Bibliophilia

I wish I had a lot more time to read. I own hundreds and hundreds of books, some of which I’ve been carting around for 30 or 40 years. Don’t remember a thing about some of them except that I enjoyed them. It would be nice to sit down for a few years and just read.

And not just the old books, either. I’d love to buy lots of new ones.

I generally read the Resnick/Malzberg column in the SFWA Bulletin, and this month they were talking about specialty publishers — small houses that are supporting the history of science fiction by keeping classics in print. So today I have an itch to rush out and buy all the science fiction I can find. It’s a mild form of mania — a raw desire to buy thousands of books simply because it would be so cool to own them! Complete collections of Heinlein, Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, and a host of other visionaries. I’ve got most of the Philip Dick paperbacks … but maybe I’m missing a few!

I won’t do it, of course. I wouldn’t have time to read them all, and I’m not rich enough to indulge such whims purely for the sake of having a well-stocked private library. Besides, a lot of the old science fiction wasn’t actually very good. Reading it would be in the nature of a research project – to find out what ideas were amazing or trendy in 1950, and what cultural blind spots the writers wallowed in without knowing it.

Some of the cultural blind spots are interesting. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, there was a lot of SF in which everybody was having happy sex with everybody else (or at least, with everybody else of the opposite sex). STDs weren’t even a blip on the radar, and nor was the importance of long-term pair-bonding to emotional health.

But I’d still like to own all those books!

Reading: Connie Willis

Many years ago I was knocked out by Doomsday Book, Connie Willis’s novel of time travel to the dark days of the Black Plague. But then I tried another of her books, found it disappointingly shallow, and gave up on her.

This month I decided to give her another shot. I borrowed To Say Nothing of the Dog from the library, rolled up my metaphorical pant legs, and waded in.

Imagine a Victorian sitcom. Imagine Lucy and Ethel wandering around in Victorian England, trying to fix up a mixup that just gets worse and worse.

The history department at Oxford is using a time machine to travel back from 2057 to 1940 in order to do a blazingly trivial bit of research (the whereabouts of a spectacularly ugly vase that vanished during the Nazi bombing of Coventry Cathedral). But there are complications, so the narrator takes a detour

Video: Battlestar

I never saw the original BattleStar Galactica series. The new series looks pretty good, though it’s far from flawless. Last night I watched the pilot miniseries, which is essentially a 3-hour movie. I’ll try a few more episodes before making up my mind.

Script: Pretty good. Plenty of human elements, and it’s always nice to have Truly Evil Bad Guys that you can love to hate. I love seeing a woman fighter pilot who (though apparently heterosexual) smokes cigars with evident enjoyment.

What the Cylon sexpot is doing inside Gaius’s brain is a bit hard to decipher. Why the Cylons would build a new Cylon race that was all but biologically identical to the humans — mystifying. What the Cylon was doing lurking in the weapons depot — even more mystifying.

Effects/animation: Very good. Marred mainly by a few concessions to what TV viewers will expect to see. The fighter spacecraft look way too much like conventional jet fighters — and when we see a profile of a pilot in the cockpit, the stars in the background are whipping past! This is just wrong. The stars would appear stationary unless the craft were spinning rapidly, in which case it would be out of control.

Casting: As Commander Adama, Edward James Olmos looks the way Captain Kirk should have looked, but didn’t. Too bad Olmos can’t act. He seems to have only one facial expression: craggy.

And speaking of Star Trek, when Galactica is hit by enemy fire in the final battle … you guessed it, everybody on the bridge staggers sideways and falls down, and sparks fly from the control panels. We have so been here before.

But overall, it’s not too bad.

World-Building

Writing science fiction is enormously difficult. If you cut corners, it gets easier. Cutting corners is always a temptation, because (a) if you don’t, your whole story may collapse, and (b) your readers or viewers probably won’t notice or care.

Quick example: Last week I watched an episode of Dr. Who called “Daleks in New York.” It’s the 1930s, and the Daleks are doing something to the spire atop the Empire State Building in order to capture the energy of what is clearly described in the dialog as an impending “solar flare.” Solar flares can’t be predicted, and not much of their energy reaches the surface of the Earth (for which we can all be thankful), but never mind that. As the climax of the story nears, the “solar flare” has transmuted into a simple bolt of lightning emanating from a thunderstorm.

I’ll bet not one viewer in ten even noticed the switch.

A reader named Conrad Cook has been grilling me about my unflattering view of Riverworld, by Philip Jose Farmer. I was critical, among other things, of

Time After Time

I am so bummed. The third season of Primeval has only just started airing on BBC America, which means it won’t be out on DVD for at least a year. And I don’t have a TV!

Is it a good enough series for me to rush out and buy a nice new TV and subscribe to cable? Basically, no, it’s not that good. Besides, the first few episodes have already aired. Who knows when they’ll go into reruns? It’s the kind of series that you sort of want to watch in order, because there’s a long story arc involving Nick Cutter’s ex-wife, who is quite clearly Up To No Good.

I wonder why the good science fiction is on TV these days. Not all of it, I’m sure. Lately most of the novels I’ve been reading have been fantasy. I think I need to stray over into the other aisle.

I do hope the SF novels being written today are less juvenile than Riverworld.

Up a Creek

Jean-Paul Sartre’s aphorism, “Hell is other people,” keeps drifting across my mind as I wade through Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld saga. Right now I’m halfway through volume 2, The Fabulous Riverboat, and I’m rather distinctly unimpressed with Farmer’s view of human nature.

