In 1984, James Cameron made a time-travel movie, with a scary killer robot with an Austrian accent who had come back from the future to kill a drop-out waitress not for anything she had done, but for what she would do. Its groundbreaking special effects and twisty story blew people’s minds a little and (along with Conan) helped establish the career of one of our times biggest action heroes and most surprising political figures, Arnold Schwarzenegger.  In 1991, he revisited that story and those characters in one of the best sci-fi/action films ever made, establishing the character of John Connor, concieved in the first film and destined to be the heroic leader of humanity’s Resistance against the onslaught of the machines.

Then in 2003, Cameron pissed all over that previous movie with a lame-duck half-assed story where the raison d’etre appeared to be having a hot “female” Terminatrix. Yeah.

Some, people, though, just aren’t willing to let a good mythos die. In early 2008, some of them made one of the best written and most underrated shows of the last 5 years, the recently cancelled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Some other people, more or less at the same time, decided to make yet another movie in the franchise. There was no collaboration between these sets of people, but the Terminator timeline is flexible and can totally handle the multiple divergent concepts, right? Right. Both of these people decided the less said about that third movie, the better. The TV show actually erased it from it’s continuum’s timeline. The movie-makers decided that their unexplored ground would be the future, instead of the present that previous Terminator movies had primarily occupied. A grim future, ruled by robots, with a young John Connor still finding the legs of leadership and facing an enemy whose tricks and evolutions were beyond his foreseeing.

And how did (the ridiculously named) film’s director McG, the writers John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, and its cast fronted by today’s gravel-voiced action star, Christian Bale, do with this story. My verdict: pretty well. If that sounds lukewarm, well, understand: this is a very fun movie, with some excellent action and a well-paced action plot. There’s some ridiculous movie physics in play, but that’s forgivable in the spirit of fun and visual splendor, right? Right. There’s even some relatively straightforward exploration of the definition of what makes a human worthwhile, and what makes them a human at all. What this movie lacks, really, can both be easily predicted and quickly ennumerated: a complete lack of Sarah Connor, and a like lack of any of the mind-bending time-twisty bits that were so fun in the first two films. In a creative void, even those lacks wouldn’t be particularly wounding to my perception of this film, but it is impossible to avoid comparing it to the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles television show, which (as the title implies) takes the exploration of both of those elements to their logical extremes, and does so exquisitely. It’s hardly the first time a film has been trounced by a similar television series, but I think it’s the first time it’s happened to the same exact story.

So in conclusion, go see this movie for some good summer fun, and because it’s possible they’ll really ramp up the interesting bits in the forthcoming planned two sequels. But, seriously, and I can’t stress this enough: if you haven’t, go watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. You won’t regret it.

Sawyer is another one of those authors who’s been around for quite a while, winning the Nebula and the Hugo and the Campbell award, and yet somehow I’ve never read one of his books.  But Rollback is nominated for a Hugo, and thus I have read it, and am pleased to have done so.  It tells the story of Don and Sarah Halifax, one of those rare couples that manages to stay together into their eighties, but have lived lives that were largely unexceptional in other regards.  On their 60th Wedding Anniversary, in the year 2048, the one truly exceptional thing from their life came back to throw them into turmoil.

Sarah, it turns out, is a famed SETI astronomer, a title she earns in the early part of the 21st century when she discovers the key to translating the first (and, thus far, only) alien message SETI had received.  The alien message was clear in its request for a response, but because of the signal’s origin many light years away it would take decades for any dialogue to make the round trip.  Those decades have passed, and on the Halifax’s anniversary, the second message was detected.  Unlike the first, though, it wasn’t just transmitted…this time it was encrypted in a code, a code that one eccentric, mega-rich SETI enthusiast believes can only be decoded by Sarah Halifax.

But even in the mid 21st century, eighty is old, and Sarah surely can’t have much time left.  For the mega-rich, however, there’s a new option: The Rollback procedure.  Through surgeries, cloned organ replacement, and genetic therapy, the aging process can be reversed, and the human clock reset to the mid-twenties.  Sarah agrees to the procedure, but only if her husband, Don, gets one also.  Now, to this point in my review you might have guessed that Sarah was the focus of this book, but it’s really Don’s story, as the Rollback fails…not for Don, but for Sarah.  Don finds himself transformed into a hale young man, married to a very old lady.  What does a retired film and audio editor do with a new youthful life…with his time…with his libido?  And will Sarah have the time and energy to decode the alien message before her health finally fails?

Sawyer does a very good job of addressing these questions, spinning a character drama of the level that is more often seen from mainstream fiction, using a device that only the genre could provide.  The question I kept asking myself, though, was “doesn’t this seem awfully familiar?”  There’s been a lot of excellent fiction addressing age reversal, lately, including last year’s Hugo Winner, Rainbows End, and (of course) Scalzi’s Old Man’s War novels, yet another response to the “graying” of our society (and, perhaps especially, of SF fandom?  It’s on my mind, certainly).  It’s clearly possible to do something special and original with material others have already addressed, but I’m not sure Sawyer managed to do so, here; to the point where I would say this book’s chief weakness is in its predictability.  The prose is compelling, gripping even, which is remarkable in a talky, contemplative book that lacks action sequences of any sort, but certain romanticized elements were underanalyzed, and I felt the light and hopeful ending was a poor match to the gravitas of the story overall.  This is a good book, and I will be looking to add more Sawyer to my shelves on its merits, but it will not be getting my vote for the Hugo this year.

