REVIEWS

2001, Part L: December 2001

2001, Christian Sauvé

Featured books:

Without forgetting the usual end-of-year stuff...

 

H.M.S. Unseen
Patrick Robinson

Harper, 1999, 526 pages, $9.99 Can pb, ISBN 0-06-109801-9

There are times where I seriously wonder if reading more than 170 books a year is somehow rotting my mind. Why else to explain peculiar attachment to authors I don't care about? H.M.S. Unseen is Patrick Robinson's third novel and freakishly obsessive readers of my reviews will remember that I haven't liked either Nimitz Class or Kilo Class very much. Robinson writes badly, has no gift for effective characterization, doesn't know how to structure his stories and has a rather curious sense of global geopolitics. I might have picked up H.M.S. Unseen with the hope that he has improved, but he really hasn't.

The story is a loose follow-up to Nimitz Class in that the terribly anticlimactic death of the first novel's antagonist is revealed to be the sham we suspected all along. Ben Adnam is back in action, but maybe not as smoothly as he wants to: The first few dozen pages of H.M.S. Unseen describe how the Iraqi government decides to get rid of their most troublesome agent, and how Adman escapes through marshes and deserts to join Iran's government. His proposition? To exact revenge, he will frame Iraq for a series of devastating terrorist attacks.

I'd say "so far so good" if it was the case, but it isn't. Early on, all of Robinson's usual faults come back to haunt us. He can't write. Still. Clumsy exposition drowns out dialogue to such an extent that there isn't any dialogue left. His sense of dramatic structure is shaky at best; events happen out of nowhere without preparation and then he'll spend dozens of pages on the most insignificant details before kicking the plot in an entirely different direction again. The downing of the experimental plane is a perfect case in point; what could have been milked for drama simply becomes another plot point without too much importance. But, oh, Adnam's Scottish escape becomes a marathon of tiny details we couldn't possibly care about, given that we know he will do it.

After three connected novels, I still can't care about one single character in Robinson's oeuvre. He tries to make an antihero of his terrorist villain, but it comes across as just... insipid. Late in the book, he tried to make me pity the antagonist (aw, looove... and it just so happens that the girl is now married to the protagonist of the first two novels!), but my only wish remained for the bad guy to irrevocably die so that I could move on to other things.

More and more, it looks like Robinson simply has no clue about what makes a good technothriller, whether it's the tiny (oh; the writing, maybe?) or the grand. On an overarching level, I just can't believe in what Robinson does. Late in HMS Unseen, for instance, Adman encourages the United States to destroy -with cruise missiles!- a large dam in Iraq, killing thousands of civilians, setting back Iraq a few decades in hydro-electrical capacity and, oh, provoking a major international incident in the process. (The characters pooh-pooh such objections as "we'll be caught!") Utterly unbelievable, especially in a context where the States are already being unjustly blamed for "hundred of children dying every day because of sanctions". Now imagine actually destroying a dam. I was practically screaming at the novel "No, you moron! Leave the civilian targets alone!" No such luck.

The structure of the novel is even more insipid, bouncing from situation to situation without a sense of heightened stakes. The final few pages are emblematic of the problem, as the villain is dispatched almost with a yawn and a wave of the hand. Almost as if by then, Robinson hated his novel as much as I did.

Still, you got to hand it to the guy. To be able to publish three awful novels in a row (and to get me to read'em) takes a special skill. You know what? I'm almost certain I'll read his fourth. I might spend my time cursing at it and muttering dark promises of retribution, but at least it'll be more entertaining than reading, say, yet another dull and tired Dale Brown B-52 fantasy.

Egad. Maybe I am brain-damaged after all.

 

 

Our Dumb Century
The Onion

Three Rivers Press, 1999, 164 pages, $24.00 Can., ISBN 0-609-80461-8

It always amazes me whenever someone opines that history is boring.  To hear them talk, history's just a dull recitation of dates, names and events. Don't they realize that history can explain everything that happens today? Don't they know that the best stories ever published don't even equal some of the amazing stuff that has truly happened in the past? Don't they even remember Santayana's admonition?

