Arts & Letters

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Leave a Comment / Arts & Letters, Movies / /

First, before the spoilers, it’s good. A dramatic improvement over the prequels, if perhaps not quite up to the legendary originals. But what could live up to that sort of hype? I tried my hardest to keep expectations in check, and as a result, found myself greatly enjoying this movie. Star Wars is a lot of fun again, which is something that was sorely lacking in the prequels. My biggest complaint, and it’s a small one, is that it’s too reliant on callbacks to the original trilogy. Everyone’s freaking out about this, so spoilers ahead I guess (I’ll try to be a little vague about it).

In the behind-the-scenes materials for the prequels (of which there is a lot of footage that was generously released), there’s an infamous scene where George Lucas notes that he’s trying to establish parallels between the prequels and the original trilogy, saying “You see the echo of where all is gonna go. It’s like poetry, they rhyme”

Star Wars Poetry from whoispablo on Vimeo.

The problem here is that George Lucas is no Shakespeare, so much of his attempts at this sort of thing come off as hamfisted and clumsy. It doesn’t help that the movies themselves aren’t very good. Now, true, J.J. Abrams isn’t Shakespeare either, but he’s a lot better at this sort of thing. He may have gone to the well a little too often, but the result is that this movie captures a lot of what made the original movies so wonderful (and he did so much better than he did with Star Trek Into Darkness). Ironically, J.J. Abrams has evoked a more Lucas-esque feeling than Lucas managed in the prequels!

So there are lots and lots of callbacks. There’s a bigger, badder Death Star. There’s an assault on that Death Star that evokes the end of the original Star Wars. There’s a dark, masked villain that is strong with the dark side of the force. He has a master that only appears in hologram. He also has a surprising familial relationship with someone. BB-8 is basically R2-D2, but he has that cool rolling propulsion. There’s a cantina scene. Heck, Han Solo (and Chewbacca), General Leia, and Luke Skywalker all show up in varying degrees.

And it works. Again, there might be too many callbacks, but for the most part, they rhyme, like poetry. Where the movie really shines, though, is with the new characters. Rey (played by Daisy Ridley) is utterly fantastic, a scrappy badass and the best addition to the Star Wars universe since the original trilogy. Finn (John Boyega) is heroic and funny, hitting a note of almost childlike wonder. He’s the most openly emotional, but still brave character in the film. Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) is charismatic and, well, not quite a rogue, but perhaps dashing. He’s a straight arrow, right out of the serials. What’s more, these three leads play off each other perfectly and the performances are spot on. One could quibble at the speed with which they develop their deep friendships, but this, too, rhymes with the original Star Wars trio of Luke, Leia, and Han. I love these three characters and cannot wait to see where they go next!

For his part, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is menacing and terrifying, reminiscent of Darth Vader, but by the end he’s carved out a wholly different identity. One that’s mysterious and vulnerable and intriguing, which softens the impossible comparison between the villains. I’m not quite sure what to make of this character, actually, especially where he ends up, but I’m really excited to see what happens here too. Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) is still in the shadows at this point, but he seems suitably menacing. Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie) gets almost nothing to do in this film except look really cool in her snazzy chrome armor. My guess is that some of her stuff wound up on the cutting room floor, but that she’ll also get a chance to rebound and establish herself as a name villain in the next film. Nowhere to go but up for her.

Of the returning characters, Han Solo and Chewbacca get the most screentime, perhaps a little too much, but Abrams made it work. Princess (sorry, General) Leia is in the movie just about the right amount, and Luke is only teased a bit (he’ll certainly have more time in the next film). I was wary of this, and in some ways, my worries were justified, but it works out well enough in the end.

All in all, this is an excellent return to form for Star Wars, evoking the best of the original trilogy and yet showing enough potential to carve out its own identity in the following films. This will be crucial because otherwise, this will play out like lesser Star Wars. It’s all well and good for this film to recall the originals so much, but the sequels will need to do their own thing if this is to truly succeed. The good news is that all the pieces are on the board, and they’ve done a good job maneuvering so far. Episode VIII writer/director Rian Johnson is a Kaedrin favorite, and I’m guessing that he’ll shepherd this series on well. He’s also on board to write Episode IX, so I think we’re in good hands (though I have more trepidation about Colin Trevorrow as director).

As a science fiction nerd, I should note that this film is perhaps the least plausible of them all. And that’s actually wonderful! One of the worst, dumbest things Lucas managed in the prequels was the hackneyed attempt to explain the Force scientifically. This movie has no such pretensions, and that’s actually what Star Wars is all about.

If I may go off on a tangent for a moment here, I feel like I should mention the books that I always thought would make a great sequel trilogy. Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy is still wonderful and worth checking out, even though it is no longer official canon material. Grand Admiral Thrawn was a wonderful villain, so different from what you might expect, and that worked really well (still holding out hope for a Thrawn cameo in these new movies – come on Rian, just throw a dude with blue skin and a white Admiral’s uniform on screen somewhere). The heroes in that book were still primarily Luke, Leia, and Han, which wouldn’t really be possible in movies these days without recasting, and the new characters weren’t quite as lovable as the new trio we got in this film. Still, the series is worth checking out, and it’s really the only Expanded Universe stuff that I’ve really enjoyed.

Anyway, this movie is great. I will grant that I’m not particularly objective about this whole thing. There’s a lot of nostalgia and love in this series for me, so it’s hard to separate this from that. If I really wanted to, I’m sure I could nitpick a ton of stuff, but I don’t want to. In fact, much of what I could nitpick here is almost equally applicable to the original movie. There’s no sense in that, I just want to revel in this for now. I enjoyed this a lot more than the prequels, and this movie shows a lot of promise for future Star Wars efforts. Only two more years until Episode VIII (though we’ll get a Rogue One movie next year).