After an aborted hope to go last year, I will be attending Worldcon this year for the first time, and as a member of the convention will be voting on who receives this year’s Hugo Awards, something I consider an honor and a privilege.  The Last Colony is the first of the nominated novels that I read, and I will endeavor to keep reviewing them as I read them.

You may remember I was very impressed with Scalzi’s first major book on the scene, Old Man’s War.  I never managed to dig its sequel, The Ghost Brigades, out of my booklog backlog for a proper review, but it was a worthy successor, and I’d be hard pressed to point a finger at which of them I enjoyed more.  The events of The Last Colony pick up a few years down the road from The Ghost Brigades, finding our heroes Perry and Sagan (and their adopted daughter) happily settled into a mostly quiet life as minor officials in a small agrarian colonial community.  Suddenly they receive a visit from the Colonial Union military that they had thought they were done with, but they weren’t looking for more military service from the two former soldiers, they were looking for them to be the leaders of a new world.

See, all of the human colonies thus far had been initially populated exclusively by former residents of Earth.  The oldest and most established colonies, however, were now clamoring that their residents should be allowed to colonize new worlds also.  The compromise the colonial governments and the over-ruling Colonial Union reached was that a new colonial expedition would be assembled from several different colonial worlds, with independent, impartial oversight.  Perry and Sagan were picked to be that oversight, and from the beginning it was plain to see that theirs was not going to be like any normal colony, indications that were confirmed when the FTL “jump” to their new world turned out to have a completely different world waiting at its end than what they’d been told to expect.

What they hadn’t been told, what none of the colonists had been told, was that there was a new intergalactic political force on the scene forbidding the founding of any new colonies without their consent, and that the Human Colonial Union was deliberately breaking this edict with the foundation of this colony…a transgression punishable by the complete annihilation of all the colonists.  If they had any hope of surviving, it must be believed by the outside world that they somehow died before reaching their new world, which meant that they would have to forgo the use of any modern equipment that might emit detectable signals.

All in all, this book is a dramatic departure from the two books that came before it.  It’s more political and less military and action-oriented.  It’s also, unfortunately, just not as innovative as those books were, either.  It was societal and military innovations, as realized through a few key technologies Scalzi created for his universe, that made Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades so compelling and refreshing.  They took a genre that is often ridiculed as pulp and made it into something worth thinking about without losing the excitement that makes that genre such a successful one.  The Last Colony does nothing wrong; in terms of prose and characterization it’s almost certainly Scalzi’s best work yet, but it doesn’t really do anything particularly exciting, either.  It is a perfectly polished exemplar of genre fiction that I am happy to have on my shelf and will almost certainly reread for the pleasure of a story well told, but polish is not the same thing as impact.  I recommend this book…but I don’t expect it to get my Hugo vote.

In several of the corners of the internet I habituate, this book is lighting things up right now, and it’s sort of obvious why.  Here we have a book that is technically science fiction, but set close enough to present day that it’s difficult to tell (much the same as Pattern Recognition was) and leveraging that immediacy of setting to maximal effect by having the political climate and conflicts that are of urgent importance right now still relevant to its characters’ viewpoints.  It’s a book that is deeply political, and a book that embraces somewhat complicated ideas about math and computers as necessary elements of its setting and plot, but one that is written to be accessible enough to be shelved with Young Adult fiction (which is where you’ll find it if you want to acquire a copy for purchase).  It’s a book that is very clearly anti-establishment, but it’s also very directly a book about being a patriot; and how combining those two things are not only disturbingly easy right now, but that the former may be a precondition for the latter.  I think it’s safe to say that it would be getting plenty of coverage on Boing Boing even if it wasn’t written by one of that site’s contributors.  It’s targeted directly at the interests of Slashdot readers, and the political leanings of sites like the Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light even if Patrick weren’t the editor.  More importantly, though, I just finished a reread of Cryptonomicon, and this seemed like the perfect chaser to that book’s heady nerd-porn-i-ness.  Very minor spoilers follow below the cut:

Little Brother is the story of Marcus Yallow, a moderately rebellious young man growing up reasonably well off in San Francisco.  One of those kids who’s of that gifted-but-not-really-academic sort that is so easy to identify with for so many of us who are readers (and particularly SF/genre readers, I think, although as I mentioned this book’s genre elements are really pretty minimal).  He skips school one day to go play an ARG with his friends just like he has countless times before.  In order to do so, he has to circumvent a few of the tracking and monitoring schemes schools across the U.S. are implementing or about to implement, and in his doing so we get to see some of his talents and interests at work.  Once he gets out of school, though, he and his friends find themselves nearby when a 9/11 scale terrorist event occurs, and get caught up in the confusion (and the government crackdown) that immediately follow on its heels.

