April 07, 2008

Flightplan, Starring Jodie Foster

Not a good movie. It's sort of half psychological thriller and half heist movie. But the psychology wasn't interesting, and the plan to steal $50 million was so outrageously stupid that I can't understand why anyone would have thought it would work. I wonder if the first draft had a plan that made sense, but it gradually morphed over dozens of script revisions until no one realized how stupid it had become?

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April 06, 2008

Myth-Told Tales by Robert Asprin and Jody Lynn Nye

I thought I had reviewed this book some time ago, but I couldn't find evidence of that. So I'll summarize. The Myth series used to be brilliant comedy. Now, it's just painful. The original author has forgotten how the characters sound and act, and the new coauthor comes from a different comedy tradition, making it painfully obvious who wrote which of the disjointed scenes.

Don't waste your time.

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February 21, 2008

Dread Empire's Fall by Walter Jon Williams

Dread Empire's Fall is a trilogy of novels by Walter Jon Williams, consisting of The Praxis, The Sundering, and Conventions of War. It's a space opera in the Napoleonic Navy mode, with our two heros being Lord Martinez and Lady Sula, two young officers in the navy of the interstellar empire that conquered Earth (and several other species's homeworlds) 120 centuries earlier. But the empire is falling apart at the seams as the the last of the Great Masters dies, and the formerly subordinate races start elbowing for power.

The Fleet hasn't fought a battle in millenia, so there had been little chance for promotion for our heros; their ancestry allowed them entry into the officer ranks, but without powerful families to provide patronage, they would never rise above the juniormost ranks.

But in a war, clever and ambitious men and women thrive, as the old guard stick to the old ways and die in blazes of antimatter fire. Martinez and Sula struck me as being modeled on English forebearers, in fact: Martinez is Nelson, and Sula is Drake and perhaps Cromwell. I don't mean to suggest that they are merely copies of the historical figures; but their tactics and situations intentionally echo thier forebearers.

In this, Williams does better than David Weber's Honor Harrington novels, which are also set in a pseudo-Napoleonic space opera regime, but have a less independant background. Weber straight up copied the age of wooden ships and iron men, and gets tied up about the ways space change things. The tactics and technologies used by Williams are much more convincing and three-dimensional.

But be warned: Williams likes to write in a realistic style, not a romantic one. Major characters can get killed in non-heroic ways, and he hates Chekhov's Law and breaks it at every opportunity. Plus, the series was intended to be longer than a trilogy (according to the author's FAQ), and the last paragraph of the third book ends with a kick in the gut for people that like all the heros fat and happy at the end.

Still, I liked it, but I'm not sure I'll read it again unless a sequel comes out, because that kick in the gut still smarts. It's perhaps not as good as his Aristoi or his Knight Moves, but those novels were written when Williams was following the style of Roger Zelanzy. Dread Empire's Fall is in William's own voice, and the better for it.

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February 11, 2008

Brightness Falls From the Air by James Triptree, Jr.

James Triptree, Jr. is a facinating person, and I look forward to reading a recently published biography about her. She was a female author in the man's world of early SF, but avoided becoming a 'token female' like, say, Joanna Russ. Triptree's novels were hard to categorize, except for empty phrases like "new", "different", and "original." Brightness Falls from the Air (BFftA) was written in 1985, late in the author's career. It was reviewed not just by the usual suspects- Locus, Analog, Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine- but by the heavy hitters: the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, the New York Times. Reviewers that normally sneer at "genre" works raved over it. That's normally a strike against a SF novel, but BFftA really is so good that the prejudices of the fine-literature crowd could not stand against it.

Normally, I ignore the text on the back of a paperback. It gets written by the junior assistant to the editor's coffee brewer, after a thirty-second skim of the first draft. The purpose of that cover text is to sell copies, and accuracy to the novel is of peripherial concern. But in this case, that back text is an outstanding introduction. Permit me, if you will, to quote it in full:

Sixteen humans have come together on Damiem, a distant world where a dream was once stolen and atrocities once took place. They have gathered to view the last rising of a manmade nova, the passing testament to an unhallowed war.
Soon time will warp and masks will be shed.
Soon some will die, and others kill. Soon some will lie, and others go mad. Some will seek love, and others release. Some will learn names, and others courage.
Some will find justice... and others judgement.
Soon.
Now, sixteen humans have gathered.
To await the light of the murdered star.

BFfrA contains many ideas that you've seen elsewhere, both in SF and Westerns. Novas as warfare, atrocities performed against the natives, corrupt big city types versus pure country folk, evil criminal masterminds and straightforward honest cops. Flying people, aquatic people. And the sorrow of those that have done what they felt was necessary, and live with the consequences. Is there a crime so large that a lifetime cannot provide sufficient expropitiation? But BFftA doesn't read like a retread- more like other novels have tried and failed to cover the same ground.
I was reminded at times of Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross, and Look to Windward by Ian M. Banks. Slaughterhouse Five. Isaac Asimov's Foundation. Murder on the Orient Express.

