The New Atlantis takes on a little bit of SF, with an interesting article about Neal Stephenson’s book Anathem. Anathem is one of those great books that I absolutely cannot recommend to most people. It’s not a casual book, and to really appreciate it you need to be willing to spend some time thinking about it. That’s not to say that there aren’t some out there who would enjoy it more casually, just that there aren’t many.

It’s a great book, and deserving of attention for its attempt to explore deeper questions of science, religion, society, and (most importantly) the very idea of ideas. In fact, I find myself thinking about Anathem quite often when my head goes in philosophical directions these days. The New Atlantis article is called “Plato in Space,” which in some ways is (and in other ways is not) helpful for understanding what Anathem is. But then, the book is difficult to characterize in any succinct way.

Interestingly enough, The New Atlantis also takes on Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. Personally, I like the novels, even though the world they portray strikes me as profoundly cold, empty and devoid of meaning. And terrifically fascistic and devoid of individuality. If Banks truly wants to live in such a world, that’s fine: but leave me out of it.Everyone talks about the Culture as if it’s utopian, but I’ve never seen it that way.

The article is a very good look at the various aspects of the Culture and its internal contradictions. The article raises the question that always sits in the back of my mind when reading the Culture novels: if everyone is so happy and content in this world, why the heck am I reading a novel about them? Life is conflict, and novels are about conflict. But there’s no conflict in the Culture. It’s all boundary issues. These are called the Culture novels, but in reality we see very little of the Culture, and that’s because the Culture isn’t all that interesting.

In any case, the articles are quite interesting, and worth a look if you’ve read either author.

tags: Books, culture, science fiction
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So, I’m watching The Vampire Diaries, and…

Yes. I watch The Vampire Diaries. Wanna make something of it?

So, I’m watching the show, and the protagonist good-guy vamp Stefan has yet another opportunity to kill antagonist bad-guy vamp Damon, and … doesn’t. The first time, Stefan traps Damon in a room full of vamp-bane, and now stabs Damon with a stake … in the stomach.

Damon has killed … gosh, I’ve forgotten how many. Six? Including Stefan’s “uncle” and now one of Stefan’s oldest friends, not to mention turning bad-girl Vicki, getting her killed in the process. And then, despite the fact that Damon is a killer, Stefan lets him go.

This is idiotic. There is no good reason for letting this jerk live. The only reason the writers did it is because … they have to. Killing the bad guy now would mean no more stories. So they come up with lame excuses for the good guy not to do his job and whack the bad guy. Seriously, this is dumb.

I’ll go to my more beloved vampire franchise, Buffy, and note (spoilers ahead for those who have not seen all of Season Two–come on guys, its been a decade! Why haven’t you watched Buffy yet?) that Buffy did the same thing with Angel/Angelus. She could have stopped him and it resulted in the tragic death of someone close to the main gang. Of course, Buffy actually did have a bit of a reason for doing what she did.

Still, this dithering by the good guys pisses me off. I had similar irksome feelings toward The Dark Knight for doing the same thing. Batman has the opportunity to put the bad guy down, but nooooo, the good guy can’t kill the bad guy. Sorry, I don’t see all the torment. Sure, we hate to do the moral calculation, but it’s there: bad guy dead results in one dead body; leaving him alive results in many dead bodies. Of innocent people.

I’ve pointed out this modern foible before. We think the problem is the killing. But its not. Killing is a last-resort kind of thing, but in these fictional cases, there’s almost always no other option. The burden of being the good guy means doing what others won’t do. And that almost always means taking life. Now, the burden is knowing that some day one might be called to account for that killing. If the good guy is confident enough in his or her judgment about what is right or wrong, this is not an issue. If you’re gonna be the good guy, you’ve got to know this.

In which case, failing to kill the bad guy means either: 1) the good guy is not confident that he’s really the good guy, or 2) the good guy is a coward. Coward in the sense that he knows that killing the bad guy is the right thing to do, but is too afraid to bear the burden of judgment. Now, one can certainly argue that no one should be so confident in the idea that they are the good guy that they are able to justify killing. But the results of that position are obvious: more dead innocent people. To believe that, one must believe that it is inherently more moral for many innocent people to die at the hands of an evil person than it is for one evil person to die at the hands of an innocent person.