The stories of the indignities that follow are brutally straightforward, and deeply disturbing; the moreso when one realizes that very little that is described is even remotely implausible.  Marcus does what anyone in that situation would do: he breaks, and capitulates to their demands, and is released…but once he’s released certain other circumstances cause him to resolve to fight against the government agency that did this to him and his friends.

Using the technology that had previously been his playthings and hobby for childhood pranks, Marcus begins a campaign that steadily grows in influence, and does some of the requisite coming-of-age sort of things along the way also, of course.  The plot is gripping, with much of the tension that one might expect from a story of an underground movement or even a spy thriller, but reality is really barely stretched in any of the exploits and adventures described.  This is all thoroughly plausible stuff.

Where it suffers, as where all of Doctorow’s books have suffered in my opinion, is in the “voice” of the characters.  The good guys talk like Cory Doctorow.  Now, I don’t think that’s a huge problem, since I’m sure to most people’s perception I probably sound pretty close to Doctorow when I’m blathering on about this stuff, but most people (and perhaps, particularly, most 17-year-olds) don’t talk like that.  You’ll note the “good guys” line above, and that’s one of the other issues I had when reading this, and that’s that the not-good guys are awfully close to being just flat bad guys, and I consider that to be a flaw.  It is, perhaps, a flaw so common to YA fiction that most of its readers would never notice or care, but I still see it as a problem.

So.  Excusing those issues, I think this has the potential to be a massively Important book, which is a curse and a blessing.  It’s a curse because there’s a possibility that, when combined with Doctorow’s aforementioned (and, I think, very adult) ”voice” it’s possible that this book’s target audience (the youth of the world and the U.S. in particular) might percieve it as being Important and a book that their elders might approve of and encourage them to read.  Anyone with any exposure to teenagers knows what an obstacle that can be.  The blessing is, ironically, obvious: this is an Important book that a certain class of adults will feel like the adolescents they know should be reading, and so it’s more likely to get purchased and be made available to that target audience.  And I guess I’ve sort given myself away in that last sentence, there, because that’s exactly how I feel about this book.  It’s massively important to me that people get the messages this book is trying to convey, particularly the generations coming into adulthood in a world that is so much more restrictive and surveilled in so many ways than the one that torturednurtured me into nerdy adulthood.  So I say go buy this book (or download it for free, like you can all of Doctorow’s books).  Then give it to a teen if you know one, or pass it to a friend.  It’s Important enough that it got me off my ass to write a review of it immediately, because how could I read that story and not feel like I should get involved even if only in this little way that I can.

So this is not going to be one of my more usual reviews, although there will be one down-post aways. Be patient. See, late Tuesday night I got an e-mail from the Nerdcore Rising mailing list, telling me that the film was going to be shown at the AFI Film Festival here in Dallas and that mailing list members could possibly be gotten into the afterparty by RSVPing to the film’s “gracious sponsors Reel FX.” Thankfully, I didn’t consider that it might be an April Fool’s joke and immediately sent an e-mail to ask if the party was Thursday or Friday night. Wendy from Reel FX confirmed that it was Thursday…and then a few hours later she e-mails me again asking if I want interview time with Negin and MC Frontalot for my blog. I am not an idiot, dear readers; of course I want interview time! She lets me know that they can probably get me in before the sound check for a few questions, so…wait sound check! MC Frontalot will be performing? I didn’t think this story could get better, but read on for the interview, the review, and the better…

So I arrive after briefly getting lost (as I do every time I go anywhere near downtown Dallas) and am escorted to meet the lovely and (really, truly) gracious Wendy who is chatting with some fellows I recognize as being the members of Frontalot’s band and Ms. Farsad. Frontalot was apparently still getting ready, so after a brief round of introductions Gminor7, Blak Lotus, The Categorical Imperative and I knocked a few balls around on the AFI Artist’s Lounge’s pool table. When Frontalot arrived, there really wasn’t time for a sit-down so we proceeded from the lounge to LFT, the site of the evening’s afterparty and concert, where the soundcheck was to commence, but on the way we had some time for conversation.

Brandon asked me what sort of blog I run and I explained that it’s a review site, movies, music, but mostly books. Mostly science fiction books. This lit Brandon up, because he likes to read Science Fiction, but having limited time to read in his busy schedule, he no longer feels like he has time for the merely fun stuff…he wants the “stuff that’s going to really change your life.” He likes the old masters; Asimov, Clarke and the like, but he feels lost in a bookstore because there’s so much new stuff and it’s almost impossible to know what’s really good without a guide anymore. Frankly, that’s the same sentiment that inspired me to start these reviews, in the hopes that someone out there will find them useful as a guide. Anyway, I recommended he try Vinge and Bujold. Somehow Neal Stephenson came up, which prompted Damian to comment that while he’d really enjoyed Cryptonomicon, he went on to read Snow Crash and was so disappointed by it that he gave up Stephenson as a lost cause. I encouraged him to pursue some of his later works, as I think they are more what Cryptonomicon was working at being and less of what Snow Crash was.

