One Geek's Mind

Thoughts on "The Big Combo"

2012-01-26T18:09:00.000-08:00

This is my reaction paper from a college film noir class. Originally written in 2003.

Spoiler...

"The Big Combo" (1955) is a great film noir because it is not only stylish and innovative, but also entertaining.

The protagonist, Police Lt. Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde), is a fascinating character because at first he seems very one-dimensional, but as the movie goes on we begin to see that his character has many layers. When we first meet Diamond, he is nothing but a stereotypical workaholic cop. We know he’s a workaholic because he is shaving in his office, which means he hasn’t been home in sometime. Diamond’s captain comes in and scolds him for continuing to put so much time into trying to bust the gangster, Mr. Brown (Richard Conte). The captain claims Diamond’s in love with Brown’s girlfriend, Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace), and that’s why he won’t give the case up. At this point, I groaned because I couldn’t deal with another poorly acted, and even more poorly written, love subplot, but thankfully I was spared that fate. The beauty of this movie was that we never really find out if Diamond has romantic feelings for Lowell. All we know is that he is deeply concerned with her well being. Notice when Diamond and Lowell talk during a piano recital, he tells her, “My captain thinks I’m in love with you.” However, many things do point to his feeling being romantic. For instance, after Rita, an old flame, and Diamond have sex, she tells him, “when she (Lowell) hurts you again, don’t wait six months.”

The villain, Brown, is very interesting because for the first time we have a villain who is a true sociopath, which makes him unpredictable and sadistic. His very first scene sets his tone for the rest of the movie. Mr. Brown talks to a boxer that he owns after the boxer loses a fight. Brown insults Joe, his hearing-aid wearing henchman, to his face and then tells the boxer that hate runs the world. Brown gets angry when the boxer doesn’t seem to understand this and so Brown fires the boxer. From this scene, we already know that to Brown, people exist only to serve him and therefore are all expendable. The only thing that matters to Brown is his unquenchable thirst for power. Brown’s next important scene is when he goes over to Lowell’s apartment. He sees what she is wearing and says, “A woman dresses for a man, go put on something white.” His sociopathic nature is reinforced by his treatment of Lowell as a belonging.

There are two scenes of violence in this movie that were just so wonderfully put together that they are truly artful. The first is the scene where Brown puts an earphone in Diamond’s ear and tortures him by turning the music to full blast (Obviously none of them had ever been to a rock concert.) The second scene is when Brown turns the tables on what Joe thinks is his coup-d’etat. Joe screams for mercy, Brown takes off Joe’s hearing-aid, and for the rest of the scene, the audio is cut. You see the machine guns going off and Joe dying, but hear nothing.

The two henchmen is this film, Fante and Mingo, were so hilariously stupid. When Brown tells Fante and Mingo to find him some alcohol, Mingo shouts, “how about some paint thinner?” I also enjoyed the Swedish antique dealer, Nils Dreyer, who claims that, “nothing will kill me, I’ll die in Stockholm like my grandfather.” Of course, he gets killed about two minutes later.

Another scene that is definitely a classic is when Diamond arrests 96 of Brown’s employees even though he has absolutely nothing to charge them with, and then manages to somehow convince Brown to take a lie detector test. The proctor tells Brown to do word association. “Woman,” he says, “expensive,” says Brown.

Henry Jude Grayshaw is Born!

2012-01-21T11:42:00.000-08:00

Henry Jude Grayshaw was born at 2:29 pm on Sunday, January 15, 2012. We'd gotten to the hospital at 1 pm. That's right Henry came out like he had an appointment to keep. He was 8 lbs 2 ozs and 21" long.

I haven't been able to share pictures because my computer was down. Hopefully it's fixed now. Well, anyway without further ado here's what you all want to see.

Have you ever seen a cuter kid?

I'm gonna make a reader out of him.

The first time I held him

It's a lot of work, but we're still mostly having fun.

Thoughts on "Force of Evil"

2011-12-21T17:38:00.000-08:00

This is my reaction paper from a college film noir class. Originally written in 2003.

Spoiler...

In “Force of Evil,” (1948) the protagonist, Joe Morse (John Garfield), is an over- idealistic criminal. He really seems to believe that everything is going to be okay in the end. He even thinks that the illegal activities he gets sucked into will only be illegal temporarily. In fact, Joe is so confident, he tries to convince and eventually forces his brother Leo into the business. The strange part is that Leo runs an illegal gambling bank, but doesn’t seem to be involved in the underworld. Somehow, Leo has managed to stay immune to such things. If he was smart, Joe would take a lesson from Leo, but Joe believes he can get rich quick and does not have to work hard for his whole life like Leo. Throughout the movie, it seems as though Leo doesn’t really like his brother. When Joe bails Leo out of jail, Leo says to Joe, “All that Cain did to Abel is murder him.” In other words, Leo is saying that Joe is a worse brother than Cain. However, later in the movie when Mr. Bauer betrays everyone, because he is deeply afraid of the mob, Leo tells him, “I’ll kill you with my own hands rather than let you put the mark of Cain on my brother.” This means that Leo feels like Joe may be wrong, but he’s still his brother, and no one is going to do him wrong, no matter what.

There is a romantic subplot: Joe falls for Doris Lowry, Leo’s secretary, who is like a daughter to Leo. The interesting thing about the romance, is that Leo always warned Doris about his brother and told her that he was no good. However, instead of making Doris cautious of Joe, this seemed to backfire and actually endear him to her. Doris was unable to resist the “bad boy,” the idea of whom she had already fallen in love with even before they met. Somehow, she seemed to have gotten it into her mind that she could change Joe and make him a good person. She might have even thought that it was the perfect way to make up the great debt she felt she owed Leo. A line that Joe says in the middle of the film sums it up well: “I think she made up her mind to fall in love with me.”

This film had two scenes that were just classic noir. The first scene is when Joe goes into his office and sees that a light is on. The only light in the scene is from the office and the use of shadows is great. Joe quietly stands on a chair and looks into his office though a window on top of his doorway. (What ever happened to windows on top of doorways? They just aren’t popular anymore.) He sees a cop tapping the phone he keeps locked in a drawer. A detail, I thought was a little over the top. I understand that it is hidden because it’s a direct line to his mobster boss, but come on, who locks a phone in a drawer? The second scene is when Joe realizes that he has been defeated. He goes out of his office and thinks to himself that he’ll never see this place again. Then he walks in the middle of a downtown Manhattan street, except there are no cars or people anywhere. This clearly represents how alone Joe feels even in a city.

The gangster side of the movie was interesting. You can see that the makers of modern gangster movies were heavily influenced by this movie. For instance one of Ficco’s henchman delivers a line that could have been right out of any modern gangster movie: “What do you mean gangsters? It’s business.” Also, later on in the movie, Mr. Bauer lures Leo to an Italian restaurant where they are both murdered by gangsters. Sounds like the "The Godfather," doesn't it?

This movie definitely has some flaws. For instance, I don’t understand the mobster’s plan to make gambling legal or why that many people would bet on a horse with the number 776, even if it was the fourth of July. Also, there is no point to the character Edna Tucker. Were all of her scenes cut? She does wear a cool spider woman outfit that would be perfect for some sort of femme fatale. However, her character must have been seducing men in some other movie, because it wasn’t in this one.

I really enjoyed Joe’s cynicism when he realizes he’s done for. He says to Doris, “A holiday is when you celebrate something that ended long ago.” “When did your life end,” Doris asks him? “The day I was born,” Joe replies.

The final scene in the movie where Joe runs down hundreds and hundreds of steps so that he can see for himself whether his brother is really dead, was also very powerful. Especially with the narration, “It was like going down to the bottom of the world to find my brother. He was dead and I felt like I killed him.”

Thoughts on "Out of the Past"

2011-12-10T21:50:00.000-08:00

This is my reaction paper from a college film noir class. Originally written in 2003.

Spoiler...

Even though “Out of the Past” (1947) seemed to borrow heavily from earlier film noirs, it also managed to introduce a new idea or two.

In the previous noirs we’ve seen in class, for example, “The Killers,” the femme fatale was a mysterious temptress. The audience suspects she’s no good, but the protagonist is drawn into the underworld by her “siren’s call” and never returns. In these films, the protagonist’s mistake is thinking with his heart (or loins) rather than his brain. However, in “Out of the Past,” the protagonist, Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum), is all too aware that femme fatale, Katie Moffat (Jane Greer), is all bad. His undoing isn’t that he falls for her again, it is that he is too over confident in his ability to turn the tables on her. He thinks that simply because he is invulnerable to Moffat’s sexual advances that he will be able to foil the machinations of the evil-doers. Unfortunately, this is not the case because, like any good villain, Moffat and Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) have many other tricks up their sleeves.

Another thing that was different about this film was that it wasn’t always focused on the city. In fact, the camera often paused for a moment on a shot of lush mountains or forests. Rather than just presenting the city as a corrupter, this film also presents to us the idea that the country is a safe haven. When we first meet Markham’s character, he is enjoying the day at a lake. When Markham is hiding from the police, he hides near a river. Finally, when Markham sets up a meeting with his girlfriend, Ann Miller, it is in a forest.

This film was about half exposition since it told the whole story of Markham and Moffat’s first encounter and romance. Ultimately, the problem with this movie was that since this first story was so long, it competed for screen time with the second story, which was Markham’s return to the underworld. The second story was, at the same time, more complicated and less interesting than the first. Was this a film about how Markham was doomed by his past? If this is the case, then the exposition could have been much shorter.

I don’t really know what, but there was something about Sterling’s character that was really great. Maybe it was simply that Douglas had great timing. My favorite line in the movie is when Sterling insults his henchman’s intelligence by saying he, “ couldn’t find a prayer in the bible.” Also fun is how Markham constantly insults Moffat. My favorite was, “you’re like a leaf that gets blown from one gutter to the next.”

I found the plot of the film to be very confusing at times. For instance, a new character, Meta Carson (Rhonda Fleming), was introduced in the middle of the movie and then never seen again. Also, when Markham hid the important papers in a mail storage of some sort, just like Bogart did in “The Maltese Falcon,” Sterling’s henchmen picked Markham up right outside the place. Am I supposed to believe that these guys can’t put two and two together and realize that he must have just dropped off the papers?

This film was successful because I cared about Markham’s character. In fact, I wanted to scream at the screen whenever he kissed Moffat because I knew she was no good for anybody. I thought that Markham would prevail in the end. However, upon deeper reflection, I realized that throughout the film, Markham is over-confident and in control. If he triumphed in the end, this movie’s tone wouldn’t have been film noir at all, because there must be an element of helplessness; fate must play a large role.

National Novel Writing Month Success

2011-12-03T19:07:00.000-08:00

I just successfully completed National Novel Writing Month in November. I wrote a 51,798 word novel in one month.

This was no small feet considering I’d never before completed a novel in my nearly 30 years of living.

It took determination, I kept thinking towards the end that I wasn’t going to finished, but my wife said, “Yes you will, just keep going.” It took discipline, I had to write whether I felt like writing or not. Some nights I felt like I would have rather have done anything in the world other then write another word.

I had a very vague idea about the novel I wanted to write when I started. I based it on a news story that happened in at the end of October. I knew it was going to be about an exotic animal farm in Ohio where the animals are let out and their owner is found dead. Only in my version there is a question as to whether or not he committed suicide or was murdered!

I thought I had the ending in mind and knew who the two killers were, but after a few days I decided I liked one of the characters too much for her to be one of the killers and I decided I didn’t like another character at all so I killed him off. Then I came up with two different guilty parties, so my advice when writing a mystery is have lots of characters that could be guilty.

As you can see on the chart I posted, I had up days where I wrote a whole lot like on the 12th where I wrote 3,839 words. I admit that I was unhappy with part of that days work and it may end up being one of the only chapters on the chopping block.

Then there were days like the 13th where I was sick and couldn’t write anything or the 18th and 19th when I had houseguests and couldn’t write anything.

My most productive day was the 27th where I wrote a whooping 5,282 words.

But enough about all that; you all want to read an excerpt don’t you?

Well here is a random chapter of the soon to be released bestseller “The Tiger’s Claw” (A Peter Gillis Mystery) by John Grayshaw:

Chapter 13

Once again I wasn’t present for these events but I’ve talked to many of the people involved in our to piece together how the events unfolded.

Theodore Roosevelt Grade School was one of three Kindergarten through fifth grade schools in Sherfield. It was on the western end of town and less then 5 miles from the Lawton farm. Therefore it was the closet school to the farm, which is why it was one of the first stops Harper decided to make. She had done a couple of education stories and so was on pretty friendly terms with the school’s principal Miguel Hernandez.

She had in mind that a class of cute little kids learning as if nothing was going on outside their four walls might be the perfect shot to end a nice counterpoint to the article about the animals on the loose. Obviously her paper had already sent every available reporter to the Lawton Farm to “get the story” but she doubted her editor Phillip Cross, a man perpetually six months from retirement, had thought to send one reporter to put together a decent feature story. She had in mind to get quotes from some homeowners in a new development that was close by, the men at the Sherfield fire department, some local storeowners, and hopefully that local librarian Rita Tallmadge. She also planned on going to a local barbershop and seeing if she could get some quotes from the men there about how they just went about their business or maybe she’d find that the animal threat really did freak everyone out. That was the beauty of being a reporter you could plan out your stories in your head, but it was the quotes that really started to shape it.

Gabriel had miraculously been quiet for the entire car ride. Thank God she had learned the importance of swaddling her baby. For as long as Harper could remember she’d felt independent. Maybe it was the fact that she was a latchkey child, walking herself home from school since Junior High School, which was partially responsible for her self-reliant streak. But babies are just the opposite they want to be wrapped up and contained in order to feel safe. Harper wondered when it would change. Would the bars of his crib one day feel like the bars of a jail cell? Or would the change happen at a later age? Harper got the baby out of the car seat and wrapped him in a hands free sling.

In the hopes that Harper would get that perfect shot of the classroom, she had come armed with her trusty camera a high end Canon Rebel. The thing had cost her a small fortune, but it had never taken a bad picture. In her business you sometimes only had one shot to get the picture and if you missed your chance it was all over.

Miss Amelia Jacobs had just moved to Sherfield two months ago. She grew up in Cleveland and thought she’d probably live there her whole life, but the school system there was so clicky. Jacobs had been out of gradschool, where she had gotten straight A’s, for two years and was still subbing because she couldn’t find a permanent job anywhere in Cleveland. Finally she became convince that she was never going to find a job because she didn’t know the right people. The fact that she started getting interviews and ultimately got the job in Sherfield within two months of expanding her search outside of Cleveland seemed to be conclusive proof.

Even though it was only October, Jacobs already felt very close to everyone in her second grade class. She always heard when she was in school from her professors that a teacher’s first class is always very special to them, but she didn’t believe it until she started to experience it for herself. Everyday she felt like she was pouring out herself to these children and she felt like they knew it and appreciated it. But that was stupid they’re just kids her rational mind would tell her. They can’t tell the difference between a teacher who gives it their all and goes the extra mile and a teacher that doesn’t. And yet Jacobs knew in her gut that the kids could tell and that is why they loved her.

At around 9 am in the middle of an art project the classroom phone rang. “Hello,” said Jacobs. It was one of the administrative assistants in the schools main office. She began with “I don’t want to alarm you but…” and then she detailed how Mr. Lawton one of the owners of the paper mill had committed suicide and how he had let dozens of wild animals out of their cages just before that. And she ended her story with, “So we’re gonna keep the children inside today.” Jacobs hung up the phone and tired to put on a bright face. She tried to act as if nothing terrifying had just happened. People say that children can smell fear, but that’s completely inaccurate what is accurate is that children can sense changes in emotions, we are social animals and one of a child’s main jobs is to act like a sponge and soak up all the knowledge he/she can about how the world works, and how people act. After teaching children Jacobs never understood why the police would ever need to use a lie detector test. Even a child can usually tell when someone is being less then truthful. Jacob wondered when people lost that ability.

Jacob walked over to the windows. On the way she looked at Avery, Penelope and Justin’s artwork. Then she closed the windows and the curtains in the classroom. She hoped none of the children started to wonder why she was doing this on a sunny and warm day.

Larry Anderson had heard about the animals being on the loose, he had a radio that he listened to in the supply room in the basement of the school when he wasn’t cleaning up after those filthy kids. Somehow they got dirtier every year. Leaving the toilets without flushing, getting feces all over the toilet seat, playing with the paper towel dispenser and wasting almost a whole roll of towels. “Their parents don’t know the meaning of the word discipline,” he thought. “They just let them run wild at home, so they’re even worse when they get here.”

He learned a lot from the radio, especially the talk shows, they had really smartened him up a lot more then any schooling he got ever did. Now he under that it was the Democrats and their liberal socialism that was responsible for most of the problems in this country. Anderson didn’t usually vote, but he was waiting for a candidate that talked about bringing corporeal punishment into the public schools, that would be a candidate that got his full endorsement.

He thought about that kind of candidate as he smoked a cigarette outside of one of the side entrances to the school, the one that was adjacent to local park’s ball fields. He was only halfway done with his cigarette when he got a text. “What is it now?” he thought. A kid in one of the fourth grade classes had puked up his breakfast. “Every time I try and take a break for just one minute.” Anderson was so angry that he forgot to take the chair out of the entrance to the school, so the door was still propped open.

Helen didn’t know why she was so angry. She just knew that she had traveled away from her own territory and she was hungry. She’d been searching for prey all morning but hadn’t found anything. Suddenly the smells of fresh meat were coming from a building. (It happened to be sloppy Joe day in the school’s cafeteria). So, though she preferred to stay in tall grass she decided to follow her nose.

Helen slowly walked through the empty halls. The concrete floor felt strange on her paws. Her claws went click, click, click, with every step. She followed the smell of the meat. She did not like the strangeness of the place but that would not matter if she could fill her stomach.

Harper was taking pictures of a fifth grade class when she first heard screaming. Not the kind of noise girls make when they see their friend in the mall. Or the sound a grown woman makes when she sees a spider or a mouse. No, this was the sound of true terror.

Harper ran down the hall. Gabrie bounced up and down in the sling but did not start crying. The noise had come from somewhere downstairs so Harper began to take the stairs three at a time. Part of her worried Gabriel was going to fall out, but he didn’t. Harper wasn’t the only one that had come running when they heard the screaming. Anderson the janitor had run too. Harper arrived in the cafeteria in time to see Anderson armed with just a broom attacking a tiger.

The tiger had turned over the lunch table and had his face in the sloppy Joes. The lunch ladies were responsible for the screams. Anderson looked surprisingly valiant as he charged the Bengal tiger. “Shoo, Shoo,” he said as he poked the tiger’s head with the bristly end of the broom. The tiger looked up from his meal and seemed like she was going to back down, but then she lunged at Anderson and sliced open his stomach. Anderson sputtered incoherently as his intestines began to fall out and he backed up and fell against the wall. Meanwhile the tiger returned her attention to the pot of food, but began to push it across the room into a corner.

Harper was horrified, the mother in her wished she’d covered Gabriel’s eyes and hoped he hadn’t seen the man gutted. The reporter in her wanted to take some pictures. But the part of her that was a human being knew that the man needed her help so she ran over to him and did her best to slow down his bleeding by putting pressure on the wound. After a couple of minutes she heard the sound of sirens. “Everything is going to be okay,” she said. “The EMTs will be here soon and we’ll get you to a hospital.”

Anderson looked at his bleed that was getting all over the floor and the havoc the tiger was causing, “If I’m going to the hospital? Who is gonna clean up this mess?”

Outline of my own "Well World" sequel

2011-10-09T20:51:00.000-07:00

Here is an outline of a sequel to "Midnight at the Well of Souls." I wrote it in January of this year, right after reading the book. I still haven't read any of the book's actual sequels, but I still plan to. However, it's funny how sometimes the best sequels end up being the ones that are only in my head.

Thoughts on "The Killers"

2011-09-01T21:17:00.000-07:00

This is my reaction paper from a college film noir class. Originally written in 2003.

Spoiler...

In “The Killers,” (1946) director Robert Siodmak stylistically picks up where “Phantom Lady” left off two years before. This is another noir classic because it possesses all of the previously seen film noir elements and even creates a few new ones.

The film uses flashback, but in a way that we haven’t seen in class. The audience learns only what people recount to insurance man, Jim Reardon. Does the hero in noir have to be a detective or an insurance man? Anyway, this style of flashback gets kind of hokey when the storytellers aren’t quite up to par. For example, when Reardon goes to see “Blinky” Franklin on his deathbed and Franklin starts mumbling, the audience sees a complete flashback, but I doubt very much a dying man’s mumbles were coherent enough to paint such a vivid picture of the events.

There are many examples of shadows being used to convey meaning in this film. For example, when Nick, the guy from the lunch counter, runs over to Oly’s (Burt Lancaster) apartment, Oly’s face is in the shadow to represent his regret and his acceptance of his impending death. Later in the film, Lily is suddenly obscured by shadows after Oly sees Kitty (Ava Gardner) and quite clearly shifts his attention to her. In this case, Lily’s shadow represents her feeling of rejection and is also metaphoric because she has faded from Oly’s mind in addition to fading physically.

The beauty of this film is that Oly, the protagonist, starts off as a loser and really just gets even worse. In his first scene chronologically, he gets the crap beat out of him so bad in a boxing match, that an hour later in the locker room, he doesn’t even know that the fight’s over. During this match, Oly’s hand was hurt so bad, he couldn’t fight anymore. Oly thinks this is the worst his life can ever get, but for the rest of the movie Oly sinks further and further into an abyss caused by the femme fatale, Kitty. At one time, Oly was a good man, but his lust for Kitty becomes his undoing.

This film has some interesting characters, like the two killers at the beginning of the movie. Their disregard of social norms and rapid-fire insults was obviously shocking at the time, but by today’s standards they just seem kind of corny. To paraphrase Gene Hackman in “The Heist,” if you’re really gonna shoot someone, you just shoot them, you don’t talk about it. I loved Oly’s cellmate Charleston, who said he wouldn’t tell Reardon anything. He said, “I‘m the monkey with his hand over his mouth.” Of course he went on and on once he had a few drinks in him. I was impressed because all of the astronomy facts Charleston kept spouting were 100% accurate. I had to laugh at Oly’s trainers who completely abandoned him the second he couldn’t fight anymore, but still had the audacity to show up at his funeral like they were his buddies. However, my favorite character is Blinky’s doctor who confesses that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He says, “Beats me, I don’t know what keeps him going. He’s dead except he’s breathing.”

The one thing I didn’t like about this film is the ending, because it makes no sense. This is mostly because a scene seems to be missing. In this missing scene, Reardon would have enlisted the help of some mysterious underworld figure, Jake the Rake, to help him find Kitty. Because this scene is missing, Jake the Rake takes his place with such great, never seen on screen but constantly talked about, noir characters as Floyd Thursby, from “The Maltese Falcon” and Sean Regan from “The Big Sleep.”

Thoughts on "The Big Sleep"

2011-08-25T20:28:00.000-07:00

This is my reaction paper from a college film noir class. Originally written in 2003.

Spoiler...

The Big Sleep (1946), is another example of the cynical detective genre. Once again Humphrey Bogart plays the straight-as-an-arrow wise-cracking detective that seems to only exist for three things: his work, making witty banter with women, and drinking.

Marlowe (Bogart) is hired by an old man to do something or other, it really doesn’t matter, the plot makes no sense. The important part is that Marlowe meets the old man’s two daughters Vivian and Carmen (Lauren Bacall and Martha Vickers). Carmen is young and oozes sex appeal in her short skirt. She falls into Marlowe’s arms and calls him cute, but also insults him saying, “you’re not very tall are you?” Vivian on the other hand is cold and aloof, she insults his manners, but Marlowe as always has a witty retort, “I don’t like my manners either, they’re pretty bad.”

In the next sequence Marlowe goes into a bookstore with big glasses on and speaks in a really phony sounding accent to a secretary. The secretary says he doesn’t look like a man interested in first editions, to which he replies, “I collect blonds in bottles too.” Since Marlowe’s less than brilliant disguise fails to fool even the secretary, he goes over to the book store across the street and meets a very sexy book store proprietress (Dorothy Malone). Marlowe understands that’s she’s the intellectual type so he appeals to her intelligence to get what he wants from her. Later, he uses a great pick-up line, when she asks if he wants to stay for a drink, “you know it just so happens I’ve got a pretty good bottle of rye in my pocket.”

After this it starts to rain and Bogart follows someone to a house that turns out to be the main location for most of the film’s action. Serious, dramatic sounding music starts to play and you know something is about to happen. Sure enough, Marlowe hears a woman screaming, gun shots and a car driving away. He runs into the house and finds a man dead and Carmen who he describes as, “high as a kite.” I guess that managed to slip by the Hollywood code somehow, though it is quite clear that she had been smoking some marijuana.

I found myself to be very distracted by the scenes that took place in this mysterious house because there were these very ugly Japanese porcelain lamps that were all over the house and seemed very out of place. I just kept wondering if the lamps were somehow significant to the story or were they just all the set designer had lying around that week.

The film kind of muddles around for a while after this. Vivian and Marlowe exchange more witty repartee and prank call someone. Later when they talk about sex, it’s thinly disguised as a discussion about horses.

Next, we meet the movie’s main villain Eddie Mars (John Ridgely) and his two inept and ambiguously gay henchman who are named Sidney and Pete, a tribute to Bogart’s frequent costars Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.

The next good scene involves Marlowe turning the tables on Joe Brody, a blackmailer, the secretary from the bookstore, and Carmen who comes into an apartment with a tiny little gun. Marlowe has a great line when Carmen is on the floor reaching for a gun, “Get up, you look like a Pekinese.”

After this, the film kind of muddles around again only this time for a lot longer. The next great scene is when Bogart has been tied up by the bad guys, but has been left alone with Vivian. Before she helps him escape he insists on smoking a cigarette.

The rest of the movie was kind of silly. Mars’ only scary henchman falls for the oldest trick in the book when Bacall distracts him by shouting, “Look over there!” Then back at the house with the ugly lamps, Mars is shot by his own henchman because they were told to shoot whoever came through the front door. Don’t ask me why they were told this.

The Big Sleep had some good moments, but I thought that this film badly needed another session in the editing room, it was too long and the plot was overly convoluted.

Thoughts on "Detour"

2011-08-23T18:36:00.000-07:00

This is my reaction paper from a college film noir class. Originally written in 2003.

Spoiler...

Detour has all of the elements that make up a great film noir movie: the action unfolds entirely through narration, the movie is dark in tone, and the movie skillfully uses shadows and darkness to create meaning (mostly because they couldn’t afford lights, but that’s another matter). The protagonist was a good man undone by forces he could not control. There is the good woman and the spidery femme fatale.

Like I hinted to, the film is not perfect. The acting is only passable, the editing is poor, and the lighting is at times, atrociously bad. I remember an early scene in the movie where Al Roberts (Tom Neal), the main character, is walking outside and narrating, and from what I could tell it was not lit at all. However, in a sense, its shortcomings are also what give this movie its strange kind of charm. Roberts finds himself trapped in a kind of seedy and gritty underworld and the film succeeds because this underworld seems genuine. A bigger budget would only have made this world seem more artificial and destroy the very things the film had going for itself.

A lot has been said about the fact that since the whole story is told through Robert’s narration you can’t know for sure how things really happened. However, I feel it is futile to think about that too much, because we can only make judgments about what information the movie chooses to tell us. Also, if the movie’s message was really about how Robert is exaggerating his story because he is bitter, then this point would have somehow been hinted to. This is clearly not the case, so I feel we should take the information as is and accept what he says as truth.

I am somewhat confused as to why the Hollywood code forced the additional scene where Robert gets into a cop car at the end of the film. Technically, Robert is not guilty of any crime so why did they feel that he had to be punished? I suppose they felt that dragging a body to the side of the road rather than facing the music was a wrong choice. Personally, I would probably make the same choice if I was sure I would be wrongly convicted unless I covered things up. And, I’ll take it one step further and say that this movie is so good because everyone can see how tempting it would be to make the same choice as Roberts.

Vera (Ann Savage) is one of the great femme fatale characters. The movie portrays her as a woman who is so ugly on the inside that it can’t help but be seen on the surface. Robert thinks to himself when he first meets her, “She looked as if she just fell off the worst freight train in the world.” Also, I think it is significant that when Vera falls asleep Robert starts to feel differently about her. He says she doesn’t look so bad when she’s asleep. Meaning, it is not her physical appearance that makes Vera so unattractive to Robert, but it is the spider woman within her. Also, I enjoyed the fact that Vera wasn’t portrayed as some evil entity with no depth. When Vera gets drunk and continually submits Robert to sexual advances, it is clear that the spider woman personality is a defense mechanism that she has created for herself, because she suffers from low self-worth. She has put herself in a continuous loop in which she is doomed to never break free of. Guys reject her because they see she is a spider woman, and she becomes more of a spider woman because guys keep rejecting her.

Thoughts on "Life of Pi"

2011-08-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

I liked "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel (2001) a lot while I was reading it. I enjoyed reading about Pi’s childhood. I thought the insights into running a zoo were fascinating. My brother is a great advocate for environmentalism, vegetarianism, and animal rights. He has talked on many occasions about the cruelty of zoos and I was starting to agree with him. I went to the Philadelphia Zoo and thought the polar bear must be miserable in the summer and the lions were always asleep no matter what time of day I visited and the gorillas looked like they wanted everyone to stop staring at them. So these insights about how an animal wouldn’t think of an enclosure as small they’d think of it as convenient were interesting food for thought. I do disagree with some of the points made though. I don’t believe that animals like cheetah can be happy in an enclosure because there isn’t enough room for them to run and a cheetah was born to run. Also, I think some apes like gorillas are higher functioning than we give them credit, no matter what anyone says they seem to know that they are captives; uplifting may be happening naturally.

It was also interesting to see Pi learning about Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. I grew up in the diverse community of Queens, NY, but I was never exposed to any religions other than Christianity, so to this day I just don’t know all that much about them. Also, like others have mentioned it was a very funny scene when all three religious leaders met.

Parts of the religious sections spoke to me personally. “These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena, but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defense, not God’s that the self-righteous should rush.” (p89-90) Wow, that’s what I’m talking about! This is Christianity in a nutshell. A religious journey is a personal journey of self-reflection and when you have your own self in order you’ll want to help other people.

I also enjoyed all the many, many details (200 pages worth) about being on the lifeboat and having to survive. I grew up on books like “Robinson Crusoe” and have always been fascinated with survival stories. One detail I remember smiling at is that Pi is so worried about running out of paper that he writes tiny, tiny on the pages and then, his pen runs out of ink way before he runs out of paper.

I felt like the religious aspects of the book dropped off in the middle part of the book. Pi clearly still felt religious and talked about it from time to time, but it didn’t seem to be the focus of the book and I wondered how this was going to be a story to “make you believe in God.”

As I was reading it, I saw the story as a fable. Fables always had animals, this book had a tiger in it. I figured there would be a moral at the end of the story and that would tie it together to religion somehow.

