Year: 2005

  • Hopscotch, Kevin J. Anderson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2002, 468 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-57640-2

    The pulp-magazine origins of genre science-fiction have allowed it to evolve its own self-sustaining market, its own rarefied standards of extrapolation and its own sub-culture of specialized fans. SF has prospered under these conditions, but in working within its own ghetto, has also relied too long on a few lazy habits that are hard to break. Intentional simplification is one of those conventions that has to go, and otherwise satisfying works like Kevin J. Anderson’s Hopscotch demonstrate why.

    The standard procedure goes like this: Given a really good idea, the author’s temptation is to write a story set in a future shaped almost exclusively by this idea. For most of SF’s history, this has meant flying cars in settings identical to white American suburbia, circa 1950-1960. Caucasian heroes saving the galaxy while their housewives are busy raising the mutated kids. Nuclear families with atomic rocketships.

    But back in the real world, we know that the present isn’t so simple, and that the future is even less likely to be so. The hallmark of today’s best SF writers (as represented by Sterling, Stross, etc.) is to present a future that is as textured, as shattered as today’s society. Futures with political complexity. Futures with doubt, incompetence and all sorts of human failings in environments that will never gleam with glass and chrome. Old-school SF, in this context, can still be enjoyable —but it just doesn’t hold up as a piece of credible extrapolation.

    Kevin J. Anderson’s Hopscotch, despite considerable lengths and a regrettable political naiveté, is a lot of fun to read. From a basic concept (what if minds could easily hop from one body to another?), Anderson imagines four hundred pages’ worth of incidents, anecdotes, economic transactions and other neat consequences. The plot is built as a template on which to hang as many of those body-switching ideas as possible. In many ways, it’s a throwback to the pure idea-throwing fun of classic genre SF. After the first few pages, it’s obvious that Hopscotch doesn’t mean to be cutting-edge SF, but a nostalgic idea-driven romp. (The hopscotching process itself is left purposefully vague, relying on foggy noosphere notions that aren’t developed very well.) The writer is purposefully playing a very specific SF game, and well-behaved readers will know how to play along.

    It works well, but only up to a point. I’m not going to say much about the straight-to-the-fact writing and the utilitarian style, mostly because genre SF has evolved a tolerance for efficient prose. What hurts a lot more is the emptiness of Hopscotch‘s world beyond the hopscotching. It all takes place in a vaguely specific America, with absent political structures and undefined social issues. (As you may expect, if the US is an abstraction in Hopscotch, the rest of the world is even less visible.) There’s a brand-new, all-powerful regulatory agency to prevent hopscotching abuse. Otherwise, well, you’re left wondering. The very concept of hopscotching seems to have been greeted with widespread approval, and there’s no word of anything looking like a counter-hopscotching movement.

    But is it fair to nit-pick this novel with such base concerns? Hopscotch, after all, doesn’t aim to present a “real” vision of the future. The lack of technical details points the way: this is old-fashioned science-fantasy, using the rational language of SF to make a point after a purely speculative, even fantastic premise. If the characters act like dim-bulbs through the entire plot, it’s to precipitate the action. If the world has no political complexity, it’s to simplify the plotting. (Even the organizational politics don’t make sense; an FBI agent today would not be allowed to head an investigation tracking down one of his best buddies.) Hopscotch has chosen to be a mean idea machine.

    A more serious objection to Hopscotch as a piece of old-school SF is that by those very same old-school standards, it’s almost unbearably long. Novels of the sixties barely topped 250 pages. This one clocks in a nearly twice that, and the last third of the novel seems needlessly long. Worse; it’s precipitated by stupid actions by characters. You know that a novel, as fun as it is, has overstayed its welcome when you wish the runaway character would just give himself up.

    It’s enough to drive you nuts: Hopscotch is a fun, fine novel, packed with ideas and easy to read. Yet it remains so far and so close to something better, something that could actually have relevance to today’s world rather than yesterday’s genre.

