Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Mute Trailer


Somebody at Netflix must be really into flying cars, neon and androids. In addition to Altered Carbon on February 2, they're also releasing a feature-length film called Mute, by Duncan Jones (Moon, Warcraft and Source Code) and starring Not Mads Mikkelsen (Neither Casino Royale nor Rogue One), Paul Rudd (Ant Man and a bunch of comedies) and Justin Theroux (5 seconds of the Last Jedi).

While Altered Carbon looks like it's going to be very technoballs-to-the-firewall action, this one seems more strange and quirky, with its cast of a mute German bartender (still not played by Mikkelsen) searching for his crayola-colored girlfriend with the help and/or hindrance of two American surgeons (both played by actors known for comedic rather than dramatic roles). Probably for the best--Jones's thinky movie (Moon) was far better than his bashy action ones.

I suppose the trailer is just trying to be a good little trailer and give as little away as possible, but I'm really getting hit by tonal shifts from cut to cut, with Rudd and Theroux's scenes looking like they come from a completely different movie: blowing bubble gum, car surfing, and going bowling, while Not-Mikkelsen goes around looking increasingly haunted and desperate.

I'm also not clear right now on why this is cyberpunk, other than the flying cars and the girlfriend's lipstick choices. With Altered Carbon, for example, the SF concept is front and center: digitized consciousness. Here, I'm drawing a blank.

Final point: I can't claim to be particularly progressive in any of my views but damn, does this fail the Bechdel test on every level. Where's the women at, Jonesey?

Not sure if other trailers are forthcoming, but so far this isn't quite enough to win me over.
Also: Not nearly enough Mads Mikkelsen.

Sunday, January 28, 2018

The Carbonist Manifesto (Now with added guns!)

Title: Altered Carbon
Author: Richard K Morgan
Publisher: Gollancz

The insatiable appetite of streaming TV services has demanded another sacrifice, and the latest victim is "Altered Carbon," soon to be adapted into a 10-episode series for Netflix. Time then for a re-read and remind myself what the book was like.

It's a bit like virtual reality sex, all fun and squishy games until you stop and think about what you're doing, and realize your avant-garde adventure is just another adolescent masturbatory fantasy with cyberpunk juices splattered all over its face.

Which isn't to say it's bad, really, after all VR sex is still sex and Altered Carbon is very, very sexy.

The sexy star of this sexy book is Takeshi Kovacs, a soldier gone rogue who is killed in the book's prologue, which ordinarily would be a bit of a snag in the sexy heroics department. It's no barrier for our man Kovacs however, as he is held in a kind of digital prison until he's sprung by a 300-year-old moneybags named Bancroft, on the condition that he solve Bancroft's own murder.

The scifi concept here is digital immortality and the resulting malleability of the physical. People in Altered Carbon are implanted with a "cortical stack" at the base of the skull, which stores their personalities and memories, thereby uncoupling the self from the physical space it temporarily occupies. Bodies are now called "sleeves," as interchangeable as clothes or Star Wars movie directors. Crime is now punished by taking the offender out of their body and stuffing them in a server somewhere -- during which time their body can be bought and used by someone else.

So Kovacs is dead, but then downloaded into a new body, which used to be someone else's. Bancroft was murdered, and now his clone with memories from the last backup--48 hours before he was killed--wants to find out why.

It's kind of two books at once; on the one hand, a hard-boiled whodunit with a manly male hero and a body count that would make Tarantino blush, and on the other, a kind of anarcho-communist manifesto about the corrupting influence of wealth on institutions and the need for the common man to resist oppression.

The Detective Story

The first of those two books is huge fun for about the first half, embodying everything young boys dream about when they hear the word 'cyberpunk.' Kovacs blows people's heads off the way you or I shake hands, or rather the way we would if we were coked to the eyeballs and had the insatiable urge to shake hands with people every 30 seconds or so.

It's a very visceral book, describing in loving detail the impact of both sex and violence on human bodies in all their liquid glory. There's a torture scene involving blowtorches and soldering irons, for example, a Terminator-esque revenge sequence with multiple beheadings and solving the murder mystery requires a series of visits to whorehouses.