I read the last part of the novel and instead of a moral we had an alternate take on the story. Instead of a tiger, and hyena, a zebra and a boy in the lifeboat, we had a boy, mother, cook and sailor in the lifeboat. This story was only given a few pages so of course it does not seem as vivid or as real as the 200-page story.

I took the second story as a spur of the moment thing Pi came up with to appease the Japanese men. I had a grandfather that would do this.

There is a picture in my parent’s house of my great-grandfather and his children. It must have been taken in the 20s. In the picture you can see that my great-grandfather is missing the tip of the middle finger on his left hand.

When I was in kindergarten the same finger on my left hand got caught in a door at school and was cut off. It was re-attached with microsurgery. However, I could never get over the coincidence that something similar had happened to my great-grandfather in the exact same finger. But my dad didn’t know what had happened.

So one time when the family visited my grandfather (he lived many states over in Ohio) I asked him what had happened and he told me an amazing story that my great- grandfather was picking wild berries and a venomous snake bit him on the finger and he knew that he would die from the poison so he had to hack his own finger off with a knife. Of course my grandfather had made this story up for my entertainment. There are no venomous snakes in Pennsylvania.

So we asked my cousin Leonard what happened and he told us a daring story that my great-grandfather worked in the coal mines of Pennsylvania when he first came to America and that one day an accident happened in the mines and he lost the finger and he came home and said that he wasn’t going to die in a mine shaft and that’s why the family moved from Pennsylvania to Ohio.

This was also a good story and also not true. Finally we asked my Great-Aunt Mary. She was the oldest of my great-grandfather’s children, Leonard was her son, and my grandfather was the youngest of my great-grandfather’s children. So she was the one mostly likely to actually know the truth and she said that my great-grandfather worked for the railroads in Pennsylvania as a switch operator and lost the finger in a switch.

So anyway, after that long story, the point is that to me all Pi was doing with this second story was telling the Japanese guys what they wanted to hear. I did not believe that the second story was the true story and that the first story was just a flight of fancy.

Now, after I read the story I started to catch up on the discussion of the novel at the Classic Science Fiction Message Board (even though this book isn't a science fiction book at all really) and that it when it really started to get weird for me! Someone was saying that the point of the story is that Richard Parker the tiger was a metaphor for God and that by believing the first story over the second you are believing in God.

Whoa!

What?

It doesn’t say that in the book itself ANYWHERE. You’d think if that was the point of the story it might be worth mentioning once of twice. I read the book and that didn’t cross by mind at all. If not for the Classic Science Fiction Message Board I would have read the book, put it down and never considered that. So in my mind if that was the point, the author did a piss poor job of it.

What the author does say is that in the second story Pi is the tiger. So in that interpretation in the first story it is just Pi on the ship, but the tiger represents a different part of himself, a part of himself that is stronger, and more confident. Pi says many times in the story that he could not have survived without Richard Parker. It does add another layer to the story to think that rather than a flesh and blood being Pi is referring to an actual aspect of himself in which he was able to find the strength to carry on.

Now I won’t deny that invoking the metaphor of Richard Parker as God is an interesting exercise, for example, you have Pi providing food for Richard Parker and in the metaphor it becomes equivalent to giving sacrifices to a God. But the metaphor fits a couple of times but mostly there are just too many details with that that don’t jive. Why the details of training Richard Parker with a whistle? In no religion do the humans train the God. Pi takes Richard Parker’s feces and openly smells it in order to dominate the tiger. Explain that one in terms of religion? Richard Parker marks his territory with urine. I missed the part of the bible where Jesus does that. I doubt that’s in other faiths either.

Pi just seemed to have the kind of personality that craved order that craved religion. He wanted to believe in some sort of order to the universe. “I am a person who believes in form, in the harmony of order. Where we can we must give things meaningful shape.” p 360. However, Pi does not think believing in religion excludes him from believing in science. The Japanese men do not believe the story about the island that was a tremendously large carnivorous plant. They say they do not believe in plants that contradict the laws of nature. Then Pi says that Darwin and Copernicus were not accepted at first. Later he says, “If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn’t love hard to believe?…Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers way. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.” p375. In other words, he is saying there is more to life then is found in your philosophy. In Pi’s mind it is science that is limited because it excludes that which is not yet understood. Of course a scientist would come back and say that science will catch up while religion explains away the unknown by saying it's supernatural.

To sum up I enjoyed the book and would have rated it as an entertaining read though I wasn’t sure what the point of the ending was. But I became more frustrated with the book after starting to read interpretations about the book because I felt like either people were looking too far into it and/or the author failed to actually say what his point was.

Thoughts on "Phantom Lady"

2011-08-19T20:27:00.000-07:00

This is my reaction paper from a college film noir class. Originally written in 2003.

Spoiler...

"Phantom Lady" (1944) was directed by my favorite noir director, Robert Siodmak. It further enforces the film noir theme of the country woman saving the urban man from the city which has corrupted or wronged him.

The movie opens with some light music and smoky credits. Scott Henderson, morose, and cynical, but still likeable, walks into a bar and asks for a “pack of cigarettes, any brand.” This is our first clue that he is deeply troubled. Come on, everyone has a favorite brand. Scott immediately starts hitting on the even more morose looking woman sitting next to him. The two of them go out to the theater even though she doesn’t seem too happy about anything. Plus, she doesn’t want to smoke. What’s she doing in a film noir movie?

Scott returns home to an apartment full of silent police officers. He runs around screaming his wife’s name and finally decides to look for her in the bedroom. It is an interesting shot because the camera jumps into the bedroom so we can see Scott’s face when he opens the door. Thankfully there is no gratuitous shot of a dead body; the audience gets the idea. The cops treat Scott pretty badly because they’re sure he did it. Scott doesn’t help things by not showing the slightest bit of emotion.

The cops drag Scott to the places where the audience just saw him, but the bartender, the cabbie, and the actress all lie and say they don’t remember seeing a woman with Scott. There’s a random scene with two cops fighting over which ice cream flavor is superior and then the action jumps straight to Scott’s trial. This sequence is noteworthy because the people conducting the trial are heard but not seen. The camera never leaves the gallery except to see the stenographer's note which is indistinguishable because it is in short hand. When Scott’s sentence is read, Carol, Scott’s personal secretary and the audience miss the verdict because of an old woman chewing on a crisp apple.

From this point on Carol is the protagonist of the movie. She tortures the bartender by just staring at him and willing him to repent like some unholy angel of truth. When he gets run over she turns her attention to Cliff the drummer. For this sequence Carol dresses quite provocatively and the jam session in a jazz club is the most cathartic and overtly sexual sequence I’ve seen in a 40’s film.

Jack Marrow, the villain in this film was excellently portrayed by Francot Tone. He managed to be utterly creepy and somehow vaguely sympathetic due to the fact that he was obviously quite mad. We know from the busts in his apartment that Jack was at one time a brilliant artist, but when Scott’s wife, who he was having an affair with, insulted him, it made something within him snap; his tremendous ego was never the same again. And yet at the same time, Jack thinks that he is somehow superior to all other humans. He says, "I’m fond of Scott, we’re friends, but what’s his life compared to mine, compared to anybody’s." When Carol tells Jack to cross his fingers, he looks at his hands and sees that they no longer seem the same to him because of the murders he has committed. Jack is aware that he has been changed, he feels this change has made him stronger, but in reality it has made him weaker because he has lost his basic humanity.

This film is unfortunately currently hard to find in the US where it is only available on VHS. A DVD is available on Region 2, so if you live Europe, Japan, or the Middle East it's not a problem. Or, if you own a region free DVD player.

"Casablanca" Sketch

2011-08-18T20:14:00.000-07:00

One of these days I’ll review the movie “Casablanca.” It will be a loving exploration of what I consider to be one of the greatest movies ever made. It never ceases to amaze me that it just got everything right. Not a wasted scene, character, line, or moment. All the more remarkable since the movie was being rewritten as they were shooting (and not just little polishes here and there. Ingrid Bergman wanted to know who she’d end up with so she’d know how to play her scenes and the writers told her they weren’t sure yet so she better play it ambiguous).

Anyway, this is not that day and this is not that post. Rather this is a sketch I wrote years ago that explores a more negative take on “Casablanca,” it gives credence to the tiny voice inside your head (or for some maybe not so tiny) that screams during the ending of the movie, “Don’t do it Rick. Don’t let her go!”

John- Did you know that Humphrey Bogart was shorter than Ingrid Bergman so they made him wear lifts or stand on boxes in Casablanca?

Stefan- Okay, am I a bad friend if I don’t pretend to care?

John- I’m not surprised, God forbid you like something mainstream.

Stefan- I don’t hate it because it’s popular, that would be pointless and stupid. I hate it because it’s dated and inaccurate.

John- It’s a classic story of love and sacrifice.

Stefan- It’s the sacrifice part that’s wrong. If he had the girl why would he give her up?

John- It was the right thing to do.

Stefan- No, no, no. It was the “right” thing to do. It was the thing society tells us to do. But it wasn’t the correct thing to do. Ingrid got on that plane and sure the other guy was happy, but what about Bogart. You can’t tell me that he didn’t give himself the short end of the stick and the saddest thing about it is that he’s actually proud of himself. He’s assured himself a lifetime of regret and jealousy as he pines for the love he’ll never find again and from his face you’d think he’d just struck the Daily Double.

John- Your world is a sad, lonely place to visit isn’t it?

Stefan- I don’t know why you find realism so depressing.

John- Real life isn’t as bad as you think.

Stefan- You think I don’t know that? Real life is even worse than I think it is. I’ll be the first to admit that.

"Particle Man" by They Might Be Giants and the Meaning of Life

2011-08-18T19:26:00.000-07:00

I wrote this sketch at least 7 years ago, but something made me think of it today. To appreciate the sketch you have to know the song "Particle Man" by They Might Be Giants. Here's a video of the song from the cartoon "Tiny Toon Adventures"

Stanley- Well if that’s not it then what is it about?

Dave- I don’t know what it’s about, but it sure as hell isn’t the answer to the meaning of life.

Stanley- That’s where you’re wrong it’s all there I know it is. I just can’t quite put my finger on it, but I know it’s there.

Dave- It’s a nonsense little song about a Particle Man and a Triangle Man.

Stanley- Don’t speak of it so lightly, this may be my religion.

Dave- “Hit on the head with a frying pan. Lives his life in a garbage can, Person Man.”

Stanley- Don’t you see that means we all live our life in the proverbial garbage can. It’s a call to us to rise up and break the chains that bind us.

Dave- What have you got for, “When he’s under water does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?”

Stanley- It’s a clear challenge against the scientific community. How can we believe any of the things they tell us when they are based on preconceived assumptions?

Dave- Don’t you think you’re looking too much into this?

Stanley- I think maybe I’m not looking deep enough.

Man cartoons can get inside your head. I hadn't seen this video for years, but it was still buried somewhere deep inside my brain as was another "Tiny Toon" video, "Istanbul (not Constantinople)" (also by They Might Be Giants).

Thoughts on "The Maltese Falcon"

2011-08-17T21:26:00.000-07:00

This is my reaction paper from a college film noir class. Originally written in 2003.

Spoiler...

The Maltese Falcon (1941) directed by John Huston is a true film noir classic and my personal favorite. If you haven’t seen it in a while, you‘ll find yourself wondering for the first few minutes, “What’s so great about this movie again? This writing is kind of bad.” Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) says she was recommended to Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) by her hotel. What kind of a crummy hotel would recommend her to this guy? Plus, Spade delivers the corniest line in the movie during this first scene when he coaxes O‘Shaughnessy to talk, “Why don’t you tell me about it?” Thankfully things pick up quickly, Spade’s partner Archer comes inside and can’t hide how attracted he is to O’Shaughnessy. It is interesting to note that O’Shaughnessy never takes her eyes off of Spade and doesn’t even seem to see Archer. In the next scene Archer is shot and killed without warning and it is in that second that you remember what’s so great about this movie. Unlike typical Hollywood fluff, the tone of this film is as dark as real life is sometimes. Also, this isn’t one of those films where you can get popcorn and soda and not miss anything. This is one of those films that you can watch over and over again and still not understand.

The Maltese Falcon is a movie of lies. Sometimes I don’t think any of the main characters said one true thing throughout this whole movie. O’Shaughnessy sums it up nicely when Spade asks her, “Is there any truth in that?” She replies, “Some, not much.” If you listen and watch closely, Astor and Bogart seem to say their lines differently when they’re lying to each other. There is a hollow ring to them, like they‘re sure the other person doesn‘t believe a word of it. Spade even says as much when he tells Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet), “I took it for granted that she was lying.” In fact the lies are so thick that we never really learn the truth about a great many things. For instance, who murdered the much mentioned, but never seen Floyd Thursby and Captain Jacobi, whose other scene seems to have been mysteriously cut from the movie? Gutman offers a very long explanation which slowly becomes less and less believable. He says, “Wilmer shot Jacobi as he was coming down the fire escape. Shot him more than once. Jacobi was too tough to fall or drop the falcon. He climbed down the rest of the way, knocked Wilmer over, and ran off."

It’s also a film about obsession. Gutman, Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), and O’Shaugnessy are willing to go to any lengths for the falcon. Nowhere is this more evident than when Gutman betrays Wilmer, who he claimed was like a son to him. He offers Wilmer this chilling explanation, “Well, if you lose a son, it's possible to get another. There's only one Maltese Falcon.”

Sam Spade seems to be nearly infallible. Much like James Bond, Spade is never seen out of his element. This is most evident when during a scuffle with Cairo in his office, Spade manages to keep his cigarette in his mouth at all times. Spade always knows exactly what to do or say, and his orders are always followed without question. Even the cops are like putty in his hands. Who else could ask a cop, “what’s your boyfriend trying to say,” and not get run in? To Spade, being a private eye is like a stage performance. Spade plays a man who thinks only of money, but in his final exchanges with O’Shaugnessy he hints to his true nature, “Don't be too sure I'm as crooked as I'm supposed to be. That sort of reputation might be good business, bringing high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy.” Spade, in essence is again just like Bond, a man who does not exist outside of his job, which is his one true passion. The only times Spade smiles is when he catches someone lying or knows he’s fooled someone.

It’s no secret that Spade didn’t like his partner Archer much. He doesn’t react at all when he finds out he’s been killed. He just goes through the motions, his greatest concern is keeping his distance from Archer’s widow Iva. The detail that Spade and Iva had an affair is an interesting one. We are left to wonder what happened. The one thing we can be sure of is that to Spade it is long forgotten. He says, “Don’t be silly, I wish I’d never laid eyes on her.” Everything continues to point to Spade not caring about his partner’s murder. He immediately changes “Spade and Archer,” the name of his business, to “Samuel Spade.” However, at the end of the movie Spade reveals that all along he was acting for his dead partner. He says, “When a man's partner's killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him, he was your partner, and you're supposed to do something about it. And it happens we're in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's - it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. Bad all around. Bad for every detective everywhere.” Here, Spade has given two very different motivations. Did Spade act because of his sense of duty to his partner or did he act to preserve his business and the reputation of detectives at large? We can’t know for sure.

Did Spade have any real feelings for O’Shaugnessy? In the end it doesn’t matter because Spade knows that he could never really trust her. She tries to argue that if his love was true that he could forget everything else. Spade looks at the situation logically and sees that their are too many strikes against her and decides that no matter how he feels, he’d be an idiot to believe anything she says.

Thoughts on "Stranger on the Third Floor"

2011-08-17T17:46:00.000-07:00

This is my reaction paper from a college film noir class. Originally written in 2003.

Spoiler...

"Stranger on the Third Floor" (1940) is not a true film noir movie. It has many of the elements associated with film noir (heavy use of shadow, narration) and yet the mood of the picture is all wrong. I feel that this is a proto noir film. In other words, if noir films were a long running TV series, this film should be thought of as the pilot of the series. It is a pilot that is so different from the series that it could never be aired. Film noir is bleak and gritty. This movie has a kind of light and peppy mood. It even has a “gosh isn’t everything swell” happy ending.

The most noir part of this movie was the dream sequence in the middle of the film. While not exactly on par with the famous Salvador Dali designed dream sequence from Hitchcock’s "Spellbound," this sequence did have some notable aspects: the jail cell which seemed to be a kind of stage which was surrounded by darkness. The courtroom scenes during this sequence were much darker, the courtroom was empty, and the jury made no attempt to mask their indifference. After his sentencing, the electric chair was seen only as a gigantic imposing shadow. When the judge becomes the statue of justice, it is clear that this movie is hitting the audience over the head with its imagery and moving at a pace that is slow enough that you can go get popcorn and a soda and not really miss anything. To make matters worse, the image of the statue and the cheesy dramatic music that accompanies it are repeated just a few minutes after their first appearance.

The main theme of the movie: bad things can happen to anyone, is very noir. Michael would be a quintessential example of a noir hero, except for the fact that it is his girlfriend Jane ends up being the main focus of the action by the end of the movie. A secondary theme, and the one that resonated most deeply with me was, what responsibility do people have to each other? At first Michael feels he has a responsibility to testify against Briggs, but after he realizes how easily events can be misconstrued, he understands how easily duty and ethics can be misused. In Michael’s dream sequence, Jane throws right back at Michael the ethical argument he hid behind after testifying against Briggs, when she testifies against him and then tells him, “I had to tell the truth.”

This film is actually very pro-woman. Jane and women at large are made fun of for the majority of the film. Even her own boyfriend thinks of Jane as little more than a child. When Michael thinks about Jane’s reaction to Briggs’ trial he says, “she’ll forget about it in a couple of days.” He also asks her “What do you know about law and trials and such things?” However, by the end of the movie Jane emerges as the hero of the film when she tracks down the killer and gets him to confess.

This movie also shares the film noir theme of the city as corrupt. Every character in the film has been changed by the city into an uncompassionate sort of existentialist. Even the police are seen as indifferent. This is clear when Michael speaks to Jane about the police saying, “They wouldn’t listen to me if that’s what you want me to do.” However, the best example of the city’s utter indifference is the truck driver who kills Peter Lorre’s character. His defense for running over a man is, “I honked.” Jane is the only exception to the city’s indifference. Because she has not yet lost her compassion, Jane is a tortured figure. This is evident when Michael calls her after Briggs’ trial and she is hidden in shadows that represent her inner-struggles.

The voice-over/narration device starts off well. Michael asks himself, “Why do people live in Brooklyn? Why couldn’t I?” However, the device is soon so over used that it becomes comical. In general, this device is severely misused when it reveals character’s emotions that can more easily be revealed by his or her actions. As a screenwriter, one of the first lessons they teach you is “Show don’t tell.” In other words, if your character is shot you don’t write a voice over that says “Ow, I’ve been shot,” because it would be superfluous and silly.

This is the first of only three films that Boris Ingster would direct. This isn’t surprising because the film invokes a feeling of a boy experimenting with a new camera. This was most evident in the first scene at the diner where Michael and Jane are seen from their reflections in a mirror.

Worth mentioning is the sexual "dance" that Jane and Michael perform when she comes up to his apartment and light, airy music begins playing in the background. She’s all wet from the rain and begins to explore his apartment and talk. No matter what she says to him, Michael keeps asking her to take off her clothes and even starts taking them off for her. Then she starts playing along and asks him if he talks in his sleep, implying that they’ll be sharing a bed sometime soon. However, their good time is thwarted by Michael’s landlady and his milk obsessed, and ill-fated neighbor.

I also found this to be a hilarious dark comedy with many great one liners and some classic characters. The defense lawyer who seems to be on autopilot, the neighbor who imposes the virtues of milk on his neighbor, and the ill fated diner owner Nick who hits on the women sitting at his counter by revealing his “big” secret, a raisin in every cup of coffee. My favorite scene was during Briggs’ trial where both a jury member and the judge are asleep. One of the lawyers hears a jury member snoring, and wakes the judge. The judge immediately reprimands the juror for doing the exact same thing he himself was doing.

Despite it’s shortcomings this film was enjoyable and it is a great example of an intermediate step between the glossy themed Hollywood pictures of the 30’s and the gritty noir films of the 40’s.

Thoughts on "Double Indemnity"

2011-08-16T20:03:00.000-07:00

This is my reaction paper from a college film noir class. Originally written in 2003.

Spoiler...

The first reason why "Double Indemnity" (1944), directed by Billy Wilder, is a classic film noir is the soundtrack, the music is tense and dark, and there is a common thread of it throughout the film. Every time Walter (Fred MacMurray) and Phyllis’ (Barbara Stanwyck) web of evil grows larger, the same theme starts playing in the background, almost like the ominous voice of some sort of inner conscience.

The second reason is the lighting in this movie is top notch noir lighting. Plot point number one, where Phyllis first comes over to Walter’s apartment and the seeds of their evil are sown by their first adulterous kiss, is the first scene that is only lit from outside of the room. The crisis/climax scene is another scene lit the same way. This time the only light is through a Venetian blind in Phyllis’ study.

The third reason why this is classic noir is the actor’s performances. Edward G. Robinson‘s Keyes, was the perfect foil for the intellectual machinations of Walter. Everything about Keyes’ physical presence was non-threatening; he can’t even seem to ever light his own cigar, and yet the wheels were always turning in his mind and it was clear from the first scene that he prized truth above emotions. You almost feel sorry for the man who got caught by Keyes for sabotaging his own truck, but Keyes shows him no mercy.

Walter has some great noir lines at the beginning of the movie. He says, “I killed him for money and a woman. I didn’t get the money or the woman.” Soon after that he says, “I never knew that honeysuckle could smell like murder.” He knows that Phyllis can only be bad for him, but he is drawn to her. He tries to keep his mind off her by bowling and drinking, but his thoughts never stray far from her ankles and her mysterious allure.

The writing of this screenplay was very tight. There isn’t a single wasted character or scene in the whole film. For a while I thought that the daughter Lola and her somewhat bizarre boyfriend Nino were nothing but filler, but by the end of the movie Lola manages to humanize Walter’s character and give him a little sympathy. While the revelation that Phyllis is having a relationship with Nino seems to make her that much more evil and inhuman. After Walter murders Phyllis, he stops Nino from going inside the house and possibly getting blamed for Phyllis‘ murder, which was Walter’s original plan. This is the resolution of the tension of the movie and the turning point of Walter’s character. We are left to wonder what changed in Walter’s character, did he give up? Did his love for Lola make him blindly act towards her happiness alone? We will never know.

The murder plan in this movie struck me as kind of dumb. I have no clue how someone who dies by falling off a train and someone who dies from being strangled can look at all similar. Another thing that bothered me was the fact that Walter and Phyllis always met in the same grocery store. If anyone with half a brain was watching either of them, I think they would have caught on really fast.

My final thought is of the slight homoerotic element that existed between Keyes and Walter. Whenever Walter says he loves Keyes, Keyes reacts by expressing his masculinity, almost as if he is afraid of such feelings. For instance he says, “Get out of here before I throw my desk at you.” Throughout the film Keyes dismisses Walter’s sexual conquests as robbing the cradle, he says, “I bet she drinks from the bottle.” Does Keyes unconsciously do this because he can’t accept the fact that Walter would have any real feeling for anyone but him? When at the end of the film Walter tells Keyes that he couldn’t find out the truth because, “the guy you were looking for was too close,” Keyes replies, “more close then you’ll ever know.” Then Keyes lights a match in the same way that Walter always did in the past as if to say that Keyes could have done it himself all along if he had wanted to, but it filled some kind of unconscious sexual desire.

Thoughts on "The Cosmic Puppets"

2011-08-05T17:15:00.000-07:00

"The Cosmic Puppets," by Philip K. Dick

Spoilers...

I liked the earliest parts of the story when Ted Barton comes into Millgate and he's been telling his wife all these stories on the way there and probably boring her half to death. Then he gets there and he knows something isn't right. My memory has never been as good as Barton's seems to be in this novel, but there are definitely certain towns that I knew as a child that I'd still know quite well today.

After he is confronted with this differentness, he leaves the town and drops his wife off somewhere. I thought this was really interesting because especially in such a short novel it kind of broke the building of tension. The story might have been more effective if he had tried to leave the town with his wife and found that he couldn't. However, I was just as happy to see the wife character go, because she would have been annoying, since she was written without any redeeming qualities. I also thought it was significant that he dropped her off, because he knew on some level that he was going on some kind of "spiritual" or "hero's" journey and that's a journey a man must go on alone. My wife and I often take separate weekend trips. It always feels like I'm reconnecting with myself, like I forget what it was like to be on my own.

I really enjoyed the first interaction between Peter and Barton. Barton plays it cool and Peter ends up giving away more of his secrets than he probably intended to.

The next scene that stuck with me was the moment the Wanderers first appear and Barton says, “Did you see them?" and Doctor Meade says, "It’s perfectly natural. What’s so strange about that?” That was the first place in the book where I really began to wonder what the heck was going on.

I really liked the scene where Barton tries to get past the barrier. Someone should make it into a short film, Barton jumping from log to log while time and space changes all around him.

The scene with Christopher and his spell remover was memorable. I liked the detail that the device itself did nothing, the real power was in Barton and Christopher's minds. However, it was at this point in the novel when I began to question how much one could rely on their memories from 18 years ago and/or childhood memories.

My memory for everyday things has always been pretty poor. I can sing every song I used to sing at summer camp when I was a kid, but my memories of my friends or camp counselors at that time is almost nonexistent. I could tell you about some of the cartoons I used to watch as a kid, but I doubt I could tell you much about my neighborhood or the park near my house.

So anyway, I was more than a little bit skeptical that Barton's memory could be as accurate as he thought he needed it to be. Though the scene when Mary comes upon Barton and Christopher in the park and they are "yelling and gesturing" like mad men is priceless.

When the novel reaches it's climax and the two Zoroastrianism Gods take their true form and start to duke it out in the spatial or spiritual realm is where I got kind of lost. First off, I don't know if my education is just lacking, but I'd never even heard of Ahriman or Ormazd let alone understand their significance in a cultural context. Maybe all we needed to understand was that Ormazd was good and Ahriman was bad?

One odd part of the novel was p. 86 when pre-pubescent Mary takes all her clothes off and rubs oil all over her body to appease a golem she had captured. Then when you get to the ending and Mary turns out to be a God, Barton suddenly has the hots for her. Before she even takes an adult human form he's asking her if she can stay on Earth. I'd understand these kinds of feeling after he'd seen her as a woman, but at that point she'd only been a pre-teen girl and a golem. Was Dick trying to put uncomfortable subject matter in the novel or did he do so unconsciously? I don’t know which answer is worse.

It wasn't fantastic, but it wasn't bad either, I'd have to give it some sort of neutral score like 6 or 7 out of 10.

Notes:

On p 102. Meade mentions the bible verse from 1 Corinthians 13 "Through a glass darkly." That same verse would inspire the title of Dick's 1977 novel "A Scanner Darkly." I guess it was a concept that stuck with him for a while huh?

I read a copy from the library; it was the Vintage Books, November 2003 paperback. One of the earlier editions of Cosmic Puppets was a sewn edition. I know this because this edition used the original typeset which included gathering markers or signatures. They were labeled C.P.-B through C.P.-F and they appear approximately every 25 pages. When books were sewn together the pages were first formed into gatherings and those gatherings where sewn together to form the text block.

"The Cosmic Puppets" art work is by Chris Moore.

Thoughts on "Planetary"

2011-08-02T21:36:00.000-07:00

Planetary is a near perfect synergy of art and story. That’s really the secret to a good comic, I think too many of the comics of today attempt to treat a comic as if it were a movie rather than treating a comic as a unique art form.

All 26 issues of Planetary were written by Warren Ellis and drawn by John Cassaday. Planetary is about a group of historian adventurers who attempt to uncover the secrets of the past. Think Indiana Jones, but with super powers. The universe of the story is a pastiche in which every pulp novel character and every superhero character appear to have inhabited this same universe in one form or another. For example in this universe there was a 30’s era superhero team made up of Doc Savage, the Shadow, Tarzan and other pulp-era heroes. At one point, the Planetary team scientifically examines a mysterious hammer that bears more than a passing resemblance to Thor’s hammer Mjolnir. Another issue focuses on versions of Superman, the Green Lantern and Wonder Woman.

Because of this aspect of examination, Planetary is a sort of thesis paper on the history of comics. In a way the heroes even acknowledge that they are in a comicbook. It is mentioned more than once that scientists in their universe have discovered that they are three-dimensional objects in a two dimensional world.

Many issue pay homage to a various different genres, there’s the fifties monster movie issue (one issue for American and one for Japanese) and, another issue is a tribute to “Rendevous with Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke.

If Planetary has perpetrated any crimes it’s that in some issues Ellis steps back and just lets Cassaday go for broke on the visuals. The first that comes to mind is the issue in which Elijah Snow (the main character of the series, an old man who has lost his memories) views the world on a molecular level. However, one can definitely argue that Cassaday’s art is worth showcasing.

Planetary is a great example of terse story telling. It’s 26 issues (plus 3 special crossovers that I unfortunately haven’t read yet). And that’s it. It reminds me of those handful of great TV series that were one and done like The Prisoner in the 60’s; Fawlty Towers in the 70’s (okay that had 2 British seasons but only 12 episodes total) and in recent times Firefly, or Strange Luck.

As far as ongoing storylines, the world of comicbooks is even worse than television. Superman and Batman have been fighting crime for 70 years. Spider-man and the rest of the Marvel universe have been at it for over 40 years. We love all of those characters because their adventures have thrilled us for many years, but how many of their adventures are fresh or completely original? Probably only a handful.

Unfortunately the price you pay for having a terse story is that there are unanswered questions or the story never goes the way you wanted it to. An example of this is, there was an important event in Snow’s life that took place on a submarine called the Nautilus. William Palmer, (a super villain and member of main baddies the Four, super villain versions of the Fantastic Four) destroyed the ship and a woman whom Snow loved was killed, but we never learn more than that. [My own theory is that it hints to Captain Nemo and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. Snow had previously met Sherlock Holmes and Dracula].

One thing that’s great about Planetary is that its fight scenes are more realistic then in most comics. Ellis understands that most fights are more like a knife fight then a boxing match so his battles are quick and dirty. Also, the characters use their super powers very sparingly, but when they do use them they are accurately portrayed. One of the things that drives me nuts is that in comics when the Hulk hits a brick wall it crumbles, but when the Hulk hits a villain in the face it just knocks him out. The truth is the Hulk would probably literally punch his brains out. So it made me smile when at one point in Planetary the super-strong Jakita Wagner punches a villain and his head and spinal cord goes flying.

In the end, even though I appreciated the concise story telling, I wanted to read more Planetary adventures. The villains aren’t supposed to stay beaten the first time. They always come back for more, right?

Thoughts on "A Dance With Dragons" part 3

2011-08-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

Part 3 of my Thoughts on “A Dance With Dragons” by George R. R. Martin.

Spoilers...