Honestly, the total body-count approach seems leagues more moral than that. I have very little patience for characters in novels, movies and television shows that arrogate all sorts of moral authority to themselves and then back away from the moments in which they might, just for a moment, actually begin to bear the burden of the power they claim. Being a hero accrues all sorts of fame and glory, but it also means that you’ve got a massive bit of baggage to carry. In the end, that’s why I gave The Dark Knight a pass on Batman’s dithering–because in the end, the movie recognized the burden heroes carry, even if they defined it slightly differently than I would have.

I understand: the modern hero is supposed to be sensitive and not want to kill. Fine. But they’re gonna pay for not killing, and that not killing means more killing, in the end. Not less. The irritating thing is that they never seem to learn this lesson. I’d be content if they’d learn. Instead we’re given conveniently stupid good guys getting people killed because they’re unwilling to make the difficult decisions. They aren’t heroes, they’re cowards.

tags: Books, culture, ethics, movies, television, whatever
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Maybe I do this subconsciously, but I just realized that quite often I choose books to read based on sub-genre. So, I read mostly science fiction anyway, but I’ll read three or four military SF books, then a few hard SF. Now, I find I’m reading two first-contact books (Eifelheim and Blindsight) back to back. Now, they’re very different books, but still about aliens.

I didn’t do it consciously. In fact, the Eifelheim and Blindsight choices mainly had to do with me going back over past Hugo nominees and picking up the ones I hadn’t had an opportunity to read. But while I was in the middle of my military SF mood, I found myself also gravitating back toward similar books that I’ve already read, just for a peek, despite the fact that I’ve got half a dozen other books waiting to be read. Strange that I never noticed this before.

For this reason, I’ve also found it difficult to go back and continue reading Gaiman’s Sandman series. I’ve had volume 4, “Season of Mists” sitting there for almost a month, now, and just couldn’t get into it. It’s not that I don’t like it (I’m ten pages in at the moment, and it is fantastic), but my head has been somewhere else. Now I worry that I’ll get halfway through Blindsight and lose my head in something else.

I used to be able to read four or five books at a time, but I’m finding that I can’t quite do that anymore. Or, at least, I don’t like to do that anymore. Very odd. I’m in a strange position now. Having read Eifelheim, with all its medieval scholastic philosophy, I’m dreadfully tempted to go dig out some of my grad school texts.

But no. I will not go there. O, that way madness lies! No more of that.

tags: Books, science fiction, whatever
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Boing Boing’s got a photo of Neil Gaiman’s library. Dude, seriously. That’s a freaking lot of books. And notice, friends of mine, that at least two shelves look double stacked (Amy knows what this is, when you keep a row of taller books behind a row of shorter books on the same shelf).

I wonder what the other walls in the room look like…  [edit: should have clicked through. Go here for more photos. And a hell of a lot more books.]

And yeah yeah yeah, tease me about my gigantic man-crush on Gaiman some other time.

[edit: apparently people are looking closely enough at the shelves to recognize some of the books. Gotta love geeks, right?]

tags: Books, whatever
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One of my favorite bloggers interviews one of my favorite authors. They spend a great deal of time talking about the technological singularity, and I’m happy to see that Scalzi and Reynolds seem to think the same thing about the singularity as I do, particularly regarding how remarkably adaptable people are when it comes to new tech. Definitely worth a viewing (it’s about twenty minutes).

tags: Books, culture, science, science fiction, technology
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The new Harry Potter movie comes out in just two weeks, and I’m pretty sure I won’t bother seeing it in the theater. The movies have never captured the feel of the books (save for maybe the third movie). Nevertheless, I am a fan, and the videogame version of the sixth book in the series came out the other day. Having some extra bucks left over on my GameStop card, I decided to pick it up.

I liked the last game in the series, which let me roam all over Hogwarts. Had the game been in any other fictional universe, I probably would have been bored out of my mind. But it was Harry Potter, so I liked it. A little. Much can be said for the new game, which is not as good, in my opinion, as the last, but entertaining enough for the seven dollars I paid for it.

You’d think that the game would be able to explore parts of the book that the movie couldn’t, due to time constraints. And this did happen in earlier games in the series. But now the games are not videogames based on the book, but based on the movie. And I can already see some places where the movie jazzed up the book in ways that are … well, let’s just say they are very, very bad. Bad enough that I don’t want to see the movie now. It’s strange getting this preview of the movie’s failings in videogame form, but it’s not the first time it’s happened, and likely won’t be the last.