Maybe all that's missing is a gifted vulgarizer, someone to make the study of history amusing, accessible and worthwhile. I don't think that this is what the staff of The Onion had in mind when they set out to put together Our Dumb Century, but the result certainly makes history a lot of fun again.

You might or might not already be familiar with the web humor magazine The Onion ( http://www.theonion.com/ ), but it doesn't really matter; all you need to know is that Our Dumb Century's shtick is to "reprint" a hundred year's worth of front pages from the Onion as a retrospective of the century. None of it is available on the web site.

Of course it's all made up. Headlines like 1917's "Pretentious, Goateed Coffeehouse Types Seize Power in Russia" or 1953's "A-Bomb May Have Awakened Gigantic Radioactive Monsters, Experts Say" should be a giveaway. But the most amazing thing about Our Dumb Century (past the funny stuff, of course) is how real it looks. The front pages from the beginning of the century look exactly like the old newspapers did, with shaky typography, badly-reproduced graphics and overstuffed layout. The graphical team responsible for the design of the book truly did their homework, and visually, there isn't a single detail that looks out of place. It's one of the small pleasures of the book to flip from page to page and see the evolution of "The Onion" through the century.

All of which is considerably reinforced by the pitch-perfect style of the writing. The Onion's writers have convincingly re-created the characteristic tone of reporting through the century, through the biased, wordy style of the 1900s to the carefully antiseptic prose of the 1990s. It may or may not be exact, but it adds a lot to the impact of the jokes.

And what jokes they are: From 1900's "Death-by-Corset Stabilizes at One in Six" to 2000's "Christian Right Ascends To Heaven", Our Dumb Century offers a century's (and 164 pages') worth of satire. Every page is shock-full of stuff in 8-point type, with enough nastily funny headlines to make you groan in pure sadistic delight. (How about 1963's "Kennedy Slain By CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemason: President Shot 129 Times from 43 Different Angles" or 1937's "German Jews Concerned about Hitler's 'Kill All Jews' Proposal"?)

Naturally, this isn't for everyone. The level of sadistic irony can be shocking (1976: "Cambodia to Switch to Skull-Based Economy"), as can be the intentional profanity (July 21, 1969. 'nuff said.)

Historical figures are in for a thorough irreverent thrashing, of course. There's an alternate-universe arrest/getaway/manhunt/shootout involving Nixon (1974), a few good slams at FDR (1933: "President confronts depression with 'Big Deal' Plan: 'Big Deal, I'm Rich' Roosevelt Says") and welcome nastiness about various great villains of our century (1977: "Idi Amin Praises Former Ugandan Defense Minister as 'Delicious'")

A sense of history is, of course, as useful as a sense of humor, but while Our Dumb Century can motivate anyone to learn a bit more, it's unclear whether a sense of humor can be developed. For those with some knowledge of the past hundred years, though, the payoff is enormous. The staff of The Onion laughs at an astonishing variety of subjects, from arts to politics, military affairs to fashion fads and you never know when your favorite areas of interest might pop up.

The only flaw of the book that I could find was a loss of historical perspective over the last 30 pages of the book in favor of lighter pop-culture references. Maybe inevitable given the lack of perspective... or accurate given the real nineties.

Not only is Our Dumb Century an instant classic and one of the funniest books of the twentieth century, but it's also one of the best gift ideas I've ever seen for smart people. Buy a crate, encourage The Onion, distribute at will and get compliments on your impeccable taste. Easy!

 

 

One Point Safe
Andrew & Leslie Cockburn

Anchor Books, 1997, 288 pages, $32.95 Can., ISBN 0-385-48560-3

In 1997, then brand-new studio Dreamworks released its first film, a techno-thriller called THE PEACEMAKER. It starred Nicole Kidman and George Clooney and dealt with their efforts to retrieve a few nuclear bombs stolen by a terrorist. Unfortunately, the film received a mixed critical reception and quickly sank at the box-office, pulling in only $41 million US and quickly fading in memories.

