59 Minutes Short: Thoughts on The Hour

The timing of The Hour, the BBC's just-concluded prestige series about the early days of British televised news, was always a bit dodgy.  In the wake of the News of the World scandal, how do you tell a story in which journalists are the brave, principled, truth-seeking heroes?  Even if you distinguish between commercial news and publicly-owned organizations like the BBC (which The Hour, set in 1956, would have had trouble doing) and between print and TV journalism (a difference the show never made much of except to note that some of the restrictions on the latter don't apply to the former), the fact remains that to argue against government control of the news only weeks after it was revealed that the present-day UK government is either too scared, too complicit, or too bought to even attempt to prevent the press from committing gross violations of privacy, tormenting the families of murder victims, and, in one particularly memorable case, trying to railroad a suspect in a murder case, is a pretty tall order.  Not impossible, of course.  The Hour could have held up a picture of what journalism should be--perhaps what it once was--as a contrast to what it has become.  To a certain extent, that is what the show tries to do (within limits, of course--the show would have been in the can for weeks or even months before the News of the World scandal broke; on the other hand, that scandal didn't come out of nowhere, and the problems with the British press have been known for a while).  But the concept of journalism The Hour trades in turns out to have so little concern for truth or facts that rather than offer a solution to Britain's media woes, The Hour comes to seem like part of the problem.

Created and written by Abi Morgan, The Hour revolves around the production of the titular show, a first-of-its-kind current events program intended to shake up a TV landscape in which the news panders to the establishment by toeing the party line and focusing on puff pieces.  The key characters are producer Bel Rowley (the always-excellent Romola Garai, whose slow travel through time in her recent TV roles--from the Regency period (Emma) to the late Victorian era (The Crimson Petal and the White) to the mid-50s--gives rise to the hope that she might some day play a contemporary character), scrappy reporter Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw), and smarmy, well-connected anchor Hector Madden (Dominic West).  The conflict between Freddie and Hector--over class (Freddie has had to fight for everything he's achieved in life while Hector, who was born into privilege and married into more of it, has had it handed to him), over intelligence (Freddie's is furious and constantly questioning, while former sports presenter Hector is amiably clueless about current events), over what journalism is (Hector describes himself as "too polite" to ask the tough questions, while Freddie is dying for a shot at the anchor's chair), and over Bel, who just wants to put a successful show together, but is nevertheless drawn to both men--have led nearly every reviewer writing about the show to draw a comparison between it and the 1987 film Broadcast News.  To that strand, however, The Hour adds--and quickly prioritizes--a Cold War espionage story, as Freddie is approached by Ruth Elms, with whose aristocratic family he stayed during the war.  After dropping several dark hints about the recent murder of an academic, Ruth herself dies under suspicious circumstances, leaving Freddie to unravel a conspiracy that turns out to involve both Soviet spies and British intelligence, and to be strongly connected to the rapidly evolving Suez Crisis.

The Hour takes a long time weaving these two plotlines together, and until it does the disconnect between their tones is one of its many problems.  Others include the sidelining of Bel into a dreadful romantic quadrangle with Hector, Freddie, and Hector's wife, and the positioning of Freddie as a hero despite the fact that he is smug and self-centered, thinking nothing of sabotaging the show he's allegedly dreamed of working on his whole career because Hector is the one in front of the camera, or of ignoring his duties while he pursues the true cause of Ruth's death for personal reasons.  Most importantly, The Hour is characterized by a lamentable lack of respect for its viewers' intelligence.  Billed and marketed as the British Mad Men, The Hour is one of those rare occasions where the American show is more subtle and less prone to baldly stating its arguments.  Bel--a high-ranking professional woman in 1956--has to have it pointed out to her that having an affair with her married anchor might be detrimental to her career.  The forces of government interference are represented by the mustache-twirling apparatchnik McCain, who shows up every episode to act evil and oily--and make misogynistic comments to Bel, just in case we'd missed how evil and oily he is--in order to drive home the point that government interference in the news is bad. 

The tendency to baldly and inelegantly lay all its cards on the table comes to a head in The Hour's final episode, and especially in its last twenty minutes, which depict the show-within-a-show's final installment, after which it is yanked off the air for speaking unacceptable truths.  It's in this story that we also get a full sense of how hollow The Hour's idea of what constitutes good journalism is.  For several episodes, Bel has been trying to find a way to suggest on the air that there has been an illegal collusion between Britain, France and Israel to attack Egypt and regain British control of the Suez Canal.  The reason she can't do so is because of a law that prevents news programs from discussing any issue raised in parliament for 14 days after that discussion.  This is, obviously, a terrible law and one can't help but sympathize with the characters for trying to get around it.  Bel's solution is to suggest the theory of collusion in a satirical sketch, a decision the show depicts as clever and bold, especially as it's done against the orders of her boss, Clarence Fendley (Anton Lesser).  The problem here is that there is actually a much more compelling reason for Bel to relegate the suggestion of collusion to a satirical sketch rather than a news segment, one that is as relevant today as it was in 1956--she hasn't got a shred of proof.  At no point do we see Bel doing any of the journalistic work that would actually demonstrate that Britain planned and involved itself in an illegal war (nor does she delegate that task to others; even Anna Chancellor's Lix Storm, the only Hour staffer who behaves in any way like a journalist, doesn't drum up concrete support for the collusion theory, even though this would have been thick on the ground).  Instead, the show relies on our present-day knowledge that collusion occurred--and on our outrage over the gag rule--to get around the fact that no one on Bel's team is actually doing their job as a journalist, and that they are all perfectly happy to present supposition as fact.

Things actually get worse when Freddie gets his moment on the air, tying up the Ruth Elms investigation by bringing her father to be interviewed on The Hour.  At this point, Freddie has discovered the following things: that the murdered academic, Peter Darrall, was an MI6 agent who used Ruth as part of a plot to assassinate Colonel Nasser and drive a stake in Egyptian nationalism before the Suez Crisis erupted; that that plot failed, in part, because Darrall was also a Soviet agent, which is why he was killed; that Ruth was murdered because of her knowledge of this plot.  Freddie can prove some of this, and Lord Elms can corroborate a lot of it.  But when Freddie finally gets Lord Elms on the air, all the man will do is make vague, insinuating statements, calling the government liars and murderers.  The show even seems aware that something is going awry, because Freddie keeps trying to steer Lord Elms towards a more specific discussion of his daughter, to no effect, until the program is pulled from the air and he and Bel are fired.  But after that point, both the characters and the tone of the show act as though there's been some great triumph here.  To repeat: Freddie is sitting on one of the biggest stories of any journalist's career, a story that he can, to a certain extent, prove.  But when given a platform, all he does is let a grief-stricken old man rant and rave for six minutes.  And this is supposed to be the face of brave, principled journalism.

In fairness, this is exactly what Clarence says to Freddie in what is only the longest of several "let's talk about what just happened and deliver the moral of the show" scenes that close out the season.  He chastises Freddie for putting sentiment ahead of his journalistic integrity, prioritizing the story of Ruth's murder (which, let's remember, Freddie hasn't actually broken) over the bigger issue of the British government having ordered the assassination of a foreign leader in order to preserve its financial interests abroad.  Why, Clarence asks, didn't Freddie run the assassination story?  Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Freddie has only been told that proof of the assassination plot exists and hasn't seen it himself--if Bel can insinuate collusion with no evidence, Freddie can certainly assert that there was an assassination plot with only flimsy evidence--this is actually a valid and important question.  Freddie's answer is that it would be irresponsible to destabilize the government in the middle of a war, and it's a good thing that Clarence's response to this is to throw a tantrum, because that provided me with the vicarious outlet that kept me from throwing something heavy against the wall.  How can you make a statement like this--surely one of the core questions of journalism--as if it were a matter of course and plainly obvious to any reasonable person, ten minutes before your season ends?  That question is what The Hour should have been about--where is the line between necessary dissent and treason?  Where does a journalist's higher loyalty lie--with the truth, or with the nation?  These are not simple questions.  They do not have simple answers.  And in the situation presented by The Hour, in which the nation is embroiled in an illegal war, Freddie's answer is by no means the obvious one.

If The Hour were not so determined to make Freddie into an uncomplicated hero, it might still have salvaged some meaning out of this exchange, and out of Clarence's entirely accurate criticism of him.  But it's at this point that Freddie realizes what has, quite frankly, been obvious since the middle of the season--that Clarence is also a Soviet agent, and that he fed Freddie the assassination story in an attempt to destabilize not just the government but the entire British political system.  So the one person who calls Freddie's journalistic practices into question, who criticizes his choices to prioritize the personal over the political, and to back down, at the last minute, from telling the awful truth, turns out to be a bad guy, someone who actually bears out McCain's argument that journalists who won't shut up when they're told to are disloyal, unpatriotic, and possibly enemies of the state.  When Freddie asks Clarence how he could have betrayed his country--and especially to an empire far more destructive than the British one--Clarence simply replies that before shows like The Hour came along, spying was the only way he could express dissent.  The smug, self-congratulatory moral of the show--also stated earlier by Lord Elms, who muses to Freddie that he might have saved Ruth from being led astray by Darrall if only he'd spoken to her about the issues of the day--is that in order to preserve democracy (and keep our young people from being led astray by Communists), we must have shows like The Hour.  But the concept of journalism embodied by The Hour--both the show and the show-within-the-show--is so hollow that this moral is made meaningless.

