The Last Theorem

What happens when you take Arthur Clarke's "The Wind from the Sun", toss in a chunk of Fred Pohl's Heechee Rendezvous, add some of Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise and Pohl's Man Plus, top with some Olaf Stapledon, and then hit the frappé button? You get the not-quite-a-novel-but-more-a-series-of-sketches The Last Theorem from 2008. It's not as tight as the work that either of them has done in collaboration before, and I attribute that to their working on this solely by e-mail. Interesting ideas tossed hither and yon, but they don't hang together with anything like a completely coherent plot.  That's too bad, since it's virtually the last work either of them published, and they were capable of so much better.

Man of Steel (revisited)

For the record, we went back and watched the part of Man of Steel after Kal-El gets off Krypton.  I’d heartily objected to the first part of the movie earlier. While Kevin Costner as Clark Kent's Earth dad is a little over the top, and Zack Snyder's direction means the fight scenes go on forfreakin'ever, on the whole, the thing didn't suck. Alexandra Katherine, my local speaker-to-comics-fans, tells me that this is all in service of starting a Justice League movie franchise, since the Marvel Avengers movie was so successful.  [Spoiler warning] I note that we will start that franchise with an interesting retcon: Lois already knows Clark’s secret identity. 

Feed

I was wrong. I read the first bits of Mira Grant's Feed before the 2011 Hugo deadline, but not enough to actually get the feel of it. And so I voted for Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear first for that year's Hugo. However, now that I've finished it, I can report that Feed is just a killer book --- in both senses of the word. Grant managed to tell a really compelling story about life in the mid-twenty-first century after the zombies have come. She manages to get enough Joss Whedon-style snarkiness in, particularly in the interactions between our point-of-view character Georgia (as in "George Romero") and her brother Shaun (as in "...of the Dead"), and their sidekick Buffy. Together they run a web site where Georgia is in charge of the news (the "Newsies"), Shaun is in charge of exploring the outside world and occasionally chasing zombies (the "Irwins", who give out an annual award called the "Golden Steve-o"), [As a tossoff, she notes about Shaun, "A good Irwin can make going to the corner store for a candy bar and a Coke look death defying and suicidal." Those of you who have seen Shaun of the Dead will note that scene sounds eerily familiar.] and Buffy runs the poetry and story side of the house (the "Fictionals").

     Then she leavens it with some swipes at thinly disguised versions of current political figures, like the congresswoman from Minnesota running for president who is described as a "publicity-seeking prostitute who decided to pole-dance on the Constitution for spare change." But it's not all lightness: she provides an excellent political thriller as a base, in which people die badly. And she manages to write it with some gut-wrenching passages like the quote below from Shaun's blog.

        She rounded out the rest of the "Newsflesh" trilogy with Feed and Blackout, both also highly recommended.

"If you ever start to feel like I have a glamorous job, that maybe it would be fun to go out and poke a zombie with a stick while one of your friends makes a home movie for your buddies, please do me a favor: Go out for your hazard license first. If you still want to do this crap after the first time you've burned the body of a six-year-old with blood on her lips and a Barbie in her hands, I'll welcome you with open arms."

The Thirteenth Floor

The Thirteenth Floor was one of the computer-mediated-reality movies in 1999, the year which brought us The Matrix and Being John Malkovich, all of which foreshadowed Inception. Based on a Daniel F Galouye book, a software company builds an artificial-reality based in 1930s Los Angeles, and their chief scientist discovers that, in fact, they're in an artificial reality themselves. "Wait! You mean it's turtles all the way down?" Well, maybe. The casting and acting are excellent, since we have each actor playing a different version of themselves in each of the levels of reality. We have a very young Vincent D'Onofrio and the lovely Gretchen Mol and versatile Craig Bierko and Armin Mueller-Stahl putting characters on and off like cardigans. Not as well-known as its contemporaries, but a more subtle story.

