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

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-

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

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+

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

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 Hugo – SPIN by Robert Charles Wilson

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+

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

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

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-

2011 Hugo Nominee: Best Dram. Pres., Short - Doctor Who: "Christmas Carol"; "Pandorica/Big Bang," Steven Moffat; "Vincent & Doctor" by Richard Curtis

After a disappointing set of specials dominated this category last year, it was to be expected that the strong fifth season would do well. I’m actually a bit disappointed that season opener “The Eleventh Hour” and the Angel two-parter didn’t get nods…not that I was rooting for a category sweep. Lots has changed since those specials. The Doctor has regenerated into a new body with a slightly different personality, meaning that young actor Matt Smith is playing him rather than David Tennant. Smith’s Doctor is more awkward, eccentric, and all around geekier, though my wife swears he’s cuter than Tennant’s. I’m not sure I like Smith as much as Tennant, but that in itself is quite a compliment, as Tennant has probably done more to define the role than anyone since Tom Baker. We also have a new showrunner in Steven Moffat. Moffat wrote most of the best episodes of the previous Russell T. Davies (and picked up four Hugo nominations and three wins for his four stories). People expected Moffat to do great things, and he more or less delivered (though for some people, expectations may have been too high). Finally, and not to be underestimated, we have a new companion in plucky Amelia Pond (Karen Gillan), who is engaged, but also manages to sexually harass the Doctor a few times.

The highlight of “Vincent and the Doctor” is first time Doctor Who writer Richard Curtis. Curtis is more famous for his very British film comedies like Four Weddings and A Funeral, Notting Hill, and Love Actually (Hugh Grant is not in this episode for some reason). The Doctor and Amy are viewing a Van Gogh exposition when they notice a monster’s head portrayed in the window of a cathedral in one of his paintings. So, being time travelers, they zip back to 1890 and ask him about it. They learn that Vincent is tormented by an invisible chicken monster that only he can see, and they spring into action. It’s very unusually paced for a Doctor Who episode; the monster fighting is a small part of the episode and is resolved early. Most of the episode is given over to quieter, reflective scenes and some light comedy, and that fits nicely into the overall arc of the season, considering that something tragic happens in the episode before. And, the invisible monster is an effective metaphor for Vincent’s mental illness (he committed suicide in 1890). This is not mind-bending speculative fiction…there’s not much new in here at all in fact, but it is very well executed.

The next two nominees are both Moffat-written, and I think they illustrate both his strengths, and some of his tics, which have become clearer as he writes more episodes. “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang” is the big season finale that ties together several running plotlines. We’ve seen cracks running through space and time in several episodes – in this one, the Doctor’s enemies believe that he is responsible, so they attempt to imprison him, but the universe explodes anyway. Oh well. So, tic #1: Moffat is great at coming up with cool images and catch-phrases (“don’t blink,” “cracks in the universe,” gas mask kid, etc.) and he seems to build episodes around them. For me, “The Pandorica Opens” is a giant exercise in this. We get a flashy beginning that runs through several guest characters and across space and time to get a simple message to the Doctor, then we get aliens versus Romans at Stonehenge, the greatest prison in the universe, the Doctor threatening a horde of circling spacecraft, and the universe exploding. Yeah. A lot of big, impressive stuff happens…but I’m not sure there’s enough story there to hold it all together. Then, “The Big Bang” has the unenviable task of dealing with the fact that the Doctor was defeated and the universe exploded in the previous episode. There’s no way fixing all this isn’t going to feel like a cheat, and it more or less does, but it’s a good, exciting cheat. Previous showrunner, RTD, was often derided for his “clap you hands if you believe Doctor” deus ex machine season enders. We get much the same thing here, without all the complaints. Maybe people just aren’t as sick of Moffat yet…or maybe Moffat just does it better. I tend to favor the latter theory. Moffat keeps things small and character focused (it looks like most of the budget went into the “Pandorica” half, as we spend most of this episode in one location, and there’s really only one physical villain). “Pandorica” is exciting, but it feels dangerously over-the-top; “The Big Bang” is quieter, and gets progressively calmer. The two episodes balance each other out nicely, though they also leave behind a lot of big questions that are still unresolved, half-a-season later.

