Source Code

The trailers and promos for Duncan Jones's second film Source Code seemed to suggest a very familiar narrative.  Not for the film, that is, but for Jones's career.  First, an arty, idiosyncratic film to establish his credentials among critics and science fiction fans alike.  Then, a bankable, formulaic action flick with SFnal touches to prove to the Hollywood money people that Jones could be relied on to rein in his artistic impulses and put seats in the movie theater.  That Source Code has turned out to be an enjoyable, somewhat intelligent and competently made film while still hewing closely to the more conventional blockbuster format suggested by its marketing is gratifying, but not very surprising--it mainly means that Jones is closer to being another Christopher Nolan than another Richard Kelly.  What is surprising, however--especially given that Jones has only directed the film, while the script is credited to Ben Ripley--is just how many similarities there are between Source Code and Jones's debut Moon.  Both are focused on a single individual, a man engaged in grueling, repetitive labor whose hoped-for reward is described in terms so hazy that it comes to seem metaphysical.  In both films the protagonist discovers that he is not what he thinks he is, and that his nature enables his handlers to view him as expendable and unworthy of compassion.  Both men nevertheless manage to win over one of their handlers, and with their help they make their escape into a world that is uncertain but nevertheless offers them more freedom than their life before--but not before making sure that others of their kind are given the same opportunity.

In Source Code, the hero is Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal, demonstrating once again how a pair of soulful blue eyes can turn a conventionally handsome, perhaps even callow face surprisingly transparent and vulnerable), a helicopter pilot flying sorties in Afghanistan for the US Air Force, who suddenly finds himself on a passenger train, meeting an unfamiliar face in the mirror and being addressed as Sean by his fellow commuter Christina (Michelle Monaghan, bubbly and charming to just the right degree).  No sooner has he started to get his bearings than the train explodes, and Colter finds himself in what looks vaguely like a helicopter cockpit, being addressed through video transmissions.  Though he insists that he has no memory of how he got here from Afghanistan, Colter is informed by his handlers, Air Force officer Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) and civilian scientist Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) that he is part of a top-secret anti-terrorism project called Source Code.  Using Rutledge's technology, he can relive the last eight minutes before the explosion again and again, using them to discover the identity of the bomber and prevent another bombing that Goodwin and Rutledge insist is imminent.

It's pretty easy to guess just what vital piece of information is being held back from Colter, and to the film's credit it doesn't wait very long before revealing that he is, essentially, a brain in a box, having been shot down and very nearly killed in Afghanistan several months before the film's events.  Colter is thus faced with several challenges on top of identifying the bomber (which he anyway takes a rather desultory approach towards, letting several iterations of the explosion go by before kicking his investigation into gear and discovering he perpetrator on his first serious attempt).  He has to convince Goodwin and Rutledge that he is a person and not a tool, and thus that he deserves respect and the chance for self-determination, which in his case means the right to die.  He has to deal with the trauma of experiencing death multiple times on the train, while coming to terms with the fact of his death in Afghanistan, even as he falls in love with Christina.  Finally, he has to fight for the chance to prevent the train explosion rather than simply identifying the bomber, insisting over Goodwin and Rutledge's objections that what he is experiencing isn't a mere simulation.

Despite the similarities between their situations, one crucial difference between Colter and Moon's Sam determines the shape and meaning of their stories--Colter is a soldier.  Moon's plot could be taken--and we were encouraged to take it so--as the story of an individual being exploited by a corporation for the sake of financial gain.  The original Sam Bell did his tour on the moon, collected his salary, and went on with his life, unaware that his clones continued to labor with no compensation, either to him or to themselves.  Colter's exploitation, however, is a less clear-cut evil.  Soldiers accept that the nation has the right to ask them to make incredible sacrifices, up to and including giving their lives.  The question that Source Code asks is whether it's right for the nation to ask its soldiers to make sacrifices even beyond that last full measure of devotion, and more generally, where the correct point of balance is between the needs of the state and the needs of the soldier.  As soon as he regains consciousness, and especially after he realizes that he is dead, Colter is preoccupied with making contact with his father, with whom he'd quarreled over his decision to return to Afghanistan for a third tour.  There's an obvious parallel to be drawn between Colter's willingness to return to the danger of a war zone--and his superiors' willingness to send him there--and the constant repetition of the train explosion.   Just as his father insisted on Colter's right to rest from battle, Colter insists on his right to rest in death, making Source Code the latest in a long line of works that equate the soldier's much-deserved rest after the tumult and peril of battle with the peaceful rest of death.

Which is why Source Code's greatest flaw is its choice to make Rutledge both a civilian and the film's villain.  Much more than the actual bomber, who doesn't end up posing much of a challenge to Colter, Rutledge is Colter's antagonist.  Unlike Goodwin, who warms to Colter and bonds with him over their shared service (when Rutledge refuses to confirm that Colter has died, Colter persuades Goodwin to do so by asking her "one soldier to another"), Rutledge has no concern for Colter's wishes and desires.  Despite promising to let Colter die at the end of the mission, he plans to erase his memory and keep him on life support, and refuses to let Colter go back one last time to prevent the train bombing, insisting that this would have no real-world effect.  The film could easily have made Rutledge an ambiguous figure--his motives, preventing a terrorist bombing and creating a powerful new tool in the war against terror, are after all honorable, even if his methods are questionable--and if he, like Goodwin, were an officer then he could have credibly represented the opposing viewpoint to her stance that there is a limit to what the state may demand of its soldiers.  Instead, the film delights in portraying Rutledge as callous and even cruel, not only unsympathetic to Colter's distress, but disrespectful of his bravery and sacrifice.  This disrespect, the film strongly implies, is rooted in the fact that Rutledge is a civilian--when he glibly tells Colter that many soldiers would jump at the chance to give more than one life for their country, Colter's response is that Rutledge must never have been in battle, because soldiers who have been would say that "one death is enough"--and the film plays up to many of the stereotypes that crop up when fiction confronts brave soldiers with craven civilians, making Rutledge a grotesque.  Rutledge walks with a crutch, and Wright makes of that disability something profoundly unattractive, wheezing and gasping for breath.  Rutledge thus presents an image of offputting sickness which the film can then contrast with Colter's attractive virility--a virility that is entirely illusory, since Colter is nothing but a torso on life support.  This, of course, plays up another war movie cliché, that of the maimed soldier who is still more of a man than the whole--or in this case, nearly whole--civilian.

If Source Code ends up disappointing as a war movie, it is much more successful, though not perfectly so, as a science fiction film.  I was particularly impressed with how the film thought through the implications of Colter's predicament, the slow revelation of the fact that the impassioned exchanges we see him have with Goodwin and Rutledge take place almost entirely in his head, while their conversation with him is mediated by impersonal technology (though I wish the film hadn't waited so long to reveal, for example, that Goodwin can't hear Colter's voice or see his face, because this goes a long way towards explaining why she and Rutledge can so easily fail to empathize with Colter, and why only she comes to see him as a person).  Even more important is the nature of the source code, which turns out, as Colter keeps insisting over Rutledge's dismissal, to be much more than a simulation.  The film appears to end when Colter, having gone back to the train one last time and prevented the bombing, arranges the last minutes of his life to be perfect, saying goodbye to his father and confessing his feelings to Christina.  As they kiss, the image freezes, and Colter appears to have gotten his desired rest.  But this turns out to be false bottom--the film restarts, and Colter realizes that he's created an alternate universe in which the train never exploded and he is free to live out the rest of his life (albeit in another man's body).  I've seen complaints that the "freeze frame" ending is the better one of the two, and though I agree that it would have been a good stopping point, it's the film's real ending that makes it truly SFnal.  The revelation of the source code's true nature elevates it from a quasi-magical McGuffin to something genuinely scary and momentous, and the film's final moments, in which the alternate universe's Goodwin receives a message from Colter and understands the true power of the source code, have the feeling of teetering on the edge of a brave and terrifying new world.  It must be said, however, that the film doesn't fully engage with the technology's implications; if Colter's final iteration created an alternate universe then so did all his previous, failed attempts, in each of which the Source Code project would have been activated, which would have created even more alternate universes, and so on and so on.

Source Code, then, is an underbaked war movie and a slightly wobbly science fiction film.  What's left is an entertaining and occasionally moving SFnal action flick that is smarter and more thought-through than it has any business being, and refreshingly uninterested in wowing us with explosions and special effects.  There's been a mini-glut of low-budget science fiction films from major studios recently (Skyline, Limitless, Battle: Los Angeles, The Adjustment Bureau), and though I don't yet know how Source Code stacks up (and am anyway only planning to see the last of the four) I think that trend is something to celebrate in itself.  A wider field means more chances for quality to accidentally make its way to the screens, and lower budgets put less pressure on filmmakers to stick slavishly to proven, and brain-dead, formulas.  For both science fiction films and Duncan Jones, then, Source Code is a promising sign of things to come.

Strange Horizons Reviews, April 4-8

This week's reviews kick off with the third installment of Alvaro Zinos-Amaro's series in which reviews Isaac Asimov's series The Great SF Stories (see also parts 1 and 2).  This time Alvaro takes a look at the stories of 1940.  L. Timmel Duchamp follows with a review of Julia Holmes's Meeks, a novel that Timmi finds frustrating in its refusal to engage the reader with any of the conventions of storytelling.  Chris Kammerud rounds up the week with his review of the Peter S. Beagle-edited The Secret History of Fantasy, the companion volume to The Secret History of Science Fiction (review here), which he finds worthwhile even as he questions Beagle's thesis about the genre's evolution and current state.

