Title: Thin Air Author: Richard K. Morgan Publisher: Del Rey
This is kind of Morgan returning to his roots, as Thin Air is more like Altered Carbon than anything he's published in the intervening years.
There's a cynical, hard-bitten, quasi-military protagonist who now works independently, dragged into a missing person investigation that turns out to be part of a bigger conspiracy ... which is pretty close to the setup of Altered Carbon. The action takes place on a barely- slash badly-terraformed Mars rather than Earth and the gee-whiz technology is cybernetic implants rather than digitally backed-up consciousness, but the tone, setting and story beats are all pretty familiar. I suspect whether you like this or not will depend on how you felt about Altered Carbon, and whether you wanted more of the same. Personally, I enjoyed the overall style and tone, but the hero is a little too super-powered for my taste, and like a lot of whodunits a lot rides on suspects or baddies revealing their entire plans in lengthy monologues in unlikely situations, and plus I think the conspiracy is a little too convoluted for its own good. Maybe the biggest change, other than the surface details of the setting, is there's a kind of acceptance in the writing that wasn't there 16 years ago--the world is shit, but it's the world we gotta live in, so we might as well make the best of it. Despite the noir style there is an almost, if not quite hopeful, then almost zen feel to the ending. So, if you liked A.C. this will definitely scratch almost exactly the same itch. If not, probably not your thing.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle: A classic far beyond any words of mine to either help or harm. Got a Vonnegut collection from my brother for Xmas, so working my way through that. David Drake, Hammer's Slammers Vol. 1: Interesting to see it obviously gestated in the same juices as BattleTech, with its intergalactic mercenaries and monocultural colony worlds lifted straight from 20th century stereotypes.
Started off promising with some good rip-snorting scifi action (reminded me more of Renegade Legion than BT, but anyway), but I find the constant slaughter of civilians faintly nauseating (let's massacre these surrendering guerillas, let's drop a nuke on this village, let's not bother distinguishing between combatants and non-) so I've given up halfway through. Joe Abercrombie, Heroes: Set over the course of a sort of medieval Gettysburg, a three-day battle between the barbarian Northerners and the civilized Union. Anachronisms abound, including late medieval armies organized into divisions and regiments, but a lot of the hack and slash is entertaining.
Started reading Abercrombie years ago, when I quite enjoyed his destruction of fantasy genre conventions (the kindly wizard is a manipulative schemer, the dashing hero is brain-dead, the torturer is the nicest character, the mute gets the best jokes, etc. etc.) but over the years his grimdark anti-trope style has itself become a trope, so I found a lot of this predictable: the worst people will come out on top, the nicest people in the latrine, and so on.
Still, Abercrombie's a vivid and entertaining writer, so it's a fun read.
Martha Wells, All Systems Red: Novella about a self-aware security cyborg tasked with defending a survey team when everything starts to go wrong. Won both the Nebula and Hugo awards for best novella, and though I'm still only halfway through, I haven't been too impressed. Too much seems to ride on the cyborg's indestructible nature and ability to hack any system, while the baddies are boilerplate corporate bad-guys we've been seeing in scifi since, like, Alien.
One
day you’re going to write the best thing you’ve ever written, and you won’t
even know it until maybe years later. You’ll just go on, blissfully producing a
steady stream of increasingly mediocre drivel.
And
what’s worse, no one will read it, this masterpiece of yours, and it will
disappear forever into some dusty hard drive in some server farm cavern. Never
to be seen again, unless data archeologists stumble across it in a thousand
years, like some digital Lascaux.
The Tatemae were a quiet, peace-loving race, descended from avian omnivore stock, migrating along the Perseus arm in flocks of swept-wing spacecraft.
They were involved in more and bloodier wars than any other race in the galaxy.
The trouble was this: The race had no word for “Yes,” and thus by extension, no way to give an unambiguous “No.” Regardless of their individual feelings, culture custom and language forced any individual Tatemae to hem and haw and reply to any request with “Well, it might be difficult…”
Did they come in peace? Well, they might, they might not. Too early to tell.
Would they be willing to exchange technologies? Ah, now, that was a good question.
Could they change their migration route? Hm. Might be tricky.
How about a peace agreement between their race and ours? Perhaps. Hard to say.
Would they withdraw before we open fire? They’d give it some thought.
As quantum scientists know, the world is shaped by observation and belief, and so it will end when enough of us want it to. We’ve approached that point asymptotically, a steady erosion of our will to live through famine, war, pestilence, and even just the common, petty, daily drudgery of not being dead.
