Divisions and Precisions

Fairy tale set in the mining country in the west. Seems cartoonish to me on every level--character, plot, setting. Which should be appropriate for a mashup of fairy tale and western tall tale, but the humor and wonder that go with these styles has been drained out. All that's left is heavy-handed message of how women are oppressed, and there is no escape; the wicked witch will follow you until you die.

I am perhaps too sensitive to the difference between being told and being shown. If the author works up to their message using small steps, each of which feels real (not necessarily in a literal sense) then I am convinced. Sometimes, however, the story is more like an "appeal to authority," where the author invents something and says Look how the world is. It can be harder to see this happening if you already agree strongly with the author.

I noticed one detail that I would expect 99 out of a hundred readers to miss. Springtime in the 19th century Montana wilderness was represented by tulips and blackberries, which happen to be a Mediterranean plant and an Asian plant. And blackberries are mostly noticeable when they fruit at the end of the summer. Not particularly important, but an example of how the details in the narrative try to add a sense of realism, but come across as paper cutouts glued onto the surface.

Sounds like a joke: An interstellar army intelligence officer, a giant alien praying mantis, and an agnostic chaplain's assistant walk into an escape pod...

In the end, a divine miracle causes the alien queen to go against her race's centuries-long policy of destroying all other races they come in contact with. This is wrapped in a layer of plausible deniability by the author, but is clearly the point of the story. Unfortunately, across millennia of human conquest, no genocidal invasion has been stopped because of the spiritual richness of the doomed civilization intrigues the invaders. "Let's make friends and stop this war" works for children's stories where "war" is a stand-in for fighting on the playground.

The story is well written, and there are enough different layers to motivations to make it interesting, but in the end, the actions are implausible and the setup too contrived. (I am being harsh, but I am looking for the best, no judging on a scale of 1 to 10. It was good enough that I read it carefully all the way through.)

Kudos to brad for making the army officer an Egyptian female instead of white heterosexual male, but he loses any credit for the unseemly emphasis on the fact that she is an Egyptian Christian, not a Muslim.

Here is my summary of the first 50 pages: In the early 20th century, the members of a secret society grab their guns, jump in their dirigible, and head out to do battle with the two greatest threats to Earth. One, an evil alien and his zombie army here to steal all Earth's magic, and, two, Democrats. Favorite quote: "The world was carnage. The desert was wet with slaughter."

To Larry Correia's credit, he does have level a mastery of the craft of writing, and an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink adventure can be a lot of fun to read and obviously entertains many readers. But it is not an example of the literary excellence I would like to vote for to receive a Hugo.

Orbit only provided an excerpt, so that is all that I read. The beginning of the plot was a horrid cliche--beneficial genetically engineered parasites have been developed, but now people are mysteriously turning into zombies! Thank goodness the scientists tell us that the parasites are "genetically stable" and are "unable to reproduce outside the laboratory." The characters, mostly scientists and doctors, talk and act like 15 year olds. The writing is limp and colorless. Events leave me constantly saying "Huh, that doesn't seem right..." For example the unexplained absence of smart phones, ipods, and tablets in 2027—the tech and the lifestyle feel like about 2003, odd for a book written in probably 2012.

I think that the target audience for this book was not yet born when the book Jurassic Park came out, so the bit of foreshadowing I quoted would not make them laugh out loud. I can't see anything in the excerpt that would make the book worthy of a Hugo nomination. Lots of good books aren't, but that is the standard I am applying here.

My first novel read from the list of nominees was Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie.

It was an interesting debut novel. Often first novels show an unconstrained exuberance, the author's idea generator out of control. This was the opposite, perfectly restrained, concise, nothing wasted.

The novel is built out of space opera tropes---space ships, AIs, war between alien empires, planetary invasions. But the major themes are not typical for the subgenre---privilege, sexual and social discrimination. SF has been grappling with these themes for at least 4 decades, but here they worked into the story with a deftness rarely seen. A typical attempt from 70s SF leaves the reader trying to sort out a mess of unreadable invented pronouns, but Ann Leckie simply tells us that the dominant culture makes no distinction between male and female, and every character in the book is referred to as "she". It feels very natural, but the cumulative effect is large. Similarly, the novel is not a polemic about the evils of social privilege, it includes the reality of it in the cultural backdrop.

The character development is unusually deep for the space opera subgenre. The story is more character driven than plot driven. The pacing is also atypical. Instead of a roller coaster, it is like a train leaving the station that accelerates slowly but continuously. I am concerned that its Hugo chances will be particularly harmed by Orbit's decision to include only an excerpt in the voter packet (the voter packet has not been released yet, so I purchased this myself).

The world building is spartan, but had rich detail where it comes into play in the story. Where the world-building in some works peters out into vague generalities, here it seems mostly omitted as irrelevant. It is imaginative and realistic when included. Ann Leckie knows how to deploy just the right amount of detail to establish an interesting setting. So we get a wonderful description of the native building style, multi-story buildings with no permanent walls, just screens for internal walls and emergency shutters for the outside, but when the characters need to take a fishing boat, it is just a boat.

This novel deserves the awards it has received, and I would not be surprised if it won the Hugo. Now, I need to start the Charlie Stross novel.

Waiting waiting waiting for my Hugo voter packet.