Free speech and the ability to express dissent are necessary for the preservation of a democracy.  But the news isn't just about freedom of speech, and its job isn't simply to express dissent.  It's to report the facts, ask questions and pursue the answers.  A willingness to dissent is a necessary condition for a functional press, but not a sufficient one.  The Hour doesn't see this.  Its idea of great journalism is driven entirely by emotion--by Freddie's anger over Ruth's death, or Bel's determination to say what she wants to, gag rule be damned--and wholly unconcerned with proof, with evidence, and with journalistic standards.  That's not journalism.  That's tabloid culture.  That, not to put too fine a point on it, is The News of the World--who cares if I can prove it, I'm going to say it anyway.  In the guise of showing us how Proper Journalists should behave--and while borrowing respectability from its period setting and its 20/20 hindsight--The Hour enshrines precisely the sort of behavior that is destroying journalism and endangering democracy.  I don't know which would be worse--that Abi Morgan and her team meant to say that good journalism is about the freedom to speak, not about having something substantial to say, or that they may genuinely not be able to tell the difference.

B-Movie Summer

The end of summer is almost upon us, but before it arrives, let's pause for a moment to acknowledge something truly unexpected: the movies this year have been good.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who's gotten used to checking her brain at the door of the movie theater between May and September, to the extent that Thor, one of the silly season's earliest harbingers, was able to win me over with little more than charismatic actors and a few funny scenes.  Had I known what was coming, I would have been a lot less forgiving.  Sure, we've had our Green Lanterns, our Transformers 3s, our Cowboys and Alienses, but alongside those turkeys the summer of 2011 has also delivered a crop of solidly entertaining, well-crafted action flicks that a thinking person can enjoy without hating themselves in the morning.  What makes this whole thing even more surprising is how implausible all of these successes are.  X-Men: First Class is the fifth film in a never-too-great series that went sour in its third installment.  Nobody had any business expecting good things from this film, but despite its many flaws, it has turned out to be the most thought-provoking comic book movie since The Dark Knight, and a lot of fun to boot.  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 is a film whose very title inspires ennui, especially if you've suffered through the previous seven overstuffed, lifeless chapters.  But the film itself works so well and is so engaging that it retroactively validates the entire series preceding it.  Somehow, in the magical summer of 2011, the more unappealing a film seems on paper, the better it works on the screen.

Take Captain America: The First Avenger, for example.  Stacked against it are: that Marvel has been churning out superhero films at a rate of one or two a year and that that haste and factory line mentality have told in the final products; that all of these films are but preambles to next year's Avengers movie; that the film's period setting only seems to emphasize its role in getting its particular playing piece to its correct position on the board; that Chris Evans didn't exactly endear himself to audiences the last time he played a superhero; and most of all, that this is Captain America we're talking about, a character whose very name suggests an offputtingly cheesy and jingoistic ethos.  Some of these potential pitfalls do manifest in the movie.  The villain of the piece is so obviously there purely to get both Captain America and an important McGuffin where they need to be for the Avengers story that even a scenery-chewing Hugo Weaving and some impressive CGI that turns his face into a red skull can't make a memorable presence out of him, while the plot is barely even there.  But that hardly seems important when you realize how deftly Captain America deals with the problems inherent in its title character.  Even more than X-Men: First Class, the decision to set the film in the past (in both cases, the period when the respective comics were created) serves Captain America well.  It allows the film to avoid the jokey, ironic tone with which most present-set superhero films try to defuse their vague but unmistakable embarrassment at the story they're telling.  By laying its scene during the second World War, decades before the age of irony, Captain America is free to be earnest.

That earnestness is embodied in a surprisingly low-key Evans, who plays Steve Rogers, a 90 pound weakling with a champion's heart, with a steadfastness that short-circuits the unease we might feel at the Captain America concept.  We may not believe in America as the kind of force for good that Captain America embodies, whose moral authority to make right in the world he mirrors, but it's very easy to believe that Steve believes in it, to sympathize with that belief, and to believe in him because of it.  The film contrasts that idealism with the realism of the people around Steve.  The recruiting station doctors repeatedly classify him as 4F because of a host of illnesses and infirmities.  His best friend Bucky (Kings's Sebastian Stan, who very nearly walks away with the film), who has been saving Steve's chivalrous but skinny ass from bullies since they were kids, can't imagine how his friend will fare against the Nazis.  Colonel Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones, who does walk away with the film), the head of the experimental unit that finally recruits Steve as a test subject for a supersoldier program, views him as nothing but a proof of concept, a stepping stone towards creating a supercharged army; when the experiment succeeds but the technology to augment other soldiers is lost, he dismisses Steve as irrelevant--one soldier, no matter how powerful and determined, can't change the course of the war.  The best use to which the US army can put its supersoldier is as a propaganda tool, as the Captain America moniker and costume are invented as part of Steve's bond-selling tour.

Unlike most origin story films, Captain America isn't concerned with doubt and self-discovery.  Steve starts the film knowing, despite the entirely reasonable arguments of everyone around him, that he can contribute and that it is therefore his duty to do so, and the film is mainly concerned with showing us how, when given the chance and a dose of fantastical, comic book "science," he proves himself right.  This can have the effect of flattening his character, which unlike his body doesn't change over the course of the film.  But that changelessness is also the source of Steve's appeal.  It drives home the point that it is his character, not his muscles, that makes Steve heroic.  Even after he becomes a musclebound Übermensch, he remains as thoughtful, soft-spoken, self-deprecating and utterly determined as he was when he was a sickly twig, and besides the fact that it is very refreshing to see a superhero character who doesn't default to the quip-happy, irreverent and irresponsible type we've grown accustomed to and maybe a little weary of, these qualities sell Steve's heroism in a way that other superhero films simply haven't.  "Hero" is a word that gets bandied about a little too often in popular culture and the public discourse, but what it originally meant was someone who was fundamentally different from ordinary people--more determined, less selfish, less bothered by the minutiae of everyday life.  A lot of superhero stories try to bring their heroes down to earth, and with good reason, but the ubiquity of this approach can leave one wondering why you'd ever root for this person, and why they deserve superpowers (it's arguably the greatest strength of the Iron Man films that they lean into this question and in fact ask it outright).  In Steve Rogers, Captain America gives as a definitive, and ultimately entirely convincing, answer to this question.  What's interesting and compelling about the film--despite the stock villain and forgettable plot--is watching all the characters around Steve come to that conclusion along with us.

As impressive as Captain America, X-Men, and Harry Potter's triumphs over the odds have been this summer, if there's one film that wins, hands down, the title of most unexpected and pleasant surprise, it must be Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  Harry Potter, the X-Men films, and the various Marvel comic book movies, after all, are series that have only been disappointing and underwhelming audiences since the turn of the century.  The Planet of the Apes movies have been delivering diminishing returns for decades, and that includes one ill-advised attempted reboot already that, unbeknownst to us at the time, heralded the decline of a once prominent artist.  As many positive reviews of the film as I read, I just couldn't make myself believe that it was actually as good as the reviewers claimed.  Which was a lucky thing, because Rise is not as good as all that--though everything having to do with the apes is very good, the human characters, and their half of the story, are flat and cliché-ridden.

You see this most prominently in the film's villains--the ones who try to curtail scientist Will Rodman's (James Franco) attempts to create a cure for Alzheimer's, and the ones who abuse Ceasar, the test subject Will rescues and adopts after his project is shut down, whose intelligence has been vastly accelerated by Will's drug.  Will's boss (David Oyelowo) is a stereotypical evil Big Pharma executive who treasures the bottom line and doesn't give a damn about saving lives.  The manager of the ape sanctuary where Will is forced to place Ceasar after the ape, defending Will's senile father from an irate neighbor, is declared dangerous, and his son (Brian Cox and Tom Felton) cheerfully abuse their charges, feeding them swill, encouraging them to fight, and tormenting them with fire-hoses and electric shockers.  Perhaps most egregious is Will's neighbor (David Hewlett) whose entirely reasonable anger at what he perceives as Will's dangerous, untrained pet trying to "play" with his children, and later when Will's father wrecks his car, is expressed in such extreme ways that he comes across, as Jonathan McCalmont says in his review, as a psychotic.  Even more problematic than the villain characters, however, is the film's treatment of Will.  Over the course of Rise, Will ignores all the rules of medical ethics in order to save his father, unwittingly creates a new species, raises a member of that species as his son but fails him in every possible way, and brings about the destruction of the human race.  He's a character whose grand ambitions are outstripped only by the magnitude of the catastrophes, both personal and global, that he causes.  And yet the character as written is entirely blank, only rarely showing any emotional response to the consequences of his actions, perhaps because he's entirely blind to them.  Will could have been a magnificent tragic character, a modern-day Victor Frankenstein, whose shortsightedness and selfishness the audience could marvel at.  But the film isn't interested in him as a human being, only as an engine for the plot's events.

