Category Archives: commentary

Cloud Atlas, Part One of a Trilogy

11 Tuesday Sep 2012

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In the New Yorker this week, Aleksandar Hemon looks at the Wachowskis’ latest project, a film adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The project includes historical, contemporary and future storylines weaved together. How they’re weaved interests me as a writer. There’s also talk of souls and redemption in future lives, so it’s likely that this is another film in the long decades of movie history which take sci-fi themes and substitute in religion and miracles for the meat of the speculative fiction in the plot. However, it sounds like that’s the point of the book they are adapting, so in a sense the story is pre-ruined. That makes the film potentially more appetizing to me.

So with my atheistic eye-rolling out of the way I will now put the novel in my queue. When I’ve read it, I’ll review it. Then when the movie comes out, I’ll finish my own little trilogy.

Leaving aside the potential of this story, I just want to note that even though the Matrix trilogy was a sales success and I seemed to enjoy the second and third films more than most people, the Wachowkis have not released anything that could be called a masterpiece. Everything they’ve done has had major asterisks and viewers carping on unsatisfactory elements. For a few of their projects, these points of conflict have been extremely geeky but not too damning (wait, the machines need human body heat, not our brains’ processing capacity to create their world? seriously? whatever executive handed down that note should have his legs broken. too dramatic? what would anyone know about drama in a film industry that would let that happen?). For others (the entirety of Speed Racer) the wailing has consumed the entire discussion. I hope that the Wachowskis finally put something together that’s watchable and tidy and right.

So, yes, the next thing I’ll write about this subject will be a review of David Mitchell’s novel.

Review: The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (without spoilers)

10 Monday Sep 2012

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I love seeing Terry Pratchett’s name on a new book. I know much less about Stephen Baxter. I’ve only read a few short stories by Baxter and most of what I remember of them is that they were concept-heavy and a bit dry elsewhere. I doubt that my sample was representative of his work. What I remember of Baxter’s work I’m okay with, but it didn’t have the playfulness that I seem to require to become hooked.

I’m a sucker for anything with Pratchett’s name on it, even if I might expect less of his usual playfulness in a work that shares another name. It isn’t just a way to salve my profound sadness over his slow exit from his working life. We are all slowly exiting our lives, so I’ll celebrate anything Terry Pratchett does until his final trip to Switzerland

The Science and the Really-Realness

Stephen Baxter is known as a hard sci-fi writer. Hard sci-fi doesn’t necessarily mean realistic. Hard sci-fi has a long history of unrealistic premises involving faster-than-light travel, time travel, travel between realities and extra-sensory remote perception of other locations and other minds.

Travel and cultural exploration is the major part of the appeal of hard science fiction. They are travelogues of the mind, reports from many varying experiments in society which we cannot duplicate in the really-real world. All of the Grand Old Men of sci-fi did it. I’m sure that somewhere in the more speculative realm of fantasy fiction, bees and educated fleas are doing it, composing their own fantasies that pit their worlds against each other in what-if scenarios of honeycomb-versus-hair or honeycomb-from-roses versus honeycomb-from-slightly-different-roses.

That said, I have some trouble getting through most books without mulling over the really-realness (or lack thereof) in a story’s mechanics and psychology. For me, only the most carefully realistic literary writers (Woolf or Ian McEwan) or the most heavily lamp-shaded speculative writers (Terry Pratchett) seem to escape this. With neither extreme do I stop occasionally and go for agitated walks around the block, chattering to myself about how “the fake world I’m reading about wouldn’t work like that at all,” and craving a cigarette.

Terry’s participation in The Long Earth is clear in the gag-like mechanics of the least really-real aspects of the premise. For me this silliness succeeds in taking the burr off the rough edges of Baxter’s really-realness. Importantly, Pratchett seems to have had a strong influence in enhancing the really-real psychology of the characters as they respond to the slightly cockeyed economics and improbably stable celestial dynamics of the Long Earth. I could go off on a tangent detailing my quibbles, but that would just be a list of spoilers. If anyone actually reads this and comments, I’ll be happy to discuss it there.

Suffice it to say that Terry Pratchett’s name is NOT just along for a ride on the cover. While he doesn’t seem to have written a large portion of the text, he’s made significant contributions to the premise and making the premise work. Also some of the jokes. Perhaps all the jokes.

The Characters

Even the throwaway characters have the kind of touches that Pratchett is known for. Entire lives are hinted at and remembered in the style of the Discworld vagrant who went to sea and had a number of adventures before dying of “stepping on a tiger”. It is Pratchett’s concern for these characters that bring much of his work to life and it works to good effect here as well.

Unfortunately, Terry’s limited contribution to the writing has left the latter part of the book with significant action of the major characters which is listed more than conveyed. In particular, the female characters have an important role but their action, conflicts, and motivations seem to parallel the story without ever becoming integrated. This is not Witches Abroad.

I know Stephen Baxter has been in this game, successfully, for a few decades, while I’m just an infrequent blogger that no one reads, but let’s just say that he has some great opportunities for improvement. Or he needs to push harder for more time to blend things together or a bit more word count to flesh things out. As it stands, the characterizations are a little bit of a letdown. It takes away the possibility of an enthusiastic Pratchett-fan-gives-it-five-stars-! and puts it down into an-entertaining-three-stars-and-a-bit.

