Virtuality
This is sort of an outtake version of Caprica. There are neural interface headbands; a dead person surviving in virtual form because of real time feedback; adults grimly committed to acting adolescent. About the only thing absent is Muslim terrorists by another name. That alone makes it more appetizing than Caprica, of course. But that is also why it is Caprica that has gone to series.
For some reason, the authors (Ron D. Moore and Michael Taylor, primarily Moore, guessing by the conjoined twin relationship to Caprica,) thought it would be really fascinating to have a series in which we did not know if the setting was real, any of the characters are real, the jeopardy is real and the point unknown. These people seem to have some ideological idee manque that ambiguity is in and of itself deeper and truer. This has taken it to the point of unconscious self parody. Not even Rupert Murdoch could swallow this tripe, and those people could even renew Dollhouse!
Synecdoche, New York
Charles Kaufman has written in the science fictional mode (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,) the fantasy mode (Being John Malkovich,) the metafictional mode (Adaptation,) and now, in what I think of as the Modernist mode. Malkovich's theme was ambition and its costs. Eternal Sunshine's theme was love's disillusions and their costs. Adaptation theme was the irrational nature of desire itself. Synecdche takes up the failure of art to comprehend life. In retrospect it's all as downbeat as country music. I must disagree with the validity of the final judgment. But Kaufman dramatizes his position with a rather Faustian character, Caden Cotard. Like Faust, he is redeemed, despite his failure, because he knows he hasn't succeeded. There is a good deal of straightforward human emotion. Highly recommended.
Vellum
Hal Duncan is a brilliant young man with many attractive personal qualities. His novel Vellum is highly ambitious. It is so ambitious in fact that he manages to blend fantasy, myth, metafictional and modernist modes simultaneously. He throws in brilliant parodies as well. It was a curious coincidence that I saw Synecdoche, New York at the time I was reading Vellum. If Duncan had gone another route, Vellum could have been named Celluloid. The world of Vellum is no more intended to be real than the titanic sets of Synecdoche. But unlike the Kaufman movie, the characters of Vellum are not everymen of any sort, but simultaneously mythic figures and fantasy figures. The relationships are simultaneously everyday human relationships and the mysterious passions of myths. The gods and demons capering about in Vellum have nothing to say to me, as I would be justly beneath their notice. I would be the nameless character tormented offscreen by demons, or trampled underfoot by the rampaging armies of angels, or ever so briefly appear as They passed in the street. They of course are the one whose intensity of passion is incandescent. They see all the colors more brightly, hear the sounds more clearly, and probably have much longer orgasms. Their woes darken the very skies. They are beyond the need for reason. It would be presumption to intrude upon their charmed circle. Enter at your peril.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Science Fiction and Other Modes Using the Fantastic
The willingness to overlook bad science in science fiction is exactly like the willingness to overlook any other kind of bad writing. Whether any particular lapse is gross enough to make you reject a particular work of fiction or drama depends both on the magnitude of the error and on the presence (or absence) of other good things that compensate. All of which brings in individual judgments, with enormous variety in results.
Still, it seems especially perverse (no matter how common the opinion!) to claim that bad science is not bad writing in science fiction. Which brings us back to the great debate over what is and is not science fiction. It's easy to slip into thinking that dumb, fake science means its not science fiction or is some nonexistent thing called science fantasy. A definition of science fiction that rules out changes in scientific knowledge or simple human errors would be absurdly ephemeral, and not much use. To say that Frankenstein was science fiction when Mary Shelley wrote it but now it's a fantasy because we know how absurd it is would be nonsense. To define science fiction as a type of fantasy because the vast majority of science fiction is boys' adventure stories instead of sober speculation (that comes true!) is the same error!
Science fiction is that fiction or drama with fantastic possibilities (hence, not realism,) including such things as alternate histories or fictional science. The better the rationalization of such things, the better the writing. But science fiction is not defined by the quality of its writing, nice as it would be to define one of my favorite kinds of reading as "The Good Stuff." The science fictional mode is one where all the characters have the same experiences and could potentially do the same things, live by the same laws of existence, whatever they may be. Everybody is equally material, and potentially equal in significance and power. Everybody's actions suffer the same restraint of natural law in the fictional world. Whether the rationalization of this world is well or ill done, whether the work relies on readers' previous experience of rationalizations in predecessor works, whether the rationalization is entirely fictional is irrelevant.
In the fantasy mode, there may be exposition of lore or some such, and rigorous plotting from the fantastic premises. The setting may deeply detailed, marvelously self consistent with the fantastic premises. Or the lore can be assumed to be the readers' common knowledge, the setting is a jumble, and the in universe handling of the premises. The first is not science fiction, or science fantasy while the second is the unicorn itself, Fantasy. Fantasy, in some fashion, is off from our world. To borrow a word, the fantasy is orthogonal to our universe. But the characters are different, because some are magic and others aren't. Some characters have a different relationship to the universe than others. Some characters can possibly do things others can't, for causes intrinsic to themselve, and their powers are not something anyone else could be imagined to have. This style of writing is entirely different. The closest science fiction comes to fantasy is the superhero story. That is why the superhero story is easily the most adolescent, if not outright juvenile, of the unique science fictions genres. (That especially includes the modern superhero stories which so greatly emphasize sadomasochistic sexuality.) Is there any adult who becomes enamored of a superhero? Without the gentle glow of nostalgia, who enjoys the superhero comic?
In the horror genres, the mode of the fantastic is irrelevant to the genre's fundamental aim. Obviously this is the case in horror without a fantastic element. When the irruption of the uncanny into the fiction is itself the source, the mode of the uncanny's origin, supernatural or natural, is a minor detail. So many horror stories use fantastic elements as the uncanny, horror is often lumped with fantasy or science fiction. That's because, for marketing purposes, there are many people who resist the fantastic in their fiction. (A feeling that leads many people to reject all fiction on principle.) If a horror story's uncanny is science fictional, a soundly rationlized uncanny is better than a badly rationalized one. Noting that is like saying that a horror story that doesn't use too many passive verbs is better. Yes you can think of the rare exception. But as a rule of thumb it's blindingly obvious. Or should be.
There are four other modes in which the fantastic is not explicated. One is the fable or fairy tale. The thing about fables, whether the traditional talking animals or fairy tales, is that they have very realistic types of people. Little Red Riding Hood and Reynard the Fox have names and realistic personality traits though they are not characters even in the way that Ralph 124C+ was. The fabulous background, whether talking animals or fairy godmothers, doesn't need rationalization, because fables and fairy tales are about the way people are (whether the moral is explicitly stated as in Aesop) or about what people hope for, but cannot allow themselves to dream about in their own persons. The fantastic is a screen, partly transparent, that highlights its subject by veiling other aspects of the scene. To put it another way, it allows daydreams or dilemmas that might be too painful to entertain seriously for oneself. A girl's hopes and fears for Cinderella are easier to deal with than her own hopes and fears. It is easier to imagine the little boy being honest than to look for the emperor's new clothes in daily life. In real life, the emperor has police. One of the rare modern blends of science fiction and fairy tale mode is Star Wars. Although an unambiguous commercial success, it is not an artistic success with high culture critics. It is severely criticized by even its ordinary fans. I think this is because Star Wars is a blend of fundamentally incompatible modes, raising expectations inevitably disappointed, engendering the hostility from the people most committed to one aspect of the series.
Another mode, the mythic, has unrealistic types, acting in strange and inexplicable ways. Yet myth is a genuine commentary on reality. It is not a playful "what if?" Hades' acquiescence in Persephone's return to the Earth for six months because she ate six pomegranate seeds is inexplicable. No person acts like that. But the story of summer and winter is a vital part of our real lives. However, fable/fairy tale and myth are generally short form works. And in any event they are less common now, because with the advancement of real knowledge the fantastic explanations of myth or the fantastic backgrounds are well known not to be so. That's why fables and fairy tales tend to be for children, who don't know much. The mythic mode tends to be rather self consciously stylized, reverential, a kind of authorial ejaculation of ambition. Explaining yourself is not impressive. Myth is also commonly used as a more or less conscious alternative to quotidian fact and logic. In this case, in universe rationalization counters the objective of myth. Myth is commonly used for other forms, notably the Homeric epics or modern fantasies, such as the juvenile series by Rick Riordan.
There is another mode in which the rationalization of the fantastic is irrelevant, which I suppose could be called the modernist. In this kind of works, fantastic things happening is a metaphor for the irrationality of the universe, or society, or the human soul. This shares with the horror genre the relative unimportance of the precise mechanism of the emergence of the irrational. This mode might be considered a metaphysical kind of horror. I tend to find these less satisfying because real people do tend to make sense of the world/society/themselves, or try to. Usually there are whole systems of ideas that attempt to explain the world, society and humanity, even if they are mistaken or are distorted to serve the ruling class. This mode tends to assume the horrific irrationality, then write strange and fantastic events to which people do not or can not find logic or meaning. Assuming the conclusion is a logical fallacy.
Last, there is the metafictional mode. Superficially, the "explanations" which may be proffered, like Jasper Fforde's numerous footnotes, serve as in universe rationalization. They are in fact commentaries on fiction as such. This mode tends towards either humor, as in Fforde or some sort of post-Modernist ideology.