Will's flatness, however, helps to draw attention to Rise of the Planet of the Apes's actual main character, Ceasar.  The second half of the film downplays Will's presence in order to show us Ceasar's experiences in the ape sanctuary, where he first encounters fellow apes, and hatches a plan to uplift them and escape into the wild.  The CGI and motion capture work are stunning, but they're also in the service of a meaty character arc--the radicalization of a super-intelligent ape.  Raised by humans, Ceasar sees himself as one, though even before he leaves Will's home we see him begin to question his place within it--the restrictions placed upon his movements, the unthinking assumption of outsiders that he is a pet, the dark history of his creation of which Will has told him only few self-serving details.  In the sanctuary, confronted with Will's abandonment and the cruelty of his keepers, Ceasar begins to see himself as part of an underclass, and to plan a rebellion.  The beats of this story, a classic prison narrative with undertones of racial prejudice, are in their own way as hackneyed as the film's construction of its villains, but the material and the performance are powerful enough that in the Ceasar-focused portions of Rise this predictability matters less and even works in the film's favor by making Ceasar and the other apes more sympathetic and recognizable despite their inhumanity.  It helps, of course, that this half of the film is also more action-heavy, as Ceasar first establishes his place in the sanctuary/prison hierarchy, then engineers a mass breakout and a mad dash to the wilderness, and that all of these scenes are tense and pulse-pounding, but at its core the film works because it gets us so thoroughly on the apes' side.  It's interesting, in fact, to compare Rise with X-Men: First Class, another film about a persecuted underclass trying, on the one hand, to live among humans, and on other hand, to fight them.  Rise cops out at the very end when it reveals that the apes aren't the direct cause of humanity's demise, but the sympathy it extends to the underclass and to its anger over its mistreatment is heartening.

So what happened this summer?  More importantly, what lessons--beyond obvious ones like "don't be dumb"--can be learned from it and hopefully applied to future films?  If I allow myself a moment of starry-eyed optimism, I'd like to believe that the summer of 2011 shows us a Hollywood that has finally figured out how to make remake- and sequel-mania work for it rather than against it.  If there's one quality that the successful B-movies of 2011 have in common, it's that they have a strong sense of what they are, what kind of world they're set in, and what kind of story they're trying to tell--even, in the case of X-Men and Captain America, to the extent of telling a period story.  If you manage to convey that sense to the audience--if you preserve your story's uniqueness instead of watering it down by trying to be just like everyone else--they will respond, and you can use your inevitable sequels and prequels to explore and deepen that sense.  I don't want to say that plot doesn't matter--though none of the films I enjoyed this summer had particularly strong or coherent plots--but it may come second to the integrity of the film's world and characters.  This summer's films possessed that integrity.  Here's hoping they're not just a blip.

The 2011 Hugo Awards: The Winners

Well, here we are again.  That day in late summer when SF fandom blearily pries open its sleep-glued eyes after a long and dimly-remembered evening, and looks dizzily about itself to see just how bad the damage is.  Ladies and gentlemen, the Hugo awards.

• In a brave but probably doomed attempt to wring something positive out Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear having been deemed the best genre novel of 2010, let me use that victory as a launching point for an intriguing question: is this the very worst best novel decision ever made by the Hugo voters?  You could argue, I suppose, that Willis's victory over what must be admitted was an uninspiring ballot is nothing to her 1993 win (shared with Vernor Vinge for A Fire Upon the Deep) for Doomsday Book, over both Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars and Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang.  On the other hand, Doomsday Book is well-regarded by a lot of people who are not me, whereas Blackout/All Clear has been poorly received even by some of Willis's fans.  Not to mention that nearly every reviewer who actually lives in the country where Blackout/All Clear takes place has taken it to task for its wildly inaccurate representations of that country and its history, and for treating that history as a theme park ride.  And, of course, there's the fact that by treating the book's two separately published volumes as a single work and awarding them the genre's highest honor, SF fandom has essentially turned to the publisher who sold them a $50 book and said "thank you, sir, may I have another?"  In other words, Blackout/All Clear's win not only rewards bad writing, it rewards cultural appropriation and exploitative business practices.  It definitely has my vote for the worst best novel Hugo choice ever.


• On to the other fiction categories.  Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects is one of his lesser works (praising with faint damns, but still), and I would have preferred to see the Best Novella Hugo go to Rachel Swirsky.  Nevertheless, there's something to be thankful for in the fact that Chiang seems to have transitioned into that club of perennial Hugo favorites who are all but guaranteed a nomination and a win whenever they deign to publish (president: C. Willis): it means that there's at least one fiction category whose winner the fannish community has no reason to feel ashamed of.  I wish I could say the same for novelette and short story.  It's tempting to feel grateful that Eric James Stone's "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" doesn't have a Hugo to sit beside its Nebula (one wonders what role the outrage over the Nebula win played in denying Stone a Hugo), but let's not allow that to obscure the fact that Allen M. Steele's "The Emperor of Mars" is the kind of sentimental, backwards-looking, name-dropping pap that has been clogging up the award's works for too much of the last decade.  There's been a lot of work in the last few years to broaden the Hugo nominator and voter base, and it seems to have worked, but when a story like "The Emperor of Mars" wins the award, it just seems as if no matter how much you increase the voting base, you'll still end up with people who would rather look to the past than the future.  In short story, Mary Robinette Kowal picks up her first fiction Hugo, after winning the Campbell in 2008 and being nominated for "Evil Robot Monkey" in 2009, and thus cements my bewilderment at the popularity of her writing.  Short story was a weak category this year, but there were better stories on it than Kowal's.


• Not content with the opportunities for stats geekery afforded by the nomination and voting breakdowns, Niall Harrison and Liz Batty have been checking how close the Hugo winners of the last decade came to failing the No Award test (at least 50% of the ballots must rank the winner above No Award).  Blackout/All Clear's No Award score is 11.5%, making it the third most controversial win in the last ten years, following Robert J. Sawyer's Hominids in 2003 (19%), and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2005 (14.7%).  The only other winner to score above 10% is The Yiddish Policemen's Union (10.2%).


• Now on to the official stats geekery: like last year and unlike 2009, when most categories were won outright in the first round of vote-counting, several of this year's categories switched winners as votes were redistributed.  What's particularly interesting is that in most of these categories the switch occurs in the last or next to last round of redistribution.  The impression that forms is of very distinct voting blocs.  Randall Munroe, for example, had an impressive lead in Best Fan Artist all the way to the last round of counting.  So did Locus in the Best Semiprozine category, but when Lightspeed's votes were redistributed, less than a quarter of them went to Locus, putting Lightspeed's sister magazine Clarkesworld, whose former editor Sean Wallace now edits Lightspeed, in first place.  Mira Grant's Feed was in the lead for Best Novel until the votes for Cryoburn were redistributed--62 of them went to Feed and 146 to Blackout/All Clear, putting Willis in the lead as The Dervish House's votes split evenly between the two remaining contenders. 


• Of course, the best known voting bloc in the Hugos is the Who contingent, who have turned the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category into the least interesting of the night.  What is interesting, however, is how the votes break down.  "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury" started in first place and held that position until the third round of counting--not, in itself, a particularly encouraging statement about either the category or the state of genre television.  Meanwhile, the highest-ranked Who episode was actually "Vincent and the Doctor"--a more deserving winner than "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang."  Regardless of which of the nominees won, the entire voting fandom should hang its head in shame over the fact that The Lost Thing has an Oscar, but not a Hugo.


• The news from the Worldcon business meeting is all about the changes to the various publication categories, and there's been no word about whether the Best Graphic Story will live to embarrass us another year.  Phil and Kaja Foglio, whose Girl Genius has just won the award for the third year running, have announced that they will decline a fourth nomination.  Which is nice of them, but as I said last year when Patrick Nielsen Hayden made the same announcement about Best Editor, Long Form (which he acted upon this year), it shouldn't be the responsibility of the nominees to maintain the respectability of the award.  Best Graphic Story was a good idea, but if the same work has won the category in every year of its existence, then it is clearly not working, and it is long past time it was retired.


• Not much to say about the nominations, except that three more votes to either Tobias Buckell's "A Jar of Goodwill" or Maureen McHugh's "The Naturalist" would have knocked Eric James Stone out of the novelette category, so that's a what if that will surely haunt us.  There's little else beneath the cutoff point of most categories that makes me cringe at the thought of it missing a nomination--either 2010 just wasn't a very good year for genre, or Hugo nominators aren't finding the good stuff.


• In conclusion, I think this best sums up my reaction to this year's Hugo awards.

