Ready Player One

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a wonderful cyberpunk story, covering the search for an epic Easter egg hidden in cyberspace. The inventor of cyberspace as we know it has died, leaving no heirs, but has left clues strewn throughout the bits and bytes of his creation to find his inheritance. The path is littered with movies, video games, books, comics, and other references to the 1980s, when the inventor grew up. (About the only missing reference is to Tetris.) In itself, this is reason to read the book: Liz and I amused ourselves by being able to say things like "Jordan from Real Genius" and "Inigo Montoya" to each other as we caught the references ahead of their explanation.

Our narrator and hero is on a quest to find the egg. He meets interesting characters on the way, including the (cyber) girl of his dreams. Of course, there are bad guys from the evil corporation who want to take over cyberspace for their own ends; they're on the hunt, too. Our hero almost keeps ahead of them, and outsmarts them until the point where they kill him. Then it gets truly epic.

We listened to the audiobook version of this in the car on our various peregrinations last summer and fall. By Thanksgiving weekend, we were sufficiently sucked in that we listened from chapter 33 to the end in the living room. Part of that delight was the performance of Wil Wheaton --- yes, Wesley Crusher --- who just does a stunningly wonderful job as the reader. Not only is he a good voice actor, but he clearly was enjoying the material, and was particularly well-suited to read it.

Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

My friend Lisa highly recommended Robin Sloan's Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and I can now do the same. It's a book in that odd space between mainstream novel and science fiction. There's a clear quest, secrets to be decoded, heroes and villians, patrons and sinners, danger and love, secret cults and the internet. Our point of view character is a clerk in a bookstore that Is More Than It Seems. His roommate is a guy at Industrial Light and Magic who builds physical props not digital ones, and he begins dating a young woman who does data visualization at Google. He and his crew work to solve a puzzle left by Aldus Manutius, the brilliant Venetian printer and typesetter. Sloan recreates Aldus's type designer Francesco Griffo as the German Griffo Gerittszoon, with a very different backstory. There are nice puzzles for the reader, too: the secret society membership numbers appear in odd places so you can track folks through them. Aldus's printer's mark appears in an interesting context. And there's a boutique hotel in New York catering to computer nerds where the bar has a drink called the Blue Screen of Death. (I'm sure I missed some other little fillips.) It's a wonderful book, and I completely devoured it.

Feynman

Having reviewed The Challenger Disaster recently, I should also mention Feynman, a graphic novel biography of Richard Feynman written by Jim Ottaviani with art by Leland Myrick. It's based, in part, on the oral histories Dick did with Ralph Leighton, son of his long-standing colleague Bob Leighton. It's great fun to read, bringing back a number of memories of a fascinating character I had the pleasure of knowing. It includes some stories I hadn't known, and quotes extensively from some of his lectures. His Nobel Prize banquet speech, for example, covers some of the same ground as Robert Heinlein's SFWA Grand Master speech. The artwork is lacking in several places --- sometimes it's hard to tell Feynman from Freeman Dyson, for example --- but the story is nicely laid out in the same random-walk way that Feynman's oral histories are.

(That said, all of the graphic novels Ottaviani and his collaborators have done have been excellent. They cover a wide range of technology and science, and are a delight to read.  I'll review more of them some other time.)

About Time

In the same sense that William Gibson kept rewriting the same damned novel for so damned long, Richard Curtis --- Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill --- keeps making the same damned movie. At least with About Time we get to skip Hugh Grant. It's the same mix of heartwarming pap that all his movies are. Father passes on to his son the family secret, that men in their line can travel backwards in time. Hilarity and hijinks ensue. Our hero learns that love is more important than being able to take a do-over. Yadda, yadda. Domhall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams put up a good fight against the material, and Bill Nighy is excellent as usual. Wait for the short story instead.

