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.

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.

Taking a Dim View of Bright

Title: Bright
Director: David Ayer
Screenplay: Max Landis

I was drawn to this for its Lord of the Rings meets modernity Shadowrun-esque mashup and mildly curious as to what yet another critic versus internet commenter controversy was all about. Perhaps the best way to put it is that the controversy is more interesting than the thing itself: it's Not That Bad, but then again it's Not Very Good.

The backdrop of modern LA with elves and orcs and magic is used as a heavy-handed allegory to modern American race relations, but frankly beyond the elves=white orcs=black setup, the movie has absolutely nothing to say about the subject, aside from one or two half-hearted 'can't we all get along' platitudes thrown in between explosions (No we fucking well can't, seems to be the message).

I've seen a number of people praising the world-building here, and those people must have damn good eyesight because I'm buggered if I can see what they're talking about. Dark Lord, magic scary, elves rich, orcs poor. That's it. It's not a well-realized world, it's a writing prompt, begging to be fleshed out in some detail, any detail. Instead, we get the world of 2017, only with orcs and elves and magic: literally nothing else about the setting is different.

Into this setting the plot throws Will Smith, here rather charmless and inconsistently characterized from scene to scene, and Joel Prosthetics, an orc cop whose personality is that he is an orc who is also a cop.

They find a McGuffin and other people also want the McGuffin, cue series of gunfights as the two stagger from scene to scene as though they were progressing through levels in a video game: there's a weird disconnect from any physical sense of space. Baddies appear at random. Scenes change as the two walk away briskly, oddly unpursued by anyone from their most recent bloodbath.

Oh, and there's tits too, because who is going to say no to tits.

It all culminates in an anticlimactic confrontation with evil elf ninjas that the plot says can murder an entire squad of swat police and a Chicano gang but will lose to a beat-up middle aged cop and his orc buddy. 

For all that though, it's not quite the festering pile of cinematic Hogwarts some critics have made it out to be. The dialogue between Will and Joel has its moments, mainly at the start before everything explodes, and Joel is sympathetic despite the layers of latex. Treating magic as something rare and special is a nice touch, even if it's only rather unimaginatively used to set fire to a couple of people throughout the movie.

Much of the critics' ire seems to be directed at the tone-deaf handling of race relations. As a white man living in an Asian country for the last 20 years, I must admit it didn't phase me that much, save as mentioned above, that it was completely extraneous to the story they were trying to tell.

More than that though, it seems to me that both critic and audience reviews are being driven to extremes, perhaps in order to be heard above the noise. If Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic have 50 reviews, you'll read maybe 3 or 4, and you'll likely pick those either at 5/5 or 1/5. Ditto for user reviews: I'll bet people skip by most reviews, reading a select few. In this environment then, I think both critic and audience scores are being pushed to the extremes, creating this kind of apparent divide.

In any event, it doesn't matter what we think. The sequel has already been greenlit, I hear. Here's hoping they spend a bit more time than 'bugger all' on the script next time.

Star Wars: The Last Review

Title: Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Director: Rian Johnson
Screenplay: Rian Johnson

Well, the movie's been out for almost a week, a period in which everyone who was going to see it has doubtless seen it multiple times and everyone who WASN'T going to see it has already explained how they're not really into Star Wars presumably because they hate fun, adventure and excitement, the bastards. Which of course means that, thanks to my impeccable, nay immaculate, sense of timing, it is time for me to provide the review that everybody, literally everybody, hasn't been waiting for. 

I feel a bit sorry for movies these days, swimming in an amniotic fluid of rumour, conjecture and leaks even before they've been pushed grunting into theatres, but then all the major names involved make multimillion dollar salaries, so fuck 'em. That's the movie business now, suckers.

So, a little bit divisive, hey? On Rotten Tomatoes, 93% positive from the critics but only 55% from site users. On Metacritic, 86 metascore, but only a 4.8 user score. Are reviews being carpet-bombed by irate fans and trolls? Are critics too scared of the Mouse to risk giving a negative review?

In a word: Yes.

I mean, it's good fun. It looks absolutely stunning, most of the time. The opening bombing run should be risible, with bombs falling down despite the zero-g and crewmembers surviving nicely without spacesuits, but is so expertly cut and framed it has you on the edge of your seat right from the get-go. There's a crimson throne-room fight that is all about fucking cool lightsaber moves, easily the best fight choreography since Darth Maul did his thing. There's a sudden cut to silence, in a monochromatic hyperspace kamikaze attack that is just jaw-droppingly phenomenal. A planet that bleeds red as the two sides battle across it. Imperial--sorry First Order, whatever--walkers hulking like Egyptian statuary against the skyline.