Finally, at the end of 2010 we got the usual Doctor Who post-season Christmas special. I liked “A Christmas Carol” very much, but I got the feeling that general reception was not so positive. It does fall prey to Moffat tic #2, he does repeat himself sometimes. There are motifs he likes – shadowy figures in space suits ("Silence in the Library," "The Impossible Astronaut"), monsters talking in crackly radio voices of dead friends ("Forest of the Dead," "The Time of Angels"), and the Doctor meeting someone several times throughout their life in rapid succession ("Girl in the Fireplace," "Eleventh Hour"). “A Christmas Carol” does the latter, and the set-up to get there is pretty contrived as well. But, those two flaws aside, I think this may have been the finest hour of Doctor Who in a very strong year. The Doctor’s companions and thousands of others are in a crashing space liner, but the Scrooge-like plutocrat Karzan Sardick (the great Michael Gambon) that runs the planet below refuses to save them. The Doctor decides to make Sardick a better man by time travelling to every Christmas of his youth and giving him a better childhood. Young Sardick finds a tragic love along the way. Yes, we see some repetition of themes, and yes, the plotting can be a bit ham-fisted, but the fine performances and the sweet holiday story made this a favorite of mine.

It was an excellent year for the Doctor. I don’t know how long this show can dominate this category without some sort of backlash developing. I also haven’t been as fond of season 6 as I was of season 5 so far. I guess we’ll see what happens next year.

Grades: “Vincent and the Doctor” A-

“The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang” B+

“A Christmas Carol” A-

1999 Hugo – TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG by Connie Willis

Well, this is a change of pace. We’re back in the Oxford of the 2050s that we saw in Willis’ The Doomsday Book. Again, we have historians as time travelers, and again the science fiction aspect takes a backseat to a focus on characterization and English “comedy of manners” humor. Time travelling is important to the plot, especially the novel’s climax, but we spend most of the novel in Victorian England while our protagonists try to return a cat and discover the fate of an ugly vase.

In the 2050s, the historians are preparing for a celebration of the renovation of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed over a century earlier in the blitz. The inconsiderate and monomaniacal Lady Shrapnell has pushed young historian Ned Henry to the brink in her quest for a decorative vase dubbed “the bishop’s bird stump.” Professor Dunworthy tries to protect Ned by sending him to return a rescued cat to 1888, from whence it had been taken by another historian, Verity Kindle, after a near-drowning. Verity is close to a young Victorian woman named Tossie, and Ned meets a nice young man named Terrence, and soon the two Victorians fall in love. Unfortunately, they’re both supposed to marry other people and the course of history may depend upon their progeny. Verity and Ned, fearing that it is their involvement that has changed these relationships, desperately try to find Tossie’s true husband-to-be.

While the wonderful writing and clever dialogue of The Doomsday Book remain, the stakes are clearly much lower than the dual raging epidemics of Willis’s earlier novel, which managed to kill off most of the characters by its conclusion. You don’t often hear that a story falters because the stakes are too high, but The Doomsday Book may be the exception that proves the rule. It’s hard to laugh at fussy upper class twits when everyone is slowly and painfully dying in two different eras. However, in a light tale of Victorian love, this kind of comedy is quite a bit more welcome. This is a really fun and sweet novel, and I think it accomplishes more by doing less. It still has a lot to say about destiny and random chance, and it can still be quite suspenseful. Willis uses a Victorian historian, Professor Peddick, to introduce dueling theories of history – that it is the product of the agency of a few important, individual decisions or that it is the product of broader forces, from mass movements to weather and geography. These ruminations fit in perfectly with the novel’s themes and enrich the overall experience. At the same time, the relationship between Verity and Ned is cute, and gives the reader something to root for.

It’s very different from most of the Hugo winners, which tend to feel like important epics even when they’re brief. There are no intergalactic worlds or dark dystopias here. If I had to describe my experience reading this novel in one word, it would be “relaxing.” That might sound like damning with faint praise, I wouldn’t want every book I read to take the same attitude, but I rather enjoyed this sandwiched between Forever Peace and A Deepness in the Sky.

Grade: A-

1996 Campbell and Philip K Dick, 1995 BSFA –THE TIME SHIPS by Stephen Baxter

This novel racked up lots of awards and even more nominations, and it heralded a new wave of hard sf writers consisting of mostly British authors, like Baxter. The novel was authorized by the H. G. Wells estate as a sequel to The Time Machine to celebrate that landmark work’s centennial.