Blackout / All Clear

I first heard Connie Willis reading pieces of what would become Blackout in the spring of 2002. It was one of the books I wanted to read on our fall vacation in Whistler back in 2010 shortly after it was published.  It might not have affected me as it did had I not spent the entire preceding week immersed in capturing my father’s memories of WWII as an Air Corps officer. To read her retelling (in part) of the stories of Londoners in the Blitz, of the guys who built a fake Army to convince the Germans the invasion was coming at Calais, of the ambulance drivers and air raid wardens and rescue workers is all pretty amazing. I timed reading Blackout carefully, knowing that it was only half the story, and that if I got sucked in at the cliffhanger, I'd only have to wait a few weeks for the second half, All Clear, to appear. I was and I did.

     Basically, a flock of time-travelling Oxford historians (see Willis' Hugo-winning "Fire Watch", et sequelae) are visiting Britain during the War. Things, of course, go wrong --- including the whole of the events in the "Fire Watch" taking place under their noses. Oxford don Mr Dunworthy traipses back into the past in an attempt to help and finds himself trapped, too. There was a point in the middle where I was getting frustrated with Willis for dragging us through day after day of the uncertainty of our time travellers dealing with the uncertainty of the Blitz. But then I realized: this is what it must have been like. Not just the uncertainty of the time-travelling historians, but the uncertainty of day-to-day life for Londoners in the Blitz, for everyone in southern England during the V-1 and V-2 attacks, for everyone while the threat of invasion was high. She manages to weave in the central mystery of why things are going wrong, with some surprising results. I blasted through the back half of All Clear on a Sunday afternoon, and when I was done and tears were streaming down my face, my first reaction was "How the hell did she do that!?" and my second was "I'm glad she did."

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

There are many books that are called classics, some of them even justifiably. For example, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I recently reread. Robert Heinlein postulates a revolt at a penal colony, which organizes itself on libertarian principles with the help of a self-aware computer. The wrinkle is that the penal colony is on the Moon, and anyone sent there can't come back because their body has acclimated to the lower gravity.  This includes the guards and administrators. The Moon is hydroponically growing a large chunk of the grain needed in Asia, and literally drop shipping it via catapault back to Earth. The Loonies defend themselves with a superior understanding of their environment and gravity, and by the simple expedient of dropping rocks on Earth via the selfsame catapault. It is well-told, tightly-plotted, with appropriate suspense, including side discussions of Heinlein's alternatives to monogamy. If you haven't read it, make the time. If you have, it's time to re-read it.

    Alas, I read the Tor/Orbit reprint, which suffers from the perennial problem displayed by Tor: there was no human intervention between the optical character recognition of the text and printing the bound volume. This means there are innumerable typoes which would have been avoided by the simple expedient of proofreading. The most annoying example was references to "flat money" instead of "fiat money." (Those pesky "fl" and "fi" ligatures were obviously invented by medieval type designers just to confuse the OCR software.)

Moon

We see too many movies with too many special effects.  But back in 2009 Sam Rockwell and the voice of Kevin Spacey teamed up together in a little character study in a science fiction setting called Moon. It's got a couple of fascinating twists and turns, and is just very cool. Well worth the two hours, and it was high on my personal Hugo shortlist that year and took home the award. Amazing bang for the buck, considering that the movie was made for about the cost of a Big Mac.

Oblivion

Last year's Tom Cruise movie Oblivion has finally made it to viewing at our house. It's very pretty, as are Cruise and co-star Andrea Riseborough. Earth's been invaded. The Moon's been destroyed. Cruise and Riseborough are drone repairmen on Earth, protecting the water desalinization plants while everyone else resettles on Titan. And then a capsule containing hybernation pods reenters the atmosphere, leading us to the discovery of what's been hidden from our heroes. There were no plot twists, only telegrams. There were no revelations, only teases. There were no new ideas, only stolen rehashes. There isn't a single frame in these two hours that isn't completely predictable to anyone who has the slightest familiarity with the Big Book of Summer Blockbuster Sci-Fi Plots.