At the sound check I set up my camera to document it for Negin (who’d left her camera in the hotel and promised me a DP credit…I think she was kidding about that), and she and I had a chance to chat for a while. I asked how she had approached Frontalot with the idea for making the documentary. She related a hilarious story that I wish I could have recorded about how she’d just opened (her “day-job” is as a comedienne) for Al Franken in New York, and was on top of the world. She went out to celebrate and met up with Gaby, who was out with Damian. Gaby had told her about MC Frontalot and the Nerdcore phenomenon previously and she thought it was a fascinating thing and that someone should make a documentary about it, and so meeting this friend of a friend she declares to him “Oh, you’re MC Frontalot! Well, I’m going to make a documentary about you, and nothing can stop me because I just opened for Al Franken and I own this town!” She says that Damian and Gaby just waved it off as her being drunk and hyper, and she doesn’t think Damian really believed it until she showed up the day they went on tour with a bunch of cameras and people behind them.

I asked her about the critical reception of the movie so far, and she said that so far it’s been really very favorable, but aside from the mainstream coverage, it’s been the nerd-world reviews, the blog posts and the board comments, that have really been rewarding in their overwhelming positiveness. So, Negin, here’s another one for your collection.

After the sound check, MC Frontalot, the band and I finally had a chance to sit down for some actual interview type questions, that I could actually record, so here’s some transcription from that time:

MC Frontalot: What’s happening?
Skwid: I dunno, what’s happening with you guys?
Front: Well we’re in Dallas!
Skwid: I noticed!
Front: AFI Dallas Film Festival.
Skwid: And where are you going next?
Front: Back to Brooklyn for a while…the movie’s going to the Atlanta Film Festival, but we are not.
Skwid: So we’re like special, because you guys came to this?
Front: *head bobs like a drinking bird*
Skwid: Alright.
Front: And next is the Independent Film Festival in Boston, which will also have a “swanky” party, although it’s not going to be in a clothing store.
Skwid: OK, so how did the band members meet? What’s the chain of relations, there?
Front: Gaby and I met when we were 14.
Skwid: Nice! What class?
Gminor7: We actually had Chemistry together.
Front: Did we?
Gminor7: Yeah…I just saw the back of your head, though.
Front: We used to hang out in the Photo room, because we had this little redheaded friend who we…probably both wanted to have smooches with? But she wouldn’t have smooches with either of us. There were like, a lot of nerdy guys who would sort of…dance around her.
Skwid: The girls with the Nerd Harems, I know exactly what you’re talking about.
Front: She had a nerd harem.
Blak Lotus: Is that why you like the girl from Mythbusters so much?
Front: Probably.
Skwid: Man. Kari Byron. Man.
Front: Would you introduce me to her?
Skwid: Would I introduce you to Kari Byron? …No, no I wouldn’t!
Front: Right, there’s not a man on Earth who would introduce me to Kari Byron.
*long sighs all around*
Skwid: Alright, so you two met in High School, who came next?
Gminor7: Damian met Brandon in College.
Front: Right. Gaby came to college with me…
Skwid: Where’d you go to school?
Front: Wesleyan. I actually met Brandon our senior year when I was visiting Wesleyan. He had long, luxurious hair.
Blak Lotus: And that was just random, right?
Front: Well, I was given to some kid in your hall, and he was like “I think you’d like Patton,” and he just dropped me off with you.
Blak Lotus: So yeah, so the quick story is that I went to Wesleyan, and then Damian ended up visiting as a senior in high school and ended up in my hall, and meeting me with a bunch of my friends, and wound up getting a crush on one of my friends and decided to come to Wesleyan.
Front: Kind of like how I met Gaby!
Blak Lotus: They’re strangely similar!
Front: Girls never, ever hooked up with me, instead I met all of you.
Skwid: And Dan?
Front: Well, Gaby and I were in the Bay Area after college, doing our Rock Opera company, Emerald Rain Productions, and…Dan, how did Gaby find you?
The Categorical Imperative (TCI): I played for one of your shows.
Front: One of our Emerald Rain shows
TCI: I had a band that had a weekly spot all through college at Berkley, and our sound guy knew Gaby and knew Gaby was looking for a drummer, and he put us together and I started playing Rock Operas with them. That’s how I witnessed Damian’s talent for the first time.
Front: *incoherent self-deprecation*
TCI: You did, though! You were the Australian newscaster and you cracked everyone up every single time!
Front: I was supposed to be a New Zealander.
Blak Lotus: What’s the difference in the accents?
Front: I dunno, I just know I picked up the accent from the Peter Jackson movies, so…
TCI: It was in this drop-dead moment of the thing…
Front: Yeah, the plot stopped, the music stopped, and there’s this scene…
TCI: But it was hysterical!
Skwid: OK, let’s talk videogames…what consoles do you own?
Front: I’ve got a PSP, and a PS2 that I sort of have to sit down and negotiate with every time I want it to do anything anymore.
Skwid: I know you’re a big GTA fan, are you going to get one of the new systems to play IV when it comes out?
Front: I’m waiting. I’m hoping that the 360 will be a little cheaper on the day that it comes out. It’ll probably be extra-expensive for a day.
Skwid: OK, so now that you’ve achieved a level of indie success which you possibly did not forsee, have you had any contact with mainstream hip-hop musicians or producers?
Front: No, no I’ve never met any famous rappers, but I did get to meet Prince Paul at the premiere of the documentary at SXSW…it was exciting…I got kind of fanboy-ish…but ultimately I think I recovered.
Skwid: One of the things that Nerdcore Hip-hop has definitely borrowed from mainstream hip-hop culture is the whole rivalry thing, but you pretty much never diss on anybody but yourself.
Front: That’s true.
Skwid: Do you think that the rivalry thing is negative for the genre, over all?
Front: Probably not, I mean, whatever…people have rivalries with each other?
Skwid: Could the competition maybe stir some creativity or something?
Front: It probably helps them out, I mean that’s something to make a song about if you can’t think of something? But for me, I feel like that would be bad form to point out that other Nerdcore rappers are terrible because my rapping’s not all that great, and everyone has room for improvement. Maybe I’ll write, like, a thunderous diss track about how everyone has room for improvement!
Negin: You should write a track about me!
Front: You want me to write a diss track about you?
Negin: You should keep me in the spotlight!
Skwid: OK, Negin, I’ve got a question for you, what did you cut from the movie that was, like, the last thing you wanted to cut from the movie, but you had to?
Negin: Oh, man, there were so many! Hey, Andrew, what did we cut from the movie that we really, really didn’t want to? …Oh I think one thing we cut was they do this focusing exercise, sometimes, where they gather in a circle and focus on an object and they’re supposed push it away from themself…
Front: …using Psychic Powers.
Negin: Right, but if they all really focus hard, then the object won’t move.
Skwid: Because they’ll be balanced.
Front: Yes, perfectly cancelled.
Blak Lotus: We’re very good at that exercise.
Front: Never fails!
Negin: Brandon! Brandon was really wasted in that scene…
Blak Lotus: Yeah…and there was probably a lot more footage of me flirting with people that was thankfully cut…
Skwid: What are we getting for DVD extras?
Negin: We’re getting some hardcore fucking!
Skwid: Alright!
Front: All Sturgis, I assume.
Blak Lotus: Sturge-on-sturge!
Front: Sturge-on-sturge action!