Too bad; I enjoyed the film a lot, finding it to be one of the only good techno-thriller of the late nineties. It seemed reasonably authentic and adequately detailed; the film is still the only one I recall in which the protagonists realistically disarmed a nuclear weapon. Small surprise to learn -later- that it was based on Andrew and Leslie Cockburn's One Point Safe, a non-fiction book about the nuclear dangers to come out of the ex-USSR. Both writers were even credited as the co-producers of the movie and penned the original story.

What you can't know until you read the source book is how the reality is presented as being far more chilling that the fiction.

One Point Safe begins with a bang, as it describes how a team of German terrorists tried to steal a tactical nuclear weapon from an American base in 1977. Their assault was thwarted by the failure of their diversion, but as the authors write, "No longer was it a question 'if' terrorists wanted to steal a nuclear weapon." [P.6]

It gets worse. Much worse, as the Cockburns delve deeper in the wreckage of the ex-Soviet Union. In a few chapters, they describe the awful conditions to which the once-proud Soviet military has been reduced to. Officers in charge of nuclear weapons now starving, multi-megaton storage facilities rusting out of neglect. Plutonium depots left un-garded. The problem with the collapse of an empire is that after the collapse, all the nasty stuff is still there even if the people aren't.

The crux of One Point Safe is to show the various nuclear dangers in this post-cold-war era. The guards are gone, corrupt or criminal, but their deadly possessions remain. So the Cockburns describe actual cases of radioactive material theft, the lax security measures in Russian weapons depots, the new ultra-capitalistic Russians trying to make money off the Soviet arsenal and how nuclear non-proliferation agreements aren't worth much when transgressions mean eating again.

Things aren't necessarily better in the United States. The Cockburns take an almost sadistic delight in describing a botched anti-terrorism exercise gone hilariously wrong. "Mirage Gold" becomes a parade of mistakes, and latter exercises designed to intercept nuclear smuggling aren't any more successful. Those mistakes are compensated, somewhat, by a few intelligence coups, such as the American purchase of important quantities of plutonium from Russia. Once such operation, codenamed Sapphire, is a marvel of logistics meticulously described by the Cockburns.

Still, as the book advances, you can't help but feel increasingly spooked by the missing "backpack nukes", the widespread corruption, the "accidentally discovered" smuggling rings, the open borders, the broken Russian chain-of-command and, oh, the narrowly-avoided nuclear war of 1995.

All of which raises the question, of course, of the veracity of One Point Safe. Certainly, the tone is cheerfully sentionalistic. Online ( www.bullatomsci.org/issues/1998/jf98/jf98arkin.html ), you can find a letter from an atomic scientist protesting the alarmist tone of the Cockburns. Indeed, they probably overstate their case. But even if half of what they say is true... In any case, it makes for exciting reading.

Beyond the compulsive narrative drive of this book, you can also look at One Point Safe for one of the clearest description of how executive policy is formed, as a team of analysts tries to convince the Clinton administration to do something about the Russian situation.

In short, One Point Safe is a meanly effective read. Sensationalist but always effective, this non-fiction account will make you cringe and hope that the intelligence community is doing its work. Because otherwise...

 

 

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
J.K. Rowling

Raincoat, 1997 (2001 ed), 223 pages, $9.95 Can., ISBN 1-55192-398-X

"Well, I'm surprised to see that you've condescended to read Harry Potter" said my uncle's girlfriend when she saw me with the first volume in hand.

The only really surprising thing is how long it's taken me to actually read the darn thing.

I've always been deeply suspicious of the popular intellectual snobbery that states that "if it's popular, it can't be good". Without citing too many examples, there are times where something is famous because it's good. It might not be better than your favorite obscure painting/movie/author, but that in itself isn't a reason to criticize anything wildly fashionable.

