BOOK REVIEWS

1999, Part H: August

1999, Christian Sauvé

Featured this month:

 

 

Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas
Dale Pollock

Harmony Books, 1983, 304 pages

Summer of 1999 was flagged, in movie circles, as being "the summer of STAR WARS" given the release of the newest chapter in the saga, STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE. The movie certainly captured media attention for a while, mostly under the form of humorous human-interest stories about the hordes of rabid fans lining up days, even weeks in advance to be the first to get tickets for the movie's premiere.

Your reviewer has more than a soft spot for the STAR WARS films, even though this fondness never reached unreasonable levels. Growing up with the STAR WARS films, however, makes them almost critic-proof, impervious to critical judgment. (Seeing the new STAR WARS on opening day was a must, though a flexible work schedule and matinee showings simplified matters considerably.)

In this context, it might seem a bit belated to do a review of a 1983 biography about STAR WARS creator George Lucas. But after reading the book, the new STAR WARS summer of 1999 makes it the best year yet to review Skywalking.

Stop. Rewind. Play.

Skywalking is a biography of George Lucas. From his childhood in California to teenage years marked by a passion for sport cars—a passion that would culminate in a spectacular car crash, and would be immortalized later in AMERICAN GRAFFITI. The narrative follow Lucas from his first few days at USCinema school, through his student films to, finally, his first full-length feature, THX-1138.

Then Skywalking details the steps leading up to the release of the first STAR WARS film, from the agonizing screenwriting to the chaotic filming (sets destroyed by sandstorms, malfunctioning special effects, etc...) and the almost-unexpected success of the film. By that time, two-third of the books are done, and the remainder of the book seems like routine; the success of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, the production of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, the making of THE RETURN OF THE JEDI...

Unexpected details pepper this biography. A visit on the RETURN OF THE JEDI set. Descriptions of George Lucas' student films. A summary of the first, first STAR WARS screenplay. A chapter on the friendship between George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.

This portrait of George Lucas is fairly complete. Dale Pollock takes great care in establishing, even at first, the traits that would push Lucas to build a cinematographic empire: His thriftiness, his sense of authenticity, his distrust of authority, his desire to entertain and his refusal to compromise.

Skywalking remains relevant even seventeen years later because this is a relatively unbiased portrait of Lucas. Relatively, because Lucas granted unprecedented access to Pollock, numerous private documents and several interviews. It's a fair bet to assume that Lucas cannot be studied in this fashion any more: Would his status as a legend of filmed SF (gack!) allow him to collaborate so willingly to a book of this type nowadays? Hmm... LucasFilm is already known for extensive history rewriting... ("EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE")

But the true value of Skywalking in 1999 is to be found in the last chapter, where George Lucas allows himself to talk about his future projects: Enhanced special effect, independent production facilities, forays in video games... THE PHANTOM MENACE is the culmination of these elements, and 1999 is the first year where we can see the extent of Lucas' success. Yes, George Lucas has accomplished everything he's set out to do. The irony, after seeing THE PHANTOM MENACE, is that he's put himself in a position of supreme accountability for the considerable flaws of the end product.

Skywalking won't convince those who criticize Lucas. It's not a chainsaw biography, it's not a slavish portrait of a demigod. It has managed to remain relevant seventeen years. It even shines on current event, proving that nothing ever exists in a vacuum, that nothing new is without antecedents. Not bad.

 

Fool's War
Sarah Zettel

Warner Aspect, 1998, 455 pages, $6.99 Can., ISBN 0-446-60293-0

A few contemporary Science Fiction critics of late have bemoaned the tendency of contemporary SF to become entrenched upon itself. Rather than being stories about the effect of rational change on humanity, SF is now most about SF itself. Instead of fresh ideas, we get stories that are explicitly about SF gadgets, space adventures with robots, laser guns and aliens that refer only to other SF stories and not plausible development from today's world.

This description of SF-as-SF certainly applies very well to the "media" segment of written SF, those bastardized written STAR TREK episodes, or infamous STAR WARS trilogies. These are not SF-as-literature-of-ideas, but SF-as-moneymaking-machine-for-media-corporation. The work aims at nothing more ambitious than giving existing fans a story in a predefined universe where sweeping changes are forbidden by license holders.

But one doesn't need to go in media-SF territory to encounter SF-as-SF. The whole segment of space opera is arguably based on premises that will not be realized "in the real world". Who can argue in favour of Faster-That-Light engines? Who believes that Galactic Empires are a viable form of government? For all we know, FTL drives will never exist and all of space-opera is fantasy.

So say the critics. And they're mostly right: SF has acquired a specialized audience in its long existence, and many of these readers are perfectly content with good old-fashioned stories about AIs, robots, aliens and galactic empires. Where critics err, however, is when they assume that SF-as-SF is somehow less worthy than its more realistic counterpart. Which finally brings us to Sarah Zettel's second novel, Fool's War.