One thing that is often unnoticed I think is that it is easy for the fantasy mode to blend with fairy tale/fable (in particular,) the mythic, the metafictional modes. This is because the fantastic elements, not needing explication, are more easily detachable. The science fiction mode can be more easily blended with the realistic mode, though even in a James Bond spy thriller, a science fiction element like lasers tends to be noticeable. The real difficulty appears to be when either science fiction or fantasy are not modes of specific genres, like military sf or sword & sorcery. In fictions where there is no playing with the formulas of the genre, no teasing about delivering on the emotional payoff promised by the form, either the science fictional mode or the fantasy mode, the media by which the fantastic is incorporated, becomes a message in itself. This is where the importance of identifying the mode is greatest. The modernist fantasy, which assumes irrationality, is incompatible with the science fiction mode.
Still, it seems especially perverse (no matter how common the opinion!) to claim that bad science is not bad writing in science fiction. Which brings us back to the great debate over what is and is not science fiction. It's easy to slip into thinking that dumb, fake science means its not science fiction or is some nonexistent thing called science fantasy. A definition of science fiction that rules out changes in scientific knowledge or simple human errors would be absurdly ephemeral, and not much use. To say that Frankenstein was science fiction when Mary Shelley wrote it but now it's a fantasy because we know how absurd it is would be nonsense. To define science fiction as a type of fantasy because the vast majority of science fiction is boys' adventure stories instead of sober speculation (that comes true!) is the same error!
Science fiction is that fiction or drama with fantastic possibilities (hence, not realism,) including such things as alternate histories or fictional science. The better the rationalization of such things, the better the writing. But science fiction is not defined by the quality of its writing, nice as it would be to define one of my favorite kinds of reading as "The Good Stuff." The science fictional mode is one where all the characters have the same experiences and could potentially do the same things, live by the same laws of existence, whatever they may be. Everybody is equally material, and potentially equal in significance and power. Everybody's actions suffer the same restraint of natural law in the fictional world. Whether the rationalization of this world is well or ill done, whether the work relies on readers' previous experience of rationalizations in predecessor works, whether the rationalization is entirely fictional is irrelevant.
In the fantasy mode, there may be exposition of lore or some such, and rigorous plotting from the fantastic premises. The setting may deeply detailed, marvelously self consistent with the fantastic premises. Or the lore can be assumed to be the readers' common knowledge, the setting is a jumble, and the in universe handling of the premises. The first is not science fiction, or science fantasy while the second is the unicorn itself, Fantasy. Fantasy, in some fashion, is off from our world. To borrow a word, the fantasy is orthogonal to our universe. But the characters are different, because some are magic and others aren't. Some characters have a different relationship to the universe than others. Some characters can possibly do things others can't, for causes intrinsic to themselve, and their powers are not something anyone else could be imagined to have. This style of writing is entirely different. The closest science fiction comes to fantasy is the superhero story. That is why the superhero story is easily the most adolescent, if not outright juvenile, of the unique science fictions genres. (That especially includes the modern superhero stories which so greatly emphasize sadomasochistic sexuality.) Is there any adult who becomes enamored of a superhero? Without the gentle glow of nostalgia, who enjoys the superhero comic?
In the horror genres, the mode of the fantastic is irrelevant to the genre's fundamental aim. Obviously this is the case in horror without a fantastic element. When the irruption of the uncanny into the fiction is itself the source, the mode of the uncanny's origin, supernatural or natural, is a minor detail. So many horror stories use fantastic elements as the uncanny, horror is often lumped with fantasy or science fiction. That's because, for marketing purposes, there are many people who resist the fantastic in their fiction. (A feeling that leads many people to reject all fiction on principle.) If a horror story's uncanny is science fictional, a soundly rationlized uncanny is better than a badly rationalized one. Noting that is like saying that a horror story that doesn't use too many passive verbs is better. Yes you can think of the rare exception. But as a rule of thumb it's blindingly obvious. Or should be.
There are four other modes in which the fantastic is not explicated. One is the fable or fairy tale. The thing about fables, whether the traditional talking animals or fairy tales, is that they have very realistic types of people. Little Red Riding Hood and Reynard the Fox have names and realistic personality traits though they are not characters even in the way that Ralph 124C+ was. The fabulous background, whether talking animals or fairy godmothers, doesn't need rationalization, because fables and fairy tales are about the way people are (whether the moral is explicitly stated as in Aesop) or about what people hope for, but cannot allow themselves to dream about in their own persons. The fantastic is a screen, partly transparent, that highlights its subject by veiling other aspects of the scene. To put it another way, it allows daydreams or dilemmas that might be too painful to entertain seriously for oneself. A girl's hopes and fears for Cinderella are easier to deal with than her own hopes and fears. It is easier to imagine the little boy being honest than to look for the emperor's new clothes in daily life. In real life, the emperor has police. One of the rare modern blends of science fiction and fairy tale mode is Star Wars. Although an unambiguous commercial success, it is not an artistic success with high culture critics. It is severely criticized by even its ordinary fans. I think this is because Star Wars is a blend of fundamentally incompatible modes, raising expectations inevitably disappointed, engendering the hostility from the people most committed to one aspect of the series.
Another mode, the mythic, has unrealistic types, acting in strange and inexplicable ways. Yet myth is a genuine commentary on reality. It is not a playful "what if?" Hades' acquiescence in Persephone's return to the Earth for six months because she ate six pomegranate seeds is inexplicable. No person acts like that. But the story of summer and winter is a vital part of our real lives. However, fable/fairy tale and myth are generally short form works. And in any event they are less common now, because with the advancement of real knowledge the fantastic explanations of myth or the fantastic backgrounds are well known not to be so. That's why fables and fairy tales tend to be for children, who don't know much. The mythic mode tends to be rather self consciously stylized, reverential, a kind of authorial ejaculation of ambition. Explaining yourself is not impressive. Myth is also commonly used as a more or less conscious alternative to quotidian fact and logic. In this case, in universe rationalization counters the objective of myth. Myth is commonly used for other forms, notably the Homeric epics or modern fantasies, such as the juvenile series by Rick Riordan.
There is another mode in which the rationalization of the fantastic is irrelevant, which I suppose could be called the modernist. In this kind of works, fantastic things happening is a metaphor for the irrationality of the universe, or society, or the human soul. This shares with the horror genre the relative unimportance of the precise mechanism of the emergence of the irrational. This mode might be considered a metaphysical kind of horror. I tend to find these less satisfying because real people do tend to make sense of the world/society/themselves, or try to. Usually there are whole systems of ideas that attempt to explain the world, society and humanity, even if they are mistaken or are distorted to serve the ruling class. This mode tends to assume the horrific irrationality, then write strange and fantastic events to which people do not or can not find logic or meaning. Assuming the conclusion is a logical fallacy.
Last, there is the metafictional mode. Superficially, the "explanations" which may be proffered, like Jasper Fforde's numerous footnotes, serve as in universe rationalization. They are in fact commentaries on fiction as such. This mode tends towards either humor, as in Fforde or some sort of post-Modernist ideology.
One thing that is often unnoticed I think is that it is easy for the fantasy mode to blend with fairy tale/fable (in particular,) the mythic, the metafictional modes. This is because the fantastic elements, not needing explication, are more easily detachable. The science fiction mode can be more easily blended with the realistic mode, though even in a James Bond spy thriller, a science fiction element like lasers tends to be noticeable. The real difficulty appears to be when either science fiction or fantasy are not modes of specific genres, like military sf or sword & sorcery. In fictions where there is no playing with the formulas of the genre, no teasing about delivering on the emotional payoff promised by the form, either the science fictional mode or the fantasy mode, the media by which the fantastic is incorporated, becomes a message in itself. This is where the importance of identifying the mode is greatest. The modernist fantasy, which assumes irrationality, is incompatible with the science fiction mode.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Recent Reading
Scottoline
Lisa Scottoline's newest, Look Again, has a terrific hook: A single mother sees a flyer about a missing child who bears an astonishing resemblance to her adopted son. Being a reporter, mom can't keep her curiosity down but can investigate. Along the way, at an excruciatingly inappropriate time (p. 242 if I remember correctly) mom does the deed with her editor, instead of sharing vital information, a laugh out loud moment that brings the thriller momentum to a dead halt. Letting the fish off the (thriller) hook is not good.
The mystery itself depends upon a truly senseless determination by the villain that killing everyone is exactly what he needs to be safe, instead of returning the boy for more money. Since the natural mother is a gambling slut (not to worry, God aka the author punishes her,) she has a lot to lose if he is returned. It is a really weird plot when you realize that he cared enough for his other girl friend to keep the boy for her, but had no qualms about killing her when the plot required it!
There is a great deal of sentimentality about motherhood, most appropriate to a character who would make a single parent adoption. That text is somewhat tiring reading. The subtext about fatherhood is considerably edgier. The heroine mom discovers a letter from her late mother to her father. Given an unconvincing sentimental resolution with her own father, the multiple killer father of the adoptive son and the philandering putative father of the boy the book seems inadvertently to be an artless fantasy. Daddy issues are floating about, propelling the plot in strange directions while attaching to story elements and giving them a weight that sinks them instead of adding to their impact. A conspicuous lapse in characterization of the key character, the reporter mom, is her indifference to the question of the editor's attitude towards the boy. He's a sexy Brazilian (editor of a Philadelphia paper? You don't have to have elves for it to be a fantasy, do you?) Basically he's rejected as a father. Yet somehow reporter mom has him and her son. Wishful thinking, anyone?