Oh, but the plot. Alas, the plot. Caught between the original trilogy and a new generation of movies, overstuffed with characters with too little to do even in the bloated 150 minute running time. Overburdened with expectations, too, all the mysteries JJ Abrams presented in The Force Awakens, apparently without bothering to have the slightest fucking clue how he was going to resolve any of them. And it shows, good lord, it shows.

There's a lot of talk of taking the Star Wars universe in a bold new direction, but let's acknowledge that it does so by almost immediately throwing over its shoulder every plot line left dangling from Episode 8. Who is Snoke? Who cares. Who are Rey's parents? Eh, just some guys. What's Luke doing at the Jedi Temple? Um, not much. Drinking space giraffe milk straight from the tit, mainly.

As a stand-alone movie, a lot of this would work fine. As the second movie in a trilogy, it just exposes the fiction of the emperor's new clothes. There is no trilogy, there's just a bunch of movies created so Disney can make back the money it spent on Lucasfilm. (Yes, yes, all movies are made to make money, but usually they also have the tiniest morsel of artistic merit to them, some message they wish to impart upon the world. Here? No.)

Some of the ideas are good, great even. There's a moment of tension when Kylo and Rey finally meet, and he urges her to forget the past. Jedi, Sith, it doesn't matter. That's a great direction to go--maybe the only direction, if the series doesn't want to mire itself in a hamster wheel of successive dark lords getting their laser-sword comeuppance from feisty youngsters, forever and ever, like infinite reflections repeating in facing mirrors--but then the movie immediately backs off by having the two revert to good/bad stereotypes.

The idea that anyone can be a hero, that it's who you are, not where you came from, is one I really, really like. It's the anti-Marvel effect: Evil is not defeated by the Chosen One or superheroes, but by ordinary people finally saying "enough is enough." That's a powerful and important message. That's weary cop John McClane saying "Yippe kai-yay, motherfucker." That's Ripley telling the Alien Queen to get away from her, bitch. That's fat gardener Sam Gamgee stabbing a 12-foot spider that tried to hurt his friend. But, oh but, it's a message that gets largely lost in a barrage of time-wasting silliness and too-close-to-home political posturing.

Which brings us to the parts of the movie that are just indefensible. A ropey CGI chase scene, punctuated by a stuttering bit-part character in service of a subplot that goes nowhere and achieves nothing. A plot device straight from the age of sailing ships, overseen by characters whose only role is not to tell each other things and then die heroically. A walk-on by returning character Captain Phasma that only serves to highlight how manipulative and pointless her return was. A finale that seems to go on and on before abruptly ending, leaving no clear way forward for the next Episode.

Like I said, it's really a stand-alone movie, not part of a trilogy.

But you know, despite all that, I still quite enjoyed it. I mean, it is AMAZING to look at. Whether I'll still think so if I try to watch it again is a question for another day.

Short is Sweet

Title: Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015: A Tor.Com Original
Editors: Ellen Datlow et. al (eight editors total)
Publisher: Tor.com

Not terribly timely here (2015 collection...at the end of 2017), but this was sitting on my Kindle for a while and I only just got round to reading it, so I figured I'd write a review.

This collection includes around 20 science fiction stories of varying length, sub-genres and quality. In reviewing anthologies it's easier to comment on each story, rather than the collection as a whole, but in general the overall quality here isn't that great. I picked up the digital version for less than $3, so no complaints there, but even then you'd probably do better seeking out individual good stories than buying the whole pack.

Another minor quibble with the Kindle edition: There's no index, so no way to jump straight to the story you want to read. Terrible oversight for an anthology. Also, there's an error where they second half of one story is printed again at the end of another story.

As for the stories themselves, there's a tendency for the shorter stories to be better, with the longer ones dragging on far too long and stretching whatever neato concept they had past the breaking point of my patience.

The So Good

"Please Undo this Hurt" by Seth Dickinson: Very subtle, slightly surreal story about two friends coping with depression, who are offered what appears to be a painless way out. I like that the SF element might or might not even exist--is the "out" real or not? Really made me think.

“Some Gods of El Paso” by Maria Dahvana Headley: Takes the idea of emotion as a drug and runs with it, featuring a Bonnie and Clyde duo trading in black-market feelings. The analogy gets stretched a little too much here, but the writing carries it along with a great sense of fun.