House Greyjoy

The Greyjoys and all of the Ironborn get hit pretty hard in “Dance.” In “A Feast For Crows” you really started to get to know these people a little bit. You saw the Kingsmoot and got a feel for their culture (they are clearly based on the Vikings), they are a proud people who have always lived by the sword and they live on this one tiny archipelago. Since the rule of the Targaryens, the Ironborn have been handcuffed. Their islands can’t contain and sustain their numbers and yet when they raid in order to survive they face the wrath of a unified Westeros. Imagine what would have happened to the Vikings if there had been a European union in the Viking era.

Of course, I feel less sorry for the Ironborn when I realize that for the most part they’re a bunch of vain and arrogant pricks. Theon, Victorian and Euron all think they are God’s gift to women and believe it is their destiny to be great men, when in reality they are merely pawns in the game of thrones.

At the end of “Feast” I was convinced that the Ironborn were on an upswing, I didn’t imagine they’d conquer Westeros, but I thought they’d manage to eek out and hold onto some limited amount of territory. Instead, the Greyjoy’s conquests of Moat Catlin and Deepwood Motte were left without resupplies. Euron was more interested in fighting the Tyrells at the Shield Islands and sending 100 ships to impress Daenarys than protecting the toehold his brother Balon had envisioned.

My favorite chapter in the entire book was Asha Greyjoy’s first chapter. She holds Deepwood Motte, but she realizes that she can’t hold it forever without reinforcements. She knows her glory will be short lived, but she doesn’t care, she’s living the warrior life she was raised for. But, when the castle is attacked, she realizes it would be better to live than die fighting a losing battle. Her men feel the same way. They retreat into the forest hoping to get to their ships and just when they’re sure they’ve gotten away, they are ambushed in the darkness. But, her men seem determined to fight to their last breaths. Asha cuts down several men, but she is eventually overwhelmed. I read this and thought it was the perfect end for her character. The Ironborn or the Vikings both would have called her death glorious. I was kind of disappointed to see that she was still alive as Stannis’ prisoner.

Not Surprising Enough?!

I want to respond to the people that are criticizing Martin for not surprising us. Personally, I thought there were a lot of surprises in “A Dance with Dragons,” but these critic’s chief argument is “Well, people on the internet have been saying maybe Aegons alive for years.”

People on the internet have been saying it…So what! Does that mean Martin should
re-envision his story? “Oh, I’m not fooling them,” he thinks. “Instead of Aegon being alive, I’ll raise Baelor the Blessed from the dead. No one’s thought of that.”

People on the Internet have had years to think about this series. In that time they have come up with any number of theories. Ever hear the phase if you throw enough shit at the wall eventually something sticks? I’ve seen perfectly reasonable theories suggesting that Jon Snow, and/or Sam Tarly, and/or Tyrion Lannister are all Targaryens. [The last one is actually less far fetched after this novel because Barristan Selmy told Daenarys that Aerys II had the hots for Tyrion’s mom] But just because fans thought of it, it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be surprising. I mean, I could say I think Theon Greyjoy is secretly a Targaryen. If that turned out to be true, I’d still be quite surprised. Is Martin’s job to tell an exciting and consistent story or is his job to razzle-dazzle us?

If the answer is surprise, here are two Martin hasn’t thought of:

1) Bran’s next vision is of a burly bearded man sitting at a computer typing his family’s adventures.

2) Edric Storm is brought to King’s Landing and stands before Tommen’s small council in the throne room. They ask him where Stannis hid the Dragon Eggs that were rumored to have been on Dragonstone. Storm breaks down under the pressure and admits, “Stannis made me smuggle one of them up my butt.”

Oh, wait, Martin’s out of luck, he can’t use either of those ideas anymore, because I already thought of them; They’d not longer be a surprise.

Here is Part 2 of my review of "A Dance With Dragons"
Here is Part 1 of my review of "A Dance With Dragons"
Asha Greyjoy and Edric Storm artwork are from an Italian Game of Thrones site Terra-di-Mezzo

Thoughts on "A Dance With Dragons" part 2

2011-07-31T20:24:00.000-07:00

Part 2 of my Thoughts on “A Dance With Dragons” by George R. R. Martin.

Spoilers...

This novel really began to illuminate the rest of the Ice and Fire world. Up until this novel I was convinced that the other places in the world were just kind of there, but not really important as far as the story Martin wanted to tell. They also never seemed real to me. Westeros, its people, and its culture has been examined at such length that it seems real to me. The rest of the world was just a couple of passages here and there and someplace for Daenarys to wreak some havoc. However, so much of “Dance” takes place outside of Westeros that you really start to get a feeling about the bigger picture. There is a whole world out there most of which could care less about Westeros

At the beginning of the novel, Tyrion meets Illyrio Mopatis, the Pentosi merchant who hid Daenarys and her brother. We’ve known since “Game of Thrones” that he’s been working with Varys, but we didn’t know why. Illyrio gives Tyrion several explanations such as gold and power, but I don’t buy those answers. I think Tyrion almost hits on the true answer when he looks at a map of the free cities and says something about how close they are to Westeros yet the Targaryens never moved across the Narrow Seas to conqueror them. Illyrio doesn’t want Daenarys to rule in Westeros for wealth or power, he wants her to rule in Westeros so she stays the hell out of Pentos.

Little People

In “Dance” Martin seems to write the “little people” better than his main characters. I don’t mean dwarfs. I mean the characters that only appear briefly. These throwaway characters had interesting stories that were often times only hinted at, but it was always enough that my imagination took over and filled in the gaps. The characters also had motivations that I readily understood like hatred, revenge, and lust. Characters like:

Lord Manderly- Since White Harbor is the only useful eastern port in the North, the Lannisters and the Freys are interested in currying his favor and yet Lord Manderly’s son Wendel was killed in the Red Wedding. Manderly hates the Freys and Lannisters but is unable to oppose them openly for political reasons. It is fun to see this bit of intrigue play out. And to see how when when he is trapped in Winterfell with the other nobles how hard it is for him to maintain his façade as the days begin to pile on.

Lady Dustin- Who as I mentioned previously, blames Ned Stark for everything that has gone wrong in her life. Events that in her delusion are Ned’s fault include King Aerys II's burning Brandon Stark and others to death, The War of the Usurper and more specifically the death of her husband Lord William Dustin at the Tower of Joy.

House Blackwood and House Bracken- The two neighboring Houses have apparently had an ongoing feud reminiscent of the Hatfields and McCoys since before the recorded history of Westeros. In fact, both Houses believe that they were the “Kings” in the region during the time of the First Men and both House believe the other House betrayed them and usurped their rule. Everything possible has been done to end the feud including intermarriage, but somehow the feud continues. I also love the imagery that at the center of the Blackwood’s castle (Raventree Hill) is this tremendously large and completely dead weirwood tree. It’s been dead for a thousand years (The Blackwoods claim the Brackens poisoned the tree) and yet since weirwood doesn’t rot, the tree remains. Each night it is home to hundreds of ravens, that “cover the tree like black leaves.” Can you imagine what a depressing castle that must be? I think the Blackwoods would feel better about their lives if they moved out of that castle.

Main Characters

These kinds of “little characters” contrasted with some of Martin’s main characters whose motivations and reasonings were so murky that I often felt as if I didn’t understand the character at all despite the fact that the chapters were written from their perspective.

Daenarys Targaryen- I didn’t understand what was going through her head for the entire novel. The image I have of her from the previous novels is decisiveness. She struck me as the only character truly worthy to rule Westeros. In terms of arc, her story always goes from bad to worse and then she wows you at the end of the novel, but I felt like this was the first novel where she was just acting foolish the whole time. Couldn’t she see that she was fighting a losing battle in Meereen? She never had the hearts of the people. The Harpys would never stop and no ruler could ever change a culture in which slavery was so ingrained. She took away their livelihood their self-image and offered them nothing in return. Of course you could argue that Daenarys ends the story in a better position then before since she has mastered a dragon, but I would argue that I’m not sure if she ever learned a lesson about how to rule. I’ll be happy if she at least learned how not to rule.

John Snow- Martin got me again. I was positive that Jon was Martin’s fair-haired boy. Sure he had a bit of a rough time of it at the Wall, but he rose all the way up to Lord Commander in a few short years. I was also convinced like many fans that he was Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark’s child and that Eddard knew Jon would be killed by Robert if that was revealed…but none of that matters now does it?

Snow’s end shouldn’t have surprised me he spent the entire novel pissing off every living creature at the wall. Was he really oblivious to the fact that his men were just waiting for him to slip up so they could mutiny justifiably?

A lot of people are convinced that this is just a cliffhanger ending and that Jon Snow will end up being alive. I don’t know, I think it’s clear Jon is dead. Maybe Melisandre’s magic will revive him, but the Jon that returns will not be a brother of the Night’s Watch. Maybe he’ll become a nameless wildling, and he’ll romance Val… Or maybe he’s just dead!

Stannis Baratheon - continues to not impress me. He is a rigid man who does not believe in compromise. He lives in the shadow of a brother whom despite his faults was still a better man than Stannis will ever be. But, Stannis continues to barrel forward despite the fact that he is in over his head at every point. I do not believe he is dead as Ramsey’s letter stated. It was clear from the letter that Ramsey was looking for Theon and the false Arya. They were last seen with Stannis. Therefore it would seem that Ramsey hasn’t found him yet. Notice how there is no mention of Asha. Is it possible that Ramsey merely killed the Umbers that were standing outside Winterfell and banging their drums?

Theon Greyjoy- Reading his chapters was quite disturbing, in a series full of scum and villainy, Ramsey Snow/Bolton really takes the cake. He took Theon to a point through torture where Theon’s will snapped. Theon was no longer human instead he was a sort of sniveling animal thing. I mentioned this to a friend that hasn’t read “Dance” yet and he said that Theon sort of deserves what he got because of how he betrayed Winterfell. And he further commented that it is kind of ironic that I feel sorry for Theon despite his evil actions. And yet, I guess it’s just good writing because I can’t help but feel sorry for Theon. I wouldn’t wish what he went through on my worst enemy.

Tyrion Lannister- His chapters were always a highlight of the novel. They are full of humor and yet were by no means comic relief. Martin does not treat Tyrion with kid gloves, if anything Tyrion is put in extra-tough spots and yet always manages to somehow talk his way out of them. My favorite Tyrion moment is when he goes into a laughing fit because he realizes that Aegon took his bait and is going directly to Westeros and also realizes that despite the fact that he is technically Jorah Mormont’s prisoner, Mormont is taking him exactly where he wanted to go in the first place: to Daenarys. I fully expected Tyrion to meet Daenarys by the end of the novel and/or figured he might use his book-knowledge of Dragons to try and wrangle one of them. Instead his story kind of ends with a whimper and I just kind of went “is that it?”

Here is Part 1 of my review of "A Dance With Dragons"
Ramsey Bolton artwork is from an Italian Game of Thrones site Terra-di-Mezzo

Thoughts on "A Dance With Dragons" part 1

2011-07-30T19:42:00.000-07:00

Spoilers...

The thing about "A Dance With Dragons" by George R. R. Martin, and the series in general, is the complexity of it. Not only are we expected to recall the events we read about 6 years ago and the books before that, but we are also expected to understand references to hundreds of places around Martin’s world and hundreds of Houses and their family trees. The librarian side of me has always found this aspect of it to be fascinating; Constantly having to put the book down and study the maps in the front of the book, or the appendix in the back.

I’ve also found some great maps online, such as the map above. The full map is a true work of art. Here's the most complete map of Westeros I've seen as well as a world map (Though the Free Cities are a bit off. We were all just guessing about those until Martin put the map of them in "Dance." Thanks Martin!)

I use a website called the Citadel, they have a concordance of the series, but find it quicker for simple things to search the Wiki of Ice and Fire. However, sites like this have started to update so anyone reading “Dance” for the first time will have to use great caution.

I wonder what Martin uses to keep all these characters and locations straight. How does he remember how many children Maege Mormont has or which of Lord Manderly’s kids was killed at the Red Wedding? Does he have a database or pen and paper charts. It never ceases to amaze me that he can keep it all straight.

In “Dance,” we met Lady Dustin. She revealed that she was in love with Brandon Stark and that the feeling was mutual. In the Stark crypt she talks about how she blames Ned Stark for all of her life’s woes. Anyway, I was sure she’d never been mentioned before. I thought I’d finally found an example of Martin thinking of something after the fact, but nope, she was mentioned back in “Game of Thrones.” Martin knew exactly who she was and what her story was even though he waited 5 books to start to tell it. It’s like what they say about Homer’s Illiad, “No one dies nameless.”

The final complexity is that we are expected to understand hundreds of years of Westeros historical and cultural references. Martin has outlines 300 years of Targaryen rulers and centuries of legend before that. In “Dance” that history seems more alive and relevant then ever before.

For Ser Barristan “the Bold” Selmy, many events of almost 50 years ago are just as vivid to him as the events of his present. And it is not only him, the surprise appearances of Jon Connington and Aegon Targaryen made the events of the War of the Usurper seem more influential to Martin’s overall story than the War of 5 Kings.

I think, two mysteries in particular are integral to Martin’s story: Who was the knight of the laughing tree at the tournament in the year of the false spring and what happened at the Tower of Joy? Barristan revealed some more clues, and I’ve had my own theories, but I’m sure we won’t get definite answers until the last novel.

I was fascinated with Barristan recalling the events of the Defiance of Duskendale and how in a way he is responsible for the events that followed since Aerys II lost his mind during his imprisonment. I liked the dichotomy that the Defiance was a high point in Barristan’s career since he single-handedly rescued the king, but he personally considers it a low point when he considers all the awful things the Mad King did and the war that stemmed from those actions.

Ser Barristan Selmy artwork is from an Italian Game of Thrones site Terra-di-Mezzo

Jim Shooter's 1979 Dazzler Cartoon Treatment

2011-07-05T19:47:00.000-07:00

Jim Shooter quietly released a bombshell on his blog this week. [I’ve got to hand it to Shooter, most comicbook writers, and artists have thus far been giving their personal papers to Universities where they unfortunately will probably only even be seen by a few people a year. Stan Lee’s papers are at the University of Wyoming, hardly a heavily visited area. Or worse, their papers are slowly mildewing in their garages or attics. I’ve long envisioned all of their papers in one Archive, run by me of course, but that’s just a personal fantasy.] Anyway, Shooter is sharing his stories and his archives through his blog. You should check it out!

A recent post told the story of his treatment for a Dazzler animated television Special and included the treatment as a pdf. It is well known that the Disco Dazzler (as she was originally called when disco was still “cool” in the late 70’s) was created with the intention of piggy-backing the character with a real life singer who would have a recording career as the Dazzler. Anyway, this treatment that fortunately never saw the light of day was chock full of celebrity voices: Cher, Donna Summers, KISS, The Village People, Rodney Dangerfield, Robin Williams, and Lenny and Squiggy.

The Dazzler was going to be voiced by Bo Derek. If you look at the issue of People magazine Shooter put on his blog you can see Derek's boyfriend is holding a stack of Marvel comics. Derek was studying up.

However, someone else would have done the singing, so why not just cast the singer as the voice too? Hollywood is so baffling; didn’t this cartoon already have enough marquee names?

The Dazzler is performing at a concert at the beginning of the cartoon, but other than that there are no musical numbers in Shooter’s treatment. But, considering it was meant to launch the Dazzler’s real life counterpart’s music career and was full of popular musical artist’s voices, I’m sure the first draft of the script would have been full of musical interludes.

Shooter didn’t write any jokes for Williams, Dangerfield or Lenny and Squiggy, but he did point out that Lenny and Squiggy’s jokes would not be funny until the end of the cartoon when the two characters would meet for the first time. Just what every special needs, characters who are constantly unfunny on purpose!

The cartoon was going to feature Marvel characters so people would know the Dazzler was from the Marvel Universe. The characters were Spider-man and a collection of random Avengers (Iron Man, Beast, Scarlet Witch, the Wasp and the Falcon).

The descriptions for the Avengers Shooter wrote into the treatment were written for someone who’d never seen a Marvel comic and were hilarious. Spider-man didn’t need to be introduced.

Iron Man- Secretly inventor Anthony Stark, who clad in solar-powered circuitized armor of his own design, is an invincible modern knight.

The Falcon- Whose rocket-powered wings give him the power of independent flight. He is actually Sam Wilson, a black teacher from Harlem.

The Scarlet Witch- Born Wanda Frank, she is a mutant, who with a gesture can cause disasters to occur. She is Eastern European, and has a rather formal bearing.

The Beast- Also a mutant, Hank McCoy is furry and bestial in powers and appearance, but extremely intelligent and erudite. He’s crazy.

The Wasp- Jan Van Dyne Pym was given a serum by her scientist-husband that enables her to shrink to insect size and sprout wings. She is an heiress, and very much a lovable scatterbrain.

Did I mention that nearly every character from Cher to Donna Summer, to KISS and The Village People were all going to have super powers of their own?

I don’t blame Casablanca Records for saying this treatment read more like a feature animated film because it was really ambitious, but in Shooter's defense he was only trying to use all the celebrity voice actors he’d been told to use. Given the enormous number of characters he was told to include in a half-hour show, I thought he did a decent job. But I am still very happy that soon after Shooter wrote this things changed at Casablanca Records and the Dazzler project died.

And the world had no idea the bullet it dodged until now. Mr. Shooter I don’t know if I want to thank you for releasing this or whether I wish you’d burned it. If you released it as a way of asking for forgiveness for this sin, I want you to know that I absolve and forgive you.

[The Spiderman and Dazzler drawing is by Tom Beland.]

Uh-oh! Somebody’s Actually Reading This- Part 2

2011-06-29T20:05:00.000-07:00

It’s been almost two months since I made the first post about my blog’s statistics. It seems more than a little bit self-centered to make another one, but I feel like I figured out some things since the last post, so I wanted to do a quick update. As you can see from the above chart the number of views on my blog have increased by almost 3,000 in the last month.

The first thing I can say with more confidence, now that I’ve been able to study it, is the only reason I have even that number of views is…I’ll give you a hint, almost no one views my blog because of my great wit, large vocabulary, and propensity towards extrapolating deeper meanings and life-lessons from science fiction and comicbooks. Instead, I’ve only got these views because I like to use large pictures.

“What if Spiderman had Rescued Gwen Stacy” and “Childhood’s End” were my top articles at the time I wrote my last post. Since then every time I’ve seen them get hits it’s been though searches on Google images.

What I also discovered is that the Google search engine is more likely to put your image higher on results screen if you have an article title that includes keywords, and have your pictures saved with keywords too, rather then just using something like image_ 1 or whatever code your camera automatically generates.

I tested this theory on a couple of my old articles that hadn’t gotten a lot of views. It turned out to be the perfect month to tweak my old Thor Review what with the new movie out in theaters. According to my Photobucket account, which also has some statistical records, since I renamed the Thor photos in my article and made them more searchable I got 323 views in a month.

The second thing I figured out is that one of the easiest ways to get views is to be a leech. I wrote an article “Meeting the Angry Video Game Nerd.” I wrote it just to get it off my chest, I felt like there was a certain bit of universality in the fact that I felt a connection to a celebrity, but meeting him brought the illusion of that fantasy into harsh clarity. My father used to call this the Johnny Carson effect because Carson said one time that people would come up to him on the street and start talking to him about their sick aunt or that Jimmy just graduated from middle school. They felt so at home with him due to seeing him every night on TV that then deluded themselves into thinking it was a two-way connection. Anyway, the article didn’t get a lot of views until the Nerd himself posted an article and a video montage about the game convention where I’d met him. I posted a simple reply on his website it just said, “I was at the convention too. I met the Nerd and I wrote an article about it. Here’s the link…” And from that I got 386 views on my article in one day!

Here’s a chart where you can clearly see that day where I had so many views. I have to admit I got sort of giddy over it at the time.

My third lesson was to pick popular subjects. The first article I did on the “Game of Thrones” series got some views so I got an idea for the ultimate “sell-out” article. I thought of it as selling out because it was the first time I wrote an article just to see if it would get views. I slapped on lots of pictures onto the article, plugged in some humorous text, and I had a best seller. “The Top 10 Game of Thrones Bad-Asses.” turned out to be the exactly the juggernaut I imagined. It has generated 1,572 views in one month. 474 of those are from image searches for Tyrion Lannister, obviously the fan favorite character.

Now I’m sure you’re thinking, "who cares? So some people are looking at pictures you posted what good does that do you?" To tell you the truth I’m not really sure. All I’ve been doing is experimenting and seeing how I could tweak things to maximize views and so far my experimenting is bearing fruit. Now that I figured out in about a month how to get people to look at my pictures, maybe in another month I can figure out how to get them to read my text?...Okay, it will probably take much longer than that.

Anyone got any advice?

Trip to Centralia, PA

2011-06-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

My friend Stefan and I took a trip to Centralia, PA, a town that has been largely abandoned since the early 80’s because of a coal mine fire that has been burning underneath the town since the late 70’s.

We read about the town online and got mixed accounts so we didn’t really know what to expect.

We saw pictures of craters and steam rising up out of them online. (Here is one of our own pics).

I pictured a post apocalyptic looking town with various abandoned building and craters thoughout the town. I also thought that all the roads into the town had been blocked off, so I though we’d have to hike in and out. I thought the only people we’d see would be the 5 residents that Wikipedia said still lived in the town.

Wikipedia also said that a boy had fallen into a sinkhole and had to be rescued by a quick acting uncle. I was skeptical about this account, but we decided to be cautious and bring a full pack with water, food and rope.

The coolest part of the day was walking on a mile long stretch of Highway 61 which has been blocked off due to massive cratering. This was the coolest part of the day walking this road felt like being in Mad Max or the Postman (The novel, I didn’t care for the movie).

However we quickly realized we were over prepared for the day as it was a popular spot for parents to bring their whole family and there was even ample parking in various spots. The reworked stretch of Highway 61 still goes through Centralia.

Also disappointing was that there are no building left abandoned except for one right off of Route 61 and the 4 or 5 houses that people still live in. Everything else had been demolished and the remains cleared away. It was hard to tell that a town had every actually been there.

Stefan and I wondered around for most of the afternoon thinking that around every curve we’d hit a clearing and find blocks of abandoned building. Instead the day turned out to be mostly a nature hike.

There are also huge hills of coal in one part of town.

Don’t get me wrong it was still a lot of fun. For instance we were goofing off at the end of the day and I told Stefan to pretend he could repel into the biggest crater.

There are a lot more pictures on photobucket, just click on one of the pictures here and you can click through everything.

Thoughts on Super 8...

2011-06-21T17:38:00.000-07:00

Super 8 is a sort of a throwback to those great 80’s movies like the Goonies, E.T., Stand By Me, etc. The whole time I was watching this movie, I was remembering what those movies meant to me as a kid. This movie had that same magic, but I’m also old enough that I realized this film will belong to the kids of today in a way that it can’t for us adults.

One of my favorite elements was that the kids in the film are attempting to make a zombie movie. (You definitely have to stay for the credits during which they play the entire movie the kids made). I like how almost none of the events that happen around them such as the train crash, an evacuation of the town by the military, etc, deter them from their goal. Instead the director talks about production value and they film in front of the train crash or in front of the military personnel searching a house.

It brought back memories of when I wrote movie scripts and tried to film them with my friends (and sometimes my brother and my father too). The sad thing is I think the kids in the movie outdid anything I managed to film, but I’d like to think my scripts were better. I dusted off an old gem so you can judge for yourself. Dave and Stanley Scene: Bach Vs. Chopin

Ironically the premise of the first movie I wrote was that me and a bunch of my friends filmed a horror movie in our high school’s lunchroom during lunch using nothing but a Super 8 camera. The novelty of using such an old technology seemed like a neat idea. I guess I was about 11 years ahead of the trend.

The thing I remember best about directing is how you are in control, everyone from the actors to the cameramen are looking to you to tell them what to do. It is deeply scary and at the same time somewhat intoxicating.

Out of the cast I was most impressed with Elle Fanning who I thought gave an excellent performance that seemed wise beyond her years.

Super 8 definitely requires you to suspend your disbelief at times, but it is exciting and entertaining and I’d highly recommend it.

Dave and Stanley Scene: Bach vs. Chopin

2011-06-21T17:11:00.000-07:00

Here's one of my favorite scenes from a movie script I wrote 11 years ago when I was a freshman in college. The characters Dave and Stanley are at their college's gym. These two best friends seemed to always have very funny arguments.

INT. GYM- DAY

Dave is doing the bench press and Stanley is spotting him.

STANLEY
Come on big guy, one more.

Dave is visibly struggling.

STANLEY (CONT'D)
Come on, you are as weak as the Baroque period of classical music.

This makes Dave have a boost of strength. He finishes the set and sits up.

DAVE
I don’t know why you bring up this up every time we come to the gym.

STANLEY
Because you won’t admit I’m right. The Romantic period is far superior.

DAVE
Just get on the bench, Bucko.

Stanley gets on the bench.

DAVE (CONT’D)
How can you completely disregard Bach?

Stanley does 8 reps.

STANLEY
I find his music to be very straight forward and lacking emotion.

DAVE
How can you say that? Bach’s music has never moved you? Fugue in C minor?

STANLEY
Fugue in C minor is one of the most mechanical pieces of trite I’ve ever heard.

DAVE
Toccata?

STANLEY
Crap.

DAVE
Fugue in D minor?

STANLEY
Boring.

Greg comes over. He is a muscular looking jock.

GREG
You still arguing about Bach and Chopin? I don’t know how the two of you can completely ignore Mozart and Beethoven.

DAVE
One discussion at a time.

GREG
But how can you ignore them?

STANLEY
Greg, we like our argument.

DAVE
Yeah, buzz off.

Greg goes back to working out elsewhere. Dave and Stanley prepare the weights to use the leg press.

STANLEY
So the other day I was listening to Chopin’s Nocturne in B. I was fascinated by the complexity. All of those trills were so complicated. From a musician’s point of view, I was completely in awe that someone could write something so rich with variety.

Dave starts the exercise.

DAVE
I find that piece to be overly busy. All that complexity is distracting.

STANLEY
How can you say that? I suppose you think Chopin should have just left some of the instruments out of his orchestral pieces so that they could be more simplified as well?

Dave finishes his set.

DAVE
Actually, I do.

STANLEY
You’re infuriating.

Dave points to the leg press.

DAVE
(condescendingly)
Your turn my friend.

Enraged, Stanley barrels into the exercise.

A Pivotal Moment...

2011-06-21T16:01:00.000-07:00

I almost got into a bad car accident a couple of months ago. I was driving home to Philadelphia from visiting my hometown in New York. I was on I-476 S, so I only had a half-hour left of my trip. I saw the car ahead of me swerve; he lost control and went into the highway divider on the left. The force with which he hit it spun him around and he ended up going back across the highway. I’d slammed on my brakes and I ended up stopping right in front of the car. Luckily no one was right behind me or I probably would have gotten rear-ended.

For a second or two afterwards I thought something along the lines of, “Holy shit! I’m okay.” Then I thought I should get out and see if the driver was okay, but there would soon be a line of cars in back of me and there was space enough on the shoulder to get past the accident so I told myself it was safer to get a ways up the highway so my car wasn’t in the way when the tow-truck and police cars arrived. They didn’t need another car right there blocking traffic, especially when it wasn’t even damaged. But when I got past the accident I realized an entrance ramp was just up ahead so I couldn’t leave my car on an entrance ramp and by the time I got past that the accident seemed so far back. How would I get back over there? I’d have to walk down the highway. Fear had entered in and so I just keep driving, but it was an experience that was impossible to forget.

Why didn’t I get over into the left lane right past the accident, stop the car, and put on my hazards? No one would have been able to drive past the accident on that side. I might have been the first one to stop. I have no way of knowing what kind of injuries the driver suffered. I could have helped him or her. Maybe there were others in the car. I’m no physician, but I could have done something. I’m sure someone else stopped, but I can’t shake the feeling that I let fear cause me to put up a “Someone Else’s Problem field” and I just drove away.

There’s a song by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones whose lyrics I’ve always liked: “I’m not a coward, I’ve just never been tested. I’d like to think that if I was I would pass.” I can’t help but feel like that accident was a test and I can’t help but feel like I failed the test.

You’d think I would have passed. I grew up on comicbooks and read about daring heroes in each issue. One of the best-known comic stories in Spider-man’s origin from Amazing Fantasy 15. When Peter Parker first receives his spider powers he uses them for personal gain. He becomes a wrestler and an entertainer. One night he lets a robber get into an elevator and escape the police when he could have easily stopped him. “Not my problem,” he tells the police officer. But, it was his problem because the following night that same robber hits his Aunt and Uncle’s house and his Uncle Ben is shot and killed when he confronts the robber. This event would forever haunt Spider-man and causes him to devote his life to crime fighting.

I can’t help but feel like that accident was my pivotal moment and like Spider-man I just let it go by without acting and like Spider-man I’ll always regret it. However, this is reality and I’m not superhero, but this experience has begun to shape my character a little bit. I find myself compelled to help people anyway I can as if a lifetime of helping friends move or walking the neighbor’s dog while they’re away will somehow make up for my past shortcomings

But this certainly isn’t penance; I don’t have the true superhero complex. I don’t believe I did an unforgivable thing, which must be made up for through a lifetime devotion to selflessness and suffering. No, I just want to be a better person, I want to be a blessing to those around me and I don’t want to be a victim of my fears.

Is the English Language Becoming Watered-Down?

2011-06-17T23:29:00.000-07:00

Words just aren’t what they used to be.

My father loves to tell a story that when I was a boy I told him that the English language had too many words and that we probably only needed about 300 words and we could just throw out the rest.

Since then I’ve grown-up and changed my tune; what I didn’t understand then is that almost every word in the English language has a unique definition. There are very few true synonyms (an exception may be flammable and inflammable). After all, why would there need to be two words if they shared the exact same meaning?

The problem is that in this age of sound-bytes, texting and twitter, words are losing their subtleties and nuances.

A friend of mine recently posted a blog article where he called hermits aberrant human beings. He got a negative comment that said there was nothing wrong with being introverted or asocial.

Being a hermit doesn’t mean the same thing as introverted. Except that the language has become so relaxed we’ll say things like, “Yeah I was such a hermit last night I stayed in my room and played video games till 2 in the morning and didn’t see anyone.”

Therefore it should be no surprise that the commenter momentarily forgot what the word hermit actually means.

Hermit- A person who has withdrawn from society and lives a solitary existence; a recluse.

Introvert- a shy person.

In case anyone is still confused I’ll break it down into logical statements:

All hermits are introverts
But, all introverts are not hermits.

Or, broken down into the hierarchy of smallest, bigger, and biggest you have introverts, asocial humans, and hermits.

Has anyone else noticed words losing their meanings?

[In conclusion, I want everyone to specify the exact meaning of every word they use. If English doesn’t have the distinction borrow it from another language. So when you tell your wife/husband you love them specify that it is Agape-love and when you tell your brother/sister or house pet that you love them specify that it is Philia-love. I promise that people will think you’re smarter and no one will think you’re a pompous windbag.]- Sarcasm

The Adventures of Pharaoh and Junior

2011-06-14T22:07:00.000-07:00

This superhero parody was inspired by my impending doom...I mean fatherhood.