  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (2005)

    The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2005) The first three books of Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide” series may be classics, but this film certainly won’t. Oh, calm down, it’s not a disaster. But it’s also nothing more than “okay”, and that’s just too bad. While Adams’ best-known comedy work has been featured onto many medium (starting on radio, making its way to a TV series, a computer game and the theater stage), this film plays with the material as if it didn’t know what to do. While the film features some fantastic sense-of-wonder moments (I’m thinking specifically of the planet-yard and the “Goodbye Earth” pullback), a lot of the rest of the film feels cheap and homely. The “Adams-approved” changes to the book don’t really work all that well, and there’s a tendency to reach for cheap laughs whenever things go on for too long. Oh, many of the best bits of the books are on-screen, but not all of them, and those who are often feel a bit out of place. The film suffers from a mishmash of tone, a curious lack of comfort with the material that somehow inhibits laughter: I ended up smiling a lot and occasionally nodding in recognition, but for some reason I didn’t laugh a lot even when I wanted to. The good news, I suppose, is that the film isn’t a complete catastrophe. On the other hand, I have a hard time imagining that anyone will remember it in a year or two. Which may be for the best, really, as people will be able to pick up the books without having them tainted by the stench of what could have been a horrid adaptation. It could have been worse…

  • Kung Fu [Kung-Fu Hustle] (2004)

    Kung Fu [Kung-Fu Hustle] (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2005) It’s a well-known truism in the movie business that action translates around the world whereas comedy doesn’t. So you can imagine the mixed reaction when a Chinese action/comedy hybrid like Kung-Fu Hustle makes it to American shores. The most unfortunate thing about the film is that it begins in a very peculiar fashion, slowly mixing low-level comedy with some surprisingly gory violence. Don’t be surprised if, fifteen minutes in the film, you don’t know what to make of it: It’s hard to care about a film that starts out with the brutal shotgun murder of a woman (in the back, no less). But keep at it; despite a few early missteps, Kung-Fu Hustle gradually reveals its glorious insanity, ballooning into a delicious parody of martial-arts films complete with the biggest density of computer-generated special effects I’ve ever seen in a comedy. Writer/Director Stephen Chow isn’t always funny (for every gag that works, another one fails) but the film as a whole improves throughout its entire duration, ending with a dynamite combat sequence that leaves most other kung-fu movies in the dust. If you’ve seen Shaolin Soccer (which shares many of the same actors), you know what to expect: A long buildup followed by an unbelievable payoff. Not for everyone (especially with the early violence), but fans will understand how good it becomes.

  • The Amityville Horror (2005)

    The Amityville Horror (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2005) This so-called “horror” film has a number of problems, but its worst one is that it tries to maintain the pretence of a “real story”. There is, of course, no such real story: the Amityville hoax has been disproved twenty years ago. But in their attempt to make believe an “authentic” haunted house story, the filmmakers end up delivering a dull film that only finds its biggest chills in its most extreme moments. The over-the-top babysitter sequence is one such scene; the last thirty seconds are another. In both cases, you can see evidence of horror mechanics borrowed from Japanese horror. Alas, the rest of the film is boredom put on screen: dumb scenes, tepid writing, slow pacing and bad ideas. Only Ryan Reynolds manages to emerge of the mess with his dignity intact. Sadly, the same can’t be said about the audience, which stays frozen solid in disbelief that they actually paid good money to see such dull stuff.

  • Wall Street, Doug Henwood

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Verso, 1997 (1998 revision), 372 pages, C$25.00 tpb, ISBN 0-86091-670-7

    The cover illustration really says it all: A Wall Street sign punctured by bullets. This is Doug Henwood’s critique of the financial system, informed by a solid background in economics and years of experience as a journalist. You wouldn’t expect such a book to be fun to read, but it is. And even the increasingly dated statistics in the book don’t make any less of a valuable exposé even today.

    I should explain that I’m neither an economist nor a political scientist, but as a layman I don’t do too badly with the stuff. I may not be able to pass Econ 101, but I’m able to follow the financial news to my satisfaction, and I like to spend some time looking at the trends out there. In some way, I’ve got a science-fiction fan’s interest in financial matters: Economics are just another way of explaining how the world works, and it’s just as worthy of consideration as hard science. Perhaps even more so when you take a look at today’s world, in which economic and political power is so closely matched.

    I should also add that I harbour some deep doubts about the sustainability of the capitalistic system. While free markets are better than the alternative, they also encourage a winner-takes-all mentality that’s incompatible with a good number of social values. I belabour this point; I’m just mentioning it given how it puts me in the target audience for Wall Street. This book will not convert the unconverted, but it will confirm vague suspicions and provide more arguments to support a sceptical stance.

