Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I hear the reviews of Signs have been mixed, but I thought it
was scary and moving at the same time. I’d run right out there and see it if I were you, even if you’re not in the middle of yet another movie-inducing heat wave like we are here in Beantown.

Signs is a movie about faith, by and for people who have never understood or even heard Job’s wife saying, “Curse God and die.” At least, I’m assuming the producer/writer/director is not personally acquainted with the theological vices; I prefer to think of Signs as an amazingly successful outsider’s view of faith, rather than an amazing approachable insider’s perspective. Either way, it was so clean - nothing wasted, nothing extra - that I was blown away.

Oh, yeah, and there were aliens and crop circles and the best use ever of a television test pattern. You’ll have to see it yourself to find out whether mankind goes off the air permanently. I’ve said too much already.

The date inflation at Analog never ceases to amaze me. I’m over a month behind on this one, but the date on the cover is September 2002. Anyway, my favorite story this time was “Protocol” by Timothy Zahn. It’s listed as a novelette; I would have called it a short story. The aliens were appropriately alien.

Promised Land was an experiment for me, and one that failed. If I had to guess, I’d say Connie Willis was the co- and Cynthia Felice was the author of this sci-fi/romance crossover. The romance side won. Nothing significant would be changed by transporting all the characters and plot events to the Wild West: the city girl returning to the family farm, the quiet but dependable cowpoke boy, the devilish rake, the flirt with a heart of gold, etc. Down to details of canning fruit, sewing sleeves and prairie fires, it’s a Western, not a sci-fi novel. The natives are fire-monkeys rather than Apaches; only the city girl’s alien pet is necessary to the plot, and you can see that resolution coming from three territories away.

Yes, I was warned by the back cover, but when I think of “an all-new novel that is not just sweeping science fiction, but an engaging romantic story as well” I think Shards of Honor. I don’t think Harlequin Romances set in space. There are genres and there are genres. Romance is one that drops anvils on your head every chapter or so. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch! The plot turns on the heroine’s slow, explicit, and stereotypical realization that the hero is her One True Love and not the neanderthal she thought. On the side, her guilt for flirting with the local Lothario dawns upon her - and I never even noticed she was flirting with him.

I don’t object to romance conventions per se, not even ones like the flirting issue that I just don’t grok. I firmly believe in a woman’s right to write off her education and spend the rest of her life on a farm pickling vegetables, baking compotes and reproducing. But that’s not science fiction. The genre is more than a sprinkling of spaceships and cute alien pets - there is a kind of story that is a sci-fi story and Promised Land isn’t that kind.

On the other hand, “K19: The Widowmaker” had a sci-fi plot, even though it was set in the past. I couldn’t help thinking of Spock in “The Wrath of Khan” when the sailors braved the reactor chamber. I’m not saying K19 was a great movie (Liam Neeson aside), but it was about the science. You could transport all the characters and plot events to a spaceship, and nothing significant would be changed.

I didn’t expect much from Men in Black II, so I enjoyed it. It’s a bit short, like a plot twist has been left out, and it’s the little things that make the movie. If a string of jokes, cute aliens, inhabited lockers, ugly aliens and touching moments a movie makes, it’s a movie.

If a string of thousand-year flashbacks, alien flybys, feeble digs at religion, pointless childhood flashbacks and spontaneous technical setbacks a novel makes, then The Fountains of Paradise deserves its Hugo and Nebula awards.

Plotlessness and lack of characterization can be excused if the technology is flashy enough, but I found Kim Stanley Robinson did the space elevator thing better. Whatever his flaws (including rehashing material from older novels like this one), at least KSR put in the word count. The Fountains of Paradise, on the other hand, read more like excerpts from a novel than a novel.

None of these were science fiction, but they still made me think about The Genre. Sense and Sensibility goes on for chapters and chapters with straight dialogue - I still feel a little displaced, days afterwards. The lack of description gave me the same feeling that most first-person stories do - I feel like I’m floating along a stream of consciousness, or in this case, a stream of dialogue.