I first wanted to read Harry Potter a long time ago. I downloaded the pirated electronic versions of the whole series late in 2000, only to realize that I just don't read novels on screen; my reader's reflexes are still hard-wired to paper, ink and glue. My sister bought and read the first two volumes. Ages passed. A movie got made. I borrowed the first volume from my sister, then consciously put it away and enjoyed the movie on its own terms. A few more weeks passed and then I decided to celebrate the end of 2001 with a good fluffy read.

I enjoyed almost every page of it.

Before gushing, though, allow me to say that there are two criticisms I can heap upon J.K. Rowling and the first Harry Potter novel.

First, how deliberate it all seems. Let's see: to ensnare kids, what better than a misunderstood, under-appreciated hero who really has exceptional magical powers and whose parents are really powerful magicians? You couldn't design a better hook on purpose, much like Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game seemed mathematically designed to hook young teenagers with pretty much the same levers.

Second; how conventional it all is. Tales of magical academies and of young magicians have been written before. Some of them quite good. Almost every gadget used in The Philosopher's Stone has been invented elsewhere, used elsewhere and seen elsewhere. There isn't a lot of new, inventive fantasy material in Harry Potter. (So far.)

But guess what? None of these two objections matter very much to the base reader that I am. What is far more important is how clearly Rowling writes, how well she builds her characters and how many little flourishes she manages to pack on every page of her novel.

I attended the World Fantasy Convention in early November 2001, and the slightly dismissive tone in which Harry Potter was discussed struck me as unfair. While elements of the Pottermania leave me nonplussed (the fourth volume shouldn't have won the Hugo, for instance), a lot of it struck me as simple sour grapes at someone outside the genre reaping all the attention and the money.

The first volume of the series, whatever the objections of the fantasy litterati are, is a wonderful little book that didn't feel at all like a kid's novel. I've always been a sucker for the "academy" type of novel, from Starship Troopers to, say, Gravity Dreams, and The Philosopher's Stone ranks among the best of them. It takes conventional elements of magical training and cleverly stuffs them in the British educational system. Simple and obvious, but not so obvious that it's cliché. And, like it or not, Rowling's produced a fantasy novel that is immeasurably more enjoyable than at least 90% of what's published in "adult" fantasy today.

While I'm not completely bowled over, I still feel that Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is a great little book that will make you -even you!- fall in love with reading all over again. Embrace Pottermania. In this case, what's popular is what's good.

(A few words about the movie vs the book: Amazing fidelity, though the book "feels" more adequately paced. The novel also provides more details on Harry's family life, Hagrid's past and one or two extra challenges before the end, not to mention a second Quiddich game.)

 

 

2001: My Reading year in review

And so comes the time to kick back and reflect upon the last 12 months of reading in my life. Here are a few notes on the best, the worst and the weirdest things read in 2001:

If you're seriously contemplating buying a house, allow me to warn you: It will ruin your reading time. Seriously. Once you've bought a house, there's constantly something else to do, from painting to cleaning, from snow shoveling to mowing the lawn. It gets worse if you have a garden. From an average of 210-260 books per year read while I was a happy fellow living in my parent's basement, I've had to struggle to reach 170 and 200 books in the past two years. While my paperback reading is more or less unchanged due to invariable commuting time, the amounts of large-format books read has plummeted. If you want to remain a happy reader, don't buy a house. Or get a significant other who doesn't read... if you can stand that.

Over the past few years, I've accumulated an impressive "to be read" pile. This is severely affecting my reading habits, since I now deliberately try to go through the pile rather than buy new books or borrow them from the library. Consequently, my grasp of current literature has dwindled to a point where I can't even, as of December 2001, list a "top five" 2001 releases. Things are not expected to change in 2002, but I'll do my best to get back on the wagon by 2003. If all goes as expected, naturally!