SF Book Review, Part 20

2 Comments / Science Fiction / /

I’ve reviewed a bunch of individual books recently, but I am still way behind, so here’s the first of several attempts to catch up. With some reservations, I’ve enjoyed following along with the Hugos the past few years, but I’ve also noticed that I really enjoy delving into the back catalog, and I’m hoping to do more of this in the near future (rather than desperately reading new releases in the hope that they’d be Hugo-worthy – that was not really that productive for me last year). Today, we’ll cover a few books ranging from 10 to 50 or so years old…

  • Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper (1962) – Frontier man Jack Holloway comes home from prospecting for sunstones one day to discover a, well, little fuzzy animal hanging around his house. As he gets to know the fuzzy (and his extended family, who also come to stay at “Pappy Jack’s” house), he begins to suspect that these aren’t just cute little animals, but actual sapient beings. Naturally, this spells trouble for the corporation who thinks they own the planet… if the fuzzies are people, that means the company loses out on property rights and the like. First published in 1962, this makes for a great introduction into the SF genre, tackling difficult questions like how to define sapience without getting too esoteric. I don’t think you’d call this a novel of deep characterization, but it’s short and sweet, with excellent pacing and plotting for a thoughtful exploration of consciousness. Plus, the fuzzies feel like the cutest race ever devised. The only flaw is that there are many subsequent works that build on this, and thus it might seem like it’s treading familiar ground… My understanding is that Piper never quite got the respect he deserved in his lifetime, but he’s certainly gained in that respect in recent years (despite some small outdated technological references to things like “tape”, this seems like an example of the classics that would still be relevant to youngsters today). It helps that his works have lapsed into the public domain (this book is available for free on Project Gutenberg) A few years ago, John Scalzi wrote a snappy “reimagining” of this book with his Fuzzy Nation, which has a lot of the same beats, with some added complexity and slightly shifted priorities. It’s also worth checking out, but I wish I had read the original first.
  • Quarantine by Greg Egan (1992) – In Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Duo, there is a planetary system that is surrounded by an impenetrable barrier, and humans go to investigate. In Quarantine, humans are the ones inside the barrier. At first, this just seems like a way to set up a backdrop of riots and weird religious cults for this neo-noir detective story, but it later becomes clear that Egan had a much deeper reason for use of that trope (one that is a lot more convincing and interesting than Hamilton’s eventual explanation for his take – note also that Egan’s novel predates Hamiltons by many moons). Egan is known for diamond-hard SF, but this is the most approachable novel of his that I’ve read, and he eases you into the mind-blowing stuff with a deft touch. Make no mistake, he gets into true sensawunda territory and this novel contains one of the better explorations of quantum mechanics, observer effects, collapsing wave functions, etc… that I’ve seen in fiction. It’s a well balanced blend of trashy detective tropes and hard SF. The ending might leave some with lingering doubts, but I was so elated by the way Egan tied together the various oddities of setting and plot midway through the book that I didn’t mind at all. Probably my favorite book of the year (blows anything nominated for a Hugo in the past few years out of the water, in my opinion), and highly recommended!
  • Sundiver by David Brin – I only really tackled this because I want to read the second novel in the series, Startide Rising, and wasn’t sure if the first one was necessary or not (it is apparently not, but we’ll see soon enough). In this series, humanity has met up with lots of other alien races, most of which were “Uplifted” by “patron” races. Humanity baffles everyone though, because there doesn’t appear to be a patron race for us, and we’ve made our way to the starts by working through first principles (rather than being taught by someone else). Go Earthican exceptionalism! An expedition into the Sun is mounted to see if the mysterious creatures living there could provide an answer, but various mishaps along the way are cause for hijinks. This novel does a decent job setting up the idea of Uplift and how unbearably patronizing and frustrating the superior alien races can be, but I also found it a bit bloated and overlong. It eventually settles into a better groove later in the story, but it took a little too long to get going. The idea of luminous beings living in the sun is an interesting one that evokes Hal Clement’s first published short story, Proof (which is excellent). This book doesn’t quite approach Clement’s level, but it’s decent enough. I’m hoping for much better things from the sequel, which I hope to get to sometime early next year…
  • Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke – This novel of two magicians, friends and later rivals, bringing magic back to England is an interesting one. Clocking in at over a thousand pages, it might seem forbidding, but it’s not a difficult read at all. I certainly don’t know that it needed to take quite so long, but it never feels like it stalled either, a neat little trick and a testament to the craft Clarke used in writing this book. On the other hand, it does end up feeling more episodic as an overall story (I have not seen the recent BBC series, but I can imagine it working well in that respect), which is not usually my favorite approach. It doesn’t help that our main characters are, while not quite unlikable, they aren’t really the most compelling people either. Mr Norrell is mildly competent, but also a complete turd about it. Jonathan Strange fares better, but is also fairly obtuse as a character. None of this prevents the story from being enjoyable and each “episode” is compelling in its own right. There are a lot of traditional English magic tropes, mischievous fairies and the like, and the novel hangs together well. I can see why it garnered the Hugo award about a decade ago, even if it probably wouldn’t have been my favorite. In the end, I’m really glad I read this, even if it’s also not really my type of book. Often in these situations, I think such an approach is valid but extremely difficult to pull off. I feel like a lot of people give works too much credit for ambition in works that don’t fully realize the ambition. Not so here. Clarke accomplished exactly what she wanted with this, and it’s worth reading because of that.
  • Agent of Change by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller – I read this almost a year ago, so details are getting a little fuzzy (pun intended?) for me, but this is the first in a long-running series by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. This one covers the meeting of Val Con and Miri Robertson, thrust together by circumstances, but clearly having some form of attraction. It starts out as an action-adventure chase novel of sorts, and our two protagonists spar with each other while fending off throngs of enemy redshirts in an attempt to escape. Things slow down in the middle, and even though we meet a very fun race of alien Turtles, the story never quite resolves itself, ending on a sort of cliffhanger. I generally enjoyed this, though I also think it says something that I have not revisited the series. However, it’s something I could definitely see myself doing in the nearish future. (Every time I start a series like this, I’m hoping to spark some sort of Bujoldesque Vorkosigan Series flame, but so far, I’ve not managed to get there… but then, it took a few books for the Vorkosiverse to really heat up for me too, so there’s that.)