The other thing that never ceases to surprise me when I read Sense and Sensibility is Lucy. She’s so bad. I invariably remember her as a stupid and possibly jealous girl; I forget that a significant portion of the dialogue is devoted to the verbal sparring of innocent Elinor and guilty Lucy. The trick of my memory seems to be the after-the-fact version of getting disappointed by the direction a novel takes (as with The Hemingway Hoax). I’m subconsciously rewriting Lucy in my mind.

Why do I want Lucy to be nicer, or at least stupider? I suppose I want the additional complication of Elinor’s doubt. As it stands, Elinor knows Edward loves her, not Lucy. While this is a suitable plot for the period, it is not the Form of the Love Story. Everyone knows that in a love story, the lovers must doubt one another’s love. (Edward doesn’t doubt Elinor, either.) I suppose it would at cross-purposes with the whole Sense vs. Sensibility theme for Elinor’s to be a love story proper, as it would be for Marianne’s to be a tale of endurance of misfortune. But give me a couple of years, and I’ll remember it as a love story again.

Sarah is the first of Orson Scott Card’s Women of Genesis series. I read it out of curiosity - I couldn’t appreciate the scriptural substrate of The Memory of Earth, so I thought I’d see how he treated the matriarch. The most interesting bits for me were the unfamiliar ones; judging from the afterword, those were lifted from Mormon scripture. The end, at the traditional time of Sarah’s death but without the death or the catalyst thereof, was perhaps the most interesting plot choice of the novel. I guess it’s the “hook” for the next novel - does Isaac live or die? (Resurrection always being an option, this is an open question.)

I’m not recommending Sarah, because it’s part of a genre that very few people care for - the epic novel. Someone out there was blogging about the epic and the novel - pardon me for forgetting who. It’s not a marriage that often works out. I suspect that the epic factor is what people who don’t like LotR don’t like about it. (For the epic without the novel, try the Silmarillion. For the epic novel without any redeeming literary merit, try The Eye of Argon.)

Taking the matriarchs and keeping them biblical in their virtues is not, I strongly suspect, the way to win over readers who don’t worry like Sarah about whether or not they still believe in Asherah. Card cannot humanize Sarah the way he does, say, Hagar, and so, just like in Milton, the rebel is the most sympathetic character. Better to reign in hell and all that.

Does this mean one has to be a hero to read an epic, or a saint to read Latter Day Orson Scott Card? No, not exactly - but one has to believe in heroism, or saintliness, at least for the duration. If the disbelief is strong, it will be hard to suspend, as a certain movie showed me recently.

Veronica, her roommate and I saw Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure back when it was playing in the Omni Theater at the Museum of Science. For those unfamiliar with the Shackleton Expedition, it was a failed attempt to cross Antarctica by dogsled in 1914. It was, in fact, one of the most stunning failures known to man.

This was how Shackleton advertised for his crew:

The Endurance was trapped in ice for ten months, then crushed in a thaw. The crew camped on ice floes for the next five months, until they melted, and then set sail in their liferafts. They ended up trapped on Elephant Island - just a big rock, really - for another six months. Shackleton himself set off with five men for South Georgia Island, spending seventeen days on the open sea in a lifeboat, and then landing on the wrong side and having to hike over impassable mountains to the whaler’s town on the other side. And they made it, and every last man of them survived. (Let’s not discuss the dogs, eh?)

There are a couple of reactions one can have to a story like this - I’ll call them the Epic and the Non-Epic. The epic reaction is to be blown over by the sheer heroicism of a crew who survived 21 months in the Antarctic, doing the impossible not just once but over and over again - to be proud you’re of the same species as Sir Ernest Shackleton. If you’re a writer, there’s a side of wanting to write a story like this one, on some cold moon somewhere. The non-epic reaction is to berate Shackleton for trying to cross Antarctica in the first place - “because it’s there” is not sufficient cause for non-epic types. I won’t embarrass Veronica by saying which she chose, but that she’s never finished LotR is a significant clue.