In support of all this mayhem there is the requisite hardware aplenty, described in techno-fetishistic detail, from poison-tipped flechette guns to "particle blasters" that operate like a cross between a laser gun and a blowtorch, from anti-gravity belts and stealth suits to custom-made bodies with enhanced reflexes.

All the frenetic action gets weighed down as the book progresses a bit, mainly for two reasons. One is an over-reliance on a limited number of set-pieces: Kovacs is pretty rubbish for a super-soldier, and gets repeatedly captured by the bad guys, leading to yet another last-minute rescue and/or escape, my word, what a surprise.

The other thing that drags it down is Kovacs himself, who isn't a terribly interesting fellow to spend any time with, possessing two essentially two narrative modes: psychopathic murderer and Red Brigade firebrand, a sort of Zack de la Rocha dropping real bombs rather than the lyrical kind.

Making him a super-soldier is part of the fantasy, I know, but executed a bit ham-handedly here. Kovacs is an ex-"Envoy", a kind of special forces soldier whose speciality is that they can be downloaded into any available body and immediately be ready to fight. Which doesn't sound like much of a superpower, to be honest, but it's used as an excuse to provide Kovacs with all kinds of plot-convenient abilities written off as "Envoy conditioning," "Envoy intuition," "Envoy training," and "Envoy wisdom." 


Morgan-Leninism

The moralizing in the book is a lot less fun than the action. Socio-politics is explored with all the subtlety of a Rage Against the Machine song, as Morgan foresees that digital immortality will accelerate the accumulation of wealth among the rich and old, leading to decadence and the careless brutalization of anyone who gets in their way.

The central message is, in the book's own words, that the political is personal. If you are victimized by systems or institutions, you should be outraged and fight back. Acceptance of unfairness is cowardice. Cue particle blasting.

The commodification of the body and the idea that under late-stage capitalism we don't even own ourselves is here made explicit: we're all whores of one kind or another. I'd be more sympathetic if Morgan's prescription wasn't quite so bloodthirsty.

I note with cynical sadness that this book appears to get a pass in progressive circles for wearing its anti-establishment sympathies on its sleeve (pun intended), despite the Cro-Magnon gender politics very much on display. Kovacs meets two key women in the course of the story, whose breasts have bigger arcs than their characters, and Kovacs does some vivid, energetic bonking with both of them (or all four, if you like).

In addition, all this moralizing relies on world-building that doesn't stand up to a whole lot of scrutiny (such as: having a digital backup wouldn't save you from dying, such as: why do even the poorest of the poor have this technology, such as: the people's champion Kovacs spends most his time living on other people's money).

Still, I give it points for trying and not copping out and going the "it's just mindless action" route. Morgan has a point that he wants to make, and if he preaches it with machine gun intensity and repetition, well good for him.

Can't say I'm a convert, but it's largely a fun ride that leaves you sated, if feeling a little dirty. So yeah, pretty much like sex. 

Saturday, January 20, 2018

At Least Partially on Target

Title: Infinity Wars
Editor: Johnathan Strahan
Publisher: Solaris

Of the three military scifi anthologies I've read recently (this one, Total Conflict and War Stories), this is probably the best of the bunch, in that there are at least a few stories which take a shot at depicting the future of war, rather than surrendering to their writers' fevered imaginations.

Ostensibly, the objective of this collection is to "take on the question of what war as we now know it might look like in fifty years, in a hundred, here on Earth and in the distant corners of the galaxy." Mission accomplished, more or less, though there are still an awful lot of stories whose wordy warheads fall pretty wide of that mark. Still, I'll give this one full marks for the few hits it does manage to land.

You're either going to buy these stories as a set or not at all, so it seems kind of pointless to review each story in the anthology separately. So that's exactly what I'll do.

"In the Evening of Their Span of Days" (Carrie Vaughn): Bland. War in the future ... will involve a shipyard engineer grousing about the lack of resources.

"The Last Broadcasts" (An Owomoyela): Very bland. War in the future ... is fought by an obsessive-compulsive data analyst who frets for a bit. Mostly about their OCD. An ongoing alien invasion, not so much.

