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newnumber6Edit note: Odd. I had the King quote in here before, along with a number of other edits, but somehow they disappeared. Maybe I screwed up and didn't save the edit, or saved an old version over it. Either way, it means there are probably more minor brainographical errors that I failed to correct... there are usually plenty, but this one more than usual. Oh well.
Finished: Song of Susannah (Dark Tower Book VI), by Stephen King (reread)
Started: The Dark Tower (Dark Tower Book VII), by Stephen King (reread)
Don't really have much to say. Song of Susannah's a little less charming the second time around with some of the author tricks and techniques he uses, but I still enjoyed it for the most part. My main concern is the whole 'ka' issue again, and the annoyance where sometimes the writer uses it and spectacular strange coincidences/telepathy/magic messages from the past when actually having the characters solve the problems on their own would have been more entertaining and take up not much more time. But, whatever, almost finished the series, not going to stop now.
Oh, and a quote which doesn't really spoil, but is kinda cool about writing in general, at least for me:
I don't knowm one day you just start having less fun while you're sitting there, tapping the keys. Seeing less clearly. Gettiing less of a buzz from telling yourself the story. And then, to make things worse, you get a new idea, one that's all bright and shiny, fresh off the showroom floor, not a scratch on her. Completely unfucked up by you, at least as of yet.
I've had this feeling a lot with stories, somewhere in the middle. Although, the nice thing is, sometimes, after a long time, the old used ideas begin to look like fun again, and you realize how, with a little polish, you could make them shine.
Finished: Mainspring, by Jay Lake
Mainspring posits a universe where the universe is literally clockwork - The earth runs on a brass track around the sun, and the main character is tasked by an archangel to find the Key Perilous and rewind the mainspring that drives the Earth's rotation.
Okay, so, granted, it's a fantasy concept at the heart (although I can think of some cool ways to go with it that's not especially fantasy). However, the premise was intriguing enough that I was willing to grant them a little fantasy, so long as they didn't go overboard.
And, for the first half of the book, I rather enjoyed it. In fact, so much that I thought that I'd probably pick up the two sequels (or set in the same world-els, since this book seems to tell a fairly stand-alone story). And then what happens?
They go overboard. WAAAAY overboard. More behind the cut, a little more spoilery than usual.
Okay, so despite the clockworkness of the premise, at the start, much of the world is recognizable as our own (at about the 19th/early 20th century), there are the same cities and countries mentioned, there are changes to history and religion (The "Brass Christ" is reputed to have rewound the Mainspring last time, and died on the gears of a clock). There are steampunky (or clockpunky) elements, and zeppilins, but it feels more like an alternate-earth story rather than a traditional fantasy in some made up world with made-up kingdoms. The British Empire exists and is competing with China, etc.
But that's just the northern hemisphere. See, the track the Earth runs on goes through the equator (hard to describe cleanly, and in fact there were times I wished the book had a series of diagrams of the solar system setup), which means all around the planet is an "equatorial wall" that divides North from South, extending higher than the highest mountain ranges. Because crossing the gap is difficult, there's not much contact between the two sides. Which leads one to wonder about how the parts of the world south of the equator that have affected much of Earth's history... and how they AFFECTED EARTH'S HISTORY? And made it ANYTHING anywhere NEAR recognizable? I mean, you're missing most of South America and a good chunk of Africa. And that's not the most difficult part. The southern hemisphere ISN'T our southern hemisphere, it's a place of magic and strange monsters and stuff like that, and very little humans. As far as the book is concerned, the northern hemisphere of our world turns out more or less the same, even if the southern hemisphere simply doesn't exist as we know it at all (at some points I wondered if the northern hemisphere was supposed to include both our northern and southern hemisphere, just mapped to a larger sphere, but I don't think that was the case). Maybe the people who normally live in our southern hemisphere were intended to have lived among the civilizations in the wall. I don't know.
Anyway, once the main character crosses the equatorial wall, it turns into an all out fantasy with clockwork stuff being merely a bit of a theme for how some of the magic works, and I ceased to care because there were virtually no characters except the rather dull main character, a couple of people who are opposed to him, and the tribe of intelligent divine monkey-people who follow him along.