And that’s all for now. Next time around, we’ll tackle some newer releases…

Ancillary Mercy

Leave a Comment / Hugo Awards, Science Fiction / /

With Ancillary Mercy, Anne Leckie has completed a trilogy that began with a lot of promise which was almost immediately squandered with the middle installment in favor of, I don’t know, let’s just say tea. This is perhaps more harsh than necessary, but I do think this series is indicative of much of the strife going on in SF fandom these days.

The first book in the series, Ancillary Justice, had a lot going for it. A complex, non-linear narrative that deftly employed indirect exposition to establish its worldbuilding (instead of tedious info-dumps). A heady mix of hard and soft SF, including an ambitious exploration of hive minds or shared consciousness. Galaxy-spanning empires, mysterious aliens, all the Space Opera tropes you could ever want. It was distinctly lacking in plot and storytelling, but as the first in a series, it established a lot of potential. Potential which the second book, Ancillary Sword, almost completely jettisoned in favor of a small scale, colonialism parable. This was so unexpected that you kind of have to respect the reversal. The problem for me is that nearly everything I enjoyed about the first book was gone. Instead, we had lots of interpersonal relationships, petty politics, and lots and lots of tea. Endless drinking of tea, the intricacies of good and bad china, even the exploitation of tea plantations.

This third and final book of the trilogy aims to complete the story, and despite hewing much closer to the second book’s small-scale approach, it actually manages to stick the landing. But to continue the gymnastics analogy, the series as a whole feels like a routine that started off with ambitious, high-difficulty release moves, flips and twists and whatever, then moved on to boring filler, and finishing with the simplest dismount possible. Again, this might be too harsh, as this book does comport itself quite well, it’s just so different than what the first book seemed to promise that I can’t help but feel disappointed.

During this year’s whole Sad Puppy kerfluffle, I ran across some non-puppy lamenting the puppy line and proclaiming that science fiction was primarily about the “exploration of the human condition”, which is funny because I think that is indeed the whole crux of the matter. With this Ancillary series, Leckie is clearly fascinated by the “exploration of the human condition”. And of course, there’s nothing wrong with that! Much of science fiction does this, and it’s a wonderful, time-honored part of the genre. The problem is that the grand majority of art ever produced is about the “exploration of the human condition”. That’s not what makes science fiction unique, and while Leckie managed to channel some of SF’s unique sense of wonder and conceptual breakthrough in the first book, she basically abandoned that pretense in the succeeding novels. Lots of Puppies complained about Ancillary Justice, but I know for a fact that a lot of them enjoyed the novel. I doubt any of them appreciated the sequels. (NB: while I have some leanings towards the type of works Puppies prefer, I am not and have never been a Puppy!)

So what we end up with is a series with some fascinating worldbuilding and SF ideas that are established but not really explored. What seemed like promising lines of thought in the first book come off like window dressing in this final novel. Leckie even acknowledges this shift in-story. In the first book, we find out that the shared consciousness tyrant that rules an empire had actually fragmented into two factions that were secretly at war with one another. Great idea! In Ancillary Mercy, our protagonist Breq flatly opines that she doesn’t care what happens, and thus we get no real exploration of what this civil war amidst a hive mind would entail (and no clarification as to how these hive minds actually work, and how such a situation hasn’t happened thousands of years earlier). Another example? A mysterious alien race called the Presger have been hinted at throughout the series. It’s suggested that they may be the force behind our Tyrant’s little civil war. There’s this extra-super-fantastic gun that, at first, is simply undetectable. In this final book, it can destroy entire spaceships with a single shot. As deus ex machina, it works, I guess, but it’s pretty indicative of how Leckie treats the Presger. They’re there for convenience, not for actual insight.

So I’ve blathered on for several paragraphs and I haven’t even talked much about this book. It picks up where the last one left off, with Breq trying to effect repairs of a space station while overseeing the planet’s transition from tyranny to more self-determined government or somesuch. She knows that Anaander Mianaai is going to visit to re-establish her rule, and she will probably have to also deal with the Presger, who will no doubt be a little upset that their translator/ambassador was killed in the previous book’s shenanigans. Meanwhile, everyone drinks tea out of cheap china because the good china was destroyed in the previous book, but hey, tea is needed.

I know it sounds like I’m being dismissive of the tea stuff, and to a certain extent, I feel justified in that, but it actually doesn’t bother me that much. I enjoy the tea minutia more than I would have thought, and as a beverage nerd who enjoys a cup of tea every now and again, it’s got its charms.

Anyway, the plot of this one actually works a good deal better than the second book. It’s not as episodic, and hangs together better. If you can go with the deus ex machina of the Presger, the story actually works really well. The pacing is still off, and too much time is spent on the seemingly endless parade of officers that have severe emotional problems (seriously, this is the culture that conquered most of the galaxy? How?) For instance, at one point a mysterious ship shows up out of nowhere. It’s the new Presger translator/ambassador! She will no doubt be a little miffed that the previous translator was killed! Whatever shall we do? Apparently, we need to sit down and discuss how microagressions make a member of the crew feel. And look, I’m not predisposed to hate that sort of thing, but it kills plot momentum and is one of several such instances. On the other hand, the new Presger translator is, by far, my favorite part of the book. She has a very weird affect about her, coming off as nonplussed and yet somehow wise, and primarily acting as comic relief. Her disaffected demeanor fits well, and is used to good effect throughout the novel, almost making up for contrived role the Presger play in the series.

