Year: 2007

  • The Last Mimzy (2007)

    The Last Mimzy (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2007) Never mind Lewis Padgett’s much-beloved original short story: The Last Mimzy is the perfect example of how an adaptation can misunderstand the story’s fundamental theme and jam it into a generic template. From an original beginning, the film inevitably converges with the plot of just about half of the SF/fantasy films out there. Thematically, the original story was all about superhuman intelligence as a goal in itself and how it doesn’t allow you to come back to normality. The adaptation turns super-intelligence into a minor affliction that makes the afflicted kids help other people and soon goes away to let them go back to normal. But that’s nothing compared to the woo-woo subplot about the crazy Tibetan prophecies, or the way it suddenly turns into a Homeland Security thriller, or the way the conclusion is another one of those “don’t fall in the CGI vortex” cheap stunt. There are, however, still a number of things to like about this film, from the likable kid actors to some of the special effects, to the way that is all comes together acceptably well. It’s certainly not a classic, but it ought to please to most of the family, and that’s already not too bad.

  • Malicious Intent, Mike Walker

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bancroft Press, 1999, 399 pages, US$24.00 hc, ISBN 1-890862-05-3

    Say it, and say it loud: This book is trash, and it makes Mike Walker proud!

    What else did you expect from a self-described “weekly gossip columnist for the National Enquirer” whose jacket biography boasts that “He’s done more Geraldo episodes than any other guest”? Walker isn’t a rocket scientist: he’s a fifty-foot shark in the Hollywood trash mag pool.

    So when he sets out to write fiction, don’t expect the Great American Novel. Don’t expect a strident denunciation of current American society. In fact, don’t expect much more than a string of salacious anecdotes and passable grammar, because Malicious Intent is what his debut novel is all about. If you’re wondering what a tabloid “writer” would churn out given four hundred pages of prose, this is it. Sex, drugs, and Hollywood.

    It starts with a murder and ends in violent death, but don’t make the mistake of taking any of this seriously. This is a thriller where journalist can be two-fisted heroes, where young actresses have older men wrapped around her most tender areas and where everyone’s got a spectacular perversion to hide. Resemblance with reality is strictly optional, but readers of gossip mags will feel right at home.

    Malicious Intent‘s so-called plot revolves around Charmain Burns, an up-and-coming actress with a sordid past who will stop at nothing to climb the Hollywood power ladder. As the novel begins, her actions cause the death of a tabloid reporter. As she tries covering up her involvement in the crime, further events are set in motion. Meanwhile, Walker’s narration takes a break in order to explain how Charmaine got to Hollywood, and the trail of broken bodies she has left in her wake.

    But as much as we love to hiss at an antagonist, we need a hero to go through the motions of a plot. Enters Cameron Tull, a square-jawed street-smart reporter for the “National Revealer” who won’t accept the death of his colleague. Launching his own parallel investigation into the case, he quickly finds out who’s pulling all the strings… and the only question is whether he’ll be able to resist her.

    But never mind the plot, because it’s all structural framework for tawdry titillation, cheap Hollywood caricatures and saucy anecdotes which just may have something to do with real-life Hollywood. It takes merely twenty pages to get to the book’s first S&M orgy. And you haven’t seen the straight-razor castration, the psycho stalker calling himself Randak 2000 or the deaths by immolation.

    Oh yes: sex, violence, money, romance, beauty and celebrity: it’s all in here, slathered with double helpings of every deadly sin. Unflappable Cameron Tull gets his girl (though to make it easier, it turns out to be a long-lost love), fights temptation, sets things right and rides off in the sunset under a killer headline. Meanwhile, we get a look at the fairyland underbelly of Hollywood, learn entirely misleading information about the glamour of gossip magazines and mentally relax for four hundred pages. This is perfect beach-side reading as long as you leave the red pencil home. It’s nearly impossible to stop reading once it gets going.

    Even the clunky style of Walker’s prose gets in the act. Clearly, no editor at the lower-tier Bancroft House (“Books that Enlighten”) has dared suggest that a professional writer shouldn’t overuse narrative ellipses, written accents and SHOUTING ALL CAPS like that. No one dared suggest that the clichés and ethnic stereotype (“[they arched] their backs to accentuate that most devastating Latin male magnet: the big, shapely ass.” [P.192]) was a bit too much over the top. And why would they? If you’re going to knock down the markers of good taste, you might as well hit all of them.

