Yes, Even Worse Than the Enterprise Theme Song

After three episodes, I remain agnostic about the Battlestar Galactica prequel series Caprica: interested enough to keep watching, but not so interested that the show's by-now all-but-guaranteed cancellation bothers me overmuch.  The one conclusion I have come to, however, is that this series has the very worst opening titles sequence ever aired on television.



The images are far too on the nose--Joseph Adama is kneeling before a tombstone (which conveniently bears his name) because he's mourning for his wife and daughter; Sister Clarice hands the symbol of the monotheistic cult to Lacy because she's indoctrinating her--and the Blade Runner-esque visual sensibility (with the zeppelin at the end adding a slight steampunk touch) is entirely at odds with the actual show's look, which can best be described as Naturalism Askew--familiar interiors and exteriors made strange through delicate touches of futuristic technology or unfamiliar design choices.  Most of all, the plasticity of the animation recalls pulp SF, not the respectable image that Caprica is obviously trying to project.  One gets the sense that the core concept was something along the lines of opening credits to Carnivalé or Rome--distinctive, richly imagined and realized credits that definitively established the show's emotional tone and visual palette--but there was either not enough talent or not enough money at work to do the job, and what results is the exact opposite of the sophisticated, mainstream-friendly show that Caprica is trying to be.

Avatar-Dump

As with Star Trek, the conversation about Avatar is loud but not particularly broad. It seems to center around the divide between those who like the film unreservedly and those (like myself) who appreciate its visuals but roll their eyes at its script and underlying message (and, on the one site where I've followed such a discussion, devolved so quickly into the former accusing the latter of cynicism and snobbery that I'm not sure it's an avenue of conversation worth pursuing).  These, however, are some of the more interesting comments I've seen on the film, which try to extend the conversation beyond this debate.

• More on the film's racism: Scott Eric Kaufman considers the film's presentation of humans and Na'vi, and concludes that its message is a variant on the "black quarterback problem":
  

  This is not a vision of a racially harmonious social politic: it is an inversion of the logic of passing that seems acceptable only because it imagines the experience of becoming a person of color as necessarily ennobling. The film argues that once a white person truly and deeply understands the non-white experience, he becomes an unstoppable combination of non-white primitivism and white rationalism which is exactly what happens. In order for the audience to support the transformation of Jake Sully into Braveheart Smurf, it must accept the essentialist assumptions that make such a combination possible ... and those assumptions are racist.
  

  He has some more comments here on the film's casting.  I'm not entirely in agreement with Kaufman, who I think is too quick to dismiss both the effects of the humans' presence on Pandora and the complexity of the Na'vi's society, but his conclusions are, I think, undeniable.
  


• At The Valve, Aaron Bady talks about Avatar as a fantasy of a return to childhood, but notes that that childhood is not the innocent idyll that crops up in rose-tinted fantasies of childhood (usually written by adults who have forgotten their own) but "a Western fantasy of spoiled childhood: pure id."
  

  Where the movie goes wrong, then, is in making the sociopathic immaturity of a spoiled Western brat into the ideal form for the child-human that it wants anti-modernity to be. After all, while even your Rousseauvians understand the noble savage as a contradiction of modernity, as a cleansing bath washing away its discontents, the Na’vi only confirm Sully’s most childish presumptions of privilege: their world turns out to be nothing but toys to play with, nothing but one long summer camp fantasy of being the fastest, bestest, most awesomest ninja-Indian ever, and then a big giant womb to hide in when it all gets to be a bit much. There are no consequences there, nothing you can do to make mommy stop loving you (though Lord how he tries!). Like toys and parents to a three-year old, it is unthinkable that they say no or exist without you, and all they can ever ask is that you play with them.

• David Hines has a memo to the corporation that serves as the film's villain.
  

  That's right; you are on this planet to collect an extremely valuable element that levitates when exposed to a presumably magnetic field, and your planet has great big levitating rocks in an area characterized by strong presumably magnetic fields.


  
  Might I suggest that if you're having so many problems with the natives, you might want to ignore their goddamn village and check out THE GIANT FUCKING FLOATING MOUNTAINS, because you can bet your ass they are chock full of unobtanium.
  