It does pick up right where The Time Machine left off; in fact, I had to put the book down after the first couple of chapters, read The Time Machine, and then start over with The Time Ships. This was fine, since a) it’s pathetic that I hadn’t read The Time Machine earlier, and b) The Time Machine is a very short work, under a hundred pages. Anyway, the unnamed Time Traveler sets off on another trip almost immediately after the events of Wells novel. He moves hundreds of thousands of years into the future, but quickly finds that something is wrong, and he is now in a different future populated by super-smart Morlocks with astounding technology. Working from the multiple universes of quantum theory, Baxter posits that the Traveler’s jaunts through time take him into different histories. He takes a New Morlock companion named Nebogipfel and continues his travels through a wide array of pasts and futures, many of them references to H. G. Wells books (including an alternate World War II with giants tanks like his “Land Ironclads”).

It’s a wild ride and a very fast-paced read. Baxter managed to explain some very big ideas and complicated scientific concepts without ever losing me for a second. His prose is straightforward and unadorned, and thus unlikely to get a lot of notice, but I do think this kind of communication skill deserves more appreciation. I’ve read enough bad non-fiction science writing to know that understandable explanations aren’t as easy as they look.

Still, I’m not quite sure that this is a worthy successor to The Time Machine. Wells managed to use his adventure tale to comment on the growing class divide he saw in industrial Britain. Baxter doesn’t make the same sort of comment on contemporary society, though there is some discussion about human nature, war, etc., none of it that deep, specific or revaltory. Also, even though it’s narrated in first person (and over five times as long), we don’t learn all that much more about the protagonist, and the rest of the characters are even slighter. The focus is on Big Ideas and action, but at least it’s very fun. The Time Ships could have said a bit more and delved a bit deeper, but it is a very entertaining and worthwhile read.

Grade: B

1995 Saturn SF – 12 MONKEYS

I’m surprised that this is my first and only chance to talk about Terry Gilliam in this awards round-up. He has one of the best sf film resumes of any director this side of Spielberg and Cameron, and his body of work is far more diverse and surprising than theirs. He received Hugo nominations for Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1978, Time Bandits in 1982, Brazil in 1986, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in 1990, and 12 Monkeys in 1996. That’s one hell of a list of great sf movies, but none of them managed to win. At least 12 Monkeys picked up a Saturn, and this is one of those instances where Saturn’s pick is more exciting and original than Hugo’s (more on that in a week). Gilliam likes surrealist stories about mentally unstable people which he augments with unsteady, drunken camera-work. This film, alongside The Fisher King, probably represents his most commercial work, but it’s also perhaps his best.

12 Monkeys is based on an experimental French film called La Jetee, which is a surrealistic romance involving a time traveler from a post-apocalyptic world. Here, James Cole (Bruce Willis) is the post-apocalyptic survivor of a horrific plague in the year 1997. He’s part of a gritty underground society that sends expeditions to the surface (where we see New York City overrun by zoo animals) and back in time to understand the plague. But, we’re warned again and again that the past cannot be changed. Cole travels back to the 1990s where he meets a mental patient named Jeffery (Brad Pitt) who spouts revolutionary rhetoric and a sympathetic psychiatrist named Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe). Cole and Railly are drawn to each other due to some mysterious memories, and they eventually begin to explore the origins of the virus, which they link back to Jeffrey and his 12 Monkeys group.

It’s a tightly plotted story with incredible visuals from Gilliam and some brilliant acting. This is the first film where Brad Pitt showed his range. Stowe is wonderful, and every time I see this film, I wish she’d had a more extensive career. Willis does pretty good for Bruce Willis. Its eerie atmosphere, great story, and exploration of destiny and apocalypse make it one of the best time travel films ever made.

Grade: A

1995 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION: “All Good Things…”

Ron Moore and Brannon Braga wrote this final episode of The Next Generation. They had become fairly integral to the show by this point, and I think their aesthetics added a lot to the show – it became less episodic, more serious and just a tinge darker under their watch.

Like, “Inner Light,” this is a fine example of what Star Trek: The Next Generation does well, and, again, it focuses on Patrick Stewart, by far the show’s strongest actor and biggest presence. It’s also an amazing model for how to do a series’ finale: it looks back to the show’s beginning and looks forward to see where the characters might go without losing sight of the present. The godlike entity Q (John DeLance) causes Picard to skip back and forth, Slaughterhouse-Five-style, through three periods in time – the show’s present, seven years earlier when the Enterpise-D launched (the show’s pilot episode, “Encounter at Farpoint,” which was nominated for a Hugo), and twenty-five years into the future. In all three time periods, Picard must investigate a cosmic MacGuffin – these leads to doubts from his fledgling crew in the past, and, in the future, Picard has to “get the band back together” while his old crew suspects that he is suffering the effects of a degenerative brain disease. The MacGuffin is rather pointless and nonsensical, but the writing and acting are excellent, and it’s a brilliant way to send off the show.