If anyone is interested in doing some artwork for this let me know.

The Adventures of Pharaoh and Junior
by John Grayshaw

(Establishing shot of Pharaoh’s Estate, a gothic manor house. Inside the house, Pharaoh’s Wife is searching for her husband. She’s wearing normal modern clothing khaki’s and a nice blouse. She finds her husband in his study. Pharaoh is almost finished putting on his costume, it is an elaborate thing in a partially Egyptian motif, but with a large cape).

Pharaoh’s Wife- What are you doing?

Pharaoh- What does it look like I’m doing? I’m putting on my costume and going out on patrol.

Pharaoh’s Wife- I thought we talked about this. You’re a father now. You’ve got a responsibility to us.

Pharaoh- You talked about it; I just gave up arguing with you. I told you what I was when we were dating. I warned you I wouldn’t change before we were married, and I told you I wasn’t going to stop fighting crime just because we had a baby.

Pharaoh’s Wife- But don’t you deserve your own life? You’ve saved the city again and again, but it's time to put that in the past and let someone else worry about the future.
(Sound of baby crying. It shakes the curtains and other loose parts of the house).
Besides before you save the world, it’s your turn to change the diaper.

Narration- Pharaoh’s years of intense physical and mental training in ancient Egyptian arts serve him well during diaper changing…

(The action whirls as Pharaoh fluidly and gracefully changes the diaper while Pharaoh’s Wife looks on. BAMF!- Pharaoh takes off the dirty diaper. KLIK!- as the dirty diaper is thrown in the trash can. DOOP!-as the baby is cleaned off. SWOOP!-He pulls a clean diaper out of his utility belt. SHOONK!-As the new diaper is put on. Shot of the baby smiling).

Pharaoh’s Wife- Don’t think you’ve won the argument just cause Junior needed changing. It’s your night to mind him and I don’t want you taking him out on patrol again.

Pharaoh- Come on, why else do you think I went to the trouble of installing a baby seat in the Pharaoh-mobile. …It wasn’t easy you know, I had to get rid of half the missile launchers.

Narration- Later that same evening.

(Pharaoh is on the rooftop of a building. He has his costume and mask on. He has the baby strapped along his chest in a baby carrier. The baby is in a tiny version of the Pharaoh costume and even has a tiny little mask).

Pharaoh- Mommy doesn’t appreciate how much you love patrolling does she?

(The sound of an ALARM coming from street level. The Pharaoh uses his cape to glide down to ground level and gets in front of the bank just as the criminals are running out onto the street. The villains are the Entertainer, who dresses in a tuxedo with tails and top hat and his two henchmen Sal and Rat).

Sal- It’s the Pharaoh!

Rat- Look, he has his baby…Aw isn’t he cute!

Entertainer- You fools! I don’t care how cute the baby is. Attack!

Narration- Taught by the reincarnation of Horus, the Pharaoh is an expert in forms of hand-to-hand combat forgotten for several millennia

(Pharaoh sidesteps Sal’s lunge and THAK!-Karate chops his back. Rat tries to punch him, but he blocks it and CLOP!-punches him in the face. The two of them both attack him at the same time, but Pharaoh jumps over them at the last second and KRUNTCH!- they crash into each other. But while Pharaoh is still distracted the Entertainer sneaks up on him and stanches the baby out of the carrier. Then he starts laughing maniacally).

Entertainer- Once again evil triumphs because of good’s vulnerabilities; let us go on our merry way or your baby will be dead before he says his first words.

Pharaoh- You think Junior is a liability. What kind of a father would I be if I made a habit of endangering my son’s life?
(Entertainer carefully examines the seemingly harmless baby).
The fact is I only keep him in the carrier because I’m being kind.

Entertainer- You’re bluffing.
(He takes out a ray gun and tries to shoot the baby, but BLAPP!- the shot just bounces off).

Pharaoh- It’s the darnest thing, he was born with a personal force shield.

(Entertainer is horrified).

Entertainer- Get this kid away from me!
(He hold him out by the underarms and the baby doesn’t like it, so he starts to cry and the power of the babies wail forces the Entertainer to his knees. He drops the baby who bounces due to his force shield and ends up in Pharaoh’s arms. Shot of the baby smiling and happy.

Pharaoh- He’s also got one heck of a sonic scream. The wife and I have to wear special earplugs until he learns to control it.
(Pharaoh straps the baby back across his chest and then goes over and handcuffs the Entertainer).
Come on Junior, let’s put these naughty men where they belong.

The End

Top Ten Game of Thrones Bad-Asses

2011-06-06T22:23:00.000-07:00

Spoilers through end of “A Feast of Crows.”

It has been 6 years since I’ve read a new Game of Thrones book and even longer since we’ve had chapters from certain perspectives, due to the split nature of “A Feast for Crows and “A Dance with Dragons.” But despite all of that, several of the characters are still quite fresh in my mind. So, they are the Top Ten Game of Thrones Bad-Asses.

The great thing about these novels is that these are by no means the only 10 bad-asses, they’re just the ones that really stuck with me over the years. As I’ve recently gotten on the web and started to refresh my memory about the novels I see tons of other worthy contenders that had for whatever reason slipped my mind over the years like Roose Bolton or Bronn the sellsword.

So anyway in no particular order…

1) Varys- Known as the master of Whispers or the Spider, this guy is a master manipulator. I think it’s been his goal all along to get the Targaryens back on the Iron Throne, he has done so by seeming to help such people as Eddard Stark and Tyrion Lannister, while in reality he was only helping them destroy themselves. He’s finally been kicked off the King’s small council, but the damage he’s done has been tremendous and he’s escaped to manipulate another day.

2) Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish - For a guy that started life as the lowest of lowly lords he really used his guile to rise to the top. He’s had his hand in almost every evil plan since the first novel. He poisoned John Arryn and Joffery and now murdered his new wife Lysa Arryn. He’s never got over his first love Catelyn Tully and now he has his eyes on her daughter Sansa, whom he’s kidnapped. Don’t miss understand me, this guy is a monster. But he is such a charming monster. He’s like Iago or Dexter. It’s always fun to see a master at work.

3) Tyrion Lannister- Probably the best character in the whole series. He’s one of the most devious and calculating men in all of Westeros, and yet in this series, he’s one of the good guys. He is a dwarf in a world where combat skills are a necessity and yet his keen mind (along with some luck) has seen him through all of his adventures so far.

4) Brynden “The Blackfish” Tully- According to my calculations he is the greatest military mind still alive in Westeros. He is also one of a few people alive who beat back the rebellion of Maelys Blackfyre during the War of the Ninepenny Kings. He’s a hard man. Battle is the only thing for him, to the point where he refused to get married. I don’t think he’s gay, I think he’s not interested in marriage, relationships and/or children. He just wants to bust heads and die in glorious combat. Plus, he proved himself worthy of his name by jumping in the moat around Riverrun and swimming away from an army. How Batman was that?

5) Sandor “The Hound” Clegane- His brother Gregor burned his face when he was a boy. It’s safe to say it was tough growing up with Gregor as a brother. Sandor was always adamant about the fact that he wasn’t a knight. I guess he never thought much of them. The Hound may be dead or he may be living in a monastery as a monk (As has been heavily hinted). I hope the Hound gives up the quiet life and goes back to fighting, the one thing he’s ever been really good at.

6) Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane- Seeing him portrayed on television doesn’t do him justice, in my minds eye the Mountain That Rides is larger than life. He is the biggest and badest human being that ever walked the earth. He is a monster, he rapes and he pillages without mercy. It would take a small army to stop this man; hence why the Brotherhood Without Banners were originally formed with one purpose: track Gregor down and bring him to justice. During the single combat fight with Obyrn “Red Viper” Martell, Gregor received injuries that later killed him, but his body may live on as an awful creation by Qyburn

7) Jamie Lannister- It seems like Jamie lost a hand and gained a brain. Jamie was just about my least favorite character at the start of the series. He was a one-dimensional, incestuous, and pompous villain. He may or may not have been the best swordsman in the land, but was certainly the biggest braggart. However since the loss of his sword hand he has been a completely different character. He seems to have had his eyes opened and suddenly I find I can’t wait to see what he does next.

8) Brienne Tarth- Brienne just doesn’t fit in; The Lady lords of Westeros are supposed to be demure waifs whose purpose is to birth many baby lords. Instead of a shrinking violet, Brienne is a great warrior strong enough and crafty enough to stand up to anyone in the realm. After killing many members of the evil Brave Companions, Brienne has been injured and captured by Brotherhood Without Banners, who plan to hang her due to her newfound friendship with Jamie Lannister.

9) Jon Snow- has been imbued with all the best Stark qualities such as strength and leadership and his direwolf Ghost is a force to be feared. During Jon’s adventure on the other side of the Wall his loyalties became unclear possibly even to himself. But since his return, and his election to Lord Commander of the Night Watch, they are clear again. Jon may be a Targaryen heir and just doesn’t know it yet. I think his father was Rhaegar Targaryen and his mother Lyanna Stark. Ned believed that his sister had been taken by Rhaegar against her will, but in reality the two of them may have been in love.

10) Daenerys Targaryen- The last of the Targaryens, the Khaleesi, The true heir to the Iron Throne. Time and again she has proven herself worthy of the crown. Her latest exploits with the Unsullied has established her as ruler of all Slaver’s Bay. There she will consolidate her power and meet several envoys that are coming her way, Victarion Greyjoy, Marwyn the Mage, representatives from House Martell, and possibly Tyrion.

On the other hand there have been several characters that were over-hyped or that I have become disillusioned with over time. These are the Top 5 Game of Thrones Disappointments

1) Stannis Baratheon- The first time I read Game of Thrones I thought, “Stannis wasn’t even in that. He’s gonna appear in the second book and really stir things up, isn’t he?” I was convinced he’d be the biggest and badest enemy of the whole series. And yes, Melisandre his R’hllor priestess makes him dangerous, be he isn’t really all that interesting otherwise. He’s kind of milk-toast and boring really.

2) Obyrn “Red Viper” Martell- He was totally played up as a great warrior and he comes to Kings Landing with four of his Sand Snake daughters like he was something out of “Kill Bill,” but soon after he comes to Kings Landing he fights Gregor Clegane in single combat and is killed. At least he killed Gregor too…or did he…

3) Cersi Lannister- Cersi has long thought herself the chief evil-doer in the realm. However, in reality she was riding the coattails of others. In “A Feast for Crows” we see what happens when there is no one left to help her, her own ineptitude and naivety are finally leading her to her destruction. Even her brother/lover Jamie has abandoned her.

4) Tywin Lannister- In my mind, Tywin was the true master of the realm. He was letting everyone else play at the Game of Thrones sure that no matter who won he’d end up on top. But, as you got to see his character in action he became more and more of a disappointment. He wasn't the master schemer I thought he was, he was just an angry old man.

5) Melisandre- The Red Priestess has real powers, but I can't seem to figure out what her end game is. And fanatics are usually touched, so she has that against her too.

Follow up to previous post Game of Thrones Fever!
My thoughts on the latest novel "A Dance with Dragons" part 1
My thoughts on the latest novel "A Dance With Dragons" part 2
My thoughts on the latest novel "A Dance With Dragons" part 3
All artwork is from an Italian Game of Thrones site Terra-di-Mezzo

Bridge Over the River Kwai

2011-06-05T23:21:00.000-07:00

“The Bridge over the River Kwai” is a fantastic film. I recently saw it for the first time.

The movie takes place during WWII in Thailand. It starts out with British Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness) efficiently marching his men into the Japanese work camp. Nicholson and his men are the prisoners, but they march in like kings. While they march they whistle the Colonel Bogey March, my personal favorite whistling tune, I remember learning it from “The Parent Trap” when I was a kid.

William Holden plays Commander Shears, an American POW that had been at the work camp for many months helping to build the barracks. He is one of very few men to survive; the graveyard around the camp is quite large. Shears tries to warn Nicholson that the Japanese commandant is insane, but Nicholson doesn’t listen. He is convinced that he must be a reasonable man. Nicholson is a true optimist while Shears is a pragmatist or a realist.

Nicholson refuses to let his officers perform manual labor on the bridge. He sees the officer’s job to organize the men. He cites the Geneva Convention and even pulls a copy of it out and offers it to the commandant, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa).

Saito hits him with the book and shouts “ Do not speak to me of rules. This is war, not a cricket game.” Saito puts Nicholson in a hot box and will not let him out until he relents.

Shears manages to escape the prison and returns to civilization. However, the British army recruits him to return to the work camp and blow up the bridge.

Back at the work camp, Saito slowly begins to realize that his project is way behind schedule and that it isn’t going to get any better. The prisoners are poor workers and do everything they can to sabotage the construction. Finally Saito decides to submit to all of Nicholson’s demands. It is a tremendous reversal, I thought Nicholson was completely over idealistic and I doubted that Saito would ever relent. Nicholson got lucky in my opinion; Saito was worried because failure to complete the bridge on time would force him to commit seppuku. A commandant from any other country would probably not be so concerned with his honor.

Nicholson quickly and completely takes over the bridge project. He and his officers redesign the bridge and motivate their troops. Saito is reduced to mumbling, “I have already given the order,” to whatever Nicholson suggests and throwing temper tantrums in his apartment when no one is around.

The bridge is completed the day before the deadline, but unbeknownst to Nicholson, Shears and a small strike force have just arrived to blow up the bridge. The small number of men with Shears are a stark contrast to the over 100 men who built the bridge. I couldn’t help but think how easily Nicholson and the others could have broken the chains that bound them if they’d tried. Instead Nicholson was seduced by the idea of building the bridge. When it was completed he imagined people using it for years after the war and he thought they’d remember that British soldiers had built it. He saw the bridge as one of the major accomplishments in his life. As a viewer, I was right there with him. War is hell, but a bridge is something good, something that is useful and can help people.

However, the commando team lays charges and is set to blow up the bridge as the first train crosses it. Nicholson and Saito find the wire the plastic explosives are attached to and trace it to the detonator. The green commando who is supposed to blow the bridge kills Saito with a knife, but tries to reason with Nicholson. Nicholson’s first reaction is to call the Japanese soldiers for help.

Shears races across the river while being shot at. He sees Nicholson and the two recognize each other. Shears dies, but seeing him is enough to bring Nicholson to his senses. He rushes over to the detonator and right before he dies from a mortar blast he manages to blow up the bridge.

The movie ends with the British doctor, Major Clipton, surveying the chaos of the destroyed bridge and the dead men strewn about the riverbanks. (He is kind of like Horatio at the end of Hamlet). All the doctor can say is, “Madness!”

Madness pretty much sums it up. Only in war could the destruction of something as seemingly positive as a bridge be the right thing to do. The Japanese and British learned to work together. The bridge was a testament to this and yet as long as the two countries were still at war there was no other option. Even Nicholson realized this in his last moments. He was so proud of the bridge, he’d almost forgotten he was still a soldier.

Game Of Thrones Fever!

2011-06-01T20:23:00.000-07:00

The next book in the Song of Ice and Fire series (Game of Thrones series), “A Dance With Dragons” isn’t out for another month, but I’ve already got Game of Thrones fever!

I’m not one of those people that rereads all the old books before reading the new one, I’d love to do that but you’d have to add about 4-6 hours into each day before I’d have the time. However, I have been thinking about the previous books, paging through them, reading timelines and character bios on A Wiki of Ice and Fire, as well as watching the TV show.

The show is a really great and largely faithful to the source material. I’ve heard George R.R. Martin is closely involved, so no one gets any smartpants ideas and starts ruining things with Hollywood endings. But the TV show is a double-edged sword (not unlike the Stark’s long-gone Valyrian-steel sword Ice) because while it is a dream come true for the fans of the novels, it is also introducing millions of non-readers to the story and call me an elitist, which I most certainly am, but being a Game of Thrones fan was like being a member of an exclusive club. Finishing the novels was like a badge of honor, you’d conquered the Seven Kingdoms, or at least the thousands of pages of text. It’s like if they built an escalator to the top of Mount Everest, it really wouldn’t really be the same anymore if you said you’d seen the top of Everest, would it?

I know that I am overreacting and that it’s a good thing for Martin to gain a bigger following, but it’s like what happened with the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. The Dinosaur is this great blues-biker bar/BBQ joint in Syracuse, NY, there is also one in Rochester, which is supposed to be just as good, but I haven’t been there. Anyway, in Syracuse the place is always crowded, because the BBQ is the best you have ever tasted (I usually get the pulled-pork). The music is blasting, the bikers are having a great time, you can bring your family, but you get the feeling that you’re a visitor in the biker’s hangout not the other way around.

Eventually the Dinosaur came to Manhattan in Harlem and I went there and there are no bikers, there is no attitude, no blues music. It’s all yuppies with their kids in high chairs and soft rock coming out of a jukebox. I could have been in Applebees or Ruby Tuesdays. The food was okay, but it just wasn’t the real Dinosaur Bar-B-Que.

So hopefully the TV show won’t reduce the bite of the series that has never pulled a punch, simplified a story or shied away from killing an important character.

As fans of the series know, the 4^th book in the series, “A Feast for Crows” came out in November of 2005. It’s been 6 years. In 2005 I was fresh out of college and working as an ad salesman for a small town newspaper. I was living in a tiny town, Highland, NY, living in my first solo apartment and I’d just started dating a very nice girl. Six years later, I've completed Graduate school, gotten married to that nice girl, moved down to Philadelphia, and have our first baby on the way.

Meanwhile, Martin only just managed to finish a book he was supposed to be approximately 1/3 finished with back when “Feast” was published. If you recalled, basically the “Feast” manuscript was split into two volumes. According to Wikipedia, the final “Dance” manuscript was 1,510 manuscript pages. Now if we subtract 1/3 of that because that’s what was already finished by May 29, 2005 (the day Martin announced the “Feast” manuscript was completed) you have 1007 manuscript pages.

Okay there are 365.25 days in a year. So there are 1826.25 days in the 5 years between 2006 and 2010. The half-year in 2005 starting after May 29 yields 216 days and the half-year from Jan 1 to May 19, 2011 (When Martin announced he’d finished “Dance”) yields 139 days. All together that’s 2181.25 days.

When you divide that you see that Martin only averaged .461 manuscript pages a day, a low average for the guy that wrote “Clash of Kings” in two years.

And I don’t want to get morbid but hopefully Martin finishes the series before he is laid to rest in the Great Sept of Baelor. He’s in perfect health as far as I know, but I worry about him. George, no one wants your series to go the way of The Wheel of Time series, please take care of yourself, and write quickly!

Thoughts on "Primary Inversion"

2011-05-19T21:42:00.000-07:00

Spoilers…

"Primary Inversion" by Catherine Asaro (1995) is the first of many novels in the Ruby Dynasty Saga (or Skolian Saga). Asaro has written 13 novels in the series to date.

This novel introduces the Skolian universe. Human beings long ago left Earth and started building empires that span many solar systems. There are three different empires that have emerged over many generations: The Skolians whose ruling class are psions (who have empathic and sometimes telepathic powers). The Eubian Concord is the Skolian’s polar opposite, their ruling class are called Aristos and they derive pleasure from making psions (who they call providers) suffer. They keep these providers as slaves and torture them. The third empire is the Allieds, which are the ancestors of original humans and have found themselves in the middle of the ongoing intergalactic war between the Skolians and the Eubian Concord.

Jagernauts

The main character of the novel is Sauscony (Soz) Valdoria. She is an Admiral in the Skolian military and she is a member of the Skolian royal dynasty and possibly next in line to be Imperator.

Valdoria is not your typical princess; she is more of a tough-as-nails action-heroine type. At the start of the novel, she is on a neutral planet for a little bit of R and R before her and her fellow Jagernauts go back to fighting the war with the Eubian. Jagernauts just seem really bad-ass, they are all dressed in black, big boots, black leather. I picture them as a military version of the Beatles early look in Germany. A Jagernaut’s main side arm is called a Jumbler, it’s a hand-gun sized partial accelerator that can only be fired by its owner.

Because of their psionic powers, which most people don’t really understand, the Jagernauts have kind of a bad rap in the popular culture of this universe. A lot of people believe what they see in the holomovies that most Jagernauts are really close to going crazy and going on a violent killing spree.

I didn’t understand how with a rank of Admiral, Valdoria is only in charge of 3 other people. I know the book explains that the human mind can’t take input from more than 3 other minds so 4 is the maximum squad size. And I understand that the Skolian advantage is their speed because of the Kyle web so the squads have to be autonomous. But the fact remains that she is an Admiral that means she has a lot of experience and training. You can’t ever win wars by sending your best officers to the front lines to die. Valdoria should have been directing troops from the safety of a battle ship or she should have been in contact with other troops using conventional communication. Basically it seems like her skills are wasted by being in such a small unit.

Here is an explanation about psions and their Jag ships, “Warfare had evolved terrifyingly beyond the abilities of humans to fight it. Although drones with EI pilots couldn’t match the human mind when it came to innovation, no human could survive against the light speed processing abilities of a drone or its ability to endure immense accelerations. Except a Jagernaut. The enhanced link between our brains and our ships boosted our minds into the ship’s EI. Add to that the advances in the stasis technology that protects humans from g-forces and the end result was a weapon with the speed and endurance of a drone and the creativity of the human mind.” (p 83 of the Baen E-book)

I liked how the Jags had the advantage of speed over the Eubian but they also had disadvantages such as feeling the pain of the people they were killing because of their empathy and also being more susceptible to the endless taunting the Aristos spewed at them.

Overall I thought the main space battle in the novel, was exciting, but I never really understood what was happening; I just had to kind of go with it. I still not sure I know what was going on in the battle or how inversion is supposed to work.

Aristos

The Aristos are definitely something that you’ve got to just accept/suspend your disbelief about in order to enjoy the novel. I know that some people disliked the novel because the idea of reading about torturers who get off on their torture is an absolute no-go for them and I can completely understand that because obviously it wasn’t pleasant for me to read about that kind of subject matter either. But the more difficult hump for me was to accept that these two cultures that are such polar opposites really both existed. I mean for the whole novel I just kept thinking these two cultures would always be at war. It was just too convenient. It would be like if aliens landed tomorrow and it turned out that humans were a “superfood” for them. And I know that the backstory of the two cultures is that a scientist was trying to come up with the ultimate psions and he created the Rhon but he also created the Aristo, but that didn’t help it make sense to me.

Also, the Aristo are just too evil to be believed, it’s been my experience that governments and religions and organizations go bad, but people in general are basically good. The cold war ended because like that Sting song said, “the Russian loved their children too.”

Plot and Characters

I thought the first hundred pages or so of the novel were amazing. The whole thing takes place in about a 12-hour period and so many things happen. It was like watching half a season that TV show "24," only more interesting then that show ever was.

I really like Valdoria. Even though she is one of the most influential and powerful people in the universe, she has still managed to be the down-to-earth type. Since I cared about her and what happened to her I got invested in the story and I think I enjoyed the book more because of it.

There were a couple of characters I wish we got to see more, Valdoria’s brother Kurj the Imperator. He just sounds strange, his skin has a metallic sheen and his eyes have inner lids, plus personality wise he’s got a lack of a sense of humor and general un-sunny disposition. He sounds kind of like a bore, but he was absolutely fascinating.

The other great character was Valdoria’s father Eldri. He only shows up at the end of the novel, but by that time you’ve heard so much about him from Valdoria that you feel like you are meeting an old friend. He is such a study in irony. A salt-of-the-earth type from a backwards planet with little technology who by some quirk of nature turns out to be a powerful psion of the highest order (a Rhon) and a natural at powering the Kyle Web even though he doesn’t understand the technology and still hasn’t even learned how to make a long distance video call. It is a really touching scene when he tells Valdoria that he thinks she’d make a great Imperator. You see on his planet a female would be passed over for such leadership, but despite not learning more about technology he has not held on to his prejudices.

I was disappointed that we never really got to meet Valdoria’s other two brothers in this novel. But I’m guessing they’ll play a bigger role in some of the other novels in the series.

One thing that I found hard to believe in this novel was that the members of the Ruby Dynasty like Valdoria were able to remain anonymous. Valdoria is one of 3 people in line to be Imperator and yet her face is not known to the general public. This was kind of hard for me to believe in the age of celebrity that we live in where the whole world seemed to be focused on Britain’s royal wedding for about the entire week leading up to the ceremony.

There were lots of memorable scenes in the novel. Such as the scene where Valdoria wakes up after a night of sowing wild oats with a young lover to find her mother waiting for her in her living room. Or, the scene in the bar where Valdoria gets depressed and drinks too much and starts to talk to the musician and puts her Jumbler to her head.

Alternative (In)versions

This novel was the first published in this series, but several novels take place before this one within the chronology of the overall series. Asaro has jumped all around in the timeline. This means that as she wrote more she ended up changing certain details. The free online e-book I read is not the novel in its original form it has been partially rewritten by Asaro and re-released in 2008. One of the members the Classic Science Fiction Message Board has been kind enough to agree to sent me a copy of the original novel so that I can do a little bit of compare and contrast. If the novel contains enough differences I’ll do a follow up post.

Doctor Who "The Doctor's Wife"

2011-05-14T20:27:00.000-07:00

Spoilers....

The latest episode of Doctor Who, "The Doctor's Wife" was written by Neil Gaiman. It is the first episode he's written and I hope it will be the first of many.

The episode examines the relationship between the Doctor and his TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space). This is a relationship that has gone largely unexplored in this long running series.

The TARDIS was first said to be a living ship way back in the 1964 serial "The Edge of Destruction"

I primary watch the new series, so it was in "The Rise of the Cybermen" that I first started to appreciate that the TARDIS was alive. In that episode the TARDIS ends up traveling into another dimension and dies, but the Doctor saves it by giving it some of his Time Lord energy, "I've given it one year of my life."

Throughout the course of the new series the Doctor has commented on several occasions that he only sometimes/somewhat controls where the TARDIS goes. He implies that he has it set to travel to pivotal points in time, sort of space time tipping points. Though it had never been specifically mentioned my theory was that the Doctor only goes to points in time where the TARDIS senses evidence of other time travelers or alien technology where it should not be.

I think it's funny that the Doctor will often assure his companions that they are going to go somewhere nice a relaxing, such as when the Doctor takes Amy and Rory to Venice. But the TARDIS only travels to tipping points, so in Venice they encounter Aquatic alien vampires. The Doctor has also said things like he doesn't like to go to boring times so he never lands on Sundays.

This episode is a first for two reasons. 1) the TARDIS is truly personified for the first time when it's essence is put into the body of a women named Idris and 2) The TARDIS tells the doctor that she/it is just as much of a thrill seeker as he is and that's why he's always finding himself on adventures.

I found this to be truly refreshing and long overdue, because though "The Heart of the TARDIS" was said to be a living entity and though the Doctor has been known to sometimes sweet talk it or "rub bits of it" as Sarah Jane mentioned in "School Reunion," the TARDIS has never been shown to have a personality of its own.

Up until this point it's been more of a vehicle. I thought the Doctor was fond of it because it took him from place to place. He loved it the way some guys love their sports car. This episode puts a whole other spin on their relationship. In essence it is a symbiotic relationship the TARDIS wanted to see the universe and so did the Doctor and as Idris put it, "you were the only one (Time Lord) crazy enough to give me what I wanted."

This episode is a bit tragic because for the first time the Doctor gets to actually have a conversation with his fellow adventurer of some 900 or so years and he learns that the ship choose him as much as he choose it, but it is only for one brief adventure and when he returns the energy into the shell of the TARDIS he knows that they won't be able to speak again. (Don't ask me why the Doctor can't make the TARDIS capable of speech, he just can't).

I think the episode is called "The Doctor's Wife" because the relationship between the Doctor and his TARDIS is the defining relationship of his life. He constantly fills his ship up with people he calls companions, but his real life-long companion is the TARDIS itself. It is his best friend, his most trusted ally, his greatest defender, and a constant believer that the work he is accomplishing is for the greater good. If that doesn't describe a wife's role than I don't know what does.

Uh-oh! Somebody’s Actually Reading This.

2011-05-10T22:03:00.000-07:00

First Problem

I have two problems, the first problem is that I just discovered Blogger.com has all sorts of statistical data about how many people view my blog, how they found the blog, what browser they were using, where they were from, etc.

I know everyone else that has a blog through this site probably realized this long ago, but I somehow missed it until now. This is a problem because I can be a bit obsessive sometimes so it’s not a good thing that I can go in at anytime and see if anyone is reading my blog and then press the little button that says refresh and see if anyone started reading it in those last two seconds.

I now know that I’ve had over 100 page views from such foreign countries as Germany, Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, and Netherlands and Spain. And in the last week I’ve had visitors from New Zealand, Denmark and the United Arab Emirates.

I can’t even get my best friends to look at my blog, but I have readers in Indonesia?!

It was also interesting to see the different web browsers and operating systems people are using to view my site because I’d never heard of many of the more obscure ones.

For instance people have viewed my site with the web browsers Ubuntu (a Linux browser), SeaMonkey, Novarra-Vision, and PBSTB (which is so obscure the only thing I found by searching Google for it, was a link to another blog where she asks “What is this browser?” and even though there are many replies no one seems quite sure).

My blog has been viewed by such devices as I-pads, I-phones, I-pods, Blackberry, DoCoMo another mobile phone operator, (but it didn’t say whether it was the Indian or Japanese DoCoMo) and Playstation Portable.

It just amuses me to no end that someone manages to get their Playstation Portable to browse the Internet and they end up at my blog of all places. Plus, it’s just a portable video game console, Game Boy sure as heck couldn’t surf the web.

My question is how come no one using an Android or Nook Color has been to my blog?

Second Problem

My second problem is that people are actually looking at my blog. This blog wasn’t created so that people could read it, it was started so that I had a place to put the various articles I’d post on message boards. I’d post them and then I’d want to find them months or week’s later and I’d have to struggle with that particular site’s search engine to find it. Also, as I got more layout savvy I got frustrated with message board limitations; I wanted it to look just so.

And so,"One Geek’s Mind" was born, a storehouse for all of my brain-droppings in one convenient location.

Up until now I was working in a vacuum. I only have five followers of my blog so I figure no ones looking except for my wife that faithfully reads it, but does admit to skipping over the boring parts (love you Babe!). But, according to the stats I’ve had over 8,000 page views.

My most read book review is “Childhood’s End” it's had 534 views since I posted it on Oct. 29, 2009. I just looked st the review tonight for the first time in who knows how long and I feel like I have to apologize to all 534 readers for never bothering to fix up the text. It was double-spaced and the heading weren’t bolded. Now I know why girls get so embarrassed when someone comes over to their house and it’s “all a mess.” I also have no idea why this particular review is so popular. It’s blowing everything else out of the water; the next most viewed book reviews are “Contact” (93 views) and “Fahrenheit 451” (89 views). Is it just that good a review? Is it a popular book?