Send in the Clones…

Lori links Salon’s review of Attack of the Clones, saying someone’s getting too deep about a shallow movie. I don’t know when demands for more on-screen rolls in the hay became intellectual - probably back when virginity became an unnatural affliction with which teens are “stricken” rather than born. Such revealing counterfactual preconceptions are scattered throughout the article. Anakin wasn’t “grim”, he was whiny. Padme wasn’t grim either; she played it cool until she decided she was going to die anyway and she might as well kiss the boy.

The reviewer gives away his ignorance when he talks about millions of cloned Boba Fetts being “gloated over” by the producer. They weren’t exactly the Ewoks, Mr. Thomson. He claims it’s never explained why the happy couple can’t just go roll in the hay, when it was actually made quite clear that Jedi don’t do the wild thing.

But what I find disturbing about this review is that it would fit any story in which two people fall in love on screen and manage to get married in the final scene, all without taking parts A and B out for a test drive. This is a criticism that could be made of Episode 2, or of Jane Austen for that matter, sight-unseen - which is to say, it’s not criticism at all. It is a statement of faith that it’s impossible to tell a love story; it is pure disbelief in romance.

Lori distracted me from what I was planning to say, so I have to back up a bit now, to Sunday night. I never meant to be trendy enough to see Episode 2 on it’s big premiere weekend. Dr. Deb and I had decided to watch the X-Files finale for old times’ sake. We used to watch XF when it was all about the fat-sucking vampires, sewer-dwelling fluke-men and UST. We went on strike when Mulder disappeared; in our minds it’s still the cult-classic of third season, when the occasional mytharc episode could be ignored as just so much inane prattle about smallpox and bees.

Imagine our disappointment when the finale turned out to be all mytharc, all the time, in a little locked room. Dr. Deb didn’t know about the Suddenly and Dramatically Resolved Sexual Tension, and I didn’t know Scully had given up Mulder’s spooky love-child - for adoption, I presume. That was the least of my problems with the new Puffy Scully. Who was that weepy woman, and what has she done with my calm and rational scientist-in-flats?

As for the episode itself, it was dreck on the level of the worst maudlin angstfic. Skinner and the prosecution posturing at each other with Scully telling-not-showing on the witness stand hardly makes for a plot, never mind a two-hour finale. So forty minutes into our abject horror and suffering, I suggested to Dr. Deb that we blow the joint and go catch Attack of the Clones instead. We made the 9:30 show, which was as man-heavy as a physics conference. “At least there are no children,” I said, little suspecting how the excess of males would contribute to later events.

After the tragedy of the mytharc, we were in the mood to be pleased. Dr. Deb made nominal protests against Jar-Jar, but when he brought an end to a thousand years of peace in the Republic, we were sufficiently avenged upon the animated pest. Jar-Jar didn’t start the trouble; Anakin Skywhiner, heir and forebear of Luke Skywhiner, did it when he confessed his undying (and extremely painful) love for Padme Clotheshorse. This was too much for the heavily-macho audience; they laughed. (Don’t tell George, eh?) I’ve seen audiences laugh at the wrong bits of movies before, but never with quite so much justification. Giggling continued on and off until the combined fashion show/love affair was interrupted by the Shmi incident and subsequent “rescue” of Obi Wan.

Let me pause to Be Like Liz here, and praise Obi Wan. He’s such the dashing hero - noble, intelligent, and forceful (sorry). I loved all his scenes, especially the ones bluffing his way through the clone factory. The poor dude was saddled with his Young Padwhine Anakin by his dying Jedi master in a massive guilt trip last movie, but does he bitch and moan about it all through this one? No. Does he complain that having a clueless idiot for an apprentice is holding him back? No. Obi Wan is a real Jedi.

Despite the audience’s impromptu laugh track, I enjoyed the follies of the One Fated to Restore Petulance to the Force. Just watching him bumble his way through the movie brought up rare questions of good and evil. When he stares at Padme that way, is he just moon-eyeing her, or is he manipulating her? Does he stop and think before his little starter-kit genocide, or was he only beserking when he killed not just the things, but their wo-things and child-things? And when he blames Obi-Wan afterwards, does he really mean it? (I think he does.)