"Faceless Soldiers, Patchwork Ships" (Caroline M Yoachim): Odd. War in the future ... will, ah, let's see, well, there're these aliens who are kinda like an organic version of the Borg, see, but then there are people who are also part-animal too, and then there are these teleporting cats and. (Shrug). Yeah so, war in the future will be like that, I guess.

"Dear Sarah" (Nancy Kress): Good. War in the future ... will start when aliens visit the Earth and (ominous tone) share all their super-advanced technology with us, thereby immediately throwing out of work everyone in manufacturing, energy, software, medicine... you get the picture. Massive economic upheaval triggers unrest and anti-alien sentiment, which is put down by the national army. Appreciate the realistic take on the impact of first contact, although I could do without the first-person account being by a sort of stereotypical white trash recruit (she says "warn't" a lot).

"The Moon is Not a Battlefield" (Indrapramit Das): Very good. War in the future ... will be fought on the moon between the Indians and the Chinese, in the cold and silent vacuum of space. One of the few supposedly military scifi stories I've read that considers what a future war might actually be like.

"Perfect Gun" (Elizabeth Bear): Okayish. War in the future ... features an amoral mercenary who gallivants across the galaxy in a semi-sentient war machine, which acquires the conscience its owner so pointedly lacks. Might have been more interesting if told from the machine's perspective, as the mercenary is just kind of a dick and remains so throughout.

"The Oracle" (Dominca Phetteplace): Bad, bad ... No wait, actually Good. War in the future ... will be fought by a generation raised on Facebook and Instagram, via popularity polls and selfies, and with all the hardened determination of a hashtag. Seems far too shallow and trite at first, until you realize it's satire, and the shallow idiocy of the main character is the point.

"In Everlasting Wisdom" (Aliette de Bodard): Odd. War in the future ... will be fought by loyalty officers who have been implanted with emotion-broadcasting symbionts / parasites that keep the populace in line. Sure, why not.

"Command and Control" (David D Levine): Okayish. War in the future ... will be fought between the Indians and the Chinese (again?!), using teleported munitions to circumvent conventional defences. Feels oddly jingoistic pro-Indian/anti-Chinese. The writer made the odd choice of focusing on a main character only tangentially connected to the teleporting hijinks.

"Conversations with an Armory" (Garth Nix): Fun. War in the future ... will be fought by a grumpy AI that at first refuses to help until it finds out just how badly it has been abandoned by its former masters, discarded like just another machine.

"Heavies" (Rich Larson): Forgettable. War in the future ... will be fought by cops who can remotely control electronics with implanted emitters, against genetically altered humans on a low-gravity colony who've been conditioned to love their occupiers but, like, too much man. They love them to death, geddit? No, me neither. 

"Overburden" (Genevieve Valentine): Not very good. War in the future ... will be deliberately prolonged by a commander angling for a promotion, in a pointless revolt over control of an exhausted copper mine and tainted water. As muddled as the waters in the story, the only memorable and slightly creepy bit being a soldier who is forced to shovel dead fish out of the poisoned waters every day.

"Weather Girl" (E. J. Swift): A bit predictable. War in the future ... will be fought by weaponizing climate change and extreme weather. Titular girl is in charge of hacking other nations' weather channels so they don't realize when a storm is about to strike. Because, apparently, people in this world can't use their eyes and see that there's a storm coming. Neat idea, but it seems an incredibly inefficient way of fighting, since there's no actual control over where the storms go. Anyway the story is much more interested in the relationship between said girl and her ex-husband, who gets caught in a storm, of course.

"Mines" (Eleanor Arnason): Drearily earnest. War in the future ... will involve a woman with a mine-sweeping telepathic rat who has a fling with another woman, who pilots a giant war robot. Not even 1% as wacky as it should have been.

"ZeroS" (Peter Watts): Not bad. War in the future ... will be fought by zombie-like reanimated dead, thanks to the wondrous advances of science and medicine.

Thursday, January 18, 2018

To Blandly Go


Title: Star Trek Discovery
Created by: Bryan Fuller & Alex Kurtzman
Network: Netflix




After covering Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Bright, I figured I’d complete the holy trinity of nerd rage and watch Star Trek Discovery. I’ve made it halfway through the first season (Eps 1 through 9) so far, so here are the initial impressions:

It’s fine.