• At CHUD, the website that brought us a blow-by-blow description of how Christian Bale's ego made Terminator: Salvation a much, much worse film than it needed to be, Devin Faraci has a side by side comparison of Avatar and Project 880, the script treatment James Cameron wrote not long after completing Titanic.  It not only addresses Hines's point above, but does all the things I was so dismayed to discover a James Cameron film neglecting.  Project 880 takes place in a fully conceived future world, it features development of both the main and secondary characters, and it has several kickass set-pieces.  As Faraci notes, there is no way this treatment in its entirety could have made it onto the screen, and its underlying assumptions are no less problematic than the finished product's (not to mention that Neytiri--here called Zuleika--is less prominent and less interesting in Faraci's description of the treatment than she was in Avatar), but Project 880 sounds like a film I would have enjoyed for more than its visuals.
  


• Sady Doyle has the definitive response to those who argue that Avatar is a politically brave film for having an environmental, anti-corporate message.
  

  So, you mean to say that this particular movie – called “Dances with Wolves in Space,” subject to more Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest comparisons than any cultural artifact in recent memory save Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest itself, already noted for belonging to the benevolent racist “white guy saves and/or bangs the natives” (going Nativ’ei! GET IT) tradition of cinematic craftsmanship – actually attempts, much like many a terrible Star Wars prequel of years past, to wedge in an unnecessary, blatant, and manipulative set of parallels to the Iraq War, the American genocide of Native peoples, and some rainforest shit possibly also? Goodness! Such a feat has never been attempted until now! Or, to be more precise, such a feat has never been attempted by James Cameron, within the last month! Until now!

• At the New York Times, Ross Douthat has a very interesting article about the Na'vi's pantheism, and more generally about the way that pantheism has become the go-to religion or religion-like-object in Hollywood films.
  

  At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.

Thank Goodness for Small Favors

TV site CliqueClack interviews Defying Gravity creator James Pariott about his plans for the now-defunct series's future, and his revelations about the planned storyline for the character Nadia--a no-nonsense, unemotional, extremely sexually aggressive German woman--put even the most fail-tastic of science fiction shows to shame:

Nadia — She had quite the odd hallucinations, didn’t she? Who was that man she kept seeing, and why did he look so much like Nadia? As Parriott revealed to me, some fans of the show got it right in their guess that she was, in fact, a hermaphrodite when she was born. The choice was made for her when she was 11, by her parents, which sex she’d ultimately become. So that man we’re seeing is actually what Nadia would have been, had they chosen to raise her — or him — as a man.

Now, here’s the wild kicker. All those DNA changes that are happening with the crew, caused by Beta and the other artifacts? Well, they would eventually wind up causing Nadia to gradually turn into a man.

Parrriott also said that it was planned for Nadia to really have a more significant presence in season two. “If you see the way we wrote her, she sort of had that male sexuality about her, that ‘fuck ‘em and forget ‘em’ mentality. So we wanted to write her sort of as a male character in a female body.”

As you may recall, I wasn't terrifically impressed with Defying Gravity to begin with, and in its later episodes the show lost what little charm it had when it downplayed its trashy soap opera aspects in favor of a dull and drawn out SFnal story, but I wasn't actually glad, even thankful, for its cancellation, until I read this.  Honestly, I'm willing to forgive this entire crappy fall pilot season just for knowing that there is no chance in hell that this abominable storyline will ever see the light of day.

Sarah Hall Roundtable

Not to be confused with the Lavinia conversation, in the last couple of weeks I've also been participating in a discussion of Sarah Hall's recent, Booker-longlisted novel How to Paint a Dead Man, organized by Ed Champion and including Frances Dinkelspiel, Sarah Weinman, Miracle Jone, Mark Athitakis, Peggy Nelson, Brian Francis Slattery, Kathleen Maher, Anna Clark, Jenny Davidson, Michael Schaub, Amy Riley, Traver Kauffman, Judith Zissman, and Anne Fernald. Ed has all five parts of the discussion up at his blog, including, in the last one, a response from Hall herself.

Also of potential interest: my review of Hall's previous novel The Carhullan Army (Daughters of the North in the US), part of my review of the 2008 Arthur C. Clarke Award nominees, at Strange Horizons.