    The result certainly won’t be remembered for anything more than a very guilty pleasure, an instantly-forgettable piece of raunchy trash and beautiful sleaze. If we must judge books on their objectives and how well they fulfil them, then Malicious Intent is a complete success. It hits the centre of the target and stays embedded there. Mike Walker may have little writing talent and a complete lack of literary ambition, but he knew what he was doing in writing his novel, and he ought to be proud of the result… in his own way.

  • Fido (2006)

    Fido (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2007) With time, I’m learning that everything is possible, including seeing my tax dollars finance a zombie comedy. A good one, even: Like the best zombie films, Fido understands the satirical social relevance of zombies, and starts off strongly with a critique of suburban America mixed with a metaphor for slavery and/or racism. The alternate-history nature of Fido is clever and amusing, and so is the first act of the film, which plays off zombie archetypes against a brightly-coloured suburban background, with a plot that seems inspired by Douglas Sirk . At times subversive and amusing, gruesome and wholesome, Fido is a great deal better than you’d expect from a B-movie. Sadly, the imagination of its creators seems to run out at the same time than their budget, leading to a flat conclusion that is visibly hampered by shoestring film-making: the climax is a muddle, with no great thematic denouement and hesitant staging that can often feel more ridiculous than suspenseful. But three-quarter of a good film is better than none, and so Fido earns a marginal recommendation on the strength of being better than expected. That Carrie-Anne Moss has a leading role certainly doesn’t hurt.

  • Dawn Of The Dead (1978)

    Dawn Of The Dead (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2007) Nervous nellies who think that remakes destroy the original work can relax a little: I’m one of those weird people who have seen the Zack Snyder remake before the original Dawn Of The Dead, I can reassure everyone that the original remains unspoiled and enjoyable on its own term: It’s a tight and terrific horror film that shares a premise with the remake but almost none of the plot. The satirical intent is certain clearer here than in the 2004 version: The idea of the mall both as a fortress and a gathering point is amusing, and the very idea of running around a mall for weeks on end smacks of wish-fulfilment. But the horror scenes also work well, and the mounting dread of the zombie apocalypse going outside the mall is frightening enough. Decades later, some pieces aren’t as successful: the introduction takes up too much time, the truck-running sequence is flabby and the character balance feels wrong. (All of which were improved in the remake.) Still, Dawn Of The Dead remains a pretty enjoyable film even today, and there aren’t a lot of films from 1978 who can still claim that.

  • 300 (2006)

    300 (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2007) Prepare to be overwhelmed by manufactured cool! This fantasy action film is a rarity in how it glorifies war and aggression by making it look neater than it’s ever been. Even splatters of blood are used as design elements in a film that’s more a series of violent tableaux than a sustained narrative. (The credit sequence alone is wonderful.) The images, almost all post-processed digitally, show how it’s now possible to film even a wide-screen war epic in a warehouse. The effect is a bit claustrophobic, but the film won’t let you realize that until far too late: the rest of the time, you’ll be pummelled into submission by the loud soundtrack, macho sound bites, constant special effects and almost unbearable self-importance. There’s certainly something here for all the boys and the girls: naked torsos, dripping violence and simple subplots will do much to compensate for the quasi-constant decapitations, shaky-cam cinematography and dumb anachronistic details (such as, ahem, a pre-Roman mention of the month of “August”). It’s all very loud and big and impressive, but I can’t help but reflect that 300 is now a watershed of sorts in my evolution as a moviegoer: For the first time, I’m feeling left behind by a marketing effort addressed to the younger ones. I was never cool, but this film drives the point that I’m forever leaving that particular demographic behind. I’m not sure I’m sad about it if the alternative is movies like 300.

  • Chasm City, Alastair Reynolds

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2001, 524 pages, C$26.95 tpb, ISBN 0-575-06878-7

    There are killjoys out there who will argue, at length, that the modern word processor has killed the novel as it ought to be. Those spoilsports will keep saying that the ease with which modern writers can just keep typing and editing without physical consequences (that is: sore fingers and the consumption of draft paper) has made it too easy to overuse words. These entirely fictional straw men (er, “older curmudgeon whose opinion I claim to have heard”) will tell you that real men once hacked out fifty-thousand words in stone tablets with a chisel, and that even Hemingway was a big softie for using a typewriter.

    It’s a silly argument, but it’s hard not to think about it when looking at Alastair Reynolds’s brick-sized novels. Helped along by Gollancz’s habit of using thicker paper stock, Reynolds’ books intimidate well before they’re cracked open. So many words! The story inside has to be important: Other writers have described the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in fewer pages!

