war) to the series.

Of course, for most viewers, things went awry in the end. It’s fairly clear that the writers didn’t know all of the answers to the questions they raised, a problem that has been the downfall of great shows like The X-Files and Lost.* The big mysteries get more complicated and more bizarre over time, and the writers lean on a massive deus ex machina to not only rescue the characters, but to explain what the hell is going on. It’s amazing how many questions God and some hand-waiving can answer, but, boy, is it a lame answer.

Why was I down on the show even before it went off the rail? There’s a lot about the show I did like; the aforementioned effects, action, and plot twists kept me involved, but sometimes my netflixed DVDs would sit around for a few months unwatched. I watched the entire series…eventually. I have two issues with the series. The first is maybe a little pedantic, but I think the Zodiac mythology is a needless holdover from first series. This world is so like ours, and yet its prevented from referencing the rich history of our own world. As a result, it always feels detached, unmoored, and yet overly familiar. I would’ve preferred either a future setting or more development of this alien setting. Plus, the “search for Earth” plotline opens up a Pandora’s Box of bs in the final run of episodes. But, at least we learned that Bob Dylan songs transcend time and space.

A more serious problem with the series is the melodrama. Oh, the melodrama! There’s a fine line between high stakes character development and ridiculous highwire soap opera, and BSG dances over the line about once per episode. Everyone’s a moody raging alcoholic, primed to rebel/go into a rage/have dirty, inappropriate sex/change religions/become suicidal/betray everyone/etc at a moment’s notice. I enjoy the excitement that all this brings to the table, but there’s something to be said for subtlety. And, as the overwrought moments piled up, it’s easy to lose track of who the characters really are. The show was famous for amped up multi-part extravaganzas that CHANGED EVERYTHING a couple of times per season. These were really fun, and delivered the vast majority of the show’s best moments. But it became harder and harder to believe the eventual resets to the status quo at their conclusion. It was all kind of exhausting.

So, it was never a contender for my favorite sf tv show, but I’ll give it credit for being often entertaining, and drawing a broader audience than most space operas. It’s unfortunate that a golden age of space opera tv from the early ‘90s seemed to come to an end with BSG in 2009.

*I haven’t seen Lost, so I’m not personally attesting to that show’s downfall. I do get a general sense of dissatisfaction from the fans though. I don’t think anyone can argue that the overarching plot of The X-Files was in any way satisfying though.

Episode Grade: A

Series Grade: B

2005 Nebula – CAMOUFLAGE by Joe Haldeman

2011-11-27T15:53:00.001-08:00

An extremely resilient, shapeshifting, immortal alien evolves in a harsh interstellar environment then travels to Earth. 30,000 years ago, it landed and began to observe local life, living for thousands of years as a shark. Finally, in 1931 it comes ashore and takes human form. We follow this “changeling” over the following decades, as it takes many different human forms and comes to understand human emotions. The great cornball sci-fi question, “what is love?” is actually uttered several times in the novel, though at least Haldeman has the good sense to couch it in literary allusions. While we follow the changeling's history through the years, we also see the excavation of its ship in 2020, led by Russell Sutton, the man who raised the Titanic.

I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy this book. Maybe it’s my love of history, but I’m a sucker for the “immortal experiences key events beyond a single lifespan” gimmick. Haldeman is as good as anyone at depicting war from the soldier’s point of view, and there’s a very effective section on the Bataan Death March in the Phillippines during WWII. That said, we’ve seen this before. In fact, in this age of vampire dominance, we’ve seen it a lot. I’m also a sucker for the “team of scientists try to understand unfathomable alien artifact” gimmick, which takes up most of the rest of the novel. Again, we’ve seen it before, and we’ve seen it done better, but combining two basic plots I enjoy is probably not the recipe for a novel I’m going to hate.

It’s not necessarily the recipe for a novel that I’m going to love though. The novel starts by combing some tried-and-true formulas, but it does go off on some tangents towards the end. There’s an odd, and rather forced, love story. Haldeman introduces another, unrelated, alien called the “Chameleon,” and I know he’s trying to draw a contrast between different views of humanity, but it really just feels like the Chameleon is just there so that there can be a fight at the novel’s climax. There are extended descriptions of the elaborate lengths the Changeling has to go through to establish identities in the modern world. And, there’s a big twist that is so obvious that I was sure Haldeman was going for a fake out.

It’s a mildly entertaining, but flawed, novel. It certainly doesn’t feel like an award-winner. I think it’s fair to hold all of these award-winners up to a high standard, and to expect them to have high quality writing and bring new ideas or themes to the table; this one does not measure up. This is Haldeman’s third Nebula. Forever War is a classic in the core sf canon. Forever Peace has some major issues, but it’s asking big questions and has some new ideas. Camouflage is a workmanlike, derivative sf thriller. Once again, I have no idea where the SFWA is coming from.

Grade: C+

2005 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – THE INCREDIBLES

2011-11-26T09:20:00.001-08:00

The Incredibles is the first Pixar movie (and the first Disney movie) to win the Hugo (through three of their five previous had been nominated), the first fully animated film, and the first superhero film. The rise of computer animation over the past decade is so obvious that it’s hardly worth mentioning, and we’ve already discussed superheroic domination of the summer blockbuster. The Hugos have sort of resisted these trends in their winners, but I guess the combination proved undeniable.

Mr. Incredible, one of America’s greatest superheroes, has a series of misadventures on his way to a wedding with another superhero, Elastigirl. He saves the day, but along the way he alienates the president of his fan club by denying him a sidekick role, and he wracks up a couple of lawsuits from a prevented suicide and a train crash. This opens a pandora’s box of superhero liability, and eventually the government steps in to pay legal fees in exchange for the superhero community going into collective retirement. Years later, Incredible and Elastigirl have settled into typical suburban lives. Their daughter can turn invisible and their son is superfast, but they try to prevent their children from using their powers in order to keep their cover. Mr. Incredible is restless though, and he jumps at a chance to do a special job fighting a robot on an isolated island. He gets back into the game, commissioning a new costume, but then uncovers a supervillain’s plot that draws his whole super-family into action.

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon or a contrarian, I don’t like this movie as much as everyone else I know. Let me be clear, I like it. I like it a lot. I just don’t love it. It’s closer to the bottom of my personal Pixar rankings…which still puts it above most movies out there. I have two big problems of varying degrees of nitpickiness. Nitpickiest first: there’s a big part of me that wishes this were a Fantastic Four movie. The powers, and a lot of the set up, are straight out of the epic, genius sixties superhero-family comics of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The similarities are numerous enough to bother me (and the FF movies are awful – so unfair), but I know I should just get over this. My second problem, which I think is a more legitimate issue, is that the political message is really weird. Writer/director Brad Bird is claiming that society forces exceptional people to hide their talents, which feels a lot like a straw man to me. I don’t really see this problem in the world. The villain’s grudge is that he doesn’t have powers, and one of his threats is that he’ll distribute his magnificent inventions to the people to put them on par with people with superpowers. The inventions themselves seem to negate his grudge and keeping technology from the masses just so powered people can feel their full specialness just seems petty. I really don’t get it. I’m probably thinking about it a lot harder than I’m supposed to.

While I’m complaining about a universally beloved film, I’ll go all in and add that the animation is showing its age a bit. It looks fantastic, but the limits if the character animation and the static nature of some of the backgrounds go a long way to showing how quickly computer animation advances. It’s still dazzling and gorgeous, but more recent Pixar pics are even moreso.

Okay, now that I’ve got all that off my chest, I will say this is a very fun movie, and one of the best superhero films of all time. It does look great, despite being long-in-the-tooth in computer animation terms, and the character dynamics are interesting and rich. I would say that Eternal Sunshine should have won, and I also prefer Prisoner of Azkaban and Spider-Man 2. But these are four great films (the fifth nominee Sky Captain…not so much), so I’m not really complaining.

Grade: B+

2005 Hugo and WFA – JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL by Susanna Clarke

2011-11-20T13:39:00.001-08:00

Every now and then we get interesting little micro-trends popping up on this blog. I wouldn’t have seen this one coming, but between the Baroque Cycle and this entry, it looks like English history mega-epics are all the rage in science fiction.

I’ve complained about historical fantasy before; it’s a great idea, but many authors give us the trappings (costumes, sets, a few cameos by famous historic personages) without capturing the feel of the period or bothering to contend with the era’s culture. Clarke does not make that mistake. This novel takes place in early nineteenth-century England, and it is steeped in the literature and history of the period. The facts are accurate, even with the fantasy overlay, and the prose is light, modern, and fun while still paying tribute to the works of Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and other contemporary authors. The Duke of Wellington, Lord Byron, and Mad King George III all pop by, but they don’t overshadow the book or spout their greatest hits; they’re entertaining guest stars on the same level as much of the rest of the novel’s vast cast.

England was once a nation full of magic. For three centuries, the Raven King ruled the north with the help of arcane alliances, fairies, and his own vast powers. This golden age passed into a silver age by the fifteenth century, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, magicians are overstuffed academics who argue about magical history while avoiding anything as ungentlemanly as spells themselves. In Yorkshire, one of these scholars deigns to ask the question “why is no real magic practiced in England anymore?” He soon discovers that there is one practicing magician nearby, a grumpy recluse named Mr. Norrell. Norrell demonstrates his power in Yorkshire, than rises to fame in London with a successful resurrection and some weather manipulation to help the cause of the English Navy in the Napoleonic Wars. Mr. Norrell is paranoid that other practicing magicians might rise and steal his thunder, but one young gentleman, Jonathan Strange, is so powerful that Norrell must take him on as a student. The novel follows their rocky relationship as they argue over the dangers of dealing with fairies and reviving England’s rich magical background.

The novel covers a decade of this relationship, takes us to the battlefields of Spain and Waterloo (and briefly to a famous holiday on Lake Geneva, where many would argue science fiction was born), and to Venice. It begins as a small comedy of manners, follows a few sub-plots that appear to be tangents, then pulls everything together for an awesome, epic conclusion in the third part. I also found Clarke’s portrayal of magic (which is the fantasy equivalent of sf’s exploration of technology) particularly exciting; it’s rich in history (one of the main attractions here is the novel’s wonderful and consistent footnotes), and the mechanisms are slowly unveiled as the plot begins to coalesce. All the while, Clarke’s prose sparkles, her characters are multi-dimensional, entertaining, and compelling, and she hints at deeper issues of class, gender, race, and the philosophy of knowledge. I’ve complained about the growing page-counts of novels a couple of times this decade; well, this is the longest book yet, and I wouldn’t give up a word of it. It is a fantastic work that I’d recommend to pretty much anyone.

Grade: A

2004 Saturn – ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

2011-11-17T15:27:00.001-08:00

Charlie Kaufman is back with another surrealist exploration of universal themes – this time love and memory. Kaufman also shoes his genius at choosing his collaborators again. Being John Malkovich was the feature debut of one of the greatest music video directors of all time: Spike Jonze. This is the second feature by another of the greatest music video directors of all time: Michel Gondry.

The science fiction conceit is that Lacuna, Inc. has developed a
technology which can erase people’s memories. It’s often used to deal with heartbreak. The film seems very non-linear, but the structure is actually a lot simpler than it appears: other than a framing device in the “present,” most of the film takes place linearly while Joel (Jim Carrey) has his memories of ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) erased. Much of the movie takes place in Joel’s memories, and Gondry gets to use a variety of exciting visual techniques (mostly just lighting, though there’s also some play with the sets and some cgi) to portray the scenes as memories and to represent their erasing. Along the way, we see the memory erasing technicians and their own messy lives. The cast is incredibly deep with Tom Wilkinson as the head of Lacuna and a sf trifecta of Bruce Banner, Mary Jane Watson, and Frodo Baggins (Mark Ruffalo, Kirtsen Dunst, and Elijah Wood) as his employees.

The visuals are great, and the film’s structure is a puzzle that’s fun and intriguing without ever becoming frustrating. The performances are wonderful. Kate Winslet is one of the greatest working actresses, and she effortlessly slips into a quirky character. Clementine is bursting with spontaneity (including ever-changing hair colors), but she’s not the typical Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She has very real and serious problems. Carrey has garnered acclaim for a lot of his performances, starting with The Truman Show, but this is the first movie where I’ve really loved him as an actor. Most importantly, the relationship feels as real as any I’ve ever seen in a movie. The film manages to capture the feeling of falling in love, and the feeling of a relationship falling apart…and the odd structure makes this strangely redemptive without ever coming close to cheese.

This is one of the greatest and most innovative sf films out there. It uses a speculative device to get at core, universal emotions. The Incredibles is good fun, but I think the WorldCon voters blew it on this one, and again, Saturn’s eclecticism keeps things interesting.

Grade: A

2004 Arthur C. Clarke Award – THE BAROQUE CYCLE: QUICKSILVER, 2005 Locus – THE BAROQUE CYCLE: THE CONFUSION and THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD by Neal Stephenson

2011-11-15T15:22:00.001-08:00

This one takes some explaining. The Baroque Cycle is a massive work by NealStephenson – a sort of prequel to his information-opus Cyptonomicon thatfocuses on several of the characters’ ancestors in the late seventeenth andearly eighteenth centuries. Together,The Baroque Cycle forms one 2600 page story, though it was published as threeseparate novels at six-month intervals (and then later as eight smallernovels). The first entry, Quicksilver,won the Clarke. It finished third in theLocus voting in 2004, but the final two-thirds were both eligible in the nextyear, and they won as a single unit. Thefirst novel, Quicksilver, does start slow, so I can see why the Locus voterspassed it by, though it does get quite good after 300 pages or so. The second novel, The Confusion, is a work ofgenius. The third novel overstays itswelcome (after reading for thousands of pages, I found myself yelling “get on withit already!” during the home stretch). Really, The Baroque Cycle should be seen as one work, so it is fittingthat Locus grouped them together (and I’m doing the same).

So, 2600 pages, huh? The Baroque Cycle is daunting, and at the end, it’s a fairly uneven work. Fundamentally, it’s about the dispute betweenLeibniz and Newton over who invented Calculus. This was a real fight between two genius men who were also crucialpolitical figures in British history – part of the dispute is about science andthe politics of science, but it also involves questions of scientific professionalization, struggles over the British crown, the birth of high finance, the prehistory ofinformation technology, and the nature of God and the cosmos.

If you groaned or gave a weary sigh during any part of thatdescription, run away now. Run as fastand as far from these novels as you can. However, if you’re at least mildly intrigued by a 2600 page novel ofscientific disputes and political intrigue, there’s a decent chance that youwill enjoy yourself here. Stephensonlivens things up with the picaresque hero Jack Shaftoe. In contrast to the Stephenson’s inventedscientist character, Daniel Waterhouse, Jack is an uneducated clown who haswild, swashbuckling adventures across the globe. He starts out as a mercenary and vagabond inQuicksilver, then spends most of The Confusion as a pirate. Bridging the two stories is Eliza, abeautiful young woman who goes from harem slave to aristocrat over thedecades-long story, and sponsors schemes in the criminal, political, scientificand financial world that the Cycle so masterfully jumps between (and oftencombines!)

We follow these three characters for most of the novel fromtheir youths in the 1660s to 1714 (the Hannoverian succession for those keepingscore at home). Waterhouse letsStephenson explore the scientific revolution and England’s burgeoning RoyalSociety, and especially its superstars, Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton. He uses Jack Shaftoe to delve into theunderworld and to tell a series of comic adventure stories. Eliza takes us into the worlds of royalcourts and early modern trade and finance.

As history, it’s generally accurate and ratheringenuous. Several historical charactersmake cameos or play large roles, including several kings, queens, andscientists (a young Ben Franklin even pops in early on). Stephenson has his facts straight and morethan once I would look up a particularly unlikely-seeming event or meeting andfind that it really did happen more or less as Stephenson described. There is some artistic license taken –Stephenson puts a witch execution in New England a few decades after they hadstopped, for instance – but that’s really where Stephenson’s genius comesin. Yes, the main characters are hiscreations, and yes, there are several improbably (and impossible scenes). At one point, Stephenson even stages aDisneyesque musical number in a Jack Shaftoe scene. But all of these moments only serve to bringthe history even more vibrantly alive.

What exactly does this all have to do with science fictionthen? Well, there are some moments thatare pure fantasy (an immortal sorceror appears, and much of the plot turns onsome alchemical gold – both are elements carried over from Cryptonomicon). But, more fundamentally, these are novelsabout science. They explore the implicationsof science by taking real discoveries and exaggerating them or carrying them toextreme ends. Leibniz really didconsider building a mechanical calculator, and is thus one of the prehistoricpioneers of the computer. InStephenson’s world, he gets to build his calculator. This is science fiction at its most pure.

This is my third Stephenson review, and it should be clearby now that I’m a fan of his work, and especially his irreverent, witty, anddiscursive writing style. I’m also a fanof historical settings and richly drawn worlds, so, it’s not a surprise that Iloved these novels. Stephenson’s ticsare all still here – especially his tendency to run off on long tangents thatcan turn into academic lectures. Youeither love it or hate it, and if the latter, you’re going to have a hard timewith Stephenson and the hardest time of all here.