Fetch My Smelling Salts

The Booker longlist is out, and to my great surprise it contains one novel I've read and liked (The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, review here), one novel I own and am eager to read (The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt), one novel which I'm very curious about due to high praise from trustworthy reviewers (Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel), and one novel by an author whose previous novel I liked very much (How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall, returning to respectable literary fiction after a walk on the SF side with The Carhullan Army). This is very nearly unprecedented. The last time I actually cared about the Booker nominees was in 2004 when David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas was nominated, and a heavy favorite to win. Of course, it lost to Brideshead Revisited 2: Revenge of the Tories, and both that upset and subsequent longlists and shortlists have repeatedly reinforced my feeling that the Booker is awarded in some alternate universe of readers who are looking for completely different things from fiction than I am, and I'd gotten used to ignoring the award. Though I wouldn't be surprised if most of the interesting nominees on the longlist got winnowed during the shortlist's creation, the very fact that I'm hoping otherwise is a huge step forward in my relationship with this award.

In less encouraging literary fiction news, Yann Martel is about to break his near decade-long silence with a new novel, coming in 2010. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether the author of Life of Pi really needed to grace the literary world with another work of fiction, much less get paid three million dollars for it, the actual novel sounds vile: "Like Life of Pi, it will be an allegory involving animals – this time tackling the Holocaust via the medium of a donkey and a howling monkey." It is taking everything I've got not to go Godwin all over this topic, but I honestly had thought that the twee Holocaust fashion had run its course with The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

Please, Make Them Stop

So, Buffy-less Buffy sounds like a terrible idea, but it'll probably never happen. And Heathers 2 is utterly superfluous, but what else are Winona Ryder and Christian Slater going to do? But now we have an Alien prequel on the horizon, because apparently neither Alien: Resurrection nor the two Alien vs. Predator movies were bad enough, and at this point I just have to wonder: if I take a ten year break from contemporary blockbusters, will there actually be enough decent original material at its end to fill up a weekend?

Oh well, at least the Toy Story 3 teaser looks promising.

Trek-Dump, Addenda

A few more interesting links and then I'm done with this movie, I swear.

• Adam Roberts hits it out of the park with his review.  The whole thing is quotable and also very funny, but this is the point that floored me, which hits on something that niggled at me throughout my viewing but which I wasn't able to put into words:
  

  Trek09 is a text so absolutely incapable of representing a collective—a functioning group, a society—that it strays into rank idiocy. It is teenage wish-fulfilment bang-zap-frot fantasy all the way through. But (and this, I’d say, is what people celebrating the Star Warsification of the Trek franchise in this film, are missing) precisely what made Trek so notable in the first place was its creation a communitarian world. Not an ensemble cast all vying for screen time; a knit-together group of people. The Star Wars universe is an open-ended, malleable space for individual adventure. The Trek universe is about having a place. It is, really, about belonging.
  
  So Trek09 grandly misses the point. My problem was not that Kirk, in this film, is a tool at the start and a tool at the end. He is, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that Star Fleet is so toolish: so completely, dysfunctionally unbelievable as an organisation. ... The Enterprise, as a group of individuals functioning together to crew a space ship, is—in this film, and for the first time in the Trek franchise—Not Fit For Purpose. It's a wholly unprofessional bunch of people squabbling and vying. It's dysfunctional.

  As I said in my review, Star Trek as a story is wholly oriented towards placing Jim Kirk in the place God intended for him, the captain's seat on the bridge of the Enterprise, but because of the dysfunction Adam notes the film's notion of what a captain is boils down to 'the guy who gets to tell everyone what to do.'  Kirk is never a leader.  His Enterprise functions not because of any action on his part but because he happens to have been lucky enough to end up with a band of under-qualified cadets who figure out, all on their own, how to work together.  I never got the sense that Kirk cared whether his crew got along or respected him so long as they enabled him to be captain, or that the film cared about any relationship that had more than two people in it.


• Nick Mamatas is an utter wronghead about the Star Trek franchise, but probably right on the money when it comes to this observation:
  

  And the J.J. Abrahms movie? Well, it's...not bad. Not great, but not bad. Actually, it isn't even a Star Trek movie. I swear to God, it's Galaxy Quest: The Motion Picture. There are inexplicably Willy Wonkaesque architectures for the characters to get stuck in, the captain and his alien buddies aren't really friends though they are somehow supposed to be, a monster is replaced by a bigger monster during a planetside interlude, the transporters don't seem to work right, the first captain is tortured by the villains (ooh, waterboarding!), and the end of the movie involves Spaceship A turning around and rushing Spaceship B. Plus the baddy snarls his lines five inches from the camera lens, a la a heel pro wrestler threatening to destroy Hulk Hogan on a Saturday morning. Just like Galaxy Quest. But not played for laughs.