And that was all the interview time we had. From there, the group went to the Red Carpet at the Inwood theater, where they were questioned by actual media for some time, before we proceeded to the Angelika theater for the actual screening of the film.

The movie begins with huge, humorous captions that explode. Literally, they blow up in a fiery ball. It sets the mood right off the bat that this is a film by and about people who absolutely refuse to let themselves be taken seriously. It then proceeds directly into Frontalot and band performing Braggadocio accompanied by animated lyrics popping up on the screen as Front says the words, which is both helpful to people who are unfamiliar with his voice and style and also a slick way to emphasize just how fast Frontalot spits the rhymes. There are occasional cutaways to full animation, in a roto-scoped sort of style, of Frontalot and the band performing, something that happens during several of the songs captured in the film. It lends those pieces more of a music video feel, which was an effect I enjoyed, but I could also see it perhaps being distracting to people who aren’t necessarily fans of the music.

From that initial song, the film follows MC Frontalot and his band from the loading up of the band’s van in Brooklyn all the way across the country on his first tour in 2006. As they travel, more and more of the history and evolution of Nerdcore Hip-hop and MC Frontalot are revealed are revealed through interviews with Frontalot and various notables from Nerdcore and elsewhere (Weird Al and Prince Paul in particular have some insightful comments about Nerds and Hip-hop). The tour also parallels nicely the climb of Nerdcore out of complete internet obscurity into a sort of phenomenal niche success, as it tracks the early shows of the tour having only a few fans show up at the venues they played, on through bigger and better publicized events, and culminating with their triumphant performance before a rapt audience at the PAX show.

The fans they interviewed at those earlier events, as well, were some of the most dedicated, and anyone who knows nerds knows that the truly dedicated among us tend to…have other issues. Those issues aren’t brushed under the carpet, though…the movie uses that display to talk about how this is part of why Nerdcore is growing. It speaks to those of us who might be a little off about something, those of us who really had serious social problems and found comfort in some niche of the world that most people deride or neglect. The film even touches on the issue of whether Nerdcore’s largely humorous appropriation of the predominantly African-American genre had racist undertones, something which had never occurred to me but I have to grant is a valid question, and does an excellent job of defending against the suggestion.

What the movie really accomplishes, though, is making you laugh. It’s damn good at that. Frontalot and Gminor7 and Blak Lotus have been friends for so long, they have a natural manner around each other that really shows on film. They’re highly intelligent, highly talented, genuinely hilarious, and Ms. Farsad’s arrangement of their antics only magnifies all of these qualities. I laughed often and hard, and the rest of the audience seemed to be similarly affected. Whether you’re a nerdcore afficianado or someone who just knows a nerd or two and wonder what all that’s about, anyway, I highly recommend it.

So I’m reasonably sure this is the first time I’ve reviewed a Direct-to-DVD feature.  I’m also sort of live-blogging it, which is another first, but I really feel like my book backlog is too absurd to tackle right now, and I’d like to get something on this site before too much more time has passed.