At Jim Harris’ suggestion I sent one of my articles “How Many Hugo Nominees and Winners can you get for free?” to a popular Science Fiction blog, SF Signal. They linked to my blog and it was a successful experiment, I got 67 hits because of SF Signal’s link. The article is my fifth most popular overall receiving a total of 223 views so far. The rest of the hits are probably a result of people searching Google with phrases like “Hugo winners, free.”

My third most viewed article with 253 views is, “Some Details in Back to the Future.” It’s just a quick article I threw together after watching the movie again. Most of the things I mentioned are found in other various articles around the blog-o-sphere. It’s just the things I happened to pay attention to that viewing and decided to look further into.

The other five top-ten articles are all comicbook reviews. Comics were one of the original focuses of the blog, but they’ve kind of been eclipsed by some of my other interests lately. The last time I wrote one was last April.

The number one most viewed article is, “What if Spiderman had rescued Gwen Stacy?” (604 views). It’s a well written review for what it is, but my theory on it’s popularity is that since I used the title of the comic for the title of the article, my blog comes up first itf you search the title in Google. And since I used a big scan of the cover with a high resolution, it also comes up first in image searches for both the title and “What If 24” (that’s what I named the image file).

The other popular comic articles are "Daredevil Part 3, The Romita Era" (175 views) and "Not so Mellow Yellow- Daredevil the Early Years Part 1" (132 views), I have no clue why people are skipping Part 2. Daredevil is kind of the "red-headed step-child" of the comicbook world, it's weird to me that his articles would get more then my other Spiderman reviews or Thor or Ironman.

Then there are, "Musings on the Incredible Hulk Part 2" (131 views) and Part 3 (122 views). These figures really confused me because you’d think people would start with Part 1, which is my personal favorite of all the comicbook reviews I’ve ever done. In it I purport that the Hulk is a modern day Buddha attempting to reach a form of nirvana by finding an end to his suffering. I guess it was too out there for most people.

The Chinese Space Program

2011-05-09T22:11:00.002-07:00

China has a space program. Sometimes it seems like it's all just a bunch of talk, but while America has basically scraped its space program and Russia is content to use the Soyuz for "taxi flights" to the International Space Station, China is putting real money into their program because they want to prove themselves as a 21st century superpower. They are playing a very long-term game and as you will see, they are making the first of their goals on time.

According to Wikipedia, so far there have been 3 manned space flights by China. It might not seem like much, but it seems like China's theory isn't repetition, it's getting it right the first time.

# Shenzhou 5 – 15 October 2003 – 14 Earth orbits carrying Yang Liwei
# Shenzhou 6 – 12 October 2005 – 5 day mission with Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng (In the space suit in the above picture)
# Shenzhou 7 – 25 September 2008 – three-man crew with Zhai Zhigang (who conducted China's first spacewalk), Liu Boming and Jing Haipeng

Here are their plans for the near future. Only time will tell if they stay on schedule or get delayed.

# Tiangong 1- October 2011 unmanned mission (Target Vehicle)
# Shenzhou 8 – 2011(?) – unmanned mission, will rendezvous and dock with Tiangong 1.
# Shenzhou 9 – 2011(?) – manned mission, will dock with Tiangong 1 and Shenzhou 8.
# Shenzhou 10 – 2012(?) – manned, will dock with Tiangong 1 and Shenzhou 8 and Shenzhou 9 to form a space laboratory.
# Tiangong 2- Launched 2013-2015 (Space Laboratory)
# Tiangong 3- Launched 2014-1016 (Space Station)

Let's check if China is meeting their schedule. This is according to an 2004 China National Space Administration (CNSA) schedule

Goal 1- Orbit a satellite around the Moon before 2007. (Lunar orbiter Chang'e 1 was launched on October 24, 2007 from Xichang Satellite Launch Center and entered lunar orbit on November 5. The spacecraft operated until March 1, 2009, when it was taken out of orbit and it impacted the surface of the Moon. Data gathered by Chang'e 1 was used to create the most accurate and highest resolution 3-D map ever created of the entire lunar surface.)

Goal 2- Phase two involves sending a lander before 2010. (Chang'e 2 was launched on October 1, 2010 to conduct research at a 100km high Moon orbit as the preparation for a soft landing by Chang'e 3. Chang'e 2 is similar to Chang'e 1 with some improvements, including a better camera with a resolution of one meter.)

Goal 3-Phase three involves collecting lunar soil samples before 2020. (In 2009, the 2013 launch date was confirmed for a landing craft and rover named Chang'e 3. It will use variable thrusters to make a vertical landing on the surface. After landing, the rover will leave the Chang'e 3 lander and work on the surface for three months. If this happens it would be 7 years ahead of their 2004 schedule.)

Goal 4-In September 2010, it was announced that the country is planning to carry out explorations in deep space by sending a man to the Moon by 2025. China also hopes to bring a moon rock sample back to earth in 2017,

Goal 5- The first unmanned Mars exploration program should take place between the 2014-2033 period, followed by a manned phase in 2040-2060. (Yinghuo 1 is a joint Russian-Chinese Mars-exploration space probe scheduled for launch in 2013)

You can argue that they haven't done much yet, but you can also argue that so far they have done everything they said they were. We live in interesting times!

I can't wait to see if China continues to meet all it's goals. Maybe there will be some space excitement in the world after all. After watching NASA's decline for year's I'd started to lose hope. Maybe I won't even care that it's not my country that's generating the buzz.

Meeting the Angry Video Game Nerd

2011-05-09T22:11:00.001-07:00

This past weekend I got to meet the Angry Video Game Nerd. For the uninitiated the Nerd is a foul-mouthed, beer drinking nerd who tortures himself by reviewing the crappiest video games in history. His reviews are so entertaining because James Rolfe who created and stars as the Nerd is a really talented guy. He directs, writes, acts, and owns his own production company Cinemassacre. (I guess that's a quadruple threat?). The humor in his videos is mainly of the scatological variety, but that's part of it's draw; he says what some of us might think, but most of us would never say.

There's definitely a nostalgic element to the videos. I and much of my generation grew up playing, Atari, Nintendo and other early video game systems. But those days are far behind us. I don't even think Atari is compatible with digital televisions.

Rolfe, who has basically been a director since he could carry a video camera, is the ultimate movie buff and so he fills his videos with endless tributes to popular culture. One of my favorite episodes is his review of Star Trek video games which features an homage to the original series' absurd fight scenes.

And Rolfe is no one trick pony, in addition to the Nerd he does other series such as Board James, You Know What's Bullshit, and Over Analyzers. He's done short film work like The Deader the Better and Legend of the Blue Hole. He does movie reviews, examines the history of movies and video technologies and has documentaries about visiting the locations featured in movies.

The one common thread is that you feel like you get to know the real James Rolfe. I know it's the Johnny Carson syndrome and I don't really know him, but I feel like I do.

Rolfe attended the Too Many Games Convention in Oaks, PA (about a 5 minutes drive from my apartment) and my wife and I went to the convention just to see the Nerd in person.

First there was a screening of some of the Nerd videos. Then there was a Q and A session during which it struck me is how good Rolfe is to his fans, no matter what kind of a loaded questions people asked or no matter how socially awkward the questioner was, he just rolled with it and was always polite.

I had all these things I wanted to talk to him about. I wanted to tell him about my experiences writing screenplays and filming short films from way back when I was still in High School. I also wanted to ask his advice because I'm thinking about doing some filming in the ghost town of Centralia, PA, but there was such a tremendous crowd to see Rolfe, even at this tiny suburban convention that I didn't really get the chance. Basically all Rolfe had time for was to sign my stuff and let me snap a picture with him.

Don't get me wrong, It was neat to meet him and shake his hand and tell him I was a fan, and I appreciate him signing my SNES and the ET Atari Cartridge (that might be worth something in the future because ET will be the featured game in the upcoming Angry Video Game Nerd feature film) and I love having the picture (though I wish I'd put down my bag). It's just like I said before, I've watched so many of the videos I sometimes feel like we're already old friends and it's disappointing when that false image is shattered. He doesn't actually know me and probably never will.

Thoughts on "Rite of Passage"

2011-04-08T22:58:00.000-07:00

I got through “Rite of Passage” by Alexi Panshin (1968) and even enjoyed some parts of it, but rarely have I disagreed so thoroughly with every idea found within a novel.

I didn’t think that Mia Havero was worthy of being the narrator of the novel. First-person perspective novels such as this one are effective when the reader quickly feels a connection to the narrator. You begin to think of them as sort of a friend and then you are truly riveted by whatever sort of crazy adventure they end up going through. I disliked Mia from the start of the novel; she was a hotheaded and small-minded girl that clearly had a lot of growing up to do.

I know that Mia’s journey of maturation is the whole point of the book. It even says as much in the second paragraph of the novel, “Some of the incidents are wholly made up. It doesn’t matter, though. Everything here is near enough to what happened, and the important part of this story is not the events so much as the changes that started taking place in me seven years ago. The changes are the things to keep your eye on.” However, that doesn’t change the fact that the reader is stuck with an unlikable guide for the entirety of this journey.

I disagree with the notion that it was the only way to tell this kind of story. Robert Heinlein’s juveniles whom Panshin, (a Heinlein biographer and fan) was clearly trying to emulate, always featured protagonists who were immediately likable. I loved “Starman Jones’” Max Jones from the very first chapter. Part of it was that Heinlein knew what emotional buttons to push and part of it was that Heinlein didn’t write kids like they were children instead he wrote them as less emotionally developed adults.

I would have been happier with third-person narration, perhaps that would have allowed Panshin to cleverly bring Mia’s flaws into stark reality. Or, I might have been happier had the book been from Jimmy Dentremont’s perspective. He learned life lessons throughout the novel too, but he seemed to be an overall better person than Mia.

In addition to failing to write characters the way Heinlein would have, Panshin was guilty of an even greater crime: talking down to his readers. Heinlein never wrote a juvenile like he was writing a lesson for children. He just wrote an adult novel with a teenage main character and trusted the young reader to grow into the novel if it was above their level the first time they read it. Panshin on the other hand, writes explanations about the human circulatory system and the basic rules of soccer. Who does he imagine is reading this?

Another premise of the novel is that since there is a limited amount of space and resources on this vessel where Mia and everyone lives. Therefore to cull the herd, 15-year-olds are dumped on a planet for a month and if they survive, they are adults and if not well then there was something wrong with them anyway. It’s not a completely foreign idea; some Native Americans had a similar “Rite of Passage.” But, in Native American culture where a man’s primary job was hunting and warring this sort of thing made more sense.

On the other hand, this ship’s society was completely intellectual. They didn’t fight wars or hunt therefore this Trial made absolutely no sense.

It is stated over and over again that the ship’s primary mission is to protect the scientific and cultural knowledge of Earth (which has been destroyed). All that knowledge would be lost if they people on the ship had to deal with the difficulties of life on a colony world, which are all largely agrarian. The ships keep knowledge that would allow the colony worlds to experience an industrial revolution to protect their own existence and so perpetuate the stunted growth of the entire remainder of humanity. Panshin understood these points and they became the basis for his dramatic conclusion. But, what he fails to understand or point out is that you don’t need to be a tough outdoorsmen to be a great protector of intellectual knowledge. What if Albert Einstein had been born on this ship? He had the greatest knowledge of theoretical physics the world has ever known, but what kind of a camper was he? Could he have survived on his own at 15-years-old for a month in a strange forest? The question is completely absurd to me! What an unthinkable crime to possibly rob the universe of his intellect because of such an irrelevant test. An even more absurd example: Could Stephen Hawkings survive such a trial?

I reject the notion that 15-years-old is old enough to give this test to. I think back to how immature I was at 15 and I can’t help but think my chances of survival would have improved exponentially for every additional year of experience I was able to receive.

In the novel, children lead a sort of mundane and normal childhood: going to school, playing sports, just hanging out. If anything is emphasized it is certainly traditional education, before they are 15 they have to decide what area of study they’ll start to focus on if they get back from the Trial.

At 13-years-old children start to take survival classes and start to learn how they’ll survive on a planet for a month. Why would they only start to learn at 13? I would have trained by children from the time they were little to be campers and then as they get older teach them how to hunt things and how to identify plants etc. This sort of practical knowledge is the only way to insure my kids survive the Trial. Why would I wait till they were 13? As far as I can tell a student could have a straight C average in school, but if they survive the Trial they are adults. This doesn’t encourage a ship of scientific and mathematical thinkers. It creates a ship of Darwinians run wild where the meanest and toughest survive while some percentage of the abstract thinkers and a larger percentage of truly theoretic and revolutionary thinkers (who unfortunately are often slightly out of touch with reality) who would not survive the Trial.

The whole idea of the Trial is flawed. It’s just random chance if someone survives not skill. One person makes camp next to a hungry bear’s cave and another person doesn’t. All the survival skills in the world aren’t necessarily stopping the bear. Also, there are no rules against working collectively so there is always the chance of one strong survivalist carrying one or more other less resourceful kids during the month.

On p 39 (of my paperback) Panshin attempts to explain what an ordinologist and a synthesist are. The best I can understand it they are two kinds of futuristic librarians, though the novel claims they are much more than librarians. We are told that both professions are highly regarded on this ship and that there are only a handful of each every generation. However, we never see any first hand evidence of the professions at work on the ship. Instead we see that politics are king on the ship. Mia’s dad is the Chairman of the Council. The Council members are the ones who publicly debate the two major policy issues that are ultimately brought before an Assembly of all adults on the ship for voting. The first discussion is about the woman that has an unauthorized pregnancy and the second issue is whether or not a planet should be destroyed and whether or not the ship should change its policy of limiting the knowledge it allows colony planets to have. Ordinologists and/or synthesists never influence either of these decisions. So why is it that at the end of the book we are left with two vague premises? One, that the younger generation on the ship are more liberal in their thinking about colony worlds. Two, that Mia and Jimmy as an ordinologist and a synthesist are going to be influential in somehow stoking that liberalism. Other than the fact that at the end of the novel both Mia and Jimmy disagreed with the current status quo, there was no evidence presented that any significant group of young people felt the same way they did. And also nowhere in the book did it explain how two intellectuals, no matter how much their professions were respected, would be able to influence a generation. To reuse an example, Stephen Hawkings is an influential theoretical physicist; it is not stretch to say he is highly regarded. He said a couple of years ago in a speech he gave in China that the world needed to focus its energy on getting us into space. He spoke about colonies within our solar system and beyond. He was basically saying that Earth is too small and fragile a basket to keep the eggs of humanity in. My ultimate point is no one listened to Hawkings. Instead our media mostly laughed at and ridiculed him. Maybe Mia and Jimmy will really influence a generation or maybe they will be thought of as over-idealistic or simply out of touch. It is an unfortunate reality that most of the time the most influential men and woman are not the smartest we have to offer, but rather those that have had greatness thrust upon them. Sometimes they measure up like George Washington or Harry Truman and sometimes they fail miserably at every turn like George W. Bush did or sadly Barack Obama continues to (sorry to bring up politics).

For the record, I found the way people thought about children and life on the ship to be sort of repugnant. They believed in love and marriage, but you conceived children based on what the ship’s geneticists said. So, I guess the idea was that maybe you didn’t necessarily have a child with your spouse. Anyway families weren’t a valued idea. Mia’s mother rejects her and moves out, we later find out that she had a son whom she loved who died. But that doesn’t seem to justify her actions. And the fact that Mia didn’t think her mother’s rejection was strange signals that lots of people on the ship do the same thing. They think to themselves that, “the geneticist told me I gotta have this baby, but let someone else raise them. I can’t be bothered.” What kind of a soulless culture is that?

Did everyone else’s p. 35-36 have an odd jump? Mia is in her apartment, she catches Jimmy snooping around her apartment and they start to argue and then at the end of the argument they are in a classroom. Also Mia says it’s the first time she met Jimmy, but they’d been together in a classroom a few pages earlier. I guess a couple of paragraphs about Mia in her apartment got mixed up with Mia at school, but I couldn’t figure out where the errors began or ended.

What did I like?

I liked the side plot with Zena Andrus, how she and Mia started off on the wrong foot, but became friends after going through the adventure of finding the sixth level together. Unfortunately this plotline just dies after that.

I also liked how when Mia goes back to her old hangout in Alpha quad she quickly realizes it’s no longer her home. Even her old best friend doesn’t want to talk to her. I’ve had that experience before of not being able to go home again as I’m sure everyone else has too.

I liked how Mia began hanging out with a “gang.” That rang true for me. I fell into clicks in High School and College too. It seems to be a universal thing.

I enjoyed Mia’s first trip planet-side where she meets colony children and finds out they have just as many uninformed notions about ship people as she has about colony people.

I enjoyed how the “gang” manages to steal some spacesuits and go for a walk outside the ship, but they are ultimately caught for a dumb and highly avoidable reason.

I liked it when Mia finally went on the Trial. I just wished I didn’t have to get through 175 pages to get to it. It might have been a better novel if it had started with the Trial and then explored Mia’s early adulthood.

Calibre Saved the E-Reader

2011-04-03T20:09:00.000-07:00

When I first got my B+W Nook last August, I took pride in my choice and convinced myself that the Nook was better then the Kindle.

But, sometimes when I’d see a Kindle novel price cheaper then a Barnes and Noble price, my pride would waiver.

I’ve finally accepted that the differences between the Nook and the Kindle, or any other e-reader for that matter, are pretty slim. Especially with the game-changing free software like Calibre, which is further blurring the line.

I just downloaded Calibre this past week and have only begun to explore its many uses, but I wanted to share my experiences so far.

Calibre is a free and open-source E-book management tool that has basically solved all my e-reader problems. It is customizable, so no matter what e-reader you have; it will be able to help you.

My first e-reader problem was that I’d put a file on my Nook and I wouldn’t be able to find it. It wouldn’t be under the author’s name or the title of the story. It would be under the file name or just the first couple of word from the file. I’ve had files whose title was completely blank. I started to make my own E-pub files use this website, I’d take a Microsoft word document, convert it to an e-pub file and on my Nook the files would be under my name as the author!

The second problem was that when I’d get multiple stories by the same author they wouldn’t always be filed with each other because one file would have the authored first, middle, and last name and the other would only have the first and last name.

Calibre solved these problems for me because it allows you to edit the metadata of the file. In other words you can change the title and author associated with the file to anything you want.

My third e-reader problem is that since I read mostly free short fiction from Project Guttenberg, I get frustrated with the pages and pages of disclaimers they attach to their files. On an 18-page file the disclaimers represent half the pages. Calibre solves this problem too because I can use it to edit any e-pub file. (Once again, I have it customized for my Nook, I’m guessing if I set it to Kindle, I could edit Kindle files somehow).

Calibre has many other features, it will convert any text file type to any other. This will no doubt result in various degrees of success depending on the files. Calibre also has a build in universal e-reader. Also, you can use Calibre to download news articles for anywhere on the web, covert them to e-reader files and transfer them to your e-reader. (I haven’t had any use for this but it’s kind of neat).

Over the last 7 months since I bought my B+W Nook, there have been some new kids on the block such as the iPad 2 and Nook Color. And I’m sure in another 7 months there will be other new and different e-readers and tablets coming out.

Today, everyone is talking about the advantages of getting an all-in-one device, why get just an e-reader when you can have a tablet? But I’m still happy with my purchase, even if it doesn’t run apps or let me check my Facebook; it does exactly what I wanted it to do, it lets me read books and short fiction. And its specificity means that it uses E-ink so there is less eyestrain and longer battery life.

Thoughts on "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater"

2011-03-24T20:57:00.001-07:00

“God Bless You Mr. Rosewater” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1965) is a novel about the relationship between the rich and the poor in modern society.

Eliot Rosewater controls a foundation, which is worth 87 billion dollars and makes $10,000 of profit a day. Eliot has poor personal habits, he constantly drinks, he wears the same dirty cloths all the time and he rarely showers and he is estranged from his wife. However, Eliot is a humanitarian who cares deeply about the poor. Over the years he has gotten to know and given vast sums of money to many of the poorest people in the small county of Rosewater, Indiana. This is where his family has their estate and legal residence (though the family hasn’t actually lived there in several generations). Eliot has a foundation telephone line that he basically mans in his office/apartment 24/7. He is always available if someone needs any sort of help. One woman, Diana Moon Glampers constantly calls him just to chat. Because Eliot gives so much of his money to the poor, he is seen by many of them as an almost religious figure. One woman insists that he baptize her children.

In stark contrast to Eliot is his father Lister Rosewater a career Senator. Senator Rosewater hates the poor. He believes they are worthless and lazy layabouts. He also thinks that his son Eliot must be insane because why else would someone want to help the poor?

For all the poor that love Eliot, it seems there are an equal number that side with the Senator because they feel it is wrong to accept handouts.

Vonnegut lets the reader decide who is right giving equal time to both sides and making each extreme seem ridiculous.

There is also a sort of tangential story about a Rosewater family in Rhode Island who are cousins to the other Rosewaters, but don’t know it. They are middle class, but are very unhappy because they desire to be wealthy.

Like all of Vonnegut’s novels it is wickedly funny and totally subversive. There is a 13-year-old girl in the novel, Lila Buntline, who makes money by buying all the dirty books (like “Tropic of Cancer”) in town and reselling them to other kids at a huge profit, all under the nose of a organization of mothers continually declaring the town free of smut.

Also like other Vonnegut novels “Rosewater” seems to be just a part of a much larger tapestry. A character visits the Rumfoord Mansion (Sirens of Titan). Eliot gives a speech at the Midland City Science fiction convention (Breakfast of Champions). And, Kilgore Trout’s science fiction stories appear occasionally throughout the novel and he makes a special guest appearance at the end of the novel.

I consider Vonnegut to be a science fiction author even though many of his novels including this one aren’t science fiction novels. But he is one of those authors that is hard to categorize. So, I thought it was kind of funny that “Rosewater” was shelved in the science fiction section of the little used-bookshop where I recently bought it. I don’t know how Vonnegut would feel about being labeled a science fiction writer, but there are worse things to be categorized as, right?

Additional: Here is proof that Vonnegut didn't appreciate being know as a science fiction writer. This column appeared in the New York Times in 1965 the same year "Rosewater" was published. I think Vonnegut ends up sounding like kind of a jerk, but that's because I'm a happy member of the "lodge." Thanks for the link Bill!

Mayhem Parody Commercials

2011-03-20T22:20:00.000-07:00

Here are the Mayhem Parody commercials I acted in. These videos were shown during services at 422CHURCH.com on big video screens before the pastor's sermon.

I'm not the guy talking, I'm the guy getting himself into trouble.

World's Greatest Valentine's Day Card...

2011-02-13T19:00:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to share the great Valentine's Day card my wife gave me. Thanks Babe, you're the greatest!

How many Hugo Nominees and Winners can you get for free?...

2011-01-24T20:52:00.000-08:00

To me, the Hugo Awards are THE award for science fiction. Tastes may vary I know, but I like to use them as a guide to the genre. So as far as I'm concerned, if you can get a lot of Hugo nominees and winners online for free then you can get a lot of science fiction online for free.

I took this to the extreme and did all the math. I got all of the Hugo Award information from Wikipedia's Hugo Awards entries. And I cross-checked that against which stories were available at Free Speculative Fiction Online, which I've found to be pretty thorough. Basically if you find a science fiction story somewhere else online, but the Speculative site doesn't offer it, I'd definitely question the other site's legality and/or legitimacy.

For the purpose of this chart I lumped the Retro Hugos in with the normal Hugos

So that is 180 science fiction stories I can put on my Nook for free. And these are all stories that are considered the best of the best in science fiction.

Now most of these stories are available to view online without download options, but thanks to the wonders of the internet, if you can find the text online, you can also convert it to a format an e-reader can use. Here is a site that offers free online conversion of files. I tested PDF to Epub format and it translated pretty well. Meanwhile, doc format to Epub was perfect. So assuming you have the text of the story on a website, all you have to do is copy the text and paste it into a blank Word document file and you are ready to go! (Thanks to Michael at the Classic Science Fiction Board for suggesting this site)

To me, I think it proves that everyone should get an e-reader of some kind. Otherwise your options are to read off the computer screen which strains most people's eyes, or print the stories out which can get pricey with the cost of ink. It just seems like e-readers pay for themselves because you can download so many stories for free.

Thoughts on "Midnight at the Well of Souls"

2011-01-17T21:33:00.000-08:00

What Makes us Human?

“Midnight at the Well of Souls,” by Jack Chalker is a novel that explores the idea of what it means to be human. Is humanity in this shell we call a body, is it found only in our intellect, or is it a synthesis of the two?

The protagonist of the story is Nathan Brazil, a freighter captain who may have lived too long. When he was younger, humanity was made up of individuals, but most of humanity are now members of a Confederacy. These humans are bred in laboratories and are hermaphroditic or neutered. Most of these humans are cloned from the same couple of original models and all of them are “raised by the state to think as identically as they looked” (p. 6 in my paperback edition).

In my mind, that essential spark or drive that makes us humans has been bred out of these creatures. They are organic robots instead of free-thinking people with wants and desires. In an attempt to “improve” humanity, by covering-up the blemishes of rebellion and vanquishing the dreaded pox of evil, this society has thrown the baby out with the bathwater and leached away everything that made us human in their attempts at creating perfection.

The whole concept reminded me of the asexual clone-based-telepaths humanity has become at the end of Joe Haldeman’s “The Forever War.” Haldeman’s novel was clearly a reaction to the changes in American society regarding sexual norms that took place while he was a soldier in Vietnam. When he left it was Donna Reed and when he returned it was free love.

However, I don’t believe that Chalker’s point was as political or topical in nature. I think his goal was to look at these themes in a broad sense; to compare individualism or existentialism to being a part of a larger whole or a part of something greater than yourself. Nathan is surely the hero of the novel and he embodies a rugged individuality and yet his philosophy has not found him happiness, instead he thinks to himself over and over again that he is “alone and will always be alone.” It is only while he is a part of a grand adventure in the Well World where he has to work with and depend on others that he is able to truly be happy.

Well World

The Well World is a magical sort of world. It is broken up into 1560 hexagons. Each hexagon is 355 km tall and 615 km wide. Each of these hexes is a controlled environment with it’s own planets and animals and unique temperature and atmosphere norms. However, the borders are open, you can step from one hex into another and not notice, just make sure you’re able to breathe the air in the new hex. Oceans, mountains, deserts, and/or forests may stretch across multiple hexes or only one. But most importantly each hex houses a form of intelligent life. One hex holds beings called Dillians that resemble our mythical Centaurs, one holds plant/animal hybrids called Czillians, and another houses man-sized bat like humanoids called Creits.

The catch is that if you stumble into the Well World (there are various planets and points in space where this might happen) you will be forced to become one of these species at random. You will still have your human intellect and your memories, but you will be a beaver (Ambrezans), or a giant flower (Slelcronian), or maybe a sort of elephant with two trunks that walks on its hind legs (Slongorian). “Midnight” seems to suggest that you would still be the same person, but you would also be driven by the needs/desires of the body you ended up in. For example, does the body produce a desire to procreate every day, every month, or only a few times a year or does it reproduce asexually? Does the new body hibernate in the winter? Do you have a sudden urge to fly south during the winter, or swim upstream in order to hatch your eggs in fresh water?

I loved the world of this story and how we only get to see a fraction of the hexes and different races and cultures that inhabit them. My imagination ran wild thinking about what might live in these unseen hexes. Also I liked how no species was truly evil just for the sake of it, they just seemed to be evil due to their nature. For instance, the “savage” Murnies who seemed like senseless monsters the way they would rip a deer apart and eat it raw, but it turned out that they were rational beings with their own sense of honor and right and wrong. It was just not the same values we uphold.

Maps and Mathematics

I did a lot of mathematical calculations regarding the Well World itself. I previously did some calculations of Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” and was fascinated that I was much better able to visualize and understand the distances involved in that story after taking a closer look at it.

780 Southern Hexagons
780 Northern Hexagons
1560 Total Hexagons (p 62)

614.86 km is the length across of each hexagon (p 88)
355 km is the length of a side of each hexagon (p 62)

Area of a Hexagon
½ x (6s) x h
½ x (6(355) x 307) note: h is the radius so it is half of 615
3,269,552^2 Area of a Hex. (This is roughly the size of India)

3,269,552^2 x 1560 (number of Hexes)
510,049,800^2 (projected area of Well World)

Area of Well World is 5.1 x 10^8 km^2 (p 55)
5.1 x 1,000,000,000
or 510,000,000^2
This is remarkable close to the area of the Earth which is 510,072,000^2

Later in the book we are told that the hexes that border the wall that separate the Northern from the Southern Hexes are “two hexes wide and half a hex tall” (p 287). Which may explain why my projected area doesn’t match with what we are told the area of the Well World is.

My edition of “Midnight” didn’t include a map but Ben from the Classic Science Fiction Message Board provided me with a copy. However, if his map is to scale the border hexes look like they are the same size as the other hexes just cut differently. I can extrapolate from that map, assuming the rest of Well World follows the same pattern as the pictured area, that there are 128 of these border Hexes, but I still can’t be sure of their shape because the map and the text in the novel contradict each other.

Thoughts on "Fahrenheit 451"

2010-12-21T21:44:00.000-08:00

“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury (1953) is considered a classic science fiction novel. It’s the story of a mixed up world where a fireman is someone who burns books and the houses where they are hidden, because books are evil.

Fahrenheit is usually considered to be a novel about censorship gone wild and that certainly is a part of it, but it is also clearly about the pitfalls of increasing government control as well as a very dark prediction about the future of television.

In fact, it was eerie to me how accurately Bradbury predicted the rise of reality television. Bradbury describes a population that is addicted to watching “the Family,” it’s a kind of a 3-D soap opera. We don’t have “the Family,” but we do have a population that seems to hunger for Reality TV. Especially creepy was the scene where Guy Montag is running from the hound and every house he passes he sees in the window that the people are watching the chase on TV. Then he hears an announcer tell everyone to look out their front door and Montag imagines millions of people all opening their front doors.

Many of the characters in the novel are memorable. Montag’s wife, Mildred is such an instantly unlikable character, there is just nothing ever redeeming about her. Captain Beatty, who always sounds so well read. You can’t help but imagine that he must have a secret stash of books himself somewhere. And Clarisse, the girl that Montag befriends at the beginning of the novel. She shows so much intelligence and free-thinking, her household was clearly one in which they read in secret. I kept thinking the novel would reintroduce her and/or her family.

Bradbury just doesn’t write like a typical science fiction authors. Typical science fiction is event and idea driven, while Bradbury writes in a style that is a bit more poetic and descriptive.

In general, I liked Bradury’s writing, but at times, in the novel, the prose would get so descriptive that I’d lose track of what was actually happening. However, in other parts of the novel the increasing description was masterfully handled, such as when Montag is being chased by the hound, the text begins to blur and confuse until we aren’t quite sure what’s actually happening vs. what Montag is imagining.