What's worse, is that throughout the whole book, it feels as though virtually nothing the main character does MATTERS. He's led by the nose from one step to the next. At first it seems random where he's going but once he gets to the wall it's suggested all the random events that led him there were part of a divine plan. (Yes, I know some of that is implied in 'clockwork universe', but... still, fate makes for DULL stories). Several times he needs a little boost or help and some miraculous sign appears to help him. When the only way for the story to progress is for him to find a new, super-fast means of transportation, or spontaneously develop MAGICAL POWERS (like the ability to speak the language of the people he's with), that's what he does. There's a point in the book where he realizes he has no leads to find the Key he's supposed to find, so basically decides "Well, I might as well go on a long quest to where the key is probably going to be used, because... well, whatever, fate, lol!" He seems to have no agency for himself, other than the mere fact of wanting to fulfill his holy mission.
AWFUL, AWFUL, AWFUL. Virtually none of the events have any impact, he encounters occasional monsters or threats but it feels like you're just stopping by a dramatic moment, having a peek at it, and then moving on, rather than it MEANING anything. All that happens is that he loses a few members of his monkey-tribe and moves on. Once he crossed the wall I kept hoping the story would go back and find out how the zeppelin people were doing.
Like I said, I knew when the story started with an Angel appearing and giving him a quest there was going to be a fantasy element, but couldn't it have at least been GOOD fantasy, or subtle fantasy, or even entertaining fantasy?
So, yeah, that second half left such a bad taste in my mouth, not bothering with the sequels, even if I find them used, even if they deal with the northern hemisphere only. A shame such a good premise was wasted on such a lousy book.
Started and Finished: Tesseracts 6) (Short story collection)
Started: Tesseracts 7, (Short story collection)
Tesseracts, well... I have to say, this was the worst of them. Very little SF content, and, perhaps especially after Mainspring, I was looking for SF. But most of the stories were either outright fantasy, or 'trying to explain a fantasy story by giving it a thin layer of science fiction' (or its twin 'we look like a science fiction but actually ancient magic's driving the plot'). The few outright SF seemed to have poor premises, for the most part. It's okay if that's your thing, but the Tesseracts line started as a SCIENCE FICTION line (although this book just calls it an anthology of 'speculative fiction' which includes fantasy), and I was deeply unsatisfied by the science fiction. Damn you fantasy, it's bad enough most of the books Speculative Fiction publishes are fantasy, you have to invade Tesseracts, too?
I blame editor Robert J. Sawyer. Possibly the co-editor (and his wife), Carolyn Clink, but she took credit for all the poetry being there (but at least there all the poetry, put together, only adds up to one lame story), so I'll give the rest of the blame to Sawyer.
There were a few good stories in the bunch though. My favorite was probably "Love-In-Idleness" by James Alan Gardner. "The Sleeper In The Crystal", this year's regular Elisabeth Vonarburg entry was also enjoyable.
-
In movies, I recently, finally, saw Inception. Wow, that actually was a pretty good movie. I mean, it's not without its flaws, but especially for a film focused on dreams, quite well done. Normally anything, book or movie, that has "dreams" as a key hook (them being meaningful to explore the psyche, people sharing them, telling the future) is a bit iffy for me, which is probably why I resisted looking into it for so long. Usually "Dream Movies" either feel like they're trying too hard to be abstract, have a hard time convincing me they have any point, or they include silly things like "if you die in the dream, you die for real" (which was okay in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, which, oddly enough, I ate up as a teenager, but any attempt of using it in a serious story really makes me want to shut the movie off/close the book). In some ways, it's a lot like "virtual reality" for that reason.
This one, though, it got around most of those concerns. (some spoilers, but not the big ones) What I liked was that the 'rules' of how the dreams work (even if they don't entirely match how I think it would really work, because it's a science fictional device I can allow them some leeway for making-stuff-up), felt very consistent and thought out. I never really felt that they were just pulling something out of their backsides at the last minute, like I do in a lot of such films. That's one of the really big risks of dream-films, the idea "This is all in the character's head, so anything can happen" (in which case, who the %$@! cares WHAT exactly happens, because it could be anything). Again, there were iffy bits, and I would have liked to see a lot more actual dreamy-imagery rather than just "wandering around in a hotel/snow field/whatever" (the point of some levels of the dream were to feel real), but the plot felt solid and the emotional story at the heart was quite enjoyable.