Star Trek has yet to pick up another Hugo, though there is some good material out there after this – at some point maybe I’ll take an opportunity to say a bit more about DS9. There’s also a lot of really bad Trek after this as well, including a few awful Next Generation films, including Generations, written by the same Braga-Moore team and filming almost immediately after this episode. You can’t win them all.

I wonder how many more Hugos TNG would have won if they had separated the dramatic presentation categories as they do now. There wasn’t much competition; I think The Next Generation prompted a lot of the sf shows that appeared in the 90s. These two Picard episodes are very deserving, especially “The Inner Light,” but it would have been nice for some of the Klingon episodes to get more attention – the show builds a fairly rich culture for these aliens that were just swarthy moustache-twirlers in the Original Series. “Sins of the Father” and “Reunion” are very good. The alternate timeline action episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise” is also worthy of attention, as are some of the Asimovian robot stories about Data, like “Measure of a Man.” Then there’s the more action-oriented battle with the Borg in “Best of Both Worlds.” I’m sure the show was bad as often as it was great, but those great episodes really are some of the finest science fiction television of all time.

Grade: A-

1993 Hugo (tie) and Locus, 1992 Nebula – DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis

Boy, Medieval England sure sounds fun!

Here (following her previous Hugo-winning novella, Fire Watch), Willis portrays a history department at Oxford in the later 21^st century in which historians can work “in the field” with the help of a time machine. As I’ve mentioned before, I am a practicing academic historian, and this was one of the Hugo-winning novels that got me really excited and prompted me to start this project. I love the idea. I didn’t love the execution quite as much.

There are really two parallel stories going on here. The central plot involves an undergraduate girl named Kirvin and her “fieldwork” in a 14^th century English town. The other remains in the 21^st century and follows her mentor, Professor Dunworthy, who worried that 14^th century England was far too dangerous a place for Kirvin to work in. After Kirvin departs, both have to deal with serious outbreaks of disease (through a bit of a contrivance…) Dunworthy tries to monitor and protect the lifeline to Kirvin in the past, despite the pressures of an epidemic and quarantine. Kirvin tries to blend in and forges some connections with an aristocratic family and a town priest, but she soon faces her own germ-spawned disaster.

These are interesting storylines, but I wasn’t always happy with Willis’s presentation. She’s a fantastic writer, but, the future portions especially, are written as a comedy of manners. In other words, lots of obnoxious and ridiculously stuffy people wander around and obsess about keeping up appearances and maintaining social status in the face of horrible events. It starts out as droll satire, but soon turns incredibly dark. And by dark, I mean dark. Maybe this is a bit spoliery, but I feel I should say in the way of warning: this novel has a very high body count, and no one is really safe. So, lots of people die in horribly disgusting ways, and the darker it gets, the more frustrating and annoying the “comedy of manners” gets…which very well may be Willis’s point. Nonetheless, while it’s good for characters to have obstacles to overcome, I don’t think those obstacles should be too petty or obnoxious. “Annoyed” is just not an emotion that I look for in novels.

Her presentation of the past was pretty strong. Again, you have some rather annoying people obsessed with social minutae, but, to be fair, social minutae meant a great deal more in a society with severe class distinctions. When travelling to the past, I think authors should always be aware of two conflicting historical realities that I think are summed up nicely by clichés: “the past is a foreign country” and “people are people.” The past (especially a fairly decent past) should be alien at the same time that we see universal themes. Willis does a pretty good job (better than most) of that here. On the other hand, Kirvin does not have much to do for most of the novel (and spends scores of pages in a delirium). By the two-thirds point, I shared Dunworthy’s indignation that they would send an undergraduate so far back.

The novel did a great job of annoying me, and an even better job of making me feel depressed. And that does take a good deal of skill. Willis's talent as a writer was always apparent, even as the book frustrated me. There’s also an ending here that I wouldn’t exactly call redemptive, but it was satisfying, and beautifully written. I liked a lot of this book quite a bit, even if it didn’t entirely live up to some high expectations.