I did say that this is an uneven work. Quicksilver takes a while to get going. The Confusion is probably the best thing thatStephenson has ever written and one of my favorite novels. System of the World was painful to getthrough at times. It’s a nice two or threehundred page epilogue to the first two parts…stretched out to nine hundredpages (for symmetry’s sake?). In System,for once, Stephenson’s diversions aren’t all that interesting, there’s a greatdeal of repetition (you will grow sick of the phrase “Trial of the Pyx”), andthe characteristic long-winded descriptions just aren’t that interesting. I’d suggest skimming the final volume if youcan bring yourself to do so. It alsowouldn’t hurt to bone up on history before delving in – I gave up onQuicksilver when it first came our, but I found it a much breezier read after reading upon seventeenth-century English history for a class I was teaching.

In summary, it’s a highly rewarding set of novels that Ican’t recommend highly enough…so long as you’re interested in history, cantolerate Stephenson’s quirks, and you can hold your nose and make your waythrough some slow portions. TheConfusion alone is worth these obstacles though.

Grade: A

2004 BSFA – RIVER OF GODS by Ian McDonald

2011-11-13T20:05:00.001-08:00

I reviewed McDonald’s novella “Vishnu at the Cat’s Circus” for the 2010 Hugos and speculated that I might like it better once I was introduced to the wider world. The answer is “yes.” McDonald’s India of 2047, it’s centennial celebration (the novel has the unusual subtitle Happy Birthday India), is a fascinating setting, and it allows him to explore familiar post-cyberpunk themes in a way that few authors I’ve read have matched.

As I mentioned in my “Vishnu” review, McDonald’s futurism tends towards the optimistic (there’s a bit of my old foe, the singularity, at play here). Artificial Intelligences, called “aeais,” are common, but their sophistication is capped by international law pushed by the U.S. Still, they have wide applications in warfare, administration, science, and entertainment (a virtual soap opera called Town and Country plays a key role). There have also been genetic advances, including the slowly aging but long-lived and brilliant Brahmin (covered more in “Vishnu”). Meanwhile, India still suffers from old ethnic conflicts and the environmental problems of climate change and its own diverse geography. The novel centers around Varanasi, an ancient city and Hindu religious center. The region is in a three year drought and a water war looms while fundamentalist Hindus are on the verge of rioting.

McDonald introduces his world through a very broad cast of characters. There’s the comedian who inherits an Indian tech company, a mercenary, a cop who hunts rogue aeais, his beautiful and neglected young bride, a young reporter, a Muslim politician, a surgically created neuter, and a pair of western theoretical physicists, lured into the plot by a strange object found in space. As tensions in the region rise, these characters collide in various, often unexpected ways. Ultimately, hints point to the fact that all of the characters are caught up in the manipulations of powerful aeais.

It’s a very well-written and exciting novel with some incredible imagery, befitting the dramatic setting. There’s always the danger with a novel set in India that we get into some hardcore orientalism (see Song of Kali), but I think McDonald is pretty savvy in avoiding that here. It’s an honest portrayal of the place’s beauty, diversity, and rich history that doesn’t white wash its contradictions and violent history of religious strife. It also has a few sex scenes worthy of the kama sutra; it seems that I only mention sex scenes on this blog to criticize them, so I’ll give McDonald some credit for being…inventive.

It took a little time in the first section for me to get all of the characters straight, but once I did, the next several hundred pages blew me away. This novel was fantastic for most of its run. The end was a little shaky, and I’m beginning to realize that this is a trend in cyberpunk novels, or at least the ones based on AI/singularity. I think the problem is that these plots always run towards apotheosis, which is difficult to portray in a satisfying, or original, way. It’s not a bad ending by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the incredible five-hundred pages that precede it.

Grade: A

2004 Hugo Drama Short Form Do Over – FIREFLY

2011-11-11T10:40:00.001-08:00

Hey, it’s my blog, I get to rewrite Hugo history if I want to.

I was, apparently, one of the few people who watched Firefly when it was on Fox for a couple of weeks in 2002. Since it was on the air, it’s become a cult classic, and it’s in the mix for pretty much any discussion of “best sf tv series of all time.” It is really good, and it’s innovative in a lot of ways: it uses hand-held doc-style camera work, even for fx shots, it mashes space opera and western genre elements, it presents a dirtier future full of anti-heroes, and it gives us a multicultural future full of Chinese curse words. Many of these elements have been picked up by subsequent sf tv shows.

If you’re assuming that the show failed because it was too science fictiony and couldn’t find a wider audience…well, you might be correct, but WorldCon’s treatment of the show rather demonstrates that it took sf fans some time to discover it as well. The only episode nominated from the original broadcast run was the shown-out-of-order pilot, “Serenity,” which was solid, but not the show’s pinnacle. Three episodes were produced but not broadcast on Fox. When they came out on DVD, they became eligible and two were nominated, which suggests that the show was gaining momentum. But, then again, they were both beat by 90 seconds of bleeped Gollum profanity on MTV. In fact, it looks like Gollum beat both nominated episodes combined (though the series finale of Buffy probably shaved some votes off Firefly as well).

Anyway, I think “The Message” should’ve won. Captain Mal receives a crate in the mail that contains the body of an old war buddy, who got involved in the smuggling of some experimental biotech. It has the typical sharp, funny dialogue and character drama that made the show great. Jonathan Woodward plays the deceased war buddy in flashbacks – he was also the vampire in “Conversations with Dead People.” I’m a bit surprised that he hasn’t been in much non-Whedon stuff. He’s kind of a poor-man’s Paul Rudd (I consider that a compliment). The other nominated episode, “Heart of Gold,” is not the show’s finest hour; it’s part Magnificent Seven with a little bit of Unforgiven (the crew defends a brothel from onslaught), but, all together, it’s pretty standard western material (with laser guns!). I actually would’ve nominated the other eligible episode, “Trash,” instead. It’s a caper episode, which the show probably overdid in its brief run, but it has the great Christina Hendricks reprising her role as sexy con-artist Saffron.

Grades: “The Message” – A-

“Heart of Gold” – B-

“Trash” – B+

Best episodes from the series as a whole:

“Jaynestown” – it’s odd to put a comedy episode in first place, but the concept, the script, and the actors’ timing are all excellent in this story of a poor colony that reveres the crew’s bad boy. A

“War Stories” – I really hate torture scenes, and this episode has a lot of them, but there are so many classic lines that I can’t help but love it. It starts out by pairing the show’s two best comic actors and putting them in an awful situation, then it ends with an exciting action sequence. And then there are those great one-liners. “I’ll be in my bunk.” A

“The Train Job” – the second pilot created by Whedon and Minear. I think it was harmed by Fox’s refusal to air the actual pilot…leaving a lot of the show’s premise unclear. It holds up really well, and introduces the mood and themes of the show, even if it leaves some questions about plot points. A-

“Out of Gas” – Great use of non-linear storytelling. In the “present” life support is cut and Mal is wounded. Throughout the episode we see how things got so bad, and how the crew got together. A-

“Ariel” – A caper story that gives us a different setting (a more urban planet), advances the overall plot, and involves some great character twists. A-

I don’t think the series is without problems. The setting doesn’t entirely make sense – there’s no faster-than-light travel but they zip around to quite a few different planets. There is some explanation about a very large solar system with many terraformed planets, but it still seems too crowded for one system. The whole “freedom” theme with the Browncoats alludes to the Confederacy without really explaining or exploring the history, or the obvious problems with the analogy. Some of the character beats are repetitive as well (River’s crazy, Jayne’s a little evil, Mal is good-hearted but ruthless, Book is mysterious, etc. I get it). All that said, the show never really had time to get on its feet. It was clearly destined for greatness when it ended prematurely, and what we did get was still very entertaining and influential.

Overall grade: A-

2004 Hugo Drama Short Form – “Gollum Acceptance Speech at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards”

2011-11-09T05:16:00.000-08:00

Oh, how cute. Gollum wins “Best Digital Character” at the MTV Movie Awards, and we cut to Andy Serkis accepting the award only to be interrupted by an obscenity-laden rant from Gollum himself in which he screams “MTV sucks” and calls Dobby a “f***ing f*****.” I approve of Dobby-bashing, though I don’t approve of the second “f” word there so much.

I seem to remember everyone sharing this video on youtube…which is weird because youtube didn’t exist yet. Maybe it was streaming somewhere though? Or, maybe so many of my LOTR-obsessed friends spouted lines from it that it felt like a ubiquitous youtube clip before such a thing existed. Either way, it shows that this new short form category is perfect for the age of new media. It’s inane, short, and stupid, but it’s also mildly humorous and a sign of internet-humor-to-come, so I can’t really object. I mean, it must have been a very weak year…

…it’s not like this 90 second one-note video clip won over some kind of short-lived science fiction television classic…

…let me check the other nominees real quick just to be sure…

Oh, f%#$ me...

$#%^&@# you, you &#%@ing Worldcon fanwankers and your stupid bull$%^@!

This has to be the worst Hugo result I’ve ever seen. This makes They’d Rather Be Right look like &#%@ing Dune.

2004 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation Short Form, a Hugo award which will live in infamy.

Grade: F-

2004 Locus SF – ILIUM by Dan Simmons

2011-11-07T06:16:00.000-08:00

Dan Simmons’ Ilium follows the misadventures of a group of war-re-enactors, as the egos of the organizers and the participants threaten to get in the way of historical accuracy.

Okay, the war is the Trojan War, the site is a terraformed Mars thousands of years in the future, and the organizers are godlike beings. But, it was reassuring for me to imagine the story on a smaller scale, since, as is the norm with Simmons’ space operas, the story has to go BIG: the nature of Earth and humanity are on the line, supertechnology and omnipotent beings abound, numerous references to great works of the western canon are thrown in to give the proceedings extra artificial weight, and one volume cannot contain the action. Honestly, if not for the fact that I’ve read or want to read every other Locus sf winner, I would have skipped this one, because it’s exactly what I’ve come to expect from Simmons after three disappointing books in a row (Fall of Hyperion and the Endymion duology). My eyes glazed over for a lot of my reading, and I’m afraid I won’t remember a thing about this book if I don’t write this review right now.

As I said, it’s the far future, most of humanity is extinct, but there are a few survivors bouncing around Earth, some missing-in-action “post-humans,” Greek gods on Mars (who may be said post-humans), and some sentient robots bouncing around the rest of the solar system. The Greek gods live on Olympus Mons and are recreating the Trojan War. They’ve brought a few twentieth-century scholars of the Iliad in to consult, including sometimes-narrator Thomas Hockenberry (who may as well just be PJF from Riverworld). Hockenberry is given the power to morph into different characters and teleport, but he’s also often given impossible, history-sabotaging tasks by the gods (“kill Athena!”), not that these lead the plot anywhere interesting in particular. There’s also some action with the few remaining humans on Earth where they hang with Oddyseus and fight Prospero and Caliban for some reason. There’s a good amount of Roger Zelazny here – the futuristic Greek gods, whatever their origin, reminded me of the futuristic Hindu gods of Lord of the Light, and Oddyseus adventuring on a destroyed future Earth took me right back to This Immortal.

My favorite portions of the novel involve to “moravecs” or sentient robots from the Gallilean moons of Jupiter. Mahnmut is a Shakespeare scholar from Europa, and Orphu is a Proust expert from Io. The scholars are tasked with a mission to check out Mars. Their scholarship doesn’t do much other than allow Simmons to remind us that he knows some things about literature, as he so often does. The Canterbury Tales format of Hyperion was original and fun; since then, the Keats, Shakespeare, Homer, and Proust references just seem like Simmons doing his shtick. Is it in his contract or something? At least Mahnmut and Orphu have personalities though, unlike the human characters.

I think Simmons is just not for me. His world-building doesn’t have the depth that I look for as it leans to heavily on shallow intertextuality, and he always ramps the stakes up to the point that nothing seems to matter.

Grade: C-

2004 Hugo Drama Long Form and 2003 Saturn Fantasy – RETURN OF THE KING

2011-11-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

This is the first of the 40+ award-winning films I’ve covered here to also win an Academy Award for Best Picture. It also won in all ten of the other Oscar categories that it was nominated for, including Best Director for Peter Jackson. This was what we call a “phenomenon.” The movie is impressive in a lot of ways: the battle scenes are bigger than ever, Minas Tirith looks fantastic, and there are many emotional moments between the characters. There’s a lot of jesting about the homoeroticism of these films, but I think it is fair to say that there is some kind of love story between Sam and Frodo. That’s clearest in this entry, as we see their ups and downs, Gollum and the Ring competing for their affections, their final triumph, and their bittersweet parting. All of this gives the film more emotional weight than a lot of the fantasy fare out there.

So, this entry works very well, but I do consider the Academy’s recognition to be for the series as a whole, rather than just this one entry. This particular film has some of the series’ highest highs, but I think is also has some of the biggest flaws. The largest is the pacing: most of the first half is taken up with another giant battle; Frodo and Sam are all but forgotten, then the entire nature of the film changes at the halfway point as they take center stage. It’s an odd flow of momentum. And, of course, there’s the extra-long ending.

It’s as if Jackson, realizing what he had accomplished, decided to take a victory lap with the epilogue. And then another one. And then one more. True, it’s shorter than the post-climax meanderings of the novel, which actually starts a whole ‘nother plot. I’m sure Tolkeinistas could dissertate all night on how crucial the scouring of the Shire is to J.R.R.’s masterpiece, but I, and many others I know, think that cutting that plotline is one of the key areas where the films are better than the books. Even with that gone, however, the movie still takes it sweet time ending after the big moment. I do think that everyone fading off to the West is thematically crucial to the series, but it certainly could have been done more efficiently.

There’s also a pretty hefty cheesiness factor to all of these movies. If you get caught up in the action, as most any fantasy fan would, it’s easy to miss some of this. But, Peter Jackson has a lot of cornball maneuvers in his repertoire – jerky slo-mo, melodramatic slo-mo, characters gleaming in the sun, fake-out deaths, fake-out endings, to name a few. And, he gets some of the mushiest performances that I’ve ever seen out of his actors. As I said at the beginning of my Fellowship review though – it all works. It’s the perfect pairing of director and material. When adapting Tolkien, who self-consciously wrote a painfully sincere and old-fashioned story, this all works beautifully. Remaking King Kong is another story altogether.

So, in summation (as if you didn't already know), these are excellent movies.

Grade: A

The Victorian Hugos

2011-11-03T07:06:00.000-07:00

Over at io9, the great scholar of historic science fiction Jess Nevins (who has decoded a great many ultra-obscure references from Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentleman for the reading public) is running a series of imaginary WorldCons from 1885 to 1930.

This is pure awesomeness. It would be a great place to take this blog when I finish up with the real, modern Hugos (only five years left!). On the other hand, I'm getting kind of burnt out, so let's just read Nevins' thoughts...

2004 Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Fantasy – PALADIN OF SOULS by Lois McMaster Bujold

2011-10-31T06:29:00.000-07:00

Bujold wins her fourth Hugo in fourteen years (only Heinlein has exceeded this feat), and her second Nebula with this fantasy novel. I tend to have nigh-impossible standards for High Fantasy (it took awhile for Song of Ice and Fire to win me over, after all)…but I liked this book, and its predecessor, 2001’s Curse of Chalion. Bujold doesn’t exactly overcome the problems I’ve come to have with most high fantasy novels. She still focuses on Byzantine political conflicts, leaving the central social issues of her faux-medieval society unexamined, and her prose is still stilted. But she sidesteps these issues with a more personal focus on a smaller cast and setting, and with the general charm that all of her books seem to exude.

These books introduce the small nation of Chalion, which I imagined along the lines of medieval Spain, I think because of the consonants she uses in names and the many political similarities. In this world, people believe in a nuclear family of gods – the Father, Mother, Daughter, and Son. Some people, including most of Chalion, also worship “the Bastard” as a fifth god of social deviance and magic, while Chalion’s enemies see the Bastard as a demonic force outside of the pantheon. The Curse of Chalion follows former general, and former slave Lupe dy Cazilar as he dabbles in death magic to redeem himself and Chalion’s royal family, who are literally cursed by dark magic, and figuratively cursed with corrupt officials. I actually liked Curse a bit more than this novel; the plot seemed more focused and the characters more interesting. It was also nominated for a Hugo, but lost in a much tougher field (that included American Gods, Passage, and Perdido Street Station).

Paladin follows a minor character from the first book, the former queen Ista. Ista had been inflicted with the curse, and had communicated with the gods. She also did some rather horrible things to try to remove the curse, and most people considered her mad in her grief. Now, she’s trying to regain some freedom by going on a pilgrimage, but on her way, she encounters an epidemic of demonic possession and raids from Chalion’s enemies, the Roknari. She comes to a castle that has its own share of curses and conflicts, and she has to deal with new powers from the gods.

Bujold plays some interesting games with magic and religion here, and it is a well-told story with compelling characters, which I’ve come to expect from her. We do get a few of the plot contrivances that bothered me in the Vorkosigan series, but they make a lot more sense when divine intervention is in play. I still want more out of fantasy novels than this, but there’s no question that this is a very solid entry in the canon. The phrase “guilty pleasure” seems unfair to Bujold, because she does offer more depth and better writing than most sf, and yet her novels do bring that phrase to mind, because they are so enjoyable, and so focused on simply telling a clear, entertaining story.

