Blades of Glory

I think everyone who has seen a trailer for this movie realizes that it's stupid. They make it very clear that this will be a very stupid movie, and it is. I went, hoping that it would be the right sort of stupid. Dodgeball, for instance, was exactly the right sort of stupid--ridiculous and overacted, and very, very funny. Blades of Glory does not quite match Dodgeball's humor level, unfortunately. But it's actually a sort of fun little goofy feel-good movie. It's definitely not for everyone, but I'm not sorry I saw it.

2007 Hugo Nomination Thoughts

OK, the moment we've all been waiting for has arrived: the nominees for the 2007 Hugo Awards have been announced.
(What do you mean, you haven't been waiting for this moment? Everyone else has. Get with the program, dude.)

I really only care about the novels, so they are all I intend to comment on. The full list can be found here.

The nominees for novel are:

Michael Flynn Eifelheim
Naomi Novik His Majesty's Dragon
Charlie Stross Glasshouse
Vernor Vinge Rainbow's End
Peter Watts Blindsight

In an email to a friend a few weeks ago, I listed six or seven books I thought had a good shot at being nominees this year. I am happy to say that four of the above-listed works were on my list. (Go, me!!) Of the above, the only one I've read is Blindsight. It's gotten a lot of good word-of-mouth, but I have to say I'm in the minority that didn't like it. It's quite absorbing, but very claustrophobic and depressing. Definitely not an enjoyable read for me. I also own His Majesty's Dragon, but haven't read it yet; and I intend to read Glasshouse, but haven't got to it yet.

The nominees for the John W. Campbell Award for the Best New Writer are:

Scott Lynch, who wrote The Lies of Locke Lamora
Sarah Monette, who wrote Melusine
Naomi Novik, who wrote His Majesty's Dragon
Brandon Sanderson, who wrote Elantris
Lawrence M. Schoen, who I admit I've never heard of

I have read Melusine, and thought it was pretty good, but I don't intend to read the sequels. It was okay, and wrapped up the story in a fairly satisfying way, but had *sequels* written all over it in big, flashy lights. No, thanks. I didn't like the characters or the world enough to want to read more.

I own The Lies of Locke Lamora, but haven't read it yet. I've heard great things about it. I hope it lives up to the hype.
I also own His Majesty's Dragon, but haven't read it yet.
I've looked at Elantris, and considered buying it, but haven't, yet.

On Dealing with Pharmacies

AAAAAAAAARRGGHHHH!!

What is *wrong* with these people?!?


OK, thanks for listening, I feel better now.

It's Spring!

Black Coffee by Agatha Christie & Charles Osborne

Black Coffee is not, as I first assumed upon seeing it, an Agatha Christie novel. It is, instead, an adaptation of one of her plays into a vaguely novel-like product.

I found myself wondering, as I read the book, how closely it followed Christie's original script. I assume that the dialogue is all Christie's, and much of the action reads like stage directions. Most of the story happens in one room, which certainly is the result of being a play. I think that Osborne tried to remain faithful to the source material. But it still doesn't feel like an Agatha Christie novel.

In Black Coffee, Poirot is summoned to the home of a scientist who fears someone in his household is trying to steal the secret atomic formula he's developing for the government. Poirot and Hastings arrive to find the scientist dead and the formula missing.

It's a fairly standard Christie scenario, and yet I found the work unsatisfying. For one thing, we are told who put the poison in the coffee on page 59. The remaining 200 pages are merely a Columbo-like exercise as we wait to see how Poirot figures it out. Likewise the location of the missing formula was very obvious.

The characters are entirely unlikable and unbelievable, which is not my usual experience with Christie. In this work, I found their priggish, selfish, xenophobic behavior to be abhorrent. There is the scientist's son, who is desperately strapped for cash, but not to the point of being willing to get a job. He is furious that the police have been called over a private family affair like this--apparently murder is none of their business. The scientist's sister is constantly decrying foreigners. And what does Poirot do when he recovers the very important formula that belongs to the government? He gives it to the dead man's daughter-in-law, who burns it because of all the trouble it has caused. Right, that should make everything better. WTF?

Other than the whole revealing-the-killer-before-the-victim-even-died thing, I can't really blame Osborne for the flaws of this story. The awful dialogue and characters are Christie's. The lights-go-out-and-then-someone-screams plot contrivance was Christie's. The flaws were mostly hers, and they are many. Not recommended.

