I havenât seen the movie yet, but the stage version is very good. Oddly enough, while itâs narrated by one of the journalists working with Frost, and is largely told from David Frostâs point of view, itâs really Richard Nixon who ends up being the main character. Frost himself is mainly in it for the ratings (if it does well, itâll jump-start his career), but Nixon is really in it to rehabilitate his reputation â which, of course, doesnât end up happening. (âWell, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.â)
The larger-than-life presence of TV is a huge factor as well, with a bank of TV screens frequently upstaging or highlighting the interactions on stage. (For the interview sequences, they actually bring out a pair of TV cameras as if they were filming, and put that picture live onto the screen above the stage.) Iâm especially curious to see how well that aspect translates to the film version.
Quite nice, although the rooms are extremely small by modern standards â small enough that instead of an actual desk, thereâs a fold-out desk on the armchair. Thereâs also a flatscreen TV with both pay-per-view and video game rentals, and an AT&T wireless hotspot accessible from the room. The staff is nice, and the location was perfect. A decent area of town, near restaurants, 5 minutes from the Moscone Convention Center one way, 5 minutes from a BART, MUNI and cable car station the other way, and right across the street from the official (WonderCon) convention hotel.
We watched an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from Netflix this evening, called âParadise.â Sisko and OâBrien investigate signs of human life on a planet with no charted settlements, and find a village of people who have been marooned for ten years in an area where no modern technology works. âFortunatelyâ they had someone who was an expert in low-tech living, and so theyâve built a small community there.
And they keep coming back to that word, âcommunity,â even though by âcommunityâ they basically mean âwhat Alixus wants us to do.â It becomes clear that they follow her with cult-like devotion, such that if she merely suggests something â say, that one of the villagers seduce Sisko to make him feel more welcome â theyâll do it. Eventually it turns out that she not only caused their emergency landing, but created and still maintains the field that keeps anything technological shut down.
In the end, OâBrien shuts down the field and exposes the fact that their âcommunityâ only exists because Alixus wanted to prove a philosophical point. The Starfleet officers take her into custody to answer for the fact that she let people die because she blocked access to modern medicine. By this time itâs amply clear that she doesnât actually care about the people in the community, just that it follows a form that proves her right.
But aside from one person saying âYou lied to us!â no one objects. And they all stay, because this is their home, and theyâve formed a community, and because, Alixus claims, theyâve discovered their âtrue identitiesâ instead of being stuck in a high-tech societyâs pre-defined roles.
Of course, it would have been more effective if theyâd shown some of this self-discovery, rather than that theyâd simply exchanged a technological pigeonhole for an agrarian one. Or that the villagers were actually connected to one another, rather than simply that they all were willing to follow their leader.
If the episode was trying to make the point that even though their society was established under false pretenses, they actually gained something from the experience, it failed utterly. It doesnât show a tight-knit, thriving community, but a bunch of followers who have just lost their leader. âFortunatelyâ they seem to have gained a new one.
Well, it took 2½ months during which I took breaks to read at least three other books, but this weekend I finally finished the first book of George R.R. Martinâs fantasy epic, A Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones.
By all rights I should have liked this book. I frequently like big epic fantasy: J.R.R. Tolkienâs Lord of the Rings, Greg Keyesâ Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, Robert Jordanâs Wheel of Time. Actually, Wheel of Time is probably the best comparison, given the sweeping scope of the series, the number of viewpoint characters, the emphasis on political intrigue, and the length of the books.
On the other hand, no Robert Jordan book has taken me longer than a month to read.
About a year ago, a friend recommended the books to Katie, and gave her the series so far (4 books) for Christmas. It took a while before she got to them, but when she did, she tore through them in about a week. (It helped that she had the free time.) She recommended them to me, but I didnât pick up the first book until sometime last November.
And I just couldnât get into it. The characters I found most interesting seemed to get the least attention. Of those, one characterâs chapters were difficult to read because sheâs in the wrong genre: a girl of 10(?) who wants to grow up to be a warrior princess in a world that would casually kill her before she had the chance. And while Iâm sure itâs a matter of morally gray=interesting, itâs basically âKingdom of Aâholesâ (maybe not as poetic as âThe Knights Who Say Fââ but more accurate, at least for the first book). The only adult character who isnât morally gray or worse is so stuck on honor that he canât handle the compromises necessary in politics. So itâs not so much a question of whoâs the best choice to be in charge, as whoâs the least bad.