Grade: B+

1992 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation and 1991 Saturn – TERMINATOR 2

The second (and FINAL!) Terminator film is another one of those sequels that’s better than it has any right to be. The scenario of the first film is pretty self-contained: woman runs from killer robot and survives. Sending another killer robot risks repeating the whole thing. Doing it with a huge budget and new special effects techniques threatens to bog the film down in mindless spectacle. Part of the charm of the first Terminator is that it’s a small budget, extended chase. It’s taut and intimate like a good horror flick. T2 threatens to be bloated and unnecessary, but, instead, Cameron manages to build on the mythology he created in the first movie.

John Connor is now a young, troubled teenager. In the future, Skynet decides to make a second attempt at destroying him with a more advanced Terminator – the liquid metal T1000 (Robert Patrick). This time, future Connor sends back a reprogrammed Terminator to protect him (Schwarzenegger). You could cynically see this as future politician Schwarzenegger redeeming his most villainous role, but the character’s conversion does make for some fun moments, especially in his interactions with Connor. The T1000 exists mainly to provide cgi shots; at the time they were so revolutionary, and thus so expensive, that this film infamously destroyed Orion Studios financially. In less than a decade, people could do the same thing on home pcs.

However, the film’s real genius comes through the journey that it takes Sarah Connor on (Linda Hamilton reprises her role). The directionless waitress of the first film has become dedicated to training her son for the apocalypse. She’s tough, well-trained, and ruthless, but she also spends most of her time contemplating fate. She knows that the world will explode in a few years, and she’ll do anything to prepare for it…or maybe stop it. I think Connor might be Cameron’s greatest achievement as a filmmaker. Sure, he’s made a few billion dollar films and revolutionized special effects filmmaking two or three times, but Connor is the kind of vivid and complicated, tough female character that I’d really like to see a lot more of.

If I had a complaint, it might be about the film’s casual violence. There are actually jokes made about assaulting and shooting innocent people (e.g., “He’ll live.”) It actually doesn’t bother me all that much, though I do have the nagging feeling that it should.

So, the effects were great, and they still look good, even if they should not have cost quite so much. There are several fantastic action set-pieces, interesting characters, and a further exploration of time travel/destiny. I’m solidly in the camp that this is a far better film than its predecessor, although I know a lot of people who are in the other camp.

And they never made anything else in the Terminator franchise….

Grade: A

1988 World Fantasy Award - REPLAY by Keri Grimwood

I imagine this is a very common fantasy: you wake up in high school or at the beginning of college. You know everything you know now – you have your adult wisdom and confidence, plus you know details about the future that can help you avoid disaster and make some very wise investments – and you can apply it all to living a better, more successful life. I’m a pretty happy guy, but I think we all have things in our youth that we’d like to do over. Despite the universality of this feeling, I can’t think of any other works of fiction that tackle this idea. But, Grimwood does it quite brilliantly in Replay, so who needs ‘em?

In 1988, at the age of 43, Jeff Winston dies of a heart attack. He wakes up minutes later a freshman in college in 1963 with all the memories of the life he just lived and lost. Once he overcomes his initial confusion, he strikes it rich via sports gambling and builds a financial empire. Over the next twenty-five years, he amasses great wealth and starts a different family. Then, in 1988, he dies and wakes up in college yet again.

None of Jeff’s various lives are that surprising. He explores different avenues from getting rich, to finding love with a college girlfriend, to living a life of reading and quiet contemplation on a secluded ranch. Grimwood does throw in a few interesting twists that do add some suspense. I won’t give anything away, but every time the premise felt like it might be starting to feel worn, Grimwood added a new element to keep me intrigued. He also quite comprehensively covers the implications of the replays, including the financial, romantic, artistic, and philosophical.

I really enjoyed this novel. Grimwood starts with an intriguing idea, but he doesn’t lose sight of character. Jeff is compelling and sympathetic, and his adventures and musings on his odd situation are unlikely page-turners.

Grade: A

1986 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, 1985 Saturn Award – BACK TO THE FUTURE

No post Friday, as I journey to the frozen wastelands of Canada for a conference this weekend. In the meantime, here's another halfhearted review of an '80s SF classic of which everything worth saying has already been said. Is it just nostalgia that makes the '80s the SF movie golden age for me?

Back to the Future is the quintessential '80s film. It's really the quintessence of the 80s, period. Take the adventure movie prototype of Lucas and Spielberg (the director, Robert Zemeckis, was a protoge of Spielberg, who also executive produced this film), add in Iranian terrorists, Reagan jokes, nostalgia for a "simpler time," Huey Lewis, yuppies and punks, and you've got the whole decade nicely summed up in under two hours. It's also incredibly fun.