Cover Art

Perhaps this is a sign of bad taste, but this cover art made me want to read the book. Really, I've no idea if it will be a good book or not, but as soon as I saw that green alien waiter, I knew that I had to buy it. They just don't do cover art like this any more.

Very Interesting

John Scalzi has just announced that he's running for president of the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) as a write-in candidate. He doesn't actually want the job, he just thinks that he might do a better job of it than the guy who's running unopposed. I don't know that he'll actually win, but it will start a firestorm of debate about the SFWA and what it should be doing better. I look forward to reading it.

His platform is here.

A Scattering of Jades by Alexander Irvine

A Scattering of Jades was the first novel published by Alexander Irvine. It came out in 2002, and I've been hearing good things about it for years, but didn't get to it until now. I read The Narrows, by this author, about a year ago, and found it absorbing but rather unsatisfying.

A Scattering of Jades is a secret history, like The Narrows. It is spread out across a period of time in the 1830s and 1840s. Archie Prescott, a man who is unemployed and living on the edge, returns home one evening to find their tenement has burned down, and his wife and daughter are dead. He sinks into a funk of alcohol and self-pity and remains there for years.

Jump forward seven years, and he's still a miserable alcoholic. He's underemployed and has lost all hope of a better job. His boss, a newspaper man, tries to push him into action and sets him to investigating corruption in Tammany Hall. He has run-ins with their enforcers, and knows that they could kill him if he doesn't back down, but he's desperate enough to keep trying. A badly-scarred little girl keeps accosting him in the street and claiming to be his daughter, but he assumes she's just crazy.

Archie gets a tip that he should be at the American Museum at midnight, where he will see something interesting. There, he narrowly escapes death twice, and is sent on a cross-country quest to Kentucky to save his daughter from being sacrificed to an Aztec god.

At a sentence and paragraph level, this book is well written. The text flows, and you're drawn along. However, it took me a long time to get into the story. I wasn't much enjoying it and wasn't sure I wanted to put in the effort to finish it. I started enjoying the book around the time Archie went to the museum, where interesting things started happening. But that's almost 100 pages into the book. If I had picked this book up cold, without having read another by the author and heard good things about this one, I'm not sure I would have bothered to read that far. I think there was too much setup before things really got going. There are also a lot of point of view characters, and that slows down the flow of the story, at least for me.

Archie, like Jared, the main character in The Narrows, is a self-pitying, miserable sod to ride along with. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think it's a common expectation in this genre to want characters who are very competent. Archie is not very competent, and that's frustrating. I generally prefer books in which I can sympathise with the main character, but this wasn't one of those books. My favorite character was Jim Diamond, a dead guy who popped up occasionally and couldn't remember people's names. He was funny, and got things done.

Overall, I liked A Scattering of Jades. It was an interesting tale, competently told. However, I also thought it was too long. I suspect that this was due to the multitudes of POV characters, and that probably sprung from a desire to explain things too much. A little mystery is better than too much explanation. We could have learned things as Archie did--all the backstory wasn't really necessary. Still, once I got into it, it was an absorbing read.

The Engineer Reconditioned by Neal Asher

The Engineer Reconditioned is a collection of stories by Asher, published by Cosmos Books. It consists of a novella, The Engineer, plus 9 short stories.

The Engineer is set in the Polity universe that is the setting for many of Asher's novels. Scientists find the preserved remains of a 5 million year old alien, and revive it. It's a fun story with androids (which here are called golems), space mercenaries, and cool alien tech. And explosions.

We are treated to three stories featuring characters who later appear in The Skinner, which provide some interesting backstory. There is also a set of three stories about a planet with an Owner, a not-terribly benevolent fellow who allows humans to live on his planet, so long as they don't break the rules. The first felt a lot like a Western to me, but the others did not. There is a creepy but fun story about a fishing boat that's captured a monster, and a story about an involuntary time traveler who kills people everywhere he goes. It seems to be connected with Asher's novel Cowl, but I haven't finished that one yet, so the connection isn't clear.

I was impressed by the imagination of the settings. I love Spatterjay, the carnivorous planet of The Skinner, but here there were more new and interesting things. For instance, in Snairls, they are flying around inside giant, helium-filled snails. Is this even remotely plausible? I haven't the foggiest, but it's cool. In The Gurnard, the residents are constantly in danger of being eaten by the carnivorous sheep.

