Asking the Wrong Questions

Most of my reading over the last few months has been for reviews, which has left this blog rather silent on the book front. The following is a selection of some of my non-review reading. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld - Lee, the protagonist of Sittenfeld's apparently semi-autobiographical debut, is a not-too-bright, not-too-talented, not-too-special middle class, Midwestern girl who somehow manages to finagle a scholarship to a prestigious East coast prep school. This is a familiar premise, but unlike most school story protagonists, Lee has very little to recommend her. Her primary motivation throughout her four years at Gault Academy is to fit in, but the harder she works at achieving this goal the more isolated she becomes. Lee is so terrified of being different, and of being singled out for that difference, that she forgets to be anything at all. She is so focused on popularity as an abstract concept that she doesn't even notice the people around her, who might have become ...

The summer of three plus one. Spider-Man 3 (2007) - I appear to be one of the few people on the planet to have liked the second Spider-Man film, mainly because, rather than reiterating its character's core concept as so many other superhero films do (Batman: the fine line between fighting evil and becoming it; X-Men: being different is something to be celebrated, not feared, or lorded over others) it expands upon it, using it as jumping-off point for character development. The first (and, I've always thought, severely over-praised) Spider-Man film got the 'great power = great responsibility' formula out of the way, and while the second film plays around in the same neighborhood it ultimately uses the Spider-Man framework to expand on the theme of heroism, ultimately bringing Peter to the realization that his doesn't originate in his superpowers, and that even ordinary people can be heroic from time to time. The third film takes the same premise and uses it to dis...

In case you've been wondering what I've been doing with myself for most of this month, here it is: Infinity Plus 's review of the 2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award nominees (by now not even fashionably late, I know, but there was some trouble getting hold of review copies). That's at least a month's worth of a blogging in a single pop, so enjoy yourselves, and come back here if you feel like arguing about anything. If you're looking for contrasting opinions, Farah Mendelsohn disagrees with almost every one of my assessments in her own (timely) overview at Strange Horizons (we both agree that Streaking sucks, though), and over at Torque Control Niall has a roundup of individual reviews of the nominated books. I'm particularly fond of John Clute's review of Streaking , and of Nic Clarke and Victoria Hoyle's joint review of Gradisil at Eve's Alexandria, a blog I would have added to the blogroll a long time ago if I weren't horribly lazy abou...

...after killing off most of the women and characters of color: David Anders, best known for playing the evil British freelance spy Julian Sark on TV's "Alias", will play ancient samurai warrior Takezo Kensei in NBC's sci-fi drama "Heroes" next season. There are times when loving this show takes a lot of effort. (reported by Strange Horizons )

There are some good reasons to draw comparisons between the recently completed Doctor Who two-parter, "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood", and Steven Moffat's first season story "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances," and not simply because the latter is the last time Who was as good as it's been these last two weeks. As Iain Clark points out in this entry on "The Family of Blood", "this two-parter does for World War One what 'The Empty Child'/'The Doctor Dances' did for World War 2: make an abstract historical event into a real and relevant thing for a young generation of viewers." The comparison seems particularly apt when one notes the two stories' emotional arcs. "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" is a story that emerges from the bleakest despair into the most miraculous, unexpected hope and redemption. "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood" tells an o...

I know, it's been ridiculously silent around here lately, and I never got around to posting those pictures from Brazil (I might yet, if it doesn't seem absurdly late to do so). In my defense, I have been writing--it's just that most of it is for other venues and is leaving me with very little free time to consume books or films or TV, much less write about them. That'll change, hopefully, in the near future. In the meantime, a few thoughts and links: I'm glad the Danish kidney donor show turned out to be a hoax, but I haven't exactly regained my faith in humanity in the wake of this revelation. Most of the reactions I read over the last week assumed the show was in earnest. Maybe I just hang around a particularly gullible corner of the internet, or maybe we've reached the point where we no longer believe there are any depths to which people won't sink in the pursuit of fame and fortune. More importantly, the people who tuned into that show probably did b...

By now you've probably heard about Veronica Mars 's cancellation. Michael Ausiello has it from the horse's mouth . Everyone always says that it's better for a show to die at its peak, rather than linger for an unnaturally long life, hemorrhaging quality and viewers. That's usually true, but it less painful--for the viewers--when a show dies at a midpoint between these two stages--when it's still good, but no longer as transcendentally excellent as it once was. I was pleased with this season's opening mystery arc, but less impressed with the murder mystery, whose handling I found aimless and half-hearted. Worst of all, when the time came for the standalone episodes (two of which have been quite good), I found myself caring a great deal less than I thought I would. I was ready to let go. The truth is, Mars 's writers never worked out how to extend their series into a multi-season format. They tried replicating the first season and discovered that lighteni...

Just popping my head in to say that I am back, safe, sound and exhausted, from my travels. Brazil was gorgeous and I will have pictures and reports up soon. The big news from my period of absence is that M. John Harrison's Nova Swing won the Arthur C. Clarke award. Congratulations to Mr. Harrison and a hearty 'well done' to the judges. In less satisfying award news, the Nebula winners were announced yesterday. Given the general mediocrity of the ballot, I can't quite find it in myself to get worked up over the winners, and of course things could have been much worse--"Unfinished Business" might have won the best script award. Finally, if you haven't done so already, be sure to check out Andrew Rilstone's ongoing series A Sceptic's Guide to Richard Dawkins , in which Rilstone mercilessly filets Dawkins's failures as a religious historian and as a philosopher in his recent The God Delusion , in a sort of counterpart to Fred Clark's by-n...