I should note that David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was nominated for a Nebula this year. It’s one of my favorite novels, so I’m kind of bummed that the SFWA panel didn’t go out on a limb and give it the award. The Hugo nominee line-up is quite a bit weaker, and, though I've only read one other nominee, I imagine that Bujold would've been my choice.

Grade: B

(I’d give Curse of Chalion a B+)

2003 Hugo Dramatic Presentation Short Form – “Conversations with Dead People,” BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER

2011-10-28T18:48:00.000-07:00

Hey, I managed to wrangle a relatively Halloween-appropriate post out of this blog for once.

I think it’s fair to suggest that this brand new Hugo category (my first since dramatic presentation debuted in 1958) wouldn’t exist without this show. For better or for worse, most of the vampire/monster-centric trends in the last decade of sf probably wouldn’t exist either. Buffy started in 1997, and offered a grab-bag of monsters, demons, superhero and fantasy elements in a groundbreaking, serialized, hilarious hour-long television show. The show offered brilliant culminations of long-running storylines in episodes like “The Becoming,” “Graduation Day,” and “The Gift,” as well as brilliant one-off episodes like the dream-centered “Restless,” the silent “Hush,” the flashback-heavy “Fool for Love,” and “The Body,” the best examination of death in the history of television. I don’t know exactly why the “short form” category was created, but I have to think that everyone watching the excellent musical episode “Once More with Feeling” inevitably lose to The Fellowship of the Ring in Dramatic Presentation had to have something to do with it. The proliferation of sf tv (in part inspired by Buffy) also played a significant role, although the great age of the space opera tv show (the ‘90s) had already passed for the most part (though I'm sure no one realized that at the time).

I think pretty much everyone knows about the show’s quality and influence now, though I also know that many people avoided it for years because of the silly title, or due to a general, irrational fear of gothic fiction, vampire fiction, and/or "girl cooties." If you did miss it a) shame on you. It’s on Netflix streaming. Go watch it now, and bear with it through that rough first season and a half, and b) it’s the story of a teenage girl granted superhuman powers to fight vampires and demons. She gets a Watcher, who has access to knowledge of the supernatural world, and she enlists various friends, who, over the series’ seven season, get their own superpowers.

This episode is from the final season, which is the weakest since the first, but, hey, the series is innovative, hugely influential, and deserves some recognition before it ends. This is probably the most experimental in the generally-restrained season seven (though the previous episode “Him” does some fun comedic stuff). It follows four separate storylines, told more-or-less in real time, of the main characters encountering dead people. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Geller) meets a vampiric version of a high school acquaintance and chats with him. Buffy’s sister, Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), is haunted by what appears to be the ghost of her mother. Buffy’s witch friend Willow (Allyson Hannigan), communicates with her dead girlfriend through a ghost. And, two of Buffy’s enemies from the previous season are lured into demonic acts by a manifestation of their dead friend. All of this leads to some great character moments – we get to see how other high schoolers saw the Buffy of the first few seasons, and we get to mourn some of the major character deaths of the previous two seasons – while also advancing the plot and forwarding the “Big Bad” of this season.
It’s also a nice actor’s spotlight. Geller always made a tough role look easy, and both she and Hannigan are very underrated. Trachtenberg is the only one who struggles, but she was only sixteen, and the writers always had her screaming about something, which has to be tough. The episode was written by Jane Espensen, the series’ most consistent scribe besides creator/geek icon Joss Whedon, and this script displays her customary wit and grasp of character.

The episode represents the great blend of action, fantasy, horror, comedy, and character that made the series so great, and it probably is the best episode of the final season.

Grade: A-

Grade for the series: A

2003 Philip K. Dick Award – ALTERED CARBON by Richard Morgan

2011-10-26T14:30:00.000-07:00

It’s several hundred years from now and widespread technology allows people to record and transfer their brains onto “cortical stacks” that can be switched between bodies or transmitted interstellar distances. Takeshi Kovacs is a badass mercenary from a colonized planet called Harlan’s World with special training that has made him into an “envoy” skilled at kicking ass in any body. After he and his girl are hunted down and killed, he wakes up on Earth. He’s been put into a new “sleeve,” or body, by an incredibly old and rich man (called a "Methuselah") named Laurens Bancroft to investigate the apparent suicide of his previous sleeve. As Kovacs delves into seedy, hypocritical Earth society in Bay City (formerly San Francisco) he meets rough characters, multiple dames, hookers with hearts of gold, femmes fatale, crooked cops, less-crooked cops, and pretty much every other hardboiled cliché you can imagine. Working with a female cop, who has an interest in his current sleeve, named Ortega, he uncovers a massive criminal conspiracy.

As an sf fan, I’m very familiar with the battle to get decent respect for genre fiction. There are certain critics in certain venues that aren’t going to give many speculative works a chance, and I do resent that a bit. However, there are works that just grab you by the lapels, knee you in the privates, and yell “I am genre trash! Whatever you do, DO NOT take me seriously.” I’m not saying that Morgan’s book fits that bill…but there are certainly times that it does. It’s a fascinating mixture of old and new. Morgan plays some interesting game with the “altered carbon” technology that allows people to resurrect their minds and switch bodies. He covers a lot of the bases – multiple copies, virtual worlds, and some fairly depraved applications. He’s thought out the implications of his ideas, and scattered the book with hints of a rich futuristic culture (not to mention tantalizing bits about alien ruins on Mars that are never really explored).

And, Morgan’s grafted it all onto a very traditional tough-guy private eye crime story. The book is thick with tropes, and it’s hard to say whether Morgan is playing with them or just leaning on them. I usually felt the latter. Frankly, I could’ve done without many of them, especially the gruesome torture, casual violence, over-sexualized women, and the running updates on Takeshi’s current level of tumescence. Even when Morgan is discussing new tech, it still feels a bit familiar. There are as many familiar cyberpunk tropes as there are noir tropes.

I never quite got a handle on Kovacs. We’re continually told he’s an amoral killing machine, and he does rack up quite a body count, but they’re all really awful people, and he spends a lot of time helping the helpless and fighting for justice. I guess this is another noir trope, but it did feel like the characters have very wobbly moralities that seem to fit the needs of the plot at the time more than anything else. There are also some basic existential issues that are barely touched on. Is a copy of your mind surviving the same as your mind surviving? Doesn’t seem like it. We’re told that Catholics resist resleeving because they believe the soul dies with the original body. I would’ve liked a little more discussion in this direction.

So, that’s a lot of complaining, but, I was entertained most of the time. There are some fun characters, interesting mysteries, intriguing speculative concepts, and exciting action scenes. The hardboiled format is oft-imitated because it works, and this is a perfectly fine entry in the genre. It’s the same mix of interesting ideas and super-violence that I complained about/begrudgingly endorsed in the two Verhoeven films I covered.

Grade: B

2003 Nebula – THE SPEED OF DARK by Elizabeth Moon

2011-10-24T06:28:00.000-07:00

It seems like one way to get the SFWA’s attention is to be an established sf writer (Moon had long-running sf and fantasy series under her belt), and then to step out of your comfort zone (this book is much more grounded in the present and tackles a serious issue of mental disability)

There are some books that I have a hard time writing a less-than-positive review for. In this case, we have a daring novel that dives into some intriguing issues of bioethics, has a character with autism as a first person narrator, and is based in part on the author’s own experiences with an autistic child. There’s hardly a sentiment here that I disagree with, and I’m very intrigued by the subject matter, but, unfortunately, those qualities alone don’t make for a great book.

We don’t get a lot of the details about the world, but it’s a few decades in the future. There are mentions of global warming and economic disaster (though not until the latter half of the book) as well as biological advances that have brought about old sf canards like personality modification for dangerous criminals, therapies for serious medical conditions, and life extension treatments. Our narrator, Lou Arrendale, was born autistic at the turn of the twentieth century before treatments were developed for the condition, though he is very high-functioning. He analyzes data for a corporation with a team of other autistics, and he manages a social life with fencing classes and church. He faces two major conflicts in the novel: 1) his dastardly boss, Mr. Crenshaw, wants to coerce all of the autistic employees into serving as guinea pigs for a new, highly invasive, autism therapy, and 2) he’s fallen in love with one of his fencing buddies, Marjorie, but another fencer, Don, resents this, and resents Lou in general. They are fairly simple plotlines, but we get a lot of Lou’s different perspective on things. This ranges from fascinating, as in the descriptions of how he sees and seeks patterns in his life, to mind-numbingly tedious, as every line of dialogue has to be analyzed by Lou to uncover the emotional content and decode non-literal speech (like metaphors).

This is the most basic problem with the novel. It’s not long, but it became a trudge through the middle third for me as we go through the same elaborate routines again and again. Hearing how fixed Lou’s environment has to be is really interesting the first time, but it gets old after a few dozen descriptions. Wathcing Lou decode dialogue is intriguing the first time, but do we need it for EVERY. SINGLE. LINE? In other words, the narration didn’t work for me. Which is not to say it couldn’t have worked. I hate to review by comparison, but another novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, came out at about the same time and explored similar ideas. In both novels, there is a narrator on the autism spectrum investigating a mystery. Haddon’s book is brisk and the prose is elegant and quick-moving while still putting you inside the narrator’s head. He also manages to show us how wrong the narrator is about the mystery of the dead dog without ever breaking format. Moon’s book, on the other hand, can be plodding. The mystery of who is sabotaging Lou’s car is painfully obvious to everyone – including Lou! – but then he is too nice and reserved to solve it. And, she breaks format and slips into third-person omniscient at times for no internally consistent reason. She blows a great chance to challenge the reader with a limited, unreliable narrator and dumbs the prose down in the process.

There are other issues as well. The best characters are Lou’s autistic coworkers, but they don’t get nearly enough pagetime. The other characters are two dimensional – Lou’s “normal” friends are truly good people with infinite patience and intelligence. Lou’s enemies…well, I called them dastardly before, and that pretty much sums them up. I’m sure that disabled people deal with antagonists on a day-to-day basis, but I think antagonism out of ignorance would be a lot more real, and interesting, then these diabolical nutjobs who really hate autistics to the point of doing very illegal things and risking everything to mess with one. This also goes hand in hand with a lot of moralizing. There are some interesting bioethics questions here, including the fundamental question of should we “cure” someone of a “disorder” that is the basis of their personality and identity? Lou’s attempt to answer this question for himself is the best part of the book by far, though even that gets a bit repetitive. But, it seems like we spend even more time on obvious issues of respect and understanding. I agree with everything Moon is saying here…but I sure got tired of hearing about it.

The book has its moments, and the premise is strong, but the characters are too black and white, the prose is too repetitive, the pace is too slow (though the final two chapters move far too quickly through major events), and Moon fails her narrator by spelling things out too clearly. I will say that it made me appreciate Flowers of Algernon even more.

Grade: B-

2003 Saturn – X2

2011-10-21T06:33:00.000-07:00

Singer’s X-Men managed to make superhero films a legitimate blockbuster sub-genre for the ‘00s. His sequel, called X2 because X-Men 2 is just too damned long apparently, raises the stakes in a number of ways. The budget is clearly larger, meaning that we get more big mutant power action sequences (and a much stronger third act as a result). This includes a fantastic opening bit in which the blue, acrobatic, tail-possessing teleporter Nightcrawler assaults the White House, and a fun dogfight. The movie also delves deeper into the central metaphor of mutants. The first film gave us mutant-on-mutant violence, but in this one, humanity is the real threat. There’s the clear possibility, only hinted at in the first film, that Magneto is right, and that mutants might be the victims of genocide.

The villain is a mutant-hating general named William Stryker. He has the ability to control mutants, and he uses some, like Nightcrawler, to manufacture mutant incidents that he can use as justification to round up American mutants. He kidnaps Xavier, and, in a very well-executed sequence, raids the School to round up the mutant children. The X-Men have to rally around Magneto (who escapes from a plastic prison in another great scene) to fight back against Stryker. There are some nice little character moments along the way: we see Nightcrawler as a mutant unable to hide his differences who leans on Christian faith, we get more of Wolverine’s origin (really all we need, despite a whole terrible movie about the topic in 2010), and we see Jean Grey’s problems dealing with the escalation of her powers (a very important storyline from the comics that will be mangled in the next movie installment). A new character, Pyro, was clearly created for the sole purpose of switching sides, but his arc is still a nice addition to a series that takes much of its strength from an antagonist with a credible philosophy. The best of these character moments is when Bobby “Iceman” Drake comes out as a mutant to his family. Sir Ian McKellen, meanwhile, chews through the scenery with abandon, and I think he even manages to steal scenes that he’s not even in. It’s like he’s taking a victory lap for the Oscar that he should have won for Fellowship of the Ring, and it’s very fun to watch.

The film’s storyline draws heavily from a Chris Claremont graphic novel called God Loves, Man Kills. Published as a standalone graphic novel in 1982, it was aimed at a more adult audience, and it’s probably more mature than this film. It’s a decent starting point for anyone interested in the comics, though Claremont’s narration-heavy style hasn’t aged all that well. Again, he is one of the most underrated influences of modern sf.

Compared to X-Men, the action scenes are better, the effects more impressive, the dialogue is more clever (even the jokes are funnier), and the thematic issues more apparent and interesting. It’s a far better film than the first, and one of the best superhero films all around.

Grade: A-

2003 BSFA and Clarke – THE SEPARATION by Christopher Priest

2011-10-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

Speaking of alternate histories, this one begins in 1999 in a world where Britain made a separate peace with Germany in 1941, preventing US entry into the war and pitting them against Japan, Mao, and the USSR in a series of economically crippling wars. The Jews have a refuge in Madagascar, and Nazi Germany faded away after its own grinding fight against the Russians. This is merely the setting for a framing story in which a popular historian collects documentation about twin brother Olympians from Britain and their role in forging this peace. So, we’re very much in the same territory as Priest’s The Prestige with historical mysteries, paired journals relating the story from different perspectives, and the pervading theme of doubling.

Also like The Prestige, this novel is a puzzle box. The reader gets to see the pieces and put them together themselves. Unlike The Prestige, however, there’s not much of a solution to the puzzle. It raises a lot of questions, and it comes up with some evocative scenes, but it doesn’t provide a lot of answers. The heart of the novel is the two brothers, Joe and Jack Sawyer, though both use the initials J. L., which causes a lot of bureaucratic confusion. Joe is a committed pacifist in “the Good War.” The very basis of his philosophy is challenged by the war, and the violence he sees while working as an ambulance driver during the blitz. Jack captains bombers for the RAF, and he sees the toll of the war on civilians…inflicts it in fact. They’re both in love with the same woman, they both admire and feel hated by the other, and they both have severe doubts about their roles in the war. I can’t say that I connected with either of these characters, but they were well drawn.

Winston Churchill and Deputy Fuhrer Rudolph Hess also both loom large in the book, both have their own doubles (and then some?) and both are quite interesting. Though I did quibble with some points, especially Joe’s push for peace having any chance of persuading Churchill, the research was meticulous. But, after Robinson’s opus, which is not just a historical novel, but a novel about history, the “alternate history” aspect of this novel seemed very thin. Priest’s prose is interesting. It’s incredibly pleasant to read, but it is on the dry and formal side. This is a bit of an issue in a novel written in several different voices. All come off the same, for the most part, especially in their interest in technical details, which, again, make for very readable, rich descriptions, but didn’t convince. That’s true of the novel as a whole as well – it drew me in, but as it became clearer we were headed somewhere ambiguous, I lost interest in the work.

Like Take Back Plenty, this is a novel that won the two big British sf awards but had very little impact in the United States (it’s not in print here). And again, the book is certainly worth checking out, but it’s exclusion from most of the US awards doesn’t strike me as a huge injustice. I liked The Prestige more.

Grade: B

2003 Locus – THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT by Kim Stanley Robinson

2011-10-17T06:49:00.000-07:00

Why Europe? By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the area was a backwater compared to China and the Islamic world. The Europeans discovered America, and, by the eighteenth century, they were on the path to world domination. Why this happened is the fundamental question in world history, and one that I think should interest science fiction authors as they often deal with issues of discovery, expansion, and technological and scientific advancement. In this epic novel, Kim Stanley Robinson digs into the science fiction writer’s toolbox to examine this and other questions of world history.

Robinson uses alternate history to get at these big questions, and he does so in a way that I think no other science fiction writer has. Philip K. Dick and writers of historical fantasy or steampunk usually focus on aesthetics, capturing the mood of a era or shocking the reader with a sense of dislocation from a world like and unlike our own. How many times have we seen the old “Nazi flag flapping in a modern city” trick? Harry Turtledove is a bit more focused on the historical questions, but he still spends more time wargaming alternate Americas than historical inquiry. Robinson, however, wants to know what made the modern world, and he does it by subtracting Europe.

This is an ambitious work of massive scope. Robinson starts with the Black Death, which killed as much as half the population of Europe in our own world. Robinson has it explode in virulence and wipe out more than 99% of the population. Then, he follows the rest of the world for the next seven hundred years to see what happens. Who discovers America? The Chinese, but they arrive among the hunter-gatherer societies of California rather than near the wealthy societies of Mesoamerica, and they don’t have as many competitors as the Spanish, so Indians have more time to maneuver. The Iroqouis (Hodenosaunee) form a pan-American movement of resistance. The Enlightenment is centered in Samarkand; the industrial revolution in India (giving us a bit of well thought out steampunk, for once). Rather than a post-Inquisition Jewish diaspora spreading capital and knowledge, there is a Japanese diaspora prompted by a Chinese invasion. The Great War is a six-decade affair that pits industrialized China against industrialized Islam, killing a billion people. San Francisco is a Chinese city called Fangzhang centered north of the “Gold Gate.” In other words, many things follow the same path – the processes of exploration, scientific discovery, technological transformation, and international conflict make certain developments inevitable, but the shape of these changes is different enough to make things interesting. Similarly, the same natural disasters occur (Japan’s Ansei earthquakes and the great California flood, both in our 1850s-1860s, get special attention), but the contexts change.