    Yet Reynolds’ novels are nothing but good old-fashioned space-opera with modern polish. Solid thriller plots with SF twists and alien locales. In Chasm City, this means another man on the run from dangerous criminal forces: hardly the stuff that justifies a book an inch and a half thick.

    Of course, that means that you get a whole lot of thrills for your money. Expect to spend at least a week of reading time in Tanner Mirabel’s company as he first pursues an assassin, then finds the chase turned against him. His trip eventually leads him to a nightmarish alien environment: the eponymous Chasm City in which humans are prey and stranger forces lie beneath the mist… and that’s not even counting the other story interleaved between Tanner’s run: What could possibly be the link between those subplots? As Chasm City goes on, little blips in the narration lead us to a bigger revelation that conveniently twists the usual certitudes of a thriller.

    It’s long, it’s overwritten and it can get pretty exasperating at times, but Chasm City is a solid middle-of-the-road SF thriller. Those looking for a good example of genre fiction could do much worse: this one has good dollops of sex, action, violence and grimness: Reynolds isn’t afraid to pull punches, and the atmosphere of his books has little to do with the shiny futures once imagined by Science Fiction. The prose is verbose but well handled. Although a shorter book may have strengthened our grasp of the novel’s universe (rather than diluting it with sheer verbiage), this one does a pretty good job at carrying the reader from start to finish. The events keep piling up, Tanner is a tough protagonist, and the mystery of the intersecting plotlines is enough to keep anyone reading.

    Readers of Reynold”s debut novel, Revelation Space, will get a related novel that’s just as competent, dark and intriguing than its predecessor. Despite my constant harping about the length of Chasm City, it’s more focused than Reynolds’ first novel, with more consistent bursts of action. It amounts to a prototypical example of the “New British Space Opera” at the turn of the century. There is strong kinship here with other writers such as Richard Morgan and Neal Asher: Reynolds may use twice as many words in making his atmosphere noir and his aliens squishy, but the feeling is similar.

    All isn’t lost, though: Latter Reynolds novels, post Absolution Gap, show clearer signs of self-control –at least when it comes to page length. His last two novels, for instance, don’t even crack a comparatively slim 460 pages. (The Prefect is even down to 410 pages.) Since the length of Reynolds’ work is just about the only thing worth complaining about, you can bet that I’ve got his entire oeuvre on my shelves… even though I’m understandably reluctant to pick up one of his tomes when shorter books beckon. But we’ll get there eventually. Hopefully before retirement age.

    [January 2008: I’m not even going to review Redemption Ark at length, as disappointed as I am with the way Reynolds has blown up a perfectly enjoyable space opera into an interminable slog. The conclusion wraps it up together decently, but there’s some serious fat to be trimmed off this novel.]

  • The Einstein Papers, Craig Dirgo

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1999, 388 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-02322-5

    Sometimes, I can’t even figure out why I’m reviewing a book. Craig Dirgo’s The Einstein Papers is a perfect example: Today, eight years after its publication, I doubt that even the author cares about it. It’s the exemplary paperback thriller, literally made in the Clive Cussler mold of action-adventure novels. It has no deep message, no memorable scenes, nothing beyond an intent to entertain its reader well enough to convince him to buy the next book in the series.

    In fact, the publishing matrix in which this novel is set is far more interesting that the book itself. For years, Clive Cussler has been shaping the thriller field with a series of formulaic novels that are never particularly exciting, but always consistent. The formula works in that it provides the framework for the witty dialogue, exciting action sequences and silly premises that form the texture of the modern American beach thriller. Even when followed to the letter, the formula still manages to entertain. Heck, Hollywood is based on the same concept. It may not be good art, but it’s great business in this age of extruded entertainment products.

    This brings us to Craig Dirgo’s Einstein Papers insofar as the novel is Dirgo’s attempt to file off the serial numbers of the Cussler formula and run with it under his own name. (Don’t think that Cussler doesn’t approve: they collaborated on two books before The Einstein Papers, and two more after that.) The rugged middle-aged hero, John Taft, is nothing but Dirk Pitt under a new name (indeed, several in-jokes make the filiation abundantly clear. At the end of Chapter 23, when questioned about his name, Taft answers “Dirk Pitt”.) His job as an anti-terrorist expert is designed to sustain a series of books —though the underwater aspects quickly pops up again in the finest NUMA tradition. Even the relationship he’s got with a team of supporting characters, including the requisite sarcastic non-WASP sidekick, is nothing but setup for handy helpers in book after book. Obviously, Dirgo has learned from the master.