The story, in case you’re unfamiliar with Riverworld, is that every human who ever lived has been resurrected, in the flesh, along the 20 million miles or so of a great planet-girdling river. (Children under 7 years old are not resurrected, probably because it would have been inconvenient for Farmer to have a lot of toddlers underfoot. What happened to the children, we’re not told.) Everybody starts out naked, healthy, and physically young, but their whole lifetime’s memories are intact. Food is provided, but nothing else. So they have nothing to do for amusement except make knives, spears, and axes out of flint and bamboo and start stabbing and bashing one another.

Their compunctions about doing so would seem minor enough in any case, but are soon erased by the discovery that people who are killed in Riverworld only pop up again somewhere else along the river. Effectively, everyone has become immortal. So there’s no reason not to bash someone’s head in or rip their guts open, if it suits you.

There’s more to the books than stabbing and bashing. There’s also a lot of slavery, some highly unlikely metaphysics, equally unlikely biology and planetology, sophomoric philosophizing, authorial intrusions, Esperanto, five hundred novel uses for bamboo, and a great deal of name-dropping. The major characters in the first two books include Sir Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor), Sam Clemens, Hermann Goering, Cyrano de Bergerac, King John, and Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves (the real Alice after whom Alice in Wonderland was named). Nobody who was nobody in their Earthly life counts for much except as a sidekick; it’s the Great Man theory of history run amok.

The writing is sometimes adequate, but not, on the whole, very good. Farmer seems to relish the scenes of hand-to-hand combat, but tends to fall back on narrative summary at other times – possibly in order to keep the sprawling story from developing a monstrous word count, or possibly because he knew his primary readership was made up of teenage boys.

There’s no music in the writing, and none in the story either. Nobody makes a flute out of the ubiquitous bamboo. Nobody makes any sculpture. Nobody dances. It’s all hacking and stabbing. Wheeee….

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

 You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s why it’s so hard to write science fiction.

The first Riverworld novel, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, was published in 1971. That was less than an eon ago, culturally, but Philip Jose Farmer was born in 1918. His ideas about the world were formed before World War II.

Read in 2009, certain moments in the novel are amusing, sad, and creepy, all at once. The story, in case you’ve never read it, is that every human who has ever lived wakes up after death in the Riverworld. This is neither Heaven nor Hell, but it’s a bodily resurrection for sure. Everybody is restored to youth and health. Everybody is naked

Monsters Invade London

I’ve been watching a British TV series called Primeval, in which a variety of prehistoric monsters wander through time/space anomalies to menace innocent civilians. Thank you, Netflix — no commercials!

The monsters are scary, and so is the technology. Most of the creatures are so well animated that you can actually believe they’re real. And on a television budget, and coming alive within the time-frame of TV’s compressed production schedule. Very impressive.

Some of the scripts are better than others. The giant centipede in episode two was … well, they tossed the square/cube law out the window on that one. But most of the science isn’t too bad. The series has a story arc that makes you want to find out what happens in the next episode, some of the editing work is very stylish with a debt to fast cut rock video, the actors have charisma, and did I mention the great animation? Not to mention Hannah Spearritt flouncing around in her undies. Mmm.

Video: Doctor Who

Watched one of the new Doctor Who stories last night on Netflix — “Voyage of the Damned.” I haven’t paid a visit to the good Doctor in many years, but this episode was just as delightfully and spectacularly cheesy as the ones I used to watch on late-night Channel 54 in the early ’80s.

This is my kind of cheep and cheerful entertainment. The premise makes not a whit of sense — in fact, there’s not even a pretense that it’s supposed to – but the story is well constructed and the acting is more than adequate.

A pleasant surprise in the plot (using the word “pleasant” in a technical sense) was that some of the good guys actually die! Think about it … at the end of Lord of the Rings, all of the good guys made it through. Lord of the Rings is a morality play, not a story about an actual war.

The perils the Doctor faces are real perils. At the end, he tries to bring a young woman who has died back to life — and he fails! That moment of drama easily makes up for the fact that the “aliens”, even the ones in rubber masks, are obviously human and speak with British accents. Doctor Who fans won’t mind that in any case. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Space Is the Place

Saturday night. Decided to pig out. Watched three sci-fi movies streamed from Netflix — two Stargates and then Serenity for dessert.

I’m using the pejorative term “sci-fi” advisedly. I’m not sure any of this qualifies as actual science fiction. Okay, I’ll admit Stargate: Continuum had a time travel element that wasn’t handled too badly. But mostly it was just silly stuff. The good guys getting beaten to a pulp by the bad guys, but somehow coming out on top in the end. The far-flung interstellar societies in these movies make not a lick of sense, the armaments and combat are preposterous, and you could drive trucks through the holes in the logic of the plots.

But that doesn’t matter. Film has the power to make us believe it’s all true. We can see it, hear it, practically taste it.

In Serenity, no explanation is ever offered for River’s ability to defeat dozens of well-armed bloodthirsty maniacs, all by herself, in hand-to-hand combat. (River is a slim 17-year-old girl.) The main reason that sequence was in the movie was because Joss Whedon needed an excuse for Buffy-style kung fu combat scenes.

As we near the climax of Stargate: Ark of Truth, all seems lost. Earth is surrounded by hostile spaceships, and we lack the armament to defend ourselves. So the good guys open a sort of stone sepulchre, which they’ve been at some pains to recover, having been spurred on by … well, by a vision of Merlin, actually. A beam of intense white light emerges from the sepulchre, and suddenly the enemy ships lose all interest in attacking Earth.

I could go on, but why bother? You can see what I mean. It’s complete, utter nonsense, most of it — and the typical viewer (a category in which I would cheerfully include myself) doesn’t care. If they release another Stargate movie or another Firefly movie, I’ll watch them.

Film has power.