    Structurally, the book moves on from target to target in successive chapters, gradually digging deep into capitalistic systems before a broader conclusion. All the main players of the financial scenes are studied one after the other, from the corporations themselves to the traders and the regulators, as well as the academics playing with their models without regard to reality. Surprising statistics help Henwood present some resonable arguments about the insanity of the market.

    Quite technical at times, Henwood’s work is also clearly aimed above my head. I won’t try to claim that I enjoyed every page of the book, because it started to lose me somewhere in the more academic “money market” section. Not being an economist, it became more difficult to associate Henwood’s subject matter with what I already knew as he started chewing on Marxist theory, modern economic models and other more theoretical concepts. On the other hand, you could always rely on one or two zingers per page. (My favourite comes on page 113, as Canadian celebrity father/businessman Frank Stronach is quoted as saying “To be in business, your first mandate is to make money, and money has no heart, soul, conscience, homeland.”)

    It’s easy to recognize enthusiasm and audacity even as the actual mechanics of the arguments remain obscure, and Henwood has tremendous energy to pour in this project. Even econ-challenged readers will get some enjoyment out of the anecdotes, quotes and arguments described by Henwood. Wall Street is a seriously funny book, even though I’m willing to concede that my definition of “funny” changed after pages of economic theory. If nothing else, the first three chapters (“Instrument”, “Players” and “Ensemble”) are reasonably accessible, as is the Conclusion.

    In hindsight, Wall Street gains a bit and loses a bit. On one hand, its cautious tone was vindicated three years later as the exuberance of the dot-com boom turned into the dot-bomb doom, wiping entire fortunes and making a great number of Wall Streeters look like idiots. On the other hand, the market moves quickly, and so the numbers from 1997 may not reflect today’s environment. Certainly, it’s hard to read Wall Street without wanting to know what Henwood now thinks of the current insanity of American economic policy. (Fortunately, you can alway head over to leftbusinessobserver.com for regular updates about what Henwood’s been up to.)

    I’m not sure that the above is meant to be a recommendation for the book. I’m glad I read it, but I’m not sure I understood most of it. I was entertained, but it took me a number of weeks to get through it all. I was fascinated by some facts and anecdotes, but I’m not sure how valid they are nearly a decade later. But then again I can recognize that few people will be able to fully understand Wall Street . You’ll have to decide whether that includes you. (And then you’ll have to find a way to get the book: a quick look at abebooks.com suggests that it’s a collector’s item.)

  • Souls in the Great Machine, Sean McMullen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1999, 448 pages, C$21.95 tpb, ISBN 0-312-87256-9

    As someone who provides technical support for libraries, I don’t have to be told about the awesome powers wielded by librarians. Sean McMullen may have dedicated my copy of Souls in the Great Machine with “watch out for strange librarians”, but that’s more of a reminder than a revelation.

    Today, librarians may be cataloguing pieces of dead trees, but in two thousand years, who knows? In McMullen’s imagined future, librarians are the undisputed masters of high technology in a world where anything more advanced than steam power is strictly forbidden. Arguments about how to run the library are settled through pistol duels, city-states dominate the political landscape and humans are regularly harvested away through an irresistible “Call”.

    Even though I many not be a big fan of post-apocalyptic futures, SF with epic fantasy trappings or massive trilogies, McMullen’s novel is strong enough, despite a few annoying writing flaws, to overcome most of my prejudices. For one thing, it’s SF that understand and espouses SF’s basic ideals. For another, it’s got enough sweep and scope to fulfil even the most demanding SF readers.

    It’s not your typical post-apocalyptic future, for instance, given how it sets its narrative at a point where humanity is once again starting to look forward. As the novel begins, ambitious chief librarian Zarvora Cybeline is single-handedly revitalizing the Great Library of Rochester and putting the finishing touches to the Calculator, a Babbage Engine made to work using enslaved human components. What follows is an information revolution, a war, a re-discovery of this future age’s underpinnings and a revolt against what could charitably be described as gods of an ancient age. Fun stuff, well-told through a cast of delightful characters. Three strong female protagonists share the spotlight of this novel, through epic adventures filled with large-scale spectacles and intimate moments.