This is a continuation of the Stargate SG-1 Ori saga that occupied the show’s last couple of seasons before it ended last year, and there’s a “Prelude” recap that does a decent job summing up the relevant events if you feel like you’ve been away from the show for too long.  The movie opens with a lot of helicopter shots of majestic snow covered mountains, backed by the still stirring strings and chant of the original movie’s main theme.  It then reveals that this is not earth, but a world populated by the Ancients long ago and far away.  They have developed a weapon called the Ark of Truth that could force the Ori to capitulate, but refuse to use it for (not unreasonable) ethical reasons.

Flash to present day on Dakara, a sacred world to the Jaffa, and the capitol of their fledgling government up until the Ori blew it to bits, and apparently the final resting place of the Ark’s shipping crate, which SG-1 has discovered.  Vala is bitchy because she hates the desert…something which I sympathize with, but she’s still obnoxious.  Whoops, here come the Ori!  Oh, and Sam is with SG-1.  So I guess this is set some time ago, seeing as she’s “now” the commander of Atlantis in the Pegasus galaxy.

I don’t think it’s a huge spoiler to let you know they get out of that initial encounter, and that they discover that the Ark wasn’t ever really on Dakara, because it wouldn’t be much of a plot-token quest if they started with the plot-token, would it?  Instead the team heads off on a familiar wild McGuffin hunt, with some shooting and pseudo-archeological stuff doubtless in store, and a couple of new faces (including a new IOA advisor, from an organization that apparently interviews candidates based on assholery score) join a few other familiar ones on the trip.

The movie does a good job of taking the elements that made the series worth watching and stitching them together into a continuous story arc that feels much more movie-like in scope than just a double length episode would have, but there are some unfortunate bits that feel very TV.  The entire storyline that occupies Mitchell and Carter for most of the film, for one, and the absurd T’ealc trek through the wilderness, for another.  Capping those, though, were (rot-13) gur fhcre, hygen-ynzr ercyvpngbe-pbagebyyrq qhqr…ernyyl.  Ubj vf guvf thl zber onqnff guna gjb be guerr abezny, rirelqnl ercyvpngbef?  V’yy gryy lbh: ur’f abg.  Nyfb, senaxyl, gur irel ynfg fprar jnf jnl gbb GI.  Vg jnf n tbbq jnl gb raq gur frevrf, ohg n fuvggl raqvat sbe n zbivr.  But really…never mind that the entire thing is a quest to bring about a literal Deus ex Machina resolution…that’s nothing new to the SG-1 franchise.  Those few beefs aside, this is a good SG-1 story, and it puts to bed some very nagging loose ends that the series was unable to tie up.  If you were a fan of this show through to its end, then I’d recommend picking this up.  If you weren’t, well, you probably wouldn’t get much out of it.

All hail Gaiman and Avary! All hail Zemeckis! All hail these men, these wizards of men, for they have made Magic!

Beowulf is a stunning accomplishment. A computer animated film that pushes past the Uncanny Valley into beauty that often surpasses what reality could produce and film could capture. A story that has captivated for over a millenium, realized in new depth by artists who appreciate both the mythic nature of the tale and the realities of the culture that originally sang it in mead halls and firelit gatherings of all sorts. And what artists! By the end of the film, my mouth was dry from my jaw hanging open and my eyes were watering from the sheer wonder of it!

First, the 3D is astonishing, and gave not a hint of the cheap, sloppy-layered appearance that so many 3-d features have. Images have depth in every dimension and texture, not simply depth separating one element from another. I am certain that this movie will blow you away if you see it on a regular screen, but in my opinion you would be doing yourself a disservice if you have any opportunity to see this in 3-D and accompanied by IMAX sound and never make that attempt. Second, the setting…immaculately detailed in both its beauties and its harshnesses. This is a story set in, and told about, a world of men whose culture is not our own. They had different values, different expectations and mores, standards for what is acceptable and what is admirable that might surprise some, but should make the heartstrings of any medievalist swell and thrum (particularly in the portion where the original Anglo-Saxon is sung). Third, the acting and animation, two features that cannot be separated. Never before have digital characters been so expressive of the analog motions and emotions of the human beings they portray. Flawless voice acting is matched to flawless motion capture and layered over and over in amazing art of astonishing detail.

I cannot recommend this film highly enough. I feel privileged to have been able to see it, and privileged to live in a time when it could be made.

Long, long ago I (somewhat glowingly) reviewed Kage Baker’s Anvil of the World, and was recommended, as having a somewhat similar style and tone, to the works of SF luminary Jack Vance. Dutifully, I picked up the omnibus collection of 4 of his novels set in the Dying Earth universe he created, Tales of the Dying Earth, but…well, I can’t write quite so glowing a review this time.