So the game is the book’s narrative twice removed. Butchered first by the movie, the game takes the butchering one step further. Not only do we get the crappy screenplay version of the plot, but we get it with lousy voice actors and with character models that look like a cross between robots and zombies. But I get to wander around Hogwarts again, which is really all I want.

I’m still fascinated by the crappy stories game players are forced to sit through. Even the so-called “good” videogame stories are complete crap. I think back to Mass Effect, lauded by many as having one of the best stories of 2007. Of course, anyone familiar with SF could see that massive portions of the story were lifted from the later seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise. ENTERPRISE! Of all shows to crib from, they pick the (arguably) worst of the Star Trek series, and some of the most contrived subplots. Ick. Or the stories for Halo 3, or Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots. The stories are attrocious, despite the fact that (unlike movies) they have up to 20 hours to play with in terms of storytelling, and unlike books have the power of great visuals.

Both benefits are completely squandered. It’s unfortunate that some of SF’s best storytellers couldn’t help write some decent game scripts. Or, as I’ve said before, decent film scripts. Sure, the genre is different, and has different demands, but I’d like to see someone give it a serious try. The best game stories are about as coherent and thought-provoking as Transformers 2 (my review of which was posted just the other day). That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but we should be demanding better.

The worst thing is that most gamers don’t even realize that these stories are complete crap. Let’s be honest here: Harry Potter’s sixth book is fantastic. It’s a great story, and has moments of amazing adventure and genuine emotion. And I’d love to see those things on the screen, but it just isn’t going to happen. If I enjoy the movie, it’s because I’m superimposing my love for the book onto the movie. If I love the game (or just like it), it’s because I’m doing the same. But it shouldn’t be that way, should it?

tags: Books, gaming, harry potter, movies, science fiction
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There is a huge gap between the scientific accuracy of SF novels vs. television and movies. Sometimes I can suspend disbelief long enough to let it slip (like the recent Star Trek’s reliance on “red matter” to create artificial singularities). Other times I just get irritated because the lack of accuracy (or any attempt at accuracy) is because the writers are too damned lazy to get it right.

SF Signal went around and asked a bunch of SF authors, bloggers and real scientists who they thought the worst offenders were, and who they thought got the science mostly right.

I thought their responses were pretty interesting. Star Trek gets taken to task pretty often (particularly The Next Generation), while other movies like Gattaca and 2001: A Space Odyssey get the thumbs up. I did notice that the more cerebral and less action-oriented the SF films were, the more likely they were to get things right.

Not all the comments are on the mark, though. Some complained of the over-the-top tech in some movies, like XXX, with its see-through-walls binoculars. I don’t think we’re meant to take those things seriously, so I can’t complain too much about them.

I guess my problem comes when shows desperately want you to take them seriously, but then start with the silly talk. That’s how Star Trek: The Next Generation always was for me. Very irritating. Some of the comments mention Fringe but again I have to disagree: as soon as it became obvious they were going with the alternate universe subtext, I kinda gave them a pass. Although I admit, the kooky science (not really “fringe” science, but outright sillines) did put me off to the show. But I learned to live with it, and find the show at least moderately entertaining.

Part of the appeal of SF, though, is doing things that can’t be done, or showing people what it might be like to do things that can’t be done. Things don’t need to be perfect. Sure, Star Wars’ battle scenes (even those in the original movie) were downright impossible and made no sense. But that’s not what the movie was about. It just looked damn cool. That was the point. So I’m willing to go pretty far for an adventure movie, but only so far.

tags: Books, movies, science fiction, television
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I love reading blogs, but there are just way too many of them. I’ve tried a number of RSS readers, and none of them do what I’d like them to do. They’re all too cumbersome. Over the last year, my blog reading has plummeted to the point where I really only ever vistit a handful regularly. And you know what that means: I’ve forgotten where a lot of the ones I used to read are. In particular, the blogs of a number of SF/Fantasy writers.

But now I’ve found a website that aggregates them all. Best yet, a brief snippet is available just by hovering over the post. Very nice. Blogs by John Scalzi, Elizabeth Bear, Robert Sawyer, Toby Buckell, William Gibson, and just about everyone else who writes SF/Fantasy and has a blog is on there.

Very cool.

tags: Books, media, science fiction
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So a few weeks ago I tried reading William Forstchen’s apocalyptic novel One Second After, which portrays the United States after an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack destroys our technological infrastructure. I say I tried to read it, because about halfway through I got bored. Very bored.