That loss has weakened the foundations of the world, and allowed the demons in.
A demon is just animate entropy, with no more malice than an acid or alkaline, only driven by the need to liberate all the stuff that makes you you from its molecular bonds and the tyranny of being you.
This is why demons are banished by belief. Only the certainty that life in all its imperfections is still worth living will ensure that there will be any life left in the universe.
The wagon master eased his horse to a halt at the crest, and turned to the train behind him.
After centuries the Klondike River was once again a destination, though its visitors were running from something, not to. It was hot even in winter, and gritty asphalt got into everything, including the food.
“Welcome,” he called to the refugees. “Welcome to the promised land. Welcome to the last indrawn breath before the mortal exhalation of a dying world. Welcome to the penultimate paragraph in Earth’s final chapter.
“Enjoy the scenery, dinner is at seven. Hope you like grubs and algae, cos that’s what you’re getting.”
There is only one soul, and it lives the life of every person, one at a time, forgetting itself at the end of each, so to return and do it all over again, only through different eyes. You will be the richest of us, and the poorest, you will be the happiest and the saddest, you will love yourself, torture and kill yourself, but never ever remember.
Welcome to the Transjovian Airsphere, your soap bubble among the stars, your exotic exile, your home away from home, friends, family, pets, the whole shebang really.
Head forward please while we insert the subdermal MTE chip.
We’re five billion clicks from Earth so there’s not a lot to see or do, but not to worry, the chip gives you immediate retinal access to centuries of shows and movies.
There we are.
Here’s your Motivator. Yes, it looks like a knife. The Airsphere orbits slowly but the walls are too thin to keep you in, so you’ve got to keep in constant motion or you float off into nothingness. Just give yourself a jab from time to time, stop yourself from getting too comfortable.
The Grave Digger dug by the moon’s bony light, and the Bounty Hunter kept watch from his shadowy seat atop the next grave stone, thumbs hooked around his six-shooter belt.
The Grave Digger’s spade bit deeper and deeper into the endless black earth, and the Bounty Hunter’s fingers drummed a brittle and skeletal tune on his thighs.
“Just a little bit more,” said the Digger, leaning against the handle of his shovel and wiping cold sweat from his brow.
“Ain’ goin’ nowhere,” the Hunter replied with the ghost of a shrug.
“No,” the Digger squinted at the Hunter. “I reckon you ain’t.”
The graveyard was silent but for the bell toll of the metal spade on unforgiving earth.
“Such a waste, dyin’ so young,” the Digger muttered. “Makes you wonder, what’s the point?”
“Too late to worry about that now. Either there’s no point, or the whole thing is the point. The length of the livin’ don’ enner into it.”
When he was done, the Digger threw aside the shovel, and hauled himself out, back out of the hungering hole, dusted the dirt from his palms and took off his hat. Held it nervously in both hands. “Anything to say before we do the necessaries?”
“Naw, no sense in gettin’ all loquacious now. Best say what you need to say when you’re still among the quick. Why waste words on the dead?”
The Digger shrugged. “Like what you said: Either words are their own point, or there ain’t none.”
The Hunter chuckled, and took off his own hat. Giving the Digger a good view of the shot that had killed the Hunter, a neat, round and brown hole just above the right eye. “Maybe put that on my tombstone,” he said, and stuck out his hand. “My thanks.”
“Safe travels,” said the Digger as they shook, and then watched as the Hunter lay down in the hole he’d prepared for him. Sighing, the Digger began to fill it again.
Title: Outlaw King Directed by: David Mackenzie Written by: David Mackenzie, Bathsheba Doran, James MacInnes, Mark Bomback, David Harrower
In this latest straight-to-Netflix installment in Hollywood’s love affair with Scottish rebels against the one people Hollywood hates more than Republicans or Nazis—the English—we follow the future “King of Scots” Robert the Bruce (Star Trek and Wonder Woman leading man Chris Pine) as he fights for independence.
Overall, it has a lot going for it, including a great cast and suitably gritty visuals, but the whole thing is kind of let down by the rushed and unengaging story.
Chris Pine plays against type here as the dour and melancholy Brucey, in a role that largely requires him to look mournful and stare just slightly past the camera with those blue, blue eyes of his. I like that he reigned in his charisma and challenged himself with a more brooding, thoughtful role, but I think he was let down a bit by the script that never shows a hint that there’s anything deeper going on inside his head—he just looks Eeyore glum most of the time, and that’s it.