As a history geek, I’d be happy to read a dry fictional history in this mode for 600+ pages, but Robinson also manages to give us a consistent set of characters through an ingenious device. We begin with Mongol Bold Bardash and African Kyu, who are both enslaved and shipped to China. When they die, they come to the Bardo from the Tibetan book of the dead, and then they are reincarnated into the next age as Bihari and Kokila in India. They, and a small group of other characters, form a jati; they are destined to meet in each life and influence each other, and Robinson helps us keep track by using the same letters in their names. K is brash and rebellious while B is humble and steadfast.

I can’t say that The Years of Rice and Salt always works as a character-centered novel; sometimes time passes too quickly, and it is hard to get attached to storylines when we change scenery every sixty pages or so (on average). I’d almost rather have 10 short novels set in this world than this set of vignettes. But, I did think it worked extremely well, and the last two chapters slow things down a bit and offer a nice capstone to the whole novel, as K and B become scholars who can look back on everything that’s happened before.
It’s probably not for everyone, but I adore this novel; it’s one of my favorites from the past decade. I love that a book can create interesting, centuries-spanning characters, build a really fascinating counterfactual world, and be so unabashedly intellectual. This isn’t just a historical novel, this is a novel about history, and I think science fiction is at its best when it works as social science, and tries to dig into the workings of the world.

Hominids, pshaw.

Grade: A

2003 Hugo Drama Long Form and 2002 Saturn Fantasy – THE TWO TOWERS

2011-10-14T05:59:00.000-07:00

It hasn’t been long since I last spoke about Peter Jackson’s excellent adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The quality remains just as high in this middle entry. In fact, this used to be my favorite of the three. We’re past the heavy exposition of the first film, and we don’t have to deal with lengthy epilogues like the final film.

As far as the plot is concerned, not all that much happens. Frodo and Sam begin the film walking to Mordor, and they end the film still walking to Mordor. The other characters get involved in a major battle with orcs, but it’s really just a dress rehearsal for the bigger fights to come in the next film. It’s okay that the plot stalls out though, as it gives the characters some breathing room and allows for some nice world-building. The more we see of the bonds between these characters and the impacts of the coming war on the people of Middle Earth, the higher the stakes feel in the end.

The one new element here, which garnered much of the attention at the time, is the cg Gollum. An effects team captures a brilliant, highly physical performance by actor Andy Serkis, and translates it to the bony, impossibly old, riddle-loving freak. Gollum could be really annoying (he is in most adaptations), but he works pretty well here.

There’s also some nice walking trees. And, it climaxes with an epic siege/battle at Helm’s Deep, which is probably the best action sequence of the series. The focus on warfare in the second-half of the entry raises the stakes, and Jackson even manages to push an environmentalist theme (he argues that there is a favoring of pastoral hobbits and trees over Saurumon’s industrial orc-army in the books – I gather this comes out of Tolkien criticism, but I never really saw it in the books other than as a byproduct of Tolkien's anti-modernism. Either way, I like it here). The filmmakers even try to include some women in one of literature’s greatest sausage fests by expanding the role of Eowyn (played by Miranda Otto).

I didn’t mention the acting last time. Serkis, as already mentioned, is great. Ian McKellan is one of the best living actors, and his performance is truly amazing. He has an incredibly expressive face. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers steals a lot of scenes as the dwarf Boromir, and his comic banter with Orlando Bloom’s is a big ingredient in what makes Helm’s Deep so fun. Bloom, Viggo Mortensen, and the hobbits all do fine jobs playing pretty dull, button-down characters.

As I said, it was my favorite in the theaters, but I don’t know if it stands up to repeat viewings as well as the others (especially Fellowship). Maybe this is because I usually watch the extended versions these days, and the additional material is mostly unnecessary Merry and Pippen comedic bits. Anyway, it’s still great. I’ll probably be able to come up with a few things to complain about with the next movie.

Grade: A

2003 BFS and Locus Fantasy – THE SCAR by China Miéville

2011-10-12T06:15:00.000-07:00

Bas-Lag round 2. As in Perdido Street Station, I really want to love Mieville’s merging of different oddball concepts and his working to look at fantasy at new angles, and again, I didn’t feel like the novel delivered on the potential of Mieville’s world.

The Scar begins with a new character, Bellis Coldwine fleeing the city of New Crobuzon (due to the events of Perdido Street Station – I guess that’s a spoiler, but the eventual revelation is more fan service than plot service). She joins an oceanic voyage to a distant colony, but her ship is overtaken, and she winds up in the floating pirate city of Armada instead. She and her fellow travelers are impressed into serving in Armada, and she begins to build relationships with them. She teaches cabin boy Shekel how to read, she learns of scholar Johannes Tearfly’s new research agenda, and she befriends a Remade prisoner from the ship named Tanner Sack. A spy from New Crobuzon named Silas Fennec warns her that her home city might be in danger, but she also learns more about the leaders of Armada, including a scarred pair called the Lovers, a mercernary with a mystic sword named Uther Doul, and a shifty vampire called The Brucolac.

It kind of feels like I just listed characters there rather than describing the plot, but there’s not a whole lot of plot. The leaders of the Armada do have an elaborate plan that involves some mystical exploration, but I don’t want to spoil it. Most of the novel is just Bellis sitting around, pondering her allegiances or speculating on the Armada with her friends. It all feels a bit aimless. In some ways, this novel has the opposite problem of Perdido Street Station’s transition to lengthy, single-minded bug hunt. That novel became too focused, The Scar never quite gets focused enough.

I think the common denominator might be the characters. Isaac der Grinebulin bounced between opportunistic bastard, bohemian romantic, absent-minded professor, and action hero without really developing a distinctive voice, other than a very funny foul mouth. Bellis doesn’t even have the foul mouth going for her. There’s a nice bit about her writing letters to an undetermined audience, but otherwise, she’s a very passive protagonist. I suppose that’s her character arc, but since we spend most of the novel's 575 pages with her, she should at least be interesting.

There is plenty to like here. Armada is another fun creation (though I wish it had done more), as are some of the magic monsters, items, and phenomena in the book (the “might sword” is one of the coolest ideas I've seen in fantasy in a long time). The themes are more cohesive than Perdido, too. Every significant character ends up with mental and/or physical scars that nicely echo the mysterious Scar of the title, but Mieville keeps it from getting too heavy handed. And there are nice allusions to the likes of Moby Dick (Melville, Mieville?). His prose is, well, a bit more restrained, which I think is mostly for the best (this novel is “wobbling testicle” free).

It’s the many strengths of The Scar and Perdido Street Station that make me so frustrated that I haven’t really connected with either. I’m still going to come back for The Iron Council.

Grade: B-

2003 Hugo – HOMINIDS by Robert Sawyer

2011-10-10T15:29:00.000-07:00

I knew going in to this novel that fellow Hugo blogger Das Ubernerd declared this his least favorite Hugo-winning novel. I also knew that sf review podcaster Luke Burrage hated this book, despite not listening to the episode in question, because he rants about it on a regular basis. Combined with my own dislike of www:Wake and, especially, The Terminal Experiment, I was really afraid of this one. And…maybe this is the low expectations speaking...but it wasn’t that bad.

Ponter Boddit and his male life-partner Adikor Huld hail from a dimension in which Neanderthals became the dominant hominid lifeform on Earth rather than our own competing Cro Magnon ancestors. They’re running an experiment with a quantum computer in an abandoned mine when something goes wrong, causing Ponter to be transported to our Earth. While Adikor goes on trial for Ponter’s disappearance, Ponter hangs out with a small group of Canadian scientists in a house somewhere, discusses his sub-species’ differences, science, and religion, and….falls in love?

Okay, it’s kind of silly. The idea that a Neanderthal visitor from another dimension would be allowed to relax with a doctor, an anthropologist and a physicist in a Canadian country home is just ridiculous, and the conversations they have are pretty inane. There’s a remarkable lack of intellectual curiosity out of these scientists and the world as a whole. The main human character, Mary Vaughan, is raped just before she meets Ponter. It’s a bold move at character-development on Sawyer’s part, but it's also executed with maximum awkwardness, and means that we spend a lot of time seeing if Mary can learn to love again. The novel just isn’t strong enough to support this level of serious drama.

Meanwhile, on the flipside, the trial feels a lot like a bad episode of Ally McBeal, complete with bizarre legal procedures, melodramatic reveals of evidence, and even more melodramatic motives for the participants. I got the impression that the Neanderthal world is supposed to be some sort of utopia. We see harmonious economics and politics, a focus on sustainability, gender equality and universal bisexuality, advanced science, and almost no crime. On the other hand, there is universal surveillance and eugenics programs, which Sawyer doesn’t do much to condemn. He also presents Neanderthals as pure rationalists, and quickly dismisses a whole pile of evidence of Neanderthal religion (which I find fascinating) with some hand-waiving. At the same time, he builds his whole society around Lewis Binford’s far more controversial and unlikely ideas that Neanderthals kept the genders completely segregated most of the time. Sawyer seems to do this a lot – promoting himself as a pro-science rationalist while using very arbitrary, and very convenient, evidentiary standards to push his own favorite ideas.

On top of these flaws, we get the standard Sawyerisms that I’ve really come to dislike: obscure geek references dominating casual conversation (Kira Nerys? Really?), corny dialogue (“par-tay!”), characters spending all of their time debating what are clearly Sawyer’s own pet ideas (quantum consciousness!), and Canada-centrism. Sawyer even returns to a device he used in Terminal Experiment – a series of dumb headlines reacting to the book’s world-changing events that reveal more about Sawyer’s blinkered view of humanity than anything else.

Okay, so I complained a lot. I didn’t say it was a great novel, it’s just not as bad as I thought it’d be. The central idea is kind of cool, and I thought the Neanderthal society was interesting enough, despite my problems with it. I know this is the first volume in a trilogy, and I’m actually half-intrigued to see where it goes. Maybe they won’t spend all of the next book barbecuing in a random Canadian home!

Then again, considering that one of my all-time favorite sf books was also on the ballot (I'll get to it shortly), I probably could get pretty steamed about this choice.

Grade: C

2002 Saturn SF – MINORITY REPORT

2011-10-07T06:44:00.000-07:00

I rewatched this in a double feature with AI, Spielberg’s previous science fiction outing. Both films disappointed me in the theater, and I’d avoided both ever since. Despite these links, they’re actually very different films – almost mirror opposites.

Loosely based on a Philip K. Dick story, Minority Report follows the pre-crime unit, led by Tom Cruise (Cruise is not the kind of actor who disappears into a role, so his character’s name isn’t worth the time). In 2054, a team of three pre-cognitives have visions of future murders which can be recorded and replayed by the police, who then have to figure out the crime’s location and rush to stop it. This procedure has led to the end of homicides in the D.C. pilot program, but it is not without controversy, since it leads to people being convicted of crimes they don’t commit. When a Department of Justice representative (Colin Farrell) shows up to investigate, Cruise discovers some inconsistencies in a few of the precogs' visions. Then, when he is himself accused of a future murder; he has to go on the run, and in the process of investigating the murder he is destined to commit, he puts himself into the position of fulfilling the prophesy.

It’s a very exciting film with fantastic effects. There’s all sorts of fun near-future tech from Apple-influenced/influencing touch interfaces (RIP Steve Jobs) to vertical highways to jetpacks to eye-scanning spider robots. The chase scenes are fast-paced and well-filmed. And, there are some interesting questions about destiny and justice in play as well. A fun, fast-paced film with believable future tech and interesting speculative questions? I told you it was the anti-AI.

So, why did I have a problem with this film? A lot of my issues concern the film’s conclusion, so I can’t really get into them without spoilers, but I will say that I wanted this film to be about the ethics of precrime and/or the question of causality. However, a twist late in the film takes it in a different direction, and it becomes a more conventional mystery/thriller. There are a few efforts made to return to the central themes, but they’re buried, I think, by efforts to give the film a simpler conclusion.

In the theater, this bothered me a lot. It really ruined the whole film for me. This time, perhaps because I knew it was coming, I wasn’t bothered nearly as much. I was able to enjoy the ride, and have fun with one of the richest and most compelling future visuals since Blade Runner.

Grade: B+

2002 Locus SF - PASSAGE by Connie Willis

2011-10-03T06:30:00.000-07:00

This is the first Willis I've read not set in her time-travelling historians of Oxford world, though there are a lot of similarities. It's clear to me by now that Willis has a shtick. Take some annoying characters, have the protagonists go to comical lengths to avoid said annoying characters, have the whole plot hinge on failures of communication, and add in some meticulous historical research, and you've got a Willis novel. And there's nothing wrong with that. Most writers have shticks; the question is whether they can engage a reader enough with plot, character, and prose to keep them coming back anyway.

The setting this time in a hospital in contemporary Colorado (Willis's home). Joanna Lander is a psychologist studying Near-Death Experiences, the whole light-at-the-end-of-a-tunnel phenomenon. She works in close quarters with a true believer named Mandrake, who is convinced that these NDEs prove the existence of an afterlife (and psychic powers). Mandrake and his star subject Mrs. Davenport are the prime annoying characters that the protagonists must avoid at all costs this go round. When a neurologist named Richard Wright shows up at the hospital with a plan to study the biochemistry of NDEs, Joanna jumps on board against Mandrake's objections. Wright has found a drug that can simulate the effects of Near-Death Experience on the brain, and, eventually, Joanna agrees to become a subject. As each simulated NDE brings her further into what feels like a real experience of an actual historical event, Joanna struggles to maintain her objectivity and frantically dodges through the corridors of the hospital to try to understand exactly what her experience means.

Why does she move frantically through the hospital? Because Connie Willis thinks it's funner that way, I guess. There's a lot of manufactured drama here. At first, it makes a fairly mundane science thriller into more of a page turner - the fact that Joanna has to sneak, run, and dodge her way through the hospital for tiny tidbits of information makes things a bit more exciting. After a few hundred pages, however, I really wanted to yell, "Good God everybody! Get some $%#@*^ing cellphones and have a $%#@*^ing direct conversation for once!" Joanna, you don't have to take a taxi to the parking lot to avoid Mandrake. You can say "I'm not interested in your work, and I have other things to do." It's easy! The novel sort of exhausted me, and I started to get the feeling that everything was spinning in place as Willis goes to great lengths to keep her mysteries going. The last part is especially frustrating, as it involves characters reconstructing information that we already know. We have to see the same hundred-page investigation twice!

That said, I couldn't stay mad at Willis for long. Her dialog, as always, is naturalistic yet clever, and genuinely funny and charming, and her core characters are typically lovable (does she make the ancillary characters so petty and awful just to make the main characters more attractive in contrast?). A dying young girl named Maisie, who is obsessed with disasters, is particularly smart and funny. And, as I've said, writing awful people is a real writer's skill, even if it's not one that I always enjoy reading. The core mysteries are interesting, and there are a couple of bold choices here. I knew in a book about Near-Death Experiences that someone important is going to face death themselves, and Willis heavily foreshadows how this is likely to happen in the hospital. But who faces death, how it happens, and the outcome took me completely by surprise. This novel managed to shock me. I also thought it was bold of Willis to write a direct, secular confrontation with the meaning of death. She has a lot of opportunities to give herself an out, but she remains a committed skeptic to the very end.

In the end, I liked the novel, though I was often frustrated by it. I think it could have been a lot better at about 2/3rds the length. I'd recommend it to Willis fans, but I'd guide Willis newcomers to To Say Nothing of the Dog instead.

Grade: B

2002 Hugo Dramatic and 2001 Saturn Fantasy – THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

2011-09-30T06:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve speculated a few times on this blog about fantasy’s recent dominion over science fiction, both commercially (as reflected in sales) and critically (as reflected in these awards). Is it less confidence of science, more pessimism about the future, or that fantasy is a genre that is – for whatever reason – more welcoming to female readers? Today I feel like offering an alternative hypothesis: in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, fantasy just got really good. Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman give us great, popular urban fantasy works. George R. R. Martin creates a new, beloved fantasy world, and J. K. Rowling does the same on another order of magnitude. And, of course, Peter Jackson skillfully adapts the greatest fantasy book series of all time into the greatest fantasy film series of all time. Of course fans are going to have fantasy on the brain.

I feel silly recounting the plot. What sf fan hasn’t read the books, or at least seen the films, probably several hundred times apiece? There’s a powerful, evil magic ring. Some peaceful little people have to take it to a volcano and throw it in, and various wizards, dwarves, elves, and knights try to escort them, while really ugly things try to kill them. It starts as an epic, takes a few quiet moments in the shire, then gets even epic-ier.

Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson is such a perfect pairing of director and subject – it elevates both. Peter Jackson’s other films just don’t measure up to this one (don’t get me started on his King Kong), and, I’m sure this is some sort of heresy, I prefer this version of Tolkien’s masterpiece to the original. Tolkien, like all of the fantasy writers who’ve followed him, can be a bit dry and effected. Jackson is bombastic, over-the-top, and painfully sincere (the last is an odd trait for someone with roots in low-budget horror). Put the two together, and you get movie magic.

Jackson’s most important trait is his love of the material. I’m not sure any other director would have lobbied so hard to film The Lord of the Rings simultaneously then release it as three big budget films; he got New Line to put a lot on the line for these films (though it more than paid off for them). I don’t know if any other director would have micromanaged the effects house WETA to create such a rich and detailed world for these characters to inhabit. It's a nice parallel to Tolkien's obsession with creating languages and mythologies for Middle Earth. Furthermore, Jackson does, especially in this film, remain amazingly close to the material. Sorry Tom Bambadil fans, those scenes weren’t necessary and wouldn’t have played well. Pretty much everything else is in here.

The result is amazing. It manages to capture everything that makes fantasy a beloved genre: the sense of scale, the creation of a foreign, yet familiar, world with its own sense of a deep history, the action, the morality. And there's that extra fine touch, that not enough of Tolkien's many copycats have followed, of centering his story around very humble protagonists. Everything looks great and the movie moves quickly through a lot of exposition. The sequence in the Mines of Moria is one of the most exciting in sf movie history. And, with focuses on male friendship, the film manages to be fun, AND be about something. Jackson really gets the series off on the right foot.

Grade: A

2002 Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Fantasy - AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman

2011-09-26T06:31:00.000-07:00

Neil Gaiman made his name writingthe Sandman series for Vertigo comics through most of the '90s. Thatseries followed the adventures of Morpheus, the god of dreams, and wovetogether a wide variety of myths and legends to create a really fascinatingsetting for some innovative-yet-archetypal storytelling. Gaiman continuedalong the same lines with his novels, and he really broke through with this,his fifth, which dominated the major sf awards (and helped start the trend offantasy's dominance in the '00s).

Gaiman usually comes off as thequintessential Brit in his writing, but he moved to the US (actually to my current neck of the woods) before thisnovel. Perhaps as a result, American Gods actually feels a lot like goodStephen King to me. Gaiman's works are usually about normal people thrustinto magical worlds and given a destiny (In King's works, the people are a bitmore blue collar, and they're less likely to get a destiny and more likely justto be trying to survive). In American Gods, the central character is aMinnesotan named Shadow, who begins the novel in prison. His wife dies,leading to a slightly early release, and Shadow ends up employed as thebodyguard of a strange man named Wednesday. From Wednesday, Shadowlearns that gods are real, but they are created by human beliefs - America is overcrowdedwith gods because of its immigrant past, and the gods from the Norse, Greek,Hindu, and Egyptian pantheons (among others) must compete with moderntechnology for their survival. Shadow has all sorts of surreal encounterswith these beings (both friend and foe) and most of them are extremelyinteresting. There are also a few very nice twists along the way (thebest twists are the sort that make you exclaim "of course!" but thatyou still never see coming - the identity of the central villain here fits thatdescription perfectly).

Gaiman does dodge Christianity for the most part, which seems odd considering the book's conceit and the nature of faith in the United States. I don't particularly blame him for dodging that can of worms, but it could have added another layer to the novel.

So, it's a fun novel, and justenough of a departure from his previous work to explain (and, I'd say, towarrant) his sudden wide recognition and mainstream success. Neverwhereis my personal favorite, but I'd still recommend American Gods first,especially to a fellow American. Great stuff, and a worthy winner fromthe fantasy side of the tracks.

Grade: A-

2001 Saturn SF – AI: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

2011-09-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

I have been looking forward to rewatching this film since I addedthe Saturns to my reviews – not because I enjoyed it so much the first time…infact, I hated it. I just really wantedto make sure that I hated it.

This film has as good a science fiction pedigree as you canget. It began as a project by Stanley Kubrick,and Steven Spielberg decided to complete it himself after Kubrick’s death; it’sbased on a short story by British sf legend Brian Aldiss called “Super-ToysLast All Summer Long;” and, it concerns the very Asimovian question of whethera robot artificial intelligence can love, and, more importantly in this case,would he be loved back?

In a catastrophic future caused by global warming, there arestrict population controls. Some peoplechoose to fill the gap left by not having children with robotic “mecha”children. David (Haley Joel Osment) is aprototype with the aforementioned lovin’ upgrade. He is placed with a couple whose real son ison deep freeze, and they come to like him. They allow David to imprint on them, but when their real son comes back,David is a fourth wheel (cars in this future have three wheels, get it?), andthe mother leaves him in the woods with his robotic teddy bear. Inspired by his mother’s dramatic readings ofPinocchio, David goes off to find the Blue Fairy and become a real boy. He meets sex-bot Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), whojoins him on his quest.

The visuals are pretty fantastic, and there’s a fewhuman-face-on-robotic-chassis effects that were pretty cutting edge ten yearsago. That’s really the nicest thing Ican say about the film. Yep, I stilldidn’t like it.

I have several problems with it. Haley Joel Osment’s performance isimpressive, but in a creepy way. Watching him in this film is just plain unsettling, as you suspect he may actually be a robot (the Child-Actortron 3000). An even bigger problem is the pacing. Kubrick hadn’t gotten past the story stage,so this is mostly Spielberg, but he tried hard to do a Kubrick impression. That’swhere the film starts to fail, I think. He begins with a much more deliberate pace and imbues every scene with aweighty sense of suspense or dread. These are old Kubrickian tricks, but I think only Kubrick can pull themoff.

The movie suffocates under this weightiness, it’s slow,depressing, and dull, and it doesn’t have nearly as much to say as it seems tothink it does. What is the message? What do we learn? People are mean to robots? Spielberg is good at sentimentality? People will wear glow sticks in the future? The future will look like Las Vegas meets aState Fair? I don’t know. The movieactually feels very New Wavey, which makes sense with the Brian Aldiss roots,but it’s the worst of New Wave misanthropy and pretension.

After meandering for two hours, the film does take a crazyleft turn in the last half hour, that’s…well, at least it’s interesting. There are a lot of contrivances to get thefilm to an awkward sense of closure that only barely mitigates the slow-burncreepiness that bogs down most of its running time.

Grade: C-

2001 Arthur C. Clarke and BFS – PERDIDO STREET STATION by China Mieville

2011-09-19T05:21:00.000-07:00

There’s no denying that expectations play a big role in howI see these books. Here we have a bookby an author whose work I've liked, who has the sort of social science perspectivethat I love in my sf, and it’s one of the foundational works of the intriguing“New Weird” sub-genre. I really wantedto love this novel, and I’m pretty bummed that I didn’t.

It gets off to a great start. The main attraction here is theworld-building, and the opening chapters are chock full of it. The setting is the city of New Crobuzon onthe fantasy world of Bas-Lag. There’smagic, steampunk technology, and a variety of weird, hybrid sentient species,taken from different world myths. Thekhepri have insect heads like an Egyptian god, the vodyanoi are frog peoplefrom Russian folklore, the garuda have wings and bird heads and are inspired byHindi stories, the cactacae are cactus people based on the venerable folk storyFinal Fantasy. There arealso odd-looking people called Remade, deformed in imaginative ways by magic(er… “thaumaturgy”). The infrastructureof the city is wonderfully described – part of it is in the massive skeletalribcage of a long-dead giant beast, it’s full of zepellins and trains, and there's a rich sense of the geography from the gritty streets to the high spire in thecenter. Mieville’s descriptions not onlyevoke a fully-formed urban aesthetic, but also a whole host of accompanyingsuggestions of class and race, which are missing from most nobility-obsessedhigh fantasy.

The protagonist is Isaac der Grimnebulin, a human scientistwho’s dissatisfied with academic life. He lives in a bad part of town, and often visits an even worse part oftown to hang out with his artist friends, including his khepri girlfriendLin. Around the same time Lin and Isaacboth get big commissions. Lin is tosculpt (out of khepri-mucous and berries) a statue of a horrificallyself-Remade druglord named Mr. Motley. Isaac is to create a flying apparatus for a garuda who’s lost his wings,named Yagharek. Improbably, these plotlines come together when a super-drug producing Lovecraftian moth-thing escapesIsaac’s care and rampages throughout the city. Isaac must team up with Yagharek, sentient steampunk constructs, ademented giant spider called The Weaver, and others, to hunt down the moths.

Yes, it’s self-consciously weird. I like that about the novel, but I thinkthere’s a fundamental schizophrenia here. Mieville wants to have crazy beasties, perpetual motion machines, magic,and steampunk, and he wants to tell a straightforward action tale. He’s not able to pull off both. Most of the book, including the entire secondhalf, bogs down in endless fights, chases, and climbs, and Mieville seemscommitted to giving us a detailed play by play of every move. The hunt for the moth monsters comes toconsume the book, pushing aside its weirdness and any deeper significance. Did Mieville really come up with all of theseingenious freaks just to have them team up for a super-battle?

Among the things that get lost in Mieville’s pursuit ofWeird action is social commentary. As Isaid, there are rich suggestions of class and race as issues, and there’s avague critique of the city’s authoritarian government, but Mieville neverreally develops these ideas. Mievillehas a Ph.D. in International Relations (though I guess he was still finishing upwhen this came out), so I expected the novel to be about society on some level. It seems that Mieville is creating metaphorsin New Crobuzon, but they’re not particularly well-developed or evocative. Again, action and self-conscious weirdnessget in the way.

I can’t say I particularly cared about the characterseither. Isaac is grumpy, consumed bywork, and ambivalent about his feelings for Lin, which adds up to somethingthat’s certainly not generic, but not particularly compelling either. Everyone else is pretty much a cipher, atleast until the final chapter adds layers to Yagharek. Not being invested in the characters madethose endless second-half action sequences even more interminable. Weird alsogets in the way of the prose at times. Mieville shows flashes of his talenthere, and the descriptions are far richer than your average sf, but he comes upwith some off-putting metaphors (e.g. “his body wobbling like a bloatedtesticle”) and strange diction (“his body was thin…with a healthyemaciation”). I might applaud theoriginality of his language if I wasn’t so busy throwing up. Add in theaforementioned overwrought descriptions, and I wanted to yell at Mieville toput the thesaurus down and get on with it.

It was almost like I could see Mieville finding his voice asa writer throughout the novel. Heimmediately turns the fantasy genre on its head, but then he doesn’t do muchwith the new world he’s made. The ideasare there, but they need to be more developed in less space (I suspect I’mgoing to find many more books about a 1/3^rd too long in this decade,as pagecounts continue to grow, more due to trends in publishing than to anyactual artistic reason). I wanted thisbook to be so much more than it is, but I am still going to check out the othertwo Bas-Lag books.

Grade: B-

2001 Locus Fantasy – A STORM OF SWORDS by George R. R. Martin

2011-09-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

I found A Game of Thrones somewhat disappointing. A Clash of Kings gave me much more confidence in Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, but Istill struggled, slightly, with some aspects. This third volume (of a series originallyintended to be a trilogy…) is damn near perfect, as far as I’m concerned.

Again, there’s not much I can say about the plot withoutspoilers for the first two novels, and this certainly shouldn’t be read withoutthose. The continent of Westeros is ripped apart by political strife betweenseveral of its most powerful families. Meanwhile, supernatural threats gatherin the frozen north and across the Narrow Sea. I’m not even going to get intospecific characters, because this is a series where anyone can die, and justknowing who survived the first two books would be a little too revealing.

Martin was already a mature and accomplished writer(especially of short fiction) before he began this series in 1996, but I feelthat his prose has matured significantly since A Game of Thrones. His dialogueis memorable, the characters are complex and fascinating (this volume is famousfor making one of the most hated characters of the first novel into a fanfavorite), and surprises abound. The world-building is amazing, and Martinclearly has a detailed history for this world and a thorough understanding ofhow its politics and economics work. The supernatural elements are especiallyfascinating, as magic is rare but immensely powerful.

My one complaint (I always have at least one) is that some of thecharacters' movements seem a little random. One character in particular has beenbouncing back and forth through the middle of Westeros for nearly two-thousandpages. There have been some good sub-plots along the way for her, but itdoesn’t feel like there’s a clear aim or purpose for her character.

This is one of the best fantasy novels I’ve read, and I’vereally come to love this series. I know that it gets more frustrating fromhere, with the waiting and the awkwardly split novels. There’s no way I can’tkeep going after this entry though.

Grade: A

2001 Locus SF – THE TELLING by Ursula K. LeGuin

2011-09-12T01:23:00.000-07:00

LeGuin wrote many of the finest novels of the New Wave in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s – really, some of the finest sf novels, period. She returned to her beloved fantasy series, Earthsea, in the early ‘90s with a novel that I found aimless and a clash with the original trilogy. Now, in the ‘00s, she returns to her Hainish social sf, which included classics like The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and…well, it works.

Like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Telling takes a delegate of the interstellar Ekumen from Earth and puts them into a society of aliens (though humanoid and distantly related). Sutty was born in India and lived for a time in Vancouver, hiding from religious extremists who have taken the planet’s government. As an agent of the Ekumen she takes the very long trip to Aka, a planet where a new pro-technology Corporation government is attempting to wipe out all vestiges of an ancient folk religion. It’s quite a clash for Sutty, but she comes to see more parallels between theocratic Earth and the anti-religious extremists of Aka’s Corporation. Sutty settles in a secluded valley where many of the old religious traditions survive, including a powerful storytelling tradition, the titular Telling, led by paired priests called maz.

The book debates issues of rationalism and modernism versus religion with plenty of nuance – just when I thought LeGuin’s portrayal of the folk religion was two idealistic, she does pull in a few twists about how it played out in other regions on Aka. It is, perhaps, a tad too preachy, but I’ve seen worse. LeGuin also throws in a little mysticism, but she keeps it ambiguous. The real star, though, is the prose. It’s always been LeGuin’s strongest suit, and here she uses a loose, succinct style that feels almost like a prose poem at times. It’s grounded, but it also fits the folkoric world that most of the novel takes place in. It’s a similar airy and laid-back style as Tehanu, but it played much better here.

While The Telling certainly doesn’t top her earlier books, it is a worthy entry in the Hainish saga and LeGuin’s catalog. She has a few more wins coming towards the end of the decade, and I’m looking forward to them now.

Grade: B

2001 BSFA – CHASM CITY by Alastair Reynolds

2011-09-08T20:36:00.000-07:00

As I said back in my review for Hyperion, I have a soft spotfor space opera. There’s something about vistas on different worlds, biglumbering spaceships, and people running around with blasters or ray-guns thatlowers my reader defenses. I’ve readily admitted that I’m unduly hard on highfantasy; well, it’s the opposite for me and space opera. I’m not trying to jumpinto the “fantasy sucks” arguments that flare up now and then from sf fandom; it’s purely apersonal preference thing. The ‘80s were a second golden age for the sub-genre,with several post-Star Wars winners culminating in the inspiring originality ofHyperion. Things fell off a bit in the ‘90s, but Vinge and Bujold kept thingsgoing. Since then, though…well, A Deepness in the Sky was the last space opera to win the Hugo, and even digginginto the other awards, this will be one of the last space opera novels I cover.That said, Reynolds is representative of a group of authors, mostly British,carrying the genre forward in the twenty-first century.

This is my first Reynolds novel, so I can’t say a whole lotabout the Revelation Space setting in which it, and the majority of his work,takes place. Humans have spread to other planets, they’ve run into signs ofother intelligences, but not many living representatives, nano-machines and allsorts of transhuman augmentation exists, but faster-than-light travel doesn’tseem to. It seems that the mood is what most sets Reynolds apart though. Spaceisn’t a pleasant place, and human beings aren’t particularly pleasant either.Betrayal, violence, war, and societal collapse seem to overshadow humanityamong the stars.

That’s certainly true of the two settings in Chasm City. Itstarts with Tanner Mirabel on the war-torn planet of Journey’s End. He’s amercenary/veteran who’s involved in some old grudges that lead him to survive amassive, space-elevator-destroying attack in an early action set-piece. Tannerthen awakes with partial amnesia near the thriving planet of Yellowstone, stillpursuing the old grudge. Tanner thought Yellowstone was thriving, buta machine-infecting virus has laid the planet low. The virus causes machines togo crazy, and it’s killed many people, interfered with the life-extendingtreatments of many more, destroyed an orbital district around Yellowstone, andturned the capital of Chasm City into an anarchic, dystopian disaster. Thisdoesn’t put Tanner off of his plans to execute his old enemy though, and hecontinues to Chasm City and gets himself into all sorts of tricky situations,including a most dangerous “Game,” some high-risk surgery, long falls fromdamaged cable cars, and lots and lots of firefights.

All the while, Tanner has flashbacks to the life of thevenerated founder of his faction from Journey’s End, named Sky Hausmann. Asthese memories pop up through the book, we learn about the planet’scolonization, the origins of its conflicts, the results of mistakes whileworking with anti-matter fuel, a few facts about alien life, and the truthabout Sky Hausmann.