It wasn’t until I read the novel’s Afterword (1982) and Coda (1979) (both by Bradbury), that were included in the 50th Anniversary edition that I read, that I realized that Fahrenheit was Bradbury’s first novel. These two short pieces made me wish that Fahrenheit had been written later in Bardbury’s career, the Coda especially is by an author at the height of his confidence and creativity. Here is a large sample, Bradbury was talking about how people send him letters and ask him to make rewrites to his novels and update them and then he mentioned how a school reader anthology tried to edit one of his short stories:

Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?

Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito-out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch-gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer-lost!

Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like-in the finale- Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention-shot dead.

Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?
How did I react to all of the above?
By “firing” the whole lot.
By sending rejection slips to each and every one.
By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Reading these two add-ons made me very interested to read the stage play adaptation of “Fahrenheit” that Bradbury wrote, if it’s as good as this Coda…then it would be well worth reading. And apparently a lot of things in the novel are expanded upon, especially Captain Beatty’s part.

Afterthoughts

Bradbury thought 451 degrees Fahenheit was the temperature at which paper combusts. It is actually 842° Fahenheit or 450° Celsius. I bet Bradbury gets letters all the time that say he should rename the novel “Celsius 450” or “Farhenheit 842.” How absurd can you get? By that logic it could also be called, “Kelvin 724.”

One of the reasons why Fahrenheit is so well know is that it has been on the book list of many American schools for decades. On the flip side, I’ve heard sometimes that Fahrenheit is banned by some American schools. This may be true, but only in isolated cases, according to the sources I found it is not one of the commonly banned classics.

Thoughts on "The Foresight War"

2010-12-03T15:38:00.000-08:00

In this review of “The Foresight War” by Anthony Williams, I will refer to the author as Tony, because the two of us are both active members of the Classic Science Fiction Message Board. Where we discuss all kinds of things science fiction related.

The plot of the novel concerns two present day (2004) WWII historians traveling back to 1934. One historian is British (Don Erlang), and the other is German (Konrad Herrman). Each of the historians informs their respective governments as to what will happen during the war. Both countries use the knowledge from the historians to better prepare for the war so that weapons that in our history were available in the middle or end of the war are mass produced by the start of the war.

Time Travel

Erlang briefly talks about his mother and father being just children in the 1930, but he never goes and seeks them out. I would have found it irresistible, I mean, his parents might have just been children, but what about his grandparents? I’d love to meet my grandfather when he was in his prime; he died before I was born. He was a doctor and had a private practice in a suburban town for many years. If I’d gone back in time, I’d probably go see him as a patient. That kind of harmless encounter probably wouldn’t put the space-time continuum at risk.

Erlang speculates as to the nature of time travel. He cites a time paradox that is worth mentioning. Since he has altered the course of the war there is a chance that one of his parents might get killed by a bomb during the Blitz that in the normal course of things didn’t explode anywhere near them. If they died then Erlang would have never existed, therefore Erland couldn’t travel back in time and alter events therefore history would return to the way it was in the first place. Unless, as is speculated, Erlang’s time traveling created a parallel universe or dimension which is no longer looped to the previous future, but instead free to explore an entirely different future.

My theory is that the “Foresight” universe is tangent dimension created by an all-powerful being (the author) just to have a playground to test his what ifs. (The novel's Afterword pretty much proves my theory).

German Historian

Herrman, the German historian who is sent back through time, was written as less capable then Erlang. He just didn’t seem to be a historian on the same level as Erlang. I couldn’t help but wonder how much more prepared for the war Germany would have been if Herrman had truly been Erlang’s equal. Also, I never really understood why Herrman worked with Hitler and Himmler and the rest when he clearly found them repulsive. His motivation was to create a stronger Germany that wouldn’t end up controlled by Russia for decades. From the beginning, I would have looked for a ways to circumvent and destroy Hitler and the Nazi’s, not work with them.

Glossary

Especially helpful is the glossary in the back of the book that lists all the military terms used in the book and also explains all the equipment used in the book. So when I read about a Churchill tank, I could look it up in the glossary and learn it’s specifications as well as whether the Churchill in the “Foresight” universe was different from the historical Churchill tanks.

This means that the book is readable to a Joe Shmoo like me, who is not one of these dumb Americans you read about that doesn’t know who fought in WWII. But, I am also not an expert on the war. Heck, for most of the book I kept wondering when they were going to start building trenches.

Vignettes

The action of the war is played out in vignettes that run anywhere from one paragraph to a page and a half. Most times the vignettes are strung together so they tell the story of a battle or a certain campaign. You see the action from different perspectives such as, British planes, then German U-boat, then a British tank, etc. Sometimes it was difficult for me to figure out what I was reading about, and by the time I understood the perspective changed again.

The perspective also shifts back to Erlang or Hermann who are in respective command centers and are reacting to the events of the day like a sort of Greek Chorus evaluating the course of the war and providing exposition.

Sometimes the vignettes were emotionally powerful such as the story of the British plane that fires at a German bus. Shrapnel from the bus ends up downing the plane. The pilot bails out and hits the ground near the bus. It is then that he realizes that the bus he destroyed was full of children. A crowd of Germans grabs the pilot and lynches him. As they tie the rope around his neck he pleads, “I didn’t know it was children.” This level of pathos is impossible to sustain, especially with so many short pieces.

One part of the book that worked really well was the part that dealt with Pearl Harbor. Morgan, an RAF (Royal Air Force) officer, is one of the few that know about future events. He is given the horrible task of going to Pearl Harbor to minimized US loses without telling them there is going to be an attack ahead of time. This piece wasn’t really longer then some of the other perspectives, but it meant more to me because I’d gotten to know Morgan throughout the novel.
That would have been my preference to follow certain soldiers’ perspectives for longer periods. I know the whole point of the book was to explore questions like how this British tank would have faired against that German tank, but without having the humanity of a soldier you get to know and care about, it just may as well be robot tanks fighting other robot tanks.

The Holocaust

I felt like it was weird that the Holocaust was only mentioned once or twice by Erlang and nothing about it was ever seen first hand. However, I realize concentrating on this horrible genocide wouldn’t have added anything to the focus of the novel, which was exploring how the “Foresight” universe differed from our own.

The Ending
(Warning major Spoilers)

The end of the book reminded me of two recent movies, both of which came out after this book. Is Hollywood stealing ideas from you Tony?

The movie “Valkyrie”(2008) is all about the ill-fated German resistance movement. Operation Valkyrie is not mentioned by name in “Foresight,” but it is pretty clear that after Herrman blew up all of the Nazi leaders, the resistance used the Reserve Army to seize and remove the Nazi Party under the false pretense that the SS had attempted a coup d'état.

The second movie that came to mind was “Inglourious Basterds” (2009). At the end of the movie several plots to assassinate Hitler and the other leaders of the Nazi Party collide with explosive results. The traitorous SS Colonel Hans Landa describes the film premiere in Paris that is being attended by Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Goebbels and other prominent part members as having “all the rotten eggs in one basket.”

I think the book ended in the right spot, at the end of the German/British conflict, because that’s what the book was generally about. However, I did have a lot of questions about what may have happened next:

-Did the increased Japanese navel losses at the beginning of the war cause the use of atomic weapons to be unnecessary?
-Was the United Nations created?
-Was the State of Israel declared?
-When did Britain “get the Bomb”?
-Did Russia emerge from the war a super power?
-What happened to Mussolini?

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I also reviewed Tony’s second novel “Scales.” here. I gave it an A+. It is a great read and it’s available for free here.

Some Details in "Back to the Future"...

2010-11-10T21:06:00.000-08:00

Everyone has been celebrating the 25th anniversary since the debut of the movie "Back to the Future" and I'm no different. After all, I love the movie and watched it many times when I was a kid.

I watched it again a couple of nights ago and paid attention to some of the details in the film. You know, stuff I missed the first hundred times I watched it.

The first detail is the comic book the kid shows his dad in 1955, that proves that the DeLorean is a space ship and Marty in the radiation suit is an alien. "Shoot it, shoot it, it's already taken human form." I figured maybe it was a real comic, but it's just a creation. It really does capture the feel of the EC comics of the 50's doesn't it?

The next thing I wondered about was the movies that are featured on the marquee at the movie theater in 1955. The first one is "The Cattle Queen of Montana" starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Regan which was obviously picked just because Regan was in it. "Ronald Reagan? The actor? Then who's Vice-President? Jerry Lewis? I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady! And Jack Benny is Secretary of the Treasury."

The movie on the marquee on the night Marty goes back to the future is "The Atomic Kid," a 1954 movie starring Mikey Ronney. The theatrical poster has the tagline "It's a laugh explosion" and a woman telling Mikey to "control your neutrons." That sounds kind of like a lost Doc line.

The next details are in the scene where Marty uses George's love of science fiction to convince him to ask Lorraine out. "I am Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan." George had fallen asleep while reading the fall 1954 issue of Fantastic Story Magazine, this time the robot kind of like Marty in the radiation suit. The difference this time is that it's actually a real magazine!

However, the music Marty tortures his dad with may or may not be real. As the tape Marty puts in says it is definitely Eddie Van Halen on the tape, but I'm not sure whether the clips are from. Some websites say "Eruption"others "Donut City" from the movie "The Wild Life" which stars none other then the original Marty, Eric Stoltz and Lea Thompson. Still other websites claim that the music is just some original riffs Eddie played just for the movie as a favor to record producer Quincy Jones. Since the last claim was said to be from the commentary track with Bob Gale and Neil Canton it just might be the true one.

Finally, when Marty goes back to 1985 and it turns out his whole family is happier and more successful because George learned to stand up for himself when he decked Biff. George gets a copy of his book in the mail.

The joke being that it looks like a retelling of how Darth Vader told him he had to date Lorraine.

But the book is proof that, "if you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything."

Thoughts on "Scales"

2010-10-23T20:18:00.000-07:00

Part 1

I don’t usually mind being a spoiler in my reviews because my logic is that you can only really have a sensible conversation about a book if both people involved have actually read the thing or if, at the very least, the relevant concepts have been fully explained. Also, I figure since most of my readers are Science Fiction fans and/or book club members, chances are they’ve already read the book.

However, with this review of “Scales” by Anthony Williams, I’m a little concerned about spoilers for two reasons:
1) The twists and turns in this novel are really good and unexpected.
2) Most people may not have read this novel.

So, in deference to everyone that hasn’t yet read this novel, this review will be in 2 parts. Part 1 will be spoiler free and discuss the novel in a general way and part 2 will be more in depth and should only be read by those who have already read the book.

Why haven’t you read this book?

Most likely you haven’t read this book because you didn’t know it existed. The novel was published through Authors Online LTD a British company formed in 1997 which publishes novels online and can also now print novels on demand. You can get Scales online for free here (in Adobe or MS Reader format).

Before I say anymore, I have to be honest here, I know the author of this novel through cyberspace. Tony and I have both been active posters at Yahoo’s Classic Science Fiction Message Board for many years. So, I will admit that I might have some bias. But those who know me and/or those who have read some of my reviews, know that I’m not one that minces words or lets authors off easy.

So you know I am being completely honest when I say that “Scales” is such a great Science Fiction novel it deserved a Hugo Award nomination.

I’m sure those who haven’t read the book are sort of checking out mentally or thinking to themselves, “this guy is a really good friend.” But those who have read the novel understand why it is worthy of such high praise.

The novel is about a man named Matt Johnson aka Cade. He is a journalist and a man who believes in science not faith. There is a mysterious explosion in his house and he is badly hurt. He should be dead, but instead he rapidly begins to heal and his skin begins to come away and instead of human skin he has a sort of lizard skin underneath. Also, he slowly begins to discover that this new skin and his quick healing are not the only powers that he suddenly possesses.

Part 2
Spoilers…

One of the things I enjoyed about the novel was the way it kept sort of switching genres. In other words, one of the first things Cade does when he starts to discover his powers is heal people, so I thought this was going to be a novel about a man of science that becomes a faith healer and sort of explore how he reconciles this. But then the focus shifts when Cade starts to help British intelligence catch terrorists and so I thought it was going to be a sort of a James Bond-adventure-Sci-fi. But then, the novel switches focus again when Cade starts to get into Earth politics and I thought the novel was about Earth getting it’s environmental and political house in order. But then the book veers again when the element of parallel worlds and the Saurians are introduced.

But the words “shift” and “veer” aren’t really good terms because the book does not ever lose its focus; it just goes in unexpected directions. Everything that happens ends up being important to the overall story. The book is about: science and religion; action/adventure; politics; and environmental issues. All the different subject matter just makes it seem more realistic.

I really liked this novel’s ideas about parallel world theory. The Saurians postulate that there are 4 different classes of parallel worlds that exist. These 4 classes revolve around kinds of turning points in time.

(rather than the theory of the multiverse that Larry Niven humorously explored in “All the Myriad Ways,” which suggests that for anyone’s every action there is a parallel universe. I didn’t like the multiverse theory. It makes your every action meaningless if there is another universe where the opposite happens.)

The first point of deviation Stage 1) concerns points where life began to develop on Earth.

“When the most infinitesimal variation in the behaviour of the elementary particles could produce major long-term differences. Among other things these could affect the formation of stars and planets, and the likelihood of life developing on a planet.” (p. 92)

Stage 2) Concerns points in time where one set of species types begins to flourish over another and when consciousness and intelligence are introduced. It is during this point that the Saurian world and ours deviated. “There was a natural disaster about a hundred million years ago. It was an asteroid strike- which in your world narrowly missed Earth.” (p. 166). I had guessed that the difference would be the asteroid strike that scientists theorized killed off the dinosaurs on our world. But I like this answer better.

It is an absolutely chilling scene when Cade goes to a Saurian zoo and sees a late stage hominin, a proto-human. Humans only got as far as homo erectus on the Saurian world, before Saurians became a dominate species.

Stage 3) In a broad sense are times when an intelligent species reaches a point of balance or goes down a path towards destruction. The Saurians knew that our Earth was in Stage 3 because they had seen parallel Earths that were more advanced than us revert to savagery after the civilization collapsed. The Saurians on the other hand through technology that brought them peace and returned their ecological balance found a civilization that was sustainable in the long term. They had found the balance.

Stage 4) Was an almost theoretical stage until Cade found he could see and visit these dimensions. This stage involves smaller differences. The Saurians theorized that there was a binding force that despite the differences in these worlds somehow brought them back towards being exactly the same as their close neighbor dimensions until possibly the two dimensions became one again.

At the end of the book when Cade discovers he has the ability to travel to different Stage 4) worlds and he goes to a world where the explosion at his apartment that gave him all the powers didn’t happen. He knocks on his own door and the novel ends. At first I was off-putted by the ending because I really liked the idea that there were only a handful of alternate worlds and it made me uncomfortable that Cade found a world that was so similar to his own. It made me feel like Williams had contradicted my favorite part of his own parallel world theory. Cade imagines that every parallel world he visits is going to splinter into 2 universes a) the universe Cade visited and b) the universe Cade didn’t visit. But I think that maybe in reality, Cade is acting as one of the binding forces that the Saurians had theorized existed. All of the universes Cade visits will be homogenized into a collective consciousness via mind-linking and journeying between dimensions and maybe they don’t actually split like he guessed, but move closer together until they actually combine.

The Saurians are such an interesting species; I think Williams wants us to see them as an ideal. They have reached a balance with nature where they are no longer polluting. There population is not growing to be larger than they can handle. No one is poor, no one is starving and there are no wars. And the recent scientific leaps in crossing into parallel worlds prove that they are not stagnating intellectually. However, they do seem to have lost some of their original drive, some of their survival instincts. Generations of peace have made them to soft and trusting. When the Saurians bring the ambassador from the more warlike Saurian dimension over to their world, Cade is the only one that can anticipate the Ambassador’s actions. Cade asks what they would do if the Ambassador got a weapon and held someone hostage and they have no idea how to defend themselves. And yet the Saurians tell Cade that they survived over a predator species that was, “almost as intelligent, but bigger, faster and fiercer.” (p 167) They survived because of their cunning and that they hunted the predator to extinction. Some might say that the Saurians have evolved past violence, but I’d argue they’ve lost an essential survival skill.

The last point I’ll go into is the effect mind-linking has on human culture when it was introduced in the novel and what the long term effects might be. Mind-linking ability is given to human civilization in the novel in the form of a rapid virus. People can suddenly hear other people’s thoughts and, at least at first, no one was able to hide anything from one another. Extramarital affairs were instantly revealed, politicians were seen to be lairs and I’m guessing used car salesman all committed suicide. Meanwhile, the Saurians developed mind-linking slowly and have many social rules concerned with it, so they really only mind link fully with close friends or family and they can mask some layers of their thoughts. Some humans quickly began to develop these masks, but the social norms would of course be slower to develop. The novel theorizes that wars would be almost impossible because enemies would be able to empathize with each other. Cade and his brother Luke were able to become closer and better understand each other through mind-linking, but they still disagreed. Luke was still a faithful Christian and Cade was not. So I believe the potential for conflict still exists. But I can’t argue that it would be a kinder and gentler world if we could all really understand our similarities as well as our differences.

Thoughts on "Tau Zero"

2010-09-26T21:00:00.000-07:00

The story involves a ship traveling via a bussard ramjet engine. Physicist Robert W. Bussard proposed this method for space travel in 1960. The ship has a huge electro-magnetic-net that collects hydrogen from space and compresses it so hard that thermonuclear fusion occurs. This energy is forced out of the rocket’s exhaust and acts as the propellant. And because the hydrogen is everywhere in space they don’t have to carry the weight of fuel.

Unfortunately Bussard’s theory was later disproved because it turns out there isn’t as many high concentrations of hydrogen in space as was thought. However when Poul Anderson wrote the book in the late 60's we didn’t have that information, so I can’t fault him for that.

"Tau Zero" has kind of a weird prose structure. There’ll be a couple of pages of story and then a couple of pages of technical information about the ship or about the bussard ramjet engine. This can be kind of jarring because sometimes I’m more interested in what’s going to happen next in the story, so I’ll want to skip the technical stuff and other times the story dragged and the science was more interesting.

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The book featured 25 men and 25 women on the ship Leonora Christine. I wish the book had a cast of characters list like the Niven/Pournelle novels always have. I made my own list because I wanted to see if all fifty were at least mentioned. I got about 20 men and only 7 women

In order of appearance or mention

Men
1) Charles Reymont; 2) Lars Telander; 3) Boris Fedoroff; 4) Norbert Williams; 5) Elof Nilsson; 6) Johana Freiwald; 7) Auguste Boudreau; 8) Luis Pereira

(Seen once or twice and/or only mentioned)
9) Dr. Urho Latvala ; 10) Chef Carducci; 11) Iwamoto Tetsuo; 12) Kato M’Bato; 13) Malcolm Foxe-Jameson; 14) Mohandas Chidambaran; 15) Lenkei; 16) Pedro Barrios; 17) Michael O’Donnell; 18) Phra Takh; 19) Hussein Sadek; 20) Iwasaki; 21) Yeshu ben-Zvi

Women
1) Ingrid Lindgren; 2) Chi-Yuen Ai-Ling; 3) Jane Sadler; 4) Emma Glassgold; 5) Margarita Jimenes

(Seen once or twice and/or only mentioned)
6) Olga Sobieski; 7) Marie Toomajian

I thought this was kind of unbalanced. Why were so many more men mentioned? The numbers look a little less unbalanced when you consider that there is approximately the same number of men and women characters that are significantly explored. Boudreau and Pereira are seen doing their jobs on the ship but never really seen off-duty. But it was straight up sexism that so many less women are ever mentioned, Anderson couldn’t imagine what jobs a woman would be doing in space, so he said they were there, but never said what they were doing.
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Reymont became too powerful a character compared to the captain who in theory should be the most capable. I understand the captain was supposed to be of an earlier time period because of time dilations, so he feels like he can’t relate to his crew, but at that point shouldn’t he just be a technical advisor instead of a captain. Movie sets sometimes hire experts from scientific fields in order to get details right, but no one puts them in charge of the whole film.

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Towards the end of the book I started to wonder how much time had past for the ship and despite all the depression the crew went through in the book, it couldn’t have been more than a couple of years. I find it hard to believe they traveled through billions of years real time even with time dilation, but as I learned when I questioned some of the science in “Ringworld” sometimes you just can’t understand the math. As they increased speed, maybe the increase in time dilation increased exponentially and exponents get real big, real fast. Can anyone here explain to me mathematically whether this story could be true or not?

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The character of Lindgren bothered me more and more as the book went on. At the start of the novel she is a young girl fresh out of school. She has trained for many years to be an astronaut and we are told she had an extensive education. She is given a very high position for a rookie: first officer. You see, in this novel the first officer’s main job is to be like a human relations officer. You see the captain is a veteran from a different time period so he needs someone to almost translate for him, tell him what modern people are like and smooth over awkward social situations.

In the first chapter Lindgren shows she is a good planner when she bags a boyfriend for the flight before the flight takes off. She sets up a meeting with Reymont before the mission and tells him she’s going to be very busy at the beginning of the mission, but it’s a long mission and she know she’ll want some sexual release and some human contact from time to time, so she wants to seal a deal pronto before someone else bags Reymont. I thought this was pretty smart and showed her to be a savvy judge of how shipboard politics would work.

However, from that good start she starts to get weird. When the engineer is having trouble performing his duties she goes to his quarters and has a drink with him, finds out it’s lady trouble that’s got him down. She compliments him, tells him he’s a great guy and then proceeds to have an affair with him. The affair ends up destroying her relationship with Reymont, who is by her own accord, the love of her life.

So why did she have the affair, for adventure? No. Reymont wasn’t fulfilling some kind of emotion need? No. She had the affair because the ship needed the engineer and the engineer needed sex and his confidence rebuilt. How do I know this for sure, because she does the same exact thing later in the book when Elof Nilsson is feeling suicidal and it is decided that the ship won’t survive without him at the top of his game.

Now it’s one thing to take your job seriously, but it’s quite another to take it upon yourself to become the ship’s courtesan. I’m all for a liberated women that uses her sexuality, but it’s a fine line between being a modern liberated woman and being the ship’s prostitute.

Thoughts on "Sixth Column"...

2010-08-08T17:48:00.000-07:00

The “Sixth Column” is one of Robert Heinlein’s first published novels. It was written in 1941 and supposed that the Asians got the atomic bomb and the “vortex beam” and won the war. I think Japan had taken over India and China before invading America so they are referred to PanAsians in the book. We see very little of them in the novel, so they never become anything more than a caricature of Japanese culture. All we learn about them is that they speak in a formal and flowery language and at the slightest dishonor, they commit suicide rather than disgrace their families. They are cruel rulers; thousands of Americans are put to death in retaliation for some rebels capturing one of the PanAsian governors.

People have said that this caricature is racist and it is! However, it is no worse then when aliens are presented as one-dimensionally evil invaders in any number of science fiction novels. But all of us know Japanese culture and Japanese people so we know what a one-sided portrayal this is. Where as when it’s invaders from Mars we just think, “Oh, those Martians are just so evil.”

And it is no different than what governments did historically to demonize the enemy in times of war. The US government demonized the Germans during WWI by portraying them as dark, evil Huns and also demonized the German people and the Japanese during WWII. That’s just what all countries did. It’s only modern technology that has made this kind of thing more difficult today. I mean the average American wants all the terrorists dead today, but at least they don’t want the Afghan people dead. That’s progress!

This book only acknowledges two races Asians and Caucasians; I don’t know what happened to all the other races. African Americans, Native Americans, Middle Eastern Americans just aren’t mentioned at all. As I’ll go in to more detail later the American forces come up with super weapons that can be programmed to only affect PanAsians.

Another unspeakably horrible happening in “Sixth Column” is the PanAsians committing genocide on all the Asian Americans. You see, the PanAsians want to be the master race and want all Americans to be a slave race. It was just too complicated to them that Asian Americans would look like the masters but still be slaves so they just started getting rid of them. It’s not the same, but Americans did round up Japanese Americas during WWII and put them into civilian internment camps (a nice way to say prison camps) because, “they couldn’t be trusted.” A lot better than mass murder, but still awful.

The first chapter of the novel is really excellent, it is really rich story and idea wise: The PanAsians invade Washington and New York City and other major cities and completely take over America in one day. Deep within one of the Rocky Mountains, there is a secret American military base devoted to scientific research called “The Citadel.” On the same day as the invasion, the bases’ most brilliant scientist Ledbetter had an unexpected major scientific breakthrough. Unfortunately the breakthrough resulted in not only his own death, but also the death of all but 6 members of the Citadel.

Also that same day, Major Whitey Ardmore, an intelligence officer from Washington arrives at the Citadel to see how operations there are progressing. He was sent before the invasion. When he left Washington, their hope was that some weapons would be developed soon, before the PanAsians decided to attack. Unfortunately, minutes after his arrival at the Citadel they listen to radio reports of the destruction of American cities. Ardmore has no choice, but to assume that the Citadel might be the last hope for America defeating the PanAsains and that they are on their own.

Ardmore first has the 6 men introduce themselves, there are 3 scientists, a mathematician, a biologist/bio-chemist, and a radiologist/physicist, a craftsman, a cook, and a cook’s assistant.

The first job in the Citadel after Ardmore gives the group a pep talk is to clean up the hundreds of dead bodies in the base from the experiment gone wrong.

Ardmore who immediately assumes command of this group is himself not a military man, he was an advertising man and became a sort of PR man in Washington. It is interesting to see a man that has never fought a war learning how to lead and how to win against impossible odds.

The breakthrough that Ledbetter had concerned the discovery of additional spectra; I’ll let Dr. Lowell Calhoun explain it, “You see, most of the progress in physics in the last century and a half has been in dealing with the electromagnetic spectrum of light, radio, X-Ray…General field theory predicts the possibility of at least three more entire spectra. You see, there are three types of energy fields known to exist in space: electric, magnetic, and gravitic or gravitational. Light, X-rays, all such radiations, are part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Theory indicates the possibility of analogous spectra between magnetic and gravitic, between electric and gravitic, and, finally , a three-phase type between electric-magnetic-gravitic fields. Each type would constitute a complete new spectrum, a total of three new fields of learning. If there are such, they would presumably have properties quite as remarkable as the electromagnetic spectrum and quite different.” (p.20-21 in Hardcover Edition)

Ledbetter it seems had found a way to tap into these other spectrums, unfortunately for him and most of the other people in the Citadel the wave he tapped into is one that is deadly to humans. Calhoun and the others figure out a way to adapt the beam. They can make anyone the beam hits unconscious or dead. They even figured out a way to make it only do so for PanAsians and not Caucasians.

They also tapped into a number of different spectra, they found a communications channel so they had radio and video that could not be traced. They had a spectrum that could be adapted into a personal shield that could deflect most conventional weapons including guns. They found a gravitational spectrum that could be used to lift heavy objects. They found a spectrum of transmutation so they could make endless supplies of gold or turn solid rock into a harmless gas. They also found a spectrum that healed people of all diseases.

Yes, it is extremely unbelievable that 7 people managed to come up with so many technological advances so quickly, but it makes sense that if you tapped into what is basically a new science you might make a bunch of different advances fairly quickly.

So now Ardmore has some superior technology, but it is still just seven men against an empire and he has already seen that as active guerilla warfare on his part would be paid for a thousand times over by innocent Americans. So he has to resort to the strange tactic of starting a new religion. You see the PanAsians still allow freedom of religion oddly enough, because they say “all a slave needs is food, rest and religion and if you give them religion you can deny them the other two sometimes.”

The Citadel quickly spreads their religion around the country and by the time the PanAsians catch on, the Americans are ready to strike.

I enjoyed the book despite its flaws, but I can see why people are offended by the one- dimensional demonizing of Asians and/or think the scientific advances are too convenient.

Thoughts on "Ringworld"

2010-07-27T21:28:00.000-07:00

The first thought that sticks with me as I make my first foray into Niven’s “Known Space” universe is that Niven was an idea man, but he wasn’t a storyteller. I mean look at all the ideas and concepts in this novel: Slaver stasis fields, Pierson’s Puppeteers, Kzin, starseeds, General Products hauls, boosterspice, tasps, transfer booths and of course the Ringworld itself. But the story itself is nothing remarkable: Four people crash land on Ringworld and wander around for the whole book. You can really see what Pournelle must have added to their mix as a writing partner. He kept him on task as far as writing interesting stories as well as interesting ideas.

Transfer Booths

Wanted to mention transfer booths, because I thought they were such an original idea when I saw identical devices in Dan Simmon’s “Ilium” series. The concept is obviously borrowed, but I give Simmons a pardon because even though Niven originated the idea, he never really explored the idea. Simmons took it, expanded the idea and kind of made it his own.

Teela Brown

The luck of Teela Brown is a very interesting concept, but luck is a very difficult thing to write about because the question becomes, “who or what is governing the luck?” You see, luck is really only good or bad when you consider future variables. Leaving for work late might be considered bad luck. But when the train the commuter would have been on crashes, suddenly it’s good luck that he was running late.

I just don’t understand how Teela’s luck could have been genetic as the novel suggests. She has had good luck all of her life to the point where she has never experienced fear or rejection, or stubbed her toe. To me luck of that magnitude would have to suggest a “man behind the curtain,” some sort of God like being that has foreknowledge of all future events and the power to manipulate events.

The other thing about her luck that bothered me is that when something bad happened to the party, like when their ship crashed on the Ringworld, Louis, Nessus, and Speaker immediately said, “well, she must not be lucky, that’s why we found her.” But, then when “good” things happen like when she meets Seeker her Conan the Barbarian boyfriend, they say that everything happened because of her luck. It’s like no matter what happens to them it’s because of her luck. Speaker even says the Kzin shouldn’t have another war with the humans because of the other lottery winning families. Do they realize they are assigning God like powers to all of these people when a few days before this they had decided it was all bunk because they’d had some bad luck while she was around.

Ringworld

The detail about Ringworld that I’ve been fixated on is about how because it’s an artificial structure there are no deposits of heavy metals on it. The engineers saw no need for them because they had the technology of transmutation, they could make any elements into any other element, but when their technology began to break down they were left with just what they had. I think it sticks with me because this is what I’ve always thought will kill humanity. We’ll have high levels of technology and forget how we made it and not be able to repair it like in the “Foundation Series” or we’ll deplete our natural resources and not be able to survive without them. Or, we’ll kill animal and plant species, one after another, until we realize we needed tigers for this antibody, but they’ll already be extinct. Or, we’ll realize all the hormones we put into cows have made the milk we drink bad for us, but it will be too late to go back, there won’t be enough cows without the hormones already in them to start over.

The other thing I thought about was the scale of the thing. They had 10 worlds that were getting too crowded. They used all their resources and spent hundreds and hundreds of years on this project. The Ringworld project is a success; the Engineer civilization now has plenty of space. But it isn’t sustainable, it’s too big, instead of helping their civilization to grow, it causes its collapse. What was supposed to solve their over-crowding problem, the project that united people for centuries, turned out to be their downfall. Their civilizations on the original 10 worlds would probably have stood a greater chance of springing back quicker, even when and if their over-crowding caused a collapse.