If I'd managed to see it last year, it probably would have made it my pick for best movie of the year (but, of course, I'd only seen a handful last year).
I would love to see Christopher Nolan try a bit more SF, judging by this he might have a knack for it. This is actually a very SF-film, one of the best SF films in a long time.
Anyway, seeing it also reminded me to track down another SFish movie that I'd heard about and wanted to see but never gotten around to... Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I am presently using... magic to find it, probably will watch it in the next few weeks.
-
Cartoons. I've been watching Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes lately. It's... well, it's the best Avengers cartoon ever, as far as I can tell. Of course, that's damning with faint praise because all the other attempts kinda sucked as I remember. I might be biased because I never really was a huge fan of the Avengers stable of characters (give me a new Spidey or X-Men cartoon, stat... or Runaways, Power Pack... even Young Avengers. Hell, I'd be more interested in a Cloak and Dagger series than an Avengers one!) But, for all that I'm not a huge fan of the characters in general, it's still fairly enjoyable on the whole. A huge array of characters, references, and cameos (Wolverine even appears, briefly, before he was Wolverine, in a WWII flashback), a continuing storyline rather than simply standalone eps that go nowhere. Rather like the old Justice League Unlimited series, actually (including in the 'I don't really care about these characters, but there's a big universe and maybe they'll feature somebody I like' department). It did confuse me a bit at first, because after the first two parter, the next 5-6 episodes were all set BEFORE the two parter, and were structured strangely - sometimes the first few minutes would focus on, say, the Hulk, and the rest of the ep would be about Hawkeye after an attempt to take him down, or Iron Man fights Hydra, then Nick Fury talks to somebody about prisons for ten minutes. Then I learned that those 'first few episodes' were compilations of individual 5-6 minute webisodes, and once the regular continuity started again the series became more traditional. Anyway, if you're a Marvel fan it might be worth a look.
Finished: Song of Susannah (Dark Tower Book VI), by Stephen King (reread)
Started: The Dark Tower (Dark Tower Book VII), by Stephen King (reread)
Don't really have much to say. Song of Susannah's a little less charming the second time around with some of the author tricks and techniques he uses, but I still enjoyed it for the most part. My main concern is the whole 'ka' issue again, and the annoyance where sometimes the writer uses it and spectacular strange coincidences/telepathy/magic messages from the past when actually having the characters solve the problems on their own would have been more entertaining and take up not much more time. But, whatever, almost finished the series, not going to stop now.
Oh, and a quote which doesn't really spoil, but is kinda cool about writing in general, at least for me:
I don't knowm one day you just start having less fun while you're sitting there, tapping the keys. Seeing less clearly. Gettiing less of a buzz from telling yourself the story. And then, to make things worse, you get a new idea, one that's all bright and shiny, fresh off the showroom floor, not a scratch on her. Completely unfucked up by you, at least as of yet.
I've had this feeling a lot with stories, somewhere in the middle. Although, the nice thing is, sometimes, after a long time, the old used ideas begin to look like fun again, and you realize how, with a little polish, you could make them shine.
Finished: Mainspring, by Jay Lake
Mainspring posits a universe where the universe is literally clockwork - The earth runs on a brass track around the sun, and the main character is tasked by an archangel to find the Key Perilous and rewind the mainspring that drives the Earth's rotation.
Okay, so, granted, it's a fantasy concept at the heart (although I can think of some cool ways to go with it that's not especially fantasy). However, the premise was intriguing enough that I was willing to grant them a little fantasy, so long as they didn't go overboard.
And, for the first half of the book, I rather enjoyed it. In fact, so much that I thought that I'd probably pick up the two sequels (or set in the same world-els, since this book seems to tell a fairly stand-alone story). And then what happens?