Scottoline's previous strengths have been a genuine empathy for the difficulties of career women and a genuine knowledge of the law (her original field.) Her authorial voice has been extremely inhibited. The irruption of such unconscious aggressions is surprising. It may be that her success (she's parlayed novels into a newspaper column as well,) is leading her to put herself into her books more. The difficulty is that this is very hard to do with artistic control. My guess she must become more self conscious, instead of expansive, more artful, instead of natural.
Kellerman
Jonathan Kellerman's True Detectives deemphasizes his old team of child psychologist Alex Delaware and gay police detective Milo Sturgis. They make appearances, as well as police detective Petra Connor, another effort by Kellerman to get away from a series detective. This is understandable. Although series detectives sell better, so much so that mystery fans often refer to a stand alone novel as a "singleton," the series stories are almost invariably inferior. Usually the first (often the origin story,) is the best. Occasionally there is an archvillain captured or a big case lost or true love found that makes another novel in the series much better. But perhaps I should stop reading past the first novels?
This would be a good example. The titular characters are two half-brothers, a mixed race private detective and a white police detective. Their fathers were a black/white team of patrol cops. These characters were introduced in the last Delaware novel. The sibling rivalry and marked personality contrasts between the brothers were explored then. Nothing interesting has been added, especially not some weird caricature mommy monster who's supposed to explain the Odd Brothers. They were best in their first appearance. This series is already going down hill.
As all the characters traipse around, they exercise what has become the signature Kellerman judgmentalism. Over the years, Kellerman's fiction has been marked more and more by a vicious aggressiveness. Delaware's superior sensitivity of course has become greater and greater, especially shown by his wonderful taste. There has been much ink about his lifestyle, which does not strike me as that of a child psychologist. A flattering portrait of a novelist's? Somebody with money.
Kellerman hasn't had good luck with Hollywood adaptations, so The Industry has taken its licks, along with poor people in general. (Let me be fair, Kellerman has always spent a lot of time trying to establish what respectable poor people are like. Usually, that means not smelling bad, but at least he's trying.) Mel Gibson and Michael Moore are blended together (Kellerman seems to be a right wing Zionist. His wife's mystery series is unspeakably tawdry,) to form a wifebeating villain, who naturally is slain for his sins. A male actor is both anorexic and drug addicted and is part of a murder. The good guy characters of course ritually abuse the Hollywood figures as spoiled. Kellerman even has one character think of anorexia as a rich man's disease!
Considering that he also condemns the Moore/Gibson blend for "class warfare" documentaries, it is obvious that Kellerman's natural viciousness is escaping onto the page. Since he came from child psychology (for a long time, his shtick was Alex Delaware hunting down child predators,) I think it far better he work out his aggressions on paper. Perhaps in person he's delightful. Best that he collect royalties than work with children for a living though.
Grossman
Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible is very much like John Ridley's There Will Be Darkness or Perry Moore's Hero in its manic effort to blend superhero tropes with supposed contemporary reality. Unlike them, it's hard to know what the point is. Ridley may not have known his book was a thoroughly convincing origin story for a supervillain (maybe he did, since he killed her off in the sequel,) but Grossman's supervillain narrator lacks all conviction. Grossman's superheroine narrator achieves, decides, learns? Precisely the problem. If the point was deconstructing the superhero myth, in superficial terms Alan Moore's Watchmen or Supreme has already done it better. And for true deconstruction, high school physics will do the job better. That's always been true. The only thing that sticks with me is how Grossman puts magic into his superhero universe but can't figure out any real role for it in the actual plot. His magic hero, Mr. Mystic, is barely on stage. The magical Macguffin simply becomes part of a machine to control the Earth's orbit.
Brown
Eric Brown's Necropath is another of the novels that finds the exotic past in the future. Chris Roberson discovered Qing dynasty China on Mars. Brown discovers Nineteenth Century India and Thai sex tourism on Bengal Station, a giant spaceport in the Indian Ocean. Such nonsense as a doctor performing amputations on street kids so they can be successful beggars may be sensational but it severely stresses the willing suspension of disbelief.
The hero is a telepath. The reader is expected to remember the pseudoscience for this by himself. The point here, is that the hero, Vaughan (I'm impressed I can remember!) is a suffering hero. His cross to bear is exposure to the filthiness of the human soul. Very trendy stuff, this. Always nice to see a writer with a firm grasp on the approved cliches.
There are a couple of exceptions, two girl orphans, sisters, with pure souls, despite being Thai child prostitutes. One of course dies, so that the hero suffers intensely her loss. The other of course saves Vaughan from his mortal enemy. There is an undercurrent of sexual attraction for children that is a little disquieting. It is blended with Vaughan's profession as a telepath who can read dying minds, which adds an undercurrent of necrophilia which is also a little disquieting. Of course all this may be artifacts of a general disposition to think that sex is bad and sexlessness (i.e., children and dead people) are therefore purer. Really it is better if the writer has conscious control of his material.
There's also something about an alien monster who emits drugs that bring people to feed themselves to it in search of cosmic unity. Questions about the nutritional value of human flesh are not embarrassed by answers. The hero somehow has a telepathic conversation with it. Naturally he expresses moral disapproval of the need to eat. It's all rather boring. Which makes one wonder why exactly he is praised by the blurbs for bringing the fun back to science fiction. Unless you think that shameless acceptance of bad science is fun?
The Unknown Universe
This science popularization by Richard Hammond of open questions is mostly repetitive to those who follow popularizations. But I do want to note his discussion of the renormalization problem. His explanation that in quantum mechanics, using the mass of the electron by itself, leads to infinities. But using the mass of the electron plus the mass contribution of virtual electrons, leads to more infinities that cancel out the other infinities leads to the natural question: Isn't the fundamental entity the whole wave of virtual electrons? In what sense is there a "real" electron, except that conservation of energy and momentum means that interactions between waves of virtual electrons must take the form of a single electron? (Obviously, you can substitute any elementary particle for "electron.")
Lisa Scottoline's newest, Look Again, has a terrific hook: A single mother sees a flyer about a missing child who bears an astonishing resemblance to her adopted son. Being a reporter, mom can't keep her curiosity down but can investigate. Along the way, at an excruciatingly inappropriate time (p. 242 if I remember correctly) mom does the deed with her editor, instead of sharing vital information, a laugh out loud moment that brings the thriller momentum to a dead halt. Letting the fish off the (thriller) hook is not good.
The mystery itself depends upon a truly senseless determination by the villain that killing everyone is exactly what he needs to be safe, instead of returning the boy for more money. Since the natural mother is a gambling slut (not to worry, God aka the author punishes her,) she has a lot to lose if he is returned. It is a really weird plot when you realize that he cared enough for his other girl friend to keep the boy for her, but had no qualms about killing her when the plot required it!
There is a great deal of sentimentality about motherhood, most appropriate to a character who would make a single parent adoption. That text is somewhat tiring reading. The subtext about fatherhood is considerably edgier. The heroine mom discovers a letter from her late mother to her father. Given an unconvincing sentimental resolution with her own father, the multiple killer father of the adoptive son and the philandering putative father of the boy the book seems inadvertently to be an artless fantasy. Daddy issues are floating about, propelling the plot in strange directions while attaching to story elements and giving them a weight that sinks them instead of adding to their impact. A conspicuous lapse in characterization of the key character, the reporter mom, is her indifference to the question of the editor's attitude towards the boy. He's a sexy Brazilian (editor of a Philadelphia paper? You don't have to have elves for it to be a fantasy, do you?) Basically he's rejected as a father. Yet somehow reporter mom has him and her son. Wishful thinking, anyone?
Scottoline's previous strengths have been a genuine empathy for the difficulties of career women and a genuine knowledge of the law (her original field.) Her authorial voice has been extremely inhibited. The irruption of such unconscious aggressions is surprising. It may be that her success (she's parlayed novels into a newspaper column as well,) is leading her to put herself into her books more. The difficulty is that this is very hard to do with artistic control. My guess she must become more self conscious, instead of expansive, more artful, instead of natural.
Kellerman
Jonathan Kellerman's True Detectives deemphasizes his old team of child psychologist Alex Delaware and gay police detective Milo Sturgis. They make appearances, as well as police detective Petra Connor, another effort by Kellerman to get away from a series detective. This is understandable. Although series detectives sell better, so much so that mystery fans often refer to a stand alone novel as a "singleton," the series stories are almost invariably inferior. Usually the first (often the origin story,) is the best. Occasionally there is an archvillain captured or a big case lost or true love found that makes another novel in the series much better. But perhaps I should stop reading past the first novels?
This would be a good example. The titular characters are two half-brothers, a mixed race private detective and a white police detective. Their fathers were a black/white team of patrol cops. These characters were introduced in the last Delaware novel. The sibling rivalry and marked personality contrasts between the brothers were explored then. Nothing interesting has been added, especially not some weird caricature mommy monster who's supposed to explain the Odd Brothers. They were best in their first appearance. This series is already going down hill.