Gender

As far as gender issues this book is a disaster!

First, we have the Kzin whose females are non-sapient. The men are intelligent and the women are animals. I mean, gender issue wise, it does even out slightly because the Kzin men are exactly what human women imagine men would be like without them: ultra aggressive and violent (4 wars with humans); don’t learn from mistakes or stop for directions (4 wars with humans).

The Pierson’s Puppeteers are another case. The main Puppeteer we see is Nessus, I’m not sure we ever learn for sure if he is a he. Louis just thinks of him as a he. However, his high-pitched voice originally makes Louis think of a woman. When Louis asks him if he is the male or female of the species, Nessus says he doesn’t think it’s proper to talk about reproduction with an alien, but he does reveal when he talks about his deal with the Hindmost that there is a third and again non-sapient gender that is essential to their reproduction.

Much later in the book we meet a Ringworld Engineer. A woman, but she wasn’t a scientist, or an engineer, she was a ship’s whore. You see, the Engineers didn’t have FTL travel, so trips were long. The men needed women to please them… Starting to see the trend?

Then Teela disappears and when they find her she’s with Conan the Barbarian (Seeker). A big muscular guy in a loincloth, who swings a big sword around. Teela is the first to admit he isn’t very bright, so what is it she sees in him? His sense of duty and honor, along with a heavy helping of the fact that he looks like the guy on the cover of every romance novel. But is this really the “perfect man for Teela” as Louis suggests? Louis believes her luck drew the two of them together. Think about it for a minute, this guy Seeker considers women to be property. He thinks he bought Teela for some boosterspice and some bodyguard duty. What happens the first time Teela wants to walk in one direction and he wants to walk in another? What happens the next time he is in the mood for sex and she isn’t? Suddenly I don’t think he’s gonna seem like the perfect man after that.

Size of Ringworld

I didn’t understand the size of Ringworld and because of that the “Eye of the Storm” they came across bothered me. Here is a place where a meteor hit the Ringworld and caused a puncture in the Ringworld floor. Air is leaking out of this hole and causing a violent storm system to occur around it. I wondered, how long before all the air in the Ringworld leaks out from this hole?

The Ringworld is 600,000,000 miles long X 1,000,000 miles wide X 1,000 miles tall =

That’s 600 Trillion X 1,000 Miles tall =

600 quadrillion cubic feet of air.

Assuming the air is leaking one cubic foot per second

600 quadrillion seconds/60 seconds =
10 quadrillion minutes/60 minutes =
166 trillion hours/24 hours
69 trillion days/365 days
19 billion years of air/1000 years
19 million centuries of air

Yep, I guess that’s a while.

Thoughts on "Perelandra"...

2010-07-12T22:00:00.000-07:00

This the second book in Lewis’ Space trilogy, it is basically a retelling of early “Genesis” and “Paradise Lost” with the science fiction twist that the events happen on Perelandra (Venus) in the present instead of in the Garden of Eden at the dawn of time.

C.S. Lewis, who says that Ransom told him about his experiences on Venus narrates the novel. I think Lewis switched to this form of narrator because he knew he could not explain what it felt like for Ransom to experience the trip across space or how wonderful Venus fruits tasted so it was easier to say, “Ransom said he couldn’t explain it to me,” than to have to say, “I can’t explain it to you,” which seems like more of a cop out.

The first part of the story is a sort of travelogue about the surface of Venus how the land is not fixed, there are these floating islands that are pushed here and there by Venus’ oceans. The islands are filled with all sorts of strange planet life and also friendly animals. And everything Ransom eats tastes fantastic. But I started to wonder if there was any intelligent life on the planet.

Finally Ransom meets “the Green Lady” a beautiful naked green woman, yet Ransom feels no sexual attraction to her due to the innocence of the planet or how innocent she instantly seemed or…basically just because that’s what the book said, I guess?

The Green Lady sits around with her friendly animals and waits for her King to come back, you see her man lives on some other island, but when they met again, they will start civilization on the planet.

The Green Lady and Ransom take a trip over the “the Fixed Land” a huge mountain that is the only Earth like land on the planet. The Green Lady who says she hears the voice of “Maleldil” says that see is permitted to visit the fixed land but never to sleep upon it. This is the one directive she has been given (This replaces eating the fruit of the tree of wisdom in this story).

Then a spaceship crash lands on the planet and it is none other than Weston’s ship. Weston is not actually Weston though, he has been possessed by some sort of demon, some servant of the “Bent One.” It is of course this creature’s mission to convince the Green Lady to sleep on the fixed land.

When the Green Lady is around, the demon is completely eloquent like a professor of history who never tires. However, when she sleeps or goes away, the demons turns into an almost mindless thing that speaks only in grunts and catches Venus’ frog like creatures so that he can slice them open and watch them die.

The fascinating thing about “Weston’s” attempts to convince the Green Lady to sin is that both him and Ransom are not allowed to lie. Ransom tries at some point and finds he can’t. So Weston tells the Green Lady story after story about strong willed women that went against the laws of the land and/or disobeyed their fathers for what they thought was right. He spoke about how sometimes these woman suffered severe consequences but it paved the way for a better life for their children and countrymen.

I found this aspect of the novel to be absolutely fascinating because we think of the devil as the “God of Lies” he tells you half-truths and tricks you into sinning. Here the devil is forced to use logic and truth to make his point and he continuously gives Ransom a run for his money in this battle of wits.

So I expected from Ransom to pull some sort of intellectual rabbit out of his hat at the end of the book. I mean, a warrior of God bears the armor of God, the belt of truth, etc. Ephesians 6:10-17. But instead Ransom is forced to resort to violence in order to defeat his foe. First Ransom beats the tar out of Weston’s body. Weston runs away and hops a ride on a fish. Ransom grabs another fish and follows him for hours and hours. When night falls they are in the middle of the ocean and neither of them know where they are.

The real Weston takes control of his body again and says that he has been to hell and that God has no authority there. He says the “Bent One” is the true God because the “Old One” only has authority over the living and life is only 70 years at the most while death is eternal and inescapable.

Then the demon gains control again and lunges at Ransom. They are both plunged into the ocean in the middle of the night. After flailing around in the darkness for some time Ransom finds that he has washed up on shore. It is still pitch black. The demon has washed up near him. In the darkness Ransom find the demon and repeatedly bashes his head against the rocks until he is positive he is dead. Ransom waits a very long time and the sun never comes up, eventually Ransom reasons that he is in some sort of subterranean (or is it subvenetean) cave. So Ransom spends the rest of the novel trying to find his way out of the cave. Along the way the Weston demon shows up once more. This time the body travels even though it is dead, so it’s like some kind of zombie. Ransom attacks it again and when it is subdued he pushes in into a fire pit and watches it burn.

In the last few pages of the novel Ransom find the Edils of Mars and Venus in the cave as well as the Green Lady and the King. They tell him that the fixed land had been forbidden because it needed generations to form, but that now it is ready for the Green Lady and the King to live on and it is on this land and in the caves that they will begin to form their civilization.

Basically from the moment when Ransom and Weston started chasing each other into the middle of the ocean on fishes’ backs, the novel started going downhill and never really recovered. I couldn’t understand why the novel didn’t just end. The endless journey of Ransom in the caves was a flashback to the boring travelogue around the surface of Venus at the start of the novel.

An interesting question raised in the novel is that Ransom continually says that God doesn’t repeat himself so he wonders he it is that the devil in the form of Weston seems to be inching closer and closer to victory as everyday he tells the “Green Lady” more and more stories. Whether or not God repeats himself isn’t the most interesting thing though, you see over the course of the two novels Ransom says things on Mars and Venus that he believes inspired Earth mythology such as the Sorns inspiration for Cyclops. Late in this novel the Edil of Mars and Venus take human form and Ransom says that surely they inspired the mythical Venus and Mars themselves. This seems to be similar to the idea expressed at the end of "Childhood’s End" (Massive Spoilers ahead…) that the death of humanity was such a strong event it took a trip backwards in time down the human collective unconscious and made the image of the Overlords into the mythical image of the Devil. So all of that caused me to wonder whether Lewis was trying to say that the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis never really happened and that the story on Perelandra took a trip back through time too. My evidence for this is that if God doesn’t repeat himself, why is the story in Genesis and this story on Venus so similar?

One plot thread that never got developed was that the Green Lady and the King weren’t the only intelligent animals on Venus there seemed to be a race of Mermen in the planet’s ocean. Ransom wonders about them but never gets to know them because he can’t breath underwater. To me, this changes the whole book, I mean surely those are God’s creatures too, why does god make such a big deal about the Green Lady and the King, when there is already some sort of civilization on Venus? Also, you never find out if the Green Lady’s ancestors and the Mermen will one day have to fight for supremacy. That might be an interesting book.

Thoughts on "Out of the Silent Planet"...

2010-07-09T21:49:00.000-07:00

First posted July 9, 2010, edited on July 12, 2010 after further examination of the book due to comments and discussion of the review.

As I was reading “Out of the Silent Planet” by C.S. Lewis, I thought of “The Wizard of Oz.” (The movie, I’ve never actually read any of the books). As you no doubt recall, the movie starts in black and white and then when Dorothy gets to Oz, it turns into a Technicolor film. I thought this book was science fiction during the trip to Malacandra (Mars), but after getting there the story becomes fantasy.

Okay, the stuff on the spaceship was far from being "hard science fiction," but for 1938 when it was written, this was remarkable. I liked how the ship was a sort of sphere and the gravity was towards the ship’s core so all the rooms were curved. It reminded me of the rotating ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Again, I’m thinking of the movie version). I also liked how Weston, the creator of the spaceship (and the book’s villain) was always so concerned with conserving power and air during the trip. There are too many science fiction stories were space travel is just routine like driving your car down the road to the next neighborhood. It’s just a more interesting story when space travel is still something difficult.

Like I said, when Ransom arrives on Malacandra, it switches to a fantasy story instantly. They get off the ship and Mars has an atmosphere, breathable air, and forests. You just have to say to yourself, “Okay, it’s going to be one of those stories.” In order to enjoy the story, you have to check the science portion of your brain at the door.

The main plot of the story is that Ransom a Philologist, a sort of linguist, was kidnapped by two men about to make their second trip to Malacandra (Mars). They think that the “natives,” Sorns, a large thin almost birdlike race several feet taller than man, demand a human sacrifice. You see, because Weston and his toady sidekick Devine don’t understand the alien language well, they think the aliens are primitive savages. In reality, they are intelligent and peaceful creatures. Anyway, Ransom believes he is going to be sacrificed too, so the first chance he gets he runs away into the strange world he’s just arrived at.

To understand this book, you have to understand that C.S. Lewis was a devote Christian. So he writes “Christian stories.” In this story the Christian elements are somewhat masked, God is called the “Old One” Jesus is “Maleldil,” and angels are Edil. All of them are interdimensional beings that live outside of linear time as we know it. The Devil, called “the Bent One” is a rogue Edil that betrayed the “Old One” and caused him to cut off direct communication with Earth through Edil. Earth is known as “Thulcandra” which translates to “the Silent Planet”

Weston, who as I mentioned is the story’s villain, is a human who believes that humanity’s destiny is to populate other planets in the solar system and then conquer other star systems and then rinse and repeat forever. Having grown up on Star Trek and having always been taught the American idea of “Manifest Destiny” in school, I must confess that a part of me agrees with Weston. I mean, didn’t Stephen Hawkins recently warn us that humanity must spread to other worlds if it is to survive?

On the other hand, sometimes I think of humans as a sort of locust. Like them, we are one of the only animals that destroys its own habitat. How can we spread humanity to other planets before we figure out how to live in harmony with this one?

According to Malacandran philosophy, each peoples and each planet have a certain amount of time and that’s it. Mars is a planet that is slowly becoming inhospitable to life, but the population just shrugs and says that’s the way of things.

In Lewis’ mind Malacandra is a planet in perfect harmony. The three intelligent alien species lived in peace. Each species felt valuable, no one group ruled over another. Ransom does not understand how three so different intelligent species could all live as equals, but he comes to realize that humanity really missed out on not having true brother species and later decides that humans so often keep pets because, without even realizing it, they are searching for the brotherhood of an equal.

My favorite of the three species are the Pfifltrigg, who unfortunately only really make a cameo in the novel. Ransom never goes to their territory, so the only one we really meet is in the capital city. The Pfifltrigg are tinkers and builders. But, they make things just because they enjoy it. They just build, build, build and then they give it away, kind of like the Doozers in Fraggle Rock. (Why do I keep going back to movies and tv today?)

Malacandra is ruled by Oyarsa, who is an Edil. Lewis wants the reader to believe Oyarsa is a fair ruler, but the truth is he’s just as dark and evil a creature as Weston or the “Bent One.” Oyarsa tells a story that thousands of years ago he feared his people might decide to make skyships and flee Mars, because even then it was known Mars was a dying planet. So Oyarsa nipped the rebellion in the bud before it got started by killing almost everyone, “Some I cured, other I unbodied” he said. Oyarsa says his actions were justified because though the civilization on Malacandra is not sustainable they do not know “fear, murder and rebellion.” Oyarsa is an Edil, he is not all-knowing. He has obviously made a mistake and refuses to admit it. I think he has broken the Social Contract he has with his people in Malacandra and should be removed. Maybe there is some other nice young Edil that can take over. As I already mentioned I don’t think I could accept a ruler that said, “Yes, the planet is dying but you should just accept it.” I’d want to preserve my people, and my people’s collective knowledge.

Overall, I felt like the religious aspects of “Out of the Silent Planet” were somewhat in the background. The story meshes science with religion (God is an interdimensional super being that lives out of linear time as we understand it) so completely that the story stands on it’s own as a piece of speculative fiction without only becoming a pseudo religious text.

The second novel of the series “Perelandra” unfortunately never develops into anything more than a pseudo religious text, but that’s a story for another review.

Thoughts about "On the Waterfront"

2010-06-28T20:08:00.000-07:00

I feel really bad for "throwing it under the bus," because I think a lot of people love this movie, but I watched "On the Waterfront" over the weekend and I just didn't get why this movie is such a classic.

The first thing that really bothered me is the Leonard Bernstein soundtrack. During the film whenever anyone starts showing the slightest emotion the orchestral music swells and distracts from the acting. Basically, I wish I could have erased the music.

Yes, Marlone Brando gives a great performance, but I didn't think the script gave his character Terry Malone much growth. He starts off as kind of a dimwitted ex-boxer that only thinks about himself and by the end of the movie I guess we are supposed to think he’s learned to think about other people, but he testifies because the villain had his brother murdered, so has Terry learned altruism or simply revenge? In fact, I thought all of the characters where kind of one-note characters, the only other character with any growth was Eva Marie Saint’s Edie, who at the start of the film is a sheltered, but book-smart girl who doesn’t seem to have any experience with men and at the end of the film she’s fallen in love with Terry, but the movie doesn’t show how/if the relationship has made her grow/change.

My favorite scene without a doubt is the one where Terry and Edie are talking and she drops her glove. Terry picks it up and starts playing with it. I've always heard that this part wasn't scripted, but improvised. It really makes the scene because it's not just Brando that's improvising Saint is right there with him because at the end of the scene she pulls the glove off his hand and it all seems so natural, so real. Unfortunately it’s one diamond among a pile of coal.

Possibly the film’s biggest problem is that it can’t decide what kind of a villain Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) is. In his first scene, Friendly talks about how he started as a nobody and carved out a crime empire. This led me to believe he was an effective and smart villain. However, in the same first scene Friendly does two incongruous things: first he repeatedly refuses to count stacks of money saying it makes his head hurt. I let this go at first thinking he must be the hands-off type. Then someone else counts a stack and says a guy was short $50 bucks and Friendly goes nuts on the guy and tells him he doesn’t work in this town anymore. For someone who can’t be bothered to count his own money, the money sure means a lot to him. I guess we are supposed to think that the money doesn’t mean as much to him as trust does?

The next questionable scene takes place when it seems like Terry is going to testify. Friendly talks to Terry’s brother Charley. Charley is one of Friendly’s Lieutenants. Charley is the reason why Terry has always gotten a free ride, Friendly has kept Terry happy because it makes Charley happy and by that logic, Friendly is willing to do so much for Charley because he is a really great Lieutenant. But the fact that Terry might testify is just too much, Friendly gives Charley an ultimatum, he tells him he has to kill his brother or else. Now here comes the curious part, he lets him go take care of it on his own! If I was a really smart crime boss who had built a crime empire from nothing, I’d probably be pretty careful. If I’d given a man an ultimatum that backed him into a corner I’d probably be concerned he might decide to betray me. So you take a bunch of guys you can trust and you go with Charley and you make sure he kills his brother and if he can’t, you kill both of them. The one thing you don’t do is let him go off alone so he can formulate some sort of plan. Luckily, Charley did something even more boneheaded. He’s in the back of a car with his brother; up front some unnamed hoodlum is driving the car. Charley openly discusses betraying Friendly. You can see how horrified the driver is and so it is absolutely no surprise when Charley is dead a few scenes later. Did Charley think the hoodlum was loyal to him before Friendly? Maybe they were really good friends, and he trusted the unnamed hoodlum completely. But the unnamed guy had secret ambitions and his betrayal was not unlike Iago’s betrayal of Othello, a saga of unbelievable evil. But unfortunately the movie doesn’t give us the slightest hint.

Okay, the next scene of interest is the court scene. Terry gives about a two sentence confession on the stand. They ask him if he knows who killed Joe Doyle, he says Friendly ordered some guys to do it. That’s all he says and it seems that’s all the evidence the Crime Commission has: one man’s testimony. If Friendly was smart he’d understand that they still have nothing and all he has to do is play it cool. Instead Terry gets off the stand and Friendly goes into a blind rage and starts screaming at Terry and punching him. This outburst made him look guilty whereas the testimony hadn’t really been all that damning.

Okay, so Friendly and his boys are the Union leaders for the dockworkers. They make their money from…I never quite figured that out. Okay, so Friendly and his boys control whether a dockworker works on any given day. They also control what jobs any given guy has. We know this because Terry Malone was given a job where he doesn’t actually have to work. But the catch is that Friendly doesn’t own the boats or the cargo. That’s all owned by an overweight bald guy who we see only twice in the movie: First he is watching the court proceedings when Terry testifies. He just sort of grumbles when Friendly goes “ape-shit” on Terry afterwards. Then we see him at the end of the movie. He stands at the doorway to the docks and waits for the bloody and beat up Terry to report for work, because none of the workers will work unless he is working too. If the fat man didn’t somehow benefit from whatever deal he had with Friendly, why did he let him run the workers for so many years?

This movie’s director, Elia Kazan is legendary. I’m a big fan of his film “A Streetcar Named Desire,” but this movie was clearly an attempt by him to justify his testimony to the House Un-American activities Committee (HUAC). You see, Kazan was a Communist for a year and a half from 1934 and 1936. Then twenty years later, the HUAC was questioning “known communists” and trying to get them to name names. It was a witch-hunt and Kazan eventually caved and named 8 people. Then the following year he made this movie where the theme of the movie turns out to be how much of a hero you can be if you have the courage to testify. Knowing this background made what seems on the surface to be a movie about silly and evil mobsters seem to be about much more and it made it seem almost insidious, like if we thought Brando’s Terry Malone was right for testifying then we had to think Kazan must have been right for testifying too, right? Only they were two completely different situations. When I listened to Father Barry’s (Karl Madden) impassioned speeches about standing up to the union and having the courage to speak out, I thought they were kind of over-the-top, but when I think about them in the context of the HUAC, they absolutely disgust me.

Thoughts on "Contact"

2010-06-12T19:49:00.000-07:00

Carl Sagan's "Contact" is a great concept and is very well written in some parts, I especially enjoyed the beginning where the reader follows Ellie Arroway through her childhood.

However, the novel suffers from being kind of flat. It's a 432 page novel (all page numbers are according to the hardcover edition I got from the library) and I got the feeling someone told Sagan that's how long a "real" novel had to be. There seems to be some filler in the form of tangents where Sagan introduces all sorts of extra science fiction elements into his near future world.

But I'll focus on those tangents later, but first I want to explain why I thought the story was flat. On about p 106 Arroway and the other scientists discover the 10,000 page encrypted message from the Vegans (Did anyone else read the first mention of Vegans as talking about those vegetarians that don't eat dairy?) but they can't decipher the message. So, they wait for the message to repeat, hoping that at the beginning of the message is a "primer," a key to the encryption. Then around p 234 they figure out that there is no primer, but they end up figuring the message out without one. It's only about 100 pages, but it felt like a lot more while I was reading the book. This section was kind of bland, nothing was happening, it just felt like the story had no momentum.

I didn't like the religious aspects of the book until the end of the novel. When the evangelist characters Joss and Rankin were introduced I felt like they were just "strawman" characters, whose only purpose was to be beaten by Arroway and science. When Arroway debated them, I thought that the two of them were made to look like jokes. I'm no preacher, but I felt like I could have put up a better argument against Arroway.

I think that religion comes down to faith. God, in the Christian sense, doesn't show himself in an absolute fashion because he wants us to choose to follow him. He wants us to choose to be "good people" not out of fear, but because of a belief that it's just the right way to live. Because philosophies like "love your neighbor as yourself" and "turn the other cheek" are worthy philosophies to aspire to.

I was happy to see that the ending dovetailed: Arroway who questioned religion because of a lack of absolute proof, received first hand proof of aliens and many other wonders in her journey across the galaxy, but she only had her words to share with others. She had become exactly what she criticized. She expected the rest of the world to believe her story and her philosophy without any physical evidence.

The very end of the novel puts a further spin on the ending when a computer finds a message buried deep inside the exponents of Pi, a binary code that translates to a circle. The novel purports that this is the proof Arroway needed for people to believe her story. I'm more skeptical of human nature and figure that the average person would either figure it was a coincidence, or not be able to wrap their head around how deep the number was buried in Pi and just figure it's not true.

I just thought I should note that in 2009 Pi was calculated to 2.5 trillion digits and no sequence of ones and zeroes or binary circles were found, but it was a fun idea, wasn't it?

Okay, I promised I'd get back to those tangents. The first one, around page 223 is all about a theme park called "Babylon" that is somewhere 30 minutes from Manhattan by train, but still subject to NYC laws, so it must be in Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx.

By day Babylon had neat architecture, fun rides, games and tasty food, but by night Babylon was an adult theme part where men and woman could play out sexual fantasies with prostitutes.

I know there is a real market for prostitution, but I find it impossible to believe that it could ever be coupled with a family friendly tourism industry. Sure Las Vegas is a tourist trap, but I've never seen it advertised as a family-get-away destination.

The other tangent is when Arroway goes up to a space station and there are a small number of elite super rich men who believe that living in the weightlessness of space is going to prolong their lives. Everything I've read about the effects of weightlessness suggest that it's long term effects are harmful. Here is what Wiki said:

The most significant adverse effects of long-term weightlessness are muscle atrophy and deterioration of the skeleton, or spaceflight osteopenia. These effects can be minimized through a regimen of exercise. Astronauts subject to long periods of weightlessness wear pants with elastic bands attached between waistband and cuffs to compress the leg bones and reduce osteopenia. Other significant effects include fluid redistribution (causing the "moon-face" appearance typical of pictures of astronauts in weightlessness), a slowing of the cardiovascular system, decreased production of red blood cells, balance disorders, and a weakening of the immune system. Lesser symptoms include loss of body mass, nasal congestion, sleep disturbance, excess flatulence, and puffiness of the face. These effects begin to reverse quickly upon return to the Earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weightlessness#cite_note-13

I especially enjoyed the part about increased flatulence. I just picture the men and woman on the International Space Station in a sort of reenactment of the famous beans scene in Blazing Saddles.

Finally, I wanted to mention my confusion about one passage in the novel. On page 277, Arroway is agonizing over Drumlin's death. She feels guilty because her first thoughts when he died were about herself. She thinks about men who for one reason or another she had admired "Drumlin. Valerian. Derr Heer. Hadden...Joss. Jesse... Staughton?...Her father."

Was the purpose of this passage just to foreshadow the revelation at the end of the book that Staughton was her biological father. When I read the passage the first time I was sure it had some sort of deeper significance. Like she was admitting to herself in some sort of Freudian way that she was sexually attracted to men she admired.

The other strange thing about the passage is that she doesn't mention Vaygay. Of the men in her life, he was my favorite. Clearly he was interested in her sexually, but he never pressured her. He just sort of left that option open to her. And in turn she developed a sort of relationship with him that went somewhere beyond friendship but only unconsciously on her part. Look at the way Arroway gets all "hot and bothered" when she thinks of the other women in his life.

I haven't yet seen the 1997 film. (It's next in my netflix cue). But I am looking forward to seeing how it differs from the novel. I see that Matthew McConaughey plays Joss and so I suspect Arroway and him will become romantically involved in the movie version. Off hand this doesn't make sense to me, though the end of the novel seems to imply that the two characters could get together after the events of the novel, because Arroway's experiences have given them new-found common ground.

Wizard Mask 2010

2010-05-16T17:07:00.000-07:00

I recently had the privilege of being made into an old evil wizard by Jim LoSasso, a make-up artist for television and movies. What do you all think? By the way the woman in the last picture is my lovely wife, how's that for beauty and the beast?

Thoughts on Essential Doctor Strange Vol. 4

2010-04-26T19:03:00.000-07:00

Essential Doctor Strange Volume 4.

Having never read many issues of Doctor Strange me reviewing this collection is a bit like if I watched a random episode of Deadwood or the Wire or any other program with an ongoing plot I’m unfamiliar with; I can comment on what I saw, but I don’t know the background. So, if I’ve made wrong assumptions please forgive me.

The first thing up for discussion is magic according to the marvel universe. It just seems to be rather uniform. Every spell and counter spell is written in the Book of Vishanti. I’d say that’s pretty convenient. Can’t a learned sorcerer make up new spells? Also, I do not understand why the Vishanti are the most powerful Gods. Doctor Strange in this volume fights Nightmare, the Dweller-in-Darkness and the N’garai, but Strange wins because the Vishanti whom he draws power from just happen to be the most powerful force in all universes and realities. It doesn’t matter if Strange goes through a black mirror and into another dimension or if he travels into Dormammu’s Dark Dimension or Nightmare’s realm, the magic of the Vishanti prevails.

In fact, the magic of the Vishanti appears to be the only magic anywhere. Clea, Strange’s lover, who was the “firstborn of Orini, who is Suzerein to the dread Dormammu, ruler of my home dimension.” (Doctor Strange #45) My assumption would be that being from a dark dimension she would have some kick-ass black magic. I don’t want her to be evil or even a bad person, but it would just open up so many great storylines. Here is my idea: Clea was a bad person in her dimension. It’s not her fault she grew up in the dark dimension and had a skewed moral lessons. When Doctor Strange first came to her dimension and fought Dormammu she had a change of heart. Suddenly here was a man who believed in her and her potential for good when no one else would. She betrays Dormammu, helps Doctor Strange defeat him and then travels with Doctor Strange to his dimension. On Earth, Clea begins to train herself to use her black magic for good. She has powerful spells that she must use carefully in order to not permanently injure opponents. Since Doctor Strange is not familiar with black magic except for counter spells, Clea has much to teach him and in return Strange teaches Clea the magic of the Vishanti.

This idea is unfortunately not the reality of the comics I read, instead Clea is a novice sorceress who is mentoring with Strange. He calls her his protégé even though she seems at times to be a bit of a hopeless case. When she admits that she lacks any self-confidence in her abilities Doctor Strange says he’s never been more sure that she should be his protégé. Strange seems to me to be blinded by his love for her, he’d be better off with almost anyone else as his protégé: what about Illyana Rasputin (aka Magik) Colossus’ sister or heck with his astral projection skills I think Charles Xavier would be a better candidate for Strange’s protégé.

Later in that same issue Strange makes the more obvious attempt to boost Clea’s confidence. He is fighting a N’Garai, an Elder Demon God from another dimension in his basement. The demon has made Wong and two others into his servants and they are attacking Strange and Clea. Strange says “I know of a spell that can defeat this guy, it’s in the Book of Vishanti, I’ll go get it in astral form. You protect my body.” Okay, he is in his basement. All he and Clea have to do is make a strategic retreat upstairs. How is astral form any quicker? It’s not like he’s going to run into rush hour traffic trying to get upstairs in his body. And staying in his body has the advantage of not leaving his body completely helpless. It isn’t as if he knew Clea could handle Wong and the two other, on the page before he was having trouble fighting them. He recklessly risked his own life, his friends lives and probably the whole dimension just because his girlfriend was feeling a little down on herself.

Okay, moving along, so Clea doesn’t have any magic different from the Vishanti, but surely evil sorcerers and sorceresses in other dimensions have some different spells. Nope. When Doctor Strange fights Shialmar ( the self-appointed sorceress supreme in another dimension (issue 44) she throws crystals of Cyndriarr at Strange and he thinks wow that spell is so powerful I haven’t used it, but it’s obviously in the Book of Vishanti because he knows the counter spell. Aren’t there different branches of magic, so that maybe one sorcerer specializes in healing magic and another in dark magic? No, in the Marvel Universe everyone knows every spell because it’s all written in one book.

Speaking of different dimensions why is it that no matter what dimension or realm Doctor Strange finds himself in, the laws of physics are also a constant. I mean I understand that one of the theories of alternate dimensions postulates that the laws of physics would be a constant throughout every dimension in the multiverse and I can accept that. But you’re telling me that the realm of Nightmare or the realm of the Dweller-in-Darkness are basically no different than Earth? That’s boring! I want to see Strange walking or astral projecting through realms beyond my imagination. I want him exploring an M.C. Escher or Salvador Dali inspired world where up is down and down is up. And when he tries to cast Flames of Faltine it causes roses to appear in the hands of his opponents and so he has to cast a spell for roses and then the flames appear.

I know it’s just a comic and it was written for a young adult audience, but doesn’t Doctor Strange make it look insanely easy to be Sorcerer Supreme. He has all the answers in one book. If I’d only had to read one book in order to get my Master’s Degree in Library Science, that would have been sort of fishy right? You’d wonder if I’d be able to perform all my duties. And I’m just a librarian; Doctor Strange is the protector of the Universe!

The other thing that leads me to the conclusion that his job is easy is that he only ever uses a handful of spells. It doesn’t matter if he’s fighting a monster, another sorcerer, or some sort of God like entity, the same couple of spells will always get the job done. Here they are, I bet you can list them with me:

Crimson Bands of Cytorrak
Flames of Faltine
Cloak of Levitation
Agamotto’s Light of Truth
Bolt of Bedevilment
Images of Ikonn
Shield of Seraphim

Despite my complaints, I did enjoy these issues and I’ll try to keep it more positive if and when I comment on individual issues and storylines.