Judge for yourself from the plot description: "Katmer Al Shei, owner of the starship Pasadena, does not know she is carrying a living entity in her ship's computer systems. Or that the electronic network her family helped weave holds a new race fighting for survival. Or that her ship's professional Fool is trying to avert a battle that could destroy entire worlds." The only missing thing is a few exclamation points.

But however conventionally specialized her setting may be, Zettel knows how to please her public. Fool's War is clearly written (up to a point where it's easy to skim and gloss over crucial details), her characters are pretty well-defined and the plotting maintains an adequate level of interest.

Her take on Artificial Intelligence is one of the elements that Zettel brings to the SF idea cauldron by writing a genre novel. In Fool's War, AI self-consciousness is a product of sudden paranoia. Succinctly put, sentience happens as soon as a program realizes that it is susceptible to being turned off at any moment. The inevitable systemic crashes caused by newly-conscious paranoid AIs are cause of significant concern for many characters in the novel, and some barely-repressed anger from one particular character.

Distinctive touches like these, plus genuine dialogue skill, cause renewed interest in Fool's War. Zettel's attention to the people side make her space opera read far more like Lois McMaster Bujold than E.E Doc Smith. While some elements are unconvincing (Her inclusion of Islamic characters is understandable, but neither touching or impressive), the novel as a while holds up pretty well.

Though "merely" a genre novel, Fool's War play the rules of the game very well. Experienced SF readers will find what they expect in here: A good plot, professional characterization and touches of humour mixed with a sprinkling of ideas. With just some more work, Zettel shows a lot of promise as an author worthy of attention.

False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes
Thomas Hoving

Simon and Shuster, 1996, 366 pages, $35.00Can., ISBN 0-684-81134-0

For someone like me, technically trained in cold, hard matters of equations, algorithms and formal methods, the world of fine arts is as mysterious and incomprehensible as an alien mindset. You look at a picture, you like the picture or not. If you really like it and if it's for sale, you buy it. Simple!

Not so simple. C.P. Snow would be proud. Art is not merely something that can be simply reduced to "liking/not liking". Especially when older artwork is concerned, it becomes a question of cultural pride, personal self-aggrandizement, financial investments... And then troubles begin. When you buy a Roman sculpture to show off, it doesn't matter if you like it: It does matter if it's an authentic Roman sculpture, though. Who is to say if it wasn't hacked out three years ago by some guy deep in Arkansas with a talent for reproducing "authentic" Roman sculptures?

False Impressions is a book about fake artwork. Well-respected "former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art" Thomas Hoving brings both erudition and wit to this fascinating subject.

Though the book is not without flaws, it does present the subject adequately. Hoving spends some time discussing the history of fakes, noting that even in Roman times, for instance, artists routinely faked Greek artwork. Medieval times are full of fakery, up to and including the shroud of Turin. The popularization of the art world has given rise to even more audacious fakery at the beginning of the century.

A lot of the narrative is simply Hoving's autobiography as far as fakes are concerned. It's a bit of a disappointment to find out that in many cases, a fake is never entirely conclusively proved as being a fake. It often happens that even the latest scientific methods are simply useless to distinguish fakes, especially if they are from roughly the same period.

Neither is the fake necessarily of lesser quality and/or artistic merit. Hoving insists that fakes are often of better quality than the original work of art. Generous souls can even consider them pastiche, especially if they're not meant to represent a specific oeuvre, but a "lost piece" in the same tradition.

What is a fake, then? It all boils down to the very simple axiom that a fake is not what it's purported to me. A Roman sculpture produced by our hypothetical Arkansas guy would be a fake if represented as being authentically roman. But it would be a work of art in its own right if represented as "American, 1999"—though probably decried as being an obvious Roman rip-off...

Any book that can have me thinking about this kind of stuff gets points for audacity. On the other hand, False Impressions is not exactly a great book and part of the problem lies in the medium. Text-heavy books are not a good way of discussing art. Art is made to be seen, to be touched, to be felt in person. A study of fakes almost requires us to be able to compare original with fake, or at least see what we're talking about. No such luck here: False Impressions does contain photographs, but they're on a black-and-white insert late in the book that feels a lot like if each one was painstakingly inserted after much arguing. This would have been terrific material for a TV documentary, even a four-part miniseries. But as such, False Impressions is a tease in its text format.

Compounding the problem is that Hoving might know his subject like few others, but his writing style often veers into irrelevant minutiae. Everything he writes isn't exactly essential. Where was the editor?

Still, I have to admire a book that can make me ask questions about artwork and fakery. False Impressions, despite significant flaws, is an eye opener and a mildly diverting trip into a hitherto unsuspected shady underworld. Not exactly recommended to everyone, but worth picking up if you're really intrigued by the subject.