Let's See What's Out There, Part III: "Optimism, Captain!"

Picard: In my century, we don't succumb to revenge. We have a more evolved sensibility.
Lily: Bullshit!

Star Trek: First Contact, 1996

My first forays onto the internet coincided with the height of my Star Trek fannishness, and one of the first websites I can recall checking regularly was a cache of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine reviews by Tim Lynch, who was writing weekly recaps + reviews long before it was the revolutionary, web 2.0 approach to writing about television (a helpful Wiki collects the reviews today). Looking back, it occurs to me that Lynch must have been the first reviewer I read for pleasure, and the source of some of my first inklings that reviewing was a worthy endeavor in its own right. I don't remember much of his actual writing, but the review that sticks in my mind is for the sixth season episode "The Chase," in which Picard's old archeology mentor bequeaths him research that points to a message concealed in the DNA of many of the humanoid species in the galaxy. The message, when decoded, turns out to be the revelation that all of these species were seeded on their home planets by a single parent race. Lynch, a scientist and teacher, was incensed at such an unscientific take on evolution, arguing that it bordered on supporting the theory of intelligent design. Though he's right about the fundamental inaccuracies of how "The Chase" portrays evolution and how they dovetail with creationist attempts to undermine the theory and its acceptance, watching the episode a second time it seemed obvious that its take on evolution was entirely in keeping with the series's general approach to this topic, an approach that is inextricably bound with original Star Trek and The Next Generation's most contentious and, these days, most maligned attribute, their optimism.

Evolution, in The Next Generation, is a purposeful, directional process, deliberately set in motion (sometimes, as in "The Chase," by a specific individual or group) and with a definite goal in mind. That's still a common misconception, but it was more prevalent in the 80s and 90s, and The Next Generation was not alone in interpreting "more evolved" not as better suited to its environment, but simply as better, more perfect. And, also like a lot of other stories in and out of genre, The Next Generation applied the concept of evolution to societies as well as species, sociology and politics as well as biology. Humanity's progress from our violent, greedy present to the 24th century's egalitarian, post-scarcity utopia is repeatedly described as the result of evolution, and other species encountered over the course of the series are described as being in the process of evolving towards this ideal form. When Riker visits a matriarchal society persecuting a group that has been agitating for men's rights in "Angel One," he argues that what is happening is not revolution but evolution. When the Ferengi are first encountered in "The Last Outpost," Riker explains to the representative of an ancient space empire that "I find them very much as we were a few hundred years ago … they may grow and learn"; evolution is not mentioned explicitly but it is strongly implied. "The Chase" itself is strongly bound up in notions of evolution as a social process. The purpose of the message hidden in the DNA of humanoids is to reveal their common ancestry and foster unity between them, and though the Klingon captain who learns this sneers at the notion of sharing ancestors with humans and Romulans, the episode ends with Picard and his Romulan counterpart exchanging a less chilly farewell than the current relations between their species would warrant, both obviously spurred to thoughts of peace by the discovery they've made.

You can't make evolution one of the central metaphors of your story without raising the specter of it going wrong, and a lot of Next Generation episodes involve the Enterprise visiting a social evolutionary dead end--the luddites and cloners in "Up the Long Ladder," the genetically engineered "Masterpiece Society." In both cases Picard shakes his head over the foolishness of trying to shape humanity on such misguided principles, but implicit in that reaction is the notion that it is principles that guide evolution--the evolution of societies, but perhaps also of species. The Next Generation never quite comes out and says this, but it strongly implies that it is not just human society that has evolved in the 400 years that separate the show from us, but human nature, that humans in the 24th century are fundamentally different from us--more moral, more tolerant, less violent. It's not until First Contact that we get a counter-example, in the scene quoted from at the head of this post, in which Lily concludes, and Picard ultimately confirms, that beneath his civilized exterior he still craves violence and vengeance. But First Contact is a very un-Star Trek-ish movie, and in the space of the show itself there is no human who surrenders to barbarity in the way that Picard very nearly does in that movie (perhaps the closest is Dr. Marr in "Silicon Avatar," when she kills the crystalline entity that killed her son).

The show's take on the future of human evolution is, similarly, guided by values rather than biology. In the episode "Transfigurations," the show strongly excoriates an alien species who are persecuting and exterminating a minority who are "evolving" into energy beings, but when Barclay becomes uplifted in "The Nth Degree," the reaction from the Enterprise's crew is fear and incomprehension. In other words, it's OK for evolution to fundamentally alter aliens, but humans had better stick to a familiar baseline. On the other hand, in "Home Soil," the Enterprise discovers sentient silicon-based life on a planet about to be terraformed. The aliens reject contact with the Federation on the grounds that we are too primitive, and tell us to come back in 300 years when, presumably, we will have outgrown our petty carbon-based prejudices. The aptly-titled third season episode "Evolution" tells a very similar story that also concludes that humans are not ready to be in contact with a non-humanoid lifeform (this time, Wesley's science experiment--by no means the first or only time that someone on the Enterprise uplifts an artificial being for fun or a good grade). At the end of "The Host," Crusher tells her Trill lover, now transplanted into a woman, that she can't handle that kind of change, a deficiency she ascribes to her species, not to herself: "Perhaps someday our ability to love will not be so limited."  So again, evolution, for humanity, is treated as a social rather than a biological process, and one whose "proper" form is guided by principles that just happen to coincide with Gene Roddenberry's hippie, California liberal values--tolerance, equality, non-violence, all that good stuff.

To say that this is problematic is to understate the issue quite considerably. Roddenberry's values are unobjectionable on the macro level, but one need only watch the series with a bit of distance to see how far from perfect its vision of 24th century society is. Geordi LaForge is the only black member of the Enterprise's senior staff, and gets the least development and the least stories dedicated to him (Michael Dorn is also black, but as all Klingons have the same skin tone regardless of their portrayer's race, I think it's safe to say that Worf is not a black Klingon). Crusher and Troi get only a bit more attention from the writers, but both just happen to be in nurturing, caretaking roles, and their stories often revolve around their love lives (it's interesting to watch the show become more aware of this in its later seasons and try to give both characters more to do on the ship, for example making them both bridge officers; the results are decidedly mixed--on the one hand, the magnificent Troi episode "Face of the Enemy" or Crusher saving the day in "Descent II", but on the other hand, the unmistakable take-away that there's nothing interesting or exciting about being a doctor or a ship's counselor, and by the time the later movies come along neither character's profession is of any importance, and they're both just waving phasers about). Then there are episodes like "The Outcast," clearly well-intentioned and, for their time, perhaps even progressive, but today what was intended as a statement in favor of gay rights comes across as homophobic--the episode clearly opposes persecuting homosexuals, but can't bring itself to come out in favor of being gay (right down to casting a woman in the role of Riker's androgynous lover). Or throwaway scenes like the one in "The Wounded" that make it clear that before they were married, Miles and Keiko O'Brien never lived together--perhaps never even spent the night together, since Keiko is making breakfast for Miles for the very first time. Like the cell phones besides which original Star Trek's communicators, so revolutionary in the 60s, seem bulky and of limited use, Roddenberry's allegedly advanced, egalitarian future society seems positively regressive when compared to the norms of your average TV show in 2011.

Even if we accept that Roddenberry had his heart in the right place but was still a product of his time (and had to appease his broadcasters and the court of public opinion), there are still the fundamental questions raised by his optimism--is it dramatically satisfying? Is it realistic? Is it moral? In "Time's Arrow II" Samuel Clemens is accidentally transported to the 24th century. A famous curmudgeon whom we'd seen, in the story's first half, railing about the fundamental wickedness of human nature, he's at first unable to believe that the peaceful, wealthy society he's arrived in is the whole truth of the future. Surely, he tells Troi, all this opulence is achieved on the backs of the poor? Even allowing for the dim view that we might take of Troi's claim to live in the perfect society--look at her outfit, for crying out loud--and for the things that a man of Clemens's era might not consider an improvement--look at her outfit, for crying out loud--the message is clear. Clemens is a stand-in for us, for any cynic who believes that humans are inherently evil and that the human race is doomed. The Next Generation, like Star Trek before it, is the story that tells us that no, humanity is going to overcome its problems and create something wonderful. That's a powerful statement even if you acknowledge the imperfection of Roddenberry's perfect society, but it's one that the genre has reacted very strongly against in the last twenty years. So strongly, in fact, that there's been a backlash against the backlash.

I think it's safe to dismiss the argument that you can't tell good stories about utopia--quite apart from the fact that The Next Generation was often a very good show, there's a persuasive argument to be made for Iain M. Banks's Culture being a more sophisticated, more developed version of the same concept as the Federation, and Banks has written some cracking stories in and about it. As for realism, I've probably said my piece about the trend of dark and gritty science fiction and its dubious claim to that trait. Like Roddenberry's utopian approach, it is rooted in truth without fully encompassing it, and seems to be driven more by its writers' preoccupations (and sometimes by fashion), than any attempt to realistically portray human nature. Whether or not either of these modes work is down to the writer in question, but I don't think that either one can lay a claim to realism--and this is not even to address the question of whether realism is an ideal, or even the ideal, to which a work of fiction should aspire. The real question, to my mind, is an ethical one. Is the kind of aspirational utopianism Roddenberry baked into Star Trek a moral good? Does it teach us to reach for the stars, or to smugly congratulate ourselves on being there already?