Thought on "Oath of Fealty"

2010-04-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

Oath of Fealty
Originally posted April 12, 2010
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClassicScienceFiction/message/17909

"Oath of Fealty" is a good science fiction novel that falls short of being a great science fiction novel. "Fealty is the fourth novel I've read by the team of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The others being "Lucifer's Hammer," "Footfall," and "Mote in God's Eye." Each of those 3 were undeniably brilliant. They were real page-turners that explored fascinating new worlds and new ideas. They had exciting characters and situations. This novel, written in-between "Lucifer" and "Footfall" just doesn't measure up.

The world of the story is: in the near future, about 20 years ago, just outside of Los Angeles a huge arcology called Todos Santos has been built. If you don't know what an arcology is don't feel bad. I had to read the description is Wikipedia too. Here is a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology

This behemoth structure comfortably houses half a million people. Most of the residents never leave the structure which has everything from parks, to shops to restaurants, hospitals and funeral homes. But many of the people of Los Angeles resent this new city, they resent it's tax exemptions, they resent it's residents living in comfort while they're still poor. Many environmental groups are also against such structures because they believe they use too many natural resources to sustain them. One such group, the FROMATES has resorted to terrorist acts against arcologies in the past.

The characters in the novel are one of the weak points, there's no real protagonist which is okay if enough of the characters are fleshed out so that it feels like there are multiple protagonists. This was done effectively in "Footfall and "Lucifer's Hammer." In this novel you have a bunch of possibly interesting characters that you are never really given the chance to get to know. All you get is a glimpse. Maybe it was the length of the story that was the problem. The other Niven/Pournelle novels I've read were around 500 pages, this ones only 324.

The Plot

You're rolling along reading about this world and exploring the arcology for about 70 pages and just when you're starting to wonder when it's going to get good, Boom! the plot hits. There are terrorists inside Todos Santos. They're about the reach the hydrogen tanks. They could destroy the city. We see how tense the mood in the Todos situation room is. Preston Sanders, the second-in-command is forced to decide in his boss' place. He orders deadly gas vented into the chamber where the terrorists are. However, it turns out the so called terrorists were teens with sophisticated electrical equipment, but a box full of sand not explosives. And so Sanders is arrested and prosecuted by the Los Angeles DA because there is a question as to whether Sanders acted too rashly.

This situation was interesting because I felt like the social norms regarding terrorism have changed since this novel was written in 1981. What was clearly an ambiguous moral situation back then would be cut and dry today. Due to the rise in terrorist attacks and school shootings (since the 1999 Columbine Attack), we (America) just don't mess around anymore. I can't see anyone in Los Angeles defending the teens actions. The thinking would be, "if you act like a terrorist expect to be treated as one."

Security

There is an omnipresent security force in Todos Santos. However there is no reason to be afraid of them because there are bizarrely no courts or jails in Todos, that being one of the main points of the story that they are still under Los Angeles legal jurisdictions. This didn't really make any sense
to me.

Rather than being afraid of this ever present security force in some sort of "1984" like way, the citizens of Todos think of security as their friends. The citizen's thinking is summed up nicely in the memorable sequence of the toilet paper rope. The kids in Todos sometimes string toilet paper rope over Todos' high speed moving platforms. Only tourists duck, Todos citizens believe if it was anything that could hurt them security would stop it. The citizen believe that since security is always watching they are protected. However we learn in one of the first chapters that security watches the citizens randomly so many incidents are likely to go unnoticed, so anyone depending on security to protect them should eventually be hurt or killed.

I don't think this feeling of complete safeness is healthy at all. What about when they leave Todos, they are likely to forget they aren't in Todos and get hurt or killed by a mugger or something. And as I mentioned before even in Todos they aren't really safe, they just feel safe.

The Newsman

One of the more enigmatic characters in the novel is Thomas Lunan, a TV news reporter that focuses on the big picture story of what life is like in Todos Santos and what kind of a culture has developed in this new society. Rather than the obvious story most reporters are focused on, the terrorism story.

At one point Lunan makes a documentary about Todos Santos and talks about how safe Todos is compared to Los Angeles. He contrasts light- hearted scenes of Todos security watching over it's citizens, walking a drunk man home, helping a teen locate her father; with a scene of Lunan's own neighborhood in Los Angeles. Lunan parks his expensive car in a seemingly falling apart garage and walks several blocks to his apartment where all of his nice possessions are similarly camouflaged in a seemingly run down building. However, it doesn't seem to dawn on Lunan that he just put a video on TV which explains exactly how to rob him! One of the other characters notices this while watching the documentary and quips "he better be moving tomorrow." But sadly, you find out later that the night the documentary aired Lunan was in his apartment entertaining a lady friend. He's really lucky he didn't get them both killed.

Later on, Lunan participates in a jail break organized by the Todos top-brass even though he knows he can never do a story on it or even ever talk about it. Why would he do that? I could buy that the Todos story changed him, but at the end of the novel Lunan makes it clear that he is still a newsman and wouldn't want to live in Todos.

Second Attack

The novel features a second terrorist attack on Todos, which though this time the terrorists are clearly a threat, it never gripped me the way the first attack did because it felt like just more of the same. I think the second attack should have been something different instead of another scene of terrorists crawling through some sort of maintenance shaft towards hydrogen tanks again. Why didn't the terrorists strike unexpectedly in the city's mall or a crowded restaurant?

The Ending

It seemed as if all the plot threads were wrapped up about 20 pages before the end of the novel and I actually put the book down for an evening thinking,"20 pages of epilogue, boring." but it turns out the book redeems itself, Niven and Pournelle still had a curveball, the last 20 pages were quite good.

Basically, for the whole novel the leaders of Todos are forced to decide whether they are going to become exactly what Los Angeles, Thomas Lunan, and the FROMATES accuse them of being, a nation state, a castle, a new independent civilization. And in the end Todos decides to stay a part of the larger world, it's an optimistic ending, but it works.

Thoughts on "the Man in the High Castle"

2010-03-28T20:43:00.000-07:00

Originally posted September 1, 2009

I'm sorry for contributing to the lull this past month. I read the first half of "The Man in the High Castle" early in the month, but like many of us I found it difficult and so I put it down and read comic books and watched television for most of the month. However, I did pick the book up again a few days ago and finished it.

I read all of the posts about the book and I am generally in agreement with others. I think Bill matched my own feeling about it when he wrote, "Enjoyed might be too strong a word."

I finished the book mainly because it won the Hugo and so I figured it must have a killer ending or something (More on the book's ending later). The only other Hugo nominee I've read from 1963 so far was "A Fall of Moondust" (which we read a few months ago) and I have to grudgingly admit that this is a better novel. It feels less dated and has better character development and story.

I agree with James who said that Dick doesn't write about heroic people, he writes about "little people" or everyday people. I thought this directly related to a quote from the novel, (my p 42) "Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small… and you will escape the jealousy of the great."

This in a nutshell was the major reason why I didn't enjoy the book more. I kept comparing it to other alternate history books specifically Kornbluth's "Not this August" which is still fresh in my mind. In August the American people are conquered too. However, that novel is about hope, it is about how even if America is physically defeated you can't destroy the American spirit. Bill hit
upon this idea when he said that it made sense that, " a defeated people would be influenced by their conquerors. On the other hand, I would expect some of the population to be just the reverse, clinging proudly to their differences."

Another note on Dick's writing I read "A Scanner Darkly" a few months ago, and believe it or not that book was ten times more confusing than this one. Darkly was also more overtly drug induced.

I also agree with Tony who calling the I Ching outdated. I was equally mystified with the idea that the oracle wrote the book within the book. Surely all educated people understand that the I Ching, horoscopes, and fortune tellers all work the same way, the predictions are always vague enough for the client to fill in their own blanks.

Like Ann James, I didn't quite understand what happened to Tagomi in the park with the piece of jewelry. It seems that he somehow traveled to a different reality were the Japanese were not first class citizens. I think it was purposefully left vague, but I came up with all sorts of crazy ideas like the whole novel was a fantasy and Tagomi merely "woke up" or the two realities are closely related and people can wander from one to the other, that's how Abendsen wrote the novel he came from the other world. But my favorite interpretation is that is a metaphor. Dick is trying to tell us that just as easily as Tagomi can come into "our world" we can find ourselves in Tagomi's world or a world like it if we as a world make poor choices and don't learn from past mistakes.

Even the cover of the novel confuses me. I have the same picture that was on this site all month. Does anyone else understand how it relates to the novel?

I don't understand if Baynes/Rudolf Wegener was really Jewish. He seemed to be a heroic character, I loved the scene where he told the anti-Semite that he was Jewish but there was nothing he could do about it. However, the revelation of his true identity at the end of the novel left me confused.

In the passage right before Juliana kills Joe (my p 212) "Blade, she thought. I swallowed it; now it cuts my loins forever." I took this literally and I kept waiting for her to drop dead. But I guess it was just more craziness. I don't understand why these few pages are the only hint of her being mentally unbalanced.

I found Childan a particularly loathsome character, kind of a sniveling rat of a man or a used car salesman. He was so obsessed with Japanese culture I didn't even realize he was American at first. However, he was a sort of interesting character, I enjoyed hearing the machinations forming in his head and knowing that they were all going to go horribly wrong somehow. Also, my favorite of the plotlines was the idea that authentic American cultural artifacts had become so popular that someone had begun mass producing fakes.

Being an archivist this fascinated me, especially the argument that an original and a perfect fake have nothing that separates them, there is no specialness that emanates from a true original. I agree this is true and yet originals will always be worth more than copies.

Thoughts on "The Mote in God's Eye"

2010-03-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

Originally posted September 28, 2009
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClassicScienceFiction/message/16182

I just finished reading "The Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. This is the third book I've read by this duo. Previously I read "Lucifer's Hammer," and "Footfall."

All three have been both riveting and thought provoking.

I'm going to focus this review on "Mote," but there will no doubt be mild spoilers for all three novels as I point out similarities and differences.

"Lucifer's Hammer" and "Footfall" both took place in the "present." The novels examined the respective questions of "What would happen if an asteroid hit Earth tomorrow?" and "What would happen if aliens invaded Earth tomorrow?" For me this made the novels very accessible. I understood the characters and their motivations because though they were in an extraordinary situation I shared the common ground of American culture and ideas with the characters.

"The Mote in God's Eye," on the other hand takes place in the future year 3017 during the Second Empire of Man. There is 1,000 years of history to learn in order to understand who the characters are and what motivates them.

While a lot of time has gone by humans are well still human. They characters don't really act much different then you or I would. In fact, I found it quaint to think that in an other 1,000 years civilization would be run by aristocracy. I don't know how realistic that is, but I just went with it.

I remember one of the great things about both "Lucifer's Hammer" and "Footfall" were the vast variety of characters such as: an astronomer, a biker, a senator, a tv producer, and science fiction writers. "Mote" on the other hand suffers from having lots of navy man characters of the square-jawed, box-body variety and there is only one prominent female character in the whole novel.

But that's where any small amount of criticism ends.

The novel follows the same rough format as the others. Events happen slow enough for characters to reflect and predict the results of an unknown event. For instance in "Lucifer's Hammer" when the asteroid is first observed many scientists think it is going to miss the earth, the reader of course knows better.

In both "Footfall" and "Mote" there is endless speculation as to what the aliens the humans are about to meet will be like.

This device is a lot of fun because the reader has the same amount of knowledge as the characters and you can speculate along with them and try and guess if they are missing something.

In "Mote" when the humans finally do meet the aliens are extremely alien. Their culture is mysterious and as one character says "It seems like they are learning a lot more about us then we are learning about them." And when the humans do finally learn the Moties' big secrets you can't help but wonder how the scientist never asked those questions! And yet as a reader I didn't think of them, so how can I blame the characters.

The Motie aliens are fascinating creatures. They are much more benevolent then the warlike baby elephants in Footfall and yet highly intelligent and crafty and perhaps more dangerous.

What do other folks who have read this book think?

Some short reviews of some short fiction

2010-03-28T20:25:00.000-07:00

Originally posted Nov 17, 2009
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClassicScienceFiction/message/16656

I came to the happy realization yesterday that no matter how many science fiction stories I read there will always be more. Previously I believed that soon I'd run out of good ones.

This month I've focused on short stories. I got "Galaxy 30 Years of Innovative Science Fiction." And have read the stories at random, going wherever the spirit moved me. I thought I'd share some short thoughts about each story. They will be spoiler free unless otherwise noted.

However, before I explore those stories I would like to say a few words about "Mindworm" (spoilers ahead), this month's short story. It was written by C.M. Kornbluth who despite his short life made a lasting impact in Science fiction. On the one hand this story is kind of silly and the ending was spoiled since I knew it was in vampire story collections from time to time. On the other hand it isn't a vampire story because it concerns a man who is literally sustained by sucking emotions out of people not blood. On the gripping hand, it was an interesting idea and an attempt to bring the fantasy idea of vampires into the science fiction age as a mutation. It is somewhat disappointing that few other authors go this route.

I also found the story to contain some amusing irony. The Mindworm goes to the small West Virginia town to disappear, but he's unknowingly arrived at the one place where he will be found. The Eastern European population of the town has seen his kind before and they are almost nonchalant in resolving the matter by immediately exterminating the "Wampyir."

Where as a more "civilized" society might have put the Mindworm on trial and discussed the possibility of rehabilitation these people thought of the Mindworm as a monster, or mutation, or a rabid animal; certainly something no longer human that was to be destroyed immediately.

The first stop in the "Galaxy" collection is "To Serve Man" by Damon Knight. This story's ending was familiar to me even though I'd never read the story or seen the Twilight Zone episode, though I have seen the parody in one of the Simpson's Halloween episodes. It's just one of those stories that's firmly in the pop culture. The story is also on the cover of this collection, and it is just about the worst cover ever. Almost every line of text on the left side of the cover has text the carries onto the following line. What were they thinking?!

Anyway, "To Serve Man," I think the story which features linguists working for many weeks to discover the terrible secret of the alien's books, makes a lot more sense then the Twilight Zone episode, where I believe they just kind of stumble upon the truth. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

"Coming Attractions" by Fritz Leiber

New York City was hit by a nuclear bomb, but you can't keep the Big Apple down. The population has just gone about their business and does their best to avoid the ground zero area known as the Inferno. The protagonist, a visitor from England, carries a meter around to see how much radiation he's been exposed to. But all of that is sort of in the background, the main focus of the story is a kind of social examination; In this future, all woman in America wear masks over their faces and the human form has been banned from all advertisements. It was
interesting to see how Leiber imagined American culture changing since this kind of modesty is currently only associated with Middle Eastern culture and for lack of a better word completely foreign to current American culture.

"Cold Friend" by Harlan Ellison

Ellison just seems to be one of those authors you either love or hate, mostly because Ellison strikes me as nuts, I mean what kind of a guy copyrights his own name? (as Harlan did in 1980). What kind of a guy writes a whole book about how he didn't like the changes that were made to City on the Edge of Forever? (Especially since most people consider it the best hour of Star Trek ever). That said I'm slowly moving firmly into the love category because he may be a son of a bitch in real life, but he does know how to craft great stories.

Cold Friend is a story about a man that wakes up in a hospital after he clearly remembers dying. He soon realizes he's the last man on Earth. Though Earth is only roughly 3 square blocks and the rest complete darkness.

Note: Anyone know how popular Ellison is these days? I was disturbed to not be able to find a single one of his books in Barnes and Nobles the other day.

Philip K. Dick does not disappoint with "Oh, to be a Blobel!" a Sci-fi story whose ending mirrors "The Gift of the Magi." In the story Earth went to war with these kind of giant amoeba aliens from Titan called Blobels. During that time both Earth and Titan genetically altered some of their soldiers so that they became the opposite species in order to act as spies. Some years later there is peace, but not for ex-spies, they were told there would be no lasting effects
but for 12 hours of the day former permanent human George is a man and for 12 hours he is a Blobel. He has nothing to live for until a robot psychiatrist introduces him to a beautiful woman who is really a former Blobel Spy. She is a woman 18 hours of the day and a Blobel the other 6.

Asimov's "Founding Fathers" was a short story Asimov wrote as a commission. It was based on a drawing Horrace Gold gave him of that month's cover and told him to make a story around this.

The story concerns shipwrecked astronauts trying to survive on a planet with a nitrogen-carbon dioxide-ammonia based atmosphere. It's an interesting idea and made me think of another strange atmosphere story, Clement's "Mission of Gravity" where the aliens floated their ship on a methane sea.

Going Down Smooth by Robert Silverberg is a great little story about an AI computer used as a therapist that begins to become as crazy as its patients.

"All the Myriad Ways" by Larry Niven is kind of a satirical review of the absurdity of the theory that there are an infinite number of dimensions where your every action and decision are played out with similar or different results.

I thought it was neat that someone called a rich guy committing suicide, "pulling a Richard Cory" because I know and like the Simon and Garfunkel song.

The Holes Around Mars by Jerome Bixby (Spoilers) was supposed to just be a fun little story full of puns, but it was kind of interesting scientifically too, even if the science in it is impossible. In the story astronauts discover a tiny, but extremely dense moon that travels around the surface of Mars and cuts through anything in its path even several miles of solid rock.

"The Gift of Garigolli" by Fred Pohl and based on notes and bits of story and dialogue by himself and C.M. Kornbluth. (spoilers) This one confused me, it's a story about a down on his luck guy and some fly sized aliens that continuously attempt to communicate with the man. The alien's perspective is shared in the form of an alien's letters to his commander. In the end the aliens turn out to be formed from chemicals in the man's garbage? Or maybe they create the organic
chemical ooze the man finds in his garbage, I couldn't tell.

And all the Stars a Stage; Childhood's End, passage Compare and Contrast

2010-03-28T20:19:00.000-07:00

Originally posted December 6, 2009

I found it absolutely fascinating that the last two novels I've read both had very similar passages in which it is purported that oral contraceptives and paternity tests will revolutionize society. Here are the two passages, after which I will do some compare and contrast.

"In particular, the pattern of sexual mores- insofar as there had ever been one pattern- had altered radically. It had been virtually shattered by two invention, which were, ironically enough, of purely human origin and owed nothing to the Overlords.

The first was a completely reliable oral contraceptive: the second was an equally infallible method- as certain as fingerprinting, and based on a very detailed analysis of the blood- of identifying the father of any child. The effect of these two inventions upon human society could only be described as devastating, and they had swept away the last remnants of the Puritan aberration." (p 73 in my copy of Childhood's End.) 1953

"The relevant technique was called sperm electrophoresis, a ridiculously simple trick to perform in glassware- and the pharmaceutical manufacturers had quickly come up with a medium, an anion or cation exchange gel, which made it equally easy to perform in situ. Its purpose was sex determination of the child at conception….

Had it not been Selektrojel, it would have been something else. That had appeared almost simultaneously with another dangerous triumph of the pharmaceutical research laboratories: a cheap, simple, safe, foolproof oral contraceptive. This, couples with the fact that venereal disease had disappeared (as a natural consequence of the virtually complete conquest of infectious
disease by chemotherapy, immunology, and universal sanitation), might easily have destroyed the immemorial family system entirely, by making sexual relations so free of any unwanted consequence that they could hardly seem worth the price of a lifetime contract, especially to the innately roving-eyed- male. "In fact," one of the leading doctors of the time had remarked in an immortal burst of unconscious humor, "venereal disease is now almost as pleasant to cure as it is
to catch.") Legal protection could still be afforded the woman afflicted with an accident of impulse, since modern genetics made it possible to determine the parents of any child ninety-nine times out of a hundred by blood tests alone." (6-8 in my copy of And All the Stars a Stage) 1960 or 1971

As I stated in my review of Childhood's End: "We of course have both of these technologies. "The Pill" came out in the 60s and it about 99% effective if properly used. I'd call that reliable. And DNA testing first reported in 1985 can offer definitive paternal proof.

So did these two discoveries change sexual mores, absolutely without the pill there would have been no free love movement in the 60s and DNA testing in paternity cases can be really important. On a lighter note, I've heard that on "the Montel Show" "you are not the father" is practically his catchphrase. However, have these discovers lead to an end to the "Puritan aberration?" Not so far. Not as long as the bible belt pushes abstinence only programs, television
networks get sued for showing a nipple on television for 3 seconds, and every day it seems like from the way people talk about abortion, it was outlawed instead of legally protected in the Roe vs. Wade judgment. So in my opinion, the sexual mores of today may be different than those of the 50s, but we still have a long way to go."

And as Bill so brilliantly stated more so than the two changes purported in Childhood's End it was the more seemingly mundane change of woman joining the work force that truly revolutionized modern sexual mores. For the first time woman did not necessarily have to get married in order to have children. Today with artificial insemination a guy doesn't even have to be involved, but that's getting off topic.

The Blish passage brings up some new and interesting ideas. And by interesting I mean crazy. The idea that "venereal diseases disappeared as a natural consequence of the virtually complete conquest of infectious disease by chemotherapy, immunology, and universal sanitation." Okay, lets pick this apart one at a time. The conquest of infectious disease by chemotherapy, I'm guessing that Blish is using the word chemotherapy to mean antibiotics not its modern usage as a cancer medicine. The story originally appeared in 1960 in "an abridged form" and the novel in 1971. Chemotherapy had a major breakthrough and first started to be used for cancer in the mid 60's.

Okay, "the virtually complete conquest of infectious disease by [antibiotics]" at least makes sense as an idea. I can't help but still consider it naive through no fault of Blish's though. When he wrote this book, no one yet experienced the ultimate venereal disease AIDS.

I have nothing to add about immunology, but universal sanitation just makes me laugh. Yes, third word countries have problems with diseases that first world countries don't because of sanitation issues, but America's sanitation is great but our population does still get venereal diseases. Not as much as third world countries, but it is probably sex education and medicine that helps us fight STDs.

Okay then looking at the passage as a whole he is saying that four things, the power to pick the sex of a baby, an effective oral contraceptive, the conquest of venereal diseases, and an accurate paternity test, resulted in the destruction of the whole ideas of marriage and monogamy. Now that just makes no sense to me. The ideas of monogamy had been ingrained into the human psyche seemingly since the days of cave man and certainly since biblical times. I don't see a couple of inventions changing this. Men, as the novel states have had "Roving eyes" for generations, but most men still seem to settle down with one partner because there is something innately special about such an arrangement. I would even concede that polygamist relationships are still the same thing because the man or men are committed to the woman or women in a way equal to a single marriage.

That said despite Blish's statement about the end of families this world does seem to find a different definition of family. The popularity of being able to pick the favored male babies results in there being lots of men and a lot less women. Suddenly due to the laws of supply and demand woman are the greater commodity and find themselves taking over society and the government. It seems that they keep this power by continuing the trend of flooding the market with men rather than correcting the population ratio which would theoretically lessen their power. However, there are still families a single woman has many husbands, but they are still a family unit.

I actually think that the scenario Blish has unfolded seems possible.

Perhaps the present day model of China can serve as an example. There male babies are preferred and that coupled with their governmental controlling of the birth rate result in, "according to a report by the State Population and Family Planning Commission, there will be 30 million more men than women in 2020, potentially leading to social instability." 1

Only time will tell whether this leads to woman gaining more power in Chinese
society as a result of their scarcity.

So anyway, what do you all think about these changes to the social makeup of society. It seems that picking the gender of a baby is now scientifically possible through a form of in vitro fertilization, but it is not yet cost effective for the majority of the population. If and when it becomes more common what long-term effects do you think it will have on society?

Also, does anyone else think it's weird that two authors wrote such similar passages?

Links
Original post at Classic Science Fiction Message Board
Review of Childhood's End

Thoughts on "The Door into Summer"

2010-03-28T20:07:00.000-07:00

Originally posted Feb 20, 2010
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClassicScienceFiction/message/17538

When I finished "The Door into Summer" and found it had a
time-travel-into-the-past-twist and a May-Dec Romance twist at the end, I couldn't help but think of the Heinlein book we read last year "Farnham's Freehold," which also had these same plot points. Maybe some of you are still trying to forget that one. As I recall, it left a bad taste in some member's mouths.

I went back and looked at some of out posts from when we read that book and they weren't quite as negative as I remembered. Some people, myself included, enjoyed
"Freehold," but it was kind of an ugly novel exploring the consequences of nuclear war, and the horror of cannibalism, and it featured lots of unlikable characters.

"Door Into Summer," by comparison seems bright and cheery. In theory, it is primarily about the engineering of robots that would help women around the house. It's also about time travel, cats, the future of civilization, and
betrayal.

I thoroughly enjoyed the narrative style, it was kind of light and easy to read, it doesn't challenge the reader to understand technical aspects of robotic engineering though that is the narrator's (D.B. Davis) job. Perhaps this lack of more hard science bothered some readers? Instead the novel focused more on Davis' humanity, his relationship with his cat, his relationship with his
business partners (Miles and Belle), and his relationship with Miles' "daughter" Ricky.

(Side note: I told my wife about the novel, especially all the cat stuff, because we have a cat, and she commented that Heinlein captured the human/cat relationship so well that must have been a cat-person himself).

The novel is, in a way, timeless since it explored a future (1970) where robotic technology was exploding; a time that has not yet come to be. Then it explores a further future (2000) where man had begun to explore the solar system. While reading the novel it really bothered me that Heinlein picked the close years of 1970 and 200. Why didn't he choose 2300 or 2XXX. But upon reflection, I decided that the close year must have been a sort of optimism that civilization was
going to go through great changes quickly or maybe he didn't think anyone would still be reading his novels after the turn of the century.

What did you all think about the significance of the years?

Bill talked about the casualness of references to nuclear war bothering him. This didn't bother me; mostly because it was so in the background I hardly noticed it. Also, after reading Bill's post I thought that leaving it in the background just kind of fit. As I said before, the novel was written in a very intimate sort of narrative voice. It explored Davis' character and his life and interpersonal relationships. It explored the differences between 1970 and 2000, but only anecdotally. So, I felt it fit that there were questions sort of left unanswered about the "6 Weeks War."

Imagine someone in another reality writing a sci-fi novel about our reality. Would Sept. 11 be mentioned? Maybe, but only if it was important to the story, perhaps it would only be mentioned in passing. Certainly the nuclear war hinted to in this novel which caused Denver to become the US's capital had a bigger impact than 9/11, but I think the analogy works.

Now, I want to talk about the ending. Specifically, Davis pining for and marrying a girl he'd only known till she was 11. Doug talked about having met "old souls" in real life. I know the concept fairly well because I've always been kind of an "old soul" myself. I had older siblings growing up and I've always been pretty smart, so, growing up, I was often more comfortable with older kids or adults, more so than I was with kids my own age.

Anyway, Mary Beth thought the end of "Door Into Summer" was a sort of romantic fairy tale ending, but I found it to be downright creepy. I was fine with this plot-thread until the end. Remembering "Freehold" and the relationship between that story's protagonist and the much younger Barbara, I was worried where this story was headed when Ricky's character was first introduced. But for the bulk of the novel Davis' love for Ricky seemed to be platonic or fatherly. I thought, in the future Davis was searching for Ricky as a friend, a link to his past, not
a lover. Though maybe I failed to read between the lines since Davis gives up the moment he finds out she's married.

In my opinion, Davis falls in love with an idea. The idea of him finding Ricky and living happily-ever-after keeps him going when he is thrust into a future where he doesn't belong. But, how can you fall in love with an abstract idea? The Ricky who emerges from cold sleep is not an 11-year-old girl, but a 21-year-old woman Davis has never met.

I always feel like the man I am today bears little resemblance to the man I was 8 years ago when I was 18. Maybe I'm closer to that version of John than I think, but one thing is for sure, 10 years can be a long time.

Personally, I think the novel would have made more sense if Davis had met Ricky in 2000 and fallen in love with her. Given the time-loop quality of the novel, she would have been already married to Davis' future self, but she could have played coy and implied she was married to someone else. Thiscould have been the event that caused Davis to visit Denver and Dr. Twitchell. Or when Davis tracked Ricky down he could have met his future self. It would have spoiled the ending, but it would have been an interesting meeting. The same scenario I just
described happened in the Red Dwarf episode "Stasis Leak," one of the best of the series.

Either of these would have made the ending less "creepy" and more realistic, but maybe I'm just not a "romantic," as I wouldn't fall in love with a person I'd never met or talked to as an adult.

What do you think was Heinlein's thought process: Was he a romantic, was he making a statement about pedophilia or was it all incidental because he just wanted an interesting time-travel-twist ending?

Or I'll ask the same question in a different way: Why didn't Heinlein have Davis meet Ricky in 2000? Was it to maintain tension in the story or was it supposed to be romantic?

Thoughts on "The Naked Sun"

2010-03-28T19:59:00.000-07:00

The Naked Sun
Originally Posted March 24, 2010
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClassicScienceFiction/message/17763

I was a bit disappointed that there was little interplay between Baley and Daneel. It's been about a year since I read the first book, but the way I remember it in "Caves of Steel" Baley was worried about Daneel solving the case before he could. Every clue Daneel recognized was suspenseful, here is a walking computer, limitless amounts of knowledge and all Baley has going for himself is human intuition.

However, in this book, there is never a doubt that Baley is in control and Daneel is the one that is outclassed. There is never a doubt that despite Daneel's knowledge he could never hope to outthink a human.

Like others said this is basically a sociology book with a plot. First there are the Solarians who have made eschewing human contact a way of life. It was fascinating to read about the way they were raising children. The children wanted to play together when they were younger, but the Solarians slowly forced it out of them, isolating them more and more all their lives. The Solarian scientists purport that this need for contact would be slowly breed out of them. To any sensible Earthling this is of course complete hogwash, but it is fascinating to imagine a world where everyone has been given the same phobias. I liked that there was one woman, Gladia, that rejected the indoctrination. She still craved human contact even though they had tried to force it out of her during her childhood. It reminded me of the topsy turvy
realities explored in classic Twilight Zone episodes.

The other interesting bit of sociology was first introduced by the lone sociologist on Solaria. He says that theirs is the first civilization where humans are all on even terms and have nothing to do but enjoy themselves because robots replace the working class. The unexpected result of this is that the people of Solaria lose the human drive, since all of their needs are met they stagnant instead of striving and becoming stronger due to hardship.

I really like how despite spacer's best efforts to build safe machines even positronic-brained robots can unknowingly break their three laws. I did however come up with an easy solution to the problem presented in this book. If two robots are being given orders that seem benign on there own but are deadly when combined the solution is to have a central positronic-brain imbedded into the house that does nothing but monitor the house and watch all the robots for just such happenings and when it begins to see one it can shut robots down by remote control or alter their orders.

Even though I read the final Foundation book, I don't think the idea of a Spacer/Earther conflict every really sunk in, it's a shame Asimov never wrote a book devoted to the conflict. He just showed the effects in the final Foundation book. I'll need to go back and re-read that because I didn't know the significance of the worlds they were visiting in "Foundation and Earth" because I'd never read this book.

It strikes me that Asimov seemed to spend all of the 80s putting a button onto his classic works, linking them together, explaining things left unexplained. He always made sure they were good stories by themselves too though.