As all the characters traipse around, they exercise what has become the signature Kellerman judgmentalism. Over the years, Kellerman's fiction has been marked more and more by a vicious aggressiveness. Delaware's superior sensitivity of course has become greater and greater, especially shown by his wonderful taste. There has been much ink about his lifestyle, which does not strike me as that of a child psychologist. A flattering portrait of a novelist's? Somebody with money.
Kellerman hasn't had good luck with Hollywood adaptations, so The Industry has taken its licks, along with poor people in general. (Let me be fair, Kellerman has always spent a lot of time trying to establish what respectable poor people are like. Usually, that means not smelling bad, but at least he's trying.) Mel Gibson and Michael Moore are blended together (Kellerman seems to be a right wing Zionist. His wife's mystery series is unspeakably tawdry,) to form a wifebeating villain, who naturally is slain for his sins. A male actor is both anorexic and drug addicted and is part of a murder. The good guy characters of course ritually abuse the Hollywood figures as spoiled. Kellerman even has one character think of anorexia as a rich man's disease!
Considering that he also condemns the Moore/Gibson blend for "class warfare" documentaries, it is obvious that Kellerman's natural viciousness is escaping onto the page. Since he came from child psychology (for a long time, his shtick was Alex Delaware hunting down child predators,) I think it far better he work out his aggressions on paper. Perhaps in person he's delightful. Best that he collect royalties than work with children for a living though.
Grossman
Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible is very much like John Ridley's There Will Be Darkness or Perry Moore's Hero in its manic effort to blend superhero tropes with supposed contemporary reality. Unlike them, it's hard to know what the point is. Ridley may not have known his book was a thoroughly convincing origin story for a supervillain (maybe he did, since he killed her off in the sequel,) but Grossman's supervillain narrator lacks all conviction. Grossman's superheroine narrator achieves, decides, learns? Precisely the problem. If the point was deconstructing the superhero myth, in superficial terms Alan Moore's Watchmen or Supreme has already done it better. And for true deconstruction, high school physics will do the job better. That's always been true. The only thing that sticks with me is how Grossman puts magic into his superhero universe but can't figure out any real role for it in the actual plot. His magic hero, Mr. Mystic, is barely on stage. The magical Macguffin simply becomes part of a machine to control the Earth's orbit.
Brown
Eric Brown's Necropath is another of the novels that finds the exotic past in the future. Chris Roberson discovered Qing dynasty China on Mars. Brown discovers Nineteenth Century India and Thai sex tourism on Bengal Station, a giant spaceport in the Indian Ocean. Such nonsense as a doctor performing amputations on street kids so they can be successful beggars may be sensational but it severely stresses the willing suspension of disbelief.
The hero is a telepath. The reader is expected to remember the pseudoscience for this by himself. The point here, is that the hero, Vaughan (I'm impressed I can remember!) is a suffering hero. His cross to bear is exposure to the filthiness of the human soul. Very trendy stuff, this. Always nice to see a writer with a firm grasp on the approved cliches.
There are a couple of exceptions, two girl orphans, sisters, with pure souls, despite being Thai child prostitutes. One of course dies, so that the hero suffers intensely her loss. The other of course saves Vaughan from his mortal enemy. There is an undercurrent of sexual attraction for children that is a little disquieting. It is blended with Vaughan's profession as a telepath who can read dying minds, which adds an undercurrent of necrophilia which is also a little disquieting. Of course all this may be artifacts of a general disposition to think that sex is bad and sexlessness (i.e., children and dead people) are therefore purer. Really it is better if the writer has conscious control of his material.
There's also something about an alien monster who emits drugs that bring people to feed themselves to it in search of cosmic unity. Questions about the nutritional value of human flesh are not embarrassed by answers. The hero somehow has a telepathic conversation with it. Naturally he expresses moral disapproval of the need to eat. It's all rather boring. Which makes one wonder why exactly he is praised by the blurbs for bringing the fun back to science fiction. Unless you think that shameless acceptance of bad science is fun?
The Unknown Universe
This science popularization by Richard Hammond of open questions is mostly repetitive to those who follow popularizations. But I do want to note his discussion of the renormalization problem. His explanation that in quantum mechanics, using the mass of the electron by itself, leads to infinities. But using the mass of the electron plus the mass contribution of virtual electrons, leads to more infinities that cancel out the other infinities leads to the natural question: Isn't the fundamental entity the whole wave of virtual electrons? In what sense is there a "real" electron, except that conservation of energy and momentum means that interactions between waves of virtual electrons must take the form of a single electron? (Obviously, you can substitute any elementary particle for "electron.")
Monday, June 22, 2009
More Rabb, Parker, Grippando
Jonathan Rabb: The Hard Boiled Henry James!
"Martha had used silences like this. It was uncanny that a boy of sixteen-who had lost her at half that age-could so readily conjure them. It made Hoffner need to understand all the more. He said,"There has to be room for hope, doesn't there?" He bit at the words; absurd to hear them coming from his mouth when they had no business being his." This was chosen pretty much at random. It was really interesting in the first novel of this trilogy, Rosa. It's getting a little stale, because with repetition it's becoming horribly obvious that a lot of this is nonsense.
For no obvious reason, one phrase, "as subtle as oil," sticks in my mind. I suppose extravirgin olive oil has to be the most subtle, with Valvoline the least. But I'm at a loss to compare the subtlety of oil to the subtlety of even vinegar, much less ethylene glycol or the multitude of alcohols. If we allow solids into the comparison, I'm overwhelmed.
In addition to the prose's novelty value disappearing, there is a tiresome repeat of the bedmate getting killed because of Hoffner's slowness/indifference/existential depravity motif. It was far fetcthed but affecting in Rosa. Now it just seems like carelessness by the hero.
All God's Children today love Zionism, so Rabb has to malign Communism in his trilogy. In Rosa, it took the rather peculiar form of contrasting the human love life of Rosa Luxemburg with the emptiness of her public life. Oddly, Rabb couldn't quite succeed in giving her romances any content. Not so oddly, he avoided the content of her public life. Given the priority to Commie bashing, he has to tag the Nazis as evil by queerbaiting them. Mystery writers are so prone to the most idiotically reactionary judgments!
Incidentally, Rabb seems to think the German Communist Party peaked with the death of Rosa Luxemburg in January 1919. Since the party had been founded in December 1918, that was a political mayfly's biography. In fact, the party gained a mass membership with the split of the Independent Socialists in 1921. In the Ruhr crisis of 1923, there was a serious possibility of revolutionary action, and the lapse in taking action was a main issue in Trotsky's critique of Stalin. But of course, if the Communists were dead, then Rabb's detective can attribute Hitler's rise to human wickedness instead of support for the the Hero (Hitler, natuerlich,) who could save Germany from the dastardly Reds. And get a lot of foreign love as a fighter against Bolshevism.
It does make you wonder what's up when these allegedly dead issues are so touchy that a mere thriller writer, even one who would be a hetero James with a six pack, cannot honestly face the historical facts. It is a shame when a commendably ambitious writers goes wrong.
Parker
Robert B. Parker's latest Jesse Stone, Night and Day, has Stone dropping his attachment for his ex-wife Jenn, for Spenser's other sleuth, Sunny Randall. It appears that Stone, another millionaire moving further and further right, has come to believe that Stone's continued relations with his promiscuous ex is altogether too much like swinging. I didn't get that out of my hat: The villainy of swinging is a major part of the plot, and Stone's therapist Dix points out the parallels in different words! One of the swingers has taken up voyeurism, then home invasions to photograph naked women. Naturally, he pays the appropriate price, death, with everyone who shoots him down, grimly satisfied that it had to be done. There is a subplot where Stone has the brutal faggot Spike threaten the evil swinger who beats his wife into swinging (and emotionally damages his children by swinging.) This of course is expected to work.
Parker has always had an easy style, with wide margins and large print as prized virtues. But egregiougly bad characterization is starting to crop up. Suburban swingers would surely note the victimized wife's lack of enthusiasm. Real people would be fearful of her alleging rape. The whole subplot is drivel aimed at "justifying" threatening nasty sexual deviants. Along the way, Parker also managed to characterize police as "working men." That view has to be seen somewhere along the descending colon!
Grippando
James Grippando, in Intent to Kill, got away from his dreadful Jack Swyteck hero. This book is at least readable. It hasn't got the clever premises of Found Money or the exotic background of A King's Ransom. Its emphasis on family relations puts it closer to Lying with Strangers. All three are better, more original. This one borrows a lot from The Curious Incident in the Night Time. There is an Asperger's Syndrome patient. The portrait of mental illnes is not grossly offensive like some many in crime novels. But it doesn't quite bear conviction either. Most of the time this character is treated more like a cliche autistic child than Asperger's. The thing about Asperger's is that the people are supposed to be functional. I wouldn't recommend this one.
"Martha had used silences like this. It was uncanny that a boy of sixteen-who had lost her at half that age-could so readily conjure them. It made Hoffner need to understand all the more. He said,"There has to be room for hope, doesn't there?" He bit at the words; absurd to hear them coming from his mouth when they had no business being his." This was chosen pretty much at random. It was really interesting in the first novel of this trilogy, Rosa. It's getting a little stale, because with repetition it's becoming horribly obvious that a lot of this is nonsense.