I decided for various reasons that this was a good year to get a supporting membership and try out the voter packet. Lots of people still seem unaware that $43 gets you electronic versions of most of the works plus the right to vote. Loncon website doesn't make it easy to figure out.

Thinking about writing out my thoughts as I read works, to make it easier to decide how to vote, and LJ is still a good platform for that. I will have to look around to see if there are any active communities here for such discussions.

I completely stopped writing about it, but I have been reading a lot more in the last year. The most unforgettable was Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear.

I wasn't sure what to expect, because I really like Connie Willis, but this two-part book seemed to receive either lukewarm support or a complete panning from many people, especially in the context of the Hugo nominations. Now that I have read it, I can say that this is perhaps Willis's best work and as deserving of a Hugo as anything in years.

She continues to play with her time-travel ideas in the same world, but this time she finds a story that is worth telling. The story is of life in England during the early days of World War 2. The role of the time travelers is to provide the reader two things. First a viewpoint from which to observe the residents of the 1940s. Second, a route to understanding the emotions of the residents. The plot is set up so that the time-travelers are experiencing their own catastrophe that engulfs them in feelings of fear, loss, despair, wild hope, and determination, mirroring the emotional state of the WW2 civilians around them. This is the best example I know of how SFF can tell a story more effectively than a straightforward approach.

An example of this is an early scene in a London air raid shelter. It is hard to understand how the 1940s residents there feel without following their entire story as war in Europe is building. But we are following a time traveler who is lost and frightened and finds a strange comfort in this deep basement below London, much like what the residents are feeling.

The first volume contains the best material about England and WW2. The second volume spends more of its time resolving the plot.

Home alone over the weekend with naught but streaming Netflix to entertain myself with, and I decided to catch up on things that I missed the first time around.

I watched the first show from the original Battlestar Galactica that I used to watch when I was in elementary school (in, like, the 70's. Urgh). Utterly execrable. No point in wasting more time there. I watched the first episode of Babylon 5 and was unimpressed. Too formulaic.

Picked Firefly pretty much at random, and WOW! The effects, the characters, the plots, all are so much better and more complex than anything else that I have seen. I am not going to finish watching them all before my poor wife returns, so she is likely to be forced to watch the rest of them.

Obviously they stole shamelessly; I imagine that Joss Whedon remembered the grimy, dented Millennium Falcon sitting in the dirt at Mos Eisley spaceport and realized that this was the window into story-telling the he wanted to develop. I also think that Joss Whedon understands what he is doing a lot more than George Lucas ever did.

Some people may find the science fiction western to be an odd mix, but I think it is hilarious. The original derogatory use of the term "space opera" referred to a style of science fiction story that was nothing but a western with "horse" changed to "space ship" and "Wyoming" changed to "Mars." I like it that they don't try to hide how elements of one genre evolved into the other. (Matthew Sanborn Smith points out that for those in California and beyond, Westerns become Easterns instead. Go listen to some of his stories. After all, he got published in Nature, which I don't expect to ever accomplish.)

We went last night to hear "Nixon in China" at the Met's movie theater rebroadcast.

The mechanics were pretty good. The sound was great. It was filmed with zooms and cuts more like a movie, which didn't seem consistent with the way a production on a large stage would be acted, blocked, and choreographed. I would have preferred something more approximating the effect of seeing a performance on a stage, although a single fixed camera view showing the whole stage wouldn't have worked. There were some very short backstage interviews with the cast and director thrown in around the intermissions (and previews of upcoming operas!). For someone with no experience with opera, it is much nicer to experiment at under $20 per ticket in a theater then at over $100 per ticket at the Met.

Unfortunately, I found "Nixon in China" completely impenetrable to me at every level. To my ear, the music from John Adams completely lacked any emotional dynamics. I heard little but staccato eighth notes and staccato sixteenth notes (with some sections in staccato triplets) for four hours, giving every instant of the opera an overlay of screaming frantic tension. The music completely eschewed any melodic lines. Arguably, the problem is my unfamiliarity with this style of music.

The characterizations were superficial (Mao as a senile faux philosopher, Pat Nixon as a housewife shoved onto the world stage) or non-existent. There was no plot; it simply followed the track of some of the media events from the visit. The politics and history surrounding the event, both US and Chinese, are virtually ignored. There's a great article at the Times from Max Frankel who was with Nixon in China commenting on the opera. The libretto (shown as subtitles on the screen) was artless; the imagery was trite and each line was an independent blob, as if they had been reordered randomly and no one noticed.

The original NYTimes review is also up on the web. "Despite interesting poetic ambitions, the text remains at heart the material for a good-natured skit, not the political or social satire one might expect." "Although described by Adams fans as post-Minimal, the score is given to stating a scrap of the most ordinary musical material and ruminating on it in a static style, much as a novice pianist will work on a single chord until neighbors begin to pound the wall. Mr. Adams does for the arpeggio what McDonald's did for the hamburger" And so on.

I am looking forward to seeing a more traditional opera in such a venue, though.

For some reason we been watching Masterpiece Classic this month and enjoying it (mostly watching over the web — broadcast teevee still exists why?). The script is awful, the acting is passable, but the costumes and settings are fascinating.

This may have something to do with reading Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which unsurprisingly talks a lot about historical changes in how people live in their houses, especially in England. I find this to be one of his most interesting books; it is little more than a bunch of digressions, like many of his books, but the digressions are all about things that are interesting to me.