Strange Horizons Reviews, August 15-19

Sofia Samatar makes her Strange Horizons debut this week with a fascinating review of Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud's collection A Life on Paper, a volume that seeks to introduce this much-lauded French author to the English-reading public.  Niall Harrison looks at another literary zombie novel, Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, which he argues is unique for combining the horror of post-apocalyptic zombie stories with the rarer strand of zombie romance.  Finally, Matt Hilliard is of two minds about Brent Hayward's The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter, impressed by its technical achievements but wondering about the whole they amount to.

This week also sees the latest entry in John Clute's column Scores.  This month, John takes a look at two urban fantasy anthologies in the slim hope of finding stories in them that actually talk about the urban setting.

Strange Horizons Reviews, August 8-12

This week on Strange Horizons: Matthew Cheney takes a look at Tor's reprint of Melissa Scott's cyberpunk novel Trouble and Her Friends and is underwhelemed, particularly by the way the novel's future has been overtaken.  Marina Berlin has mixed feelings about Paul Kearney's Corvus, which impresses her with its alternate history Roman military setting and battle scenes but disappoints in its handling of characters and the more unsavory aspects of its period.  Rhiannon Lassiter looks at The Age of Odin, and finds its Norse gods brought to life characters and little too familiar and down to earth.

Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

Strange Horizons Reviews, August 1-5

Kicking off August's reviews is Dan Hartland's take on God's War by Kameron Hurley, which Dan, with a few reservations, is very impressed by.  Katherine Farmar makes her Strange Horizons debut with a review of the Haikasoru book Mardock Scramble, by Tow Ubukata, which she finds rather exhausting, full of great ideas and moments but on the whole a bit of an assault on the senses.  Hallie O'Donovan rounds out the week with a review of Franny Billingsley's Chime, a YA novel which Hallie compares to the work of Diana Wynne Jones and Frances Hardinge.

Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

Strange Horizons Reviews, July 25-29

Rounding out July's reviews are: Erin Horáková, who finds Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless delightful on the micro level, but somewhat shapeless in the macro; Nathaniel Katz and Marie Velazquez, who take two looks at the first volume in Daniel Abraham's new epic fantasy series, The Dragon's Path, Nathaniel wondering when the payoff to the book's buildup will come, and Maria whether Abraham plans to complicate the somewhat simplistic treatment of race in the book; and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, who looks at Times Three, an omnibus edition of three time travel novels by Robert Silverberg, with his usual care and erudition.

Also, Strange Horizons is looking for volunteers to help us prepare for the website redesign by checking the existing content for errors.  The details are here.

Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

Recent Reading Roundup 30

After a couple of dry months, reading-wise, I've gotten back on the horse in a big way and with some very fine books.  Here are my thoughts.

• Kraken by China Miéville - It's taken me a while to get to this book, and having finally read it the question foremost in my mind is: why?  It's strange enough that Miéville is going back to the template of a Londoner who discovers that there's a magical underworld to the city, is forced into that world, and becomes proffiicient at navigating it and affecting it--a barrel whose bottom he had already rather thoroughly scraped with King Rat and Un Lun Dun, both of which were themselves heavily derivative of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, and which, in the intervening years, so many other writers have dipped their spoons into.  But to write this sort of story as the follow-up to the breathtakingly original The City and The City, a book that seemed to herald a new stage in Miéville's already genre-changing career, is just baffling.  Kraken, in which natural history museum curator Billy Harrow is caught up in a magical arms race after the preserved body of a giant squid--revered by one of the city's many cults and thus imbued with great power--mysteriously disappears, is by no means a bad or unengaging book, and there are some nicely done and typically Miévillian touches such as a labor strike among animal familiars, or ghost policemen who are not actually the ghosts of real people but amalgams of copper clichés derived from reruns of The Sweeney and Life on Mars.  But these are just touches--the structure of the novel, the personalities of its characters, and its take on London are all very familiar, from Miéville's previous work and from that of others writers.  If it weren't for the fact that Embassytown seems to see Miéville returning to his form of having no form I'd be worried about where he plans to take his career. 


• A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan - there are a lot of compliments I could pay Egan's already much-complimented novel, but I'll start with the glibbest one--that reading it feels like compensation for having suffered through Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists earlier this year.  Both novels are made up of connected stories that jump back and forth through time (though Egan's structure is more adventurous and demands more of the reader's attention) and which together form a single picture.  But whereas Rachman, perhaps relying on the bittiness of his chosen format to obscure these flaws, wallowed in clichés and broad, unfunny attempts at humor, Egan's writing is deft and her characters are immediately believable and affecting.  The stories span a period between the early 70s and the early 2020s, with characters appearing at different points in their lives, taking over the narrative thread after having previously played a supporting or walk-on role in someone else's story.  For the first half of the novel, this seems like a clever and well-executed trick, but ultimately a self-defeating one, as it seems to prioritize a soap opera reading of the novel, in which what's important isn't the work as a whole but simply knowing how character X ends up.  It was only very slowly that the brilliance of Egan's approach crept up on me, because of course what happens next, for all that it takes many forms, is ultimately the same--disappointment, disillusionment, and death.
  
  The goon of the title is time, and as the novel slips back and forth within it we watch debauched has-beens on their last legs turn into teenage wannabes quivering with rage and ambition, and promising children curdle into compromised adults.  A picture of a long-dead friend becomes that friend on the day of their death, and a teenager convinced that she will never be as beautiful or successful as her friends becomes a contented adult puzzling over the ruin of their lives.  If there's one flaw in the novel, it's in Egan's construction of the near future, which has the slightly hysterical tinge that we've come to associate with mainstream writers dipping their toes into SF--barely ten years in the future, America has been largely desertified, the music industry has overcome the digital crisis by marketing to babies, and everyone reads and writes text-speak fluently (OK, maybe that last one isn't so far-fetched).  But the future chapters also help to drive home the fact that the goon-like nature of time isn't something that ever stops, and that the characters contemporary to us, who seem to have escaped time's ravages, are merely its next victims.  Together with Egan's subtle prose and her generous treatment of her characters, this device gives a theme that might, in another author's hands, have seemed obvious and trite true resonance and heft, so that Goon Squad becomes genuinely heartbreaking.


• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell - Like Kraken, this book seems like an odd direction for its author to be going in, though in Mitchell's case I wonder if Thousand Autumns doesn't herald a more permanent shift.  You can understand where Mitchell is coming from--alongside the praise that has been heaped on his novels, especially Cloud Atlas, there's always been an undertone of concern that maybe what's remarkable about these books, and about Mitchell as a writer, is their structure, the playful tricks with genre, voice, multiple points of view, and intersecting plotlines spread out over time and space (you could of course ask what's wrong with clever structures, and why they're considered less worthy--or a less integral part of the works that contain them--than plot or characters, but that's a broader discussion than we have space for).  It's easy to imagine Mitchell deciding to write a more constrained, more traditional type of novel, but the result is, again like Kraken, good but also terribly familiar.  Jacob de Zoet is a young clerk in the Dutch East India Company around the turn of the 19th century, who arrives in Dejima, an artificial island off the coast of Nagasaki which for several centuries was the only point of contact and trade between Europe and Japan.  Thousand Autumns follows him as he engages in a campaign of reforming the corrupt trading station only to discover that his patron has his own hand in the till, then shifts to the points of view of several Japanese characters, then to that of an English captain who arrives in Nagasaki harbor hoping to take over the trading post.
  
  The novel's themes are familiar from Mitchell's other work--the universality of suffering and oppression, the horror of slavery, which powers the economies of nations and empires, and the mental contortions that slavers employ to justify it, the rare but very real instances in which a single decent individual can make a stand and make the world just the tiniest bit better--and there's a twist on this preoccupation when Mitchell points out that Japan has protected itself from Western colonization and exploitation by isolating itself, but that that same isolation is helping to preserve a restrictive, oppressive system of government.  But that's not quite enough to set Thousand Autumns apart from so many other historical novels set in this period--it reminded me, in some portions, of Shogun, and in others of Sacred Hunger.  For all that it's well-written and has compelling, delicately-drawn characters and situations, Thousand Autumns can't help but stand in the shadow of these novels (and many others) even as it suffers from a comparison with Mitchell's more inventive treatment of its themes in his previous novels.  The one point at which the familiar, unpredictable David Mitchell seems to rear his head is in the middle segment, when Thousand Autumns takes a strange turn towards the pulpy as one of the Japanese characters is kidnapped by a baby-killing immorality cult.  This plot strand, however, not only sits poorly with the more naturalistic tone of the rest of the novel but is rather disturbing in the way it plays into the Western characters' conception of Japan as a society ruled by superstition and cruelty.  Still, it's a welcome reminder that Mitchell doesn't really do conventional, and a promising sign that in his future work he'll strike a more distinctive tone.