That’s probably the highest praise and most damning condemnation I can make.

It tries to feel fresh and different but doesn’t, since grimdark futures and fantasies are the norm these days, not the exception. It’s different from previous Star Treks yes, but it’s not in competition with them; it’s fighting for eyeball time against all the other grimdark shows out there. It isn’t witty or charming, far too dour and depressing for that. It isn’t particularly exciting either, lacking the kinetics of a Marvel superhero show or the murderous infighting of Game of Thrones.

It’s passable, neither the death of Star Trek nor the “fuck you” to the old fans that some claim. Best I can say is that it’s engagingly weird at times, and if there’s a way forward for the show maybe it will be to double-down on the wackiness.

To be fair, much of what seems to irritate the fans is, how can I put this tactfully, stupid fucking bullshit: The uniform insignia is the wrong shape, the Klingons’ heads are too bumpy, X and Y technology “shouldn’t exist yet.” The show is theoretically set 10 years before Kirk, Spock and McCoy donned their pastel-palette jerseys, yet it was produced 50-odd years after. You shouldn’t even have to say anything further than this; the conclusion should be bleedin’ obvious.

I religiously watched the originals and Next Generation--episodes like Inner Light and Darmok have a special place in my cold, wrinkled heart--so if there's a target audience for this prequel series it's me, and frankly my dears, I couldn't give a fuck about this kind of trivial minutiae.

More serious is the charge that Discovery has lost the essence of what made Star Trek interesting and unique, in favor of poorly-choreographed fight scenes and cheap CGI explosions.

Gone is old Trek’s tradition of commenting and moralizing on modern-day issues. Also missing is Trek’s faith in humanity, in the belief that we would one day overcome our prejudices and differences, and take to the stars in the spirit of curiosity, comradeship and understanding.

Such ambitions are problematic these days I guess, with Starfleet’s neoconservative mission to remake each civilization they encounter in their own peace-loving image seeming as insidious as the Borg, their lifeform-assimilating antagonists from The Next Generation. Less believable, too, with pan-human understanding in 2017-18 feeling further out of reach than ever.

Instead of issues then, the writing is refocused onto plot and people. Instead of one-and-done episodes where the writers hit the reset button and everything returns to normal at the end, we have season-long story lines, featuring troubled, morally ambiguous characters who solve their problems through poorly-choreographed fight scenes and cheap CGI explosions (and in one particularly risible example, shoddy CGI running).



Speaking of characters, there’s a narrower focus now: In place of an ensemble cast with swashbuckling Kirk or Shakespearian Picard as merely the first among equals, there’s a single main character, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), a human raised by emotionless, logic-loving Vulcans (and supposedly a heretofore unheard-of foster-sister to Spock, in a misguided attempt to tie this series back to the originals).

The supporting cast is made up of ruthless captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), slenderman-esque first officer Saru (Doug Jones), Burnham’s intensely irritating blabbermouth roommate Tilly (Mary Wiseman), bland security chief and love interest whose name I just had to Google because he's so uninteresting (it's Tyler, played by Shazad Latif), mad scientist-slash-chief engineer Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and his bland husband, Doctor somebody or other, sorry I never caught the name.

With these characters now the main focus, this show really lives or dies depending on how engaging and interesting they are. And so far, they aren’t very. Martin-Green does her best with Burnham, but the writers haven’t yet mastered the art of portraying a conflicted character, torn between her duty and humanity, so she seems simply unsympathetically inconsistent instead.

The rest of the crew is a mixed bunch. Lorca’s very un-Starfleet methodology suggests a hidden past, but he’s never in focus enough for this to generate momentum. Meanwhile, Tilly is in dire need of being transported straight out the airlock without a space suit, and Taylor ... Tyler ... whatshisface, whatever, musters all the personality and sex appeal of a goldfish.

The plot has fared better, with some trippy what-the-fuckery in the form of an experimental jump drive that runs on pan-dimensional magic mushrooms that require a biological host. The cinematography has also improved, the cameras no longer welded in place but getting right in the characters' faces, the spaceships no longer swanning about like sailing boats but diving, twisting and turning in combat.