    But what Dirgo still hasn’t figured out is the formula. The book begins with a too-long set-piece deep in China, an escape sequence which acts as a stuffy prologue to the book’s real story: a hunt for papers left by Albert Einstein, papers which (predictably enough) could mean a terrifying new weapon. Less terrifying should it stay in the hands of the United States, more terrifying should it go to those all-purpose-evil Chinese. The papers are discovered, fall into the wrong hands, and the chase begins. Meanwhile, the Middle East is once more thrown in chaos. The action starts and sputters, finally going along merrily to its expected end.

    (There’s also some silly subplot about the weapon being developed while waiting for the crucial papers, as if scientific research could hop along on government funding and a missing theorem. But if you’re reading The Einstein Papers for an accurate portrait of the scientific/military establishment, boy have you got the wrong book in your hands. And oooh, let’s not talk about the geopolitics of the novel. No, let’s not.)

    It all amounts to, well, an ordinary beach thriller. Nothing crazy, nothing wild, just the equivalent of an action film bound in a paperback format. It passes through the brain like a breeze, temporarily displacing lighter concerns but ultimately leaving no trace. As a piece of literature, it’s a non-entity. I can’t imagine that it took much more than a few weeks to write: certainly, the editing appears to have been completed in minutes.

    As a piece of Dirgo’s career, it’s may remain a failed experiment. Though he has recently written another solo John Taft novel (Tremors), most of his latest books have been “collaborations” with Clive Cussler. It’s a career, I suppose, somewhere in the gravitational pull of another author, unable to escape even when writing solo novels. I may not be able to figure out why I’m reviewing this novel, but I hope there’s at least five digits on the reason why Dirgo wrote it.

  • Identity Crisis, Brad Meltzer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    DC Comics, 2005, 256 pages, C$19.99 tpb, ISBN 1-4012-0458-9

    I’m both the best and the worst kind of reader for this particular super-hero comic book.

    Worst because frankly, I’m not much of a superhero comic book fan. I know the archetypes, but I never had a steady weekly habit at the comic book store, never followed the history of the characters and don’t care much about them either. Identity Crisis is many things, but it’s partly a homage to an entire era of comic books, the Sixties’ “Silver Age” in which many of the conventions of the genre were refined in time to reach the baby-boomer generation. So when the story starts messing around with the lives of particular C-list characters, I’m left on the sidelines going “Oookay, whatever.”

    But this same detachment also makes me a member of another audience for the book. Identity Crisis, I’m told through its Wikipedia entry, was a major event in DC comics continuity. It upset a number of conventions, changed the lives of several characters and -best of all- messed with the heads of comics fanboys. It made the DC universe a slightly uglier place and brought some consequences and realism to a stunted sub-genre that was doing very well without them.

    Written by thriller author Brad Meltzer (whose Zero Game wasn’t bad at all), Identity Crisis is set in motion by the violent murder of a superhero’s wife. In a terrific first chapter, Meltzer establishes the characters right before the crisis and sketches the first few consequences to the crime by hopping back and forth in time around the “now” of the corpse’s discovery: it’s some of the finest comic-book writing I’ve read so far in my admittedly meagre experience.

    The victim was carefully chosen (I’m told) among the most innocuous characters in the DC repertory. But the death sets in motion a number of even more shocking developments, including a revision of classic superhero history that will make most readers squirm in their seat. During Identity Crisis, the DC universe’s carefully limited spectrum of good versus evil was nudged toward the “evil” side: murder and rape became possibilities against which the superheroes themselves weren’t immune, and even the least-dark characters became complicit in shared shames. (Ironically, it’s Batman, dark anti-hero par excellence, who becomes a victim of the least-heroic moment of the series.)

    And that, frankly, is the reason why I’m so satisfied by Identity Crisis despite its loaded baggage in the field. I don’t need to be told how this miniseries was carefully engineered for monetary purposes. I have read the infamous “the rape pages are in” essay, and I don’t disagree with its conclusions. But the darker turn marked by Identity Crisis represents an identity crisis of sorts for the entire superhero industry, and it’s about time that it starts to confront its own schizoid nature.