I've said so in my review of Nelson DeMille's The Lion Game, but it bears repeating: The events of September 11, 2001 have definitely affected my reading. Any thriller dealing with terrorism is now perceived differently than before, and usually not for the best. I don't expect that I'm alone in saying so.

From terrorism to bad books, there is only a matter of degree, so here are my bottom choices for the worst books read in 2001. The common element linking these five choices is that they're all indescribably dull. Save for Appleseed, don't look for reviews of these books anywhere on the site; if I lost hours of my life reading these books, I'm not about to waste minutes of my readers' time by writing about them.

Don't get the impression that I couldn't enjoy some books. Here are my choices for top ten books read in 2001:

Enjoy!

Finally, here are a few more recommendations of books published over the past five years:

1997:

1998:

1999:

2000:

2001:

Until next time... happy reading!

 

 

2001: The year in SF&F movies

2001, thanks to Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, used to represent the ultimate in science-fiction. People used to expect aircars, trips to Jupiter and insane AIs by that year. Instead, we got Segway, cloning research bans and fundamentalist morons smashing hijacked planes in large buildings.

Overall, it was such a bad year that it seems almost offensive to complain that it also wasn't a good year for SF movies. But that's what you get when you do this feature year after year. So let's check what was offered to us in 2001.

The good

Well, here's a short list: The only SF-flavored film of 2001 I can recall enjoying without too many reservations is JIMMY NEUTRON: BOY GENIUS, an animated SF-themed children's comedy that packed more cool ideas in 90 minutes than the rest of the year's movies combined. Fast clean fun, JIMMY NEUTRON can also boast of some of the best writing of the year, and a dynamic direction.

I'll mention VANILLA SKY as another good SF film and leave it at that, having spoiled too much of the movie already.

Honorable mention goes to JURASSIC PARK III, though it should be said that I did so by considering it solely as a B-series monster movie adventure. It wasn't as polished as the first two films, didn't contain a single original SF idea, but it was fun. If I recall correctly.

And that's it for 2001. As a point of comparison let's just point out that the best SF films of 2000 were FREQUENCY, X-MEN and SPACE COWBOYS. 1999 saw THE MATRIX, THE IRON GIANT and EXISTENZ. Oh, the decline!

The flawed

Some films promised much and delivered oh-so-little.

In SF-ideas terms and overall artistic ambition, the Spielberg/Kubrick collaboration ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (A.I.) was clearly the best SF film of the year. Unfortunately, the end result poured a ton of Spielberg' cloying saccharine over the cold concrete slab of Kubrick's intellectualism to produce a movie that was annoying through both sentimental manipulation and sheer boredom. Some visuals are superb, some sequences really make you happy to see the film, but overall you can doze though most of the film without missing anything. A shame!

The computer-generated FINAL FANTASY should have been a fantastic SF story unburdened by SFX concerns or practical limits. Granted, some of the sequences were quite amazing and some of the visuals, again, were wonderful to behold. Unfortunately, the anime-influenced story delved a bit too much in science-fantasy, the pace often sputtered and the end result fell though. Add to that the definite creep-factor of watching almost-photo-realistic characters and you end up with a movie that should have been much, much better but whose ambition might have exceeded the current state-of-the-art. It's still the only so-so film of the year that I recommend, if only as an educational experience. The DVD is worth owning.

Finally, THE ONE started from a cool alternate-universe premise, featured interesting effects and starred the charismatic Jet Li. Unfortunately, the pacing wasn't adequate, Li disappointed and, perhaps more offensively, the potential of the premise was badly mishandled. I started poking holes in the plot not even fifteen minutes in. Hollywood can usually turn out one good B-series SF/action film by year, but that wasn't it.

The ugly

EVOLUTION isn't totally bad -you'll laugh-, but it feels so lazy that you might not want to acknowledge it. The alien-invasion premise has been done to death already, and this comic treatment of the subject is so easy, so obvious that it's clear that no one save the SFX guys worked hard on that film. The direction is strictly pedestrian, and even if there's some inherent interest in seeing David Duchovny and Julianne Moore in a comedy, their charms wear off quickly.