The conclusion actually works, too. It is, of course, not a conclusion to all that was set up in the first novel and again relies on the deus ex machina of the Presger, but it does resolve the smaller-conflict at the heart of the book in a surprisingly satisfying fashion. At the start, I thought Leckie had written herself into a corner, but she manages a couple of twists and turns that make sense. I left the book feeling pretty happy that I read the series, even if I have my fair share of complaints.

Despite my reservations, this book has been well received critically and fans of the series seem to love it. I have no doubt that it will make next year’s Hugo ballot (indeed, even the Sad Puppies are talking about it), even if it will probably not make my ballot. I am actually curious to see if Leckie will revisit this universe, maybe even tackle some of the unrealized potential she so ably established in the first book. I would like to read that, actually.

Whither the SF Classics

4 Comments / Science Fiction / /

A couple weeks ago, author Jason Sanford kicked up a fuss about the “fossilization of science fiction and fantasy literature”, suggesting amongst other things that “No one still discovers the SF/F genre by reading Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, or Tolkien.” Needless to say, this caused a lot of consternation in some quarters, though my guess is that the medium of delivery had a lot to do with the response. Sanford posted all this in a series of Tweets, which by necessity are brief and thus come off as pompous and dismissive. Sanford later posted a clarification on his blog in a much more friendly tone, even if the weight of his argument is the same. Others have taken up the call as well, notably John Scalzi who notes:

The surprise to me is not that today’s kids have their own set of favorite authors, in genre and out of it; the surprise to me is honestly that anyone else is surprised by this.

And indeed, I’m not surprised by this notion, but it does represent a difference in the SF/F world. I was a teen in the 1990s and read all sorts of stuff from the 1930s-1960s corridor that generally represents the Golden Age, the same way (near as I can tell), teens in the 70s and 80s did. This is literally the first time in history when readers weren’t introduced to SF/F via Golden Age authors like Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein (as Scalzi notes, Tolkien probably still reigns in Fantasy). What has changed?

I think a big part of it might have something to do with the on-demand nature of our current media environment. To take an example from another medium, kids growing up in the 70s didn’t have much choice as to what movies they watched. It was whatever was playing on TV or the local theater, and a lot of what played was in the public domain. In other words, film nerds in the 70s saw a lot of silent movies by default. I grew up in the 80s, and with the advent of cable, I didn’t really see any silent movies until I started actually studying film. I did, however, watch lots of black and white movies or movies from long before I was born, simply because that’s what was showing on Cinemax or whatever. You can really see the difference in film critics who grew up in an earlier era, they have a much broader base to draw from when discussing current movies. Nowadays, it’s all about what’s on Netflix.

Bringing it back to SF/F, I think this is a big part of it. Many folks hit up the classics of SF/F back in the day because they were basically the only thing available. Book stores had tiny SF/F sections and primarily stocked the classics with the occasional new release. These days, kids can snag an ebook or even an audio-book on-demand, and their available choices have exploded in the past couple of decades. SF/F has sorta conquered the world, and is widely available everywhere. Thus the classics, while still available, are getting dwarved by other books.

And this is before you get to all the other options kids have to occupy their attention these days (video games, anime, internet stuff, etc…) There seems to be a dismissive streak running through fandom these days. Perhaps its because there’s so much new SF/F flooding the market. There’s too much to keep up with; you don’t have a choice but to filter in some way.

One thing a lot of people mention when it comes to this is that kids don’t like the classics because they can’t relate, which seems kind of silly to me. Sure, old books were written in a different context, and there’s a lot of weird stuff people were exploring. But for crying out loud, this is Science Fiction we’re talking about here! The whole point is to explore alien ideas and blow your mind within the confines of a rationally knowable universe. When people are pining for the Golden Age of science fiction, they’re craving that Sense of Wonder we got from Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. Lots of great science fiction is being written these days, but a surprising amount is dystopian misery porn or boring character studies with a veneer of SF Tropes. This is especially rampant in YA fiction, which is so melancholy that I’m wondering why we’re so excited by it. Maybe the reason people keep recommending Heinlein juveniles is because so much of YA fiction is dedicated to gloomy settings and grim despair. There’s nothing wrong with that type of story, but is it really surprising that some of us crave Golden Age throwbacks like, say, The Martian?

I suppose the worry is that this represents another cultural battleground where kids don’t read the classics because they’re trying to establish a “safe space” or some other such nonsense. Again, I find that odd considering the whole point of speculative fiction is to expand your horizons. To a lot of people, reading is a passive activity, but it really isn’t. If you’re not interrogating what you’re reading, you’re doing it wrong. This gets us into strange territory though, and we’d have to go about discussing what really makes the SF genre work, which is probably better served in its own post someday.

None of this is malicious or necessarily dangerous, but it is different, and for the first time in 70ish years, kids aren’t reading the “classics”. One can’t help but wonder what that will mean, but I’m not too worried. People like what they like. I don’t like the idea of dismissing the classics out of hand, but I wouldn’t be surprised or upset if someone got into SF by reading, say, Scalzi or Weir. For instance, I don’t think Fantasy is anything but strengthened by the popularity of Harry Potter. The same is probably true with SF, even if I’m not a huge fan of dystopian YA…

Weird Book of the Week

Leave a Comment / Weird Book of the Week / /

Last time on Weird Book of the Week, we fell in love with giant pink space bunnies who shoot laser beams out of their nose. This time, we amp up the weirdness with something that is 100% chosen because of it’s title. Behold: I Don’t Care if My Best Friend’s Mom is a Sasquatch, She’s Hot and I’m Taking a Shower With Her. I think that pretty much says it all. Probably a good companion piece to a former Weird Movie of the Week, Yeti: A Gay Love Story.