    Summarily put: Superhero comics are made for retarded teenagers and their commercial viability has meant that for decades, the surest way to keep printing the dollar bills was to make sure that nothing changed. The essence of melodrama is that despite the tears and the screams and the flying plates, nothing ever chances. Think about it: Superman is an archetype. For all of the various plot developments, he hasn’t changed much in decades, so that the commercial potential of the character remains intact across all potential profit-making ventures (in comic books, yes, but also in movies, books, posters and lunch-boxes). Superman is doomed, by marketing fiat, to remain static. This means that he can never be too affected by any story. This means that the stories themselves have to be superficial. The very kernel of story-telling (“characters undergo events that change them forever”) is absent from superhero comic-books.

    Now repeat the same reasoning for all characters in the superhero stable. They are archetypes, not evolving creations. Even if marketers agree to mess around with the characters, fans start frothing at the mouth, unable to cope with the end of their comfort reading.

    Dramatically satisfying stories are almost impossible in that locked format; all that remains is a stunted type of sideshow where city blocks get destroyed but nobody gets killed, because true consequences are feared by both the marketing geniuses who advertise the product and the fanboys who keep buying them. Perfect deadlock, leading straight down a spiral of ever-loonier denial. If that’s the way the superhero comics industry has to be, I’d rather see it crash and burn. Perhaps, after, things wouldn’t be so bad.

    But there’s an alternative, and Identity Crisis is part of it. Raise the stakes. Face the consequences. Get rid of the fans who can’t take it. It doesn’t mean rape and murder on every page: it means a comic book field that grows up and starts responding to a wider segment of the population. Imagine if written novels had to be tailored toward the type of fan who buys comic books…

    Timidly, I see that the post-Identity Crisis comic book industry has started to evolve. Not much, and it remains to be seen how much of it is driven by marketing decision … but it’s a step in the right direction. (The recent Civil War story arc was interesting, but not quite handled elegantly enough: part of the problem was that the story arc couldn’t be confined to a tight story and had to sprawl in all nooks of the DC universe. Once again, marketing screws up storytelling.)

    These considerations aside (to go back to the subject after the longest tangent on record), Identity Crisis is worth a look because it’s a well-written, well-drawn miniseries. I’m disappointed about the identity of the killer, and it’s obvious that I’m not getting even a quarter of the references in the series, but those inconveniences are more than outweighed by what’s good and impressive about the story. The only superhero battle in the entire book is handled in a very unconventional fashion, the storytelling is fully exploiting the possibilities of the comic form, there are a few terrific moments and images (I’m very fond of the close-up on Batman’s faux-printed photo) and there’s almost a conceptual breakthrough in how Meltzer re-uses a hoary “body-switching” event as a hair-raising imperative for indefensible moral choices. He almost highlights the absurdity inherent to superhero comics, but then turns into something that leaves a bitter taste of reality.

    And that, in the end, is why I can’t help but respect Identity Crisis. As stated in the book’s afterword, it’s a story that takes something silly (the whole concept of secret identities) and justifies them. It’s both an intricate homage and a step forward. Of course, it could end up meaning nothing. There’s nothing quite as meaningless as “a comic book death”, especially in a field where continuity is always adjusted retroactively. But for the span of 256 pages, it’s a mean new world for superhero comics, and I’m both the least and most appreciative of readers for that type of thing.

  • Cusp, Robert Metzger

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2005, 517 pages, C$36.00 hc, ISBN 0-441-01241-8

    Some novels don’t have to be good if they’re completely insane.

    Case in point: Robert Metzger’s Cusp, the type of book for which craaazy has been invented.

    Consider the prologue: Thunderstorms! Earthquakes! Entire continents torn asunder! One billion deaths! When the dust clears, Earth’s geography has been forever altered: It’s now circled by two massive rings of what looks like reactors, their tip reaching above the atmosphere.

    That’s the prologue. Eleven pages into the novel.

    Then twenty years years pass before the first chapter begins and things get even craaazier.

    Trying to give you an idea of the subsequent plot would be a challenge of van Vogtian proportions, so let me tease you with some buzzwords: Lemur-evolved Aliens. Bill Gates as a dinosaur. Planets used as engineering components. Humans “punching through” the singularity. And many, many more, including familiar SF tropes: Police state America, AI-augmented brains, robot servants, spaceship to Mars, evidence of time-travel, etc. A glossary of terms would have been helpful. Cusp is crammed with cool ideas and big-scale thinking: if only for that, the novel ends up with a marginal recommendation.

    But readers may have to struggle through entire chapters of unconvincing developments in order to get to those ideas. One of Cusp‘s most visible signs of craaaziness if how it flips back and forth between a pretty big cast of characters, arbitrarily sending them from one planet to another in order to keep the plot moving forward or sideways. The demands of the plot pieces outweigh the character development: it’s all a frantic rush through five hundred pages.