"The Shape of My Name" by Nino Cipri: The plot here is pretty basic, and those of you who don't like modern social commentary will likely hate this, but I thought it was elevated by the writing, the cadence and the use of verbal imagery. Beautiful words in service of a so-so plot.

The Not So Good 

"Thyme Fiend" by Jeffrey Ford, “Islands off the Coast of Capitola, 1978” by David Herter and “Waters of Versailles” by Kelly Robson: Novella length, each starts of interesting but drags interminably.

“Variations on an Apple” by Yoon Ha Lee: Is there a term yet for writers who deliberately fill their prose with the most obscure terms possible? Anamorphically, integument, tessellations, reifying... I'm not against the writer stretching my vocabulary here and there, but doing it every other sentence is simply wearying and smacks of deliberate obfuscation (hah, two can play this game) and intellectual showing-off. To paraphrase Hemingway, big ideas don't have to come from big words.

The Forgettable

All the rest, really. None were terribly memorable, I'm afraid.

Military SciFi Without Much of Either

Title: War Stories: New Military Science Fiction
Editors: Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak
Publisher: Apex Publications LLC

I haven't written a review in a while--Jesus, since 2011--okay, in a long while, so bear with me. The literary landscape has changed in a lot of ways, I feel, and this short story collection is a fair example of a few of them.

The biggest change is that my favoritest author in the whole wide world was still alive in 2011, may Iain M Banks rest in the Sublime and/or the land of infinite fun forever.

Other changes abound. I read this book on Kindle, which isn't exactly new, but what is new is that it's become pretty much my only means of consuming literature these days. Another change: It's published by Apex Publications, which near as I can make out, ran a Kickstarter to get financial backing before publishing it. Another one: It seems to have been inspired by a discussion on SF site io9.com. Tired yet? One more: It's focus is military SF from the perspective of female and LGBTQ characters.

Might be hard to imagine now, but six years ago any one of those factors would have been unusual (published via Kickstarter, inspired by a website, focused on alternative perspectives). All in one book would have been well nigh unimaginable.

Yes, yes, but Giles you waffling twerp, do those changes result in anything good?

Well. It's a short story anthology, so let me be the first reviewer ever in the history of reviewing to ever say that, ahem, Some Stories Are Good But Others Are Not.

Which perhaps in itself represents a small triumph for alternative modes of publication, in that the quality of output isn't much different from what you'd get from more traditional publishers.

On the other hand, it's not a breakthrough, and there are some absolute duds here. Mike Barretta's "War Dogs" is the worst of the bunch, just cringe-inducingly badly written with its cast including a sexy telepathic wolf-woman and the cast of Deliverance. Every author featured in the collection is a previously-published author, near as I can tell, so it's not like we're even getting any new voices in the bargain.

So, we're not getting better quality, nor are we getting new names.

Well, what is new then? The content, as mentioned above, is self-consciously different. I'm not the gender, race, sexual orientation or age that seems to be the target market, but you know, there's plenty here to appreciate for any reader.

There are 23 short stories in the anthology, divided into four parts: Wartime Systems, Combat, Armored Force and Aftermath, which sound pretty forced as far as categorizations go. Joe Haldeman's contribution, "Graves," a slightly surreal tale set in Vietnam, feels oddly tacked on to the front of the collection, as though the editors wanted Haldeman for name recognition and little else.

The standout is "Enemy States" by Karin Lowachee, a positively lyrical love story about the longing and loneliness of those left behind when soldiers go to war. That it's a gay couple at  the center is completely irrelevant--if the intent was to show there is no difference between the feelings of hetero- and homosexual couples, then mission accomplished.

At the same time though, this lovely, wonderfully-written, poetic story also highlights my biggest gripe with the collection: In many of the stories, the sci-fi elements are beside the point. You could set a lot of them in the modern world with little or no change. These tales of long-suffering lovers or oppressed Arabs would work just as well set in modern-day Iraq or Afghanistan.

So there's a new social conscience, expressed in the desire to have stories about women or gay couples that aren't just or only about women or gay couples, where the heroes just happen to be women or gay facing challenges and issues that any hero in other sci-fi stories face. Which is great, but the sci-fi often seems to get left by the wayside, and we're left with stories that describe modern issues without adding anything new to the dialogue.

I'm left with the feeling of an opportunity missed, as though a lot of effort was spent normalizing alternative heroes, and not enough spent giving them something interesting to do.

Spiral Tower, Mars

Beacon

Broken Falls

Composite photo

Cold canal.