The first book is about 95% straight medieval-setting political/military drama, with hints at supernatural elements here and there. The prologue sets up an otherworldly menace that is subsequently ignored for most of the book, thereâs the occasional sword described as magic, it gradually becomes clear that the dragons are a historical fact, rather than legends (the previous king had dragon skulls mounted along the walls of the throne room) and that seasons frequently last years. âWinter is comingâ is a key phrase, and the motto of the family that provides all but two of the viewpoint characters.
After 400 pages of tedious setup establishing just how brutish, brattish, or manipulative everyone is, things start going off the rails. And boy, do they go off the rails. You know how, when reading a book, you get to a point where you figure it canât get worse? It does. Repeatedly.
About 200 pages from the end I decided I was going to make an effort to finish the book and get it out of the way. So I had a marathon reading session one Sunday, then made an effort to read during lunch over the next week, and then finally finished it over this past weekend. (For contrast, with each of the first two or three Wheel of Time books, when I got within 150 or 200 pages of the end I had to finish, even if it meant staying up until 2am on a work night.)
Actually I guess itâs kind of like some of the later Wheel of Time books in terms of sheer detail and trudgery. Except those have the advantage that youâve probably read the earlier ones, which were quite good. (Iâve often described the WoT series as 5 novels of one book each followed by one novel that spans 7 books.)
The last 50 pages or so, particularly the final chapter, are considerably more interesting. If it had stopped at 750 pages, Iâd probably be inclined to just leave it there, but I might actually pick up the second book at this point.
Robert J. Sawyerâs novel looks at what happens when, at the moment a scientific experiment begins, everyone on the planet blacks out for two minutes. For those two minutes, everyone sees through the eyes of their future selves, two decades down the line. The world is transformed: first by the millions of accidents caused as drivers, pilots and surgeons lost control of their vehicles and instruments, and second by the survivorsâ knowledge of the future.
What follows is an exploration of the nature of time, destiny and free will. Is this a glimpse of the future as it will be, or as it may be? Did the experiment cause the event, or was it a coincidence? Is foreknowledge a blessing or a curse?
Dilemmas
Flashforward is at its best when it focuses on charactersâ dilemmas. The novel centers on the personal lives of researchers at CERN, particularly the two scientists who designed the experiment: Lloyd Simcoe, a 45-year-old Canadian who is shocked to learn that his impending marriage is doomed to collapse, and Theo Procopides, a 27-year-old Greek who learns that he will be dead by the time the visions come to pass. Lloyd wrestles with his responsibility for the event and whether itâs worth going through with a marriage he knows wonât last. Theo is consumed with preemptively solving his own murder.
Thereâs a great bit in which a stand-in for the Amazing Randi declares on international television that the future isnât set, and demonstrates it by smashing a souvenir that he had seen in his vision. The viewpoint character, annoyed at what he considers an obviously inconclusive display, calls up the museum that sold it and orders a new one sent to him. Another character ponders suicide, depressed by his bleak future, but considers: if he does succeed: he will prove beyond a doubt that the future can be changedâŚwhich would mean that he could live and still avoid his fate.
Occasionally it stumbles into telling, rather than showing, as when presenting the view of the next twenty years worked out by correlating thousandsâ of peopleâs visions, or when presenting a debate at the United Nations. And it does take a strange turn at one point that reminded me of Robert Charles Wilsonâs novel, Darwinia.
Most of the book, though, is an enjoyable look at the different ways that people, organizations, and even nations might react to learning their future.
The Future Isnât What It Used to Be
This next bit has nothing to do with the quality of the book, only the timing of when I read it. It was published in 1999, but the bulk of the story takes place in April 2009. I read it in December 2008, just five months before its setting, which makes it interesting to compare Sawyerâs ten-year-old predictions to reality. Plus the Large Hadron Collider was in the news quite a bit when it went online just this past September.
He correctly predicted that the world wide web would be significant, but didnât anticipate that newsgroups would be virtually gone; that countries without anti-spam laws would be havens for spammers, but didnât anticipate that limited success at enforcement would lead to scofflaws everywhere else flooding 90% of email traffic. Characters submit a new website to hundreds of search engines, rather than focusing on the few top ones (Google was in its infancy back when this was written). Expected that Lasik surgery would make eyeglasses rare by 2009. Missed the mobile phone boom and convergence of PDAs, phones, cameras, etc. (Iâm not sure I saw anyone with a cell phone until the narrative caught up with the Flashforward itself, but then the leads all work at a high-energy particle physics lab.) Interestingly, he got the name Pope Benedict XIV correct.
Adaptation
The book was adapted to a TV series in 2009. The first episode was amazing, but the show got bogged down in missed opportunities and was canceled after only one season.
