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In this issue: Firefighting, Robert J. Sawyer, C.S. Friedman, Nancy Kress, Daredevil, and the Pet Shop Boys
Murry Taylor, Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper’s Memoir of Fighting Wildfire: Major thumbs-down. Fighting fire sounds interesting, but excerpts from a wilderness firefighter’s diary, which doesn’t explain lots of things and doesn’t have a coherent order, won’t prove it. I was unfamiliar with the process of smokejumping, and remain so. This might be interesting if you already knew what he was talking about. Or it might not be; he spends an awful lot of time talking about his women troubles.
Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids: Sawyer can be incredibly frustrating. He consistently has fabulous what-ifs, such as the premise of Flashforward: what if everyone on earth suddenly had a vision of what they would be doing 21 years in the future, whether they were sleeping (dreams), dead (nothing), or living (future reality)? Aside from the destruction caused by the initial incident, when drivers/pilots/etc. lost control of what they were doing, the ramifications would be amazing, and Sawyer does a good job with them. He’s just not a reliable closer – endings can be rushed and even leave a bunch of loose ends around. This is, of course, the risk of any ambitious undertaking, and it’s to Sawyer’s credit that he tries, but there is a real risk of failure in any Sawyer book, more disappointing for his greater reach.
Hominids is the first of a promised trilogy. Fortunately, Sawyer resolves the main conflict of this book at the end rather than making us wait, unlike too many “trilogies” that are really enormous, unedited single books. It involves parallel universes, specifically ours and one in which Neanderthals survived and rule the earth. During the course of two quantum experiments, one Neanderthal is brought into our universe. The characters are fairly two-dimensional, and Sawyer makes the Neanderthal society so perfect in comparison to ours that the comparison doesn’t seem quite fair, but the ideas are interesting and I found the book worthwhile. As it happens, Neanderthal society is based on some ideas that could give rise to a “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas”-type moral conflict, but Sawyer doesn’t seem invested in exploring that, though one of the characters mouths critical sentiments.
I may also be biased by the seemingly random dig at lawyers – one of the Neanderthals, suspected of murder when his coworker disappears (to our earth, though nobody back home knows it), finds that the laws are very complex and thinks that it would be useful for society to have a profession dedicated to knowing the law, then reasons that there would be too much unnecessary litigation were that true. As opposed to too much unnecessary surgery when there’s a profession of doctors? Or too much fashion if there’s a profession of clothesmakers? Not that there isn’t unnecessary surgery, unnecessary clothing, or unnecessary litigation, but I just hate it when writers casually assume that lawyering is inherently character-degrading and that lawyers are essentially parasites and wouldn’t exist in the perfect society, whereas no one in other professions is self-serving. Oh, just go read Gideon’s Trumpet or, for that matter, To Kill a Mockingbird.
C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy: I liked Friedman’s sf a lot. This trilogy – Black Sun Rising, When True Night Falls, and Crown of Shadows -- has a thin sf veneer over what is really fantasy. The world of Erna, with its demons born of humans and humans who fight them, is intriguing and generally well-constructed. The main POV character, a priest, and his antagonist-ally, the demon-bound, once-human sorcerer Gerald Tarrant who is both anathema to the priest’s church and its Prophet, make a good pair. (Look how Tarrant took over that sentence – evil seems so much easier to make interesting, doesn’t it?) If one was of a mind to do so, one could call it a slashy relationship, though that wasn’t the big draw for me; rather, the attraction of the partnership was the moral clash and the strength of united opposites, and the compromises made by both.
The books didn’t grab me as much as This Alien Shore or The Madness Season, and I can’t explain why – they were certainly just as well-written and decently plotted. The characters had understandable strengths and weaknesses, and the villains weren’t stupid. It may simply be that I’m in an sf phase, or that my interest flags at around p. 800 of a trilogy (I should note that Friedman also has produced a real trilogy, not a 1500-page book in 3 parts). The ending was also a bit unsatisfactory, in that it headed back into that sf veneer without really explaining itself in scientific terms. Now, given the POV characters, living on a world without much technology, this is perhaps all that Friedman could give us, but it felt a little too wand-wavy for me.
The demon/human interactions also reminded me somewhat of Carol Berg’s very interesting trilogy, Transformation, Revelation, and Restoration. In Berg’s books, one has to reevaluate demons and humans several times as new information is revealed, and there’s also a great, tormented, nonsexual relationship between a slave/sorcerer and a conqueror (both guys). As fantasy, I’d recommend Berg’s trilogy over Friedman’s, though Friedman’s isn’t a waste of time.
