2008 Nebula – POWERS by Ursula K. LeGuin

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

2005 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – THE INCREDIBLES

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+

1981 Saturn - SUPERMAN II

And, I'm back! I'll try to catch up with some Hugo nominee reviews this week, but to keep the 1980s going, we have Superman II.

Richard Donner’s Superman managed to present some crazy silver age comic book material in a grounded context. Superman II does the same….except without the grounded context part. I mean, they try for grounded – Superman gets beat up at a truckstop! – but on rewatching the film, I don’t think they pulled it off.

There are two major plotlines here: a group of Kryptonian prisoners are freed near Earth and try to conquer the planet with their Superman-like powers, and Superman tries to make a relationship with Lois work by revealing his identity to her and giving up his own powers. Any comic book fan will tell you that Superman vs. an equally matched opponent is the way to go with these films (it certainly makes more sense than reviving Lex Luthor’s bizarre real estate plans, as Superman Returns did in 2005), and this film is a consensus favorite among the fans for this very reason. I’ve never understood why you would depower Superman in the same film that you have reasonably strong opponents for him (other than that it gives him an excuse to take his powers back and give up Lois), and the result is that we barely get the epic battle the film’s premise suggests. And, of course, when we do get it, the effects aren’t quite there yet (and there are ridiculous slapstick elements added…more on that in a second).

There are good ideas here, but the execution doesn’t quite cut it, and the tone just feels wrong. Richard Donner began work on this film at the same time as the previous one, but left over creative differences before the film was finished. The film hangs together pretty well anyway, but I can’t help but feel that it would have been a bit better with Donner’s humanistic touch rather than replacement director Richard Lester’s slapstick humor. The lengths to which the film goes to reestablish the status quo at the film’s end rival the first film’s in ridiculousness.

At least it’s better than the next three Superman films.

Grade: B

1979 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, 1978 Saturn - SUPERMAN

For some reason, after 1977, big budget sci-fi epics with soaring John Williams’ soundtracks became all the rage. It’s important to remember that Superman had already been around for decades when these movie came out. The comic was (famously) created by a couple of struggling Jewish sons-of-immigrants in the midst of the Great Depression in the 1930s. It caught on and quickly became a successful radio show, a series of pathbreaking Max Fleischer cartoons, and eventually a major television series.

In the ‘70s, Richard Donner decided to class up the franchise with a major motion picture. Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather, wrote the screenplay (and Marlon Brando plays Superman’s father). I think Puzo shows through – in many ways, this is a family epic about a son trying to live up to the ideals of his two fathers. At the same time, it’s the most science fiction take on superheroes to date (outside of the silver age comics themselves). The film begins with a credit sequence speeding through space and then zooms in on a giant crystalline city on the planet of Krypton. I think it’s a fantastic set-up – as we move from glowing alien culture to a very grounded Earth-bound film (there are no science fiction elements not originating on Krypton in this first film – no superpowered baddies, as in the fourth film, or futuristic technology, like the ridiculous computer in film three*).

If you can’t tell, I’m really fond of this movie. I grew up on superhero comic books, and this film sets the stage for the serious, and sometimes incredibly good**, superhero films of the 2000s. For that alone, it’s worthy of attention. But, it’s also a very compelling story with strong and rich characters. Christopher Reeve is magnificent, and his growth into his role as Earth’s protector strikes all the right notes.

As Superman switches gears to accommodate more conflict with the villain, the second half of the film does not work as well. I’m not crazy about the idea of playing Lex Luthor for comic relief, though Gene Hackman’s performance is great. Luthor’s plot is ridiculous and overly-complex, and I have always hated the infamous deus ex machina near the end of the film. Still, this is a fun, groundbreaking superhero film that has aged relatively well. The effects have not, unfortunately, aged well at all; they suffer from being far too ambitious for their time, but I actually thought they added to the film’s immense charms.

*Okay, maybe artificially stimulating earthquakes in California should count, but really, that’s too stupid to take seriously as a science fiction concept.

**well, and sometimes incredibly bad.

Grade: B+

1978 BFS - A SPELL FOR CHAMELEON by Piers Anthony

I'm more than a little ashamed to admit how much I loved Piers Anthony's Xanth novels in Junior High School. The Xanth novels are parodies of fantasy novels, like Terry Pratchett's Discworld books dumbed down a level. Or maybe Discworld is a more clever version of Xanth, since the latter came first (I will take an opportunity to talk about Discworld in the future). Xanth is a magical kingdom shaped like Florida that actually coexists with our world, which the Xanthians call Mundania. It occasionally replaces various peninsulas, like Florida, Korea, etc., so that people can travel between the worlds. Xanth has the usual assortment of magical creatures - centaurs, nymphs, ogres, dragons - but every human being has a "talent," which is basically a superpower. Some people can control time or fly, and others can only project a spot on a wall. So, you have a merging of superhero comics with sword and sorcery, but the main appeal is the humor, which is...somewhat less than mature. Most of the humor revolves around bad puns, and there's also a fair share of Flintstones-esque replacement of modern conveniences with fantasy versions. There's also a large share of sexual humor - though it's of a very tame and juvenile sort. There's no real sex (when it does finally appear in the later novel it's described as "rolling around together"), but, for instance, there is an entire plotline in a later novel about seeing a girl's panties, and there's gratuitous nudity throughout. It's all perfectly suited for the not-sexually-active but very sex-obsessed 'tween mind.

A Spell for Chameleon is the first Xanth novel, and among the better ones. It involves Bink, who appears not to have any special talent. As a result, he is exiled to Mundania, where he runs into some other exiles from Xanth. Hijinks ensue, and Bink eventually discovers his power, gets the girl, and his friend becomes king. The novel was very successful and there have been thirty-two sequels (another similarity to Discworld), and this is apparently how Piers Anthony makes his living now. The books at least skip forward in time quickly so that you get a new generations of characters every two or three novels. I read the first umpteen of them, but I remember that they began to go downhill after book five or so. But those first five books were good, clean fun for me as a thirteen/fourteen year old boy. Still, I'm not so sure that I'd recommend them to adults, and I have no real desire to revisit them. Xanth is, at least, an original and entertaining fantasy setting.

Grade: B