• God's War by Kameron Hurley- Niall Harrison has been furiously evangelizing for this book, calling it one of the best books he's read in 2011.  I wouldn't go quite that far, but God's War is certainly very good.  Set on the planet Umayma which has for centuries been ravaged by religious conflicts, the story follows Nyx, a nihilistic, amoral bounty hunter, and her team of misfits and outcasts, as they try to keep their heads above water.  When Nyx accepts a commission to track down a renegade alien scientist who may be planning to sell weapons technology to the other side in the war, she and her team end up in the crossfires of several powerful groups.  If my praise of God's War is more qualified than Niall's, it's because this is a rather shopworn plot, and Hurley doesn't quite do enough to elevate either it or the novel's characters above the familiar beats of this story.  The action scenes are good, but not exceptional.  The characters are appropriately cynical and hard-bitten, but don't quite leap off the page.  The proto-romance between Nyx and her team-member Rhys, a defector from the other side of the war who views his adoptive nation--and his employer--with disdain for their sacrilegious, godless ways, is effective but at the same time a little too obviously manipulative.  It should be noted that all of these elements improve as the novel progresses, giving the impression of an author who is growing more comfortable with her invented world and characters, so that I have hope that the forthcoming sequel, Infidel, will either transcend the template imposed by its plot and character types or use it well enough that its predictability ceases to matter.  In God's War, however, Hurley is not quite there.
  
  What makes the novel worth reading--and its sequel worth anticipating--despite this flaw is Hurley's worldbuilding, which is complicated, shocking, and overwhelming, all within the confines of a relatively short novel.  Umayma was settled by Muslims, or rather followers of some version of Islam several millennia removed from ours, which has developed and experienced schisms and splits after the planet's colonization.  Similarly altered version of Christianity and Judaism also exist on the planet, and humans on other worlds practice subtly different versions of these religions.  Though religious conflict is at the root of many of Umayma's wars, it intersects with issues of gender (Rhys's nation is patriarchal while Nyx's is matriarcahl, and the war between them is in part over gender supremacy, but both countries send men to the front, either because they are prized or disdained), race (as well as prejudice over skin tone and an at best grudging tolerance of half-breeds, Umayma plays host to several genetic mutations, some of which confer prestige while others are reviled), and the struggle for supremacy between religious and political power.
  
  Hurley does a fantastic job of creating societies that are civilized and permissive in one respect, barbaric and oppressive in others, but more than that, she creates a world in which prejudice and sectarian violence of one form or another are, in the end, inescapable, and shows us how people learn to live on it simply because they have no other choice.  On top of which are the alien aspects of Umayma--the centuries of terraforming that have resulted in a barely livable desert, the native viruses first tamed and then weaponized by the settlers, the abilities, such as shapeshifting, healing powers, and control over insects, that emerge within humans as a response to the alien environment, and the semi-organic, blood- and insect-based technology that arises as a response to all of these forces.  God's War is a novel of blood and sand, and Hurley makes us feel both--the oppressive heat, the buzz of insects, the stench of a war zone, a boxing ring, or a magician's laboratory.  It's an impressive achievement that more than makes up for the shortcomings of the novel's plot and characters, and leaves me eager for its sequel.


• The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson - My immediate reaction when I started reading The Long Ships, originally published in Swedish in two parts in 1941 and 1945, and translated into English in 1955, was that Bengtsson was the Swedish Tolkien.  Like Tolkien, he was an academic who nurtured a fascination with his nation's history and with pre-modern literary forms, and who translated that fascination--at the same time as the rest of the literary world was plumbing the depths of the modern, character- and affect-oriented novel--into a pastiche of those forms, a sort of rediscovered epic.  For all my love of The Lord of the Rings, there's no denying that this sort of endeavor should give a prospective reader pause--will it be full of inhumanly heroic characters achieving impossibly great feats while declaiming long speeches?  It wasn't long, however, before The Long Ships allayed these concerns, and not long after that I was completely under its spell.  Though the Tolkien comparison holds water, a more relevant point of reference might be Michael Chabon, who in his introduction to NYRB Classics's reprint of The Long Ships proclaims himself a longtime admirer of the novel, and whose own Gentlemen of the Road was clearly influenced by it.  Like Gentlemen and Chabon's other novels, The Long Ships is characterized by an infectious sense of whimsy, and the ability to mingle earnestly told swashbuckling adventure with just a hint of ironic distance.
  
  The Long Ships tells the story of Red Orm, a tenth century Dane who is kidnapped and press-ganged by Vikings, as he journeys to Muslim Spain and Christian Ireland, makes his fortune, wins the heart of a chieftain's daughter, and retrieves a buried treasure originally belonging to the Caliph of Constantinople.  It's a rollicking adventure, but it is also often funny and bawdy.  Far from being larger than life, Orm is an impossibly winning combination of boldness and bloodlust and endearingly human characteristics such a tendency for sarcasm and hypochondria.  Other characters, such as Orm's best friend and would-be poet Toke, his headstrong wife Ylva, and the ill-tempered but ultimately kindhearted priest Willibald, are similarly engaging.  An important theme in the story is the spread of Christianity throughout Scandinavia, and the novel's treatment of the strained relationship between pagans and Christians (and between Christians and Muslims, and Jews and everyone) is both funny and intelligent, showing the sometimes underhand tactics that Christian missionaries use to gain hold of pagans, and the way that pagans twist Christianity to suit their understanding of what a religion should be (a theme that is also touched on in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet).  Nevertheless, the heart of the novel isn't in historical recreation or comparative theology, but in adventure, and this it delivers so consistently and so well that it was almost sad to turn the last page and realize that there will be no more adventures of Red Orm.


• Eclipse 4, edited by Jonathan Strahan - I've read three of the four Eclipse anthologies, and, as Strahan himself notes in the introduction to this volume, each of them clearly had its own flavor.  Eclipse 2 veered toward meat and potatoes SF.  Eclipse 3 was literary.  Volume 4 goes beyond that into what I'd call slipstream (for the purposes of this post, my rigorous definition of slipstream is "what I point to when I say slipstream"), with stories often aiming for that sense of Feeling Very Strange.  But no matter what the theme of the anthology, Strahan and I can't quite seem to get along.  I did better with Eclipse 4 than the previous volumes, in that there are several stories I liked and only one (Damien Broderick's "The Beancounter's Cat") that I disliked, but the general level of the Eclipse anthologies continues to disappoint me, to the extent that it's obvious that Strahan and I just don't have the same taste.
  
  The only story in Eclipse 4 that truly excited me was Gwyneth Jones's "The Vicar of Mars," which is set in her Aleutian universe but nevertheless works as a sly inversion of a very familiar type of horror story often employed by the imitators of Lovecraft.  The vicar of a the title is an alien who arrives on Mars for a position that he views as semi-retirement, and encounters a deranged woman who may be haunted, and who passes that haunting on to him, thus challenging the very foundation of his beliefs.  Jones gives this familiar plot a massively entertaining twist, and besides that does a good job of writing Mars as a place simultaneously lifeless and haunted, and of rooting the story in the Aleutian universe without drowning it in extraneous detail.  Other standout pieces include Caitlin R. Kiernan's "Tidal Forces," in which a woman struggles to deal with her lover's inexplicable affliction, Nalo Hopkinson's "Old Habits," in which people who died at a mall spend eternity in it alternately reliving the moment of their death and craving sensation, Rachel Swirsky's "Fields of Gold," in which a recently-deceased man must face up to his failures in life in a party attended by his dead relatives, and James Patrick Kelly's "Tourists," the continuation of the adventures of space-brat Mariska (recently seen in the Hugo-nominated "Plus or Minus").  None of these, however, blew me away, and the rest of the anthology is solid but not much more.  I'll probably keep reading the Eclipse anthologies, because there's usually at least one story in them that I love and because no one else in the field is doing what Strahan is doing, providing a high-profile venue for unthemed stories (or at least, they're not doing it as consistently--as Strahan notes in his introduction, the year Eclipse came out there were several other similar anthologies, such as Fast Forward and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but none have developed into the kind of series that Eclipse has), but I think it's time to lower my expectations of them.

Strange Horizons Reviews, July 18-22

We have two new reviewers this week.  First, Lila Garrott looks at Betrayer, the latest installment in C.J. Cherryh's long-running series, and concludes that though it might lay the seeds for interesting stories later on, as a work in its own right it is a disappointment.  In today's review, Guria King is more pleased by Kate Griffin's The Neon Court, the third Matthew Swift novel, which, though it disappoints Guria in its handling of its main character, pleases her in its interpretation of the term "urban fantasy."  Between the two debuts, Niall Alexander reviews Kaaron Warren's third novel Mistification, a story about and containing stories which Niall finds somewhat less than the sum of its parts--the individual stories are engaging, but the story framing them is less so.

Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

Recent Movie Roundup 14

It's been rather quiet around here, I know, and will probably remain that way for a while yet.  In the meantime, some of the movies I've seen recently.