They go overboard. WAAAAY overboard. More behind the cut, a little more spoilery than usual.
Okay, so despite the clockworkness of the premise, at the start, much of the world is recognizable as our own (at about the 19th/early 20th century), there are the same cities and countries mentioned, there are changes to history and religion (The "Brass Christ" is reputed to have rewound the Mainspring last time, and died on the gears of a clock). There are steampunky (or clockpunky) elements, and zeppilins, but it feels more like an alternate-earth story rather than a traditional fantasy in some made up world with made-up kingdoms. The British Empire exists and is competing with China, etc.
But that's just the northern hemisphere. See, the track the Earth runs on goes through the equator (hard to describe cleanly, and in fact there were times I wished the book had a series of diagrams of the solar system setup), which means all around the planet is an "equatorial wall" that divides North from South, extending higher than the highest mountain ranges. Because crossing the gap is difficult, there's not much contact between the two sides. Which leads one to wonder about how the parts of the world south of the equator that have affected much of Earth's history... and how they AFFECTED EARTH'S HISTORY? And made it ANYTHING anywhere NEAR recognizable? I mean, you're missing most of South America and a good chunk of Africa. And that's not the most difficult part. The southern hemisphere ISN'T our southern hemisphere, it's a place of magic and strange monsters and stuff like that, and very little humans. As far as the book is concerned, the northern hemisphere of our world turns out more or less the same, even if the southern hemisphere simply doesn't exist as we know it at all (at some points I wondered if the northern hemisphere was supposed to include both our northern and southern hemisphere, just mapped to a larger sphere, but I don't think that was the case). Maybe the people who normally live in our southern hemisphere were intended to have lived among the civilizations in the wall. I don't know.
Anyway, once the main character crosses the equatorial wall, it turns into an all out fantasy with clockwork stuff being merely a bit of a theme for how some of the magic works, and I ceased to care because there were virtually no characters except the rather dull main character, a couple of people who are opposed to him, and the tribe of intelligent divine monkey-people who follow him along.
What's worse, is that throughout the whole book, it feels as though virtually nothing the main character does MATTERS. He's led by the nose from one step to the next. At first it seems random where he's going but once he gets to the wall it's suggested all the random events that led him there were part of a divine plan. (Yes, I know some of that is implied in 'clockwork universe', but... still, fate makes for DULL stories). Several times he needs a little boost or help and some miraculous sign appears to help him. When the only way for the story to progress is for him to find a new, super-fast means of transportation, or spontaneously develop MAGICAL POWERS (like the ability to speak the language of the people he's with), that's what he does. There's a point in the book where he realizes he has no leads to find the Key he's supposed to find, so basically decides "Well, I might as well go on a long quest to where the key is probably going to be used, because... well, whatever, fate, lol!" He seems to have no agency for himself, other than the mere fact of wanting to fulfill his holy mission.
AWFUL, AWFUL, AWFUL. Virtually none of the events have any impact, he encounters occasional monsters or threats but it feels like you're just stopping by a dramatic moment, having a peek at it, and then moving on, rather than it MEANING anything. All that happens is that he loses a few members of his monkey-tribe and moves on. Once he crossed the wall I kept hoping the story would go back and find out how the zeppelin people were doing.
Like I said, I knew when the story started with an Angel appearing and giving him a quest there was going to be a fantasy element, but couldn't it have at least been GOOD fantasy, or subtle fantasy, or even entertaining fantasy?
So, yeah, that second half left such a bad taste in my mouth, not bothering with the sequels, even if I find them used, even if they deal with the northern hemisphere only. A shame such a good premise was wasted on such a lousy book.
Started and Finished: Tesseracts 6) (Short story collection)
Started: Tesseracts 7, (Short story collection)
Tesseracts, well... I have to say, this was the worst of them. Very little SF content, and, perhaps especially after Mainspring, I was looking for SF. But most of the stories were either outright fantasy, or 'trying to explain a fantasy story by giving it a thin layer of science fiction' (or its twin 'we look like a science fiction but actually ancient magic's driving the plot'). The few outright SF seemed to have poor premises, for the most part. It's okay if that's your thing, but the Tesseracts line started as a SCIENCE FICTION line (although this book just calls it an anthology of 'speculative fiction' which includes fantasy), and I was deeply unsatisfied by the science fiction. Damn you fantasy, it's bad enough most of the books Speculative Fiction publishes are fantasy, you have to invade Tesseracts, too?