Nancy Kress, Probability Sun: What is it with me and these trilogies recently? This is the second book in Kress’s trilogy about World, where the inhabitants “share reality” so that disagreement and deceit aren’t possible for most people, though theft and some other forms of crime are. It’s also about the war against the Fallers, a spacegoing species apparently determined to exterminate humanity and unwilling to talk. This book is much better than Probability Moon, which depended too much on a cardboard Bad Guy, down to his drug addiction. Here, there are people with wildly different values and perceptions, but each is basically understandable and coherent. I did think the Kantian never-do-harm-for-the-greater-good character was silly, but that’s because I find her version of Kantianism silly, not because she was in any way implausible or badly written.
See, it turns out that the artifact that creates “shared reality” on World also might be the weapon that humanity needs to survive the Fallers, in a war they’re losing badly. Oh, and the humans have finally captured a live Faller, and they’re trying to talk to it. It’s hard to understand why these two things are going on within light-years of one another, given the importance of each and the generally sensible attitude of the characters in regards to the proper distribution of eggs and baskets. Kress never explains that to my satisfaction, but that’s my only complaint, and I really don’t care. I’m looking forward to the conclusion of the trilogy, which I hope will focus more on the Fallers, just as this book focused less on World than the first did.
Daredevil, the movie. I like superheroes, if that’s not screamingly evident already. I watched The Shadow twice, in theaters, that’s how much I like superheroes (and the Baldwin phenotype, admittedly). And a crime-fighting lawyer? As in, a good guy? Oh, how I wanted to like this movie.
Nope. Daredevil is a pure snoozer. The scene just after the opening scene, showing how he acquired his powers, drags on for-fucking-ever. Now, maybe it’s easier for Batman because most people already know the basics: the theater, the gun, the string of pearls, the puddle of water. But I’m pretty sure that Burton’s film pulled it off in under 5 minutes, as opposed to the roughly three years that this film’s intro took.
There are a few genuinely interesting visuals: the credit sequence showing NY’s lights turning into braille markings, and some nice stuff in Affleck’s bachelor pad, including the truly creepy water-filled coffin in which he sleeps to tune out the sounds of the city. But, um, where does he get the money for all that Batcave gear? Oh, never mind.
There’s one good scene in which Daredevil terrifies a young child, and Affleck sounds genuinely conflicted when he insists, “I’m not the bad guy.” The rest is silence, or would have been better as such. Jennifer Garner is pretty, but lifeless, as the love interest. The villains are uninteresting and the fights drawn out enough to leave a viewer pondering the wisdom of the Evil Overlord Rules, particularly the ones about shooting first, gloating later and shooting as opposed to the viscerally more satisfying hand-to-hand. I mean, one of the big bads is an amazing marksman with any number of projectiles, yet he feels compelled to go mano-a-mano not once but twice in a row. He’s got a bullseye imprinted in his forehead, but it would have been a lot more accurate to have “Loser” instead.
Grrr.
Pet Shop Boys, Disco 3: I don’t exactly know how the PSB decide what to put on an album and what on a B-side. As Alternative proved, many of the B-sides had disco potential, so to speak, and would have fit well on an album. I wasn’t a huge fan of the recent Release, even after I saw them perform a bunch of the songs in concert, and the remixes from that album on Disco 3 don’t move me any more than the originals did. The B-sides, that’s a different story. I’d heard “Positive Role Model” before, and it’s about midlist PSB. “Try It (I'm in Love With A Married Man)” and “Somebody Else's Business” are great, vintage coy/bitter PSB. “Time On My Hands” and “If Looks Could Kill” are also worth a listen. For 5 worthwhile tracks and 5 remixes, priced as an enhanced CD single, it’s a definite buy.
Murry Taylor, Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper’s Memoir of Fighting Wildfire: Major thumbs-down. Fighting fire sounds interesting, but excerpts from a wilderness firefighter’s diary, which doesn’t explain lots of things and doesn’t have a coherent order, won’t prove it. I was unfamiliar with the process of smokejumping, and remain so. This might be interesting if you already knew what he was talking about. Or it might not be; he spends an awful lot of time talking about his women troubles.
Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids: Sawyer can be incredibly frustrating. He consistently has fabulous what-ifs, such as the premise of Flashforward: what if everyone on earth suddenly had a vision of what they would be doing 21 years in the future, whether they were sleeping (dreams), dead (nothing), or living (future reality)? Aside from the destruction caused by the initial incident, when drivers/pilots/etc. lost control of what they were doing, the ramifications would be amazing, and Sawyer does a good job with them. He’s just not a reliable closer – endings can be rushed and even leave a bunch of loose ends around. This is, of course, the risk of any ambitious undertaking, and it’s to Sawyer’s credit that he tries, but there is a real risk of failure in any Sawyer book, more disappointing for his greater reach.
Hominids is the first of a promised trilogy. Fortunately, Sawyer resolves the main conflict of this book at the end rather than making us wait, unlike too many “trilogies” that are really enormous, unedited single books. It involves parallel universes, specifically ours and one in which Neanderthals survived and rule the earth. During the course of two quantum experiments, one Neanderthal is brought into our universe. The characters are fairly two-dimensional, and Sawyer makes the Neanderthal society so perfect in comparison to ours that the comparison doesn’t seem quite fair, but the ideas are interesting and I found the book worthwhile. As it happens, Neanderthal society is based on some ideas that could give rise to a “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas”-type moral conflict, but Sawyer doesn’t seem invested in exploring that, though one of the characters mouths critical sentiments.
I may also be biased by the seemingly random dig at lawyers – one of the Neanderthals, suspected of murder when his coworker disappears (to our earth, though nobody back home knows it), finds that the laws are very complex and thinks that it would be useful for society to have a profession dedicated to knowing the law, then reasons that there would be too much unnecessary litigation were that true. As opposed to too much unnecessary surgery when there’s a profession of doctors? Or too much fashion if there’s a profession of clothesmakers? Not that there isn’t unnecessary surgery, unnecessary clothing, or unnecessary litigation, but I just hate it when writers casually assume that lawyering is inherently character-degrading and that lawyers are essentially parasites and wouldn’t exist in the perfect society, whereas no one in other professions is self-serving. Oh, just go read Gideon’s Trumpet or, for that matter, To Kill a Mockingbird.
C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy: I liked Friedman’s sf a lot. This trilogy – Black Sun Rising, When True Night Falls, and Crown of Shadows -- has a thin sf veneer over what is really fantasy. The world of Erna, with its demons born of humans and humans who fight them, is intriguing and generally well-constructed. The main POV character, a priest, and his antagonist-ally, the demon-bound, once-human sorcerer Gerald Tarrant who is both anathema to the priest’s church and its Prophet, make a good pair. (Look how Tarrant took over that sentence – evil seems so much easier to make interesting, doesn’t it?) If one was of a mind to do so, one could call it a slashy relationship, though that wasn’t the big draw for me; rather, the attraction of the partnership was the moral clash and the strength of united opposites, and the compromises made by both.
The books didn’t grab me as much as This Alien Shore or The Madness Season, and I can’t explain why – they were certainly just as well-written and decently plotted. The characters had understandable strengths and weaknesses, and the villains weren’t stupid. It may simply be that I’m in an sf phase, or that my interest flags at around p. 800 of a trilogy (I should note that Friedman also has produced a real trilogy, not a 1500-page book in 3 parts). The ending was also a bit unsatisfactory, in that it headed back into that sf veneer without really explaining itself in scientific terms. Now, given the POV characters, living on a world without much technology, this is perhaps all that Friedman could give us, but it felt a little too wand-wavy for me.
The demon/human interactions also reminded me somewhat of Carol Berg’s very interesting trilogy, Transformation, Revelation, and Restoration. In Berg’s books, one has to reevaluate demons and humans several times as new information is revealed, and there’s also a great, tormented, nonsexual relationship between a slave/sorcerer and a conqueror (both guys). As fantasy, I’d recommend Berg’s trilogy over Friedman’s, though Friedman’s isn’t a waste of time.
Nancy Kress, Probability Sun: What is it with me and these trilogies recently? This is the second book in Kress’s trilogy about World, where the inhabitants “share reality” so that disagreement and deceit aren’t possible for most people, though theft and some other forms of crime are. It’s also about the war against the Fallers, a spacegoing species apparently determined to exterminate humanity and unwilling to talk. This book is much better than Probability Moon, which depended too much on a cardboard Bad Guy, down to his drug addiction. Here, there are people with wildly different values and perceptions, but each is basically understandable and coherent. I did think the Kantian never-do-harm-for-the-greater-good character was silly, but that’s because I find her version of Kantianism silly, not because she was in any way implausible or badly written.