Vance’s setting is interesting enough, in concept. Presumably billions of years in the future, the Sun is dying. Mankind, the environment, and the Earth itself have been through so many traumas and evolutions that it can seem quite alien, especially as humanity’s control of its environment has advanced technologically, or psionically, or spiritually, or some combination of all of these, to the point where Magic in the traditional sense is very much in the world and readily perceived. Vance does a fascinating job presenting a world with billions of years of human history, and his environmental descriptions are almost Tolkien-esque at many points in their vivid paintings of his eerie world. Unfortunately, while I found much to admire in these books, like Tolkien I often thought his characterization and dialogue sometimes lagged far behind his other skills, although I wonder how much of that is simply the choice of stories included in this collection.

The first book in the collection, The Dying Earth is a collection of stories about the wizards of Vance’s world and their creations or servants. Some of these stories have that indefinable touch that elevates a tale to the tone and impact of a legend; I particularly enjoyed “Liane the Wayfarer” (which I would have named “Chun the Unavoidable,” as Liane himself is entirely uninteresting) and “T’sais,” while others seem pedestrian and underwhelming. The entirety of its style feels old, though, in that hard to define way that the prose of Bester, Asimov, and many of the other notables from that period do…something about the rhythm of their language, even when writing in a fantastical mode, that differs from modern usage in some subtle fashion. Old art does not necessarily mean classic art…in some senses it implies a lack of sophistication which is sometimes evident here.

My hesitant approval began to wane, however, after slogging through the next two books in the omnibus, Eyes of the Overworld, and Cugel’s Saga. The titular Cugel is the focal character in these stories (the former book being a collection of shorts and novellas, while the latter was written as a novel from its inception), and is in almost every regard a vile, annoying, and despicable man. That, in and of itself, is not a problem; I’ve read lots of stories where the main character begins as such a wretch. Perhaps it is due to the nature in which these were written and initally published, though, that any step forward that Cugel seems to take in competence or character is utterly reversed in the next moment; after all, if your anti-hero develops into a straight-up villain or hero, you can no longer tell the sort of story that Vance seemed to want to tell with this character, but as a reader it was inordinately frustrating to me. Likewise the humor that can be wrung from such a character wore thin quickly with me…it’s not a character device I’ve ever particularly enjoyed, to be honest. So while I often found his surroundings and supportive characters fascinating, I was equally often annoyed that I was forced to view them around Cugel’s unpleasant presence.

The fourth book in the collection, Rhialto the Marvellous, was much more enjoyable to me than the previous two, thankfully. Centering around a group of aristocratic wizards and particularly the eponymous “Rhialto,” this collection of stories is humorous, whimsical, and mystical in close to equal measures. The characterization is much better, here, and the depth implied in some of the early stories is much better developed. It’s still not grab you by the brain and Wow you level fiction, though, which Anvil was for me.

One of the things this series is best known for, apparently, is its influence on Gary Gygax in developing the setting and magic system for Dungeons & Dragons. I didn’t know that going in, but could totally see it when I learned about it later. It’s also the origin of several creatures that are seen in later prominent books, games, and films; Zork’s “Grue” being just one of the ones that I noticed. So, clearly, this is a series that influenced many, and perhaps broke new and important ground in its day, but in the end it just wasn’t as much to my tastes as I had hoped.

MacLeod continues to create interesting worlds filled with interesting (if not always entirely believable) characters and wildly variable political and economic systems that always manage to trend towards socialist libertarianism. And I keep reading them, and enjoying them, which may or may not tell you something about my own political leanings and/or tolerances. This trilogy of books starting with Cosmonaut Keep, bridged by Dark Light, and concluded with Engine City, is one of those rare interstellar epics where the speed of light is inviolable. Travel, then is accomplished in ships capable of essentially transforming themselves and their contents into light itself; massless and timeless, the traveler arrives at his destination in the same subjective moment as his departure, while years (or decades, or millennia) pass in the frames of reference of the worlds in between. Turns out that extra-terrestrials and their servant species have been relocating life-forms from Earth to an area on the other side of the galaxy for many millions of years, for their own reasons and without much consultation of those being moved, and the primary thrust of these books is the tale of those displaced colonists, impossibly distant in time and space from their homeworld, trying to establish balance and trade with other worlds and species. Minor spoilers (necessary to describe the setting) await you after the cut…

Cosmonaut Keep, however, is told in two timelines…one on the world of Mingulay, the most distant of the settled planets of humanity’s “Second Sphere,” and the other on Earth in the mid-21st century. The latter is first person, ostensibly a recollection of those events by a survivor of them and a character in the former, a more genre-traditional omniscient third story of the descendants of a vessel unique among the known human-inhabited worlds…a vessel crewed and piloted by humans alone. The rest of the humans in the Second Sphere were brought there essentially against their will, in vessels crewed by humanoid descendants of Sauropod dinosaurs and piloted by giant squid. The “Cosmonauts” who arrived in their vessel at Mingulay, however, had essentially built their interstellar ship from a kit…a kit with rather poor documentation and navigational controls. Stuck on the other side of the galaxy, they soon realized they would need to make this largely primitive world their home, and set themselves (and later their children) to solving the puzzle of interstellar navigation. They also soon discovered that somehow, through some cocktail of life-extending drugs taken on Old Earth that they could neither isolate or replicate, that they were effectively immortal. Soon the Cosmonauts wandered from their initial settlement and tasks, but their descendants, having assumed a degree of aristocracy by their advanced knowledge, continued the project alone.