For no obvious reason, one phrase, "as subtle as oil," sticks in my mind. I suppose extravirgin olive oil has to be the most subtle, with Valvoline the least. But I'm at a loss to compare the subtlety of oil to the subtlety of even vinegar, much less ethylene glycol or the multitude of alcohols. If we allow solids into the comparison, I'm overwhelmed.
In addition to the prose's novelty value disappearing, there is a tiresome repeat of the bedmate getting killed because of Hoffner's slowness/indifference/existential depravity motif. It was far fetcthed but affecting in Rosa. Now it just seems like carelessness by the hero.
All God's Children today love Zionism, so Rabb has to malign Communism in his trilogy. In Rosa, it took the rather peculiar form of contrasting the human love life of Rosa Luxemburg with the emptiness of her public life. Oddly, Rabb couldn't quite succeed in giving her romances any content. Not so oddly, he avoided the content of her public life. Given the priority to Commie bashing, he has to tag the Nazis as evil by queerbaiting them. Mystery writers are so prone to the most idiotically reactionary judgments!
Incidentally, Rabb seems to think the German Communist Party peaked with the death of Rosa Luxemburg in January 1919. Since the party had been founded in December 1918, that was a political mayfly's biography. In fact, the party gained a mass membership with the split of the Independent Socialists in 1921. In the Ruhr crisis of 1923, there was a serious possibility of revolutionary action, and the lapse in taking action was a main issue in Trotsky's critique of Stalin. But of course, if the Communists were dead, then Rabb's detective can attribute Hitler's rise to human wickedness instead of support for the the Hero (Hitler, natuerlich,) who could save Germany from the dastardly Reds. And get a lot of foreign love as a fighter against Bolshevism.
It does make you wonder what's up when these allegedly dead issues are so touchy that a mere thriller writer, even one who would be a hetero James with a six pack, cannot honestly face the historical facts. It is a shame when a commendably ambitious writers goes wrong.
Parker
Robert B. Parker's latest Jesse Stone, Night and Day, has Stone dropping his attachment for his ex-wife Jenn, for Spenser's other sleuth, Sunny Randall. It appears that Stone, another millionaire moving further and further right, has come to believe that Stone's continued relations with his promiscuous ex is altogether too much like swinging. I didn't get that out of my hat: The villainy of swinging is a major part of the plot, and Stone's therapist Dix points out the parallels in different words! One of the swingers has taken up voyeurism, then home invasions to photograph naked women. Naturally, he pays the appropriate price, death, with everyone who shoots him down, grimly satisfied that it had to be done. There is a subplot where Stone has the brutal faggot Spike threaten the evil swinger who beats his wife into swinging (and emotionally damages his children by swinging.) This of course is expected to work.
Parker has always had an easy style, with wide margins and large print as prized virtues. But egregiougly bad characterization is starting to crop up. Suburban swingers would surely note the victimized wife's lack of enthusiasm. Real people would be fearful of her alleging rape. The whole subplot is drivel aimed at "justifying" threatening nasty sexual deviants. Along the way, Parker also managed to characterize police as "working men." That view has to be seen somewhere along the descending colon!
Grippando
James Grippando, in Intent to Kill, got away from his dreadful Jack Swyteck hero. This book is at least readable. It hasn't got the clever premises of Found Money or the exotic background of A King's Ransom. Its emphasis on family relations puts it closer to Lying with Strangers. All three are better, more original. This one borrows a lot from The Curious Incident in the Night Time. There is an Asperger's Syndrome patient. The portrait of mental illnes is not grossly offensive like some many in crime novels. But it doesn't quite bear conviction either. Most of the time this character is treated more like a cliche autistic child than Asperger's. The thing about Asperger's is that the people are supposed to be functional. I wouldn't recommend this one.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Val McDermid, Jonathan Rabb, The Closer and The Prefect
Val McDermid
Val McDermid's latest, A Darker Domain, suffers by comparison with her superb A Place of Execution, or even by its predecessor A Distant Echo. Like most singletons, Place had a completeness that made it better than almost all series novels. A Distant Echo introduced the heroine of Domain. The references to the previous novel fail so miserably, except, unhappily, to diminish the memory of Echo. In Domain, the villain of Echo receives a visit from Karen Pirie, the heroine DI. This is so awkward that the characters have to deny comparisons to Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. Bursting the fourth wall, so to speak, is a bad thing when the flying bricks hit you in the face.
Domain also suffers from McDermid's infatuation with her detective, a disease endemic in series novels. The novel is written with numerous flashbacks, suggesting a hope for another TV series past Wire in the Blood. The real difficulty with this novel is not that it's fairly easy to guess the solution. But the real climax of the novel is the dauntless Pirie successfully taking down a zillionaire Scots tycoon. Since there is never any question that Pirie would even hesitate to do this, nor is there any question that the invincible Pirie could fail, the climax is way too anticlimactic. The neat dovetailing of two seemingly unrelated cases, both decades old (and one tackled without permission to boot!) is also way too neat.
There is personal jeopardy hook, having to do with finding a suitable bone marrow donor for a dying toddler. Since Pirie's case(s) hinges on paternity, the sudden resolution to this outside the main plot is rather pointless, save as a ironic commentary on Pirie's "success." Except that it's the last paragraph of the book, and comes across merely as a PS to let the reader know what happened. Pirie gets laid in this one, and it is of course True Love, even though she's zaftig and he's H-O-T! Stephanie Plum getting courted by both Morelli and Ranger beats this for daydreaming in print, except this we're supposed to take seriously. Ouch!
Jonathan Rabb
Ouch, too, but in a different way for Jonathan Rabb's Rosa. (It and Shadows and Light are the first two volumes of a projected trilogy about a Kripo detective in Berlin. I've just started Shadows and Light.) Rosa was a wild conglomeration of serial killer and political intrigue over the sudden appearance of Rosa Luxemburg's body, with the distinctive cuts from a homicidal maniac imported from Belgium by some nefarious military/political operatives. Although I read the novel within the last six months the details of the labyrinthine plot have already escaped me. This doesn't matter, because Rabb's hero, Nikolai Hoffner, is much more about seeing into the souls of the people he questions, and pondering, depressively, about the emptiness of his own. There is a certain extent to which we can already see that the Reader's Digest version of the whole thing is "Humanity is shit, and the heroes are shit too."
Rabb does actually write more of a novel than a series of cues for the director. Settings are actually described! Hoffner's insights to people do actually work for the most part. And since the rather peculiar plot of Rosa got his wife killed, his depressive demeanor works in the opening of Shadows and Light. But what precisely is the point of picking Rosa Luxemburg, the eponymous victim of Rosa, and Fritz Lang in Shadows and Light, if not to address something more than the vagaries of a made up character? Rabb resolutely eschews politics, except in a politics is shit, politicians are shit and political police are especially shitty way. This quietism is like soldiers grumbling: It makes them feel all manly but doesn't mean a damn thing. Rabb may have had some foolish notions about not projecting our views backwards, except that everyone who cared to see knew exactly what kind of people murdered Luxemburg, and what kind of forces were unleashed to crush socialism. Ralph Lutz, first head of the Hoover Institute (therefore a card carrying conservative) ended his 1920 work on the Spartacist revolt specifically foreboding about the consequences. Instead, much of Rosa is about Hoffner's insight into Rosa's soul. It seems that Rabb felt a great need to find the human being, believing politics not worthy of human thought, I suppose. I would have that that all mammals have sex but only people have politics, which would make it more interesting. But there you are.
Rabb was the perpetrator of The Overseer, which positied a philosopher superior to Machiavelli who wrote centuries ago a handbook for ultimate power. The handbook was cunningly based on conservative philosophy. The gimmick was for a sexy scholar in such arcana to chase around finding the handbook, before the villainous cabal executed its instructions. Much hugger mugger, with somehow a sexy, kickass female spy handholding the sexy scholar's hand. In memory it seems very much like Da Vinci Code, except the theology in Code was intrinsically interesting. It was all very sensational and long like a blockbuster thriller should be. There is a curious contrast between The Overseer and Bruce Levine's Something to Hide. In the Levine, a not so sexy grad student has sexy, but not so kickass female holds his hand, while said grad student chases down the secret cabal operating on the philosophy of Joseph de Maistre. The plotting is much simply, the wish fulfillment characters much less grandiose and the de Maistre deadly accurate on conservative philosophy. Indeed the Levine sounds now like a Roman a clef about Leo Strauss. And yes, Skull & Bones makes an appearance in Something to Hide. That was an overlooked gem, while The Overseer's ponderous bulk confuses poor Mr. Rabb into overkill on plots and sensationalism. I'm hoping that Shadow and Light, if Rabb thinks he can start writing about the politics will be better. The opening, where someone fakes the murder of an UFA director to resemble the suicide of Fritz Lang's first wife as a way of pointing the Kripo's attention at Lang...well, maybe it won't be overplotted and underthemed. Hoffner's soulfulness may be beloved of the author, but Rabb's taste for vicarious martyrdom gives hope for some truth breaking in.