On the other hand, the supporting cast is generally excellent. This is the movie for anyone suffering from Game of Thrones withdrawal. Not only is the tone similar—including everything from the evisceration of supposed good guys to a mud-soaked Battle of the Bastards-esque finale—but it also has a lot of familiar faces.
There’s James Cosmo (Jeor Mormont in GoT) as Robert’s father, Clive Russell (Brynden Tully) as Scottish Lord MacKinnon, and best of all, Stephen Dillane (Stannis) finally claiming his mantle as our true and rightful king, Edward I. However, his son, the Prince of Wales and future Edward II (Billy Howle) is a right turnip, so he’s still not winning any awards in the parenting department.
The camera is restless and dynamic, swooping and twirling around, into and through the scenes, most notably an opening one-take whirlwind as Edward I brings the Scottish lords to heel with a demonstration of his power before the last pocket of resistance, Stirling Castle.
The action is suitably frenetic, particularly in the smaller-scale scenes like an ambush on Robert’s small band of followers or a sneak raid on a castle. Battles don’t stint on the mud and gore, though they do fall into the common pitfall of having the main characters act like board game Hero Units, dispatching hordes of faceless adversaries with one stroke. I don’t claim to be an expert on medieval warfare, but I rather think the point of wearing all that chainmail would be to make it ever so slightly difficult for the other fella to gut you with their sword—just once I’d like to see a medieval movie that tried to show how hard it would actually be to kill an armored opponent with nothing but a big fancy knife.
Still, that’s a minor quibble.
The main trouble with the movie is that the whole spectacle is far too sterile.
Action movies have to be more about yelling and screaming and blood and gore and bashing each other with bits of metal. All that has to mean something, otherwise it’s all just empty spectacle.
Interesting, gripping, edge-of-your-seat drama and action depends on engaging the viewer. And being engaged depends on—excuse me if I get technical here for a second—understanding what the hell is happening on the screen, both physically and emotionally. What are these people trying to do? Why? Does that make sense? Is there a chance of failure? Do I—as the viewer—hope they will succeed or fail (and why)?
Outlaw King is brilliant at showing me What is going on, but completely duff at showing me Why. It charges through plot points like a knight in chainmail, without bothering to slow down and show you the motivations or reasons for any of the action.
We open, as mentioned above, with Robert the Bruce and the other Scottish lords surrendering to Edward I after a failed rebellion, led in part by William Wallace of “Braveheart” fame. Soon after the English execute Mel Gibson and hang up bits of his body around the kingdom, driving the Bruciest of all Roberts to rebel once more.
And I have no idea why.
He informs his family of his decision to fight, and they all agree, including his new wife, the product of an arranged marriage to a powerful English nobleman’s daughter. His wife, Elizabeth de Burgh (Florence Pugh) defiantly declares “I choose you!”
And I have no idea why.
These aren’t minor details, these are the pillars on which the whole movie rests—the A story about Robert’s rebellion, and the B love story between Robbie and his English queen—and the key players’ motivations in both are a complete blank.
With a movie so tightly focused on one man, the titular Outlaw King, especially one so withdrawn and thoughtful, his reasons for fighting and going through all the shit he does are not incidental to the movie, THEY ARE THE BLOODY MOVIE. Without that you’ve just got a bunch of Billy Connolly impersonators going Arrgrrrghgyrrhghwharrr and smashing each over the head with maces.
The problem I think is that the scriptwriters were too focused on hitting all the necessary plot points charting Robert’s fall and rise, not enough on ensuring we actually care about them. It’s just kind of assumed that you’re on board with Rob and the gang and know the English are baddies worth fighting against.
That’s why we blast through the opening, including the decision to go to war, without bothering much with motivations, and why later plot points, like the guerilla war against the English, are done in a scene or two before we move on.
It’s also strangely lacking in tension, as the action tends to be all one thing or all the other—either Robert and Co are getting mercilessly clobbered and slaughtered, or they’re downing the English like pints at the pub. There’s never any hint the former will be less than an utter disaster, nor any challenge to their success in the latter, so again you’re left just kind of watching numbly. Huh. Well, I guess that happened.
And that’s almost painful, because in almost every other respect, this is solid, first-class filmmaking. It’s well shot, well-acted, well-designed, all the other thousand elements that go into making a movie are all fine and good and nice, but it’s just so hard to give a damn about it when the characters are automatons going through the motions and the outcome of any scene is never in any doubt.