Tomorrow morning, at an hour so ungodly that I shudder to speak it, I will be leaving on holiday to Brazil, where I plan to attend my cousin's wedding, do tourist things, and read many books. I'll be back on the 12th, so expect some report (possibly with pictures) some time after that. I have no idea whether I'll have internet access during this time. It's possible that I'll be able to see comments to the blog, but unlikely that I'll respond. I definitely won't be reading e-mail. Be good.

Overall, the novella ballot is neither as exceptional as the novelette shortlist nor as uniformly good, but unexceptional, as the short story shortlist. It may, in fact, be the worst of the three ballots, although to a certain extent this is praising with faint damns. Two of the nominated stories appeared on the 2006 Nebula ballot, and I reviewed them last month. To reiterate: Paul Melko's "The Walls of the Universe" , about a boy who meets his parallel-universe counterpart, is amusing, but fails to explore the more interesting ramifications of its premise, including the question of how two versions of the same person could have developed completely opposed moral outlooks, as the protagonist and his alternate do; the protagonist of William Shunn's "Inclination" --a young member of a pseudo-Christian luddite cult living on a space station--is exteremely appealing, and his journey towards rejecting his upbringing is compelling, but the story suffers a crucial...

(Context, and a sampling of available works, here .) Following in the footsteps of Peter Watts, whose decision to make his novel Blindsight available online under a Creative Commons License may very well have been a major factor in getting said novel on the shortlist for this year's Hugo, fellow nominee Michael F. Flynn is allowing readers to download his novel Eifelheim ( PDF ). Flynn is also nominated this year for the novelette "Dawn, Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth" , which I greatly enjoyed , and as it turns out he is also the author of a very fine piece from the 2005 Hugo ballot, "The Clapping Hands of God." All that, plus an interesting premise--a first contact story set in 14th century Europe--makes me quite eager to give Eifelheim a try. (Link via SF Signal .) In unrelated news, and coming as a surprise to, I suspect, absolutely nobody, Drive has been cancelled .

I was a little reluctant to continue with this year's Hugo roundup after the remarkable--and, after a years-long drought, wholly unexpected--experience that was the novelette shortlist. It seemed impossible that the other shortlists would stack up, and in fact the short story ballot is nowhere near as exceptional as the novelette ballot. It is, however, a solid bunch of a stories, with no piece by Resnick or Burstein or someone equally unpublishable marring its overall quality. The closest the short story shortlist comes to a bad story is Tim Pratt's "Impossible Dreams" , and even in this case I'd be more comfortable calling the story slight and insubstantial. Pratt's story is a play on the familiar one about a mysterious disappearing, reappearing shop from which the protagonist purchases a magical object (to be fair, Pratt acknowledges the hoariness of his premise--through a Twilight Zone reference, no less). In this case, the shop is a video rental store fr...

This is just guesswork on my part, but I imagine that, had the creators of Lost been asked, back when the show was in its embryonic stages, to sum it up in a few words, they would have described it as a scripted Survivor , taking the reality juggernaut's premise--strangers thrown together in an unfamiliar setting--and imbuing it with the one quality that reality TV never quite manages to reproduce--drama. By the same token, Tim Minear and Ben Queen's new series Drive , whose first two episodes aired yesterday in Canada and which has its American premiere on Sunday, seems to be a scripted version of The Amazing Race , the series which seems to have taken Survivor 's place in the hearts of reality fans. Like Lost , Drive provides its characters with a more powerful and compelling motive than the chance at a cash prize (although a fantastic payoff awaits the winner of Drive 's race) and fifteen minutes of fame. A mysterious, all-powerful, all-knowing Them run the ille...

It's been said before, but one of the things that made Life on Mars unusual is--was--that by its very nature it couldn't reveal its genre until its very last episode. Was the show SF--had Sam Tyler travelled from his, and our, time to 1973?--or fantasy--was Sam insane, fabricating memories of a reality that just happened to be identical to ours?--or mimetic--was Sam in a coma following his accident, hallucinating 1973 as an extended metaphor for his predicament? It doesn't help that the show's writers seem to have changed their minds halfway through the story. If the first season premiere--in which Sam changed the course of future events--prioritized the time travel reading, the second season as whole seemed eager to drop it. As the series came to its end, we were left with a choice between madness and hallucination, and between two different kinds of slightly unsatisfying endings. If Sam is in a coma, then everyone he's met and everything that's happened over ...

Ellen Kushner conveys a message from Geoff Ryman in which he offers his thoughts about the reasons for the gender imbalance on this year's Hugo ballot : SF is driven by an underlying dream, and part of that dream is profoundly hostile to domesticity, which is traditionally assigned to women. It is hostile to staying at home on Earth. It dreams, Peter Pan-like, of magic flights to a Neverneverland in the stars, full of pirates and mermaids and Indians. It is largely a land of and for Boys. Women love it too, perhaps because they also want to escape domesticity. These days women's place in fantasy is not as Wendy. Women get to be guys now. They have a place in the SF dream, most usually toting guns or swords. I guess it's fun for women to shoot people , and men certainly feel more at home with women who act like the rest of their buddies. I would say that the dream is hostile to the traditional place of women's power: home. Home is what you escape and Mother is who you h...