The Closer
Another detective who has been known to fail is Brenda Johnson. Kyra Sedgwick will probably never win an Emmy for her performance because Emmys are just not going to go to basic cable. Nonetheless, it is the key to the success of this show. Johnson is superior to the usual ruck of TV detectives, not just because she can fail, as in last Monday's episode, where she finds the kidnap victim dead, instead of saving him. And not just because she is a flawed human being.
She has the humorous little flaws like compulsively sneaking candy, but the big ones, like lying to her loved ones, even her parents, not just suspects. She also uses people ruthlessly, especially her new husband FBI agent Fritz. She even has had a sexual history, still a rough sell for women characters on TV. The other characters have taken note of her flaws, unusually, and they haven't always compensated with simpering at how cute her dedication is, either. The episode where Fritz told her to pick a wedding date or else, admitting that was the only way to deal with a bully was an example. Even more pointed was the Christmas episode where she lied to her parents about her visit (which was actually to search for a fugitive.) In the upshot, her lies led the fugitive to get himself killed seeking revenge for his younger brother. (Yes, there was some drivel about how the guy actually knew she was lying. It wasn't convincing.) The parents end up adopting the younger brother as a sort of compensation for her meanness. Naturally, in a later episode this is forgotten, but that's the nature of series TV.
The thing about this judgmental bitch, with her reactionary attitudes, and unthinking authoritarianism, aside from carrying conviction as the real thing, is that she is consistent. Murder's murder. Her black-and-white view leads to pursuit of lawbreakers. She almost never lets disdain for the victim or the status of suspects deter her. She never uses her manipulation to get confessions from innocent people. Is this realistic? Hell, no. It's about as fantastic as being able to twitch your nose and do magic. But it does make the series much more tasteful than something like NYPD Blue. The plots are usually decent. There has been gratifyingly little personal jeopardy. There has been a tendency for Brenda's personal life to provide the last clue to a mystery. Example: The bathroom mirror fogging up shows her how a guy in jail give his girl friend the address for a hit on a witness, despite being recorded and filmed. He fogged the mirror just off camera and wrote in it.
There has also been an extraordinary run of good luck in office politics, so that she expends huge amounts of money, time and authority on pursuing justice, instead of framing people for the clearance rate, letting cases fall between the cracks and such things we find in the real criminal investigation system. Johnson not only gets away with it, but is coming out on top! Her original nemesis, Daniels of Robbery/Homicide, now works under her in the expanded Major Crimes Unit!
The Prefect
Alastair Reynolds' latest is set in the same universe as Chasm City, before the Melding Plague that made it so delightfully Gothic, which I guess makes this book a prequel. The autonomous habitats in the Glitter Band orbiting Yellowstone must have all citizens vote in ad hoc referenda on issues of concern to all the space habitats. The Panoply operates the polling apparatus as well as traffic control. As such, it is what passes for the central government. The prefect is an agent of the Panoply. The plot is about the effort of an alpha intelligence, a survivor of the Eighty mentioned as background in Revelation Space, to seize control of the Glitter Band, having foreknowledge though the Exordium (mentioned in Redemption Ark if I recall correctly,) of the Melding Plague to come. There's still plenty of the Grand Guignol we've come to expect from Mr. Reynolds, such as the Panoply head having a booby trap in her neck that has kept her from sleeping for years. But he seems to be developing an interest in something beyond sensationalism. The variety of space habitat societies combined with political issues of polling (for instance, whether to call a referendum for authority for the Panoply to use nuclear weapons,) show an interest in people, not just angst puppets.
Also, the novel doesn't quite have the logorrhea of Mr. Reynolds' previous work, spacious as it is. Even better, the hero is a more rounded person, not quite so infatuated with himself or delighting in his ruthlessness as too many of Reynolds' other characters in the past. The novel would have been stronger as a stand alone. I imagine the impending advent of the Melding Plague is supposed to put the heroes' success into properly diminished perspective.
Val McDermid's latest, A Darker Domain, suffers by comparison with her superb A Place of Execution, or even by its predecessor A Distant Echo. Like most singletons, Place had a completeness that made it better than almost all series novels. A Distant Echo introduced the heroine of Domain. The references to the previous novel fail so miserably, except, unhappily, to diminish the memory of Echo. In Domain, the villain of Echo receives a visit from Karen Pirie, the heroine DI. This is so awkward that the characters have to deny comparisons to Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. Bursting the fourth wall, so to speak, is a bad thing when the flying bricks hit you in the face.
Domain also suffers from McDermid's infatuation with her detective, a disease endemic in series novels. The novel is written with numerous flashbacks, suggesting a hope for another TV series past Wire in the Blood. The real difficulty with this novel is not that it's fairly easy to guess the solution. But the real climax of the novel is the dauntless Pirie successfully taking down a zillionaire Scots tycoon. Since there is never any question that Pirie would even hesitate to do this, nor is there any question that the invincible Pirie could fail, the climax is way too anticlimactic. The neat dovetailing of two seemingly unrelated cases, both decades old (and one tackled without permission to boot!) is also way too neat.
There is personal jeopardy hook, having to do with finding a suitable bone marrow donor for a dying toddler. Since Pirie's case(s) hinges on paternity, the sudden resolution to this outside the main plot is rather pointless, save as a ironic commentary on Pirie's "success." Except that it's the last paragraph of the book, and comes across merely as a PS to let the reader know what happened. Pirie gets laid in this one, and it is of course True Love, even though she's zaftig and he's H-O-T! Stephanie Plum getting courted by both Morelli and Ranger beats this for daydreaming in print, except this we're supposed to take seriously. Ouch!
Jonathan Rabb
Ouch, too, but in a different way for Jonathan Rabb's Rosa. (It and Shadows and Light are the first two volumes of a projected trilogy about a Kripo detective in Berlin. I've just started Shadows and Light.) Rosa was a wild conglomeration of serial killer and political intrigue over the sudden appearance of Rosa Luxemburg's body, with the distinctive cuts from a homicidal maniac imported from Belgium by some nefarious military/political operatives. Although I read the novel within the last six months the details of the labyrinthine plot have already escaped me. This doesn't matter, because Rabb's hero, Nikolai Hoffner, is much more about seeing into the souls of the people he questions, and pondering, depressively, about the emptiness of his own. There is a certain extent to which we can already see that the Reader's Digest version of the whole thing is "Humanity is shit, and the heroes are shit too."
Rabb does actually write more of a novel than a series of cues for the director. Settings are actually described! Hoffner's insights to people do actually work for the most part. And since the rather peculiar plot of Rosa got his wife killed, his depressive demeanor works in the opening of Shadows and Light. But what precisely is the point of picking Rosa Luxemburg, the eponymous victim of Rosa, and Fritz Lang in Shadows and Light, if not to address something more than the vagaries of a made up character? Rabb resolutely eschews politics, except in a politics is shit, politicians are shit and political police are especially shitty way. This quietism is like soldiers grumbling: It makes them feel all manly but doesn't mean a damn thing. Rabb may have had some foolish notions about not projecting our views backwards, except that everyone who cared to see knew exactly what kind of people murdered Luxemburg, and what kind of forces were unleashed to crush socialism. Ralph Lutz, first head of the Hoover Institute (therefore a card carrying conservative) ended his 1920 work on the Spartacist revolt specifically foreboding about the consequences. Instead, much of Rosa is about Hoffner's insight into Rosa's soul. It seems that Rabb felt a great need to find the human being, believing politics not worthy of human thought, I suppose. I would have that that all mammals have sex but only people have politics, which would make it more interesting. But there you are.
Rabb was the perpetrator of The Overseer, which positied a philosopher superior to Machiavelli who wrote centuries ago a handbook for ultimate power. The handbook was cunningly based on conservative philosophy. The gimmick was for a sexy scholar in such arcana to chase around finding the handbook, before the villainous cabal executed its instructions. Much hugger mugger, with somehow a sexy, kickass female spy handholding the sexy scholar's hand. In memory it seems very much like Da Vinci Code, except the theology in Code was intrinsically interesting. It was all very sensational and long like a blockbuster thriller should be. There is a curious contrast between The Overseer and Bruce Levine's Something to Hide. In the Levine, a not so sexy grad student has sexy, but not so kickass female holds his hand, while said grad student chases down the secret cabal operating on the philosophy of Joseph de Maistre. The plotting is much simply, the wish fulfillment characters much less grandiose and the de Maistre deadly accurate on conservative philosophy. Indeed the Levine sounds now like a Roman a clef about Leo Strauss. And yes, Skull & Bones makes an appearance in Something to Hide. That was an overlooked gem, while The Overseer's ponderous bulk confuses poor Mr. Rabb into overkill on plots and sensationalism. I'm hoping that Shadow and Light, if Rabb thinks he can start writing about the politics will be better. The opening, where someone fakes the murder of an UFA director to resemble the suicide of Fritz Lang's first wife as a way of pointing the Kripo's attention at Lang...well, maybe it won't be overplotted and underthemed. Hoffner's soulfulness may be beloved of the author, but Rabb's taste for vicarious martyrdom gives hope for some truth breaking in.
