February 21, 2004
The Praxis
I was really excited when I read that Walter Jon Williams was going to be writing a space opera series. I really like Williams' more space-opera-like books. Aristoi is a remarkably solid piece of science fiction (although like most books that are not Camp Concentration, its depiction of artistic genius leaves something to be desired). City on Fire, the sequel to his earlier Metropolitan, is not space opera in the Doc Smith sense (or even in the early Iain Banks sense), but it shares a certain similiarity to the genre; it's the story of a low-level bureaucrat who gets wrapped up in the undertaking of a coup, and her slow transformation into a political power in her own right. It's got its flaws, but it's my probably my favorite science fiction novel that I've read in the last few years. This is a subgenre that Williams can do quite well. Alas, you wouldn't know it from Dread Empires Fall: The Praxis, the first volume in what promises to be a horribly extended series.
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July 26, 2003
28 Days Later
My friend Johnny says that zombie movies are his favorite because they tell the story of what happens when civilization is stripped away. Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave stripped the veneer away from three London yuppies and let them slip into a war of all against all, so you'd think he'd be a natural to make a zombie film. You'd be right; 28 Days Later is really good. The setup -- they're not the walking dead, but victims of some sort of zombifying virus that is transmitted through blood and saliva and takes effect within seconds -- means that the zombies can be something other than the shambling braineaters I know and love, and it works magnificently: the zombies are creepy as hell. The film is lovely, too; I don't normally care for feature films shot on digital video, but it looks just right for post-apocalyptic London. (The cinematographer is associated with the Dogme 95 folks, so video is presumably his métier.) The contrast between London and the bucolic countryside is handled nicely, too. The second half of the film gets a bit too man-vs.-man society-gone-mad for my tastes (a bit too Shallow Grave, in fact). Romero's best movies knew that human conflict is supposed to be the backdrop and subtext for zombie-related carnage, not the other way around, and this falls down on that front, but I still liked 28 Days Later a heckuva lot.
(Bonus: A song by Godspeed You Black Emperor! on the soundtrack. Their music makes my commute feel cinematic and sweeping; it's no surprise that it works well as the protagonist runs through an abandoned London. Extra bonus for the distaff sex: V. says that the protagonist was knuckle-chewingly hot. Extra extra bonus: There's apparently a new ending now playing after the credits; I might go back and see it again, because I am a sucker, yes I am.)
May 31, 2003
Gigantic
It was weird walking into the showing of Gigantic: The Story of Two Johns. Usually when I am at an event attended by a deeply geeky subculture, I am at least noddingly a participant in that subculture. But while I think "Anna Ng" is a great song and that the video for "Birdhouse in Your Soul" was fabulous, I'm not really an active fan of They Might Be Giants. The documentary only hints at the obsessive fandom that the band apparently inspires -- a girl bursts into tears after meeting the Johns, choking out that it's the happiest day of her life; a boy, maybe seventeen years old, says that he's seen TMBG upwards of seventy times -- but I got the feeling that every single person in the audience except me knew every lyric of every song in the movie.
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May 8, 2003
Sanctofrauduometer
Teresa Nielsen Hayden really outdid herself with her handy, D&D-style modification chart for determining how unlikely a saint's life (or, indeed, the actual existance of the saint) truly is. Modifiers include:
- -1: levitated
- -2: flew
- -4: performed significant actions after being beheaded
- -1: is fun to draw
- -2: is credited with the spontaneous generation of roses or rose petals
- -5: had a run-in with a dragon
- -15: is a member of the current lineup of the X-Men
That last one would seem to cast doubt on the rightful canonical status of a person, it's true. And then Teresa's readers went off on some amazing tangents, producing links to St. Guinefort (the canine saint), theories about Celtic religious traditions and incorruptable corpses, and a brief discussion of whether Christina Mirabili, a patron saint of mental illness, gets credibility points added back in for her wholly unsuitable miracles and inconveniently timed levitations. Good stuff.
March 12, 2003
Eye in the Sky
Eye in the Sky, Philip K. Dick.
Eye in the Sky is not one of Philip K. Dick's best books; it lacks the sheer headtwisting power of some of his later works such as VALIS, and it doesn't have the polish of The Man in the High Castle, which I think is Dick's most readable novel, if not quite his best. The conceit of protagonists trapped in an amorphous reality has been done better by other authors before and since; Dick himself did it better in the fine, jarring, and creepy Ubik. But there's one wonderful moment when our hero and his stalwart companions -- loonies and neurotics, the lot of them -- are living in a paranoid schizophrenic's fantasy world. She's convinced that everything, cats, spiders, houses, canned food and chopping knives, is out to get her. In the end, of course, she decides that the main characters are all out to get her as well, and since her delusions guide reality, suddenly they are. They are transformed into horrible malevolent bug things, except for the hero, who watches in horror. And it's a memorable scene, one of the few really good ones in the book (another is the hero's umbrella ride up to Heaven, where he sees the face of God), but how much more wonderful and unheimlich would it have been if the hero and his third-person singular voice had been transformed as well? I'm not sure which would have been worse -- a slow transition from two-fisted engineer to bloodsucking entity, or an abrubt shift, like PKD stepped away from the typewriter and let someone with an even shakier grasp on a much less pleasant reality take over for a page. I suspect the latter would have given me a case of the whim-whams for a week.
February 25, 2003
Dog Soldiers
My friend Claxy summed up Dog Soldiers quite neatly: (Night of the Living Dead - zombies) + (Aliens - aliens) + werewolves + self-awareness. Still, that doesn't mean it's a bad bad thing. Being neither as uncomfortably smart and unexpected as Night of the Living Dead nor as slick and white-knuckled as Aliens is not a damning flaw; Aliens was one of the best action movies of the Eighties, and Night of the Living Dead is one of the great horror movies of all time. Dog Soldiers is a movie about a small British Army unit conducting a field exercise in rural Scotland. I hope no readers will be shocked to discover that things go horribly, horribly awry when the werewolves turn up. Once the soliders hole up, along with a mysterious and taciturn Special Forces operative and the obligatory beautiful local, Dog Soldiers succeeds by keeping things moving. The key to great horror movies is a growing sense of either claustrophobia or the unheimlich, but Dog Soldiers is really a horror film more in the late Carpenter vein, which is to say an action film, quips and all. That's not a flaw, however: the characters are largely charming and believable, the plot suffers from no gaping holes until the very end, and the special effects are quite impressive for what must have been a limited budget. If a movie willing to sacrifice what mimesis it can get from a story about werewolves squaring off with the British Army for a cheap pun sounds appealing and the idea of a self-conscious horror movie hasn't been spoiled by Scream knockoffs, then Dog Soldiers is worth a rental. Plus, V. claimed that a number of the soldier boys were cute, and the obligatory beautiful local was awfully easy on the eyes.