I really wanted to like this rare, award-winning space operaof the last decade, and I thought I very much would early in the book. Reynoldsdoes some pretty solid world-building, quickly establishing his dark take onhumanity in space and painting the ruined Chasm City itself with rich, moodydetails. The novel did lose me at some point in the second half though. It’s alittle too long, and a little too obsessed with dramatic twists over solidstorytelling. There are just so many odd turns in the end, and some rely on bigcontrivances (without spoiling things too much: Tanner runs into a galacticrarity TWICE in two very different places). I stopped caring the third timesomeone was NOT WHO WE THOUGHT THERE WERE, and there were two or three such BIGREVELATIONS left (is this why it’s called “revelation” space?). Reynolds’ loveof the grim and gritty didn’t help either - almost all of the surprises revealthat characters are actually terrible. I don’t mind a little darkness; I justgot bored with its relentlessness here. The biggest twists have to do with Tanner’s lost memories(you know when a character acquires amnesia that there are some surprises onthe way), but I wasn’t particularly interested in them. I wasn’t involved inTanner, and I didn’t care about his true story.

There’s some solid world-building and fun action here, but Iwas not impressed overall. More varied character work, less misdirection, andmore streamlined storytelling might have kept me in Reynolds’ world a littlelonger. Also, as with A Deepness in the Sky, I don’t think an sf novice wouldstand a chance here, and that, in my opinion, goes a long way towards explaining space opera's fade.

Grade: B-

2001 Nebula – THE QUANTUM ROSE by Catherine Asaro

2011-09-05T07:06:00.000-07:00

I often try to explain my frame of mind going into anovel. In this case, between the Nebula awards’consistent inconsistency, the fact that this is an entry in a sprawling spaceopera epic that I’ve never heard of, let alone read, and the harlequin romancecover and cover description…well, I wasn’t looking forward to this one. But, it kind of surprised me. Emphasis on "kind of."

In Asaro’s Skolian Empire books, ancient humans, with somemysterious alien intervention, colonized large segments of the galaxy. This empire was ruled over by geneticallyengineered psychics. It eventuallycollapsed, and by the time Earth caught up to it, the whole thing was reelingin the midst of an interstellar war.

I’m sure that background is apparent in the other novels,but in The Quantum Rose we start on the backwards planet of Balumil, where no oneis aware of any of this. Kamoj is thebeautiful young ruler of Argali, and she is betrothed to the cruel, older JaxIronbridge. However, the strange masked foreignerVyrl Lionstar makes a better offer and wins her away (brides on Balumil aremore or less bought by the highest bidder). Kamoj is initially horrified, but she soon learns that Vyrl is notmerely a rude foreigner, but a heroic exile from another planet. His clashes with the local culture aremisunderstandings, and he is kind, handsome, and wants to treat Kamoj as anequal. He introduces Kamoj totechnologies from computers to advanced medicine to spaceships. He does have his own troubled background;he’s been caught up in a conflict with the Earth Alliance, and it’s left psychologicalscars that have driven him to alcoholism and a distrust of his Skolianallies. Meanwhile, Ironbridge stillfights for Kamoj, and she has to balance her sense of duty to her planet withher love of Vyrl and complex interstellar politics.

It does have some of the trappings of romance novels thatthe cover and description imply; I don’t have any particular problem with aromantic storyline, but the genre does have a set of tropes, some of which I find somewhat offensive, and others are just worn out. Here we do get the beautiful, damaged man, and the initial fear androughness in a relationship that quickly turns to abiding love. There’s all sorts of sexual coercion here,and Kamoj is often a victim. We’re toldthat her people have been genetically engineered as compliant slaves, butwatching her allow herself to be trampled for duty or love for most of thenovel can get annoying. Also, thecharacters are a little too perfect in their beauty, heroism, self-sacrifice,and love for each other, not to mention their superhuman abilities. Hey, Vyrl can even dance like a god amongmen! Is their a term for this sort ofromance-novel, perfect mate Mary Sueism?

All of this grated, but there was also plenty to like in thenovel. Contact between advanced and primitivesocieties is old hat in sf, but Asaro handles it quite well here, slowlyunveiling the Skolians to us at the same time she reveals them to Kamoj. The overall plot has a lot of momentum, andthe scale of action gets bigger as the novel goes on, eventually moving toanother planet. Despite theirunrealistic perfection, the main characters are solid and interesting, and someof the side characters, especially the crew of the ship that brought Vyrl, are evenmore intriguing. Asaro has a PhD in mathherself, and she keeps the technology interesting and familiar, while alsodrawing bigger metaphors from mathematical processes (“couple-channeledquantum-scattering”). I can’t say that Iever really grasped this aspect of the novel’s structure, but I do appreciatethat Asaro tried something different.

All in all, I'd call this a mixed bag. When I wasn't rolling my eyes, annoyed by cliché, I was usually caught up in the book and enjoying myself. It gets a middling grade from me, but I'm rather glad that Nebula went with something different this year.

Grade: B-

2001 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON

2011-09-02T06:15:00.000-07:00

Whenever the topic of all-time favorite movie comes up, I'll give a different answer almost every time. There are a few films that keep popping up though: Citizen Kane, The Searchers, Dr Strangelove, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade… And, among that vaunted set of films is this one, a Kung-Fu masterpiece by the brilliant Taiwanese director Ang Lee.

The film, based on a Chinese novel from the 1930s, follows a set of legendary martial artists from the Giang Hu underworld during the Qing dynasty. Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat) is contemplating retirement and can’t find peace due to his love for fellow wandering fighter Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). On a visit to Beijing, Li Mu Bai’s ancient and powerful Green Dragon Sword is stolen by Jun Yu (Ziang Ziyi), a martial arts prodigy who is also an aristocratic girl soon to have an arranged marriage with a man she doesn’t love. The evil Jade Fox, who killed Li Mu Bai’s master to steal a secret training manual, has trained Jen. There are also a few subplots involving Jen’s true love and an undercover police officer who has vowed to find and kill Jade Fox.

It sounds complex when I write it out like that, but it’s actual a very straightforward story that never gets in the way of a series of stunning fight scenes while also managing to give those scenes importance and thematic resonance. The characters can fight like superhumans, but they have a much harder time declaring their feelings and navigating conflicts between freedom and duty. The film also explores gender issues in a way that few action films have. All of the best fighters, except for Li Mu Bai, are women. There’s a nice parallel between Jen, who fights to follow her heart, and Shu Lien, who represses her feelings. Even the villainess, Jade Fox, finds her initial motivation in the Wudang school’s refusal to train women.

There’s plenty of interesting character and story work here, and I think that’s what most sets this apart from most other films in the genre. But, the fight scenes, with amazing wire work by Yuen Woo-Ping (who also did The Matrix) are also fantastic. There’s a real emphasis on the grace of the often weightless-seeming characters, and Lee does an excellent job of capturing the precision of the moves without losing the action. It’s a mixture of clarity and speed that very few directors (especially in the West) manage to capture.

On top of all of that the scenery is gorgeous, the characters’ backstories are rich and efficiently conveyed, and their relationships and fates are genuinely moving. I can’t really judge the dialogue; the subtitles come across a bit wooden, but that’s as close as I can come to a genuine complaint. I think this film is damn near perfect.

I do think this is another instance where we can play one of my least favorite games: “is it sf?” The fantasy elements are pretty clear, what with the characters flying all over the screen, but I would object that those are established conventions of another genre: wuxia (martial arts). It’s like saying that Sin City must be sf because its Noir conventions are unrealistic. By that logic, it’s a short leap to calling soap operas like General Hospital speculative fiction, because, well, they’re certainly not realistic fiction. But, as I’ve said before, I try not to get too caught up in that debate. It only bothers me here because it seems to ignore the existence of a genre with its own long history. That said, I can’t blame Hugo voters for recognizing a film that I truly love, which also happens to be the first non-English language film to ever win this category. I love this choice, and I'm sure I would have voted with the majority.

Grade: A

2001 Hugo – HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE by J. K. Rowling

2011-08-30T19:58:00.000-07:00

I laid out most of my thoughts on the Harry Potter series last time (in fact, I was going to combine these two reviews at one point), so this should go pretty quickly. Perhaps the most important thing to mention here is that this is the first fantasy novel to win a Hugo award, which still kind of amazes me. There were forty-eight Hugo awards handed out without anything close to fantasy winning (fantasy novels were eligible and nominated from the beginning), then, starting here, they win four of five. I think this is testimony to both how big the Harry Potter series had become and a sea change in speculative fiction readership as a whole. I’m sure I’ll say more about this going forward.

As for the book itself, it’s another strong, mid-series entry in the Harry Potter series. Every book and film after the first two always prompted headlines along the lines of “Harry Potter Grows Up,” but if you really want to choose a novel where the series matures the most, I think you have to look here. The central plot is kind of lame. There’s a big, inter-school competition hosted by Hogwarts in Harry’s fourth year called the Triwizard Tournament. Harry is chosen as a competitor despite being too young, but, with his usual pluck and help from his friends, he manages to do quite well. It’s a very artificial structure, and it’s one of the worst offenders of Rowling’s bad habit of not having her characters examine major mysteries until it’s convenient to the plot.

The attraction here is not in the main plot though, it’s in the sub-plots. And, there are a lot of them. One of the ways that this novel “matures” the series is that it is the longest yet, by a healthy margin. At 700+ pages, it’s more than twice as long as the first book. Rowling uses that space mostly for character development, as her characters become teenagers with the requisite hormonal angst. Harry has a crush, for instance. Meanwhile, in the background, Lord Voldemort once again threatens to return, but Rowling breaks formula by making the threat realer than in the first novels and by having his vicious minions, the Death Eaters, attack a sporting event in a manner that parallels any number of real world events. There’s also the famous death at the end, though it’s a fairly ancillary character.

All in all, it’s another fun book from a series that’s become an instant classic. It's one of the most controversial Hugo winners, and I probably wouldn't have voted for it, but it makes sense that such a landmark series should get some recognition from within the field. I am glad that the awards stepped away from the subsequent books though. They remain strong (especially the final two entries), but one Hugo and one Locus fantasy seems about right for the series.

Grade: A-

Also, to follow up on the movie watch from last time, I think the Goblet of Fire film isn't very good. It sticks mainly to the central plot, which, as mentioned above, isn’t so great. Mike Newell’s direction is limp and generic where Cuaron’s was taut and original. See Prisoner whether you like the books or not, but consider avoiding Goblet even if you are a big fan of the books.

Who am I kidding? Who hasn't read all the books and seen all the movies by this point?

2000 Locus Fantasy – HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN by J. K. Rowling

2011-08-28T14:34:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter is a multi-billion dollar phenomenon. It has probably made more money and penetrated into the popular consciousness more than anything else I’ll talk about on this blog with the possible exception of Star Wars. I think the real turning point of the phenomenon, the moment that it truly broke the bonds of the fantasy genre and the juvenile audience was right around 2000, when Goblet of Fire came out and the first film went into production. At least, that’s when I first heard about it, and it’s about the time that the awards I’m covering took notice.

The novels follow an orphaned and neglected boy named Harry Potter as he turns eleven and discovers that a) magic exists, b) he can do magic, c) he’s expected to attend a school for wizards, and d) he has a destiny as the unwitting defeater of the evil Lord Voldemort. It’s a perfect wish-fulfillment scenario, but it also allows Rowling to play with some of the tropes of urban fantasy, an area where I think the films have focused more. In the novels, it’s almost suburban fantasy, as the real world (or “muggle,” in Rowling’s parlance) contrast is the suburban, dull, and downright abusive Dursley family.

Each of the seven novels in the series focuses on one year of Harry’s school at the wizard school Hogwarts. I think this might be Rowling’s most brilliant conceit, as it gives her a sold formula to follow or subvert as needed, and it allows the series to grow and mature along with its protagonist. The early books are short and clever, but fairly childish. The latter books are heavy, and filled with character deaths and epic battles. The two award-winning volumes slide right into the middle at three and four, which results in a nice balance of light and heavy, and this is probably my favorite era – the formula hasn’t broken, but it’s maturing.

Prisoner of Azkaban may be my favorite for this very reason. It manages to maintain some of the series' early innocence and charm, but the threats seem more real than ever, and Rowling does a great deal of world-building that hints at the magical world outside of Hogwarts and gives some more background to some of the characters. Sirius Black, a key follower of the dark wizard Voldemort, has escaped from the nototious Azkaban prison. He betrayed Harry’s parents, and there are hints that he is coming to kill Harry himself. Meanwhile, Dementors, the grisly and ghostly guards of Azkaban also frighten and endanger Harry as they hunt for Black. There are the usual number of intricate, interlocking mysteries that you get in a Harry Potter book, as well as some of the usual magical gadgets; this has my favorites: an interactive map of the school grounds and a limited time travel necklace that Rowling puts to great use.

It may be obvious by now, but I am a fan of these books. Rowling is a great plotter, and she reweaves some tired fantasy tropes into something that feels both original and classic (I’ve heard it claimed that these books rip off Earthsea and/or Ender’s Game, but I don’t see it. The school setting is old and oft-used, and the mood is completely different. Orson Scott Card sure seems convinced though!). The prose makes for a fast-paced read, though it can get a little precious, even for a children’s book. Still, the books are fun and exciting, and I think they offer plenty for adults. But you’ve probably already read them, so you don’t need me to tell you.

Grade: A-

I also want to mention that the film version, directed by the excellent Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, ifantastic. By far, it’s the best of the film versions, as it steers away from the childish schlock of Chris Columbus’s first two films and creates a new visual style that clearly influenced all of the subsequent films. He really plays up the urban fantasy elements, and his Hogwarts is more spacious and engrossing. It was nominated for a Hugo in 2005, and maybe should have won (actually, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind should have won, but that’s a debate for another day). I highly recommend it.

2000 Saturn SF – X-MEN

2011-08-25T19:04:00.000-07:00

Comic books are science fiction’s bastard child. Pulp comics grew alongside golden age pulp science fiction, and it’s clear that both genres have influenced each other from the ‘40s on. And yet, a graphic fiction category wasn’t created for the Hugos until 2009, and Watchmen was the only sequential work to get recognition before then.

Most sf fans in their thirties and forties, from Joss Whedon to yours truly, would tell you that writer Chris Claremont’s X-Men was one of their formative sf experiences. If you’d asked twelve-year-old me if I wanted to see a live-action X-Men film, I probably would have said “YES!” followed shortly thereafter by “oh no, I’m sure it will be terrible.” There are a lot conceits of superhero comics that just don’t translate to the big screen: the brightly colored costumes, the soap operatic deaths and resurrections, the wanton genre-mashing, and the larger-than-life supervillains. As a result, most superhero movies before this one are awful. Even the good ones, Donner’s Superman and Burton’s Batman and…that’s about it, have their embarrassing moments. And, well, so does this film. But, director Bryan Singer does manager to take one of the most over-the-top superhero properties and translate it to a mostly successful film.

One of the keys to his success is that Singer approaches this as a science fiction movie rather than a comic book movie. The point of the X-Men is that they are mutants, people with genetic differences that give them superhuman abilities. All you naysayers are probably complaining right now that a genetic mutation is unlikely to allow someone to manipulate magnetic fields, read minds, or shoot lasers out of their eyes, but there’s a perfectly good psuedo-sciencey explanation in the comics involving space gods called Celestials. Obviously, the movie isn’t going to go there, so let’s move on.

One mutant, a Holocaust survivor named Magneto (Sir Ian McKellen), fears that humans will destroy the mutants and takes a more militant line. Another, Charles Xavier (Sir Patrick Stewart), has created a school for the “Gifted” to teach mutants to use their powers safely. He takes a more assimilationist line, and he’s trained a group of mutants to fight Magneto that he calls the X-Men. A Canadian with a healing factor and claws named Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) picks up a young woman who can absorb people’s lifeforce named Rogue (Anna Paquin), and they end up with Xavier, but Magento tries to kidnap her as part of a sinister plot. Also, Halle Berry, Famke Jansen, and Rebbeca Romjin are around.

The cast is very strong (Picard versus Gandalf!), and says a lot about how seriously the filmmakers took the subject matter. Along with the sleek metal sets and not-as-corny-as-they-could-be leather uniforms, this keeps the film out of embarrassment territory for most of its run time. In fact, the first act is quite strong, as it efficiently raises the key issues, introduces the characters, and all around looks good. The film goes a bit downhill from there though. Magneto’s sinister plot is far too elaborate, the dialogue takes a turn for the cheesy, and the ending feels rushed and decidedly un-epic. However, the film does deserve a lot of credit for making the franchise, and really the whole genre, credible.

This film kicked off a trend, still ongoing, of blockbuster superhero movies. From here, they come to dominate the Saturn Fantasy category (it does make sense to me that Singer’s X-Men are “sf” to Saturn while Spider-man, Superman and Batman are “fantasy,” though I’m not sure I could justify it all that well). I can’t say that I’ll cover many of these Saturn fantasy winners (anything not to have to watch Superman Returns again), but Raimi’s first two Spider-man movies and Nolan’s Batman movies are quite good.

Grade: B

1999 Locus Fantasy – A CLASH OF KINGS by George R. R. Martin

2011-08-22T13:44:00.001-07:00

Before I move onto the last decade of coverage, I wanted to tie up one loose end from the ‘90s (that I didn’t read in time to hit in the natural order…but close enough). This is going to be a very short review, even though it’s another rather long, epic book. Why so short? Two reasons: 1) It’s too difficult to discuss the plot much without spoiling major plot points from A Game of Thrones. 2) this whole post can be summed up rather neatly in three words: I. Was. Wrong.