The Closer
Another detective who has been known to fail is Brenda Johnson. Kyra Sedgwick will probably never win an Emmy for her performance because Emmys are just not going to go to basic cable. Nonetheless, it is the key to the success of this show. Johnson is superior to the usual ruck of TV detectives, not just because she can fail, as in last Monday's episode, where she finds the kidnap victim dead, instead of saving him. And not just because she is a flawed human being.
She has the humorous little flaws like compulsively sneaking candy, but the big ones, like lying to her loved ones, even her parents, not just suspects. She also uses people ruthlessly, especially her new husband FBI agent Fritz. She even has had a sexual history, still a rough sell for women characters on TV. The other characters have taken note of her flaws, unusually, and they haven't always compensated with simpering at how cute her dedication is, either. The episode where Fritz told her to pick a wedding date or else, admitting that was the only way to deal with a bully was an example. Even more pointed was the Christmas episode where she lied to her parents about her visit (which was actually to search for a fugitive.) In the upshot, her lies led the fugitive to get himself killed seeking revenge for his younger brother. (Yes, there was some drivel about how the guy actually knew she was lying. It wasn't convincing.) The parents end up adopting the younger brother as a sort of compensation for her meanness. Naturally, in a later episode this is forgotten, but that's the nature of series TV.
The thing about this judgmental bitch, with her reactionary attitudes, and unthinking authoritarianism, aside from carrying conviction as the real thing, is that she is consistent. Murder's murder. Her black-and-white view leads to pursuit of lawbreakers. She almost never lets disdain for the victim or the status of suspects deter her. She never uses her manipulation to get confessions from innocent people. Is this realistic? Hell, no. It's about as fantastic as being able to twitch your nose and do magic. But it does make the series much more tasteful than something like NYPD Blue. The plots are usually decent. There has been gratifyingly little personal jeopardy. There has been a tendency for Brenda's personal life to provide the last clue to a mystery. Example: The bathroom mirror fogging up shows her how a guy in jail give his girl friend the address for a hit on a witness, despite being recorded and filmed. He fogged the mirror just off camera and wrote in it.
There has also been an extraordinary run of good luck in office politics, so that she expends huge amounts of money, time and authority on pursuing justice, instead of framing people for the clearance rate, letting cases fall between the cracks and such things we find in the real criminal investigation system. Johnson not only gets away with it, but is coming out on top! Her original nemesis, Daniels of Robbery/Homicide, now works under her in the expanded Major Crimes Unit!
The Prefect
Alastair Reynolds' latest is set in the same universe as Chasm City, before the Melding Plague that made it so delightfully Gothic, which I guess makes this book a prequel. The autonomous habitats in the Glitter Band orbiting Yellowstone must have all citizens vote in ad hoc referenda on issues of concern to all the space habitats. The Panoply operates the polling apparatus as well as traffic control. As such, it is what passes for the central government. The prefect is an agent of the Panoply. The plot is about the effort of an alpha intelligence, a survivor of the Eighty mentioned as background in Revelation Space, to seize control of the Glitter Band, having foreknowledge though the Exordium (mentioned in Redemption Ark if I recall correctly,) of the Melding Plague to come. There's still plenty of the Grand Guignol we've come to expect from Mr. Reynolds, such as the Panoply head having a booby trap in her neck that has kept her from sleeping for years. But he seems to be developing an interest in something beyond sensationalism. The variety of space habitat societies combined with political issues of polling (for instance, whether to call a referendum for authority for the Panoply to use nuclear weapons,) show an interest in people, not just angst puppets.
Also, the novel doesn't quite have the logorrhea of Mr. Reynolds' previous work, spacious as it is. Even better, the hero is a more rounded person, not quite so infatuated with himself or delighting in his ruthlessness as too many of Reynolds' other characters in the past. The novel would have been stronger as a stand alone. I imagine the impending advent of the Melding Plague is supposed to put the heroes' success into properly diminished perspective.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Definition of Science Fiction
It seems to me one difficulty is caused by trying to describe the genre of science fiction. It's about as useful as labeling nonfiction as a genre, then trying to describe it's unique characteristics.
Science fiction isn't a genre in the way that a Western or a mystery or a romance is a genre. The reader picks up those kinds of stories or novels expecting certain themes and tropes, a certain kind of emotional payoff.If you pick up a science fiction novel, you don't know what to expect. That was true when Wells and Verne were writing and it hasn't changed since.
Science fiction is infamous for bleeding into other genres. For example, thrillers can be set in the near future, with plots that hinge on extrapolated technology. There's no reasonable way these can't be called SF, yet such a thriller still belongs in the thriller genre. If you try to label a blend, you soon discover that most science fiction is a blend. That leaves the unanswerable question of why you'd bother to talk about science fiction as a separate genre in the first place.
For example, Kage Baker might write about time travel, a fantastic element that is tradionally part of science fiction, and therefore doesn't even need to be explained in detail. But the genre she is writing is romance (at least, the Kage Baker novels I've read are romances albeit in a science fictional mode.) A fan of space opera, which is a genre, will not generally like a romance, which is a different genre. I mention Ms Baker as a counterexample to the thesis that science fiction is a subgenre of boys' adventure stories.
A novel like Allegra Goodman's Intuition is much more scientifically based than any space opera, even Alastair Reynold's. Yet fans of the space opera, which really is a genre, might be actively repelled by her novel. Again, there no reasonable way that a novel about the scientific process can't be regarded as in some sense science fiction. Yet it is so little removed from reality that the publisher never dreamed of marketing it as science fiction. Nonetheless, it's science is still fiction. It also is in no sense an identifiable genre novel. Well, unless you somehow call serious or art novels a genre. But using any words with such elasticity doesn't seem kosher.
In another example, the TV series Jericho was set in an imaginary future after a limited nuclear assault of some sort on the US. This is obviously fantastic, in the indisputable sense that it is a product of the imagination, not description. It would be deranged to call it realistic. The post-holocaust story has been common enough to be tagged as a subgenre of science fiction. Yet people have still argued that Jericho was not science fiction!
Science fiction and fantasy are marketed separately for the good reason that not everyone likes the fantastic in fiction. Indeed, not everyone likes fiction of any sort. The importance of the fantastic element in the science fiction mode is revealed in the difficulty some people had accepting Jericho as science fiction.
The notion that science fiction is therefore a branch of fantasy does suffer from stylistic insensitivity. In discussion literature, even popular literature, this is an insuperable difficulty. A fantastic element that is explained as somehow natural (especially if the explanation really is a plausible speculation!) just doesn't have the same style as a fantastic element that is frankly supernatural. Kage Baker and Sherrilyn Kenyon may both be writing romances but one has an entirely different flavor than the other. If the store's big enough, they will not be on the same shelf. But they will not be in the same place of realistic (superficially, anyhow) romances, either.
Many people live daily lives in a materialistic universe of natural causes and effects. At the end, they hope God or the afterlife will suddenly appear. There are similarly inconsistent science fiction stories where God or the afterlife suddenly appear. They don't tend to be very good, but they are not fantasies in the same way as when angels are part of the plot from the beginning. If supernatural ideas are dressed up in natural form, as in nineteenth century spiritualism, with its ether and protoplasm and vibrations, or as twentieth century crank psychotherapy, as in Scientology, well, that's an old tradition. The point is,in literature, style is essential, not an irrelevancy. Thinking so is philistine. Mixing science fiction and fantasy doesn't work well generally, as witness C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy.
Another difficulty in defining science fiction is trying to encapsulate its unique artistic contribution. Most literature is popular literature and has no great artistic contribution to make. As a science fiction fan, I too have been tempted to find a definition of science fictions that rules out everything but the good stuff. Doesn't work, I think.
I would like to think that science fiction, as fiction informed by a scientific worldview or fiction concerned about the future, has some intrinsic merit. But upon reflection, how could such noble things be excluded from ordinary serious, artistically ambitious literature? In practice, it is obvious it is. But I don't think that means science fiction is really different, or even really separate. It means there's something narrowminded about current elite definitions of literature.
Living memory shows that the world has changed. Thinking it won't change more is mad. Writing as if it won't is bad.
But failures of the would be great novelists and short story writers are not our successes. Looking at bookstore shelves, it is plain that being a science fiction fan just means you have a taste for fantastic stories that still have some illusion of grounding in reality. And being a fantasy fan means you like the fantastic freed from the surly bonds of earth. If you want to claim science fiction that describes parts of the human condition regular literature averts its gaze from, you should probably start naming names.
It seems to me one difficulty is caused by trying to describe the genre of science fiction. It's about as useful as labeling nonfiction as a genre, then trying to describe it's unique characteristics.
Science fiction isn't a genre in the way that a Western or a mystery or a romance is a genre. The reader picks up those kinds of stories or novels expecting certain themes and tropes, a certain kind of emotional payoff.If you pick up a science fiction novel, you don't know what to expect. That was true when Wells and Verne were writing and it hasn't changed since.
Science fiction is infamous for bleeding into other genres. For example, thrillers can be set in the near future, with plots that hinge on extrapolated technology. There's no reasonable way these can't be called SF, yet such a thriller still belongs in the thriller genre. If you try to label a blend, you soon discover that most science fiction is a blend. That leaves the unanswerable question of why you'd bother to talk about science fiction as a separate genre in the first place.