K-PAX is another one of those cheap dramatic movies that try to pass pretentious nonsense as profound philosophy. Oh, the movie coasts a long time on Kevin Spacey's sensitive-alien shtick, but once that's dropped for a ridiculous hypnosis-induced psychological disillusion, there isn't much to like. Even worse; this film takes delight in providing no coherent answer, feeling that it's quite all right to simply "make up our minds". Refund!!

But as disappointing as EVOLUTION and K-PAX were, they're paragons of movie goodness compared to GHOSTS OF MARS, a ridiculous Z-grade film that shouldn't have been allowed in theaters. Stupid story (ghosts... of... Mars!), flat directing, muddy cinematography and atrocious villains make this one of the worst films of the year. I do feel sorry for the likeable actors (all of whom deserve much better), but don't be fooled and avoid!

Unseen

Associated genres

However poor 2001 was for Science-Fiction, it was a fabulous year for fantasy on the big-screen. Yes, I'm talking about the amazing adaptation of THE LORD OF THE RINGS' first volume. Yes, I'm talking about the first HARRY POTTER. Yes, I'm also talking about SHREK and MONSTERS, INC. Yes, I'm also trying to forget about MONKEYBONE.

In horror, same-old-same-old mixture of good and bad: There was THE OTHERS and then there was THE FORSAKEN. There was THE MUMMY RETURNS and then a bunch of atrociously-reviewed film I dutifully avoided, like JEEPERS CREEPERS, VALENTINE, SOUL SURVIVORS and 13 GHOSTS...

Next?

And that, alas, was the year that was. Naturally, 2002 promises marvels... but we'll wait and see.

I don't think that IMPOSTOR will be any good, having been pushed back more than eighteen months from its first mid-2000 release date. It would be highly surprising if the also-delayed ROLLERBALL ended up being anything but tripe. Nor do I believe that the equally-delayed Eddie Murphy vehicle PLUTO NASH has any hopes of being good.

On the other hand, I have hopes for David Twohy's follow-up to PITCH BLACK, a WW2-horror/SF submarine thriller called BELOW. I'm also curious about M. Night Shyamalan's SIGNS and Andrew Nichols' S1M0NE. I'm not so sure about Paul (SOLDIER) Anderson and the videogame adaptation RESIDENT EVIL. CLOCKSTOPPERS has a fun trailer, and so does EIGHT-LEGGED FREAKS, though we can't say the same for THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES. What's happening with LIBRIUM and PLANET ICE? Can we expect anything from Spielberg's MINORITY REPORT? Maybe.

Otherwise, well, we have a year of remakes and sequels to look forward to: MEN IN BLACK II (high suck-potential), THE TIME MACHINE (hoping that the troubled-production rumors are false), STAR TREK 10: NEMESIS (hey, it's an even number!), TRON 2.0 (if it gets made), THE PRISONER (ditto), RED DWARF (uh-huh) and SPIDER-MAN (fan-boys unite!) Oh, and some movie called STAR WARS II: ATTACK OF THE CLOWNS?

After that, well, bets are open: The IMDb mentions ABELCAIN, ABOMINABLE, ANTIBODY, ASCENSION, AVATAR, THE CORE, DREAMCATCHER, GHOST SHIP, IT'S ALL ABOUT LOVE, MEGALOPOLIS, PULSE POUNDERS, REIGN OF FIRE, SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS, SGT. KABUKIMAN LAPD, SUBTERANO, THROUGH THE MOEBIUS STRIP, TIME CHANGER, TREASURE PLANET and UNDER THE MOUNTAIN. Which ones are mere outdated rumor? Which ones will be released straight to video? Which ones will be delayed until 2003 or later? Which ones will you see? And, most importantly, which ones will be any good?

34 possibilities, according to the IMDB. According to the shotgun theory, at least a few should hit the target. But then again...