It started off well enough, but once the book confronted me with the messy reality that would inevitably follow such an attack, I realized the book was quickly re-treading old ground. I’d been there before. Lots of times. And while I do find it interesting to read stories about people in impossible situations, I expect that authors will have something new to say. Forstchen’s book didn’t say anything that hadn’t been said before. Sure, the source of the crisis was relatively new (EMP, instead of nuclear war, pandemic, environmental collapse, whatever), but from then on it was pretty much the same as any other post-apocalyptic storyline.

But my real disappointment with the book was the crisis itself, which I didn’t find all that frightening. EMP destroys technology. Chaos ensues. Sure. Okay. But unlike other books where the crisis event remains a danger throughout (Don’t go out in the radiation! Don’t catch the virus! Don’t get eaten by hungry, mutant wolves representing the angry Gaia spirit!), in this book the EMP happens and then … nothing. The real danger comes from other people being jackasses. That’s fine, but I kinda missed the urgency and tension of an ongoing crisis that other similar works provide.

The book had other irritations that made it difficult for me to read. The author consistently uses “could of” instead of the correct “could have” or “could’ve.” In spoken language “could of” and “could have” are very nearly indistinguishable. On the page, though, “could of”  simply doesn’t work. I could have (*ahem*) put up with it once or twice, but the author uses it so much that it was really starting to irritate me. The author is obviously trying to maintain that North Carolina feel to the whole thing, but it was unnecessary. The characters were a bit flat and uninteresting, and I often felt like the author was trying to manipulate me into feeling something for the characters rather than letting me like or dislike the characters on my own.

So I couldn’t quite finish it. And it’s not a long book, either. Maybe I’ll finish it up this weekend, but it will be a long, hard slog.

tags: Books, science fiction
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Here’s a list I stumbled on listing seven SF books that are, in that blogger’s opinion, unfilmable. The list includes some classics like The Stars My Destination (which I vaguely remember reading years ago), and A Canticle for Leibowitz, as well as some of my own favorites such as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels and Dan Simmon’s Hyperion.

But here’s my problem with this (and all) lists like this: nearly all books are unfilmable. Not if you want to stay true to the source material and do it justice. I’ll admit that the Lord of the Rings trilogy did as best as could be done in bringing the books to the big screen. But don’t mistake best as could be done with good. The movies mangled most of the subplots, destroyed a few beloved secondary characters, and lost most of the central theme of the books. So, no, they weren’t good translations of the book to the screen. But they were good movies, which is all I really wanted.

So I guess this depends on what you mean by “filmable.” I don’t like movies made from books, in general. Books are very different beasts than screenplays, and it’s best to keep the two separate, in my opinion. Movies are inherently brief, and derive their depth from what actors bring to it. Books are about words. Movies are about images. The two very rarely overlap.

That doesn’t mean that some books aren’t inherently filmable. Some writers are good at that. Stephen King and Michael Crichton come immediately to mind as writers whose style is very cinematic. Of course, both have experience writing things for the screen, so big surprise there.

Rather than compile a list of books which are unfilmable, I think it is more productive to compile a list of books which are, more or less, filmable. Shorter, punchier books whose action would translate well to the screen. Who in their right mind would want to see Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow on the big screen? It would be a waste. On the other hand (and I’ve said this before) a book like John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War would translate fantastically to the screen. Of course, I’d prefer a six- to eight-hour made-for-TV (preferably Showtime or some other uncensored cable network) miniseries with high production values. Now that would kick ass, and allow the themes of the book to emerge.

But at two, maybe two-and-a-half hours? No. No book is truly filmable at that point. Only if you accept that the movie version is, for all intents and purposes, a completely separate work could that ever be acceptable. If the movie tries to be the book, it won’t work. It must be its own thing. And at that point, it really ceases to be a film of the book, doesn’t it?

I could probably name all the filmable SF books on the fingers of … ok, both hands. And I’m being generous.

Leave the books alone. Let them be what they are. The big screen demands its own unique stories tailor made for that medium. So, rather than telling filmmakers to destroy great works of SF by putting them on the big screen, perhaps it would be better for some visually-oriented filmmaker to team up with the hottest SF writers and create new works for the big screen. Adaptations are always exercises in compromise. I like my SF uncompromising, please.

tags: Books, media, movies, science fiction
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