In the Shadow of the Moon

Given that yesterday was the forty-fifth anniversary of the events described, it seems appropriate to post this review today:

They're old men now. Gray or balding, wrinkled, with liver spots. Their voices are still crisp and animated, with the calm of test pilots, which they all were, as they explain what it was like to be In the Shadow of the Moon. We have interviews with ten of their tiny fraternity --- it was a fraternity which only ever had twenty-four members, six of whom were dead and one of whom didn't give interviews at the time the film was made.  The interviews are intercut with archival footage from their adventures on and around a world a quarter of a million miles away. Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins talk about the seat of the pants feelings as three hundred feet of rocket below them lights off and starts to propel them upwards. Charlie Duke explains that his father barely believed he traveled to the Moon, but his son thought it wasn't a big deal. Jim Lovell explains that the let down of not walking on the Moon didn't hit him until after he'd safely returned to earth after Apollo 13. Gene Cernan says baldly "I called the Moon my home for three days of my life... That's science fiction." It's material I know well, so there are no new facts here, but it is wonderful to hear the story of their adventure in their own words, to see the expressions on their faces as they pause to gather their thoughts and realize that, yes, they were at the Moon, to sample the awe they felt, to have them tell how they were transformed by the experience, how they now regard the Earth as a precious jewel. However, this has a very high wow! factor. Certainly, my sense of wonder was actively engaged through the whole three hours it took me to watch this hour-and-a-half long documentary: I kept backing up and watching passages a second time.

"When they opened up the fuel baffles we could hear the full rumble down these huge pipes. Then it dawned on me from an emotional point of view that we're gonna go to the Moon."

     --- Jim Lovell, In the Shadow of the Moon

Dick Francis's Bloodline

I've been a voracious reader of Dick Francis's thrillers -- all of which take place with a background of horse racing -- since I discovered them in the 1980s. After Francis's wife (his unacknowledged co-writer) died, his son Felix left his job teaching physics at a British prep school and started writing with his dad. Now that Francis senior has died, Felix has continued the franchise his parents started with Dick Francis's Bloodline, and continues it badly. Like Silks, the novel which they wrote jointly, this ends with the hero killing the antagonist. It also proceeds through the gratuitous murder of an attractive woman who appeared for six chapters only to be knocked off, the annoying "I recognized the murderer, but won't tell you who it is right now" ploy, and two instances of "how could they have been so stupid" for the sole purpose of advancing a stalled plot. That's it. I'm done. Francis pere put together good thrillers, which violated rules of plotting to good purpose. I don't know how good a physics teacher Francis fils was, but as a writer, he seems to be re-inventing particle physics --- he's just smashing things together to see what flies out.

Where the Truth Lies (film vs book)

I tripped over Atom Egoyan’s film Where the Truth Lies via a Netflix recommendation.  I was massively disappointed.  The film stars Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a 1950s comedy-singing duo, who break up under mysterious circumstances after a dead girl is discovered in the hotel suite they are about to check into.  The point of view character is a young journalist who idolized them when she was a small child, and is writing a biography of one of them in the 1970s.  It wants to be a film noir mystery, but can’t quite get its act together to do so.  Fortunately, the credits note that the source material is a novel by Rupert Holmes (who you know for “The Pina Colada Song” and the plays Drood and Accomplice), and the novel is everything the movie should have been.  It's a send-up of Tom Wolfe-style “new journalism” and provides the full story of our intrepid girl journalist chasing down the reasons for the team’s break up, their sexual predilections, the quirks of their entourages, and surrounding oddness.  It is a fully formed story, rather than the cartoon Egoyan attempted to get past the censors at the MPAA.  We have a real whodunit plot with murder, blackmail, suicide, mistaken identity, and several interesting switchbacks in the path.  This is the story I would have expected from Holmes, who, in Accomplice, was a subtle and sneaky storyteller.

