Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 60

We watched an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from Netflix this evening, called “Paradise.” Sisko and O’Brien 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. “Fortunately” they had someone who was an expert in low-tech living, and so they’ve built a small community there.

And they keep coming back to that word, “community,” even though by “community” they basically mean “what Alixus wants us to do.” It becomes clear that they follow her with cult-like devotion, such that if she merely suggests something — say, that one of the villagers seduce Sisko to make him feel more welcome — they’ll 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, O’Brien shuts down the field and exposes the fact that their “community” 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 it’s amply clear that she doesn’t actually care about the people in the community, just that it follows a form that proves her right.

But aside from one person saying “You lied to us!” no one objects. And they all stay, because this is their home, and they’ve formed a community, and because, Alixus claims, they’ve discovered their “true identities” instead of being stuck in a high-tech society’s pre-defined roles.

Of course, it would have been more effective if they’d shown some of this self-discovery, rather than that they’d 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 doesn’t show a tight-knit, thriving community, but a bunch of followers who have just lost their leader. “Fortunately” 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. Martin’s 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. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Greg Keyes’ Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, Robert Jordan’s 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 didn’t pick up the first book until sometime last November.

And I just couldn’t get into it. The characters I found most interesting seemed to get the least attention. Of those, one character’s chapters were difficult to read because she’s 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 I’m sure it’s a matter of morally gray=interesting, it’s basically “Kingdom of A—holes” (maybe not as poetic as “The Knights Who Say F—” but more accurate, at least for the first book). The only adult character who isn’t morally gray or worse is so stuck on honor that he can’t handle the compromises necessary in politics. So it’s not so much a question of who’s the best choice to be in charge, as who’s 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, there’s 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. “Winter is coming” 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 can’t 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 it’s kind of like some of the later Wheel of Time books in terms of sheer detail and trudgery. Except those have the advantage that you’ve probably read the earlier ones, which were quite good. (I’ve 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, I’d probably be inclined to just leave it there, but I might actually pick up the second book at this point.

Just not now.

Robert J. Sawyer’s 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 survivors’ 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 characters’ 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 it’s worth going through with a marriage he knows won’t last. Theo is consumed with preemptively solving his own murder.

There’s a great bit in which a stand-in for the Amazing Randi declares on international television that the future isn’t 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 changed…which 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 thousands’ of people’s 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 Wilson’s 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 Isn’t 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 Sawyer’s 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 didn’t anticipate that newsgroups would be virtually gone; that countries without anti-spam laws would be havens for spammers, but didn’t 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. (I’m 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.

So, volume 3 of Heroes, “Villains,” is done. I liked the start of the season, but by the end it had gotten to the point where I was alternately ready to jump for joy and throw things at the screen in the space of the same episode.

I love the parts with Hiro, Ando, Daphne and Matt (except when Matt’s overdoing the “I saw you in the future and we’re in love!” bit). If they could make that into a show, I’d have no complaints. But the rest has slowly gotten bogged down in a mix of technobabble, melodrama, and an endless face-heel revolving door. “I’m evil!” “No, you’re good, I’m the one who’s evil!” “Wait, I thought it was my turn!”

Some specific comments, with spoilers, after the cut:

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SPOILERS!

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The woobification of Sylar. I realize they felt they had to do something to keep him around for the fan base, and they couldn’t keep him as the big bad after volume 1 finished, so he spent volume 2 powerless and volume 3 trying to figure out whether he was good or evil. And had an epiphany while he was powerless. You know, the way he was all last season? But that’s okay, it’s still not really his fault. He has The Hunger, you see, and really it’s all Bennet’s fault. Everything’s HRG’s fault! And Elle’s. Not poor little Gabriel’s fault, no! 🙄

Someone please tell me that either Claire or Noah — or heck, even Angela — stuffed garlic in his mouth and cut off his head before they left. Which reminds me, I have a hard time getting worked up over a pyrokinetic being trapped in a burning building. Especially one who has a history of escaping from a fire that “no one could possibly survive.” I expect she’ll show up somewhere in volume 4 to be used as leverage against Claire, and everyone will be so shocked to see her alive…except the audience.

While we’re at it, have we ever seen any indication that Meredith’s flame powers were involuntary, as in they would manifest while she was, say, unconscious? Noah could have asked her to aim her hands at the wall, then knocked her out with the butt of his gun, and they could have had plenty of oxygen while her system metabolized the adrenaline. And later, they could have gotten her out of the building without burning it down. With Peter, Mohinder, Nathan, or Matt, you kind of expect them to be carrying the idiot ball at times like this, but Bennet’s always been shown to be one of the few characters on the show with some consistent brains.

By the time Hiro was trying to steal the formula in the past, I was actually hoping that they were going to prevent the whole season from having happened, and normally I hate when stories do that.

Unfortunately it looks like volume 4, “Fugitives,” is going to be the kind of super-hero story that always annoys me, whether it’s well-told or not: the one in which the general populace turns against the heroes and either rounds them up or runs them out of town. (I guess there’s a reason I was never much of an X-Men fan.)

*sigh*

Holding out for Volume 5. Or the adventures of Hiro, Daphne, Ando and Matt in the Cretaceous.

I’d never stayed there before, but it’s highly sought-after among attendees at Comic-Con because it’s right across the street from the convention center.

The rooms and view are very nice. The staff is very helpful. The person arranging everything had set us up with late checkout, and I couldn’t remember what time it had been set for, but when I called, they just asked me what time I needed. Amenities are quite nice: there’s a DVD player, a well-stocked minibar fridge, a safe in the room, even a spare ethernet cable in case you forgot yours.

But there are some things that just don’t make sense. For instance: The bathrooms have no towel racks, so you have to set your hand towel in a clump on one of the shelves, where it won’t get dry. And the bathrooms have wooden blinds which can be opened to let in light — but they don’t close tightly enough to muffle sound.