There is a great deal in The Next Generation that suggests the latter. Much as the Federation represents humanity's future it is also, and particularly in its dealings with the Romulans, intended as a stand-in for the US during the Cold War. In episodes like "The Enemy" or "Data's Day" the Federation behaves with scrupulous even-handedness and reacts with wounded dismay when the Romulans, the series's Soviet stand-ins, interpret its actions as underhanded or conniving. The parallels to Cold War-era notions of the two sides in the dispute are clear--the West is open, ethical, and law-abiding, while the Russians are distrustful, perceiving their own immorality in others. By presenting the Federation as the perfected, evolved version of the democratic US, The Next Generation reinforces its audience's image of themselves as being the good guys, leaving no room for the possibility that this image is at least partly a self-imposed delusion, or for an acknowledgment of the underhandedness that came from the West during the Cold War. More generally, by positing the Federation, with its obvious Western antecedents, as the end result of humanity's social evolution, The Next Generation engages in a level of cultural imperialism. Unlike the series's blindness to its own sexism or racism, this is something that feels baked into its utopian premise. You can imagine the Federation as a less blindingly white society, less gender-segregated, less heteronormative (and later Star Trek series went some way towards portraying it as such). It's impossible, however, to imagine it as less Western.

I've been using the Federation and humanity as interchangeable terms in this post, which is one of the things that threw me during my rewatch of The Next Generation, coming to it as I was with Deep Space Nine, whose cast was largely alien, as my last foray into Trek. Humans are not simply the majority on the Enterprise. They are so much of a majority that the presence of non-humans on the ship usually requires an explanation. Main castmembers who were not human usually had some connection to humanity that profoundly affected their lives. Troi was half-human, and her alienness was strongly downplayed, both through her appearance and her behavior. Worf was raised by humans, had spent his life trying to regain his Klingon heritage, and kept bumping up against what were to him the pernicious effects of human culture when trying to raise his part-human son. And then there's Data. Data is the most high-concept character in The Next Generation cast and, of the three main castmembers who can be said to have a character arc (the others being Picard and Worf) the one whose story seems to have been the most thought out at the series's outset. The premise of that story, as laid out in "Encounter at Farpoint," is that Data wants to be human. Not sentient, not feeling, but human. This is for the same reason that the Enterprise's crew is so overwhelmingly human--because humanity is The Next Generation's business. Just as the perfection of the Federation is intended as a demonstration of humanity's potential, Data's quest to be human sheds a light on what humanity actually is.

This has the effect of contorting Data's story in ways that seem particularly glaring today, with the concept of artificial intelligence and machine life having received a lot of interesting and sophisticated attention in genre, and in light of Deep Space Nine's more nuanced handling of its own outsider character, Odo. It's understandable that Data wants to be a person rather than a machine, but why does he want to be a feeling person--why does he aspire to the one thing that is obviously beyond his programming? Star Trek features aliens who are sentient but not emotional, and though Data raises the question in his diary entries in "Data's Day," or his conversation with Spock in "Unification II," he never truly explains why he's chosen to emulate humanity rather than Vulcans. In the later seasons of the show, there are episodes that edge around a recognition of the fact that Data's personality is bound up in his lack of emotions--"In Theory," in which he tries and spectacularly fails to engage in a romantic relationship, "Descent," in which the temptation of feeling emotion overrides his most cherished values. When he finally becomes capable of emotion in Generations, Data becomes a completely different person, and the fact that this was inevitable, and that much of what we valued about Data--his patience, his even temper, his generosity--was rooted in his lack of emotions is never acknowledged. To do so, and thus to admit that Data can be a person without having emotions, would also mean the show saying that he can be a person without being human.

This resistance to the notion of alien--truly alien, not humanoid with forehead ridges alien--sentience informs a lot of the episodes that try to discuss Data's rights. In "The Measure of a Man," Bruce Maddox, trying to argue that he should be allowed to dismantle Data against his will, asks whether, if the computer of the Enterprise were to refuse an upgrade, the court now discussing Data's case would allow it to do so. He means this as a rhetorical question, which of course it is, but not in the way he thinks. If the computer of the Enterprise possessed the self-awareness and will to understand the meaning of an upgrade and refuse it, its wishes would have to be respected. That neither Maddox, nor Picard, nor the judge recognize this simple truth is because they are hung up on hardware rather than software. To them, the issue isn't what kind of machine Data is, but the simple fact that he is a machine, and not human. This attitude persists in "Measure"'s follow-up episodes, "The Offspring" and "The Quality of Life."  Partly this is due to the trope being undeveloped--by the time Voyager comes along, the idea of an electronic person is a lot easier for both the writers and the audience to swallow (compare Voyager's Doctor, or even Deep Space Nine's Vic Fontaine, to Moriarty in "Elementary, Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle," where it is inconceivable that the sentient holodeck character might have a life, and a meaningful one, despite being, and knowing that he is, a hologram). A more important reason for the show's resistance to the notion of artificial sentience, however, is that the purpose of Data is not to explore the possibility of different forms of sentience, but to hold up a mirror to humanity, and a rather flattering one at that. Here is a super-intelligent, super-strong, virtually immortal creature, who repeatedly states that he would give up his many advantages to be more like us. As Odo is once told, "What higher flattery is there? 'I, who can be anything, choose to be like you.'" For Data to aspire to be human implies that humanity is pretty hot stuff.

Which brings us back to optimism, and to the notion at The Next Generation's core--that humans are, indeed, hot stuff, that we have great potential and are capable of great things. The very foundation of Star Trek, after all, is the notion that humanity will become a leader on the galactic stage, one of the most important and influential races in the quadrant and beyond it, and there are a lot of instances in The Next Generation in which humanity is described as exceptional. Sometimes this exceptionalism reaches absurd degrees, as in "When the Bough Breaks," when our attachment to our children is described as unusually strong, or the aliens in "Allegiance" who call morality "a very interesting human characteristic." There is, as these examples demonstrate, a pernicious side to The Next Generation's cheerleading of humanity, especially when one considers how homogeneous and Western-derived 24th century humanity is. But there's also something admirable. The fact is that Roddenberry allows himself to imagine something audacious and, especially in our present moment, almost impossible to believe--that it all turns out all right, that we make good, that we get it right. The sheer chutzpah of the act is impressive in itself, but I keep going back and forth about its moral implications. Is Roddenberry giving us hope for the future, or is he telling us that we're fine just the way we are? Does his work spur us to bigger and better things, or help us to ignore what's wrong in the here and now? The answer, obviously, will vary from one viewer to another, but I would dearly love to know what effect, if any, Star Trek had on the generation of people, like me, who took it down as our first introduction to SF TV--and what effect did the myriad works tearing down its optimistic premise had. Did it make us self-satisfied? Did they make us cynical?

In lieu of an answer to that last question, which I don't have, I'll close with one more episode. "Chain of Command II" came up quite a lot in conversation a few years ago, when torture was the hot button issue, both in real-world politics and the entertainment industry, and Jack Bauer was waterboarding and ripping out fingernails at the drop of a hat. So I thought that I was well-prepared for the episode when I sat down to watch it again a few months ago. It still took me completely by surprise. What I had somehow forgotten about "Chain of Command II" is that it is determinedly, unequivocally anti-torture. Not only in the sense that, unlike so many episodes of modern TV that try to raise a "tough question" by having the protagonists commit torture, here the torturer is the bad guy and the victim is Picard. And not only because the torture is shown to be brutal and cruel. "Chain of Command II" is anti-torture because it concludes that torture doesn't work. "[It] has never been a reliable means of extracting information. It is ultimately self-defeating as a means of control. And so one wonders why it is still practiced," Picard says to his torturer. In late 2010, with pop culture having almost uniformly accepted that torture is an effective and reliable means of information-gathering, which repeatedly enables heroic characters to save the day, this came as a genuine shock, but no more so than the answer the episode gives to Picard's final question. Picard never gives his Cardassian torturer any information, but he does break--famously, he sees five lights where there are four. This is necessary for the episode to have an effect--if Picard had held out, "Chain of Command II" would be a story about how much of a badass Jean Luc Picard is, not about how awful torture is--but it isn't necessary for the torturer. By the time he makes that last push against Picard's defenses, the one that finally tumbles them, his side has lost. Picard is about to be released. The torturer is, in fact, defying orders to clean Picard up and get him ready for transfer. There is no possible reason to keep torturing Picard except pride and cruelty. And that, the episode concludes, is what torture is ultimately for.

There is much of the hypocrisy and self-congratulation that underpin The Next Generation's optimism in "Chain of Command II"'s conclusion. The episode assumes that the Federation--which is to say the US--doesn't torture, which in the real world wasn't true even at the time. But it is also underpinned by the recognition that torture is wrong and that we should be above it, neither of which are things that are taken for granted anymore, in either entertainment or the public discourse. Perhaps that, if nothing else, is the value of The Next Generation's optimism, of its starry-eyed take on humanity's future--to remind us of the values we've lost, and of those that we've allowed ourselves to relinquish.