 

Moonseed
Stephen Baxter

Harper Prism, 1998, 534 pages, ISBN 0-06-105044-X

Sometime, I wonder how Hollywood producers deal with it.

No, I'm not talking about the sleeping-with-supermodels-and-rolling-in-cash part. That I can reasonably understand. But I really wonder how they have to deal with the trade-offs between story and budget. Consider disaster movie, which are all about showing expensive catastrophes on screen. If you're on a limited budget (and even $150M is a limited budget), how can you deliver a really good disaster film when it's literally too expensive to put it all on screen?

This isn't a problem in novels, because when you get down to it, prose writers have essentially an unlimited budget for visual effects. They can blow up the earth for exactly the same amount of money that have two minor character talk to each other. No publishing house is ever going to bankrupt themselves by investing in a spectacular historical war novel over a simple romantic comedy. Movie studios, on the other hand, pretty much tattooed HEAVEN'S GATE in the forehead of every script acquisition manager...

Stephen Baxter's Moonseed proves how much more satisfying a disaster story can be in written format. Not only is it more spectacular, but it's also better-constructed and far more clever than its Hollywood counterparts.

It all begins on the night when astronaut Geena Bourne and geologist Henry Meacher decide to divorce. Venus blows up and Henry is transferred to Edinburgh, where a mysterious silvery dust soon begins ravaging the countryside. Before long, the Edinburgh dust pool is growing at exponential rate, and it becomes clear that they've got to stop it. Evidence points at contamination from one of the Moon rocks, so NASA puts together a mission using present-day technology to go back there...

Stephen Baxter is known for being a hard-SF writer, and Moonseed will do nothing to diminish this reputation. He plays the SF game and follows the rules, which does give a delicious particularity to the part where NASA puts together a baling-wire mission to go back to the moon. Otherwise, spectacular scenes abound, whether it's Edinburgh being consummated by the "Moonseed" or Seattle being erased by a tidal wave. Big bucks special effects, backed by I-guess-accurate physics.

Moonseed is less capable when it comes to human characters. Some are barely introduced and then forever forgotten (Marge Case, Jenny Calder, Cecilia Stanley, etc...), others are superfluous (Blue Ishiguro, Hamish "Bran" McCrae and the remainder of the clichéd cult subplot), while the protagonists are involved in quasi-soap-opera plot complications to keep them together. (No, but seriously, wasn't it possible to select a worse three-person moon team?)

But it doesn't really matter, disaster stories and hard-SF novels being what they are. Even the lengths of the novel can be a good thing when they add such richness. Who cares about individual humans when the whole race is at risk? Moonseed is far more original than the usual catastrophe scenarios, ironically by going back to the source disaster story, the classic When Worlds Collide. The ending accelerates the pace of the novel, leading to a wide-open conclusion that truly rewards the reader.

So, next time you're contemplating paying almost 10$ for a disaster movie, consider Moonseed as an alternative. Easy reading, original threat, imaginative plotting, neat gadgets and cool scenes not constrained by a fixed SFX budget. What more could you ask of an end-of-the-world story?

 

The Warrior's Apprentice
Lois McMaster Bujold

Baen, 1986, 315 pages

In almost four years of steady book reviewing, I have somehow managed to avoid talking about Lois McMaster Bujold's work. This oversight is inexplicable given that I've never read anything by Bujold that I haven't liked. I've even had the chance to meet her in 1997, at Montreal's Con*Cept SF convention (I unknowingly transgressed normal con-going etiquette by asking her to autograph a book while she was browsing the art show. Fortunately, she was gracious enough to sign my paperback copy of Mirror Dance with a smile.) So, allow me to use this review of The Warrior's Apprentice as a general rave about her work.

Lois McMaster Bujold is not exactly at the cutting edge of science-fiction. Her books contain few original ideas, her future is comfortably extrapolated according to the old-style rules (no pervasive nanotech, no real infotech impact, etc...) and -if you want to get downright nasty- many of her stories could comfortably be told in fantasy, romance or contemporary settings.

But that is belittling Bujold's considerable skills. What she lacks in terms of innovation, she compensate by creating some of the most realistic and sympathetic characters in the genre. Her writing is simple, yet elegant and powerful. Her plotting is meticulously paced to keep the reader racing forward. While her worldview is characteristically positive (the good guys invariably win), she doesn't hold back on the punishment her heroes have to endure in order to triumph.

Most of her stories are set in one single universe and feature the same set of characters. This provides her with the opportunity to build one comprehensive universe, and to move her characters across arcs that would be impossible to complete in one single novel. Contrarily to other multi-book universes, hers holds together amazingly well, and seems more logical than most.