I'm not usually interested in description, but I really liked this, from The Thrake: "The sky was alien. No other word applied. He could have said it was the colour of blackberry cordial shone through with a sun lamp or that the clouds were like the froth on fermenting red wine. But those were descriptions taking as their basis things from Earth--things familiar. The sky was not familiar." Very cool. And I liked the story, too.

I freely admit that I generally prefer novels over stories, but I enjoyed this collection. It is very violent, frequently gross, and filled with parasitic worms. But it also had a good selection of really fun, cool stuff. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Götz and Meyer by David Albahari

I am, generally, not a fan of literary novels. By this, I mean books that focus more on style or character than on story or plot. I like believable characters, but I also require that things happen in a novel--and the more that happens, the better. I do not want to read about people on a journey of self-discovery, or an account of everyday events in someone’s life as they wonder if they’re happy and consider having an affair. I *really* don’t want to read a book about someone going back to their home town and confronting events from their childhood. I don’t read books for mundane, everyday life. I’m surrounded by that every day. I read books, simply, for cool stuff. I like hyper-competent characters. I like explosions, and rockets and aliens. I like a good mystery, or comedy. I like snarky books that poke fun at everyday life. I also like nonfiction. Not biography, usually, but history and popular science and how-to books.

So it is a slight mystery to me why I occasionally pick up books like Götz and Meyer, which is a Serbian literary novel about the Holocaust. It is even more of a mystery to me why I usually finish such books. Nevertheless, I do this sometimes. Götz and Meyer is the sort of book I should hate. It has no chapters, or indeed any paragraph breaks. The book is a 168-page paragraph, narrated by a Serbian Jewish writing instructor who has become obsessed with two men and their truck, and pretty much goes nuts by the end.

Götz and Meyer were two noncommissioned SS officers during World War II. It was their job to drive a truck every day. The truck would hold about 100 people, if they were jammed in tightly. They would pick up a load of Jews at a camp outside Belgrade, then drive away. They would stop along the way, reconnecting the exhaust system so that the fumes went into the box of the truck, then continue driving. By the time they reached their destination the passengers would all have died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and then the bodies would be unloaded into a mass grave. They did this trip day after day, until all 5000 residents of the camp were dead.

The narrator is a Jewish man who learned of this only after he began researching his family tree. None of his few surviving older relatives were willing to talk about what happened during the war, so he had to dig it up himself. Our narrator wonders about Götz and Meyer, wonders what sort of men they must have been. Did their work bother them? Did they have wives and children of their own? Why did one of them sometimes give chocolate to the children of the camp, shortly before loading them into the truck to their death? From there, he begins to make up stories about them, and imagines talking to them. He imagines what his relatives must have gone through, imagines what they were thinking and feeling in the back of the truck. He develops nervous tics and psychosomatic itching. He imagines the ghosts of his dead relatives touching him as he walks down the street, and starts making odd statements in class, which confuse his students. By the end of the novel he is a truly broken man, and I half expected him to commit suicide.

I neither liked nor hated this book. It was thankfully short, and sort of absorbing. The author did a good job of brining to life the image of the camp and the horrible efficiency of their deaths. Perhaps it was the feeling of bringing me closer to history that kept me reading. I really can’t recommend or dis-recommed this book, since it hasn’t inspired any strong response from me.

Bother

Based on my cough, and the wheezing noises I was making as I tried to breathe last night, and how much it hurt to breathe the cold, dry air outside, I suspect I have bronchitis. Bother. However, at least at the moment, I don't feel too bad.

Zodiac

Zodiac is a film about a serial killer who caught the public's eye in the late sixties and early seventies. I saw it because I was in the mood for a movie, and this was the one that looked most promising at the local theater. The Zodiac killed a few people, claimed credit for more murders he probably didn't commit, and sent letters and codes to the newspapers, which they printed. He was never caught, though different people have theories about who it might have been. The film is supposed to be based closely on the real facts of the case.

Zodiac is long at about two hours and forty minutes. It really isn't about the killer himself, it's about the search for the killer, featuring an ensemble of police and newspaper men. As odd as this may sound, I think it's a fairly quiet, thoughtful film for a serial killer movie. The early part of the film is dominated by Robert Downey Jr. playing a flamboyant alcoholic reporter. He is wonderfully entertaining, and steals the scenes he is in. The middle of the film centers more on the police investigation. Anthony Edwards is likable as always as Inspector Armstrong, and Mark Ruffalo was outstanding as Inspector Toschi. The final part of the film features Jake Gyllenhaal as an obsessed cartoonist who decides to investigate the crimes on his own.