I blame editor Robert J. Sawyer. Possibly the co-editor (and his wife), Carolyn Clink, but she took credit for all the poetry being there (but at least there all the poetry, put together, only adds up to one lame story), so I'll give the rest of the blame to Sawyer.
There were a few good stories in the bunch though. My favorite was probably "Love-In-Idleness" by James Alan Gardner. "The Sleeper In The Crystal", this year's regular Elisabeth Vonarburg entry was also enjoyable.
-
In movies, I recently, finally, saw Inception. Wow, that actually was a pretty good movie. I mean, it's not without its flaws, but especially for a film focused on dreams, quite well done. Normally anything, book or movie, that has "dreams" as a key hook (them being meaningful to explore the psyche, people sharing them, telling the future) is a bit iffy for me, which is probably why I resisted looking into it for so long. Usually "Dream Movies" either feel like they're trying too hard to be abstract, have a hard time convincing me they have any point, or they include silly things like "if you die in the dream, you die for real" (which was okay in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, which, oddly enough, I ate up as a teenager, but any attempt of using it in a serious story really makes me want to shut the movie off/close the book). In some ways, it's a lot like "virtual reality" for that reason.
This one, though, it got around most of those concerns. (some spoilers, but not the big ones) What I liked was that the 'rules' of how the dreams work (even if they don't entirely match how I think it would really work, because it's a science fictional device I can allow them some leeway for making-stuff-up), felt very consistent and thought out. I never really felt that they were just pulling something out of their backsides at the last minute, like I do in a lot of such films. That's one of the really big risks of dream-films, the idea "This is all in the character's head, so anything can happen" (in which case, who the %$@! cares WHAT exactly happens, because it could be anything). Again, there were iffy bits, and I would have liked to see a lot more actual dreamy-imagery rather than just "wandering around in a hotel/snow field/whatever" (the point of some levels of the dream were to feel real), but the plot felt solid and the emotional story at the heart was quite enjoyable.
If I'd managed to see it last year, it probably would have made it my pick for best movie of the year (but, of course, I'd only seen a handful last year).
I would love to see Christopher Nolan try a bit more SF, judging by this he might have a knack for it. This is actually a very SF-film, one of the best SF films in a long time.
Anyway, seeing it also reminded me to track down another SFish movie that I'd heard about and wanted to see but never gotten around to... Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I am presently using... magic to find it, probably will watch it in the next few weeks.
-
Cartoons. I've been watching Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes lately. It's... well, it's the best Avengers cartoon ever, as far as I can tell. Of course, that's damning with faint praise because all the other attempts kinda sucked as I remember. I might be biased because I never really was a huge fan of the Avengers stable of characters (give me a new Spidey or X-Men cartoon, stat... or Runaways, Power Pack... even Young Avengers. Hell, I'd be more interested in a Cloak and Dagger series than an Avengers one!) But, for all that I'm not a huge fan of the characters in general, it's still fairly enjoyable on the whole. A huge array of characters, references, and cameos (Wolverine even appears, briefly, before he was Wolverine, in a WWII flashback), a continuing storyline rather than simply standalone eps that go nowhere. Rather like the old Justice League Unlimited series, actually (including in the 'I don't really care about these characters, but there's a big universe and maybe they'll feature somebody I like' department). It did confuse me a bit at first, because after the first two parter, the next 5-6 episodes were all set BEFORE the two parter, and were structured strangely - sometimes the first few minutes would focus on, say, the Hulk, and the rest of the ep would be about Hawkeye after an attempt to take him down, or Iron Man fights Hydra, then Nick Fury talks to somebody about prisons for ten minutes. Then I learned that those 'first few episodes' were compilations of individual 5-6 minute webisodes, and once the regular continuity started again the series became more traditional. Anyway, if you're a Marvel fan it might be worth a look.
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