If you've somehow missed the film, the film begins with Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), a cool, guitar-playing high schooler with an unhappy homelife. In the evenings, he works for mad scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd, in the performance of a lifetime). When Doc Brown tries to show off his time machine (the Delorean, a futuristic-looking '80s novelty car). Muslim terrorists show up (of course!) and Marty ends up in 1955, where he meets his Mom and Dad in high school and things get weird.

The movie is fast-paced, funny, and exciting. Michael J. Fox is fantastic, as this week's surfaced footage of Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly has made me realize. I'm not sure that version would have worked, even though I like Stoltz.

I also enjoyed the film's two sequels, whose reputations are not quite as solid. For me, this is part of the holy trinity of '80s trilogies alongside Indiana Jones and Star Wars.

Grade: A

1984 Saturn - THE TERMINATOR

Yes, there was a time when James Cameron had to work with budgets under $200 million, and his films generally made less than a billion dollars. The Terminator had a relatively low budget of $6.5 million, and there are times when it feels like a low rent action flick…I think mostly because so many low rent action flicks (starring the likes of Dolphe Lundgren and Jean Claude Van Damme) have imitated it.

The plot, for those who are somehow unaware, follows a struggling young waitress in LA named Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), who is being chased by two naked men from the future. One of them is a steroid-sculpted cold-blooded killer and future governor (Arnold Schwarzeneggar). The other is a scruffy dude named Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn). Schwarzeneggar kills a whole mess of people, but Reese protects Connor and eventually tells her that he is from a war-torn future that only her womb can save. But that damn Terminator keeps coming!

‘70s films were obsessed with overpopulation and ecological disasters. ‘80s films were obsessed with the threat of humanoid robots. This seems kind of bizarre, considering that a quarter century later we still can’t really make a robot that can walk on two-feet or understand human language the way that we do, but I guess robots were changing the world economy in the ‘80s – propelling Japan to near superpower status and speeding the erosion of America’s industrial base. I don’t remember people really talking about it at the time (and mechanization seemed to be a much more explicit worry of ‘50s and ‘60s sf), but maybe Blade Runner and The Terminator are playing on these sub-conscious fears. Maybe an even more likely explanation is that this is a manifestation of anxiety about the growing importance of computers.

Anyway, the film is pretty thrilling; it’s really more of a horror film than an action film. I think the low-budget feel works to the film’s advantage, though the big ending has aged pretty poorly (stop-motion fx!). The scenes in the future are among the best, and I wish that Cameron had made a film about the resistance in the '90s instead of McG's in the '00s. The film even manages to say some interest things about destiny (and creates a nice time loop). The score is terrible though – the signature rhythm is great and unforgettable, but the rest is awful synthesizer music (just try not to laugh at the music that accompanies Linda Hamilton’s first appearance).

Cameron’s Avatar has been accused of ripping off a whole host of stories, films, comic books, concept albums, performance art pieces, dream journals, etc. He actually set a precedent for this here in his first real film. Harlan Ellison sued, claiming that the story ripped off two of his Outer Limits episodes: “Soldier” and “Demon with a Glass Hand,” and now all releases say “acknowledging the works of Harlan Ellison” at the beginning of the end credits.

Grade: B+

2010 Hugo nominee, Dramatic Pres. Short: Doctor Who: "The Waters of Mars" Writ. by Russell T Davies & Phil Ford; Dir. by Graeme Harper (BBC Wales)

Just when the silliness of the 2010 Dr. Who specials was starting to overwhelm, Davies delivered what I consider to be his finest Dr. Who story as a writer. This was the one special that I said should receive a nomination, and it is really good.

This serial does two things that Dr. Who doesn’t do often: 1) it takes place in the near future and deals with early efforts at space colonization (Mars, in this case), and 2) it explores the nature of time travel.

The basic story is that the Doctor stops off on Mars in the twenty-first century, takes a walk in his spacesuit, and runs across the first human colony on Mars. The humans are understandably confused by his arrival, but they’re soon caught up in an attack by some strange water-sucking entity. It’s a great change of pace for the series over the usual trips to a few millions of years in the future, and allows for some decent hard-sf moments (in Classic Who, Mars is home to rubber-suit aliens called Ice Warriors and pyramids dedicated to evil Egyptian deities). The colony looks great (though maybe too roomy), the monsters are effectively creepy, the guest actors are fantastic (especially Lindsay Duncan as Captain Adelaide Brooke), and there’s only one embarrassing moment of camp from Russell T. Davies (it involves a rocket-powered robot).