    I could spend paragraphs describing McMullen’s constant stream of ideas, from human-powered computers to indirect space warfare. But that would spoil some of the book’s appeal while selling short its considerable reading pleasure. SF fans looking for a gigantic helping of ideas will be well-served by this book. Simply put, Souls in the Great Machine is a compelling read even at 448 pages, packed as it is with grand characters, great moments, compelling ideas and the comfortable sweep of an big, big story. McMullen’s writing is clear and clean, with occasional flashes of humour. (I was quite fond of the quote “Seneschal, allow [this character] to be harmed, and I will do something so pointlessly hideous that you will die as much from disbelief as pain.” [P.308])

    There are, unfortunately, problems with this book that prevent it from being a complete success. McMullen, though gifted, is not a polished writer, and so Souls in the Great Machine is still rife with inconsistent viewpoints (sometimes switching in the middle of a section) and rough development. Months, sometimes years pass between chapters and sections, and better control over the pacing of the book could have done much to smooth over some of the book’s most jarring moments. McMullen writes fantastic characters filled with both good and evil, but in two specific cases, I found the abrupt transition of some characters to the dark side to be unconvincing and, ultimately, harmful to my appreciation of the novel. Some plot threads end spectacularly while others simply peter out. The “Call”’s explanation is lame. Several annoying coincidences abound, including “chance” meetings between our main cast of characters over and over again. A more experienced writer (and a stricter editor) could have fixed those problems. In the meantime, the impression remains of a great novel fighting its way out of imperfect writing. Frustrating, especially given how enjoyable is the rest of the novel. Curiously enough, this book may have been better with an added fifty pages’ worth of smoother storytelling.

    But even so, Souls in the Great Machine achieves most of its goal as a solid and intelligent Science Fiction novel. Though not billed as such, this is the first volume of a series, and it ends on a high note that makes a sequel both superfluous and intriguing. I’m already on board for The Miocene Arrow (which feels like a sideshow more than a straight-up sequel) and you can be sure that I’m keenly interested in what McMullen thinks about next.

    Furthermore, it goes without saying that I remain on my guard regarding strange librarians.

  • In the Country of the Blind, Michael Flynn

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 549 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-34498-X

    In the history of the Science Fiction genre, few notions have captured readers’ imagination as much as psychohistory – the idea that given a sufficient number of people to study, sociology becomes as deterministic as classical physics. In Isaac Asimov’s famous Foundation series, political movements can be described using mathematical equations, and a savvy psychohistorian can predict the future of the empire by running a few statistical models. It’s a seductive idea in part given SF readers’ fondness for hard science and cold equations, but also because it gives validity to SF’s pretencions of predicting the future. Why, yes, a sufficiently clever writer, well-versed in history and sciences, can say what’s likely to happen: Victory for Hugo Gernsback’s spiritual inheritors.

    So it shouldn’t be surprising to see other writers jumping on the bandwagon from time to time. Michael Flynn (best known for the Hard-SF Stars series) did so in 1990 with In the Country of the Blind, a book now revised and republished with a nonfiction appendix. In this novel, ex-reporter, real-estate developer and all-around competent woman Sarah Beaumont gradually discovers the existence of a secret society, dating back more than a hundred years, that has figured out the elementary rules of “cliology”. Using calculating machines derived from Charles Babbage’s Analytical engine, this “Babbage Society” has spent decades subtly manipulating history to its own purposes. But now that Beaumont knows too much, well, she’ll have to be silenced…

    I really, really wanted to love this novel and for the first hundred pages I truly did. Despite some too-hasty plotting and early characterization problems, In the Country of the Blind efficiently sets up a secret history in which history is silly putty in the hands of a few master manipulators. The means of The Babbage Society’s developments are convincingly portrayed (Chapter 1-IV features a wonderful discovery of an attic filled with analytical engines) and the story steadily moves forward.

    It’s such a shame, then, that the book ends at this point. Oh, sure, there are twists and turns, revelations and betrayals, chases and gunfights for the rest of the book’s duration. But as a science-fiction novel, In the Country of the Blind essentially ends as Beaumont is welcomed into the society she discovered. The two or three refinements (that there are more than one such society, and that cliology just doesn’t work as well as one would think) are obvious from the get-go, and they’re not handled nearly as efficiently as they should have been. No, after page 101, In the Country of the Blind devolves into a standard-issue thriller in which the various parties could be just about anything. Replace “cliologists” by “industrial spies”, or “Nazi revivalists” and this novel wouldn’t change much.