Avatar

White European industrialists bad. Smurfs, er, native people good. That's the plot of Avatar (2009). A rehash of Disney's Pocahantas, (or, if you prefer, Dances with Wolves) with a swipe from Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe". That said, it's visually stunning and beautifully executed, but, boy, the evil Earthmen meme wears a little thin by the time we get to the third hour and the interminible battle scene.

Marooned

Martin Caidin's novel of a rescue in outer space, Marooned, actually exists in two versions. There's the one that was published in 1964, and then the fixup based on the 1969 John Sturges movie. I've had the latter version, unread, on the shelf for a number of years, and read it a couple of months ago. Then I was curious and got the earlier version out of the library. They're both overdone a bit, very much products of their times. And once you've read the earlier one, the seams in the later one are even more obvious. However, they both suffer from "dark and stormy night" syndrome. Sample sentence: "In the growing absence of restrictive air, the stripped atoms and wildly agitated gases howled mutely in every direction, spreading in the form of a phantasmal spheroid, it surface and inner space rippling and turning with the light reflected from the blazing rocket."  That said, it's a good adventure story.

Replay

In the mainstream-with-sci-fi-conventions category, Lisa Roberts recommended Ken Grimwood's Replay, originally published in 1986. It is (in some sense) the serious version of the movie Groundhog Day. A man repeats a chunk of his life again, and again, and again. There's no clear-cut purpose, though. He doesn't need to make one perfect day or one perfect life so much as experience it from different angles and be grateful for what he's got. He can make money by betting on horse races he already knows the winner of and investing in unknown companies that will make it big, but he can't stop Kennedy from being assassinated. He can marry his college sweetheart, but not reconnect with the woman who is also caught in a similar time loop. In the end, when he pops out the other end of his loop, he has to deal with life as it comes, one day at a time.

     (Two anachronisms which pop out painfully, and I note because I'm a nit-picking pain in the butt: The desk in the hero's office features Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Chair, which is a lounge chair, not a desk chair. Our hero is drinking Glenlivet scotch in a New York bar in 1964 --- to the best of my knowledge, the only bottle available in the US at that time had been smuggled into my father’s liquor cabinet from Scotland as a gift by an Inverness-bred friend of his: it wasn't generally available until the late '70s.) 

The Secret History of Science Fiction

I picked up an anthology at the library edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel entitled The Secret History of Science Fiction (2009) which contains stories such as Kate Wilhelm’s "Ladies and Gentlemen, This is Your Crisis" and Michael Chabon's "The Martian Agent", which are mainstream stories in sensibility, but use the conventions of science fiction. You and I would recognize them as speculative fiction, but they could hide in plain sight in The New Yorker. Kelly and Kessel’s intention is to bring material in that middle ground to your attention. And they do a good job, providing some excellent stories, many of which I'd read before, but some, like the Chabon, Gene Wolfe's "The Ziggurat", and Connie Willis's "Schwarzchild Radius" were new to me.

Inception

Normally, I avoid anything starring Leonardo DiCaprio like the plague, but encouraged by Liz's studio mate Karen, we recently watched Christopher Nolan's Inception, which won both Hugo and Nebula. And it deserved them. It builds a complete, complex, self-contained world in which DiCaprio's character is in the business of stealing industrial secrets by sneaking into people's dreams. Even though DiCaprio's name is above the title, it's an ensemble cast, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, and Marion Cotillard, and they succeed in carrying the movie. The dream within a dream within a dream within a dream is a stunning plot device. Cotillard's character appearing in DiCaprio's mind and in the shared dreams even though she's dead is a lovely on-going threat. This movie also succeeds in showing Nolan's scriptwriting and directing chops, which he hasn't done in the commercial Batman fluff he's been doing, or the crappy Superman reboot he wrote last summer. It has a brilliant, haunting closing shot.