Let's See What's Out There, Part II: To Boldly Stay

"Anyone remember when we used to be explorers?"

Picard, Star Trek: Insurrection, 1998

The first season of The Next Generation is probably best thought of as the fourth season of original Star Trek, except set decades later and with an entirely different cast. To a certain extent, this was probably inevitable--any spin-off feels the gravitational pull of its original, and the twenty five years that separated Star Trek and The Next Generation, with their movies and tie-in novels and increasingly vocal fandom, would have turned the original series into a black hole. That Gene Roddenberry was at The Next Generation's helm surely only compounded the original show's influence, as he repurposed everything from character designs to costuming to scripts, left over from the original show or from the various abortive attempts to revive it, for use in the new show. But beyond the stylistic and tonal similarities, there is the fact that early Next Generation is, like its predecessor, a show about exploring the unknown. This seems obvious at first--boldly going, seeking out, and exploring are right there in the opening narration that every Star Trek fan knows by heart--but as the first season draws on it become apparent just how different its stories are from what The Next Generation, and eventually all of Star Trek, became, and how little exploration there was in the latter.

Picard is introduced to us as a great explorer--Crusher even refers to him as such in the series pilot, "Encounter at Farpoint"--who has given up the chance of a normal life in order to see things that no other human has seen. The Enterprise's mission is described as an extension of the original ship's, exploring the uncharted portions of the galaxy, and opportunities to do just that abound in the first season. When the Traveler whisks the Enterprise thousands of light years from known space in "Where No One Has Gone Before," Picard and Riker are positively giddy at the thought of exploring this region, and it's only due to their ironclad discipline as Starfleet officers that they forgo the opportunity. Aliens who are encountered in this season are often described in awestruck terms that seem more suited to fantasy--they are creatures of legend said to possess fantastic powers ("When the Bough Breaks") or secretive villains shrouded in mystery (the Romulans in "The Neutral Zone"). "We've only charted nineteen percent of our galaxy. The rest is out there, waiting for us," Wesley says in the early second season episode "The Dauphin," and that is what seems most strange and unfamiliar about early Next Generation--the sense that the galaxy is a vast and largely unexplored place, full of wonders yet to be discovered. This was, of course, original Star Trek's starting position, but it's one that the modern franchise, with its emphasis on the known and the familiar--on political disputes between established alien species and the role of the Federation on the galactic stage--moved away from. The galaxy in later Star Trek, and even in the later seasons of The Next Generation, is a much smaller place, whose rules are more clearly laid out.

You can spot the moment when original Trek-style Next Generation dies and gives way to what we think of today as Star Trek. It comes in the second season, in the episode "Q Who?" In the episode's early scenes, Geordi is trying to keep up with the enthusiasm of Sonya, one of his new ensigns. "Whatever is out here, we're going to be the first humans to see it," she tells him, almost vibrating with excitement. At the same time, Picard is getting into another argument with Q, who offers to act as the Enterprise's guide to the great unknown and, when rejected, petulantly flings the ships into a distant part of space, setting in motion humanity's first encounter with the Borg. By the time the episode ends, Sonya's enthusiasm has given way to horror at the Borg's casual slaughter of 18 Enterprise crewmembers, and Picard is begging Q to save the ship from destruction. The lesson Q is trying to teach Picard is that humanity isn't ready for what it's about to encounter as it ventures into unknown space--"It's not safe out there. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross, but it's not for the timid"--but the lesson that The Next Generation learns is not to venture at all. "Q Who?" sets up the Borg as an antagonist that will overshadow the series for the next season and a half, and by the time they have been dealt with, both the Klingons and the Romulans will have been developed as the major sources of story. The Enterprise encounters less and less unknown species, and spends more time visiting human colonies and scientific outposts, or rendering aid to species with whom it already has diplomatic contact.

In all fairness, the immediate effect of this shift on the show is that it tells the same kind of stories in a more effective way. If an alien species hasn't been heard from before--if, in all likelihood, they were invented for this very story--does it matter that the episode tells us that they're already known to the Federation and have diplomatic relations with it? The audience gets the same hit of newness they did before, even if the characters don't. There's certainly an argument to be made for dispensing with what, by the end of the first season, had already become a boilerplate in which Picard introduces the Federation to the aliens of the week, and getting to the more interesting meat of the story, in which an alien social custom causes consternation among the Enterprise crew, as in "The Outcast" and "Half a Life," or Picard's adherence to the Prime Directive forces him into a moral quandary, as in "Evolution" or "Homeward." It's also very difficult to come up with an interesting new alien culture, while also telling a story and introducing guest characters, in the space of 45 minutes--and a rather thankless task if that species is never to be heard from again. Even within the confines of its episodic storytelling, The Next Generation was more resonant, and more interesting, when it returned to the settings of the Klingon or Romulan empires, societies which it developed over the course of several episodes and seasons. The Klingons are, in fact, an interesting case. In the show's first and early second seasons, even after Denise Crosby's departure from the show moves Worf into a position of greater prominence, his race remains shrouded in secrecy. "I think perhaps it is best to be ignorant of certain elements of the Klingon psyche," Picard tells Troi at the beginning of "Where Silence Has Lease," fretting over Riker joining Worf in his training exercise (his fears are well-founded; overcome by bloodlust, Worf nearly attacks Riker), and in "Heart of Glory" he and the rest of the crew are befuddled by Klingon rituals. But in "A Matter of Honor," Riker joins of the crew of a Klingon ship and we see them from the inside, and Star Trek begins its decade-long love affair with this culture (some of the credit for this falls to Michael Dorn, whose ability to convey intelligence and humor from beneath his makeup and Worf's stolidness brought life to the character and no doubt encouraged the writers to explore his history and his race).

The Next Generation never becomes as inward-looking as its follow-up series, but as it deepens the Cold War analogy it draws using the Romulans, the show becomes more concerned with the Federation, its values and attributes, and its relations with a very small set of species. As the Star Trek franchise grows, it moves even further away from exploration. Deep Space Nine explicitly rejected the mobile setting of Star Trek and The Next Generation, and though its early seasons briefly flirted with the notion of exploring the gamma quadrant, such stories quickly gave way to ones about its specific region of space and the war that erupts over it. Voyager was a story about boldly going home. Enterprise paid lip service to the importance of exploration while resetting the franchise's time period to a point where the rough timeline of events was already known to the viewers, and much of what was strange to the characters was familiar to us (a reversal of post-"Q Who?" Next Generation's approach). The Next Generation movies, which span the three series, reflect these changes in the franchise. Generations is nearly an episode of the series, as much a cap to Picard's story as "All Good Things…" Insurrection, which begins with Picard telling his officers that in the wake of the war with the Dominion, the Federation is licking its wounds, consolidating itself, and turning away from exploration, and ends with his discovery that in their pursuit of greater security, the Federation's higher ups have betrayed its cherished values, is clearly of the Deep Space Nine era. Nemesis, which dispenses with any pretense of moral focus (Picard ignores the Prime Directive and gets into a shooting match with members a pre-warp society, and we discover that the Federation has happily tolerated the existence of a Romulan slave race) and revels in our heroes shooting at over the top antagonists, is an Enterprise film. (First Contact is not a Star Trek film in any meaningful way, more an action movie that happens to feature Star Trek characters.)

If you go by numbers, I'm not sure that the shift from exploration to Federation-centric stories was particularly good for Star Trek--against latter-day Next Generation and Deep Space Nine you have Voyager and Enterprise, not to mention the later movies. But it's clear that The Next Generation became a better show once it stepped back the emphasis on boldly going where no one has gone before. There's a part of me, however, that like Picard in Insurrection feels rueful for those days. Those words in opening credits, that for most of the show's run turn out to have been hollow, express a grand and worthy sentiment, a spirit of adventure that's worth celebrating, and that science fiction fans in particular should feel an affinity for. There's a joyfulness to Picard when he sees something new and different that reaches through the screen and grabs at your soul. A big part of that joy is lost when his stories come to revolve on keeping the peace between the Federation and the Romulans, or steering the Klingon empire towards an optimal resolution of its succession crises. One of the reactions I kept having during my rewatch of The Next Generation was that Gene Roddenberry had some lovely ideas that just didn't lend themselves to good drama. That's still my conclusion, but I also think those good intentions should be lauded. It may be unrealistic, but I'm nursing the hope that exploration-based Next Generation failed not because it was inherently undramatic but because of the limitations of the show's writers, and of the medium in the 80s. Perhaps an enterprising television writer might still make good TV out of the notion that though it might be scary and dangerous, it is bold, and exciting, and worthwhile, to see things that no other human has seen.

Let's See What's Out There, Part I: Introduction

"Seven years ago I said we'd be watching you, and we have been. Hoping your ape-like race would demonstrate some growth, give some indication that your minds have room for expansion. And what have we seen instead? You spending time worrying about Commander Riker's career. Listening to Counselor Troi's pedantic psychobabble. Indulging Data in his witless explorations of humanity. … It's time to put an end to your trek through the stars, to make room for other, more worthy species."

Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation, "All Good Things…" 1994 

Reexamining my youthful SF TV loves has been a recurring theme on this blog, with decidedly mixed results. Babylon 5 was a profound disappointment. Deep Space Nine an unexpected delight. I held off on revisiting Star Trek: The Next Generation for a long time because I had the sneaking suspicion that it would fall on the former end of the scale, and because my attachment to it runs a lot deeper than to either of these shows. The Next Generation was my first fannish love, a childish rather than a teenage one, and one that was bound up in some of the major events of my life and the process of my growth into fandom. The first time I saw the show was on a visit to the States, just a few weeks before my tenth birthday. A month later, the first Gulf War erupted, and one of that war's consequences was that Israel, a nation that up until that point had held back the tides of the telecommunication revolution, opened itself up to twentieth century entertainment. We needed CNN to tell us what was happening in Iraq, and commercial TV to keep hundreds of thousands of scared children docile and distracted while the schools were shut down for the six weeks of the war. Over the next decade, commercial channels, cable and satellite TV, the internet, and the cellular revolution became fully integrated into Israeli society, and helped to revolutionize it, but in the early years of that revolution its significance, to me, was in how it affected my ability to access Star Trek: The Next Generation. Would my cable carrier drop the foreign channel that was airing the latest season? Could I convince my mother to buy a VCR to record the episodes that aired while I was at school? The Next Generation, to me, represents not only my childhood and my earliest forays into SF fandom, but the first steps along the path that has brought me here, to this blog and all the opportunities and friendships that have resulted from it. The possibility that I might return to the show and find what my hazy recollections strongly suggested would be a staid, stiff, preachy series with little but nostalgic associations to recommend it held me back, for a long time, from revisiting it.

Right now seems like a good time to reexamine The Next Generation, however. As I wrote in my contribution to an SF Signal Mind Meld just recently, the current lull in science fiction television, though obviously driven in large part by the growing popularity of fantasy, and urban fantasy in particular, also feels like the result of the field having finally exhausted the ways in which in it can react to Star Trek: The Next Generation. When I reviewed the new Star Trek film unfavorably, it was suggested several times that the concept of Star Trek I felt the film had betrayed was actually The Next Generation's take on the franchise. In hindsight I think that's probably true, but I also think I'm not alone in that. I'm not the only geek of my generation whose first introduction to SF TV and SF fandom came through The Next Generation, and who formed her impression of Star Trek--and of what SF TV should be--from that show. For twenty years, The Next Generation has been the springboard from which nearly every science fiction series has launched itself, first in imitation and later in opposition, but always with The Next Generation in their rearview mirror. In 2011, it seems as if we've reached the point where there is nothing more to say in response to either the show, its spin-offs, its imitators, and the shows that rebelled against it. The field is waiting for the next Gene Roddenberry to come up with its next dominant paradigm, and in that moment of silence it seemed appropriate to take a look at the series that set those tumultuous two decades in SF TV in motion.

I'd like to report that The Next Generation defied my fears and turned out to be just as thrilling and engrossing as it was when I was a kid, but I can't. On the other hand, the show isn't the nearly unmitigated disaster that Babylon 5 turned out to be when I rewatched it. There are moments--specific characters, or episodes, or scenes--that I genuinely enjoyed, and if you ignore the shakiness of the first two or three seasons (and the hit-and-miss, but mostly miss, final season) the series is well-made and well-written. In fact, what keeps me from loving The Next Generation is less any flaw in its execution and more the fact that it is so much of its time. When I wrote about Deep Space Nine, I called it a hybrid series. Its baseline is The Next Generation's 80s-style episodic, low-continuity storytelling, but as the 90s draw on and the shows around it start bucking against that model, Deep Space Nine also starts to experiment with it, though it never fully abandons the Trekish plasticity that so many other genre shows rejected. The Next Generation is fully on the other side of that divide. It's an 80s show, right down to the big hair, and stayed that way almost to its end, when you could sense the writers straining against the limitations of their own format to do some of the things that the cool kids were doing, and finally deciding that they needed a blank slate on which to tell that more complicated story. This didn't bother me as a child because it was all I knew--plot arcs meant a two-part episode or a season-ending cliffhanger, character continuity meant a very special episode that referenced the events of a previous very special episode, which had gone unmentioned in the interim--but I came of age around the same time as the television medium, and especially SF TV, did, and nowadays there's so much I expect from the television I watch that The Next Generation doesn't do that it was hard to get swept up in the show. 

The conclusion I ended up drawing about The Next Generation is not so much that it's a bad show, but that it isn't particularly interested in any of the things that I watch television, and particularly SFnal television, for. While it can't be said that the show does no worldbuilding--much of what we think of as the modern Trek universe comes from it, not from original Star Trek or the movies--it isn't the elaborate, lived-in construction of alien cultures that I've loved on shows as diverse as Farscape and Caprica. Rather, The Next Generation draws the broad strokes of its universe--the various alien races and their relationship to the Federation, cherished concepts like The Prime Directive, the types of technology available and their limitations--and leaves coloring within those lines to Deep Space Nine. There's little character development, almost no recurring characters or settings, and of course no plot arcs. The themes that interested me in Deep Space Nine--the clash of cultures and their cherished values, the challenge of multiculturalism, the impossibility of immersing oneself in an alien culture without becoming altered as a result--are completely absent here. I was therefore more interested in The Next Generation as the series that set the stage for Deep Space Nine and created the modern Star Trek universe than as a work in its own right. So this series of posts, which will not be as long or as detailed as my discussion of Deep Space Nine, will be about those things. More specifically, I want to talk about how the definition of Star Trek changes over the course of the series--because of Gene Roddenberry's death, because of the changing times, because of the other Star Trek series and films that emerge around it, and because of the changes in television itself.

Strange Horizons Reviews, March 28th-April 1st

This week's Strange Horizons reviews cover two short story collections and a movie.  Niall Harrison is impressed with the Jonathan Strahan-edited The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson, finding that many of the themes he's admired in Robinson's novels are ably expressed in his short fiction.  Anil Menon reviews Beth Bernobich's collection A Handful of Pearls & Other Stories and also likes what he finds.  Less positive is Adam Roberts's review of Battle: Los Angeles, a film he likens to "the experience of sitting inside an oil drum for two hours whilst people hit the outside with metal rods and drop firecrackers in at the top."

Strange Horizons Wants You

Over at the Strange Horizons blog, I've published a call for reviewers, and particularly female reviewers.  This is a follow-up to Niall Harrison's recent project to examine how genre review venues break down according to gender.  Click through to read more, and if you're interested in writing for Strange Horizons, by all means drop me a line.

Strange Horizons Reviews, March 21-25

This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with one of the most talked-about books of the last few months, Jo Walton's Among Others, which charms reviewer Michael Levy by being as much about the experience of being a genre fan as a genre story itself.  Graham Sleight takes a look at the seemingly puzzling combination of Michael Moorcock and Doctor Who tie-in novels in Doctor Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles, and concludes that the groundbreaking author and the classic-but-revitalized TV series have a lot in common.  Today's review is of the anthology Sprawl, edited by Alisa Krasnostein, a collection of fantastic stories by Australian authors from Twelfth Planet Press that deeply impresses its reviewer, Dan Hartland.

Strange Horizons Reviews, March 14-18

This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with Matthew Jones's take on Caprica, which is a little more negative than mine and, interestingly, more concerned with the technological questions raised by the series's premise, which the show neglected in favor of political and social storylines and, of course, soap opera.  On Wednesday, Hannah Strom-Martin reviews the anthology Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die, which I (and I think Hannah too) had taken as nothing but a gimmick, but which she finds surprisingly thoughtful and worthwhile.  Today, David McWilliam reviews Charles Stross's latest Laundry novel, The Fuller Memorandum, which he thinks is a welcome return to form after the disappointing Jennifer Morgue.

Being Human, Season 3

A year ago, when Being Human concluded its second season, I was pretty sure I was done with the show.  Being Human's first season was a fun but underbaked affair, clearly too charmed by its own premise--a vampire, Mitchell, a werewolf, George, and a ghost, Annie, who move into a house in Bristol--to do very much with it.  The show's second season took that premise and ran with it, and the result was not only a poor piece of storytelling, but morally revolting.  Having rid himself at the end of the first season of his genocidal sire-turned-enemy Herrick and thrown in his lot with humanity, Mitchell discovers that his human girlfriend Lucy is in league with the preacher Kemp, who has sent men to kill Mitchell.  Mitchell takes out his anger over Lucy's betrayal on all of humanity, waylaying a passenger train and slaughtering the twenty people on board, but the season ends by concluding that Lucy and Kemp are the true villains. 

"Look at us both, covered in other people's blood," Mitchell tells Lucy in the season finale, "But there's one difference between you and me: you had a choice."  This is by no means the only occasion in the finale in which Mitchell permits himself to take the moral high ground with Lucy, whose experiments on werewolves led to the deaths of several people.  Even though Mitchell's body count dwarfs hers, she eventually accepts his right to do so.  Kemp, meanwhile, is simply a monster, ranting about fire and brimstone as he lusts after Lucy, and proclaiming his righteousness as he kills her, banishes Annie to purgatory, and is dragged bodily into hell.  Mitchell, on the other hand, is allowed to return to the bosom of the family he's formed with George and his werewolf girlfriend Nina, who are willing to overlook his past crimes and remain ignorant of his more recent ones, brooding over his misdeeds without taking any steps to atone for them or ensure that they won't recur, and reclaiming his role as a romantic hero by vowing to rescue Annie from the underworld.