It is certianly not without faults. The good guys made some mistakes that were difficult to justify, considering the sensitivity of their post and the selectivity with which they were chosen. One of the characters suffers a fate that has more to do with a gypsy curse than "widespread glandular damage". But Triptree is not an author to let trivia get in the way of a good story. This novel is about the ideas, not the facts.

I recommend this book unreservedly. I'm sure it's out of print. Check your library. Check your used bookstores. Read this book.

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January 28, 2008

Halting State by Charles Stross

Halting State is the new novel by Charles ("Charlie") Stross, one of the leading lights on the 21st century British Invasion of SF authors. He writes personal SF- no giant space fleets thundering across the immense vast inky blackness of space and whatnot; or rather, when he does write about that, it's from the perspective of a minor diplomat and and hard-working engineer. He's not interested in the people that make Grand Policy Decisions, he's interested in the people that work for a living and are just trying to not get crushed by the wheel of change.

He also loves to switch between characters, and Halting State carries along with that. It's told from three perspectives: a Scottish beat cop, a forensic accountant, and a game programmer. The three of them are brought together by a bank robbery. What gives the cop headaches is that the bank isn't real, and neither is anything that was stolen- the crime took place in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, when a squad or orcs backed up by a dragon broke into a game's main bank and proceeded to loot the place down to the furniture.

The heist gets interesting as soon as everyone realizes that committing the theft required breaking a number of ciphers that should be unbreakable- so why is someone robbing an online game's bank, when they could be taking real money from real banks?

The writing itself is interesting, and I'm embarrassed to admit it took me about ten chapters to realize why it seemed strange. The whole thing is written in the second person, a very unusual choice for a novel.

Now, this book was written for me. Specifically. The primary target to understand all of the jokes and allusions would have knowledge of:

  • Tabletop Role-Playing Games
  • Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games
  • Macroeconomics
  • Fencing
  • Scotland and England
  • The DnD monsters that the author created in the 1970s
  • Distributed Network Computing
  • Cryptography

So really, if I was English or a Scot, it's be perfect.

In summary: highly recommended to anyone with knowledge of any two items in the above list.

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January 02, 2008

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen

I'm a conflicted about this book, which is why it's taken me two months to get around to writing a review. Let's get the dollars and cents out of the way first. I paid one hundred twenty-eight dollars for this book. Sad to say, that's not even close to my personal record for expensive wood pulp and ink. But at least the other books in that range were textbooks.

That's not really a fair criticism though, because I bought HMJCtW in Hong Kong Dollars, so it really cost about eighteen bucks in American currency. Sloppy thinking like that suffuses this book.

Francis Wheen is a columnist at the The Guardian, Britain's most profitable left-wing newspaper, which should have been a clue about what I was getting into. For every reasonable screen about how UFO believers are idiots, there was another chapter about how only idiots could believe that a free market could efficiently distribute goods and services. He spends a chapter bewailing Margaret Thatcher and her distruction of the British coal miner's union. He also spends a chapter on post-modernism in literary criticism (see the Sokal Affair), but his half of his objections to the "po-mos" is that they supplanted Marxist literary criticism as the academic vogue; and Marxist criticism is just as irrational as the po-mos.

Lastly, the books was heavily cover-blurbed as being hilariously funny. Maybe this is one of those "English humor" things that this poor colonial doesn't follow, but this book is rather profoundly unfunny. Reading it was like getting stuck at a dinner party next to an aging hippy that made a bundle in the stock market and is now ethically confused but bitter and unwilling to shut up.

I didn't learn a damn thing from this book, except that writers all-fired up to expose idiocy may, in fact, be idiots themselves.

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December 03, 2007

Occidentalism by Ian Buruma & Avishi Margalit

One of the books I picked up in Sihanoukville was a slim plastic-wrapped volume entitled Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. The cover artwork is a nineteenth-century caricature of the West as a grotesquely fat capitalist in the center of a spiderweb, surrounded by piles of lucre. I didn't think too much about the plastic wrap, assuming it had some innocent purpose. That now seems unlikely. Because unless Penguin Books has seriously let down their standards, I bought a pirated book. The paper is of decent quality and the pages are all aligned properly, but the whole thing has visible artifacts and a lack of clarity that suggest a low-resolution scan, or outright photocopying. It's unfortunate that I am now in possession of a work of copyright infringement, as under the DMCA I think that Penguin Books is legally authorized to throw me in jail, expropriate all my property, and send professional assassins after my family.