The first two hours or so were very entertaining, creepy but not sensationalistic. I really enjoyed that part of the film. Most of the movie is set in the late sixties, and the sets and costuming were great. It reminded me of films shot in that era. It looked great, and the characters were interesting and believable.

The last forty minutes, however, were not so much fun for me. They are dominated by Gyllenhaal's character, who is obsessed with finding the killer. He isn't rational or likable, and the last part of the film is why I don't recommend it enthusiastically. It was a lot of fun up to that point, but the end isn't so great. I think it is a good film, but also a flawed one. The same might be said of Gyllenhaal's character. It's an interesting film, and certainly worth seeing.

We got fifteen inches of snow yesterday

Yuck.

Dismissed with Prejudice by J.A. Jance

To me, mystery novels are candy. They are quick comfort reads, usually not very challenging but pretty satisfying. I can gulp down an average mystery in a few hours, which gives me the satisfaction of completing a book without having to commit a week to finishing it. The less time I have, the more I appreciate quick books. Mysteries are a genre that are split into dozens of subgenres, each catering to their readers' particular taste. There are private eyes, cosies, suspense, serial killers, amateur detectives, historicals, and many more. I've read a lot of mysteries over the years, especially when I was in college, and subsisted almost entirely on books from the used stacks at Uncle Edgar's. My preference is for police procedurals.

I am always on the lookout for new authors of police procedurals, and this is the first I've read by J.A. Jance. It features Detective J.P. Beaumont of the Seattle police department. He is a series character, as so many mystery detectives are. I haven't read any of the earlier ones, so I know only what I was able to pick up through the context of the book about him. Jance doesn't include the usual little paragraph or two of intro for her character that is common in series mysteries. Therefore, I have no idea why this alcoholic homicide detective lives in a penthouse and drives a porsche. (But it reminded me of John Sanford's Lucas Davenport, millionaire police detective) Likewise, I was in the dark through most of the story as to why his lawyer was living with him. (Apparently he's from out-of-town, and was visiting)

It was clear, however, from the first page, that he is an alcoholic. He is awakened by the telephone, having failed to show up for work. His hand is splinted, and he has no idea what happened to it. He doesn't remember the previous day, and spends the next 24 hours missing appointments he doesn't remember making. When questioned about his absence, he gets defensive and makes up stupid lies. Later, when a doctor tells him he has an enlarged liver and needs to see an internist, he rationalizes that it's nothing and skips the appointment. These characteristics don't make him very likable. Yes, it may be realistic characterization, but I'm a science fiction reader, and like my protagonists to be hyper-competent. It's a genre-based difference of expectation, like romance readers believing that a story about a relationship isn't a romance unless it has a happily ever after ending. I prefer reading about a competent, professional police detective over a lone wolf screwup who can't get along with his colleagues. But as I said, it's a genre thing. However, I think that's why I like Peter Turnbull--the whole CID are reasonably intelligent, professional, work well together, and don't have particularly miserable home lives.

Anyway, on to the mystery: a Japanese businessman who was on the verge of bankruptcy is found dead, with a priceless Samurai short sword in his gut. The medical examiner strongly prefers a suicide verdict, but people who knew the man say that he wouldn't have killed himself. As it turns out, they are correct--he was murdered. Then his widow and daughter are brutally attacked. Then a helicopter pilot disappears, and so do two potential witnesses. Beaumont spends a lot of time contacting other police departments for help with his investigation. I read this book pretty quickly, but by the end I was having trouble keeping track of all the characters. I haven't read any of the other books, so I wasn't already familiar with any of them. It didn't help that there were two detectives with a Scandinavian last name and a first name beginning with the letter A. However, I admit that remembering character names is one of my weaknesses as a reader.

On a sentence level, this story flows well. It moves quickly, lots of things happen, and it's pretty entertaining. The resolution, however, was very stupid. It seems the killers were mobsters from Chicago. Why? Not for any good reason, actually. And when Beaumont catches one of the bad guys, he punches the guy, hard, just to work off some frustration. Huh? Police brutality like that can lead to charges being dropped. What the hell was he thinking? Now, this book is from 1989, before Rodney King, when all the detectives drove K cars and a car phone was a luxury. But I still found it massively stupid.

Would I read another Jance work? I dunno. As I said, it flowed well and was fairly entertaining. But the massive stupidity of some of the plot ruins my willing suspension of disbelief. (Chicago mobsters? WTF?)