• Hanna (2010) - What a strange film this is.  The premise makes it sound like The Bourne Identity starring a waifish teenage girl, and that's not an inaccurate description, but what it leaves out is how little the film seems to care about any of the plot or character beats suggested by this description, and how much emphasis it places on its visuals.  Joe Wright--an unlikely choice for an action director--directs Hanna half as an art-house movie, with long wordless shots that take in the film's frequent changes in scenery (the frozen tundra where Hanna grows up, the Moroccan desert to which she escapes from a CIA rendition facility, the grey gloom of downtown Berlin), and half as a music video, composing the many fight sequences as if they were dances (the Chemical Brothers's fine but often too-present soundtrack does little to diminish the impression that Hanna is a very long video clip with lots of dialogue).  None of this is bad, but along the way the film leaves by the wayside nearly all of the connective tissue that might tie these sequences to one another.  Though there are nice scenes of personal connection in the film, particularly when Hanna hitches a ride with a talky, bohemian family and befriends their daughter, there's never a good sense of what kind of person Hanna is, what she wants, besides doing her adoptive father's bidding and killing his enemy, and whether she ever comes to feel ambivalent about this mission, and as her good and bad guardians, Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett are ciphers.  The result is a film that feels like a succession of well done and occasionally very good set pieces rather than a story, and thus less than the sum of its parts.


• Jane Eyre (2011) - I'm probably more enthusiastic towards this latest adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's novel than it deserves, because it's the first version of Jane Eyre I've seen that has managed to crack the book's problematic structure--the fact that though the two chapters that flank Jane's experiences at Thornfield are essential to our understanding of her character (and to Jane Eyre's being more than a melodramatic romance), adapting them in full tends to bog down the story.  By using Jane's sojourn with her cousins as a framing narrative from which she can flash back to her time at Lowood school and Thornfield, screenwriter Moira Buffini gives that chapter its rightful importance (and allows the character of St. John Rivers, so often shortchanged in adaptations of the book, his full complexity, which is ably conveyed by Jamie Bell--he's simultaneously appealing and creepy) at the same time as she develops the events that led to Jane leaving Thornfield.  It's a clever, elegant solution that nearly obscures the fact that the film is otherwise a solid but not very exciting adaptation.  Mia Wasikowska is good but perhaps too muted as Jane, and Michael Fassbender does his duty by Rochester without approaching the complexity and contradictions of the original character--his version of the character is a stock tragic hero, equal parts dashing, noble, and roguish, which serves the film perfectly well but is a cruel reduction of the character as Bronte wrote it.  Aside from the innovative flashback structure, the film proceeds through the novel's high points and important scenes respectfully, but with little flair.  It's a good adaptation, but by no means an essential one.


• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (2010), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (2011) - Despite being repeatedly disappointed by the Harry Potter films, I kept going with the series until the fifth installment, but even though Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was a better adaptation than its predecessors, doing much to curtail the excesses of one of the most troublesome books in the series and delivering one of the films' highlight performances in Imelda Staunton's Dolores Umbridge, as soon as the book series ended I found myself much less interested in anything Potter-related, films included.  The hoopla over the film series's end, however, and surprisingly positive reviews for the final film, piqued my interest enough to make it seem worth catching at the movie theater.  Before I did that, though, I had to catch up with films 6 and 7a, which very nearly convinced me to let 7b slide.  Half-Blood Prince suffers from much the same flaws as all the other Harry Potter films before it--it's rushed, overstuffed, and made almost lifeless by the need to cram so much information into a generous but nevertheless insufficient running time.  Somewhere during that process, the actual Half-Blood Prince story, which was my favorite parts of the book, gets truncated, which leads to a rather nonsensical final confrontation between Harry ans Snape (and completely short-circuits the almost-connection they forge through Snape's old potions textbook).  Deathly Hallows Part 1, meanwhile, is just as lifeless but for reasons that have more to do with the book--the extended running time granted by the money-grubbing decision to split the final film into two is wasted on the one book in the series with almost no interim climaxes before the final one, and the notoriously dull middle segment of the book becomes even more so on screen.
  
  In both films, however, there are brief scenes--Horace Slughorn recalling a gift from Lily Evans in Half-Blood Prince, Harry and Hermione dancing after Ron's departure in Deathly Hallows Part 1--in which the story suddenly comes to life.  They give a sense of the kind of Harry Potter screenwriter Steve Kloves might have created if he'd taken a less detail-oriented, more holistic approach to the books.  (And if he'd had an easier task laid before him: I'm not a great admirer of Kloves's adaptations, but that's not to say that any other screenwriter would have done a better job.  Not only do the books feature dozens of subplots revolving around dozens of characters, and change tone significantly over the course of the series, but Kloves was writing his adaptations as the series was being written, and lacked the foreknowledge that would have told him what to cut and what to stress from the outset.)  Kloves clearly has a sense of the essence of Harry Potter, even if that sense is sometimes divorced from the books (for example his obvious conviction that Hermione should end up with Harry, and in fact that she may be the actual heroine of the series), and the movies only breathe when he allows that sense, rather than specific plot points or lines of dialogue, to guide him.
  
  Which is a big part of the reason that Deathly Hallows Part 2 is actually, and to my great surprise, a pretty good film.  The bulk of the film is concerned with the battle of Hogwarts, and the combination of relatively little material to adapt (especially once the decision is made to excise Dumbledore's backstory and truncate Snape's) and unity of time and place give Kloves a lot more room to extemporize and put his own stamp on the story.  Not all of his decisions work--the film follows in Half-Blood Prince's footsteps in that the actual Deathly Hallows are given short shrift, which means that Harry comes back from the dead through what seems like writerly fiat, and pairing up Neville and Luna, though sweet, is precisely the sort of too-neat solution that Rowling wanted to avoid when she declared that the characters do not, in fact, end up together--but others, such as the expanded role the film gives to Luna and Neville separately, and the fact that the story frequently moves away from Harry's point of view to show us the battle from multiple perspectives, are very effective.  The film as a whole is exciting, moving, and perhaps most importantly, an entity in its own right, one that draws from the Harry Potter books but has a life apart from them.  It's what the films should have been from day one, and though it's a bit sad that they only managed to accomplish this in their final installment, better that than never at all.

Strange Horizons Reviews, July 11-15

Paul Graham Raven kicks off this week's reviews with a long, thoughtful look at Gwyneth Jones's collection The Universe of Things, which not only makes the collection seem like essential reading, but doubles as a detailed examination of the themes of Jones's writing.  Raz Greenberg is less pleased with another collection, Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars, whose four novellas Raz finds disappointingly uninterested in delving very deep into the psyches of their murderer protagonists.  Phoebe North makes her Strange Horizons debut with a review of Seed Seeker, the conclusion of Pamela Sargent's Seed Trilogy which, Phoebe argues, makes a compelling argument for reading the entire trilogy as the character arc of an AI.

Strange Horizons Reviews, July 4-8

Richard Larson kicks off this week's reviews with a rave for the fourth volume in Jonathan Strahan's anthology series, Eclipse.  Though several of the stories strike him as particularly strong, Richard finds the entire anthology well worth a read.  We also have two new reviewers making their debut this week.  Tori Truslow is intrigued by S.L. Grey's The Mall, which has been championed by Lauren Beukes, but ultimately concludes that its strong parts don't make up an equally strong whole.  Sarah Frost, on the other hand, is very pleased with Elizabeth Moon's Kings of the North, which she finds an improvement over the previous book in its series, Oaths of Fealty.

Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

A Long-Awaited Announcement

I think I've mentioned that I've been writing entries on television series for the third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute, David Langford and Graham Sleight.  It's been a lot of fun and I'm pleased with what I've come up with, so I was thrilled, several weeks ago, to hear from Graham the news that he's made public today: in association with British SF publisher Gollancz, the third edition of the encyclopedia is going to be made available online, free of charge.

The official website is here, though right now it's just a placeholder where you can read the press release (PDF), follow the SFE on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to receive announcements.  A beta version of the encyclopedia will go online later this summer to coincide with Gollancz's 50th anniversary celebrations, and the plan is for the text to be completed by the end of 2012.

Strange Horizons Reviews, June 27-July 1

Lisa Goldstein kicks off the week's reviews with her take on Patrick Rothfuss The Wise Man's Fear, the sequel to The Name of the Wind, with which Lisa is pleasantly surprised.  Maureen Kincaid Speller is less enamored of Holly Black's White Cat, wondering if this novel about con men doesn't constitute a con on its readers.  Christy Tidwell makes her Strange Horizons debut with a review of Kevin Brockmeier's The Illumination, a literary fiction novel about a world in which pain becomes visible as light.

Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

Game of Thrones, Season 1

I read George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, the first volume in his Song of Ice and Fire sequence, in 2005, and came away feeling that it was rather poor stuff.  The post in which I listed the reasons for my disappointment received a fair share of peeved comments, but the one that's stuck in my mind these six years came from a commenter who wondered how I could say that A Game of Thrones didn't diverge from the conventions of epic fantasy nearly as much as I'd been led to believe.  Wasn't the fact that Martin had killed his main character, Ned Stark, in the first book a huge deviation from those conventions?  I remember feeling baffled at this question.  Far from surprising me, Ned's death had seemed to me both predictable and, by the time it finally happened, long overdue.  It had been signposted early in the novel; the book's YA tone and its emphasis on Ned's young children all but guaranteed that he would be done away with; and it took forever--most of A Game of Thrones's 800 pages--to come about.  I was reminded of this exchange last week, when I watched the penultimate episode of HBO's adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire.  I knew, going into the episode, that it would most likely end with Ned's death, and yet I was nervous throughout the hour and, though obviously not surprised at Ned's death, somehow shocked by it.  I can think of no response that more thoroughly encapsulates how much Game of Thrones improves on Martin's novel--the same death that left me yawning on the page when I only suspected it was coming, riveted me on screen when I could expect it with certainty.

The most obvious reason for the superiority of television series to book is rooted in the shift between mediums.  Martin's novel alternates between the points of view of less than a dozen characters, most of whom are young children.  It's locked into their perceptions and their limited opportunities to observe their world.  A television series can't allow a single character's consciousness to dominate it to the extent that a book can, but the creators of Game of Thrones could still have chosen to follow only the characters that the first book does.  Instead, they widened the book's universe, adding scenes in which none of the point of view characters are present and complicating the presentation of many of the characters who, in the first book, are presented as flat-out villains.  A lot of the responses to my post about A Game of Thrones pointed out that my complaints about the novel--the stark division between good and bad characters; the absence of any acknowledgment that the novel's wars of succession were being fought over the backs of the common people, who would suffer equally no matter who was on the throne--were addressed in later books in the series (to which my response was and remains that the book is 800 fucking pages long; no author should need longer than that to come to their point).  The series injects this complexity into its world from day one, and is better for it.

Game of Thrones gives us better sense of Westeros's history and the horrible wars that have led to its present state.  With that information at our disposal, it's easier to see that the war between the Starks and the Lannisters is just one more succession battle in a long list, and that none of the people who have sat on it or aspire to it truly deserve the throne, because in the end no one deserves to have that much power.  That impression is compounded by the view the series gives us of the people who have no chance of ever sitting on the throne of Westeros--prostitutes, commoners, wildlings, warrior tribes--and how they're exploited or destroyed by our main characters, whose consciences are only rarely troubled by this suffering.  Maybe the later books in Martin's series make all these points, but why wait?  We're all smart people; we all know the conventions of epic fantasy.  Why not start exploding them from the first minute?  If there's a single theme to A Song of Ice and Fire, in any medium, it's disillusionment--with ideas of chivalry, honor, and rightful kingship, with love, friendship, and loyalty.  My impression of A Game of Thrones was that Martin wanted to make sure that I had been well and properly illusioned before he pulled the rug out from under me.  The series seems to have more respect for me.

I see this also in the way the series handles its villain characters, most notably Cersei.  She's still, as she was in the book, an evil schemer who sanctions--requires, even--the murders of children and puppies, is having an affair with her brother, and will stop at nothing to put her psychotic son on the throne and make herself de facto ruler of Westeros.  But Game of Thrones (and Lena Heady's performance), without ever compromising Cersei's wickedness, also gives us a very good sense of how she got to that place.  We see the coldness and cruelty of her marriage to Robert, and its juxtaposition with the hopeful, yet just as clearly doomed, beginning of Sansa and Joffrey's betrothal speaks volumes about the limited options that were placed before her, and how little thought was given by the men who directed Cersei's life to her happiness.  Perhaps most importantly, we get a sense of Cersei as a human being--when she befriends Sansa, or sympathizes with Catelyn's fear for Bran's life.  This is rank hypocrisy, of course, especially in Bran's case, but it's a human sort of hypocrisy.  It shows us that, no matter how many terrible things she's done, Cersei doesn't think of herself as a villain.  Again, I just don't see why this wasn't in the book to begin with.  Why was it so important to hammer in for 800 pages that Cersei is a Bad Girl--as if incest and child-murder weren't enough to establish this--before revealing that there's another side to her?

The second way in which Game of Thrones improves on the book is by sidelining the child characters and condensing their storylines in favor of the adults'.  A Game of Thrones suffered from many of the flaws of a YA novel without possessing any of its positive attributes.  It was mired in too-familiar bildungsroman narratives--Jon, the unappreciated child with Special Qualities who goes off to A Special School and finds A New Family and A Destiny; Robb, the Heir to the Throne who is Forced Into a Leadership Role; Bran, who must Overcome Disability; Arya, the Tomboy; Sansa, the Fairytale Princess.  Worse than that, it was mired in the oversimplified terms in which a child--and particularly these children, who have been raised to believe in Ned Stark's ideas of honor and chivalry--views the world.  And yet it lacked the lightness, brevity, and humor that make YA novels worth reading.  It was obvious that all of these children were headed for a rude awakening, but did we have to spend so much time on the preamble?  (I realize that I'm repeating myself, but something like 90% of my complaints about A Game of Thrones would have been nullified it Martin had gotten through its events in 300 pages instead of 800.)

A story about disillusionment needs children in it--we need to see Jon and Sansa learning that life is very different from fairytales, Robb, Bran, and Arya learning that their position doesn't guarantee that they will be obeyed or protected.  But it doesn't need to be told at a child's level.  The series shows us the selfishness and thoughtlessness that underpins the children's behavior--Jon's inability to grasp that he's privileged compared to his fellow Night Watch conscripts; Bran's thoughtless expectation that he will be waited on hand and foot after being crippled; Robb casually promising Arya's hand in marriage to the son of a lord whose lands he needs to pass on his way to battle, then balking when the same promise is asked of him.  It also shows us how a combination of innocence and pernicious education can produce a monster like Joffrey, or a helpless victim like Sansa.  More importantly, Game of Thrones recognizes that though children are necessary to a story about disillusionment, they are not the most interesting part of it--that adult characters who have experienced disillusionment and been stunted by it, like Tyrion, Robert, and Cersei, and the rarer kind who refuse to accept it, like Ned, are a lot of more interesting, and more varied, than the child who is just learning for the first time that life isn't fair.

Game of Thrones clearly has its flaws.  As everyone has noted, the series is too fond of exposition and too convinced that no exposition scene isn't made better by the presence of a naked woman or two cavorting in the background.  The one plotline in the original book that actually proceeded from one end of an arc to another, Daenerys's story, is rather horribly shortchanged here, flattening her growth and, more frustratingly, thoroughly Othering the one non-white character in the novel.  More interestingly, people I know who are watching the series cold are making the same complaints about it that I made about the book.  My mother doesn't understand how I can call Cersei a complicated character when she's so clearly drawn as evil.  Niall Harrison had the same FINALLY response to Ned's death on screen that I did when it arrived on page.  I wonder, therefore, whether I'm not more forgiving of the series than I ought to be simply because it's such an improvement on the book.

That's a question that will presumably be answered next season.  I'm very curious to see how I'll respond to Game of Thrones now that I'm, minus a few spoilers here and there, ignorant of how the story is going to proceed.  More importantly, I'm just curious.  I want to know whether Arya will make it to the Wall and unite with Jon, whether Sansa will find some way to rebel against Joffrey or sink into despair, and whether Daenerys will cross the sea with her dragons before or after the Stark, Lannister, and Baratheon armies tear Westeros apart.  I felt no such curiosity after finishing A Game of Thrones, no eagerness to know what happens next, no desire to pick up the next volume.  And that, even more than my response to Ned Stark's death, is really all I need to say to make it clear how much better I like the series than the book.

Strange Horizons Reviews, June 20-24

It's alternative steampunk week at the Strange Horizons reviews department.  Brendan Byrne kicks things off with his review of Angry Robot's reprint of Infernal Devices by K.W. Jeter, one of the first steampunk novels, which Brendan views as a glimpse of what steampunk might have been without its propensity to view the past through rose-tinted glasses.  Chris Kammerud looks at another reprint, Fantagraphics's translation of Jacques Tardi's early graphic novel The Arctic Marauder, a work of "icepunk."  Finally, Adam Roberts reviews Jean-Christophe Valtat's Aurorarama.  Valtat is an author of literary fiction who responded to Charlie Stross's broadside against steampunk soon after it was posted, and Adam finds his approach to the subgenre more palatable than most.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that John Clute's column Scores also appears this week.  This time, John's topics are the Jonathan Strahan-edited anthology Engineering Infinity, which he finds disappointingly backwards-looking, and J.M. McDermott's Never Knew Another, which he praises, but with the caveat that it's the first volume in a trilogy and therefore defies definitive judgment.

Footnote

In the last decade the Israeli film industry has experienced a dramatic renaissance.  More films are being made; more tickets are being sold; and, internationally, Israeli films have been acclaimed at prestigious festivals and in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars.  I have to confess that I've let most of this new wave pass me by, mainly because so few of these films piqued my interest with their premise or subject matter.  Israeli filmmaking often seems to be cleanly divided between family dramas and examinations of the Arab-Israeli conflict in its many forms, to the extent that the recent film Rabies billed itself--quite correctly, from what I've gathered--as the first Israeli horror film.  What excited me about Footnote, Joseph Cedar's follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Beaufort, when I first heard about it, was that it seemed like such a departure from this narrow range of subjects, and the film itself has more than lived up to that expectation.  Footnote is a film about the search for knowledge, about scholarship and academia, and about the politics of both.  I can't remember the last time I saw anything like it.

Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnik are, respectively, father and son Talmud scholars at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-Aba) is a philologist who spent thirty years gathering evidence for the existence of alternate text of the Jerusalem Talmud, only to be simultaneously proven right and scooped when a copy of this theorized text was discovered and publicized by one of his rivals.  Since then he has spent his time in solitary study, cut off from even the small world of Talmud scholarship and publishing nothing.  His greatest achievement is having been mentioned in a footnote to one of the canonical reference texts in his field.  Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) is a rising star--quick to publish, politically savvy, and eager to address the general public through books and lectures.  As the film opens Eliezer is seething over the fact that Uriel has been invited to join the Israeli Academy for Sciences, a body to which he himself was never invited.  His long exile seems to be over, however, when he's informed that he's been awarded the Israel Prize--given out every year for outstanding achievements in arts, sciences, and culture (Cedar's own father, Professor Chaim Cedar, is himself a recipient of the Israel Prize for biochemistry)--for which he has been nominated, and passed over, for sixteen years.  The next day, Uriel is summoned to the Ministry of Education to learn the awful truth--the call to Eliezer was made by mistake, and he, Uriel, is the real winner.

In a tense, meticulously directed scene that is one of the film's highlights, Uriel argues with Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewensohn), the chair of the prize committee and the man who scooped Eliezer all those years ago, over the issues that are at the heart of the film.  Should the Israel Prize go to Eliezer simply to spare his pride and hurt feelings, or is this a betrayal of the award's integrity?  Are Eliezer's erudition and keen insight into his subject reason enough to reward him, or is the salient point the fact that he hasn't made any meaningful contributions to his field?  Is Grossman maliciously persecuting Eliezer out of envy and curdled guilt, as Uriel insists, or is he making a stand for intellectual rigor?  And what of his dark hints that there are skeletons in Eliezer's closet that Uriel knows nothing about?  As Uriel struggles with these questions, Eliezer takes advantage of his newfound fame to lob his own grenade into the fray.  In an interview with Ha'aretz he declares that the only worthy scholarship is his kind--painstaking, thorough, and focused exclusively on the text--while the kind that publishes every half-formed thought and uses the text as a jumping-off point for discussions of social and historical issues is dismissed by him as "folklorism"--or worse, populism.  This, of course, is precisely the kind of scholarship that Uriel engages in, and he views the interview, correctly, as a personal attack.  The question raised by Uriel's dilemma and Eliezer's behavior is: which is more important, truth or love?  Uriel chooses the latter, telling himself that he's giving his father the Israel Prize out of love, but Grossman admonishes him that for all his flaws, Eliezer is not the man who would sanctify a mistake for convenience's sake, and as the film draws on its suggests that it's not love driving Uriel but fear of confrontation, the same fear that keeps him from investigating Grossman's allegations against Eliezer.  Can a man who is afraid of the truth ever be a worthy scholar?  And on the other hand, is pure scholarship for the truth's sake worthwhile if it's disconnected from all other disciplines, and shared with nobody?

Footnote is written, acted, and directed as a comedy, and at points it is very funny.  But what the comedic tone conceals is that this is a very dark story.  Bit by bit, Eliezer and Uriel damn each other and themselves.  Uriel realizes that the emotion that has been poisoning his relationship with Uriel isn't jealousy but contempt, and that he may deserve it.  Eliezer, by accepting accolades he knows weren't meant for him, loses his soul.  In this sense, the film reminds me of Martin McDonagh's In Bruges, another literate, multilayered comedy that is ultimately about damnation.  In Bruges, however, is told from within a Christian framework, so its concept of damnation is tied up in the idea of an afterlife.  Footnote is, fundamentally, a Jewish movie, so the hell that Eliezer and Uriel trap each other in is corporeal and mundane, and the crime for which they're consigned to it equally mundane--their desire for recognition and acceptance.  Neither Eliezer's alleged purity of purpose, nor Uriel's success, are enough to inoculate them against this thirst for accolades, and the film leaves us wondering just how, or whether, a scholar can balance their integrity with this desire.  (In a sort of unintended corollary to the film, Cedar played out the artistic counterpart of this struggle when he transformed an interview with Ha'aretz's film reviewer Uri Klein into an ambush in which he attacked Klein for his--to my mind, entirely wrongheaded--negative review of the film.)

You'd think that with all this weight of thematic material, with such an emphasis on the life of the mind, as well as a very talky script, there would be little attention paid in Footnote to the technical aspects of filmmaking.  But Footnote is a striking piece of cinema, with several beautifully composed shots (most notably the opening scene in which Uriel gives a speech upon his acceptance into the Israeli Academy of Sciences entirely offscreen, while the camera slowly moves in on Eliezer's stony expression) and a strong sense of the film's setting of Jerusalem and its landmarks.  There are points where Cedar's visual sensibility borders on over-stylized.  He piles long shots over misdirected cameras over split screens over on-screen text, and around the middle of the film this all seems like a bit much.  Similarly, the insistent, dramatic soundtrack by Amit Poznansky (which many reviewers have compared to Bernard Hermann's work on Hitchcock's films) occasionally overstays its welcome.  But as the story draws to its climax, these devices seem more and like tools being used--quite expertly--in furtherance of a cause, rather than an end in their own right, and Footnote is ultimately as engaging visually as it is intellectually.

If I have one caveat about Footnote, it is that I'm not sure how much non-Israelis, and particularly non-Hebrew speakers, will get out of it.  Footnote is rooted in Israeli concepts and institutions, such as the Israel Prize, whose prestige presumably doesn't cross borders.  When we're introduced to Uriel, for example, we're told that on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot he gives six lectures in a single night.  This refers to the fact that the religious custom of studying through the night on Shavuot has been transmuted into a secular event, with many cultural centers holding all-night sessions to which prominent lecturers are invited.  To Israelis, the fact that Uriel is so busy on Shavuot marks him out as a populist, a glory hog, and probably a bit in love with the sound of his own voice, but viewers unfamiliar with the custom might be lost.  In fact, some of Footnote's terms are so niche-driven that even I wasn't entirely clear on all the nuances of the film's milieu--I've seen comments by academics in the field of Jewish studies who have noted details in the film's portrayal of that field that went entirely over my head.

Even more important is the matter of language.  Footnote is in many ways a film about language, the subject of Eliezer's studies, and, fittingly for a story about people whose lives are devoted to the study of manuscripts, that preoccupation is expressed less through speech (though the film's dialogue is well-crafted, and I wonder whether translation will do it justice) than it is through text.  One of the film's most crucial scenes intercuts Eliezer's damning Ha'aretz interview with Uriel writing the judges' notes for Eliezer's award, a task delegated to him by the disgusted Grossman.  As the reporter writes down Eliezer's harsh words, the camera lingers on each stroke of the pen as if they were slashes of a knife.  At the same time, Uriel copies the judges' notes for his award and tailors them to suit his father.  It's an act of invention that simultaneously validates Eliezer's judgment of Uriel as lightweight who cobbles disparate facts together into a pleasing but inaccurate whole, and proves both to us and to Uriel that Eliezer doesn't deserve the award, the camera focusing tightly over each typed word on the computer screen as Uriel considers it, deletes it, and replaces it with fainter praise.  Later in the film, Uriel's trickery is unmasked through textual analysis, and the final twist of the knife is delivered through a play on words.  All of this text flies so quickly across the screen that it's hard to imagine how a non-Hebrew speaker, even aided by subtitles, will be able to make anything of it.  More than this, it's hard to imagine that someone who doesn't have a Hebrew reader's connection to the language will feel the visceral importance that it has in the film.

But what do I know?  The Cannes jury recently awarded Footnote the festival's best screenplay award, and it has received some enthusiastic reviews from foreign critics.  My hat is off to all of them for their ability to surmount the barriers of language and culture, and I'm hopeful that this ability presages wider acceptance.  It's gratifying to see a film about so esoteric and so quintessentially Jewish and Israeli a topic gaining wide acceptance overseas--as pleased as I've been for the Israeli directors whose films have gained international acclaim in recent years, the ubiquity of the Arab-Israeli conflict within those films has made it impossible not to wonder whether the international community doesn't have a very narrow concept of what Israeli films should be about, and it's nice to see a work that lies outside that narrow band and recognizes that Israel neither begins nor ends with the conflict gaining recognition.  The truth, however, is that films like Footnote are uncommon not just in Israeli cinema, but in cinema in general, which rarely pays any attention to erudition, study, and scholarly disputes--and more's the pity, as far as I'm concerned.  I'm very proud that one of the few films to buck that trend has come from Israel, and despite my concerns about its accessibility to foreigners, I hope that many of you get the chance to see it.