Now, I wasn’t that wrong. I gave the first novel a solid B, which is not all that bad by my grading standards. But, I also complained that the book had a lack of world-building, over-reliance on shallow conceptions of medieval Europe, and a focus on nobility (in many different senses of the word) that I found off-putting. This volume so directly addressed and overcame those objections, that I can’t help but think I completely misjudged, maybe even misunderstood the previous volume.* The world-building here is amazing. Several new elements are added, religion and magic are fleshed out, and characters spends much of the novel discussing the history of the continent of Westeros. This is certainly the most background information I’ve seen in a novel series this side of Tolkien. These historical interludes could feel like unnecessary diversions, but each manages to illuminate or resonate with the situations the characters find themselves in. All of the characters show off greater depth, and I have growing sympathy for some of the “evil” characters of the first novel, while the “good” characters are forced to make some very tough ethical choices. Finally, we see how hollow the concepts of chivalry and aristocracy are, while also witnessing more of how the struggles for power between the principle characters impact the lives of the “small folk,” and also how they can and will make their own voices heard, even in a strictly hierarchical world.

I do still have a few complaints though. Two books in, and it *still* feels like Martin is mostly moving the pieces into place. The story is very intricate and chaotic at the same time, and it only seems to get moreso with each passing chapter. I don’t really have a sense of narrative structure here, and I can only hope that Martin has some kind of plan. Also, one of the characters and his storyline were so annoying that they drove me nuts (*cough*Theon*cough*). It’s one of those things where I have to give a grudging respect for the author for managing to get such a rise out of me…but that doesn’t make it any more pleasant. Maybe Martin will address these objections as well as the series goes on.

Also, what a lousy cover. It really misrepresents the tone of the series. The newer, simpler paperback covers are much nicer.

This was a great read, and I’m looking forward to seeing it on HBO next year and reading the next volume.

Grade: A-

*The excellent HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones (while will hopefully show up on next year’s Hugo ballot, preferably the whole series in “Long Form”) makes me feel the same way.

[Note: There was a long ranty post up here this morning about overreactions to Blackout/All Clear winning the Hugo. There's nothing sinister about my pulling it down; I just didn't think it was a very good post. It seemed kind of silly to rant about other people's rants, especially to defend a book I hardly liked.]

Hugo Stats

2011-08-21T06:54:00.000-07:00

Hugo voting statistics are here.

Just like last year, this is where I really get to see how out of step I was. Feed a strong second? The Dervish House last? "The Lady Who Plucked Flowers" below "Troika"?

The most interesting voting was not in novelette (as I predicted last night - it actually went rather smoothly), but in Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, where there was an initial surge of first place votes for the "Ray Bradbury" novelty song, which then sank quickly down-ballot. The Doctor Who finale became the consensus choice from what was initially a very divided ballot; it was fourth in first place votes (above only my pick).

As for nominations: Three novels that would have been interesting additions to the nominees (and which I would have preferred to read over some of these nominees) came in just below Cryoburn: Who Fears Death, Kraken, and Surface Detail. As for my "Not a Hugo" reads: How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe came in 12th and Zoo City was 27th. Super sadly, no love for my favorite science fiction novel of the year. Thankfully, WWW:Watch was 20th.

Scott Pilgrim just missed in Graphic Fiction. Caprica got no love in Dramatic Short.

Hugo Winners and Thoughts

2011-08-20T21:19:00.000-07:00

BEST NOVEL: Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)

BEST NOVELLA: The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (Subterranean)

BEST NOVELETTE: "The Emperor of Mars" by Allen M. Steele (Asimov's, June 2010; also in audio)

BEST SHORT STORY: "For Want of a Nail" by Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov's, September 2010)

BEST RELATED WORK: Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It, edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O'Shea (Mad Norwegian)

BEST GRAPHIC STORY: Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse, written by Phil and Kaja Foglio; art by Phil Foglio; colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM: Inception, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Warner)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, SHORT FORM: Doctor Who: "The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang," written by Steven Moffat; directed by Toby Haynes (BBC Wales)
BEST EDITOR, SHORT FORM: Sheila Williams
BEST EDITOR, LONG FORM: Lou Anders
BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST: Shaun Tan
BEST SEMIPROZINE: Clarkesworld, edited by Neil Clarke, Cheryl Morgan, Sean Wallace; podcast directed by Kate Baker
BEST FANZINE: The Drink Tank, edited by Christopher J Garcia and James Bacon
BEST FAN WRITER: Claire Brialey
BEST FAN ARTIST: Brad W. Foster
JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER [Not a Hugo]: Lev Grossman

I didn't cover it, but the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer did go to a novelist that I've reviewed before: Lev Grossman. I'm not really clear how he qualifies, since he had a widely-distributed novel published in 2004, and, apparently, another years before that...oh well. I'm looking forward to reading the just-published The Magician King, and if it's as good as people are saying it is, I hope it gets some consideration in the novel category next year.

Graphic Fiction - I said the Foglios were hard to criticize because they're super-nice and hardcore supporters of sf fandom, and they proved this yet again by withdrawing themselves from contention in this category next year. And yet...I don't have much confidence in the category getting better without them. I won't be covering it anymore unless there are some really interesting nominees, and, speaking as a fan of the medium, I kind of hope it just goes away.

Dramatic Presentation, Short Form - I voted for a different Who episode, but at the last moment, I started rooting for "The Lost Thing," just to have something different... But, Who wins anyway, and the more predictable episode at that. I can't complain though; it was a very strong season of what's been a great show.

Long Form - Yep.

Short Story - I'm shocked that "The Things" didn't win, but also very happy that "For Want of a Nail" did. Maybe I have more in common with the majority of Hugo voters than I thought...or maybe the Watts story is just much more polarizing than Kowal's, and she won on alternate votes.

Novelette - Another pleasant surprise. I figured "That Leviathan" was too polarizing, but "Plus or Minus" was also a great story. I bet the voting was really interesting in this category.

Novella - Ugh. Damn you, Hugo voters! "Lifecycle" was a fine story, and my second choice, but it was nowhere near Swirsky's story, which was my favorite Hugo nominee of the year (except possibly Inception).

Novel - I take back what I said three categories ago about being on the same wavelength as most Hugo voters. Well, it's a relief that the female winner drought has ended, though it'd still be great to see a new female winner. I liked Blackout/All Clear better than a lot of the reviewers I read, but it's flaws are glaring. I can't help but feel that both Willis's and Chiang's wins are more about their legacy than an honest evaluation of quality. But, then again, maybe that's just nerd blogger sour grapes. You can't win them all, and there wasn't a stand out novel among the nominees anyway this year, so cheers to Willis and the rest of the winners.

Swirsky not winning really burns me though...

My scorecard:

6 of my first place votes won

1 of my second place votes won

2 of my third place votes won (an art category, and novel)

1 of my fourth place votes won (a Dr Who episode that I certainly didn't dislike)

1 winner that I preferred "no award" over

And I skipped the other 5 categories, due mainly to unfamiliarity

2011 Hugo Nominee: Novel Wrap

2011-08-16T20:21:00.001-07:00

At first glance this was an extremely poor set of nominees, but I think they turned out stronger than I expected. If I could replace Cryoburn with Super Sad True Love Story, and Feed with Zoo City, and force Connie Willis to edit five hundred pages out of Blackout/All Clear, it’d be an even stronger slate than last year.

But, I’m told I can’t do that. So, I guess I have to decide who should win out of the nominees, which are clearly not as strong as a whole as in 2010. As I said last year, I think a Hugo winner should have three qualities: 1) it should explore speculative ideas, 2) it should build a compelling world, and 3) it should be of high literary quality. Super-Sad True Love Story did these things really well, and so did the Hunger Games trilogy…okay, okay, I'll move on to the actual nominees for real this time. Actually, now that I have grades, unlike last year, this is probably pretty darn obvious.

Anyway, ascending order: Feed didn’t work for me on a number of levels. It leaned too heavily on zombie tropes and a rather generic conspiracy plot. I was intrigued by some of the world-building, but I didn’t buy the “blogger’s truth over the lamestream media” concept at the crux of the world. The writing could have been better. A crowd-pleaser like Boneshaker, but probably not as good.

Cryoburn was a fairly forgettable entry in a series that was always a little ridiculous and is probably past its prime. Then again, I read four other books to catch up, and I never really regretted it. Bujold is still great at putting well-rounded characters in pulpy situations, but only a brief epilogue prevents this volume from being completely skippable, even for diehard Vokosiganers (? - I don’t know what the fans call themselves).

Blackout/All-Clear was better than I expect. In fact, it was almost really good, and portions of it were fantastic. And, it meets all of my criteria – a very detailed world, some exploration of time travel’s consequences (though there could be a lot more of that), and strong prose. I wouldn’t mind if it won the Hugo, as it did the Nebula and Locus. But, it’s just too damn long.

One-Hundred Thousand Kingdoms presents an interesting, layered fantasy world with very strong characters. The world could use some elaboration, and I could’ve done without the “tortured-dangerous-sexy man” romance sub-plot, and I’m just not quite sure Jemisin has realized her full potential as an artist yet. There’s so much potential there to realize though.

Which leaves McDonald’s Dervish House. I don’t think this is McDonald’s strongest work, but it does seem to have the richest ideas out of the nominees, and it has beautiful prose that really evokes an ancient city in wondrous detail. I'd put it third behind last year’s dual winners, but it kind of wins by default for me this year.

And, that makes me a horrible sexist for voting for the one man in a year with four female nominees in the midst of a serious female-winner drought. Honestly, I’m kind of rooting for Jemisin to pull off an upset and break the penis-streak, even though McDonald deserves a Hugo for a strong body of work over the past decade. Either way, I think that they’ll both have other chances.

Here's a summary of my Hugo coverage:

BEST NOVEL

Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
Feed, Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
The Dervish House, Ian McDonald (Pyr; Gollancz)
Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis (Spectra)

BEST NOVELLA

The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
‘‘The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon'', Elizabeth Hand (Stories)
‘‘The Sultan of the Clouds'', Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov's 9/10)
‘‘Troika'', Alastair Reynolds (Godlike Machines)
‘‘The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen's Window'', Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Summer 2010)

BEST NOVELETTE
‘‘The Jaguar House, in Shadow'', Aliette de Bodard (Asimov's 7/10)
‘‘Plus or Minus'', James Patrick Kelly (Asimov's 12/10)
‘‘Eight Miles'', Sean McMullen (Analog 9/10)
‘‘The Emperor of Mars'', Allen M. Steele (Asimov's 6/10)
‘‘That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made'', Eric James Stone (Analog 9/10)

BEST SHORT STORY

‘‘Ponies'', Kij Johnson (Tor.com 11/17/10)

‘‘For Want of a Nail'', Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov's 12/10)
‘‘Amaryllis'', Carrie Vaughn (Lightspeed 6/10)
‘‘The Things'', Peter Watts (Clarkesworld 1/10)

BEST GRAPHIC STORY

The Unwritten, Vol. 2: Inside Man, Mike Carey; art by Peter Gross (Vertigo)
Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse, Phil & Kaja Foglio; art by Phil Foglio (Airship Entertainment)
Grandville Mon Amour, Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse)
Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel, Howard Tayler (Hypernode)
Fables: Witches, Bill Willingham; art by Mark Buckingham (Vertigo)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION – LONG

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
How to Train Your Dragon
Inception
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Toy Story 3

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION – SHORT

Doctor Who: ‘‘A Christmas Carol''
Doctor Who: ‘‘The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang''
Doctor Who: ‘‘Vincent and the Doctor''
F%$& Me, Ray Bradbury
The Lost Thing

Finally, if you want to see how I line up with other blog reviews, Nicholas Whyte did a cool comparison here, and I was happy that he included me. I'm in the minority on "The Things," which I already knew, but otherwise, I seem to be with a pretty strong consensus except in that pesky novelette category (which also happened to be my favorite this year).

I'm sure I'll have more to add this weekend after the ceremony (which will be streamed live).

2011 Not a Hugo Nominee: Novel – HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE by Charles Yu

2011-08-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

Charles Yu is really good at freezing a moment in time - not necessarily a particularly important moment - and picking it apart. Within these moments, he manages to detail every conflicting emotion, all of the personal history and potential, and the interplay of little background vignettes. In this novel, Yu hand-waives his way through some science fiction traditions like time machines and temporal loops as an excuse to create some of these frozen-in-time moments. We get to see every detail of a father and son meeting in a park, for instance, because the narrator is reliving it.

Just as with Super Sad True Love Story, we’re back on the topic of literary/sf crossover. I generally try to avoid excluding books with labels, but I’m going to put my cards on the table and say what I think about the genre elements here: while Shteyngart is an example of a literary writer doing science fiction, this novel is an example of a writer using science fiction references to write a postmodern, literary novel. I spent much of my decade away from reading science fiction reading “po-mo” novels by the likes of Pynchon and Auster, so I know these things when I see them. There are a lot of genre tropes here, but this is really a story of an unhappy man thinking about his father and about where his own life went wrong. Heinlein, LeGuin, Niven and others get name-checked, but there’s not much of their spirit here – which is not inherently a bad thing, though perhaps it is misleading.

The narrator, Charles Yu (first sign we’re in a postmodern novel: the author or his/her name appears somehow) is a time travel machine repairman in some sort of meta-universe that is finite, shifting and crowded with characters and ideas from science fiction (Luke Skywalker’s disgruntled son appears – it’s totally non-canonical if there are any hardcore Star Wars expanded universe fans out there reading :P ). Yu finds himself in a time loop, and he kind-of-maybe has to solve the mystery of the book he’s in that we’re reading (now we’re really getting po-mo!) and find his Dad. He’s aided by a cute computer program named TAMMY and his retconned dog Ed (if you don’t know what a retcon is, you don’t read/watch enough serialized storytelling). That’s kind of the plot, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. We mostly get these detailed deconstructions of scenes of Charles and his dad as they struggle to build and market the first time machine.

I have mixed feelings about these freeze-frame analyses. As I said, Yu does a great job with them, and there are moving moments and a few beautiful lines in the mix. On the other hand, they tend to drag on and maybe even get a bit repetitive. And they’re pretty damn self-indulgent. And, if you don’t like them, there’s not much going on in the rest of this short novel other than some po-mo games with illustrations and metatextuality. But, when the book is moving, it really is moving. It feels like there’s a lot of raw emotional truth on the page, trying to hide behind the games, and (deliberately?) failing. I kind of admire Yu’s sincerity, even if I didn’t always completely enjoy it.

I’m having a hard time rendering a verdict on this novel. I'm glad I read it, but I didn’t love it. I admired the emotional content and enjoyed some of the po-mo games about half the time, but found them cloying and tedious the other half. I liked its metatextual engagement with science fiction, but found it too shallow in the end to say that it added all that much…

I think I’d give this novel a mild recommendation, but I’d like to see more work from Yu, specifically something more ambitious and straightforward. I wish the sf literati had taken a harder look at Super Sad Love Story, but they weren't missing much here (even though this book seemed to get a little more attention in sf circles - I guess its the title).

Grade: B-

2011 Hugo and Locus SF, 2010 Nebula: Novel - BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR by Connie Willis

2011-08-12T05:58:00.000-07:00

Well, I managed to finish this 1140 page monstrosity. I think the Hugo nominators were right to combine these two books as one volume, and that’s how I’m going to talk about them. It’s clearly one story, and the dividing point between the volumes is rather arbitrary. I’ve seen some criticism of the division as a result, but it seems unfair to Willis, who apparently didn’t have much choice. The way the economics of book publishing are these days, I don’t necessarily blame Ballantine either. An 1150 page print-job has to cut into their profits, and Willis isn’t necessarily a New York Times bestseller. I don’t blame them for keeping All Clear out of the Hugo Voter’s Pack initially either (I got my copy for free using an old-fashioned, analog version of bittorrent called the St Paul Public Library).

So, the question isn’t "should this 1140 page book be divided into two volumes?"…it’s “should this book be 1140 pages long in the first place?” My answer: Hell no. That said there is a lot to like here. I’ve been dreading this book since before it was nominated, because of the length and the fact that Willis has covered much of this ground in novels and stories I’ve already read. I guess I forgot how charming a writer Willis can be, because she did suck me into this novel at several points. Unfortunately, there are just as many points when I wondered how the novel could possible still be meandering on.

For the third time on this blog, we’re in twenty-first century Oxford, where historians literally travel into the past to do their research. Mr. Dunworthy is still desperately trying to protect his students from past dangers, and he’s still failing miserably. Willis adds a time travel wrinkle by arbitrarily switching settings and protagonists. The three main characters are Polly, Merope, and Mike, and all of them travel to Britain in 1940, at the beginning of World War II. When their scheduled method of return fails, they must try to find each other and another way out, all while avoiding death in the Blitz, while also worrying about possibly altering the future and causing Britain to lose the war, which may or may not be the reason they’re stuck. We also get occasional chapters in 2060, as the Oxford crew investigates some anomalies in travel to that period, and this includes young Colin Templer, last seen in Doomsday Book. Then we have a set of nurses during the V-1 rocket attacks in 1944, and the attempt to create a fake invasion of France to distract the Nazis from Normandy in the same year. These are the main stories (though there are a few more), and it’s only very slowly that Willis reveals how they all connect together.