See, it turns out that the artifact that creates “shared reality” on World also might be the weapon that humanity needs to survive the Fallers, in a war they’re losing badly. Oh, and the humans have finally captured a live Faller, and they’re trying to talk to it. It’s hard to understand why these two things are going on within light-years of one another, given the importance of each and the generally sensible attitude of the characters in regards to the proper distribution of eggs and baskets. Kress never explains that to my satisfaction, but that’s my only complaint, and I really don’t care. I’m looking forward to the conclusion of the trilogy, which I hope will focus more on the Fallers, just as this book focused less on World than the first did.
Daredevil, the movie. I like superheroes, if that’s not screamingly evident already. I watched The Shadow twice, in theaters, that’s how much I like superheroes (and the Baldwin phenotype, admittedly). And a crime-fighting lawyer? As in, a good guy? Oh, how I wanted to like this movie.
Nope. Daredevil is a pure snoozer. The scene just after the opening scene, showing how he acquired his powers, drags on for-fucking-ever. Now, maybe it’s easier for Batman because most people already know the basics: the theater, the gun, the string of pearls, the puddle of water. But I’m pretty sure that Burton’s film pulled it off in under 5 minutes, as opposed to the roughly three years that this film’s intro took.
There are a few genuinely interesting visuals: the credit sequence showing NY’s lights turning into braille markings, and some nice stuff in Affleck’s bachelor pad, including the truly creepy water-filled coffin in which he sleeps to tune out the sounds of the city. But, um, where does he get the money for all that Batcave gear? Oh, never mind.
There’s one good scene in which Daredevil terrifies a young child, and Affleck sounds genuinely conflicted when he insists, “I’m not the bad guy.” The rest is silence, or would have been better as such. Jennifer Garner is pretty, but lifeless, as the love interest. The villains are uninteresting and the fights drawn out enough to leave a viewer pondering the wisdom of the Evil Overlord Rules, particularly the ones about shooting first, gloating later and shooting as opposed to the viscerally more satisfying hand-to-hand. I mean, one of the big bads is an amazing marksman with any number of projectiles, yet he feels compelled to go mano-a-mano not once but twice in a row. He’s got a bullseye imprinted in his forehead, but it would have been a lot more accurate to have “Loser” instead.
Grrr.
Pet Shop Boys, Disco 3: I don’t exactly know how the PSB decide what to put on an album and what on a B-side. As Alternative proved, many of the B-sides had disco potential, so to speak, and would have fit well on an album. I wasn’t a huge fan of the recent Release, even after I saw them perform a bunch of the songs in concert, and the remixes from that album on Disco 3 don’t move me any more than the originals did. The B-sides, that’s a different story. I’d heard “Positive Role Model” before, and it’s about midlist PSB. “Try It (I'm in Love With A Married Man)” and “Somebody Else's Business” are great, vintage coy/bitter PSB. “Time On My Hands” and “If Looks Could Kill” are also worth a listen. For 5 worthwhile tracks and 5 remixes, priced as an enhanced CD single, it’s a definite buy.
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C.S. Friedman; Daredevil
Your comments about Sawyer reflect the way I felt about reading Tad Williams. It's like he spent all this time building weight and meaning into a certain character and then having them not matter. It would be like Frodo carrying the ring, but at the end of the books, the ring has no meaning or power; the power lay in something else. Kinda steals the wind from the sails.
Yeah, about Daredevil. So sad. Garner really had no chemistry w/ Affleck. And you are so right about the beginning. I was thinking, "Die, already," to the kid's old man. Kingpin is hardly on screen long enough to qualify for evil guy status. Wasted film stock.
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I wonder if it might not have been better to leave Tarrant unredeemed. This from someone who LIKES happy endings.
I recently read the Berg trilogy and am eagerly awaiting her next offering. Again, these were nice, meaty books that I enjoyed but that made me anxious at the same time (partly due to real life stress). But of course, being anxious is part and parcel of the Things Get Worse plot I love so much.
The thing I found lacking in them part of the relationship between Seyonne and Aleksander--I wanted more of what there was. Berg thought the books were about Seyonne, and they are, but I think there should have been even more about that defining relationship in Seyonne's life. The trilogy starts and ends with it--where was Aleksander in the middle? I think Berg wanted to allow Seyonne the space alone to grow, but all the time I felt like something was missing.
I may feel differently about all this a few months from now.
They were pretty slashy together, weren't they?
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From: (Anonymous)
You didn'tlike release....
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I added you to my friends list. Happy stalking!
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