    I have alluded to van Vogt above, and the most pleasing quality of Cusp is indeed the way it never pauses for consideration. Absent an editor and most common-sense, it just keeps slamming along, adding even more elements to the mix regardless of how appropriate they are to the entire story. Sometimes it works: For every few artificial plot point, there are a few spectacular scenes that really focus the novel. A scene in which a woman manages to go post-singular is both vividly described and completely terrifying. Another action set-pieces involves an AI-augmented cop surfing down a rain of debris from an exploding air vehicle. Things turns spectacularly nasty at the end of the book as characters outdo themselves in order to engineer a pre-ordained tragedy. And through it all, readers will be left wondering how much craaazier this is going to get.

    The answer is very craaazy. By the time planets are moved around like billiard balls to complete (or thwart) million-year-old plans, veteran SF readers will be too exhilarated to care about the suspicion that the plot makes no sense at all. Rings to move the Earth around? When a simple earthquake can destroy an entire countryside? What’s the point? In many ways, Cusp is high-tech fantasy dressed up in Hard-SF wording. And I’m not even going near the character motivations. Though it is satisfying to see Bill Gates get his head bashed in. Sort of.

    (On the other hand, the grimness of the novel almost ends up working against it: You can forgive practically everything to an author who keeps smiling, but it takes a lot more fortitude to stay nice to those who pile bodies up like cord-wood. Not that this is quite Cusp‘s problem, of course…)

    In more competent hands, Cusp would have been a blockbuster. In Metzger’s hands, though, all it’s got is its craaaziness. Despite the high-fructose energy of the plotting, the book itself can be tough to read and even harder to follow. This isn’t Metzger’s first novel and it’s not Metzger’s first disappointment either: his Picoverse was similarly dogged by undisciplined writing and outlandish plot developments. Cusp is just a bit better, but still a fair distance away from satisfaction. If seasoned SF readers will stick through it for the cool visuals and the demented plotting, casual readers are likely to swear off the whole thing after a few incoherent pages. I’m not blaming Metzger as much as I’m surprised Ace wasn’t able to find an editor good enough to reign him in. Because, as much fun it is to find van Vogt-level craziness in twenty-first century science-fiction, it would be even better to be able to read a good SF book and not feel guilty about it.

  • Map of Bones, James Rollins

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 2005, 523 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-076524-0

    The runaway success of Dan Brown’s 2003 thriller The Da Vinci Code had terrifying consequences: an entire cohort of copycat novels. Suddenly, mixing history with big thrills (preferably with a side order of religious conspiracies and high tech gadgets) was the genre’s favourite recipe. A number of new authors appeared on the scene with trunk novels that just happened to catch the right wave, while other veteran authors suddenly found themselves encouraged to write a certain type of novel.

    It’s presumptuous to link James Rollins’ Map of Bones directly to The Da Vinci Code: Without priviledged access to the author, who can really say that Rollins saw Dan Brown climb up the charts and decided he could do just as well? The only thing we have to go on are the right dates (allowing for a two-year publishing cycle, Map of Bones could have been written as a response to Brown’s early success), explicit cover blurbs and eerily similar thematic elements.

    Consider this: A terrorist attack on a German catholic church with supernatural overtones. Another terrorist attack on an American military base with a high-tech secret. A scientific investigation that reveals historical clues. A top-secret organization within the Vatican. Another shadowy organization that seeks ultimate power beyond organized crime. Maps with secret clues. Gunfights and chases down subterranean structures. Tons of “factual” details. Oh yes: Even if Rollins was never inspired by Dan Brown’s success, his marketers aren’t shy about making the comparison twice on the back cover, and readers will definitely feel similar thrills.

    The irony is that I may be harping about the novel’s derivative nature, but Rollins has seldom written anything better. His first few novels felt like standard-issue thrillers, sometimes a bit too ludicrous to be taken seriously. But with Map of Bones, Rollins finally finds his way to a superior thriller. The action is tighter, the characters are more distinctive, the details are more interesting and the pacing never flags. The union of historical clues with high-tech gadgets is well-handled, and Map of Bones simply rockets forward. As a result, it easily rockets to the top of my list of his novels.

    You can even say that it’s better written than Brown’s novel… although that’s not saying much, of course.

