| (no subject) |
[Dec. 22nd, 2009|11:25 pm] |
I tried reading Alastair Reynolds'Revelation Space. It was very quickly terrible, but I held out hope because the wikipedia summary said it would talk about all kinds of cool stuff like transhumanism and the Fermi paradox and a hostile ancient race of galaxy bogarting robots. But I eventually had to just stop. His writing has so many problems.
1) He writes like he gets paid by the word. Never say something in 5 words when 45 words will suffice almost as well.
2) All of his characters are petty jerks. Almost all character interaction takes the form of snide bickering. Why?! Do people really like to read that? Does Alastair really like to write that? As if that weren't bad enough, all of his dialogue is full of tacky cliches that only appear in bad writing. Nobody would ever say most of what his characters say. It just comes off as artificial and sounds like he's copying and pasting sections from cheesy 1950s sci fi screen plays.
3) The details of the transhumanism stuff and the robot race are just glossed over.
4) Generally sci fi authors set down some premises that their universe is formed around. Maybe they have warp drive or maybe laser pistols can be super powerful. Alastair Reynolds chooses a very wacky group of premise technologies. There is no faster than light travel, but there is nearly infinite, nearly free energy available to some ships, which lets them approach the speed of light. It also gives them weapons powerful enough to easily blow up planets. Why would you invent a weapon powerful enough to blow up a planet? What conceivable use would it have? A less powerful weapon could sterilize a planet of your enemies without blowing it up.
Other assumed technologies include the ability to tear loose zones of spacetime, making spacetime bubble universes (although oddly this is not used for FTL travel). Minds can be perfectly copied with little effort. It is easy to tell which simulations are truly sentient and which are just automatons, even though both can pass a Turing test. (How you even define "truly sentient" is not explained.) Anti-matter is easily generated and stored by devices smaller than a marble. Nanotech suits exist that can reshape their mass into nearly any shape or weapon imaginable. Viruses exist that can infect both human tissue as well as nanotech machines, and the viruses want nothing better than to randomly mutate these two things, and ultimately kill them. Computer viruses exist that can infect any computer made by any civilization.
Yet oddly, cameras are super hard to repair and some planets are unable to put anything into orbit.
5) The author seems to have never engaged in combat, watched any combat footage, or even taken part in a fist fight or paint ball game. The way he writes about infantry combat resembles combat scenes in Star Trek. Characters have time to speak multiple, lengthy (and snarky) sentences to each other in between shots. Combat involves a lot of two people standing in front of each other and trading gunfire. Cover is rarely taken. Covering fire is never mentioned. Rather than clear chains of military command, combatants all bicker about what their plans should be. (These are all supposedly seasoned combat veterans.)
6) While I did like the complicated plotting and scheming the characters do against each other, bizarrely they will make their intentions clear by verbally threatening their intended targets.
7) The author fails to communicate what the motivation of the main characters is. The crew of a space ship risk all their lives, engage in several multi-decade long space journeys, vaporize a town full of people, and threaten an entire planet with death in order to save the life of their captain - but their captain remains in deep freeze for nearly the entire book, and no clue is given for the source of this fanatical loyalty. certainly it is not his ability to inspire crew cohesion as they all hate each other and some of them have tried to murder another crew member in cold blood. I don't think an author should leave a reader thinking "why bother?"
Honestly I don't know how this kind of crap gets published, yet somehow this book alone was shortlisted for the 2000 BSFA and Arthur C Clarke awards. (Whatever those are.) |
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| 2009 Movies! |
[Dec. 22nd, 2009|11:04 pm] |
#99: American Pie
We were watching The Big Bang Theory last night when a commercial for a horrible-looking direct-to-video American Pie sequel when ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sithlet said "You know, I've never seen an American Pie movie." I own the first one, so we watched it, and it was fun. The Enb. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 20th, 2009|11:53 pm] |
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I just watched District 9. I was very skeptical of the premise. The beginning of the film was really looking bad, but then it kept getting better and better and better. All in all I think it was a very good movie. I was quite impressed.
( spoilers ) |
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| Braced and prepared to accept change. |
[Dec. 19th, 2009|08:59 pm] |
It's already a touch embarrasing how personal, and how utterly geeky, this post is going to get.
Set the stage. I'm a mousy sophomore in high school, 1994. A friend of mine lends me a manga novel on the bus. This manga changes my life forever. It becomes a near decade long obsession, inspires me to hone my artistic skill (and is solely responsible for any 'anime' feel to my artwork absolutely), and sets a bar of excellence I've still yet to achieve artistically. I fell in love with the protagonist in an infatuation sense. Like an imaginary friend or an untouchable idol. Hell, it's probably how some people feel about Jesus.
Alita. Or Gally, if you will. Ah. It's still there a little bit.
This is probably that dorky fandom thing that runs rampant in Japan, I've just kept it mostly internal. My close friends all know I obsessed over this manga, but they also found it to be awesome so I just kinda shared in the appreciation. And aside from jokingly, I don't pretend to 'own' this fandom, I know plenty of other people love and obsess over Battle Angel just as I have, or at least enjoy it. It's out there. But it's still fairly obscure, and now it's getting old and buried under the sands of time.
Yeah, then Avatar did fantastic opening weekend.
See, you've probably heard of Avatar over the last year, being James Cameron's new 3D masterpiece. Well, I've known about Avatar for going on 4 years, because it was announced Cameron was making this movie to test out the 3D camera technology before he tried it on his magnum opus. His opus, of course, being Battle Angel. Turns out James Cameron, lover of cyborgs and robots that kill, is also a huge Alita fan. So big, he made a little show in the 90's called Dark Angel starring Jessica Alba, with a not-so-surprisingly similar plot. Of course, instead of robotics it was genetics, but the roots of the tale were the same. Still, he worked to get the rights, and Yukito Kishiro is now working closely with him on the new movie.
I haven't seen Avatar yet, but it is doing well enough that people are going to want more. Eyes will shift to Battle Angel. People will want to know how this one turns out. It will be big.
My little Alita, who's probably already had her share of popularity in Japan, is going to make big waves in America, potentially the world, as Cameron's latest femme fatale. She could be featured on late night shows or Saturday Night Live sketches, much like hobbit and Harry Potter references are these days. Battle Angel could become a franchise. It could become another... Star Wars? I don't know. I can't predict the future.
But what I do know is that something I've kinda always known to be this great thing is about to be opened up to the masses. My silent 16 year obsession could, by 2011, be a commonplace fad.
I'm just saying I'm totally cool with that. It'll be weird, and kinda awesome, and it may strip me of something I've long held to myself, but I'm cool with it. Especially since, y'know, I get to enjoy the movies also. You always want to see the things you enjoy grow and give you more. |
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