Double Feature: Deep Impact & Armageddon

Recently we had an interesting "compare-and-contrast" double feature over two evenings. We re-watched Deep Impact and Armageddon, 1998's two "oh my God! the earth is about to be smashed by a meteor" movies.

     First things first: Deep Impact is about people; Armageddon is about technology. The science in Deep Impact is somewhat more accurate. That NASA acquiesed in helping to push Armageddon out to an unsuspecting public suggests they're loonier than we've given them credit for.

     Téa Leoni gives an absolutely wonderful and nuanced performance as the newswoman in Deep Impact. She's ably supported by the likes of Vanessa Redgrave, Morgan Freeman, and Elijah Wood and Leelee Sobieski as the teenagers. Geologist Gene Shoemaker --- who figured out as a grad student what caused the thing in Arizona we now know as Meteor Crater --- acted as advisor on the film. It's a real story, with a beginning, a middle, an end, with intelligent characters doing the best they can under the circumstances. Best line: Mary McCormack as one of the astronauts, thinking about their choices, says, "Look on the bright side. We'll all get high schools named after us."

     On the other hand, in terms of emotional manipulation Armageddon is much more effective. It didn't help that there's a shot about nine minutes into the movie, at the end of a meteor shower hitting New York, of both towers of the World Trade Center in flames --- painfully too close to what we saw in real life only three years later. And, as I've observed recently, there's a shot in this movie at Launch Pad 34A, where the Apollo I fire occurred, that always leaves me in tears --- not because of the content of the scene but rather because of the setting and the realization that we haven't served their memory at all well. It's got Bruce Willis, running his usual emotional (non-)range, Ben Affleck, Steve Buscemi, and Billy Bob Thornton, giving the best performance of the lot. It's also got, as the sole respite from testosterone-laden grimaces) Liv Tyler. (Though Tyler appears to exist in the script for two purposes: to look fetching, and to wail "that's my daddy up there!" at the appropriate moments.) Best line: Buscemi, playing the brilliant, but crazy, geochemist, "Why do I do this? Because the money's good, the scenery changes, and they let me use explosives."

     They've both got their good points, but Armageddon is a thrill ride, while Deep Impact is a movie.

Cryptonomicon

The elapsed time to originally read its nine hundred pages was nearly three months, but Cryptonomicon was worth every word, and every minute. Neal Stephenson has written two parallel stories of nerds, one in the present day, and one in World War II, and both heroes are wonderful. The story operates in interlocking, intertwined layers as Stephenson stories do. There are simply too many good bits in this to recount them all, from Lawrence Waterhouse spending time at Princeton with some chap named Turing, to Randall Waterhouse bunged up in a jail in Manila; from Robert Shaftoe, haiku-spouting Marine raider, to scuba-diving America (Amy) Shaftoe; from a mysterious excommunicated priest named Enoch, to a dangerous-looking Chinese guy named Wing. I devoured the last two-hundred-odd pages in a binge, punctuated by my stopping, wandering around for fifteen minutes at a stretch and saying "wow!" Very nice. Deserving of its Hugo nomination. If you have not read it, do so now.  It's head-and-shoulders above some of Stephenson's later books.

Making History

A couple of years ago, old friend Stephen Walli and I were discussing Stephen Fry over coffee one morning. He asked if I'd read Making History, which I hadn't, so he delved under his desk and tossed me a copy. It's wonderful. Given that I'm fond of alternate history, this is a great book. It asks the question, What if you could invent a time travel technique that made Adolf Hitler never happen, but what you got instead was worse? It's told in two sequential tracks, matching the two timelines.  There are great characters, lovely dialog.  It's fascinating stuff, with a little less of Fry's usual wit --- see The Liar for that --- but it's still got all of his wonderful insight. 

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.

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.

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 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.