Being Human's fascination with Mitchell, and its determination to shape itself around him and his stories, was in its first two seasons the show's greatest flaw.  The tormented vampire who tries to stop killing is, after all, a rather familiar and even worn trope, and unlike Angel, his obvious template, Mitchell has no mission or life goal to distract either him or us from the monotony of his core dilemma.  He spends his time struggling manfully against his desire for human blood, occasionally giving in to that desire, and then beating himself up over his lapse and vowing never to fall off the wagon again (the addiction metaphor is deliberate and made quite explicit over the course of the series, but like True Blood's paralleling of vampires with homosexuals, and especially in light of how Mitchell's story concludes, the analogy is quite problematic).  After the third or fourth iteration of this story the audience might be forgiven not only for feeling bored, but for wondering just why such a character--who is either an unrepentant murderer or an irredeemable monster--was still being portrayed as sympathetic and deserving of our affection.

I've written before, particularly in my posts about Dexter, about the moral bankruptcy that underlies a lot of the writing for, and audience reception of, antiheroes and reformed villains.  Whether we like or dislike a character usually has nothing to do with how moral they are, or whether they do good or evil.  We like characters whom we find attractive, and immoral behavior, when cast in the right light, can be very attractive.  Power, even if it's just the power to kill, is attractive.  The coolness and audacity to declare yourself above the rules of common man, even if those rules are necessary and right, is attractive.  In handsome men, tormented brooding over their past misdeeds--so long as it doesn't spill over into an ugly display of uncontrolled emotion--is very attractive.  Some storytellers recognize the danger of portraying an antihero in too attractive a manner and try to undercut it, usually with only limited success (Tony Soprano is the best example--no matter how hard the show's writers tried there was always a portion of the audience who thought of him as a hero and just wanted him to bust a cap in his enemies), but as its second season ended, it seemed that Being Human's writers were using every tool at their disposal to maximize Mitchell's attractiveness--pitting him against villains who are not only evil but uncool and decidedly unattractive, showing him in the grips of photogenic remorse, blaming his lapse on a girl.  It was easy to imagine Being Human becoming a show dedicated to the woobification of John Mitchell, and to the perpetual justification and whitewashing of his ever more horrific crimes.  I wrote off the show in disgust, but curiosity (as well as an appetite whetted by the otherwise lifeless American remake) prompted me to give its third season a try.  I'm very glad I did.  Not only is Being Human's third season a huge step forward for the show's storytelling, but it does the one thing I never thought the show would have the guts to do.  It makes Mitchell unattractive.

Not entirely, of course.  Aidan Turner is as handsome as ever and does his fair share of emo brooding.  But over the course of the season the show exposes and eventually foregrounds the narcissism and hypocrisy that lie beneath Mitchell's facade of coolness and charm.  In the season premiere, Mitchell ventures into purgatory to rescue Annie.  There he meets Lia, a woman whom only his colossal self-absorption and century-honed capacity for denial allow him to fail to recognize as one of his victims from the train car.  During a brief tour of some of his past murders, Mitchell makes the by-now familiar excuses for his crimes--he can't help himself, he is also a victim, it was all the other vampires' fault--but when Lia reveals herself he finally admits that he is a monster who has enjoyed slaughtering his way across a century.  In itself, this is not a meaningful change in the show's depiction of Mitchell.  Admitting his monstrousness and expressing self-loathing was part of his cycle of relapse and remorse in the show's first two seasons and probably for decades beforehand.  The show has always found a way to suggest that there is a loophole to his incurable desire to feed and that this time around Mitchell would find it.  But Lia is as uninterested as we are in yet another round of this game, and sets up the season's overarching plot when she tells Mitchell that he is going to be killed by a werewolf.  With those few words, she explodes Mitchell's pretense of penitence.  The minute he hears that he is about to get the punishment that he claims to crave, Mitchell begins scheming to find ways to avoid it.

As the season draws on, Mitchell's aura of coolness is replaced by the stench of desperation, and the acts he becomes willing to commit in order to save himself grow more and more off-putting.  When George and Nina befriend McNair and Tom, father and son werewolves, Mitchell fixates on the older man, who has a chip on his shoulder about vampires, as his potential killer, and sells him to local vampires as the star attraction in a lethal circus act.  When Herrick, brought back to life at the end of the second season, shows up on the family's doorstep with no memory of who or what he is, Mitchell becomes obsessed with learning the secret of his resurrection, to which end he tortures Herrick, and very nearly feeds him an innocent woman.

"I think there's a poison in you which has nothing to do with being a vampire," Nina tells Mitchell halfway through the season, and the third season, in which Mitchell does not drink a single drop of blood but nevertheless does so much damage, seems dedicated to exposing that poison, the core of emptiness in Mitchell's heart.  Like Dexter, Mitchell is a sociopath whose few meaningful relationships mask a fundamental inability to grasp that other people are real, but unlike Dexter, he isn't content to think of himself as a monster.  Throughout the season we see Mitchell make up stories, narratives of his life in which he is the tragic, and ultimately blameless, hero.  But, like the stories that Mitchell spins for George and Annie when they start asking questions about the train murder, or for the police when they do the same, these narratives keep changing to serve his interests, which ultimately exposes their hollowness.  Mitchell tells Lia that he wants to be punished, and at the beginning of the season he delights in declaring to other vampires the worthlessness of their race.  But when he and Annie become romantically involved, the narrative changes.  Now Mitchell must spare Annie the heartbreak of knowing what he's done, and his efforts to stay alive are consecrated by her goodness and the purity of their love.  When Annie begins to investigate the train murders and urges Mitchell to help the police catch the vampires responsible, he tells her that to reveal the existence of the supernatural to humanity would spark an all-out war that humans are bound to lose.  Staying out of prison thus becomes an act of heroism.  But when Mitchell is arrested, he begs Annie to break him out by claiming that he's the underdog--the terrified, uncomprehending humans are bound to kill him.  When Lia asks Mitchell why he didn't kill himself upon becoming a vampire, he tells her that he wasn't going to let "it"--the vampire--win, and it's obvious that he thinks himself brave for this choice.  A few episodes later, trying to persuade Herrick to feed, Mitchell paints giving into hunger as the brave act.  By the time Mitchell, at the end of the season, comes to understand himself fully and asks George to kill him, thus ending the cycle of death, we as well as the characters have heard so many of his stories that we can recognize this request--earnest and genuinely remorseful as it clearly is--as yet another of Mitchell's attempts to cast himself as the tragic hero of an angsty story.  His heroic death is therefore tinged with the same narcissism that had guided his life.

Despite the heavy debt that it owes to the Buffyverse, one of Being Human's most interesting, but also most frustrating, traits in its first two seasons was its rejection of that universe's stake-and-crossbows ethos.  Everyone on the show, and Mitchell in particular, balked at dealing the death penalty to even the worst and most murderous vampire.  The implication was obvious--vampires and werewolves are still people, and killing a person is murder.  The third season reinforces this message.  In the episode "Adam's Family," George and Nina become the unwilling guardians of a teenage vampire who has slowly drunk his parents to death, and try to fob him off on a local vampire couple only to discover that these new guardians are racist, classist fetish freaks whose debauched lifestyle terrifies their new ward; in "The Longest Day" (an excellent, meaty episode that is one of the season's, and the series's, highlights), Nina insists and finally persuades George that to kill the helpless, amnesiac Herrick would be murder; in the season's penultimate episode, Annie stakes a vampire in order to stop him from killing a woman, and calls herself a murderer for it; and in the season finale, George, Annie, and Nina, even knowing the things that he's done and how inevitable his relapse is, take a long time to talk themselves into killing Mitchell.

There's something very admirable about this approach, especially when one considers the conventions of the vampire story in most other venues.  It's too easy to categorize certain people as "other" and therefore not as deserving of life, or of the same protection of the law and due process, as the rest of us, and Being Human challenges us to remember that whenever it rejects the easy solution offered by the stake.  But there's also a one-sidedness to it that left a huge moral gap in Being Human's first two seasons.  It's all very well and good to say that all life, even vampire life, is sacred, but what do you do with someone who refuses to recognize that sanctity?  Morality in Being Human is on the level of the individual, not of society (which doesn't seem to exist for werewolves or ghosts, and is entirely immoral in the case of vampires).  There is no law or due process that applies--or is allowed to apply--to vampires, and this translates into a carte blanche for vampires to wander the earth for centuries, killing left and right, without anyone having the moral authority to take their lives.  The third season addresses this imbalance, first through Mitchell losing his compunctions about killing vampires, then through his killing of Herrick, and finally through his recognition that his return to the bloodsucking fold is inevitable and his death at George's hands.  It's not quite justice--victims like McNair and Lia still find themselves having to choose between letting their abusers go free or becoming monsters themselves in the pursuit of revenge--but it is an acknowledgment that in the system the show has created, killing isn't always an indication of a lack of respect for life.