    And that’s a real shame given how, from time to time, we get a glimpse into cliology’s interest in a Science Fiction setting. The idea that the future is predictable and that we can influence it if we know where to act gives a realistic framework to exploit two of SF’s traditional obsessions: Given solid predictions and “inflexion points”, isn’t acting on these opportunities a form of preemptive time-travel? Isn’t this also a way to exploit the concept of alternate realities without actually alternating realities? Readers of this novel will be allowed a moment or two of intellectual vertigo as past, present and future, real or alternate, all merge into a solid whole of speculation.

    What’s even more interesting is that since Foundation‘s publication in 1943, we are finding out that cliology may not be completely fanciful. Flynn gives out tons of examples in the non-fiction appendix that follows the book (a case of the appendix being more interesting that the previous novel), but you don’t have to look far elsewhere to find out how social sciences are becoming predictable. Jared Diamond did a lot to quantify history in his best-selling Guns, Germs and Steel. Political scientists are starting to understand how government falls or evolve given their social contexts. Wall Street is leading the way in building models to predict the evolution of markets, trends and economic activity. Even governments and corporations are getting in to the act with “strategic analysis” units.

    If Flynn wants to use cliology as an excuse for a standard chases-and-gunfire thriller, fine. But as a Science Fiction novel, In the Country of the Blind wastes its considerable potential. It doesn’t make it a bad novel… just a very disappointing, very ordinary one.

  • Air, or Have not Have, Geoff Ryman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 2004, 390 pages, C$21.95 tpb, ISBN 0-312-26121-7

    Early-21st century Science Fiction occupies a curious philosophical position. It has inherited a tradition of rational techno-optimism that has never been more relevant, at a time where the future has never been less predictable. SF knows that the world does not and will not look anything like what it has been predicting for the past fifty years. And yet it struggles to evolve, dying of a thousand weak Star Wars tie-ins and falling on its knees as the reality thunders past.

    It’s in this context that Geoff Ryman’s Air arrives, like a bootleg Bruce Sterling novel, like a fusion between SF’s traditional ideals and the values it has to espouse in order to evolve. It’s a novel about then, about now and about soon, a novel that makes unlikely heroes out of people who wouldn’t have been out of place in the nineteenth century.

    Most of the novel takes place in the small village of Kizuldah, somewhere in the fictional country of Karzistan (presumably set close to Khazakstan). Thirty families. Two or three cars. One stone bridge. A subsistence economy based on the culture of rice and a few odd barn animals.

    The heroine of the tale is one Chung Mae, a self-styled “fashion expert” who acts as nothing more than a skilled conduct between the outside world and her faraway village. She’s doing well, but her entire life is about to change: Air is coming, and it promises nothing less than the ultimate connection to information. A test is run; things go wrong, people die and Mae is irrevocably changed. Shunned by her peers, stuck with a ghost in her head, obsoleted by technological changes, Mae nevertheless becomes an unlikely advocate for change. Illiterate and impulsive, she understands information trading better than anyone else, and wastes no time in adapting her village to the coming changes.

    If you think that this is a parable about our own society and how it’s being changed by, oh, The Internet, you’re absolutely right. Air may plug your brain into an always-on T3 connection, but its impact on Mae’s village meets with the same type of change resistance seen in our world. Arguments raised for and against this technology are similar to what we’ve heard ourselves over the past decade.

    But there’s more to it than just a thinly-veiled retelling of the Internet Boom. The product of a skilled storyteller, Air is first and foremost a story filled with good characters and a compelling plot-line. The scale of Mae’s village allows for a cunning personalization of issues: Access to information is initially restricted to one “TV”, then a second one, and then many more. Characters see their livelihoods threatened on a very basic level by the arrival of this opening on the rest of the world.

    By setting his near-future story in the third world, Ryman also touches upon an under-exploited subject in SF, how the first world is as alien to the third-world (and vice versa) as any type of extra-terrestrial. And even how, thanks to modern communication technologies, the alien is only one address, one number away. Ryman never treats Mae and her villagers with even a hint of condescension; the result is the kind of world-literate novel that shouldn’t surprise us, but still does.

    Air gnaws on the future and takes a big bite out of it. It’s almost a brilliant novel. The only things holding it back are the inclusion of a (quasi-magical) pregnancy subplot that seems too contrived even for its own good, and a general lessening of tension that runs through the entire second half of the book. Chapter 14 opens up a can of worms that is never fully satisfactorily explained, almost as if the novel has become too small for its own ideas, then abruptly brought back in familiar surrounding. The final crisis seems too conventional (and too drawn-out) for such a snappy and unconventional novel.

