Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 65

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:

.

SPOILERS!

.

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.

Austin Grossman’s novel Soon I Will Be Invincible is a fun romp through every super-hero cliché ever invented over the history of the genre. Time-travel, cyborgs, telepaths, aliens, evil geniuses, legacy heroes, secret identities, heroes going bad, villains turning good — everything. It’s an affectionate, tongue-in-cheek parody of the tights-and-flights set.

The book is narrated in alternate chapters by Dr. Impossible, a mad scientist who has held the world in his grasp a dozen times, only to be defeated by his arch-nemesis CoreFire — whom he inadvertently created — and by Fatale (as in “Femme”), a small-time cyborg hero who has just been invited to join the world’s premiere super-team, the Champions.

The book opens with Dr. Impossible still in prison, a situation that’s taken care of within the first few chapters. The world’s greatest hero CoreFire is missing, and the Champions, disbanded for nearly a decade after the death of one of their own, have re-gathered to find him. Their number one suspect: Dr. Impossible. Once he escapes, it becomes a race between him and the heroes: will he build his next doomsday device before they capture him? And where is CoreFire?

Dr. Impossible’s megalomaniacal nature (he suffers from “Malign Hypercognition Disorder,” the clinical diagnosis given most evil geniuses) suffuses every sentence as he dwells on his tortured past and schemes to take over the world. By the end of the book, he’s monologued his entire origin, down to the day his eighth grade guidance counselor told him he was a genius, and taken us on a tour of the underworld from its greatest peak to its most pathetic.

Fatale, despite being a high-tech super-soldier who can never live a normal life, comes off as the closest the book has to an ordinary person. She’s still an outsider in the upper echelons, and her loneliness is a constant presence in her chapters. She knows her new colleagues mainly from television, from news footage of their battles and from their celebrity endorsements. (One fundraises for Amnesty International. Another has her own line of beauty products.) While much of Dr. Impossible’s narration consists of flashbacks in which he tells the reader what he already knows, Fatale is entrenched firmly in the present, learning as she goes and relaying her experiences straight to the reader.

The Champions form a sort of dysfunctional Justice League (or is that redundant these days?), with CoreFire, Damsel and Blackwolf as the Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman equivalents. Except in this version, Wonder Woman and Batman are a divorced ex-couple, trying to work together. And Superman’s a bit of a jerk. (But then again…) The team is rounded out by man-tiger Feral, ageless Faerie warrior Elphin (who still has a mission to perform for Titania), magician Mr. Mystic (mainly in the Mandrake/Zatara mold, but with elements of Dr. Strange), teen pop idol Rainbow Triumph, and two newcomers: Fatale herself and Lily, a powerhouse from a distant, blighted future who once fought on the other side of the law. (The book’s website has a database of heroes and villains that doesn’t seem particularly spoilery at first glance.)

The book has its requisite battles, but for the most part it’s about what heroes and villains do in between the fighting: the endless investigations that go nowhere. Bickering at team meetings. Rivalries and affairs. Clandestine meetings in dive bars and abandoned buildings. Hunting for the components of a doomsday weapon. The same concerns as anyone else.

One disadvantage the book has is that it points out just why super-heroes tend to work best in a visual medium: the costumes. I only had strong images of a few of the characters, and most of them were taken from other comics. I never did figure out just what Damsel was supposed to look like, so I pictured her as Payback from True Believers. Fatale was somewhat like Liri Lee, a member of the Linear Men. CoreFire, I saw as a cross between Red Star (in his red-and-yellow outfit) and Firestorm. Without pictures, the costumes are more or less pointless, and the only reason they’re included is tradition. Small wonder that colorful tights only really came in when heroic fiction made the jump from the pulps to the comics pages.

Although Dr. Impossible does make a case for why, despite Edna Mode’s warning in The Incredibles, a villain might want a cape. It makes for a much more dramatic entrance.

A campy take on the super-hero genre, from the point of view of a D-list villain trying to make it to the big leagues.

Doctor Horrible, mad scientist (Neil Patrick Harris); Captain Hammer, the super-hero who keeps beating him up (Nathan Fillion); and the girl from the laundromat whom he’s too shy to speak with (Felicia Day).

It’s funny. It’s quirky. It’s short. It’s structured as a video blog intercut with narrative scenes. And yes, there are songs. They remind me of a cross between “Once More With Feeling” and Moulin Rouge. (Though I still get “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair” running through my head with slightly altered lyrics. “Dr. Horrible. Dr. Horrible. Telephone call for Dr. Horrible…”)

I think I liked the middle act best. The last episode doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of the first two, though there were some great bits in it, and the resolutions for Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer were fitting. There was a twist that Katie had predicted that I thought would have been really cool, but it turned out to be wrong.