In fact, I find myself wondering if the pendulum hasn't swung a little too far.  The fact that Mitchell is actually killed at the end of the third season is, if not exactly gratifying, then at least the only honest, satisfying, moral ending to his story.  I'm shocked and deeply impressed by the writers' willingness to take that step, which I had been certain, all the way to the last swing of the stake, that the show would chicken out of.  (The cynic in me, however, wonders whether this story would have been written if Turner weren't attached to the Hobbit production for at least the next year, and probably hoping for bigger and better things out of that role.)  But Mitchell's end also means that the take-away from his story is that being human was, ultimately, something he couldn't do.  And as Mitchell was one of only a few pro-human vampires featured on the show, and just about every other vampire who has tried, like him, to stop feeding has eventually fallen off the wagon (the possible exception is Adam, who, if he hasn't already lapsed, has only been dry for a few months at the end of the third season), it seems reasonable to conclude that this inability extends to the entire race, and that therefore the right, moral response to a vampire is to stake them.  (The show could, of course, replace Mitchell with another sympathetic vampire, but then the writers would find themselves in exactly the same bind they were in with Mitchell.)  The season ends with George, Annie and Nina realizing just how high up vampire infiltration of human institutions goes, and with a new head vampire introducing himself to the group and promising to make their life hell, to which George responds, "you've got a fight on your hands."  The implication is that Mitchell-less Being Human will be about the fight to defeat or maybe even rid the world of vampires, and as frustrating as I found Being Human's localized pacifism in its first two seasons, I'm not sure that switching to a vampire slaying story will be an improvement.

Being Human's third season is not perfect--George and Annie are still being written somewhat inconsistently, as is the romance between Annie and Mitchell, which in the season's last minutes is retconned from an ill-advised and painfully awkward relationship to the great love of both their lives; the season finale is oddly structured, and the whole season, but especially its latter half, is very talky.  Nevertheless, the season sees the show finally finding the story it was meant to tell, and once that happens Being Human's storytelling improves dramatically--for all its flaws, the season is tense and hugely entertaining.  The only question is, what's next?  Can Being Human reshape itself without the character that acted as its core for three seasons, and with an entirely different story to tell?  If the third season teaches us anything, it's that given enough time and the proper inducements, Being Human's writers can meet the toughest challenge, but does this mean it'll take them another two lackluster, frustrating seasons to figure out how to take the show to the next level, and will they even be given that chance (Turner was a huge part of the show's draw and it's not difficult to imagine a large part of its fandom tuning out now that he's gone)?  Whether or not Being Human manages to survive the shake-up at its end, the third season is worth applauding and celebrating in its own right.  I'm very glad that I didn't break with the show last year, and got to watch it.

At Strange Horizons: Two Things

1. The results of the Strange Horizons 2010 readers' poll are in, and, alongside such winners as Theodora Goss (best short story), Marge Simon (best poem), and Orrin Grey (best article), I'm stunned to announce that I was voted best reviewer.  I'm joined in that category by Adam Roberts, Niall Harrison, Matthew Cheney, and Farah Mendlesohn, which is such an august group of reviewers that I can't believe anyone would rank me above them. Thanks a lot to everyone who voted, and congratulations to the other winners.


2. Genevieve Valentine joins Strange Horizons as a columnist this week, and her first column is about reading the film Winter's Bone as a fairy tale.  I saw Winter's Bone just last week, and at the Strange Horizons blog I discuss Genevieve's column and some of my reactions to the film.


3. Actually, the absence of a thing: I've let my series about the Strange Horizons review policy lapse for, quite frankly, lack of time.  I'm hopeful that I'll be able to revive it before the end of the month.

Strange Horizons Reviews, March 7-11

This week's Strange Horizons reviews kick off with Richard Larson's discussion of one of the most talked-about science fiction novels of the last year, Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, with Richard joining in the novel's near-unanimous praise.  On Wednesday, Andy Sawyer puzzles over Ken MacLeod's The Restoration Game, and the meaning of its twist ending.  Today's review, by Duncan Lawie, is of a debut that we might have called urban fantasy a few years ago when that term had a very different meaning, Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London (Midnight Riot in the US).

Recent Reading Roundup 29

Some of the books I never got around to writing about in the women writing SF project, and a few of the ones I've read since then.

• Moxyland by Lauren Beukes - I found a lot to be impressed by in Moxyland, one of the most talked-about debuts of the last few years.  What I didn't find was a novel.  The book feels like a demonstration of Beukes's talent--for worldbuilding, for constructing interesting and flawed characters, for bravely taking her story to its dispiriting conclusion--but its pieces don't come together into a greater whole.  Which is not to say that Moxyland isn't worth reading.  The setting--a future South Africa in which corporations and government have become indistinguishable--is a nice blend of cyberpunk tropes, real-world problems taken to the nth degree, and the strangeness of a foreign country with a troubled history.  A lot of the devices Beukes deploys are familiar--cell-phones are necessary for everything from buying food to using public transport, so the police uses the threat of temporary or permanent disconnection to keep troublesome citizens and anti-establishment protesters in line, and breaks up demonstrations by using them to deliver electric shocks; advertising is ubiquitous and, in many cases, illegal to block; employment contracts more closely resemble indentured servitude, and seeking alternate employment is very nearly a criminal offense--but she uses them with aplomb and makes them her own.  Moxyland describes the intersecting lives of four characters--a naive artist who has sold her body as a billboard to a drinks manufacturer; a narcissistic, bed-hopping, shock-jock blogger; an activist being drawn towards increasingly dangerous but no less futile acts of protest; and a corporate employee ruthlessly trying to maneuver her way into a better job.  These are unpleasant people in unpleasant situations whose stories end unpleasantly, and Beukes isn't afraid to take any of them to the depressing places her premise demands.  At the same time, she doesn't let gloom overwhelm the novel, which for all its hopelessness is an energetic, engaging read.  There is, in short, a lot to be impressed by here, but despite the faint intimation of change at the novel's end (which gives the impression that it is a prologue to a very different story), Moxyland feels more like a snapshot than a story, more like a promise that Beukes can do great things than that promise's fruition.  I'm certainly planning to seek out more of Beukes's fiction, though--most obviously, her second novel Zoo City, recently nominated for the Clarke--in the certainty that she can achieve that greatness.


• When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead - I first heard about Stead's Newbery-winning children's novel when it participated in School Library Journal's Tournament of Kids' Books last year, where its description as an homage to both A Wrinkle in Time and Harriet the Spy intrigued me.  Though the book skews a bit younger than most of the YA fiction I tend to read, it tells a resonant story--growing up in New York in the early 70s, narrator Miranda is distracted from humdrum problems such a single mother who is frustrated by her job and afraid to commit to her boyfriend, a best friend who has stopped talking to her, and a snooty rich girl at school, by notes that seem to predict the future and ask her to carry out certain tasks in order to prevent an unspecified calamity.  Miranda is well-drawn as someone who is both intelligent and believably limited, and part of the pleasure of the novel is watching her realize how many of she assumptions she makes at the beginning of the book were mistaken--the break with her best friend turns to have been the right choice for both of them, the girl she hates turns out to be smart and cool.  The time travel aspect of the story, however, is less successful.  It relies on Miranda being so unfamiliar with the tropes of the time travel story that she can barely wrap her mind around them.  That may be believable for a child growing up in the 70s, but surely nowadays even children are so familiar with time travel as a story element that they can understand, for example, how you can arrive at a place before you left it.  For an adult reader, Miranda's slowness in figuring out what's happening to her, while not an insurmountable obstacle to enjoying When You Reach Me, makes the book a lot harder to get lost in.


• Origin by Diana Abu-Jaber - I chose this book for the women writing SF project not so much because Origin is science fiction (though as a mystery it is a genre novel, and it raises the possibility of being SFnal very briefly) but because I thought it might be interesting to add to that project a mimetic novel about a female scientist--the narrator, Lena, is a fingerprint analyst in Syracuse who is called upon to help investigate a series of suspicious crib deaths.  What I found instead was a novel that put me very strongly in mind of Kit Whitfield's Benighted, which, if you've read my review of that novel, you'll know is no great praise.  Like Benighted's Lola May, Origin's Lena is a neurotic who, at thirty, has barely any grasp of how to function in society or how to deal with people on any but the most basic level.  There's an interesting story to be told here, obviously--Lena might suffer from serious mental health problems, or the novel could point out the responsibility she bears for cutting herself off from human interaction (or both)--but like Whitfield, Abu-Jaber chooses to portray Lena as a hard-done-by victim, whose social phobias are solely the fault of wicked people around her--unloving parents, conniving colleagues, a domineering ex-husband--and easily remedied by a love interest who seemingly has no other goal in life but to pursue Lena in a respectful but relentless manner, break down the walls of her social maladroitness, and dedicate his every moment to her happiness.  Even the science part of the novel turned out to be a dud--Lena is a sought-after crime lab technician despite having no formal education not because she's a good scientist, but because she has insights into crime scenes that not even she can fully explain, and the novel is a lot more interested in her emo narrative than in science and rational enquiry.  The mystery itself, despite the irresistible hook of a serial killer who targets infants, fails to ignite--at one point Abu-Jaber has to posit that the victims' families somehow convince the press that their children's death are an act of terrorism in order to keep the tension from flagging--and its conclusion arrived long past the point where I had ceased to care about it.