    But those caveats aside (caveats that may be ways of saying “the book didn’t go where I wanted it to”), Air is still one of the best SF novels of 2004. It takes the best the genre has to offer and sets it in a situation that has relevance to us, right now. It may even have a thing or two to teach to other Science Fiction writers. Accessible to mainstream audiences and well-written, it’s an ambassador the genre has nothing to be ashamed about.

  • The Rainmaker, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Island, 1995, 598 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-22165-X

    At his best, John Grisham delivers a satisfactory re-telling of his favourite story (“Young southern lawyer fights evil organization”) but never strays too far away from it. It’s a good niche, when you think of it: there’s regional colour, a crowd-pleasing plot, solid movie material and the potential for a sympathetic hero. (There are worse ways to earn a living than being a best-selling author.) But the real fun starts when Grisham starts playing tricks and variations on his familiar elements: Often, those quirks and structural choices can become the central point of interest of a book.

    Nowhere else in Grisham’s oeuvre so far is this truer than in The Rainmaker, an obvious David-against-Goliath story whose courtroom component is one of the most lop-sided legal contest you’ll ever encounter in legal fiction. If the courtroom drama was the main focus of the book, we’d have a problem justifying the existence of The Rainmaker as a piece of fiction. But it’s not. For better of for worse, Grisham has other things in mind for the novel, and I’m not sure they all fit together.

    The break from Grisham’s other books is obvious from the first page: For the first time in his career, Grisham uses first-person narration (present-tense, no less) to tell the story of one Rudy Baylor, a law student about to graduate. At the beginning of the story, most things seem to be running in Rudy’s favour: He’s got cash-flow problems, sure, but he’s also weeks away from a job with a well-regarded law firm. But then the hammer falls. In short order, Rudy loses the job, files for bankruptcy, moves out of his apartment and finds himself with next to no prospects. Still, he’s got a file in his hand, a civil suit that just may be worth millions…

    Plot-wise, Rudy’s fight with the eeevil insurance company of Great Benefit Life is one of the most one-sided contest you’ll ever read. Sure, it’s the whole single-David against corporate-Goliath fight again, but Grisham stacks the deck so ridiculously in favour of his populist protagonist that the courtroom becomes the vicarious blooding of an easy target. Rudy’s corporate opponents make every mistake in the book, and face the added difficulty of having the facts against them. Rudy, on the other hand, has a sympathetic jury, a friendly judge, two or three dirty tricks up his sleeve and some killer pieces of evidence. It’s not much of a contest, and not much of a drama either (though it makes for cheerful reading).

    If that was all there was to The Rainmaker, there wouldn’t be much point in going on. But there’s more. You could argue that the real point of the novel isn’t the insurance case, but the portrait of a young lawyer during difficult times. Rudy doesn’t come from a good family, can’t depend on a trust fund and doesn’t display prodigious legal abilities. But he works hard, never gives up and scrapes by on the strength of his conviction. The first-person narration is an ideal vehicles for the elliptical asides, the showy supporting characters and the day-to-day drudgery of being a working lawyer. Tasty stuff; fans of Grisham’s other thrillers won’t be surprised to learn that this novel is as compelling as Grisham’s previous onces. Set aside some free time to make your way through this one.

    Still, the novel is also filled with loose ends and choices that don’t ring true. A number of those things (a mysterious fire, for instance) seem to be kept in reserve for a final revelation that, ultimately, never comes. All, including a romance, seems rushed and crammed in an ending that doesn’t conclude as much as it gives up and throws everything back onto the table in desperation. Conscious choices by Grisham, I’m sure, but the purpose of which still has me dubious: Sure, part of it is an attempt to subvert Grisham’s own favourite story… but the way it’s handled seems just as contrived as the one-sided courtroom theatrics.

    But don’t let that stop you from grabbing a copy of The Rainmaker. Grisham devotees will note the blueprint of The Runaway Jury buried deep in The Rainmaker, what with the emphasis on civil suits and the passing mention of jury consultants. But even readers without an encyclopedic knowledge of Grisham’s fiction will be so completely swept along by the narration that the book’s problems will hardly register. And that’s a trick that sets the magicians apart from the other authors, whether or not they’re telling their favourite story all over again.