Hugo-nominated short fiction for 2014

Every year, over the summer, after the Hugo nominees are announced, I read at least all the short fiction nominees.  It's also been my habit to write short notes as I read the stories and rank them so I can vote, and I share those with you now, by category:

Novella

1. "The Butcher of Khardov" by Dan Wells: Sword and sorcery, with a Russian flavor. I was unimpressed through the first third, but then it turns into an interesting psychological portrait of a broken warrior, trying to maintain his humanity, and failing.
2. "Equoid" by Charles Stross: A novella in Stross's "Laundry" universe, taking yet another page out of HP Lovecraft. Unicorns are not cute and fluffy, but actually dangerous eaters of souls, and they're invading rural England. More of the same from Bob Howard's universe of eldritch horrors.
3. "The Chaplain's Legacy" by Brad Torgersen: A chaplain's assistant who was a prisoner of war holds the key to preventing a resumption of an alien war, except the powers-that-be want to fight on regardless. A rehash of CJ Cherryh's stunning 1986 nominee "The Scapegoat," crossed with a bit of CM Kornbluth's Not This August. 
4. "Wakulla Springs" by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages: An excellent literary story, but there is no science fiction content here, until perhaps the last three paragraphs.
5. "Six-Gun Snow White" by Catherynne M Valente: Retelling Snow White with a western flavor, mashed up in a feminist narrative, dragging on for too many pages to drudge through.

Novelette

1. "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" by Mary Robinette Kowal: An astronaut wants one last long-range exploratory flight, but must leave her dying husband to do so. Lovely cross-references to L Frank Baum.
2. "The Exchange Officers" by Brad Torgersen: Space battle in low earth orbit between American and Chinese astronauts. Annoying political swipes, but well-told.
3. "The Waiting Stars" by Aliette de Bodard: Humans transplanted into cyborg starship-controlling minds, and one family rescuing their matriarch whose ship is lost, and her mind transplanted into another body.
4. "Opera Vita Aeterna" by Vox Day: An elf decides to explore human religion, and becomes a scribe in a monastery. Workmanlike, not stunning.
5. "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" by Ted Chiang: What's the difference between recording our thoughts in writing or electronically taping everything around us? Like all Chiang stories the message is "life is shit and you have to live with it."

Short Story

These were uniformly bad. I only finished Olde Huevelt and Chu's stories, which were both pointless. The other two were unreadably bad, even the Swirsky which is only a thousand words.  How did these get nominated?  Is the good short fiction only in the longer two categories now?  I know that excellent stories can be written at less than 8000 words, as evidenced by last year's stunning Ken Liu story "Mono no Aware."

• "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachel Swirsky
• "The Ink Readers of Doi Saket" by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
• "Selkie Stories Are for Losers" by Sofia Samatar
• "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" by John Chu

If you've been following the controversy, you'll know that a number of nominees appear, in part, because of a concerted campaign by novelist Larry Correia and Vox Day.  Day (a penname for Theodore Beale) has been spouting some vile, misogynist, racist claptrap, which (when he posted it on the official Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Twitter account) got him expelled from SFWA. However, I believe that's immaterial:  I think we need to read the nominees on their merits, not the views of their authors.  And, I'm not sure but that the "Vox Day" screeds are an act of self-promotion -- I can't believe that in this day and age anyone actually believes the crap he's been saying.

The Sessions

William Macy deserved an Oscar nomination for his work in The Sessions (2012), a movie for which Helen Hunt was nominated. John Hawke plays a man in an iron lung who wants to lose his virginity. His therapist points him at a sex surrogate, played by Hunt. Macy plays Hawke's priest with an amazing touch of humor. In fact, all of the characters in this movie face their challenges and emotional problems with humor, honesty, and poignancy. Even better, it was a delight to see Helen Hunt, on screen, naked, having clearly eschewed any kind of plastic surgery, unlike certain other Oscar-winning actresses younger than she is. Stunning performances all round, including by Adam Arkin as Hunt's husband, Moon Bloodgood and W Earl Brown as Hawke's caretakers. This was an hour and a half well worth spending.