For example, Kage Baker might write about time travel, a fantastic element that is tradionally part of science fiction, and therefore doesn't even need to be explained in detail. But the genre she is writing is romance (at least, the Kage Baker novels I've read are romances albeit in a science fictional mode.) A fan of space opera, which is a genre, will not generally like a romance, which is a different genre. I mention Ms Baker as a counterexample to the thesis that science fiction is a subgenre of boys' adventure stories.
A novel like Allegra Goodman's Intuition is much more scientifically based than any space opera, even Alastair Reynold's. Yet fans of the space opera, which really is a genre, might be actively repelled by her novel. Again, there no reasonable way that a novel about the scientific process can't be regarded as in some sense science fiction. Yet it is so little removed from reality that the publisher never dreamed of marketing it as science fiction. Nonetheless, it's science is still fiction. It also is in no sense an identifiable genre novel. Well, unless you somehow call serious or art novels a genre. But using any words with such elasticity doesn't seem kosher.
In another example, the TV series Jericho was set in an imaginary future after a limited nuclear assault of some sort on the US. This is obviously fantastic, in the indisputable sense that it is a product of the imagination, not description. It would be deranged to call it realistic. The post-holocaust story has been common enough to be tagged as a subgenre of science fiction. Yet people have still argued that Jericho was not science fiction!
Science fiction and fantasy are marketed separately for the good reason that not everyone likes the fantastic in fiction. Indeed, not everyone likes fiction of any sort. The importance of the fantastic element in the science fiction mode is revealed in the difficulty some people had accepting Jericho as science fiction.
The notion that science fiction is therefore a branch of fantasy does suffer from stylistic insensitivity. In discussion literature, even popular literature, this is an insuperable difficulty. A fantastic element that is explained as somehow natural (especially if the explanation really is a plausible speculation!) just doesn't have the same style as a fantastic element that is frankly supernatural. Kage Baker and Sherrilyn Kenyon may both be writing romances but one has an entirely different flavor than the other. If the store's big enough, they will not be on the same shelf. But they will not be in the same place of realistic (superficially, anyhow) romances, either.
Many people live daily lives in a materialistic universe of natural causes and effects. At the end, they hope God or the afterlife will suddenly appear. There are similarly inconsistent science fiction stories where God or the afterlife suddenly appear. They don't tend to be very good, but they are not fantasies in the same way as when angels are part of the plot from the beginning. If supernatural ideas are dressed up in natural form, as in nineteenth century spiritualism, with its ether and protoplasm and vibrations, or as twentieth century crank psychotherapy, as in Scientology, well, that's an old tradition. The point is,in literature, style is essential, not an irrelevancy. Thinking so is philistine. Mixing science fiction and fantasy doesn't work well generally, as witness C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy.
Another difficulty in defining science fiction is trying to encapsulate its unique artistic contribution. Most literature is popular literature and has no great artistic contribution to make. As a science fiction fan, I too have been tempted to find a definition of science fictions that rules out everything but the good stuff. Doesn't work, I think.
I would like to think that science fiction, as fiction informed by a scientific worldview or fiction concerned about the future, has some intrinsic merit. But upon reflection, how could such noble things be excluded from ordinary serious, artistically ambitious literature? In practice, it is obvious it is. But I don't think that means science fiction is really different, or even really separate. It means there's something narrowminded about current elite definitions of literature.
Living memory shows that the world has changed. Thinking it won't change more is mad. Writing as if it won't is bad.
But failures of the would be great novelists and short story writers are not our successes. Looking at bookstore shelves, it is plain that being a science fiction fan just means you have a taste for fantastic stories that still have some illusion of grounding in reality. And being a fantasy fan means you like the fantastic freed from the surly bonds of earth. If you want to claim science fiction that describes parts of the human condition regular literature averts its gaze from, you should probably start naming names.
Friday, June 5, 2009
www.wake
There is little to say about a work in progress. Wake is first of a trilogy, to be followed by Watch, then Wonder. It is the story of an artificial intelligence evolving, naturally, on the worldwide web.
The parts of the books in the first person of the emerging Webmind (as it finally names itself) had a certain frantic but solemn effort to communicate a fragmentary consciousness slowly emerging. I must confess that I skipped practically all of those sections. I didn't miss anything but a slower pace I think.
There is actually a main plot about the interactions of the emerging mind with a teenage math prodigy, daughter of an autistic physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Canada. She was born blind, but an experimental procedure to encode visual stimuli and input it into her visual cortex fails initially because her own visual cortex is adapted to navigating the web. Instead of seeing the physical world, she sees the web, where she finds the emerging consciousness, which she calls the Phantom, after a theme borrowed from Helen Keller's autobiography. Caitlin is like no sixteen year old girl I've ever dealt with, but then, I've never dealt with the blind, and most especially never with a prodigy. This is conspicuosly unbelievable in regards to the girl's sexuality. There are many fifteen year old virgins, but the only ones who are as naive as this character are withdrawn. Yet thematically it is necessary that this girl not be withdrawn, as opposed to her father, who is. The effort to embody themes of isolation and consciousness with Caitlin's personal story and the science fictional story is pursued systematically. But it falls a little flat on the believability of the girl.
There is a subplot about a hacker in China. An epidemic of bird flu is contained by gassing the sick and well alike in a rural county. All China's internet contacts are firewalled during this exercise. This subplot is left hanging when the hacker breaks a leg fleeing the police, about to be arrested because he Knows Too Much. Actually, the character exists almost exclusively for editorializing about Tian An Men. Sawyer's political views are standard liberal imperialist thuggery. This is to be expected but failing to write a real character is just plain bad writing.
Sawyer posits that Webmind, by absorbing massive data bases, such as all of Project Gutenberg, can achieve a more or less human consciousness, albeit of superhuman intelligence. He is somewhat inconsistent, giving Webmind a comprehension of vision but not sound. Overall, I'm inclined to believe that in practice the only alien intelligence humanity will ever meet will be artificial intelligence. If it were somehow possible to program a human intelligence, that would be equivalent to deliberately creating a deaf, blind, mute quadriplegic. A human personality in the computer would shut down from trauma, I think. Functional AI wouldn't be human.
The really freakish thing is that Sawyer has his heroine into Julian Jaynes Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It appears that Mr. Sawyer thinks it is really plausible that humanity only developed consciousness in the last few thousand years. The characters of the Iliad, for instance, are not truly conscious. They are automatons answering the divine voices in their head. I'm pretty sure that is crazy. Human consciousness developed from animal consciousness. There is no reason to posit a weird form of schizophrenia as a transitional form in my opinion.
Oh, dear.
The parts of the books in the first person of the emerging Webmind (as it finally names itself) had a certain frantic but solemn effort to communicate a fragmentary consciousness slowly emerging. I must confess that I skipped practically all of those sections. I didn't miss anything but a slower pace I think.
There is actually a main plot about the interactions of the emerging mind with a teenage math prodigy, daughter of an autistic physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Canada. She was born blind, but an experimental procedure to encode visual stimuli and input it into her visual cortex fails initially because her own visual cortex is adapted to navigating the web. Instead of seeing the physical world, she sees the web, where she finds the emerging consciousness, which she calls the Phantom, after a theme borrowed from Helen Keller's autobiography. Caitlin is like no sixteen year old girl I've ever dealt with, but then, I've never dealt with the blind, and most especially never with a prodigy. This is conspicuosly unbelievable in regards to the girl's sexuality. There are many fifteen year old virgins, but the only ones who are as naive as this character are withdrawn. Yet thematically it is necessary that this girl not be withdrawn, as opposed to her father, who is. The effort to embody themes of isolation and consciousness with Caitlin's personal story and the science fictional story is pursued systematically. But it falls a little flat on the believability of the girl.
There is a subplot about a hacker in China. An epidemic of bird flu is contained by gassing the sick and well alike in a rural county. All China's internet contacts are firewalled during this exercise. This subplot is left hanging when the hacker breaks a leg fleeing the police, about to be arrested because he Knows Too Much. Actually, the character exists almost exclusively for editorializing about Tian An Men. Sawyer's political views are standard liberal imperialist thuggery. This is to be expected but failing to write a real character is just plain bad writing.
Sawyer posits that Webmind, by absorbing massive data bases, such as all of Project Gutenberg, can achieve a more or less human consciousness, albeit of superhuman intelligence. He is somewhat inconsistent, giving Webmind a comprehension of vision but not sound. Overall, I'm inclined to believe that in practice the only alien intelligence humanity will ever meet will be artificial intelligence. If it were somehow possible to program a human intelligence, that would be equivalent to deliberately creating a deaf, blind, mute quadriplegic. A human personality in the computer would shut down from trauma, I think. Functional AI wouldn't be human.
The really freakish thing is that Sawyer has his heroine into Julian Jaynes Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It appears that Mr. Sawyer thinks it is really plausible that humanity only developed consciousness in the last few thousand years. The characters of the Iliad, for instance, are not truly conscious. They are automatons answering the divine voices in their head. I'm pretty sure that is crazy. Human consciousness developed from animal consciousness. There is no reason to posit a weird form of schizophrenia as a transitional form in my opinion.
Oh, dear.
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