It appears the author, one Lacey Noonan, has quite a back catalog of raunchily titled books, including A Gronking to Remember (first in a series of Rob Gronkowski themed erotica novels), Seduced by the Dad Bod, and The Babysitter Only Rings Once. Quite prolific.

The Scarlet Gospels

Leave a Comment / 6 Weeks of Halloween, Arts & Letters / /

“I am doing another Books of Blood collection and I’m writing a sequel to the book on which Hellraiser was based – this will be Pinhead’s first appearance on the page, because he isn’t even named in the original.” – Clive Barker, from an interview in Imagi-Movies, Vol 1, No 2, Winter 1993/94

The story that would eventually be published as The Scarlet Gospels has been a long time coming. To my knowledge, it was first mentioned in 1993, and has gone through innumerable permutations on its way to its current incarnation, published in May 2015. First it was to be but a single small story amongst others, then it ballooned into a 230,000 word behemoth, and finally it was cut back down to around 100,000 words. It’s been quite a journey, and while I remain fully committed to the notion that authors don’t owe their readers anything, teasing a story for 20+ years is perhaps a bit excessive. The biggest problem with this novel is one of expectations. Even if I found myself enjoying the book, it’s hard to live up to 20 years of anticipation.

The novel brings together two of Barker’s most famous characters. There’s the Cenobite popularly known as Pinhead (but don’t call him that to his face), who we meet as he’s finishing off a quest to obliterate all living human magicians and in so doing, wrest all of their arcane knowledge for himself. You probably know Pinhead from the myriad filmic portrayals in the Hellraiser series of movies, but his origin is rooted in Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart. Then you’ve got Harry D’Amour, the private detective with a knack for finding himself at odds with the supernatural, as he did in Barker’s The Last Illusion (from Cabal) and Everville. Here, he starts off on a routine assignment to clear out a dead man’s magical library. Amongst that man’s possessions is Lemerchand’s Configuration, the infamous puzzle box capable of opening a door to hell that is usually occupied by our Pinheaded friend. It turns out that Pinhead would like Harry to act as a witness for the next phase of his nefarious plan. Harry is naturally reluctant, but when Pinhead kidnaps Harry’s best friend Norma Paine, an old blind woman who can nevertheless see and speak with the dead, Harry has no choice but to round up a posse to chase after Pinhead. Their travels naturally lead them to hell, where Pinhead is waging all out war on hell’s establishment.

I tend to vacillate back and forth on Barker. I love a lot of his short work, but he also has a tendency to get lost in language and stylistic machinations. That being said, I often find that he’s able to right the ship just before I’m about to actually give up on what I’m reading. His best work manages the balance incredibly well, other works are a little more uneven. This one actually veers towards the more page-turnery side of the divide, but perhaps he’s gone a bit too far. It feels pretty mainstream for what I normally think of from Barker. Even his grotesque imagery feels a little staid, nowhere near that edgy stuff he was writing in the 80s. On the other hand, this was actually quite a fun read, and I mostly enjoyed the whole experience.

I tended to prefer the plot threads centered around Pinhead, who remains a fascinating and somewhat obtuse character. On the other hand, I think I’ve figured out that I’m not a particularly big fan of Harry D’Amour. He’s fine, but I feel like we’re constantly told how badass he is, rather than actually seeing him doing something cool. For the most part, he seems to just blunder through the story, barely making it through alive. This story is often pitched as Pinhead versus Harry D’Amour, but if that was the case, Harry’d be dead on page one. He just doesn’t display the competence that we’re constantly informed he is supposed to have. Take, for instance, his encounter with Lemerchand’s Box. He actually recognizes it for what it is (competence!), but he picks it up and starts playing with it anyway, thinking to himself that he can stop before it goes too far. As a reader, you’re just sitting there in shock that a character who is supposedly smart when it comes to the supernatural is doing something so utterly stupid. He does slightly better as the story proceeds, but that’s mostly just because he’s so ineffective that no one actually considers him a threat, and thus he can act as Pinhead’s witness.

Hell is always an interesting place to visit, and Barker’s hell is an interesting one. A bleak, blasted landscape filled with impossible architecture and grotesque creatures, not to mention an almost bureaucratic streak that runs through everything, Pinhead guides us through it all with aplomb (Harry just follows along in Pinhead’s footsteps like a dope). We’re eventually treated to a glimpse of the morning star himself, Lucifer, and what follows is a well plotted and interesting confrontation. The ending seems oddly appropriate, though I have no idea where hell is supposed to go from here…

So was it worth the wait? It doesn’t really feel like it, but that doesn’t make the book bad either. It’s clearly missing the edge that Barker’s earlier work so astutely captures, but it’s still worthwhile and actually quite entertaining (if a bit on the perverse side). It was certainly a good Halloween season read, which is all I can ask for…

Stephenson’s Fall

Leave a Comment / Neal Stephenson / /

Buried in an excerpt of Neal Stephenson’s interview with Locus Magazine is a throwaway line that mentions his next project:

Fall, featuring some characters from Reamde, is forthcoming.

Well that’s interesting, isn’t it? It certainly doesn’t say much, and there’s almost nothing else being reported out there. After many machinations, I managed to discover a slightly more descriptive notice at Publisher’s Weekly (it has since gone off the first page and thus requires a login, but Google Cache still has it, and this blog picked it up as well):

NYT bestselling author, including the most recent SEVENEVES, Neal Stephenson’s FALL, pitched as a high-tech retelling of PARADISE LOST featuring some characters from REAMDE, to Jennifer Brehl at William Morrow, in a major deal, for publication in Fall 2017, by Liz Darhansoff at Darhansoff & Verrill (World English).