    It’s not perfect, of course. The scientific justification for the quasi-supernatural elements that rocket the plot forward is almost painfully stupid and won’t earn any bonus points from anyone with at least high-school physics. Worse, though, is the novel’s conclusion, which resorts to the hoary “there are things man isn’t meant to know, yadda-yadda” cliché to refuse its readers a world-shattering explanation even though the entire novel’s been building toward it. We’re left with a bright flash, a few lines of pseudo-lyrical description and a hole in the ground: another triumph for the small-mindedness of thriller writers looking to the sequels.

    Of course, there are sequels. Rollins is now up to his third “Sigma Force” novel, The Judas Strain, proving to the world that he has absolutely no shame left in exploiting flash crazes. Good for him: if we’re lucky, we’ll even get a passable novel out of the lot. Heck, I didn’t expect much from this one and ended up pleasantly surprised. If he can keep it up, maybe I’ll have to stop making all of those Dan Brown references.

  • Overclocked, Cory Doctorow

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Thunder’s Mouth, 2007, 285 pages, C$19.95 tpb, ISBN 1-56025-981-7

    This is Cory Doctorow’s second short story collection, but there’s a big difference between the Doctorow who wrote the stories in 2004’s A Foreign Place and 8 More and the one who wrote the stories in 2007’s Overclocked. In retrospect, the earlier Doctorow seems more scattered than the newer one: his early stories range from comic surrealism to nerdcore hard-SF, with a diversity of theme and effect that brings to mind a young writer still finding his true calling.

    Things are different with Overclocked. As the title suggests, it’s an all-nerdcore collection. Following on the footsteps of “Ownzored”, Doctorow has spent the latest period of his writing career giving his fiction a thematic unity with an activist edge. Doctorow’s real-life work has turned him into political lobbyist, arguing in favour of free culture against interests that would seek to monetize or restrict it. In this light, it’s almost natural that Doctorow’s fiction output would match the set of issues for which he has become an Internet celebrity.

    The six stories in Overclocked, all published between 2005-2007 (though specific publication credits regrettably aren’t included in the collection) all relate in some way or another to free culture. This isn’t a mere question of being allowed a few free music downloads: Doctorow makes it clear that he’s arguing for nothing less than civil liberties at a time where the expression of thoughts is becoming currency.

    “Printcrime” may be one of those Nature short-short stories that fits in three pages (four, if you include the introduction), but it’s a quietly angry shot at whoever would think about restricting civil rights in the name of making an extra dollar buck. It may not be long, but it delivers Doctorow’s thesis in its distilled essence.

    “Anda’s Game” is likely to become one of the centrepiece stories in any of Doctorow’s future career retrospectives, not because it’s a particularly fine story (It struck me as obvious the first time I read it, and only slightly better the second time), but because it’s been re-anthologized a number of time, even in non-SF venues. Most of all, it exemplifies one of Doctorow’s central themes, which is how SF is uniquely placed to comment upon the present by re-casting it in the future: The story discusses the very real phenomenon of virtual game gold-farming, with a few tweaks and gadgets to make it feel five minutes in the future. It’s no accident if the entire collection is subtitled “Stories of the future present”.

    “I, Robot” got a similar amount of attention within the SF community (earning Doctorow a Hugo nomination), but feels even more ham-fisted. Questions Isaac Asimov’s assumptions is interesting, Doctorow’s point feels obvious and trite given the length of the tale. At short story lengths, it might have worked better. As it is now, we just wait too long before hearing the other shoe falling. At least it’s readable enough: few Doctorow stories are anything less than crystal-clear in their prose.

    “I, Row-Boat” takes the concept even farther and manages to one-up its predecessor, in some ways confirming my doubts about Doctorow’s sledgehammer subtlety. The story is somewhat more unusual than Doctorow’s typical settings, and the unlikely characters are quite unlike anything seen so far. It takes Doctorow’s reflexion on sentience on non-obvious tangents, and satirizes the obvious rhetoric. It may not be as immediately accessible as the other stories in the collection, but it’s more effective at engaging the reader. Which, considering the place of the human characters in the story, is not an obvious conclusion at all.

    “After the Siege” almost feels like a return to sledgehammer rhetorics with a tale of copyright-driven warfare, but Doctorow mitigates that feeling with a powerful depiction of a population under siege. The old-fashioned feel of the story is intentionally derived from the horror of WW2 Leningrad. For all of the future gadgets and fancy justification, it’s the atmosphere of war that lingers on after the story is over.