I wish there was more of that, but all too often the show gives up on traditional Trekkie technobabble in favor of having people resolve their problems by punching things. Consider, for example, how they visualized the struggle between two telepaths as one tries to access the other's memories -- by having their astral avatars engage in an awkward Karate Kid chopfest. That is at least engagingly silly, but sadly the rest is dreary: people being tortured, stabbed, blown up or raped by grey-titted Klingons (yes, really).

They try to alleviate the darkness with humor at times, but it is utterly tone-deaf, as though the writers don’t realize the horror of what they’re showing on the screen. A shuttle pilot's tether cutting and setting them adrift to die in space is played for laughs. There’s an early “comedy” episode that involves a time-travelling criminal who repeatedly and gruesomely murders the crew over and over again, which jarringly ends with said criminal being led away by the ear by his fiancée and the moral “just be yourself and people will like you.” Ha ha, yes, so true, presumably unless you’re a brutal serial murderer who beams people into the freezing vacuum of space. You rascal, you.

In the end then, it feels like a clone of Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, or of the Expanse. There's nothing irretrievably wrong about what it's doing (apart from the dreary lack of humor)--Star Trek series often start slow before finding their feet--but if the show just apes the look and style of Star Trek without the heart, then why (aside from the obvious commercial reasons) brand it Star Trek at all?

So much has been changed, everything from the big themes--war and death instead of peace and discovery--to the little details--injecting spores instead of engaging the warp engines. With all those changes, it seems a shame nobody had the courage to try to make a completely original SciFi series. Instead, it's on with the reboots, adaptations, prequels and sequels.

I'll bear with it at least until the end of the season (the great advantage of Netflix: the "It's not costing me any extra so eh, might as well" factor), but it's always going to occupy a very different part of my head than old Trek did, and no part at all of my heart.

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Conflicting Views

Title: Total Conflict
Editor: Ian Whates
Publisher: NewCon Press

On a bit of a roll recently with the short-story anthologies, mainly because I find it increasingly hard to sit down and read a full novel cover-to-cover. Partly, that's the time constraints that come with adulthood and having a family, partly though I think my brain is being trained by social media--Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Reddit--to take things in smaller bites, so my attention wanders after ten pages or so.

What was I talking about again?

Oh right. The anthology. Like I said (I think?) I've been reading a couple of short fiction anthologies as a way to outsmart my own dwindling attention span, with mixed results (see my reviews of War Stories and Tor's best of 2015 anthology). While both contained some nice and engaging writing, looking back now they're both a bit dour and take themselves a bit too seriously. I read them and felt worse about myself, the world, the future and my place in it.

I wondered if this was a particularly American phenomenon, so I was eager to crack open this 2015 collection of 18 short stories by several prominent British authors--including Neal Asher (the "Polity" universe), Adam Roberts ("Salt" and "Jack Glass") and Dan Abnett (a DC comics and "Warhammer" novelist)--and see if they were having a bit more fun.

Sorry to say that, by and large, no they aren't. Not to say there aren't identifiable differences between American and British scifi--at least, judging from the completely unscientific sampling I've done--with the Brits less prone to spew Greek or Latin at you ("poiesis" was one I came across recently), more content to tell unapologetic, straightforward SF.

Despite the hoo-rah machismo of the title, this is a pretty diverse bunch of stories, and while there's conflict and claret spilled aplenty, there's not a lot of what I'd call "Military SciFi." Once I got used to the idea that "conflict" is here used in the widest possible sense in that there is some kind of opposition at work in each story, this proved a highly enjoyable collection, with almost every entry at least competent if not inspiring.

"The Maker's Mark" by Michael Cobley ("Humanity's Fire" series) is by far and away my favorite of the bunch, despite being the least conflict-y in the bang-bang shoot-em-up sense of the word. It's more of a woozy daydream of a story, reminiscent of Jack Vance or Matt Hughes, about a conman who runs afoul of assorted suzerains, prelates, assassins and concubines.