• As with the presence of women, lots of people have talked about the lack of diversity in Star Fleet and on the Enterprise (I note that the film took the standard Trek approach of having a mainly white cast and a black admiral), but Rachel M. Brown really gets to the heart of the difference between emulation Star Trek's form and emulating its spirit:
  

  The point of Chekhov in the original was not that he had a funny accent. It was that he was a proud citizen of a country that, at time of airing, was America's # 1 enemy. The modern USA equivalent of Chekhov would not be Chekhov, but a crew member from Iraq or Afghanistan.

• A Fox News commentator takes Abrams's overturning of Roddenberry's message to its logical conclusion:
  

  The new "Star Trek" film shows Captain Kirk's Starship Enterprise making good use of photon torpedoes and force fields. So the question comes to mind: Would Israel be safer if it could shoot down enemy missiles and rockets with such photon torpedoes, or block them altogether with a force field? Of course it would.

• A report from a Q&A session with screenwriters Orci and Kurtzman, in which they try to justify the film's numerous plot holes.  The whole thing is quite delicious, but this is undoubtedly the money shot:
  

  In the minds of the creators, the focus of the plot is that Nero’s destruction of the timeline has altered history to the point that the all important friendship of Kirk and Spock is now threatened. If these two don’t come together, the fabric of space and time itself is endangered (as we have witnessed by the universe itself being saved countless times over the last 40 years). Kirk “coincidentally” running into Spock Prime is an example of fate itself trying to bring these two together. That’s how important it is.

  Also, apparently Kirk was only sleeping with Uhura's Orion roommate in order to gain access to the computers running the Kobayashi Maru scenario.  What a prince.

Trek-Dump

One of the ways in which this summer's testosterone-heavy action-adventure flicks are falling short of last summer's crop is that they're not generating nearly as much, or as diverse a range of, discussion.  I mean, The Dark Knight alone kept the internet going for weeks.  This year, the consensus establishes itself pretty quickly--by the end of its opening weekend, everyone knew that Watchmen was a faithful adaptation, but perhaps a little too faithful for its own good, and that was that.  When it comes to Star Trek, you've got a whole lot of people who liked it, and a few like me who didn't, but everyone seems to have pretty much the same reasons for their opinions.  Here, however, are a few posts that make interesting points or make them particularly well.

• Niall Harrison and I are pretty much opinion-twins when it comes to this film, which happens so rarely that it's noteworthy in and of itself.  He makes a surprisingly rare comparison between the film and New Who, which is something I wanted to touch on in my review but had neither the space nor, just yet, the coherent thoughts for.  After all, when it comes to Doctor Who, I'm exactly in the position of all the newly-minted Star Trek fans who have been brought to the franchise by the movie, and I think it's worth pondering just what, if any, are the differences between J.J. Abrams's reboot and Russell T. Davies's.  (See also in that same post: thoughts on Dollhouse, with which I'm less congruent--I'm not as certain as Niall that an interesting concept makes up for the show's serious failures in plotting--while still agreeing that it has potential and deserves time to find its footing.)


• There have been a lot of essays about the limited number of female characters in the film and their even more limited roles, but my favorite comes from Sady Doyle at the Guardian's Comment is Free (though as usual for a feminist article in the Guardian, you should probably avoid the actual comments).  This is also a good opportunity to mention Doyle's blog, Tiger Beatdown, a recent discovery which I've been greatly enjoying trawling through.  Her focus is mainly real world feminist issues, on which topic she is trenchant, intelligent, and extremely funny, but she also writes about pop culture from a feminist perspective, and I'm particularly fond of these posts about Dollhouse, Sense and Sensibility, and the similarities between Mean Girls and Mad Men.  The whole blog, though, is worth a look.


• Still on the topic of women in the film, Meghan McCarron asks "couldn't they have Starbucked somebody?"  To which my answer is, depends on who you mean by 'they.'  I can't really imagine the creative types in charge of this film taking a move as gutsy as this, nor their studio bosses allowing it.  More importantly, I'm not sure that Starbucking (and as annoying as I ultimately found the character I do like the idea of using her name to describe this action, even if the need for such a verb does reinforce my conviction that we've become a remake culture) would have suited this film.  With the exception of Kirk and Spock--who clearly never would have been considered for such a transformation--the rest of the Enterprise crew have rather limited roles in the film, and their characterization consists mainly of recalling established facts about them (Sulu fences, Scotty and Chekov have accents).  I don't think making Sulu female, for example, would have made a significant statement given how little we got to know the character.  On the other hand, I find myself wishing that some of the secondary, non-canonical roles had been played by women, and in particular I'm wondering why the parent Kirk lost on the Kelvin had to be his father instead of his mother.


