Asking the Wrong Questions

"How do cellphones work?" Abe, one of the protagonists in Shane Carruth's ultra-low budget 2004 SF film Primer , asks his friend Aaron, at a point near the film's midpoint. The line is delivered with some urgency, and with good reason--depending on the answer, Abe and Aaron may have just created a time-travel paradox. This is one of the standard landmarks of the SF or technological thriller film--the point at which a seemingly safe scientific discovery goes off the rails--and as he does throughout the entire film, Carruth chooses to present it in a non-standard manner. Whereas in another film, the characters' emotions would be at the forefront--they would swear, or go very silent, or take on a terrified expression--in Primer , Abe and Aaron's fear is expressed through an urgent quest for knowledge, the acquisition and application of which takes up the bulk of their waking hours. Since it gained significant acclaim at the Sundance film festival (where it won th...

Life on Mars season 2 teaser . Apparently this is a clip from an episode, which explains why it cuts off so abruptly, and boy is it strange. Still no sign of a premiere date, though.

Behold my slightly-belated birthday present: As you might have gathered from the key in his side, this is a wind-up toy--Bender walks. He also comes with a detachable stogie and a can of Mom's Robot Oil. ( Available from , since I know some of you will want to know.)

Over at Strange Horizons , Dan Hartland writes about Battlestar Galactica so I don't have to, and is, as usual, thoughtful and eloquent on the subject: Moore these days seems almost exclusively interested in the endpoint rather than the journey. So "Unfinished Business" needs to be a story about Apollo and Starbuck's relationship, and thus crafts an entirely unconvincing sequence of flashbacks to justify the resuscitation of their on-again off-again love affair. We are expected to accept this ret-con of the characters without question, even as we beg to know why not a hint of this sudden backstory has been dropped before. Similarly, in "Hero," Adama reveals that just prior to the Cylon attack on the colonies he had led an illegal incursion into Cylon space, thus arguably provoking the machines' devastating onslaught. The viewer resents such massive elements of backstory being conjured from nowhere. This is not merely another permutation of the show...

Dark Horizons reports : HBO .. plans to turn George R.R. Martin's bestselling fantasy series "A Song of Fire and Ice" into a drama series by David Benioff ("Troy", "Wolverine") and D.B. Weiss ("Halo"). ... Variety indicates that the series will begin with the 1996 first book, "A Game of Thrones," and will turn each novel into a season's worth of episodes I was profoundly unimpressed by A Game of Thrones , but as in the case of The Prestige , an adaptation into the visual medium will automatically get rid of the novel's greatest weaknesses--Martin's indifferent prose and absurd verbosity. Once these steps are taken, there's probably enough potential in the core story for Benioff and Weiss to make something of merit--I'm quite curious to see how an epic fantasy fares on the small screen.

I confess, in spite of the praise heaped on Christopher Nolan's The Prestige from almost all quarters, I was somewhat reluctant to go see it. Similar praise, after all, had been heaped on the Christopher Priest novel of the same name, of which the film is an adaptation, and it was and still remains one of the most unimpressive pieces of fiction it has ever been my misfortune to read (admittedly, the soporific experience of reading The Prestige takes on an almost rosy glow when compared to the one I had reading Priest's Clarke-winning The Separation , a very strong contender for the worst novel of my reading life). To my relief and delight, Nolan's version of the story is truly as fine as its fans would have had me believe--a clever, cleverly-made film, at the same time suspenseful and thoughtful, and full to the brim of observations about stage magic, showmanship, and the sacrifices that both entail. Most interesting to me, as one of the half-dozen people on the planet w...

Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson's best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from [George] Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions. ... Stephenson will adapt his novel for the miniseries, the first time the Hugo and Nebula award winner has written for TV. The full story is here , and includes descriptions of other projects the Sci Fi Channel has in development (the 'behind the scenes of a long-running space opera' comedy sounds like it might be cute). ( Via )

...the chapters on whaling in Moby Dick can be omitted by all but the most punishment-loving readers... William Goldman, The Princess Bride I made my first stab at Herman Melville's Moby Dick at the age of sixteen (and, just to get this out of the way as quickly as possible, yes, it was because of all the pimping the book was getting on The X-Files ). I made it about halfway and stalled, defeated by the novel's frequent forays into whaling lore--the hierarchy of whaling ships and the roles of each of their crewmembers, whaling techniques and the process of converting a killed whale into salable products, the history of whaling and its customs, and, worst and most stultifying of all, whale biology. But I was annoyed by my inability to deal with a novel so central to the Western canon, and my much-abused copy survived several cullings of my library. One of these days, I would promise myself each time I divided my books into 'save' and 'give away' piles, I'm ...