The plot thickens. Sorta. I have no idea how a story about Lucifer’s quest to poison God’s most favored creation (with flashbacks to angelic wars) would play out in a high-tech fashion (with characters from a contemporary thriller like Reamde), but hell, I’m on board. And Fall of 2017 (I see what they did there) is not that far away in Stephensonian timescales (most books are separated by 3-4 years), so I’m sure we’ll find out more in due time. While I have no idea how this will work, it’s not at all surprising that Stephenson is working on a Milton-themed book…

No word on the series of historical novels Stephenson teased in an interview a few years ago:

Stephenson says he has returned to the past to tap a “similar vein” to that covered in his globe-spanning Baroque Cycle.

“They’re historical novels that have a lot to do with scientific and technological themes and how those interact with the characters and civilisation during a particular span of history,” he says of the new series, refusing to be specific about the exact period.

“It looks like it will start with two back-to-back volumes.

“One of those is largely done and the other will be done early next winter. So I think [they will be released] mid-to-late 2014 perhaps – something like that.”

Well clearly that didn’t happen, as Stephenson must have switched gears to put out the long gestating Seveneves. No word as to when or even if these novels will ever happen. Whatever the case, I’m all aboard the Stephenson train, as per usual.

Update from November, 2018: Fall, or Dodge in Hell is confirmed!

Update from August, 2019: The book is out, I have read it, and I have thoughts.

The End of All Things

Leave a Comment / Science Fiction / /

When John Scalzi started his little serialized publishing experiment a few years ago with The Human Division, it felt a little like a television series. Each story was self contained and episodic in nature, and Scalzi even went as far as to call each installment an “Episode”. The book (unexpectedly and distressingly) even ended on a cliffhanger, and when he announced the sequel, he did so by saying that it had been “renewed for a second season“. Well, the new season has finally arrived, in the form of The End of All Things.

To continue the television analogy, though, this is less like a season two and more like a mini-series. The first book/season consisted of thirteen stories/episodes, and they were very episodic in nature. There was a burbling background conflict that wound its way through, like one of those procedural TV shows that has a monster of the week, but an overarching conspiracy that gets mentioned every now and again. This new book/season only consists of 4 novellas (each of which is significantly longer than most of what preceded it), and instead of focusing on self-contained, episodic conflicts, this one focuses pretty intently on bringing that background conspiracy to the forefront in a more longform narrative way. As a result, this feels like a bit of a turn in the series, and lends itself to the mini-series analogy. This is all well and good, and the narrative here is more cohesive than the previous entry, but then, one of the things I loved about the first book was the way some of those standalone stories worked. So yes, this is more cohesive, but not quite as much as a normal novel, which makes it a bit of an oddity. Let’s take a look at each episode.

The Life of the Mind is the first story, told by Rafe Daquin, who is basically a brain in a box. He wasn’t always that way, but here he tells us the story of how he became that way and what he did about it. It actually explains a lot about the mysterious disappearing ships from the previous book, but it is also the most clumsy story in the series in terms of exposition. Maybe Scalzi was concerned that the head-in-a-box thing would be confusing, but even inexperienced SF readers don’t need you to repeat something three times or extrapolate every piece of information. I was a little concerned at the outset of this story because Scalzi’s last novel, Lock In, also started with an unnecessary and egregious example of info-dumping. Fortunately, while this grated on me a bit, it wasn’t nearly as bad as last time, and I was able to quickly move past it. I liked the character of Rafe and I liked where this novella went.

This Hollow Union is up next, and it follows alien diplomat Hafte Sorvalh as she attempts to keep her Conclave of alien races together while dealing with those pesky human factions. You may remember Sorvalh as the Churro loving diplomat from the previous book, and it was nice to revisit her. While told from a different perspective, this basically continues the narrative set up in The Life of the Mind, in particular the fallout of various information leaks and revelations about third party factions out for their own purposes. It’s a little talky, but it reminded me a bit of the previous book’s focus on the diplomatic corps and while Lieutenant Harry Wilson shows up at one point, the zaniness factor isn’t quite what it was. Since we’re finally getting down into the details of the shadowy conspiracy hinted at in the first book, the tone is necessarily more serious here, and Scalzi did manage a few little surprises. All in all, a solid story.

Can Long Endure is told from the perspective of a 4 person CDF squad as they’re sent out on riot patrol, keeping the Colonial Union in line (instead of their normal conflicts with alien species). There’s some of Scalzi’s snappy dialog here, and that part goes pretty well. The story itself is a little repetitive and the ending is a little anti-climactic, but that’s kind of expected for the penultimate episode of a series, right? It was my least favorite episode, but even then, it was a good story, well told.

To Stand or Fall brings things to a close on a strong note. Due to its episodic nature, it’s hard to call any one character the protagonist of the series, but the one man present throughout almost all the stories would be Lieutenant Harry Wilson. He’s a fun character, and breathed fresh life into all the preceding stories whenever he showed up (even if only for a short time). Here, he’s the viewpoint character, and while the overarching narrative has become more serious, Wilson’s stories always feel breezy and fun. It helps the Scalzi is able to devise a plausible solution to the challenge facing our various factions and heroes (you can nitpick if you like, but I was more than willing to go with it).