Dan Abnett's piece is a straightforward zombie actioner on board a space station, but again written in a very fun way, while Andy Remic's "PSI.COPATH" is easily the funniest, though at times it tries a little hard to be so. On the other hand, despite headlining the lineup I thought Asher's entry was absolute balls, consisting of soldiers running around a city filled with dinosaurs (which would have worked well if coupled with Remic's over-the-top silliness, but here is played completely straight), and Roberts' was just a bit dull, focusing on a futuristic submarine hiding beneath the Antarctic.

Even so, overall there's a wide variety of sub-genres, settings and tones provided in the anthology, which makes it easy to find something you like and easier to forgive those you don't.

If there's one beef I have with this collection, and others like it, it is the reliance on famous writers to sell the product. The fiction market is frighteningly small compared to the number of people writing, so it seems a shame the winner-takes-all world of WalMart and Amazon and Google and Disney should apply here as well--I would have hoped that short story anthologies were the one place where publishers could showcase new talent, not least because I'm a failed and bitter writer myself although yeah, that's mostly why. Shut up.

Anyway, mostly great fun, good and pulpy scifi. British writers rule, UK?

Sunday, January 7, 2018

Middle-Aged Man's Review

Title: Old Man's War
Author: John Scalzi
Publisher: Tor Books

I'm seriously starting to wonder if there's something wrong with me. I mean, aside from the obvious.

Here's another acclaimed, well-loved science fiction novel from one of the genre's most famous writers, and I'm sorry. I just don't get it. It feels not quite one thing, not quite another; not quite funny enough to be a parody, not quite respectful enough to be an homage, not quite original enough to be its own thing.

"Old Man's War" is all about 75-year-old John Perry who, as is common in Scalzi's universe, signs up with the colonial army and has his brain transplanted into the body of a green-skinned ubermensch, and then goes off to fight a series of aliens of varying physiology, ferocity and pronouncability.  

It's breezy and light and fun, obviously not taking itself too seriously. There is, for example, a sequence in which Perry fights against one-inch tall aliens, through the simple expedient of stepping on them. Another race has chefs accompany its armed forces so they can serve up dead humans as delicacies. Mildly amusing, yes, but not quite laugh-out-loud funny.

It's patently ludicrous stuff like this which make me feel like a bit of a bugbear for pointing out that, for a start, the central premise doesn't make any goddamn sense. If I can make super-soldier clones whenever I like, it seems a little unlikely that I'm going to fill them up with the psyches of elderly retirees, unless I wanted to do battle with a particularly vicious race of jigsaw puzzle pieces. It later turns out that the colonial army doesn't even need to use the brains of real people of make their soldiers, just to double down on the fundamental what-the-fuckery running through the book.

The plot is "Starship Troopers" -lite, perhaps deliberately so, but the writing isn't nearly sharp or biting enough to mount any kind of real criticism of the kind of writing or world-view Heinlein represents. Which should be an easy target since Heinlein spends half of "Troopers" expounding on how great it would be if we all lived in a military dictatorship. "Old Man's War" vaguely suggests that might be, you know, oh, a little bad, since, well, we might end up using violence as a first resort which, well, and OH COME ON. I get that Scalzi admires Heinlein, but if you're going to write satire, go full throttle, rev that engine, let it roar, otherwise the criticism just comes out like a confused fart. In the end, I'm still not even sure if he even intended any criticism or not.

Well, OK, I'll admit that gently poking fun would still be alright, if there was some point to it, but none of the possible themes stay in the book's focus long enough for anything to really register. It might have something to say about ageing and our treatment of the elderly and the way--nope sorry, now everyone is a genetically enhanced superman, so maybe its about the mil--wrong again, we're on to the meaning of marr--ha ha, wrong again.

I'll quote from Wikipedia here:

"Old Man's War sits in the military science fiction genre but themes of the ethics of life extension, friendship, marriage, the significance of mortality, what makes one human, and individual identity are present within the novel."

No. Sorry folks, but no. Just mentioning something for a couple of chapters does not mean the themes "are present within the novel." Nor, to my mind, does something like "marriage" count as a theme. What does the book have to SAY about marriage? Just having two people married in the book doesn't say shit about it. IS life extension ethical? No? Having themes is not a tick-box exercise, ffs, you have to voice an opinion through the writing, back it up, offer some insights.