Is the soul of evil, then, blaming others for what is your own or no one’s fault? Or is it wanting to force people to be good, or wanting the power to do so? Is it wanting to be a Jedi and get the girl, too? (Padme deserves some share of the blame for getting involved with Jedi-boy, but who can help kissing the boy when your timeline is about to dead-end gladiator-style?)

Yes, I’m reading all this into the movie because I know Jedi-boy is scheduled to do an interstellar Evil Willow in the next ep, but if I’d lived under a rock for the past few decades and walked into the movie blind, I would still have loved it. You see, I’m constitutionally unable to resist a secret wedding - I’ve written at least six of them, and I have a bad habit of keeping the wedding secret from the bride and groom themselves. It’s more than just the wedding, though; the whole self-destructive, “we’ll be living a lie and it will destroy us,” star-crossed romance is just lovely in a live-fast, rule-Naboo-young kind of way. It doesn’t matter that Lucas wrote it badly enough that the audience laughed, because he still wrote it and it’s still floating around in my head teasing the muse with ideas of love as suicide, love as greed, love as irresistible as the dark side, and the fundamental tragedy of the good.

Which brings us to the last deep theme of this laughable piece of fluff: that the Evil Overlords have a plan that’s coming together, while the Jedi Knights are falling apart. They are blind to the Sith they’ve elected provisional Emperor, blind to the clone plant cranking out Boba Fetts for the past ten years, blind to the fact that “balance” is the last thing they should want restored to the Force after a thousand years of peace, blind to their pretty-boy messiah practicing genocide and marrying a Senator, blind to the truth of the war, which is both sides against the Jedi - blind and self-defeating.

There’s nothing in the world like a good old-fashioned tragedy, unless it’s good old-fashioned badly-written science fiction into the gaps of which you unconsciously read the story you would have written, if you had millions to blow on your own personal space opera. Fanfiction, by the by, is the act of writing the shadow-story down.

  Puppy:  off
  Word of the day:  incitement

This time I have an excuse - I’ve been too ill to blog. I have been racking up the books, however, and my sister gave me a nice stack of LMB for my birthday. I’m far enough behind, however, that I’ll have to drag out the puppy tomorrow and dictate. For now, though, let me make a note on seeing The Lord of the Rings. Today I finished rereading The Fellowship of the Ring to clean my brain out after the movie. The scenery was wonderful, and the choices of what to cut from the book were not bad choices. However, the choices to rewrite the dialogue, plot and characters were all bad choices - too many to name, but all of them poor indeed. Let me clue the producer in: You’re not J.R.R. Tolkien. You’re not even Christopher Tolkien.

If I had to pick the biggest nit, it wouldn’t be the fifty Ring-shots. It wouldn’t be Arwen oozing elfish essence into Frodo. It wouldn’t even be Aragorn the Slacker. It would be, strangely enough, Frodo moaning glassy-eyed in pain from the moment he’s stabbed by the Ringwraiths until he wakes up in Rivendell. In the book, Frodo took it like a hobbit, and formed complete sentences all the way to the Ford.

Still, the scenery was nice.

  Puppy:  off
  Word of the day:  occult

Now that was neglecting the brog. I saw the Harry Potter movie when it came out, and read the book afterwards to check for accuracy. Someone asked what age the books were intended for. Thirty, I’d say - I see people reading them on the T nowadays about as often as I see people reading Ayn Rand. (There are no other patterns.) Ayn Rand is very, very popular, but nobody admits it.

Back to the movie. It looked like it cost a fortune; I wonder what’s left to the imagination after a show like that. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was addictive, but when I finally put it down, I realized it wasn’t The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by any stretch of the imagination. There was something amoral about it, something like what David Brin talks about in his Salon article about Star Wars. (Snagged that link from a blog…) Harry Potter, like all the Skywalker children, was born into the right family. The foundling-king is an old, old story, but Grimm had morals. Harry Potter needs a good moral, besides don’t stare in the mirror too long.

But it was a good book.