• John Rogers, creator of the silly but utterly charming Leverage, writes about Kirk's character arc, or lack of same:
  

  He starts as an arrogant sonovabitch, and becomes a slightly more motivated arrogant sonovabitch. He does not learn to sacrifice, he does not learn to work well with others -- he takes over the goddam ship. He's right all the time, he never doubts he's right, and the only obstacle he occasionally faces is when other people aren't sharp enough to see how frikkin' awesome -- and right -- he is as quickly as they should.

  This is, obviously, a great deal more positive than I was about Kirk, but I do think that Rogers has hit on the essence of what the character was trying to be--the smug bastard who is all the more infuriating because he actually is the best guy for the job.  Unapologetic arrogance can be an extraordinarily appealing character trait, but only if it's warranted, and Kirk's assholish actions throughout the film are, to my mind, insurmountable obstacles to his claim for leadership.
  
  
• Two lists of introductory facts about Trek, ostensibly for new fans who have started writing fanfic, but at least some of these details seem to have escaped the attention of the filmmakers themselves.


• God bless Anthony Lane, whose New Yorker review of the film is typically sharp, funny, and merciless.  Despite the delicious snark, Lane ends up a great deal more positive about the film than I was, but before reaching that conclusion he gets a good dig in at the present craze for reboots and prequels
  

  In all narratives, there is a beauty to the merely given, as the narrator does us the honor of trusting that we will take it for granted. Conversely, there is something offensive in the implication that we might resent that pact, and, like plaintive children, demand to have everything explained. Shakespeare could have kicked off with a flashback in which the infant Hamlet is seen wailing with indecision as to which of Gertrude’s breasts he should latch onto, but would it really have helped us to grasp the dithering prince? Or, to update the question: I know it’s not great when your dad dies a total hero and leaves you orphaned at the same time, but did James T. Kirk have to grow up such a cocky son of a gun?

• This last one is for Hebrew readers: Raz Greenberg reviews the film for Fisheye, expertly capturing the site's distinctive style, and concludes that Abrams's Star Trek is an excellent Star Wars film which just happens to be set in the Star Trek universe.  There's certainly no denying that Kirk's journey, at least, follows Luke Skywalker's quite closely (though like most Star Wars imitations, Star Trek has taken the admittedly wise step of jettisoning Luke's personality and replacing it with Han's), though I think this is probably more an expression of the fact that the Star Wars story--fatherless boy with great destiny is urged by mentor figure to take his place in the universe, triumphs over adversity, defeats villain and wins glory--is still the template for the overwhelming majority of our blockbuster entertainment than a deliberate or even unconscious imitation.

April's Links

No jokes here, I promise.

• Just when I thought I was out: SF Signal's latest Mind Meld asks contributors, including myself, what they would have done to fix the Battlestar Galactica series finale, though many take the same tack I did and spend more time talking about the series's overall problems. Several interesting perspectives here, such as a medieval historian who talks about the series's treatment of religion (though I strongly disagree with her conclusions), and even a few people who thought the finale was perfect just the way it was. Sadly, no contribution from John C. Wright, who is always good for a laugh.
  


• Over at Torque Control, Niall Harrison has started a series of discussions of award-nominated short fiction. He's starting with the BSFA nominees and will move on to the Hugos shortly, but his first subject of discussion, Ted Chiang's "Exhalation," is on both shortlists. As I say over there, I'm probably going to save most of my thoughts for my upcoming Hugo nominee roundups, but the discussion of Chiang's story is very interesting and might make me rethink my position about it.


• OK, this one is probably a joke, but if it is it's very well done: the TARDIS gets a makeover. (Via SF Signal.)


• Is anyone else baffled by the Chuck love-in at TWOP? Chuck is a cute show (though I'm growing less and less patient with its treatment of female characters), and after an increasingly stultifying second season the last few episodes have really picked up and tapped back into the qualities that used to make the show fun and charming (see also Heroes), but it's hard to imagine anyone being as passionate about it as the regular recapper and the author of this essay are. The Chuck/Sarah relationship as a major draw of the series? Their tedious on again, off again is a huge part of why I'm seriously considering not returning to the show next year.