  • Mou gaan dou [Infernal Affairs] (2002)

    Mou gaan dou [Infernal Affairs] (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) Hong-Hong crime cinema’s traditional fascination for the criminal/policeman duality here finds its masterpiece. Tony Leung and Andy Lau play polar opposites as (respectively) an undercover policeman infiltrating criminal gangs and a criminal infiltrating the ranks of the police forces. After an effective opening sequence, the cards are on the table for all to see and the game begins as to which man will uncover the other before he is himself discovered. But the plot is only half the story as this tense crime drama is developed with great skill and grace. The direction is fluid and the suspense runs high. While some leads go nowhere, the film a s a whole is a superior cops-and-criminals drama in much of the same vein as Heat or L.A. Confidential. This is world cinema at its accessible best.

  • The Stepford Wives (2004)

    The Stepford Wives (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) When considering America’s evils, the culture war between conformity and individualism is far more important than the so-called battle between the sexes. The satiric potential of obedient wives may have found its audience in 1975 (hey, that’s the year I was born!), but thirty years later, it’s wasted when it’s placed besides such juicier targets as the need to conform to outdated ideals. This remake misses the point and yet, in its last five minutes, shows signs of at least understanding that. Rumours of last-minutes re-shoots may have something to do with the incoherency, but as it stands, The Stepfords Wives is a mish-mash of half-gelled ideas, contradictory information (what; robots and control chips?), lame gags, idiot plotting, absent suspense and groan-inducing developments. Watching this film today, after years of training in watching suspense movies, is an exercise in seething exasperation: how can characters act so stupidly? How can they miss the obvious clues? Gaah. A tiny argument can be made that this remake is really a parody, but that’s a hollow excuse for a bad film. At least Bette Midler is amusing in her un-Stepfordized character, and there’s maybe a handful of good laughs here and there. Otherwise, forget it: this film isn’t worth the aggravation of seeing the potential for good satire wasted on such tired subjects.

  • Robots (2005)

    Robots (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2005) It’s hard to be overly critical of this type of film. Sure, it’s no masterpiece –heck, it’s nowhere near the level of quality of Pixar’s CGI animated films. Plot-wise, it’s a Saturday-morning cartoon special: Young robot goes to the city, makes friends and enemies, saves the day. Robots may feature an all-robots cast, but it’s straight-up comedy rather than Science Fiction. But you don’t need to be flawless to be entertaining, and so few will fail to be amused by Robots: The level of wordplay and visual invention alone is worth a look, what with its joke-every-five-seconds pacing. It’s not high-level humour (Farts and big body parts: Comedic gold!), but there is an awful lot of it, and at least some of the gags are bound to amuse you. As with other recent CGI films (Monsters, Inc., for one), the elaborate animation allows for a few frantic action pieces and some amazing depth to the film’s imagined world. Tons of stunt voice casting may make for an impressive credit sequence, but they don’t do much to raise the interest in the characters –at the exception of Robin William’s usually hyperactive delivery. It all amounts to a quirky comedy that’s just too likable to kick too hard. It’ll do for kids, and it’ll do for adults too.

  • Assemblers of Infinity, Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1993, 278 pages, C$20.00 hc, ISBN 0-553-29921-2

    The gradual endangerment of the Science Fiction mid-list over the past decade and a half has already been discussed to death elsewhere, but that doesn’t make it any less important. The conglomeration of publishing under ever-hungrier multinationals has increased the drive for clear profits. Authors who used to sell profitably but not spectacularly have been driven away in the hope of finding strings of best-sellers. This, in turn, has affected what gets into bookstores. Authors are encouraged to do series, to do novelizations, to “co-write” something with a celebrity.

    Unfortunately, what has gotten lost in this evolution is what I call the meat-and-potatoes genre novel. The kind of adequate, but unspectacular standalone book that entertains despite not breaking any genre convention. Novels like Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason’s Assemblers of Infinity.

    The story is one we’ve seen many times before: Twenty-five years in the future, astronauts on the moon discover a strange alien artifact that is both intriguing and dangerous. People die, scientists are sent to investigate and soon enough, we’re stuck in a race against time, between revelation and annihilation. Simple enough: that Anderson and Beason choose to exploit nanotechnology as the Danger Tech is a sign of the times, but otherwise there isn’t much that’s not instantly recognizable by SF fans.