So, it’s a very good horror tale set in a Martian colony. What pushes it into the realm of greatness is that it does take on some of the central themes of the show. In the classic series, the Doctor often mentioned that you couldn’t change history and then proceeded to do so every week. In the new series, they came up with the compromise that only some moments must remain unchanged and only certain situations create paradoxes. This special focuses on one of those unchangeable moments and then asks if the Doctor can stand by and watch people die. The central conflict is not some crazy monster-of-the-week, it’s with the Doctor’s own ego. There’s a device that Davies used so often that it grew tiresome: everything looks bleaker than bleak, many people have died, the odds are overwhelming, there no way the Doctor can win, and yet, he still manages to turn everything around at the last second. This special has that exact moment – one of the best-realized versions, in fact – and yet manages to subvert it completely. It’s wonderfully dark and challenging, and by far the best of the 2009 specials.

Grade: A-

2010 Not-a-Hugo Nominee GALILEO'S DREAM by Kim Stanley Robinson

My third and final not-a-nominee entry. Galileo’s Dream is an ambitious work from one of sf’s most prominent (and, I’d say, best) writers, so I expected to see it on the nomination list. When it didn’t appear, I wondered if it’s late US release date (December 29th!) had hindered it in some way. For all I know, that could be the case, and it may even be eligible again next year. However, while I liked the book, now that I’ve read it, I’m not quite so miffed to see it absent from the nominee list.

Robinson’s main focus is on writing a biographical novel of Galileo Galilei, the seventeenth century scientist who made a host of discoveries that reinforced the idea that the earth revolved around the sun and paved the way for Isaac Newton a few decades later. Galileo emphasized mathematics and empiricism, and thus also influenced the modern practice of science. And, he made some of the first important observations with a telescope, discovering Jupiter’s largest moons among other celestial objects. When Galileo published his observations, he faced persecution by the Catholic Church, which had committed itself to a geocentric view of the universe that put the Earth at the center of everything (ironically, this was the result of a thirteenth century bout of rationalism in the Church that had Thomas Aquinas synchronizing Greek thinkers like Ptolemy and Aristotle with the Bible, and Aquinas was also persecuted and recanted, but that’s a whole tangent that Robinson doesn’t really get into).

So, about 3/5ths of the novel covers Galileo’s life, which is suitably operatic: he has an abusive mother, he suffers bouts of debilitating (mental?) illness, he fathers three illegitimate children with the same woman, his two daughters end up in a convent and suffer from their own illnesses, he’s caught up in court intrigues, he makes the aforementioned scientific discoveries, and he has a dramatic trial that includes forged evidence and startling testimony. There’s lots of material to work with, and though these biographical portions started out slow, I eventually came to prefer them to the science fiction portions.

So, yes, the other 2/5ths of the novel involve Galileo being plucked out of time by 31st century colonists of Jupiter’s moons. He’s pulled forward by competing factions who are involved in scientific disputes and want to alter Galileo’s destiny for their own purposes. Early on, these sections were very intriguing, and it’s fun to watch Galileo learn about Einstein (though he takes things in a little too easily). But it all gets a bit fuzzy as the story goes on, and we begin to get vague, pseudo-sciencey talk about “entanglement.” Robinson is usually known as a hard sf kind of guy, but, paradoxically, a hard sf version of time travel inevitably takes you to some sort of probabilistic, quantum mechanics-heavy view of the universe. The uncertainty principle is good science, but it’s not very satisfying from a narrative point of view: “ah, yes, you’re the Galileo who died young – or not – or both. Oh well, who cares?” This story just gets more bizarre and more pointless as it goes on, and I found some of the future discoveries about Jupiter to be just plain silly.

There are other weird decisions in the book as well. The future debates all involve the relationship between science and religion, and what it means for human history. But, it’s never explained all that well, and that entire narrative thread feels unfinished. There’s also a first-person narrator, but he generally refers to himself in the third person and drops completely out of the novel for hundreds of pages at a time. Again, I was left wondering what the point was.

There’s a lot to like here. Robinson’s writing and ideas are characteristically strong, and the Galileo material is generally compelling. But, the novel never quite comes together. It’s very unclear and uncertain, which may have been the goal…but it makes for a difficult and unrewarding read.