The Warrior's Apprentice is, from real-world chronology, the first book to star Miles Vorkosigan, the tortured hero of most of her cycle. Published in 1986, it was her second novel, but it remains as good as her latter efforts. Ultra-intelligent Miles is introduced and brilliantly wins both his battles and the reader's undying sympathy. After all, who else can fail his military academy exams and yet manage to build up a mercenary fleet?

Despite a few slight flaws here and there (it needed a bit more clarity in some spots, and maybe some fleshing out of the mercenaries), it's very hard to dislike this novel. Not only is it compulsively readable, but the characters are all-around winners. Miles Vorkosigan's superior tactical skills could be insufferable if they weren't balanced by some wickedly funny self-depreciating internal monologue: A typical SF superhero with an atypical lack of pretentiousness. The other characters are well-handled and also made suitably sympathetic. Bujold not only writes good stories, but also has the knack of building up to great scenes. The Warrior's Apprentice mixes coming-of-age episodes with space battles and one final great courtroom scene in a whole that's just satisfying.

After that, it's no wonder to see Bujold regularly nominated for the fan-selected Hugo awards, and to read some rabidly devoted comments by Usenet fans. She deserves all of it. Though maybe not imaginative enough to be an essential part of the SF panorama, the works of Lois McMaster Bujold are nevertheless worth some attention. And you could do worse but to try The Warrior's Apprentice as an introduction.

 

MTV: The Making of a Revolution
Tom McGrath

Running Press, 1996, 208 pages, $22.95, ISBN 1-56138-703-7

If ever some future historians decide to study my life in detail, they'll probably abandon before my twenty-fifth birthday out of terminal boredom. They'll quickly conclude that I missed out on sex, drugs and most of rock'n'roll. It speaks volume that I've never seen a straight ten minute of MTV, and that was an accident. For all their much-vaunted influence, MTV and its Canadian equivalents (MuchMusic and MusiquePlus) are remarkably easy to avoid if you don't have cable.

And yet, even I can't argue with the impact of MTV and video clips. From the business side of things, it has produced a discontinuity in the way popular music is marketed. There is very literally a pre-MTV and a post-MTV era as far as selling pop music is defined. Before, you produced some songs, played them on the radio and hoped for the best. Now, with the artist in everyone's home through video clips, the image is an integral part of the process. Is it any wonder that pop-phenomenons like the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys can succeed today on unimaginative musical content? (Indeed, looking at today's female singers, one can wonder if musical success is somehow genetically linked with attractiveness.)

But the true measure of MTV's success is that its influence has spread well beyond the confines of music: By linking image and song, it has also boldly redefined the audiovisual universe of popular culture. Squeezing a mini-story in four minutes require some compression, best achieved with quick cuts, fast-paced action beats and the avoidance of subtlety. Television quickly noticed that the same rules could also apply to longer lengths, as initially proven with "Miami Vice". Cinema took longer to catch up, waiting for clip directors to helm full-length pictures, but when Hollywood noticed the phenomenon, it never looked back. Action films are now filmed like videoclips, their frenetic pacing appealing to jaded viewers. The biggest summer movie of 1998, -ARMAGEDDON, directed by former music-video director Michael Bay- was called "the first two-hours movie trailer" by top film critic Roger Ebert.

MTV did this. MTV took popular culture by storm and single-handedly changed it beyond former recognition. That's what Tom McGrath tells us in MTV: The Making of a Revolution. He goes beyond just a straight corporate history of the TV network and places it in context by linking it to other changes in the 1982-1993 timeframe. That' how we end up not only with a book that decently traces MTV's ascendancy, but also the associated fields of cable television (actually invented in the 1950s) and video clips.

As could be expected, MTV lovingly covers the pre-history of the network and its first few moments. (The first video played by MTV was, fittingly enough, The Buggle's "Video Killed the Radio Star". MTV Europe began with an even more appropriate clip, Dire Strait's "Money for Nothing") Then it's America's infatuation with Michael Jackson, Madonna, video clips, and MTV... But the book covers roughly fifteen years, and that's just enough time for more than a success story. MTV briefly faltered in the late-eighties, as it realized that it could be only "FM radio with pictures", but had to re-invent itself as a true channel with more to offer.

This is not a press-release book, nor is it a superficial look at a pop phenomenon. The writing is informative, witty and occasionally very funny. But McGrath has done his research, and the end result is truly a good look at MTV. Even the carefully-wild graphic layout respects the content and tries to spice up the rest. It's a shame, for such a visual subject, that there couldn't be more photos, and that the ones that are printed are limited to a bichrome palette.

In a nutshell, MTV simply accomplishes what it set out to do: Give a good and thorough history of MTV as well as make it clear that the impact of the television channel was significant on more than simply popular music. I was convinced, and that's all I need to say.