• Finally, on a more sombre note, this has been widely reported already, but I wanted to add my sad response to the news of Andy Hallett's, AKA Lorne from Angel, death. It's sad enough that he died so young, but apparently he spent the last years of his life battling illness, which is heartbreaking. Niall wonders what a good Lorne tribute episode would be, and aside from the obvious suggestions such as the Pylea triptych and "Spin the Bottle," I'm partial to his scene in "Epiphany," which perfectly encapsulated the character and his role as Angel's wise counselor.

What a Difference a Script Makes

Via Micole, what's rumored to be the original script for the Dollhouse pilot.  As several scenes and lines of dialogue within it appeared in the first Dollhouse trailer, I think this is the genuine article.  Unsurprisingly, it's a massive improvement on "Ghost," not only because it dives right into the arc elements of the show, stressing Agent Ballard's investigation of the Dollhouse and Echo's potential awakening, but because it's engaging--unlike the by-the-numbers kidnapping story in "Ghost" the plot here is interesting and entertainingly twisty, taking me by surprise with its turns on several occasions.  The secondary characters--Boyd, Topher, Dr. Saunders--are also more believably sketched and and more intriguing, and there's some interaction between Echo and Ballard.  Perhaps most importantly, the episode suggests believable uses for the actives that go beyond the jumped-up prostitution the show has thus far concentrated on.

As depressing as it is that someone in Fox preferred "Ghost" to this episode, this script gives me hope--that Whedon has a firmer grip on the show than I'd previously dared believe, and that he'll work elements from this script into future episodes.  The second Dollhouse episode was an improvement on the first, if still depressingly self-contained and slow to build up the arc storyline, but both it and this script suggest that the show might soon find its legs.

Three Links Make a Post

Some of my recent online reading.

• Hal Duncan writes about Battlestar Galactica, and, as on most topics, does so intelligently, forcefully, and at great length.  Lots of interesting ideas here: some more exploration of what it means that the show's premise maps more accurately to the Holocaust than to 9/11 (I hadn't, for example, thought of Gaeta as embodying the cliché of the victim made monstrous by his victimhood, mainly because I was too busy being aggravated by the fact that the show's one and only acknowledged homosexual character was being depicted as a villain who kept seeking out powerful, charismatic men to follow), some provocative meditations on just how telling it is that its writers have favored the 9/11 parallel, and mainly a lot of insights into the kind of story the writers produced as opposed to the one they thought they were telling.


• Dan Hartland is rereading the Sherlock Holmes stories in order of publication.  I read these stories, and the Holmes novels, in junior high, and for years I assumed that this was a rite of passage for people growing up in Western countries.  Again and again, however, I've met people who knew Holmes as a character and cultural icon but had never read a single one of Conan Doyle's works, and eventually I realized that they were the vast majority.  Dan's series is a great opportunity to disentangle the iconic image of Holmes we all (including those of us who read the stories and novels) suck down from the aether from the actual fiction in which he appeared, and reevaluate them as works of fiction (thus far, to no great acclaim).


• Richard Morgan writes about The Lord of the Rings, and argues that the only emotionally honest moment in the whole gargantuan work comes during a conversation between two orcs.  I'm beginning to wonder if there's a clause written into the contract of every author who sells a potentially paradigm-shifting work of epic fantasy obliging them to publicly excoriate Tolkien, because it happens quite often.  Moorcock did it.  China Miéville did it (sadly, the essay is no longer online.  There's an excerpt here, but all you really need to know is that he calls Tolkien "a wen on the arse of fantasy literature").  Now it's Morgan's turn.  What always gets to me about these essays is their blistering certainty that they're saying something new as opposed to something that the community of fantasy readers has been debating for decades (OK, "Epic Pooh" was first published in 1978, but I find it hard to believe that Moorcock was the first person to express those specific reservations more than a decade after The Lord of the Rings' popularity exploded).
  
  Most fantasy readers go through a phase where they realize that The Lord of the Rings is conservative, reactionary and, by certain very real yardsticks such as, to take Morgan's example, realistic characterization, not very good.  It's like figuring out that Narnia is a Christian allegory.  You take a deep breath, pick your jaw up from the floor, and decide if you can go on liking the book in spite of these flaws--because it has other qualities that you value, and because a genuinely good work of fiction is one that you can enjoy even if you disagree with the attitudes it expresses.  I really don't know who it is that Morgan and the other writers like him think is going to be blown away by their regurgitated criticisms, and I have an unpleasant suspicion that essays like this one are actually written for people who have already decided that they don't like Tolkien, and are looking for ammunition to lob at his fans.