I enjoyed this basic storyline, and some of the resolutions, quite a bit, especially since Willis’s prose is clear, light, and clever, and her research is impeccable and richly detailed. The last hundred pages or so especially sparkle as the puzzle pieces get together and the relationships between the characters pay off. Getting there can be a real chore though. Willis likes to wring drama from delaying the passage of information. A character vitally needs to know x, but loud noises, air raids, other characters making speeches, dull wittedness, mixed signals, rocket attacks, limps, sudden marriages, secrecy, etc., all prevent the straightforward conveyance of x. End chapter on cliffhanger. Rinse and repeat. Very quickly, this becomes less dramatic, and more annoying. In fact, I was still annoyed about this from the last Connie Willis book I read (Passage, review forthcoming soon) going into this book, so I had little patience. Considering that it’s these constant interruptions that do the most work in stretching the novel’s length, those 1100 pages were pretty unbearable a lot of the time. Everyone’s so damned passive-aggressive (fittingly, in Willis’s model of time travel, the whole damn space-time continuum is also highly passive-aggressive). Just communicate!

As I’ve said before, as a historian, the Willis books were among my most anticipated when I started this project. While they’re certainly given me their fair share of entertainment, they’ve frustrated me just as often. Reading Blackout/All Clear, I’ve decided that one of the things that’s most disappointed me is that they’re not really about history, they’re about historical settings. The research is admirable, but we never get more than hand-waivey discussion of how history works (in these books, it’s a mixture of coincidence and individual heroism). Her historians don’t ask the sort of questions that any real-life contemporary historian asks about the why and how of things, and that’s where my biggest disappointment comes from. If you want good science fiction that explores the themes of academic history, check out Kim Stanley Robinson. If you want well-researched and charming historical fiction with an sf twist, Willis is for you. Unfortunately, I’d been hoping for the former.

Grade: B-

NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction, Fantasy Books

2011-08-11T11:51:00.000-07:00

Two things I love combine: National Public Radio and sf novels.

NPR has published a list of the top 100 science fiction and fantasy books. I've read 65 (many of them for this blog), though I'm counting a series even if I've only read one book (hello, Thomas Covenant).

I can't say I'm thrilled with everything on the list. For one, it seems heavy on Tolkien rip-off fantasy series. But, these things are always fun. It's nice to know there's plenty of material out there for me to work through once I finish with the Hugos, Nebulas, Locuses, etc.

2011 Not a Hugo Nominee: Novel – SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY by Gary Shteyngart

2011-08-09T21:19:00.001-07:00

As I've discussed before, things often get uncomfortable when authors from the amorphous world of “literary fiction” crossover to the world of science fiction. You get elaborate excuses from the likes of Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut about how their dystopias and time travel space epics ARE NOT science fiction, and the major awards promptly ignore and reject their work (unless it’s the first year of the Clarke). I can’t say things went all that differently with this novel by a young lit fic sensation – I don’t see it on any sf award nominee lists – but this does feel well grounded in the world of sf. In fact, this novel read a lot like Vinge’s Rainbow’s End (review coming soon), touching as it does on singularity and post-humans, social networking, physical books, and generational issues. But, it’s like awesomely way better.

Set in the post-literate near future, we follow the journal of Lenny Abramov, the almost-forty son of Jewish-Russian immigrants to New York who acquires clients for a company offering immortality treatments. Abramov is something of a throwback, he likes actual physical books, and he, like, reads every word of writers like Tolstoy and Chekhov. On a business trip in Italy, he falls in love with a boisterous-but-damaged girl in her early twenties named Eunice Park. We alternate that journal with emails and chats from Eunice, who thinks she could score a hotter guy, but Lenny seems so sincere and easy. They move in together in Manhattan, in an America in steep decline. Debts are heavy all around, people with low credit ratings are discriminated against, America is losing another foreign intervention in Venezuela, privatized National Guardsmen harass people on the streets, and the world has become shallow and obsessed with their rankings on social networks, which are displayed on apparati (basically smaller iPhones with more social networking features).

So, lots ofcyberpunk/dystopian material we’ve seen before, as I mentioned, but the differences are huge and all fall in Shteyngart’s favor. Most importantly, Lenny and Eunice are incredibly rich characters. They both can annoy, they both make bad choices, and their relationship is a trainwreck, but they also both feel real, and even young shallow Eunice has hidden depths of compassion. This deft touch with character is what sets some these literary types apart, and I do think it speaks to all that crossovers have to offer in an area where science fiction has been, traditionally, pretty weak.

Maybe I'm biased because Shteyngart clearly shares my anti-singularity, anti-post-human pessimism in another clear difference from most sf these days. For Vernor Vinge, the destruction of books and the alienation of the elder generation are birth pangs on the way to something bigger (man, I wish I'd gotten to my review of Rainbow's End before this), but Shteyngart focuses on the class issues and the unpredictability of technological advance. Of course, post-human technology will be the province of the super-rich for a long time, and of course there will be setbacks and unintended consequences. Shteyngart is clearly aware of the discussion of these issues within science fiction, and he makes some smart, incisive additions to the debate. That said, I’m not so convinced that the US will collapse into a corporate security state, but there’s plenty of echoes of our reality to keep things believable.

The one area where I felt the book did fail, and even admitted defeat to some extent, was in the portrayal of a post-literate world. Yes, people think books are smelly and gross, and no one seems to have the attention span to focus on longer pieces of text, but Shteyngart’s voice for Eunice is full of evocative language. He even has characters comment on this, calling her a “born writer.” There’s clear growth in her style throughout the book as well, and I couldn’t help but feel that this was part character development and part Shteyngart throwing in the towel on writing a solid portion of a novel in semi-literate txt speech.

Either way, I really enjoyed this novel. It has a lot to say about love, relationships, and mortality, and it says it all while presenting an insightful view of the future. It’s everything I want from science fiction; who cares if it’s written by someone not so immersed in the genre (has anyone not in the SFWA ever gotten a Nebula nomination?) Maybe we can set up some sort of lit fic/sff exchange program?

Grade: A-

2011 Clarke - ZOO CITY by Lauren Beukes

2011-08-09T06:19:00.000-07:00

Noir sf has become quite the trend in the last few years, with recent Hugo winners Yiddish Policeman’s Union and The City & The City doing rather classic versions of the genre in recent years, among others. It makes a lot of sense, as the genre has always been about introducing a new world – whether it’s the criminal underworld of LA or San Francisco in the 1940s or a fictional bifurcated city in Eastern Europe, these gritty stories let the reader explore a place they’re probably not familiar with in a manner that’s almost anthropological. We get to learn the laws, the leadership structure, probably a bit of history, and the social mores, all at their rawest. Beukes novel fits nicely into this emerging trend, and, at least as far as North American readers like myself are concerned, it gets to do double duty. It introduces us to the criminal underworld of modern South Africa, with its violent tsotsis, refugees from horrific African wars from Rwanda to Congo, and 419 scams. But, it also gives us a fantasy element of animal familiars that attach themselves to certain people and grant magic powers (African myth and magic lurks behind most of these ideas). In Johannesburg, these people have been segregated into a slum called “Zoo City.”

Zinzi December is “animaled” with a sloth, and she’s gained the power to find things that people have lost, which she uses to do cheap detective work in Zoo City. She used to be a journalist, but drug addiction put her into a life of crime, and landed her in jail then in Zoo City. She still works email scams to pay off some of her debts. Meanwhile, her refugee boyfriend learns and reveals some things about his own past that begin to disrupt Zinzi’s life. In an effort to work her way back into her former career, she takes a bigger case involving a pair of young pop stars that also brings her into contact with a string of murdered "zoos." These plots begin to intertwine as the usual gritty, ultraviolent noir hijinks ensue.

There’s a lot to like about this novel. Beukes’s writing is strong, Zinzi is a very compelling character, and the sociological details she’s invented for the zoos are well-thought out and compelling. She’s done exactly the sort of world-building that I want from a fantasy novel. Her portrait of Johannesburg is also quite rich, and I think I would’ve enjoyed this novel almost as much without the fantasy elements. On the other hand, I did think the fantasy elements were underplayed at times. The novel goes for long periods in which the animals aren’t much of an issue, and the pop star storyline especially felt off topic for most of its run. Beukes has a lot more she can do with this concept, and I almost wondered near the end if she was holding material back for a sequel. Some of the noir stuff can get a bit generic as well. In the end, I’m not sure the novel is as unique as its concept and world promise. It’s certainly a worthwhile urban fantasy read though, and at the least, it shows how much can be done with the sub-genre without resorting to vampires and werewolves.

Grade: B

2011 Hugo Nominee: Novel - CRYOBURN by Lois McMaster Bujold

2011-08-08T05:47:00.000-07:00

This is something like the twelfth or fourteenth Vorkosigan book (depending on how you count it). There have been four or five novellas in there as well. Three of those books (and a novella!) won Hugos in the 90s, but the last win was in 1995, and the last nomination in 2000. It’s a real challenge to keep a series going this long; I can’t say that I’ve ever read a book past the tenth in a series that still engaged me as much as the early volumes (though I can’t name many series I’ve read that far in). So, imagine my surprise when I found that one of my favorite books in the Vorkasigan series came in this later period.

Unfortuantely, that book was not Cryoburn, it was Komarr, which was not nominated for a Hugo when it was eligible in 1999. Yes, I did read the intervening books since Hugo-winner Mirror Dance, and I did get some enjoyment out of the experience. The books move star Miles Vorkosigan from his position as an undercover mercenary and into a position as a powerful diplomat, beginning with the bloated Memory. The plots remain on the pulpy side of the suspension of disbelief continuum (someone should count how many times Miles has escaped capture by his enemies), but the move away from military plotlines was a welcome change. Komarr and A Civil Campaign blend an off-beat love story with some espionage intrigue. Bujold avoids a lot of clichés by making Miles’ love interest Ekatrin a single mother coming out of a disastrous failed marriage, and the relationship feels mature and believable (despite the fact, maybe because of the fact, that Miles frets like a lovesick fifteen-year-old during the courtship). Both books have nice, straightforward plots, though A Civil Campaign has some silly, lame hijinks with Miles’s clone Mark. I can barely tell you what Diplomatic Immunity was about, even though I read it a couple of weeks ago (I do remember that it featured the quaddies from Nebula winner Falling Free), which tells you more-or-less how I felt about that one.

Cryoburn seems to be in the same category as that previous entry, so I better write this out quickly while it’s still fresh. We begin in media res with a confused Miles escaping, as he so often does, from a kidnapping attempt. We soon learn that he’s on the world of Kibou, which is dominated by a small cohort of powerful cryonics corporations with eyes on the Barrayaran colony of Komarr. Miles investigates in typical Miles fashion, throwing his weight around, getting in over his head, breaking some local laws, befriending innocent children, scheming with his clone, and generally overcoming every obstacle in his way with supernatural ease. It’s all stuff we’ve seen before. Bujold usually does a good job of mixing in some biotech ethics questions in with her pulp space opera, and cyronics is an interesting topic, but we don’t get too far into the problems of life-extension, and the main problem seems to be simple corporate greed.

There is an event at the very end (on the very last two or three pages) that keeps the book from being completely forgettable and immaterial to Miles’s life. It’s a bit of a shock, despite some subtle foreshadowing, and Bujold relates it in a very interesting way. I can’t quite decide if Bujold made a mistake by sidelining the main event, or if it’s kind of brilliant, but I think those pages alone kept this book from getting a C+ from me. Either way, this is a weaker entry in a series that probably has more than its fair share of Hugos as it is.

Grade: B-

2011 Hugo Nominee: Novel - THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS by N.K. Jemisin

2011-08-05T05:38:00.000-07:00

If I were a more ambitious blogger, I’d go back and see how many Hugo nominees were first novels. I suspect it doesn’t happen that often, though Windup Girl was Bacigalupi’s first published novel. Anyway, here we have the first novel of N. K. Jemisin, who wrote my second-favorite short story nominee last year. She delivers an entertaining and original fantasy story right out of the gate.

The story takes place in a world where a war between a trinity of gods led to the prominence of a god of light Intempa, the enslavement of the god of darkness Nahadoth, and the death of the god of dusk and balance. The Arameri, human servants of the god of light, rule the world with absolute authority backed by the power of their enslaved god of darkness. They rule from a towering city called Sky. The narrator is Yeine, daughter of a self-exiled Arameri, who is called back to Sky to compete for inheritance of the throne (this is volume one of the "Inheritance Trilogy"). This involves a whole lot of wicked intrigue by Yeine’s devious cousins, and many smoldering glances between Yeine and the imprisoned and rageful Nahadoth.

One problem I have with the book is that it is so heavily focused on the rather clichéd romance trope of the dangerous/powerful/tortured/sexy male lead. I honestly don’t have a lot of patience for this trope. Still, Jemisin does have a deft touch with these characters. My other problem is becoming a running theme in my fantasy reviews. Even I’m sick of me saying this, but the world-building here just doesn’t quite work for me. I said this recently about Game of Thrones, and as I watched the tv show and dived into the next book, I began to realize my mistake. I was clearly wrong on that series, which is basically almost nothing but detailed world-building. I feel a bit more confident here. We get a lot on the capitol of Sky, but we don’t step outside it all that much. We get a few details of Yeine’s people, but even these seem more designed to add some depth (and trauma) to Yeine’s character than actually creating a believable ethnography of a fictional culture. This feels like a very narrow, confined world. I was actually a bit claustrophobic reading this, which is perhaps what Jemisin was going for, and at least Jemisin’s limited scope kept the novel short and brisk.

There’s some fascinating material, and I was very intrigued by the set-up for the sequel at the end, which promises to take us out of Sky and give us a new character to look at. I think Jemisin probably has some room to grow as a writer, but she’s certainly a talent to watch, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be my second favorite of the Hugo nominated novels.

Grade: B

2011 Not a Hugo Nominee: Novel – MOCKINGJAY by Suzanne Collins

2011-08-03T05:40:00.000-07:00

Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy is the latest in a line (starting with Harry Potter and detouring through Twilight) of Young Adult sensations that have crossed over to adult readers and grabbed massive sales as a result. It’s tempting to use this phenomenon as an excuse to make catty remarks about adult literacy (and maybe throw in a Fahrenheit 451 reference), but I actually really like Harry Potter, and I enjoyed this trilogy as well. I read it for a book club meeting that I never made it to, but I ended up hoping that this final volume would garner a Hugo nom.

The series takes place in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian Panem (shortened “Pan-America”). In this fascistic state, a central capitol dominates twelve poor, hard-laboring districts. In retribution for a past revolution, and to symbolize the capitol’s dominance, two children are drafted from each district every year to take part in a deadly reality show with only one survivor. Twenty-four kids fight to the death, while tv audiences cheer.

In Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen is a teenage girl in District 12 who developed survival skills after the death of her mother. She joins the Hunger Games to protect her sister and becomes outraged by what she witnesses in the capitol and in the games themselves. Collins doesn’t pull many punches in her portrayal of the fights, and this book is very dark and very violent, especially for YA fiction. There are some interesting sf ideas here besides the dystopian setting. We get high speed trains, hovercraft, and all sorts of high-tech weapons, including some genetically modified, weaponized organisms. There are obvious similarities to the Japanese novel/film/manga Battle Royale, but it does still feel pretty original, especially with the additions of the sequels.

I have to spoil something fairly obvious about the ending of this book to continue with the review, so stop here if you’re an absolutist about living spoiler-free.

So, yes, the existence of a trilogy should make this obvious, but Katniss survives the first book. In Mockingjay, the final volume of the trilogy, Katniss now finds herself the leader of a rebellion against the capitol. She, and other Hunger Games survivors, use their celebrity status as a weapon against the media-obsessed society of Panem. In an excellent, and very mature, twist, we see here that the revolution can be just as bad, just as manipulative, callous and violent, as the Capitol. It’s a great concept. It’s dark and pessimistic, and it’s a more nuanced version of the rebellious tendencies that often pop up in YA fiction.

The pacing of the trilogy as a whole does have some problems. I actually liked the first novel the best, because of its quick pace and self-contained structure. The final book spends a lot of time hammering on the flaws of the revolution, and speeds through the climax and denouement at the end. The middle volume, Catching Fire, I found especially weak – it mostly reiterates the first novel while laying some groundwork for the third, and it gets stuck in the obligatory love triangle. I like romantic subplots; I think they’re too rare in sf novels, but these books push hard for the lusty heights of Twilight, and I didn’t find that aspect convincing, or interesting, in any way.

There are also a few other clear signs that this is YA, despite the politics and slaughter. The world is very small-feeling. This novel sprawls over an America-spanning empire, but everyone seems to know each other. You get the feeling that the population has been reduced to the tens of thousands, which is hard to buy; it's a continent-spanning empire of one city and twelve small towns. The world-building could have used a bit more thought. The prose is solid, but it is constrained by the intended audience. There are some great cultural details though. I would recommend this series, which is darker, and more thrilling, than a lot of adult fiction out there. Also, as I mentioned in my Hugo prediction post, I think it's very interesting that WorldCon nominators passed this by just two years after nominating three YA novels.

Grade: B+