This online comic strip answers the question (honestly, I think 300 is a bit low for Starbuck). See also . (Via)

As I wrote in yesterday's best books roundup, this is not going to be an very long list--it might just be that I'm developing a better bullshit detector, but I didn't read many genuine stinkers this year. Which might seem like something to be grateful for, but I've found that a truly terrible book can be a blessing in disguise--few things are as fun as a no-holds-barred rant against a novel that offends one's sensibilities simply by existing in the universe. Which is what the year's worst reads roundup is all about--it's how I compensate myself for having read these books in the first place. As it was last year, this list is presented in ascending order of horribleness. Misfortune by Wesley Stace I think Wesley Stace must live in a cave. How else to explain the fact that, in his debut novel, Stace chose a premise all but identical to that of Jeffrey Eugenides's sublime, Pulitzer-winning novel Middlesex --male child raised as a girl--and then sat back an...

Another year gone by. The time for listmaking is once again upon us (or, as those overhasty folks who were posting year-end summaries at the beginning of the month or even, I ask you, in November would have us believe, already long past) and the news is not good. I've mentioned on more than one occasion that 2006 was not turning to be a great reading year for me, but it was only when I sat down to compile this list that I realized how dire the situation truly was. This is not to say that I read a great many bad books this year--tomorrow's worst reads of the year list is as anemic as this one. Rather, what 2006 was short on were remarkable reads--remarkably good or remarkably bad--with the result being that I can come up with more candidates for the honorable mentions list than for the year's best reads list. Which is probably the main reason for the massive drop in the number of books I read this year--75--compared to previous ones--106 in 2005 and 99 in 2004. When you put ...

Not so sure if there's any point posting anything on Christmas day, but here are some of the last books of 2006. I'll have some year-end thoughts later this week. Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman - on a Friday afternoon nearly ten years after they last saw one another, unemployed teacher Simon kidnaps the young son of his ex-girlfriend Anna. The boy is soon recovered and returned home, unharmed, but the kidnapping causes an upheaval in the lives of a large group of people, some of whom--Simon and Anna, Simon's psychiatrist and his daughter, Anna's husband and his business associate, a young prostitute in love with Simon--emerge in this novel to narrate the events preceding and following Simon's reckless, inexplicable act. Seven Types of Ambiguity bills itself as a Rashomon -ian synthesis of conflicting perspectives, but there are two major problems with this description. The first is that the seven characters--who come from different social backgrounds, ...

Strange Horizons 's reviews section published a piece yesterday that I've been looking forward to for quite some time: Graham Sleight's retrospective on The West Wing , in which he argues that Aaron Sorkin's political drama can and should be read as science fiction. On one level, of course, the claim is silly: there is nothing in the series outside the canon of current political or scientific possibility (or what we as outsiders might imagine those to be.) The West Wing is entirely mimetic. Of course, in another sense, it's trivially true that The West Wing is sf. It's a piece of alternate-world science fiction: presidential elections take place in 1998 and 2002, not in leap years; the September 11th terrorist atrocity does not take place; and global events in general follow a different track from our recent past. I want to argue, though, that it's sf in a more profound sense, the Roger Rabbit sense. It makes an argument, as sf does, about possibility,...

Nathan Fillion joins Tim Minear's new show Drive : The show, from 20th Century Fox TV and executive producers Tim Minear, Ben Queen and Greg Yaitanes, chronicles an underground race across America. Fillion will play Alex Tully, a charming, rogue landscaper who is coerced into joining the race to search for his wife who had been abducted. Let's all just cross our fingers and hope that the Firefly / Wonderfalls / The Inside curse has run its course. Via . There are a few brief scenes from Drive in this self-made Minear fan video .

Peter Boyle has died. It's something of a shock to discover that even ten seasons of Everybody Loves Raymond aren't enough to tarnish his performance in that single, magical X-Files episode. UPDATE: A few reminders of the past .

With impeccable timing, Showtime's Masters of Horror anthology series chose this last friday to air an adaptation of James Tiptree Jr.'s short story "The Screwfly Solution" . I say impeccable not only because Julie Phillips's extremely well-received biography, James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon , has brought Tiptree back into the limelight in recent months (Niall at Torque Control has an excellent list of Tiptree-related links, including several stories), but because it was only this last week that I finally got around to reading Her Smoke Rose Up Forever , which collects eighteen of Tiptree's short stories, including, yes, "The Screwfly Solution". With the eerie, disturbing piece still fresh in my mind, I was quite curious to see what writer Sam Hamm (interviewed here about the task of adapting the story) and director Joe Dante would make of it, and the adaptation, in turn, gives me a chance to discuss some of my reactions to ...