    Not that this is a bad thing: From the opening prologue, in which a discovery turns deadly, fans will slip into Assemblers of Infinity like in an old set of clothes. The technology-heavy vocabulary is familiar. The easy prose is unobtrusive and compulsively readable. The characters are engineers and scientists, bright folks with just enough back-story to avoid charges of cardboard characterization. In short, it’s a perfectly lovely hard-SF story in the Clarke mold, with enough ambiguity to make it interesting: the characters don’t neatly divide in good/bad bins, and that’s already nice enough. In retrospect, few fans will be surprised by the twists and turns taken by Assemblers of Infinity, though there are a number of pleasant developments here and there (much like the authors’ previous Lifeline, which tweaked a few genre conventions by the nose). The somewhat gratuitous suggestion of ESP power is old-fashioned, but not in an intolerable way: Everything ends up fitting together nicely.

    Assemblers of Infinity is not meant to be innovative, but comforting. Working away from genre spotlights, the Anderson/Beason team has produced more than half a dozen interesting Hard-SF/techno-thrillers that are well-worth a quick read. Comfort food for the SF audience, meat-and-potatoes novels that are fulfilling but hardly spectacular. And that’s fine, because those mid-pack novels are the true backbone of the genre, the structural blocks that define what people imagine when they think about SF. The genre classics stand out over the background noise that is generated by novels such as this one. Without a strong fuzzy stream of good solid SF novels, there isn’t much of a genre. Assemblers of Infinity may be a middle-of-the-pack book, but there’s no dishonour in that.

    Ultimately, this thought brings us back to why the much-heralded “death of the mid-list” hurts the genre. Without a support net of mid-list building blocks, SF is stuck without references, without a way to keep readers from abandoning the genre while waiting for the next Big Thing.

    So authors adapt and evolve. Like Kevin J. Anderson, they start massive trilogies and series. They turn to comic-book writing. They shill themselves to cults and celebrities. They write novelizations. They try other genres in the hope that they’ll find a magic formula. But most of all, they stop writing those mid-list novels that define the genre. Assemblers of Infinity may not be publishable today (The Anderson/Beason team has certainly stopped writing anything like it), and that’s a real shame.

  • The Quick And The Dead (1995)

    The Quick And The Dead (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) The Western genre has rarely been faithful to the historical reality of the American west, opting for operatic grandeur and machismo myth-making over the true grime and uneventful routine of the era. This film cheerfully won’t do anything to correct the record: here, the wild west is only a backdrop to a series of shoot-em-up duels, aggrandized by ridiculously overblown personalities and heightened visuals. I say this like it’s a bad thing, but it really isn’t: The Quick And The Dead is most enjoyable when it goes for broke in its quest for the ultra-Western, and at its weakest when it tries to inject realism (or its boring cousin, “motivation”) into a framework that doesn’t need it. As a tongue-in-cheek take on the pistol-duel shtick, it’s hugely enjoyable. Too bad that it chose to saddle itself with a clogging revenge story, complete with lengthy flashback and barely-repressed rage. But that takes maybe ten minutes, and the rest of the film is a lot of fun: The impressive cast is awe-inducing even today: Gene Hackman has rarely been better at chewing scenery, and any film that managed to snag both pre-stardom Leonardo Decaprio and Russell Crowe is nothing to dismiss easily. Sharon Stone herself has lost a lot of starpower in the decade since this film (and her middling screen presence here may show why), but she looks cute enough as a female gunfighter. The fifth cast member worth noticing is director Sam Raimi, who infuses the film with some much-needed style. Realistic? Absolutely not. As tight as it could be? Heck no. Fun to watch despite everything? Oh yes.

  • How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days (2003)

    How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) Fluffy, slightly original romantic comedy that shows promise but then devolves in the usual yadda-yadda. There’s interest in the basic premise (dual bets: she has to break up; he has to stay with her; hijinks ensue) but once it’s properly presented, it’s immediately discarded in favour of the usual idiot characters, dumb misunderstandings and wacky chase sequences. The whole film is contrived, but the last quarter hour overdoes things in this regard. It’s still not an entire waste of time mostly because of the charm of the two leads: Kate Hudson is even pretty cute in her “Kathie Lee Gifford on crack” mode. Matthew McConaughey is blander (in keeping with Romantic Comedy male lead tradition) but not entirely boring. It all amounts to a fair film, slightly too long but still pleasant enough.