At any rate, Occidentalism is about, well, the converse of Orientalism. For those that don't recall their literary criticism classes, count yourself lucky. Orientalism is the irrational love of things Eastern and/or "uncivilized", and the assumption that the Easterner/primitive people and customs are good, pure, and superior. Classic examples of Orientalism are John Locke and his Noble Savage, and the Beatles and their silly quests for Indian gurus.

Occidentalism is the distorted view of the "civilized" West from the West's enemies. The West is generally the United States, UK, France, and sometimes all the rest of western Europe too. The Occidentalist view is that Westerners are greedy, shortsided, non-heroic, idolatrous, prostituting merchants, without souls, and not even really human. Being without souls killing them is a non-evil act; and while Westerners may have some temporal success at the moment, God will surely lead the believers to triumph, as long as there is suffient faith and willpower to rise against the evildoers.

The books traces these ideas through different cultures and philosophers, elucidating how most of the same steriotypes can be traced backwards from current Islamofacists to early twentieth centurn facists and nationalists in Germany and Japan, to Russian revolutionaries at the turn of the twentieth century, to German nationalists in the mid-nineteenth century.

It's written in an academic style, so the prose is rather dry. But the index and references are quite good, and although it's short, it suggests quite a few other things to read to fill in the ideas further. Students of international relations or anthropology should certainly be interested in this book.

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November 19, 2007

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

A Wild Sheep Chase is the eigth book by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. The English translation is by Alfred Birnbaum. I find the fact of it's translation amusing, as Murakami has translated a number of English novels into Japanese. But ability to translate isn't necessarily transitive, I guess.

Muramaki is a celebrity in Japan, to the extent that he lived abroad for several years to gain some privacy. His most famous novel is Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which I intend to read one of these days. He's been compared to Kafka, and I can see why- he doesn't have Kafka's tragedy or mysticism, but his characters live lives of confusion, and the world pushes them about with no regard to their concerns.

A Wild Sheep Chase is about- well, a lot of things. It's complicated. Our nameless protagonist is 30, half-owner of a small advertising business, just divorced, with a new girlfriend he doesn't understand. His best friend from childhood disappears and sends a couple mysterious letters. His business partner is slipping into alcoholism. He's not depressed, he's just sort of aimless. Life isn't the grand adventure he hoped for after college. His job is good enough, but it doesn't thrill him anymore. He's not sure he wants to keep doing it, but he's not sure he should just up and start over, either.

(See why I identified with this novel?)

Into his life a mystery comes. The assistant to Tokyo's most powerful yakuza boss summons him to make an offer. You see, the narrarator had created an ad a few weeks earlier that used a photo of a bucolic hillside, with sheep. With close inspection, one of the sheep was an anomoly: Japan has relativly few sheep, all accounted for. But this sheep is of a breed never before seen, and it has a peciliar birthmark on the flank. Where is this sheep? Where did it come from? The mobster gives the confused narrarator one month to discover the sheep, with the price of failure an ugly one.

The narrative takes twists and turns, on themes of death, exploration, love, leadership, and sex. The childhoon hometown that's never the same when you come back as an adult. The quiet peaceful small town that's dying as the children all leave. Fun stuff like that.

On the whole, I recommed this novel, but not if you're already feeling depressed.

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November 13, 2007

Slither

The ship has two continually-running movie channels. We don't have a TV in the shop, so I don't watch them very often. Still, last night I wasn't busy for a bit, and I stopped by Maintenance Control, and saw Nathan Fillon onscreen. You know, Mal from Firefly? So I watched for a bit.

He was in a movie called Slither. If you are ever trapped in a room with that movie playing and all you've got is a sharp stick, don't poke your eyes out. Because it's much easier to poke your ears out first, and _then_ poke your eyes out. That movie made my inner child cry. From what I saw, it didn't fall into the "So bad it's funny" category (E.g. Battlefield Earth). It sat solidly in the "Just plain bad" category, like a dog turd stuck to the shoe of the cinematic arts.

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October 08, 2007

Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell

I've been reading Sarah Vowell's books backwards. I'm running out though, as she's only written four so far. I just finished Take the Canolli, which, like her other works, is a collection of essays. It's an eclectic mix- the history of the USA via a particular intersection in Chicago, following her anscestors on the Trail of Tears, and coming to terms with her father's gun collecting.

Ms. Vowell has a distinctive voice, shaped by the radio, where most of these essays were first performed. The breezy conversational style works very well; reading this book is like listening to some of my old college friends holding forth on a favorite subject. Her nerdy obsessiveness and trivia-collecting seems quite familiar to me, somehow.

Yet she got better as she went along. Take the Cannoli is good, but The Partly Cloudy Patriot is much better, and Assassination Vacation is also superior.

So, I recommend checking this one out of the library, and buying TPCP and AV.

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