• I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett - Fans of Pratchett's writing have long ago learned to ignore the author's occasional proclamation that the next book would be his last, or the last in the Discworld series, or the last to feature a certain character or setting.  Somehow, once the manuscript was turned in, there always turned out to be another story in the tank.  Nevertheless, there is a feeling of finality about I Shall Wear Midnight, and not just to the YA-oriented Tiffany Aching series, of which it is the fourth volume, but to the whole world of the witches of Lancre and the surrounding regions.  For one thing, Tiffany is no longer a young adult.  Though she's only 16 at I Shall Wear Midnight's outset, there is nothing childish or juvenile about her.  She's been carrying a woman's load for quite some time, caring for the sick and elderly, resolving disputes, and acting as an official arbiter and figure of authority in her native Chalk.  I Shall Wear Midnight sees Tiffany coming into her own as the head witch of the Chalk, to which end she must earn the respect and acceptance of the new Baron Roland, her former friend and almost-paramour (Pratchett handles this near-miss with delicacy, remaining true to both characters but also making a persuasive argument for their incompatibility; it is frankly refreshing to see, in YA fiction, childhood sweethearts who realize, upon reaching adulthood, that they really shouldn't be together).  Throwing a wrench in those plans is the spirit of a dead witchhunter who awakens anti-witch sentiment in Roland and the people of the Chalk.  Which is how I Shall Wear Midnight manages to cap off the whole sequence of witch-centric Discworld novels--it is a story about the nature of witchcraft and its necessity, and its climax brings to Tiffany's side not only familiar figures such as Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, and new ones such as the young witches she discovers and trains on the Chalk, but reaches all the way back to Equal Rites, the very first witch novel, to let us know what became of its heroine.
  
  The problem here, and not for the first time, is that these are very familiar beats.  I Shall Wear Midnight wants to be a crescendo, the definitive statement of Pratchett's take on the role of witches in his world--as quasi-magical social workers, simultaneously leaders and servants of their community--and on the evils of human nature that make them necessary.  But instead of a crescendo the novel is a repetition of what most of the previous witch novels have said already.  The first Tiffany Aching novel, The Wee Free Men, was one of the freshest, most engaging Discworld novels of the last decade, giving us a new and entirely different perspective on the nature of witchcraft and its practitioners while telling an exciting and funny story.  But perhaps because it rested on a foundation already six books deep, the series very quickly descended into familiarity, and into the same tendency to prioritize message over plot that has marred most of Pratchett's writing in the last half-decade.  I Shall Wear Midnight also confirms what the previous volume in the Tiffany series, Wintersmith, had suggested--that though Tiffany herself is a wonderful character, her series's premise has a lot less give in it, and a lot less room for expansion and for new kinds of stories, than the regular witch novels.  Tiffany's pixie protectors the Nac Mac Feegle, for example, have gone from a hilarious invention in The Wee Free Men to a tired joke, and their role in the novel feels forced.  I Shall Wear Midnight is by no means a slog, but it rather persuasively argues that even if Pratchett doesn't intend it as the last witch novel, it probably should be.


• The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman - It's a piece of rather bad luck that after two months of reading thought-provoking, evocative, beautifully-written genre novels, my first foray back into literary fiction should be Rachman's snide, unfunny, inexplicably well-received novel.  I find myself wanting to rant, like the most partisan of genre enthusiasts, about the worthlessness of a critical scene that elevates novels like this one.  Set in and around the offices of a Rome-based international paper during the second half of the last decade, The Imperfectionists charts the death throes of the paper--and of the print journalism industry--by visiting the people who make it work, from the managing editor to stringers in Cairo and Paris to the chief financial officer to the paper's most loyal reader, dedicating a chapter to each and weaving through them the paper's history and the steps that lead to its demise.  The problem is that none of these people are characters--they're caricatures, whose behavior is, at best, trite and predictable (the Paris correspondent is so desperate for a byline that he sells out his estranged son by naming him as a source; the corrections editor has spent a lifetime romanticizing a childhood friend as a free-spirited artist, but discovers when they meet again that his is the adventurous, cosmopolitan life while his friend has happily settled into bourgeois mediocrity).  At worst, they are simply unrecognizable as human beings.
  
  Rachman seems to be aiming for humor, but he more often hits something so broad and obvious that it turns leaden.  In one chapter, a grad school dropout is angling for a job as a stringer in Cairo, but is so completely lacking in backbone or any sense of how the world works that he not only allows himself to be scooped by his opponent, a walking stereotype of the man's man, globetrotting, war-zone reporter, but ends up giving the guy a place to stay, paying for his cabs and meals, and letting him carry off his laptop and house keys.  Possibly the worst chapter in the novel involves the paper's chief financial officer, who finds herself seated on a plane next to an employee she's just fired.  As the two struck up a flirtation, magically discovering how much they had in common, I said to myself that not even Rachman could possibly be aiming at a conclusion as juvenile and preposterous as the revelation that the fired employee is playing a cruel prank of seduction and revenge, but this is exactly how the chapter ended.  There are one or two readable chapters--the best, which sadly comes rather early in the novel, tells the story of the paper's obituary editor, who has let his career fester in order to spend time with his daughter only for her to die in an accident; it is probably telling, however, that Rachman must reach for a dead child before he can elicit genuine emotion--but for the most part The Imperfectionists is a clomping, cliché-ridden novel.  I can't help but wonder whether the ecstatic reviews I've seen for the book--which have almost uniformly called it nuanced, well-observed, and, most incredibly, funny--aren't tinged by their authors' being print journalists themselves, and perhaps too caught up in the excitement of seeing their own profession captured in fiction, and elegiac fiction to boot, to notice how little humanity there is in the novel.  Whether or not I'm right, neither The Imperfectionists nor its critical reception leave me feeling particularly heartbroken about the death of print journalism.


• The Fortunate Fall by Raphael Carter - This is three quarters of a truly excellent novel, sadly undone by its last fifty pages.  To put it another way, The Fortunate Fall works really well as a piece of worldbuilding, but falls flat on its face trying to tell a story in that world.  The world, however, is very nearly worth the price of admission, combining cyberpunk and transhumanism with third world and post-genocide politics into a setting that I would have loved to have spent more time in--albeit with another author.  Maya is a journalist several centuries in the future, in a Russia only a few decades past a brutal, genocidal conquest (by Americans, though the novel makes very little of this--we don't find out anything about the American "Guardians," their philosophy, or the reasons for the slaughter they carried out, and in the novel's present the US is mentioned only briefly as a wasteland that none of the characters are particularly concerned with) which was only overcome through the force of another atrocity--a computer virus that turned millions of the Guardians' subjects into the single-minded, relentless Unanimous Army.  In the present, the same brain-chip technology that allowed the Army to come into existence, now heavily regulated, is used for entertainment.  Maya doesn't report the news but allows her viewers to experience it through her networked sensorium.  In the post-Guardian world, the new superpower is Africa, which largely escaped the Guardians' and the Army's ravages, where mind-sharing technology is used freely and the definition of human is rapidly evolving.  In the former subjugated nations, remnants of tyrannical rule are still in place, and Maya in particular is fearful of being arrested for her sexual orientation.
  
  There is, obviously, a hell of a lot that could be done in this setting, and though it is understandable, given its intricacy, that Carter spends most of the novel simply explaining its world to us, once that setting is established the story he chooses to tell in it is a let-down.  Maya is investigating the little-documented Guardian period and the Unanimous Army, and stumbles upon a former dissident and present-day enemy of the state who promises her the story of a lifetime.  "Stumbles," is, in fact, exactly the right word--Maya does little investigative work on her own and the story seems largely to fall in her lap.  That this turns out to be deliberate, a plan by Maya's source and her new screener--the person who edits Maya's thoughts and emotional state for public consumption, and also doubles as her research assistant--doesn't truly justify how shapeless and cobbled-together the novel's plot, and Maya's progress along it, feel--though again, for most of the novel, when Carter's energies are directed towards having Maya explain her world's culture, politics, and history to us, this is not a problem.  When the long-awaited interview with the mysterious source finally occurs, however, it turns out to be a chance for him and for Maya's screener to speechify for 50 pages, elaborating on the subjects that underpin the novel--the changing nature of personhood in the wake of mind-sharing technology, the effect that that technology has on human capacity for empathy, and the morality of doing evil for the sake of achieving good.  Important and interesting topics all, but not when they're delivered as a lecture that more than anything else put me in mind of the Architect scene in The Matrix Reloaded.  The tragic love story in Maya's past, which is supposed to humanize these chapters, is too thinly sketched--too drowned out by worldbuilding--so that when Maya finally finds herself forced to choose between accepting her lover as an altered, possibly evil transhuman, and living alone, we know so little about either character that it's hard to know which outcome to root for.  Despite its tedious conclusion, The Fortunate Fall is worth a look for its setting and the ideas that have gone into it, but it is ultimately a failure.

Strange Horizons Reviews, February 28-March 4

This week on Strange Horizons, Nader Elhefnawy rounds off February with his review of L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s Empress of Eternity, which Nader thinks has its strong points, but is ultimately a disappointing execution of an interesting premise.  Dan Hartland kicks off March on a more positive note, with a glowing review of Zoran Živković's short novel The Ghostwriter.  Continuing the trend, C.B. Harvey is also quite pleased with Col Buchanan's debut fantasy, Farlander.  John Clute is less cheerful in the latest installment of his column Scores, in which he is decidedly unimpressed by three recent novellas, Tobias Buckell's The Executioness, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Alchemist, and Elizabeth Bear's The White City.