    But for atmosphere, it’s hard to beat “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”, a post-apocalyptic story that imagines the reaction of Internet system administrators locked inside a data centre during and after a major civilization-ending event. Though the event itself is hazily described, the end-of-the-world feeling is terrific, bringing to mind a number of classic British cozy catastrophes. As someone neck-deep in the IT industry, I ended up unexpectedly moved by the story and its characters. The laconic last few lines are a killer: “Tomorrow, he’d go back and fix another computer and fight off entropy again. And why not? It was what he did. He was a sysadmin.” Beautiful.

    And in some ways, that resonance explains why, despite my hesitations and problems with Doctorow’s stories, he remains one of the SF writers who most closely track my own conception of Science-Fiction, what it’s good for and who it speaks to. Doctorow’s the bull geek of SF, and Overclocked shows us why he’s important.

  • Stomp The Yard (2007)

    Stomp The Yard (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, February 2007) If ever you’ve wondered what would happen if you blended hip-hop music with Jackie Chan movie-making, don’t look any further: Stomp The Yard is this year’s 8 Mile in how it present a troubled youth’s redemption through suddenly-hot performing arts. For Eminem, it was poetry slams; this time around, it’s dance-stepping. But whereas 8 Mile was grim and dreary, this one’s all-out light and fun. The dance and song sequences have an irresistible energy, and they lift the film far above its terrible plot and dialogue. The protagonist isn’t unsympathetic despite his almost tiresome aggression, but that character trait feels like a dramatic shortcut in a film that can’t be bothered by subtlety. Elsewhere in the script, hideous coincidences and convenient back-stories make up the rest of what could laughably be called “plotting”. But just like a Jackie Chan film, the story is just an excuse to move from sequence to sequence. In this case, it’s easy to be forgiving as soon as the foot-stomping dance sequences start: The film suddenly becomes alive, bubbling with good fun and terrific camera work. (It could have used longer coverage shots, but that’s a common-enough complaint.) As far as teen movies go, this is surprisingly enjoyable.

  • Notes On A Scandal (2006)

    Notes On A Scandal (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, February 2007) As we all know, it doesn’t take a crime to be a bad person and Notes On A Scandal seems fascinated by this idea. Though there is a nominal crime at the heart of the story, it seems minor in comparison to the twisted mind games played by an older woman (Judi Dench) on a younger one (Cate Blanchett). Though the film disappoints in how it refuses to be spectacular, there is an unnerving quality to the film’s banal betrayals and how it represents the kind of toxic relationship that sometimes contaminate lives. Visually, there’s little to distinguish the film: It’s strictly movie-of-the-week territory. But the performances are interesting, and the “banality of evil” theme is unusual enough to warrant some attention.

  • Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

    Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2007) “Independent comedies” are hit-and-miss affairs. Though their “independent” nature ensures that they’ll be quirkier than conventional studio fare, that same quirkiness either works to viewer’s sensibilities or doesn’t. In this case, Little Miss Sunshine doesn’t look all that funny for a long time. Suicidal Proust expert? Foul-mouthed grandpa? Loser-writer trying to get a publishing contract? Not exactly the stuff laughs are made of. It doesn’t get any better as the film becomes a road trip film, as it plays as a humiliation comedy, as characters die and others are pushed even further in depression. But something strange happens near the end of the film, as viewers finally click to its peculiar view of the world and as the dramatic arcs of the characters reach a meaningful conclusion: Little Miss Sunshine becomes, well, a ray of sunshine. The end dance number is terrific: the film earns its comedic release far more than in a film where nothing is risked or loss. A surprise finish for a film that takes its time to put all the pieces together.

  • Little Children (2006)

    Little Children (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, February 2007) I have a particular loathing for the “suburban adultry” sub-genre of melodrama, enough that I try to avoid them unless they’re (inevitably) nominated for the Academy Awards. Imagine my surprise, then, at how Little Children turned out to be an almost enjoyable example of the form. It’s not nearly as clever as it thinks it is: the ponderous narration is almost completely useless, bringing little to the film that we can’t already see for our own. But the same narration gives a pretentious degree of self-importance to the film, one that takes it into a darkly comic realm. Oh, sure, it’s not laughs from beginning to end: the film’s most consistent thematic motif is how it keeps playing with expectations: just as you think the story may aim toward redemption, it twists the knife again, transforming heroes into heels, losers into bastards and bored housewives into masters of manipulation. Little Children, at the very least, won’t allow you to get too comfortable, and that very well may be why I respect it despite my complete lack of interest in what it has to say. After all, how can one dismiss a film that includes the line “Madame Bovary is not a slut, she’s one of the greatest characters of Western Literature!”?