(To meander a little off-topic, I recently read a post where the writer talked about "self-sacrifice" as a literary theme. No. Self-sacrifice is a plot point. Doesn't make it a theme. A literary theme requires you to make some kind of statement about it, not just name-check it along the way to the conclusion. Otherwise it's just stuff that happens, words you're using to fill the pages.)

The tone is a bit all over the place, too. In the last third of the book, all the silliness comes crashing up against a super-serious subplot where Perry finds the colonial government has (spoilers) used his dead wife's DNA to make another soldier. There are some scenes which are nice and touching in a Hallmark Card-y kind of way, but again, this all comes as jarring after the previous X-hundred pages of over-the-top bug splatter combat scenes.

So with all that, I'm just plain stumped. I'm not sure why this was nominated for the Hugo, way back in 2006, unless Hugo voters are subject to some strange fads, fashions or passions I'm not getting. Is US science fiction really so dour that a light-hearted, fun read wowed people so much they felt it was the best novel written all year? Or am I the one who has become too dour, too out of step with modern tastes, a lonely old man railing against the tides of time?

Must be about time for me to sign up for the army, then.

Thursday, January 4, 2018

The Lemmiest of Books

Title: Annihilation
Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Publisher: Fourth Estate

This 2014 novel, the first in the Southern Reach trilogy, won the Nebula Award for Best Novel that year, and a movie adaptation is scheduled for release this year by Paramount Pictures. While this slimmish (195-page) work is diverting enough, I find it hard to see what all the fuss is about. Between this, and the ongoing hysterical online war or words being fought over the subjects of my last two reviews--Netflix's Bright and Star Wars: The Last Jedi--I'm beginning to feel alienated from the rest of scifi fandom, as though you're all doppelgangers or possessed by alien parasites.

"Annihilation" one of those novels where nobody goes anywhere or achieves anything, save to be confronted with exponentially escalating weirdness for which there is neither explanation nor resolution. I hesitate to call it Kafka-esque--here it reminded me more of Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris," so perhaps it's more Lemmy than anything else. Yes, definitely a Lemmy book.

The plot is mostly beside the point, but just for the record, four women are sent to investigate a coastal area plagued by mind-bending phenomena, the 12th such expedition. The previous 11, including the one the narrator's husband was part of, almost all ended in madness, murder and/or suicide. Sure enough, when the four arrive a deepening sense of unreality sets in, as they try but mostly fail to investigate the fate of the other expeditions and the origin of the area's mysteries.

Just as in Solaris, the narrator and main character (here simply known as 'the biologist'--none of the characters are referred to by name) is thrust into a bizzaro alien world where something or -one bends the normal rules of nature to sanity-defying degrees for some inscrutable purpose. In "Solaris," it was the planet of the title; in "Annihilation," it's a place known only as "Area X". In "Solaris," the narrator's deceased wife reappears, seemingly re-created by the alien intelligence; in "Annihilation," it's the narrator's husband. The narrator in "Solaris" is wracked by guilt over his relationship with his wife; in "Annihilation" the narrator is maybe too sociopathic for as relatable an emotion as guilt, but there's an undercurrent of regret.

The writing too reminded me of Lem, not to mention both Kafka and Camus, in that the bulk of the story takes place in the mind of the narrator, and focuses on their reaction, or more often blank failure to react, to their surreal surroundings. It's to Mr VanderMeer's credit that the book is never a slog despite this. It's a light read for such a weighty theme.

That said, I didn't find anything particularly new or exceptional in the interior monologues, oblique weirdness or existential angst presented here. To be fair, the navel-gazing in "Annihilation" seems more about the individual's place in nature rather than in the cosmos (as in Solaris) or in society (as in Kafka or Camus), but how thought-provoking you find those themes probably depends on to what degree you empathise with the anomic narrator, and I didn't very much, and without that connection the whole book becomes a series of pointless mysteries with no payoff.

I do find it interesting that despite the opacity and resistance to any clear interpretation, enough people connected with this book enough for it to win the Nebula. What did they see? Was it the fact that all four characters are women? The undercurrent of environmentalism? The lack of any heavy-handed or didactic messages? You see, the book's very popularity has me feeling like a character in it.