Trouble With The Curve

A very funny bit in In & Out is where Glenn Close rattles off the names of the Oscar nominees: fellow best actor nominee Paul Newman for "Coot", Clint Eastwood for "Codger", Michael Douglas for "Primary Urges". In Trouble with the Curve, Eastwood does indeed play his stock codger character, this time in the guise of a baseball scout who's going blind. His lawyer daughter, up for a promotion to partner, played by Amy Adams, goes on the road with him to scout one last player that the computers claim is the next star. Except even a blind codger can figure out some stuff with his ears that a computer can't. Justin Timberlake appears as a pitcher Eastwood recruited years ago, who (now that he's blown out his arm) is the scout for another team and the potential romantic interest for the daughter. Lots of predictable repair of the relationship between father and daughter. Lots of baseball statistics thrown around. Net net, though, we should have spent the evening bingeing on season 1 of Kevin Spacey's House of Cards.

The Last Policeman & Countdown City

If you knew the world was going to end, how diligent would you be in continuing with your daily routines and responsibilities? Thus is the plot of Ben Winters's The Last Policeman. Our point of view character, Henry Palace, has just made detective in Concord, New Hampshire, when it is discovered that an asteroid is going to clobber Earth in nine months. And yet, he insists on finding who murdered the man he finds hanging by his belt in the restroom of the local McDonald's. As society collapses around him, he continues with his daily routines, attempts to corral his errant sister, starts a relationship with a woman he meets while investigating the murder, and tries not to take his fellow detectives' black humor too seriously. A wonderful character study, and a wonderful excuse to ask "what would I do if I was there?"

The immediate sequel to The Last Policeman, as society begins to break down, is Countdown City, in which Palace, now forcibly retired from the police force as local police departments are federalized, takes on a missing persons case. The husband of his childhood babysitter has gone missing, and he agrees to find him. He uncovers several plots larger than he expected and sees his sister off on her own last-ditch attempt to save the world. In the end, he is rescued from a tight corner by an old colleague from the Concord Police.

Through both books, the question kept coming up, "what would I do in those circumstances?" I'd like to believe that I'd carry on, as Henry does, doing what I could, continuing to discharge my responsibilities, even as those responsibilities changed with the world around me. To do otherwise would violate my sense of who I am, of what I'm about.

And now, World of Trouble, the third book in the series is due next week, on 7/15.  I'm very much looking forward to it.

The Amateurs & Zack and Miri Make a Porno

"The difference between an amateur and a professional is that the professional doesn't wait to be in the right mood."  --- William Arthur Herring

Picture a small town, where there's a guy who decides that the best way to get him out of his mid-life crisis and the town out of its doldrums is to make a porn movie. Thus, The Amateurs. Jeff Bridges stars as the guy who puts the town up to the project. Jeanne Tripplehorn as his ex-wife, Patrick Fugit (from Almost Famous) as the video store manager turned cinematographer, Tim Blake Nelson, Joe Pantoliano, Glenne Headly, Ted Danson and William Fichtner as the townspeople. I almost bailed out on this at about the 40 minute mark, but it's worth watching to the end. It doesn't come out as you might expect: though the good guys definitely win in the end.

This ended up on our screen because Netflix recommended it when I was on a Kevin Smith orgy and wanted to watch Zack and Miri Make a Porno.  Unfortunately, they should have recommended The Amateurs instead of Zack and Miri, not in addition to.  Kevin Smith's rendition of the story is inferior in every regard, from humor, to attractiveness of the actors, to good taste, to overall quality.

The Numbers Station

The Numbers Station was a little thriller last year which I'd wanted to see because it stars John Kusack and Malin Ackerman. It was massively disappointing. A completely predictable thriller with predictable tension, a predictable huge plot handwave, and a pre-ordained outcome. Kusack plays a nearly washed-up CIA agent who's put out to pasture babysitting a cryptographer (Ackerman) out in the boondocks at a "numbers station" which broadcasts encrypted instructions to spies in the field as seemingly random digits over-the-air. I was not impressed. They should both know better.