Gregor Cairns, one of the youngest of the descendants of the Cosmonaut (and narrator of our 21st century storyline, explaining how the “cosmonauts” got into this fix) Matt Cairns, has finally discovered the solution that will allow interstellar navigation, and with dreams of establishing true human independence and trade (and also a wish to woo the charming daughter of a trading family) he sets out to try and track down his ancestor Matt and get himself onto the original human ship, the Bright Star, still in orbit around Mingulay. Various adventures and romances, in both timelines, and a heaping portion of geekery to relate to in Matt’s story especially, make this a rousing and relatively straightforward adventure, and leave you craving more.

The second novel, (which is, to my immense annoyance, not overtly labeled as such) Dark Light, is in many ways more what I had come to expect from MacLeod than Cosmonaut Keep. Less influenced by the disruptive knowledge of the late-coming cosmonauts, Mingulay’s closest interstellar neighbor Croaton has a human population divided between industrial city-dwellers and Luddite-esque primitive hill-folk. Crashing (almost literally) into the staid bureaucracies and tribal societies of this world come the Cosmonauts of Mingulay, first Matt’s fellow Cosmonaut (and Socialist hero of Europe) Grigory Volkov arrives via a trading vessel, and then the Bright Star which Matt and Gregor had used to successfully make the first human controlled interstellar voyage with. Volkov, partly to achieve his own ends and partly because he truly believes in his Cause, agitates the industrial workers of Croaton into a state that is ripe for a Communist revolution. When Matt and Gregor realize how difficult accomplishing this goal of Volkov’s would make their own plans and aspirations, they ally themselves with the primitive tribes-people and some level-headed townspeople to moderate the breakneck changes Volkov is wreaking. Along the way, the Cosmonauts learn something of the motivations among the powerful beings that sent them to this corner of the galaxy, and of the galactic war that they might soon be vulnerable to.

The conclusion of the trilogy, Engine City, finds Volkov in the heart of the Second Sphere, Nova Babylonia. Their society, ancient and dignified, is unbearably stagnant and hidebound. Volkov, fresh from the revelations of Croaton and bearing knowledge of the coming invasion, perceives that (once again) it would be easier to create a new society capable of defending against the coming alien menace than it would be to adapt the one he already found in place. Meanwhile, Gregor has retired with his wife to raise a family and do scientific research back on Mingulay, where humanity’s newfound technological parity has brought a level of equality to their relationship with the Saurs and other humanoids that had never been possible previously. Together, they formed a new, richer culture and began to start their own colonies, spreading out from Mingulay in a young sphere of their own. Advancing technologically, now, to levels surpassing those of their Earthly ancestors, they encounter the first of the aliens they had been forewarned of…an encounter which changes everything.

As always, MacLeod insists that you get a heaping helping of thought-provocation to go with your adventure. The setting, in many regards more fanciful than his
“Fall Revolution” novels, perhaps helps humanize his characters somewhat…I certainly found Gregor and Matt more easy to relate to than any of that series’ primaries. Although the in-world effectiveness of the politics still strikes me oftentimes as impossibly optimistic, that too seems moderated in these books of adventure, conspiracy and diplomacy. Although not MacLeod at his best (see my (hopefully) soon to come review of Learning the World for that), you can clearly see his skill as a character-author evolving in this series, and it’s got my strong recommendation.

This book is sometimes hailed as one of the turning points in the Discworld novels…a pivotal step in the evolutionary process whereby fiction that was humorous but made you think is transformed into thoughtful fiction that makes you laugh. I would certainly offer it up as being so, but Pratchett also accomplishes something in this novel that is more difficult and rare than many genre authors (and fans) might admit: a time travel story done well.

Without over-complicating the story with paradoxes, Pratchett involves a character intimately in his own history in a believable fashion, and still manages to resolve the situation with almost no loose ends.  Not only does he juggle those difficulties with seemingly little effort, he still manages to invoke plot concepts both profound and accessible, addressing themes including the role of impersonal authority in law enforcement as opposed to a role of cops as individuals who are elements of the community, transparency in government, and the effectiveness of populist movements in complex societies.  And he still manages to be damn funny telling this story.

The story, after a brief memorial service, launches into Vimes chasing after one Carcer, the Discworld equivalent of Hannibal Lecter (leaving any questionable dietary choices solely to Dibbler), leading to Vimes and Carcer being involved in a magical accident propelling them back in time to the corrupt and unstable city-state on the verge of revolution that Vimes first began working in as a young, rookie copper.  He must, somehow, make sure his younger self and the rest of the Night Watch does what needs to be done in a world that’s been subtly changed by his and Carcer’s arrival.  It’s this unique device, making sure things occur as they did in his youth with the perspective of time guiding his decisions this time as to why they must occur in that fashion, that lets Pratchett explore his deeper themes so effectively, and speaks (I think) to the potential the Fantasy genre holds to explore difficult to address themes in literature.  Highly recommended, and as always with Pratchett books I recommend newcomers consult the Pratchett Reading Order Guide, although in this case I read this way out of order and still enjoyed it immensely.