Quick, Before the Rest of the Internet Links to It

The inimitable Adam Roberts hits on the perfect approach to reviewing Anathem:

it is surely beside the point to object to the tell-don't-show styless, or to the myriad annoylogisms, which are amongst the showiest elements in S.’s worldbling. My problem with the tekst can be boiled down to one focus: its monstrous and inflated infodumping. Of course I appreciate that for some ridders, and perhaps for many ridders, this 'problem' will be the whole point of the book. The entirety of the tekst is one gigantic Infodump, and that’s that.

The review itself, however, is merely a backdrop to a glossary that simultaneously parodies Stephenson and, for people like myself who found the wordplay in Anathem surprisingly enjoyable, gives him a run for his money, all while supplying genre reviewers with a wealth of apt and much needed terms such as 'worldbling', 'narractor', and 

HARI-PARTER. Committing a form of tekstual suicide by increasingly expanding the parts of an ongoing tale until they reach such size that the guts of the story split open and spill all over the ground (see Rowmbling). Painful and grisly.

I can't wait to use these in a review.

File Under 'Hmm'

Via Edward Champion, we learn that Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) is trying to adapt David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas for the screen, with the help of the Wachowski brothers.  Note that this article erroneously (I hope) assumes that Tykwer's adaptation will focus on only one of the novel's six narratives, and also that there's no indication of an actual production deal in place.

Champion calls Cloud Atlas 'an unfilmable novel', but I'm not sure I see how it is any more so than any other big, sprawling piece of fiction.  The nested narrative structure is unusual, but there have been plenty of films--including Run Lola Run--whose narratives were far less linear.  Unlike, say, Possession, Cloud Atlas makes the switch from story to story, period to period at only a few clearly marked locations--in that sense, the shape of the movie is predetermined, and 'all' that's left for a screenwriter is to fill in the details of each narrative.  Which of course is the problem, but it means that Cloud Atlas is no more unfilmable than Pride and Prejudice, and for much the same reasons: because there's too much going on in the novel to cram into at most three hours.  That sort of problem has been solved well on occasion, and badly much more often.  I guess we'll have to wait and see.

In Conversation

Appearing today in Strange Horizons's reviews department is Dan Hartland's review of Benjamin Rosenbaum's The Ant King and Other Stories. Over at Torque Control, Niall Harrison has posted a discussion he led with Dan, Martin Lewis, and myself about the collection and Rosenbaum's strengths and weaknesses as a writer, plus links to other reviews. And, of course, the collection itself is available as a free download from Small Beer Press.

JMS, Plagiarizing Himself

For the last couple of months, I've been boggling at the positive buzz surrounding Clint Eastwood's The Changeling, for the simple reason that the script is by J. Michael Straczynski. Was it possible, I wondered, that in the decade since Babylon 5 went off the air Straczynski had learned how to write dialogue that didn't make its hearers simultaneously cringe and guffaw?

The film's IMDb page would seem to indicate otherwise:

Christine Collins: I used to tell Walter, "Never start a fight, but always finish it." I didn't start this fight, but by God I'm going to finish it.

That settles it: it's going to be impossible for genre fans to watch this film without laughing inappropriately.

Good News on a Saturday

The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been picked up for a full second season.

Of course, this would be even better news if the show gave any signs of improving, but five episodes into the second season, the flaws that marred it in its first are still going strong: great acting, great character work, great individual scenes, but the plotting, in both individual episodes and the overarching save the world arc, is nonsensical.  The next to last episode aired, "Alison from Palmdale," is a perfect example.  Summer Glau is incredible as three different people in the same body who combine into whatever the hell Cameron is right now, but the notion that Cameron has enough empathy to become Alison--who understands and feels emotions, like fear, grief, and anger, which in the past have left Cameron baffled--is too much to swallow.  We've already got one show about a genocidal war between dirty, sweaty humans and immaculate machines confused by these things we call 'feelings' in which the actual nature and capabilities of those machines have been kept too fuzzy for too long.  We don't need another.  Sarah Connor is still the most interesting and complex SF on TV right now, but that's mostly because of its parts, not its whole.

James Crumley, 1939-2008

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of one fine spring afternoon.  Trahearne had been on this wandering binge for nearly three weeks, and the big man, dressed in rumpled khakis, looked like an old soldier after a long campaign, sipping slow beers to wash the taste of death out of his mouth.  The dog slumped on the stool beside him like a tired little buddy, only raising its head occasionally for a taste of beer from a dirty ashtray set on the bar.