Grade: B-

1982 Locus - THE MANY COLORED LAND by Julian May

As I said a couple of weeks ago, prehistoric settings were a hot commodity in the early ‘80s. Julian May sends her cast of characters to the Pliocene rather than the Pleistocene (a few extra million years in the past), but I was still hoping that she’d redeem the concept. I can’t say that I think she did, though Many Colored Land seems to fail in the exact opposite manner as No Enemy But Time. Bishop’s book was a simple narrative that tried to tackle ambitious and provocative themes; May’s novel uses an overly complicated setting and overloaded cast of characters to tell a very straightforward adventure story.

In the twenty-first century, a French scientist opens a window to the Pliocene epoch, but it turns out to be a one-way gate for living tissue. Still, people are attracted, especially those alienated from the world around them, and tens of thousands choose to go into exile in the ancient time period. This is an amazingly promising concept, and I looked forward to a tale of exploration full of fascinating factoids about a little-known era in geological history that could also explore some interesting, alienated characters.

May was not content to stop there, however. In the opening chapters we’re introduced to the characters in question, but we learn that they live in a space opera setting called the Galactic Milieu. That means we get lots of info dump on strange alien cultures, psychic powers, and even weird galactic sports – all of which is destined to be relatively unimportant in the novel’s latter sections (except for the psychic stuff). The characters themselves are mildly interesting, but a lot of them are pretty stereotypical – like the super tough girl athlete or the space-pilot scoundrel.

When we finally do get to the Pliocene, May continues to pile on extra concepts. I won’t spoil it too much, but suffice it to say that it’s more like a mythical quest in Narnia or Oz (both of which are name-checked) than prehistoric exploration and society-building. I just don’t understand why May wanted to smash all of these concepts together. Why not just write a fantasy novel? It seems that May had a fantasy concept and a sci-fi universe all fleshed out in her head, and she decided to throw it all into one novel.

As with No Enemy But Time, this could all be forgiven if it was a well-written novel, but it’s not. The prose is less offensively bad than Bishop’s, but it’s not particularly thrilling, and the dialog often tends toward the cheesy. This is part of a larger series, but I don’t feel the need to revisit the Pliocene Exile after this entry.

Grade: D

2010 Hugo nominee, Dramatic Pres. Short: Doctor Who: "The Next Doctor" Written by Russell T Davies; Directed by Andy Goddard (BBC Wales)

I’m a rather late convert to the Doctor Who revival, and the franchise in general, but I have been voraciously devouring new and classic episodes for the past year or so. After four seasons of Hugo-dominating, high quality television, the new series took a year to say goodbye to star David Tennant with a series of five holiday specials – two years of Christmas specials, an Easter special, a New Year’s Special, and….um…Guy Fawkes Day? Three of them were eligible for this round of Hugos, and, despite being fairly poorly received by a lot of fans, all three received nominations.

There are two big things going on in this special. First, it’s a very steampunk story that has the Doctor fighting Cybermen in Victorian London at Christmas. We get giant robots with gears, powered by Dickensian child labor! At the same time, we have an odd twist on the old “mulit-doctor story.” If you’re not all that familiar with the show, the Doctor has been played by eleven different actors (and that’s just canon!). Since he is a time traveler, it’s not too hard to do a story where he hangs out with different versions of himself. This has happened three different times on the show proper (but not for twenty-five years), and some more in telethon specials and in audio plays. In this special, we’re teased with the twist that Tennant’s Doctor is meeting a future version of himself played by David Morissey. It doesn’t quite work out that way, but it’s a fun idea.

So, steampunk, multiple doctors, bigger budget special – it all sounds good. Why the disappointment? I actually don’t have a great answer for this one, other than, it’s just not as crisp and exciting as the best Doctor Who always is. There are a couple of chase scenes, a big setpiece with the aforementioned giant robot, and lots of scenes of Morissey and Tennant chatting, but there’s not much going on underneath. Writer Russell T. Davies tries to do something with the villain being a woman of ill-repute, motivated by oppressive Victorian society…but there’s not much depth to that either. And, it’s a bit twee at times – instead of the Doctor’s usual TARDIS, a time travelling police box, the Victorian Doctor has the Tethered Aerial Release Developed In Style, a hot air balloon TARDIS. It’s not horrible, but it’s not up to the high standards of the show at its best, and it’s not Hugo-worthy either.

Grade: B-