As a whole, it all works out, even if it comes off a bit disjointed. That’s just a natural result of the whole serialized publishing thing though, and I think the overarching narrative was pretty solid. Personally, though? I think I appreciated some of those lowish-stakes diplomatic missions from the first book a lot more. This sequel reminds me of a TV series that started out episodically, then got bogged down in the mythology and ended up devoting all its attention to the continuity story rather than coming up with a series of small, fun adventures for our heroes. I can’t really fault the book for being something different than what I desired though, and it still fares really well in my book. I am on the fence with this one with respect to the Hugos though. None of the stories are really suitable for inclusion in the novella category (The Life of the Mind might be, but the glaring exposition issues make it a tough sell), but the disjointed nature of the narrative also makes best novel a tough sell. On the other hand, I liked this more than most of the stuff on the past two years’ worth of novel ballots, so there is that! Of course, we’ve got plenty of time here, so there’s no need to make snap decisions. Let’s see how this one ferments in my head over the next few months. All of which is to say, this is a solid successor to The Human Division, and it resolves all the cliffhangery elements of that first book well. The resolution here does not seem to lead to a natural third “season”, but who knows? I would certainly like to spend more time with some of these characters…

Hugo Awards: The Results

6 Comments / Hugo Awards, Science Fiction / /

The Hugo Award winners were announced last night, and since I’ve been following along, I figured I should at least cobble together some thoughts on the subject. Also of note, the full voting breakdown in case you wanted to figure out how instant-runoff voting works. In short, this year’s awards were a clusterfuck, and no one’s coming away happy. “No Award” happens in several categories, and those voters were clearly the dominant force in the final voting. You can blame this whole thing on the puppies if you like, but to my mind, it’s a two way street. Plenty of blame to go around. Action and reaction, it’s a thing.

  • The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Ken Liu translator) wins Best Novel. As predicted, this one had the most rounded support because it wasn’t on either Puppy slate (which allowed Noah Ward voters cover to vote for it), but it was endorsed by the dread Vox Day (which allowed Puppy voters to vote for it). That being said, it was my favorite book on the ballot (and indeed, the only one I actually nominated that made it to the final ballot). The Goblin Emperor came in second place, but was my least favorite novel on the ballot.
  • Looking at the stats for Best Novel nominations, a few things jump out. The two next in line were Trial by Fire and The Chaplain’s War, both Puppy nominees (though it seems likely that Torgersen would have turned down his nomination, had it come to that). After that were two non-pups in Lock In and City of Stairs. I didn’t particularly love Lock In, but it probably would have come in third on my ballot had it been there (which says something about last year’s crop of favorites, I think). Interestingly, The Martian showed up next, though I’m not sure if they screened it for eligibility. It was on my nominating ballot and it may very well have been my favorite novel of last year (eligibility issues aside).
  • Chaos Horizon has a detailed initial look at the stats, of course, and estimates the influence of various factions as such:

    Core Rabid Puppies: 550-525

    Core Sad Puppies: 500-400

    Absolute No Awarders: 2500

    Primarily No Awarders But Considered a Puppy Pick: 1000

    That sums up to 4600 hundred voters. We had 5950, so I thin the remaining 1400 or so were the true “Neutrals” or the “voted some Puppies but not all.”

    For what it’s worth, I would put myself into one of the 1400 “Neutrals”.

  • The only other fiction to win an award was the Novelette “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, which basically won by default since it was the only non-Puppy nominee in that category. It was also my least favorite story, by a wide margin. “No Award” takes Novella (which I was kinda expecting, since even I was ranking No Award in that category, though not in the highest place. It seems that nominating one writer for three stories isn’t the best approach.) and Short Story (more surprising, I guess), trouncing all competition in the first pass of voting.
  • So the Puppies did not do so well in the final voting. I was basically expecting this, though perhaps not to this flagrant extent (the 2500 Absolute No Awarders number is pretty eye opening). More evidence for my Action and Reaction theory, and I stand by most of what I said there. One thing I hope I’m wrong about is “No Award” being the worst possible outcome. It’s always been clear to me that the current Puppy approach does not work (assuming you’re actually trying to get your nominees an award and not, say, burn the whole thing down). My recommendation for Kate Paulk: Please, for the love of God, do not put together a slate. Focus your efforts on garnering participation and emphasize individuality. If you’re dead set on listing out nominees, go for a long reading list as opposed to a blatant slate. Brad Torgersen called for nominees early this year, and the grand majority of them didn’t make his slate (and some things appeared on the slate that weren’t discussed? I think? I don’t really feel like digging through that.) Perhaps coordinate that effort and be inclusive when you list out eligible nominees. We’re all fans, let’s write this year off and try not alienating everyone next year (that goes for everyone, not just the Puppies). Forbearance is a good thing.
  • The notion that voting on the current year gives you the ability to nominate next year is a brilliant one that might actually keep me participating. That being said, if there’s anything like this year’s clusterfuck brewing, I’m out. I can forgive this year because I think even the Puppies were surprised at how successful their slate approach was. I can understand the Noah Ward voters too. But if the same thing happens next year… I don’t know, why bother?

I’m not particularly looking forward to the upcoming teeth gnashing, gloating, and/or whining that is inevitable in the coming week. If a worthwhile discussion emerges, maybe I’ll roundup some links, but I’m not particularly sanguine about that prospect.

Seveneves

1 Comment / Hugo Awards, Neal Stephenson, Science Fiction / /

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.

That’s the eye-opening first sentence of Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, palindromically titled Seveneves. It speaks to how much science fiction loves the what if mode of storytelling. What if the moon exploded? At first, not a whole lot. The moon splits into 7 big pieces, but thanks to gravity, they’re generally in the same location and orbit, exerting the same tidal forces, and so on. That is, until the pieces of the moon start to smash into one another, splitting massive rocks into smaller chunks, leading to an exponentially increasing number of collisions. While we’re not really expecting the moon to explode anytime soon, the notion of space debris colliding with other space debris, creating more debris and thus increasing likelihood of further collisions, is something NASA scientists have actually speculated about. In the novel, Stephenson calls this the “White Sky”, and the smaller pieces won’t stay nicely in orbit like the moon did. Within two years of the moon exploding, the Earth will be assaulted by what Stephenson calls the “Hard Rain” as all of the pieces of the moon fall to earth as bolides, releasing so much energy and heat as to make the Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years.