The Potential for a Series

Given that Sir Terry’s involvement is probably only going to wane, the only strong hope I have for this series is if the strength of Baxter’s characterizations wax considerably. A more robustly human touch is needed.

It’s Not At All Bad

It’s a very entertaining read that will get you thinking about exactly the kinds of things sci-fi is supposed to. It’s also amusing, quirky, and has all the touches you might ask for from a story from these experienced authors.

 

See also Josh Roseman’s review on escapepod.org.

From Confusion to Completion

24 Sunday Jun 2012

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I lost a thing two Sundays ago. I had already been unable to find a starting point for the day and then I couldn’t find the thing. I was going to write my first blog post, but I had lost the feeling for the idea that inspired me to create this blog in the first place. I lost that idea a week before. Two weeks later, three weeks after buying the domain, I’m still writing this post as I occasionally swirl past the draft on random currents in my daily sea of electric media.

The thing I lost that Sunday was part of the liquid electric fuzz that manages my ears along with the thing’s over-jiggly silicone rubber earphones. I couldn’t even be sure the thing was even possible to find. The thing could have slipped forever under the surface and become a figment, so I lacked optimism and my search wasn’t well-designed for success.

Finally, I checked to see if my fleet of electric fluff could find the thing floating out on the fluffosphere. It could. With confidence in the thing’s nearby existence, it took only a moment to find.

For an hour I had been caught in a cycle of looking in the same places over and over. Only after the thing’s name appeared on a list in my phone could my search lose its hopeless churn: hey, at the other end of my bed under the window… how did it get there?

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Ray Bradbury died at the beginning of this month. One of his stories I never got around to reading was “The Toynbee Convector,” published in Playboy when I was 13. This story has been mentioned elsewhere and this is a good time to be introduced to it. I worry about climate change, ocean deterioration, and the effects of the continuing economic depression. These things sometimes overpower my optimism just as certain other people are demented by fears of the final battle with the Beast (or creeping socialism, sexually ambiguous hipsters, lizard people, whatever).

In “The Toynbee Convector,” a man builds a time machine and visits Earth 100 years in the future. He comes back with evidence of great improvements in technology, a peaceful civilization, and environmental restoration. Bradbury’s time traveler declares:

“We made it!” he said. “We did it! The future is ours. We rebuilt the cities, freshened the small towns, cleaned the lakes and rivers, washed the air, saved the dolphins, increased the whales, stopped the wars, tossed solar stations across space to light the world, colonized the moon, moved on to Mars, then Alpha Centauri. We cured cancer and stopped death. We did it—Oh Lord, much thanks—we did it. Oh, future’s bright and beauteous spires, arise!”

After his return the time machine is locked away by the government and the film and recordings are published by the time traveler, sparking a cultural orgasm of optimism. One hundred years after the time traveler’s journey, the world described by the time traveler has come to pass. The time traveler, however, reveals in an interview that he had lied all along: his journey to the future had been a hoax. The civilized world of the 1980s had been sinking into cynical dreams of dystopian futures, so Bradbury’s time traveler decided to do a bit of prophylactic and purple-prosed culture-jamming.

The “Toynbee” of the title refers to the real-world historian, Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee was a famous pop-intellectual among historians. For a long time in the 20th century he was considered “Mr. History” in the same way Marshall McLuhan was later considered “Mr. Media.” A central idea of Toynbee’s was that civilizations survive only by facing continual challenges that are difficult but possible. Otherwise, they are annihilated by adversity or fall into weak, decadent elitism.

While Ray Bradbury himself referred to the ideas of Arnold Toynbee as the inspiration for the story’s premise, I’m not sure Bradbury understood that his character’s gift to the world had nothing to do with Toynbee’s idea of measured challenges and continual renewal. Bradbury was reacting against the apocalyptic mania of science fiction in the 1980s and his time traveler simply gave society the confidence of knowing that civilization would have an almost miraculously optimistic endpoint. The time traveler’s “history machine” took away the perception of risk from the task of engineering sci-fi optimism in the real world.

Today we see misinformation about economic risk being used in the real world to turn the public against investments in science, infrastructure, education, health care, and environmentally sustainable technology. In Bradbury’s world, the time traveler laid down a brave and clear image of a future target. That future target, though, is a brave challenge only because he was lucky enough to present challenges that were possible. In our world, experts duel about the possibilities. Some wish to work toward a more egalitarian and sustainable future, others view that possibility with skepticism or disgust. Many more swim in confusion between the two visions.

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My goal with this blog is to complete writings, complete them to my satisfaction, and fix them publicly in time to allow me move on. With two weeks spent getting here and still being unable to get fully around my point, my hair is too short to hold firmly and tear out. I don’t know if I’ll ever get this done. My mind plans, but the rest of me doesn’t really believe in the future. As in Bradbury’s scheme of hoaxing the world, I have to tease myself past my bodily skepticism with visions of accomplishment. Still, it seems so self-indulgent and the contemplated accomplishments are either unrealistic (somehow I’ll eventually be paid to… blog?) or shamefully lame (I blogged! I are now a blogger! Now for a warm bath and a utility knife!). These are optimistic lies, but they are possible lies and I might turn them into entries on a list.

The cynical and hopeless mutterings that always follow my hopeful lies stir more hopeful rebellion. It is the reason I’m taking this exercise. There’s always a larger message for the future of society and science fiction, but for right now I’m just trying to get to the end of this thought, which is: I must write and finish in order to know, finally, that I can, and then reach farther.