These are the opening sentences of The Last Good Kiss, still the finest mystery novel I've ever read, though ultimately it is far less concerned with solving a mystery than with cataloguing the sadnesses and disappointments of its characters' lives in a way that makes your heart ache for them (which is one of the reasons why the ecstatic praise for Kate Atkinson's fine but nowhere near as good Case Histories has left me baffled).  Of Crumley's other novels, I've only read The Wrong Case, which still leaves me a small but promising bibliography to go through.  What distinguished Crumley for me was his ability to delve into the squalor and grime of 70s America, his stories taking place in towns gutted by drugs and the erosion of industry and wealth, while still feeling a profound compassion for his characters, no matter how damaged.  Violent, brutal, and ultimately hopeless as they were, his novels are among the kindest I've ever read.

(Report from The Missoulian of Crumley's death.)

Extremely Loose Interpretation of the Term 'Review'

Reviews of The Dark Knight are cropping up all over, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Rick Norwood's at SF Site is, by far, the weirdest. It starts out normally enough, commenting on the film and praising, in particular, Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker. Then, at about the halfway point, we get this:

Is The Joker on drugs? Heath Ledger died from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs. Was he taking drugs when he played The Joker? I don't know, but I hope not. Good as The Dark Knight is, it is not a film worth dying for.

Believe it or not, it gets even more mind-boggling. The review proceeds in what can only be called a stream of free associations, as Norwood muses on drug-addled artists of the past, America's hypocritical attitude towards drug use, George W. Bush's drug history, and racism. Each thought is only tangentially related to the one before (or indeed to the sentences preceding and following it), and has absolutely nothing to do with The Dark Knight. "Sorry if this review has been a downer," Norwood says in his concluding sentence, but what he should be apologizing for is using the word 'review' to describe what we've just finished reading.

I'm not a regular reader of SF Site (this review was pointed out to me by Niall Harrison), but I do read their book reviews on occasion, and usually like what I find. I especially like their end of year readers' and editors' polls, which can be relied upon to provide a pair of interesting lists and an even more interesting comparison between them. But their media coverage sucks. Their television column is a joke (and, unsurprisingly, also by Norwood), not much more than a glorified TV Guide inset, and this review simply screams editorial negligence. I don't know which would be worse--that Norwood's editor waved his Dark Knight review through without reading it, or that he or she did read it and thought it publishable. Either way, if this is the kind of care and attention SF Site gives its media reviewing, it might as well not bother.

Two Links

1. Further to my last: Niall Harrison reviews Night Shade Books's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 2, and coincidentally ponders the fluid definition of fantasy as expressed by that anthology's editor, Jonathan Strahan.


2. Further to my comments on Iron Man being, fundamentally, just another dumb superhero film: The Kids Aren't All Right by Christine Everhart, a phony Vanity Fair profile of Tony Stark which imagines events in his life and on the global arena in the year following the end of the film.  I suspect that this story is going to be to fanfic what the Supernatural fanvid "Women's Work" was to that form last year: a work that appeals even to those not generally interested in fan art, and which mercilessly skewers the unthinking and simplistic assumptions at the heart of the original work.  If any superhero film ever came close to dissecting its character and premise as finely as this piece does, I might not dismiss them as easily as I do.

So Close and Yet So Far

So, you're the production team parachuted in to save the American Life on Mars, scrambling desperately to turn its laughable pilot into something watchable.  You've just landed The Sopranos's Michael Imperioli.  Who do you cast him as?  Imperioli is not really the right physical type for Gene, but with a little tweaking of the character he might work, and he could certainly pull off the combination of vulnerability, toughness and intelligence that made John Simm's Sam so winning, not to mention the character's working class background.  But no, apparently if you're producing the new Life on Mars and have been lucky enough to cast Michael Imperioli, you cast him as Ray.  I can hear the Italian stereotypes from here.

This is yet another dispiriting choice on the part of the new production team, like the one to move the show's setting from LA (admittedly an awful decision) to New York.  One of the things that made the original Life on Mars special was that it wasn't set in London but in Manchester, a working class, industrial town going through major upheavals but still possessed of a distinct character which is deeply important to its inhabitants.  There any number of cities like this in the US, but the new production team doesn't seem to be interested in telling that kind of story, and instead have plumped for yet another cop show set in New York.