The human response to this news is to send as much material into orbit as possible. In a way, this is an “ark” story (a common subgenre, though it’s also often relegated to backstory), but since Earth orbit is going to be crowded with moon parts, it can’t be a single, giant ark. Instead, Stephenson comes up with the concept of a “cloud ark”, a series of small, independent arklets that can swarm and maneuver to avoid debris. Various groupings can be made, and there’s also a home-base of sorts with the International Space Station, which is somewhat larger than it is today and which is also bolted to a large iron asteroid called Amalthea (which acts as a shield for the ISS). Naturally, the cloud ark cannot accommodate more than a few thousand souls, so there’s lots of Earthside wrangling and politics over who is chosen to survive, and who will remain on ground to perish in the hard rain.

You’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned anything about characters yet, and that’s pretty illustrative about how this book reads. There is a very large cast of characters, of course, but the book seems primarily concerned with orbital mechanics and more broad sociological interactions. The depth with which Stephenson explains various elements of humanity’s future home in space will no doubt turn casual readers off, but this is par for the Stephenson course. Blog readers know that I’m totally in the bag for this sort of thing, so it didn’t really bother me, and while info-dumps can be frustrating when done poorly, Stephenson is a master of incorporating that sort of detail into a larger narrative. Here, the orbital mechanics are mixed fairly successfully with social mechanics and the more divisive political aspects of the cloud ark.

Depending on your point of view, this could be viewed as an intensely pessimistic view of humanity. I was actually reminded of the Battlestar Galactica television series, where people can’t seem to agree with each other about anything, even when the entire race is on the brink of extinction. In some ways, it’s not quite that pessimistic, and spoilers aho, humanity manages to survive, but not after some pretty harrowing and surprisingly sudden crises. More spoilers forthcoming, but the immediate takeaway is that fans of Stephenson will probably enjoy this, but like most of his novels, you probably have to have a certain mindset to enjoy it…

Individual characters feel more like chess pieces in the story’s game. Sure, they have personalities (this comes into play later in the book, moreso than early on) and they’re a compelling enough bunch, but their actions are severely constrained by their circumstances. This is, in many ways, the point. Living in space does not allow for many of the habits and practices we’re used to here on our cushy planet, after all. Personal space, privacy, and so on are pretty severely limited. Still, the characters feel more like types than individuals. There’s a science populizer called “Doc” Dubois Harris who is basically Neil Degrass Tyson. There’s a miner turned roboticist named Dinah Macquarie, who is arguably the main character of the first two thirds of the book. We like both of them, and several of their surrounding characters. There’s an almost cartoonishly devious political villain that emerges as well, along with her own retinue of followers. We don’t like them! And there are dozens of other side characters, some becoming very important, some unceremoniously dispatched in one space disaster or another.

It’s a huge novel in nearly every way, including it’s physical size (another 800+ page hardcover), but also in terms of its ambition and the way Stephenson tells the story. If you think the first line is cool, the transition about two thirds of the way through the book was another pretty big surprise. At the time, humanity isn’t in particularly good shape. They’ve fractured into two main camps, but few remain alive when they rejoin one another. On the other hand, they’ve finally reached a relatively safe and stable position in space to build out from, and they have enough technology to ensure the survival of the species… and then Stephenson starts a new chapter with “Five Thousand Years Later” and proceeds from there.

It’s a bold choice, one of many in this book. Unfortunately, when you move the action that far forward, there’s a lot to catch up with. As mentioned above, Stpehenson is a master of info-dumps, but this section of the book, in which nearly every narrative event is preceded by long and complicated digressions about how this or that piece of new orbital technology works or how this or that aspect of society works (again we get the juxtaposition of orbital and social mechanics frequently here) left even me a little impatient. It doesn’t help that the events that drive that future part of the narrative seemed pretty obvious to me from the start (it’s based on something from earlier in the book). Still, once the basics are established, the story gets moving on its own terms and ends strong enough.

It’s just that you have to get through 5000 years of basics, which takes a while. A lot of Stephenson’s ticks are noticeable here (and I don’t mean that in a bad way). Stephenson loves to play with familial relationships and often returns to certain types of characters. Here, we get seven different strains of characters, such that when the story is moved 5000 years into the future, even if we don’t know the new characters yet, we know their ancestors, and this gives you a little bit of an idea as to who they are. It’s not a perfect, one-to-one relationship, the same way that Randy Waterhouse is distinct from Lawrence Waterhouse (in Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon), but there’s some underlying type that works for them both. Now, it is a bit of a hard sell to say that the 7 distinct genotypes (the eponymous seven “eves”) wouldn’t have interbred more in the intervening 5000 years (it is implied that this does happen, but it seems infrequent), but I can accept that the storytelling works better when you make such sharp distinctions.

It’s funny, but this feels like Stephenson’s most cinematic work. Many of these info-dumps and extended discussions of orbital mechanics would be much less daunting if presented visually (the book even includes a few illustrations to help you visualize what he’s talking about, but they are few and far between). Alas, I’m guessing such a movie (or, more likely, TV series) would be cost prohibitive because of all the special effects required to blow up the moon, portray the white sky and hard rain, and all the arklets, let alone the far future space habitats and gigantic orbital launch devices, etc… Perhaps someday this could happen, and I think it could perhaps even surpass the book in terms of quality if done right.

I’m a total sucker for Stephenson, so it’s not a surprise that I enjoyed this novel. It’s not going to unseat Cryptonomicon as my favorite, but it compares favorably to his other work. I have to admit that I don’t particularly agree with all of his sociological musings here, but this is interesting, exciting, and ambitious stuff, and I can’t fault Stephenson for wanting to explore this fascinating territory. I know that this is an unpopular line of thought with increasingly ideological Science Fiction fans of late, but I’m actually capable of disagreeing with a work that I think is great without actually needing to doubt that greatness. This is bold, adventurous writing, and while there are plenty of valid complaints to be made, I still think this is some of the most interesting SF published in the last few years (it certainly puts the last few Hugo novel ballots to shame). You can bet this will show up on my 2016 Hugo nomination ballot.