Author: Christian Sauvé

  • 127 Hours (2010)

    127 Hours (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) I wasn’t really looking forward to the experience of watching 127 Hours.  Survival films strike an implicit deal with viewers in that they’re going to spend much of the film’s length feeling acutely uncomfortable, and this one doesn’t soften the experience of spending five days with a poor guy with a hand stuck between a rock and a crevice wall.  Since there’s only one slightly softer component in that mix, you can guess what’s coming… and steel yourself for it.  Director Danny Boyle’s films have been hit or miss as far as I’m concerned, but his impressionistic direction style here works well at presenting the protagonist’s experiences and keeping the film interesting even as it’s stuck in one location.  If 127 Hours does something very well, it’s to put us inside the protagonist’s every solitary experiences from the irresistible appeal of the outdoors to tasting the last of his water reserves: Indeed, when That Scene comes up, it’s easy to end up seeing stars alongside the hero.  James Franco is exceptional as a self-reliant man slowly discovering the limits of insularity: The film depends on him, and his performance is one of the few this year capable of rivalling Ryan Reynolds’ similar turn in Buried.  But 127 Hours is not a downer thriller, and so viewers emerge from the experience thoroughly uplifted.  Despite the fact that the film stays in one location for about two-third of its length and often resorts to oneiric flights of fancy, it still feels taut, tight and unsentimental.  It’s a minor achievement in filmmaking, and it will win over even the sceptics.

  • Police Squad! (1982)

    Police Squad! (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, December 2010) Almost thirty years later, this short-lived TV series still holds up splendidly.  Best-known as the prototype for the Naked Gun! trilogy of police movie spoofs, Police Squad! is an amusing attempt to translate the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker brand of rapid-paced comedy to the TV screen.  The pacing is slower than the films but is considerably faster than most sitcoms and as a result still works pretty well even today, echoing the rhythm of latter series such as The Simpsons and Family Guy.  Leslie Nielsen is great as Frank Drebin, although his TV portrayal is a bit more competent that the film’s doofus character.  One of the ways the series can sustain its rapid-fire stream of comedy is by recycling gags, and it’s hard to tell whether they’re funnier the first or the sixth time: The end-of-episode fake-freeze moments still feel inspired today.  At six episodes, total running time for the series on DVD is slightly over two hours, making it an ideal length for an evening’s viewing.  The DVD contains a generous amount of supplementary material, including three episode commentaries and a gag reel.

  • Level 26: Dark Origins, Anthony E. Zuiker and Duane Swierczynski

    Level 26: Dark Origins, Anthony E. Zuiker and Duane Swierczynski

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dutton, 2009, 406 pages, C$33.50 hc, ISBN 978-0-525-95125-4

    Some novels are unexplainable, but this isn’t one of them.  It doesn’t take much more than a look at Level 26: Dark Origins’ dust jacket to understand that this is a book about money, the corporatization of entertainment and a repellent vision of the future of prose fiction.  Pompously billed and trademarked as the world “first Digi-Novel™”, Dark Origins’ main narrative hook is entirely external to the story: This is a novel with multimedia extensions.  If you want the so-called “full experience”, you need to log onto a web site and sell your soul to the Penguin Group (or at least engrave your email address in their marketing databases) to watch video segments, email snippets and other assorted miscellanea.

    (Actually, it’s even more pretentious than that.  Let me quote from the dust jacket: “Level 26 takes the best features of books, film and interactive digital technologies and roll them all into a raw, dark, and intense storytelling experience we’re calling the world’s first “digi-novel™.”)

    This has the sole virtue of feeling new.  But not really; also published in 2009, Jordan Wiseman and J.C. Hutchins’ Personal Effects: Dark Arts also tried to expand the putative “boundaries of the novel” by providing a pouch full of fake credit cards, photos and other documents (some of them with web addresses and phone numbers set up expressly for the book) that meant to provide a supplement to the prose narrative.  Like Dark Origins, Dark Arts (what’s with the Dark fascination?) was billed as a collaboration between an experienced thriller novelist and a creator best known for other kinds of entertainment.  Anthony E. Zuiker created the CSI series; Jordan Wiseman led several Augmented-Reality Games.  It starts to reason that both books would attempt to extend a novel through a mixture of ARG tropes and short multimedia clips.

    In both cases, I deliberately approached the novels as their own narratives, ignoring the included or web-accessible miscellanea.  Neither novel did particularly well when considered as just-novels.  Dark Arts was a run-of-the-mill supernatural thriller, with a few good scenes but not much in terms of narrative interest.  Dark Origins, on the other hand, is quite a bit worse… to the point where it’s easy to think that it wouldn’t have been worth publishing if it hadn’t been doped with multimedia supplement and a truckload of hype.  (In an article, Zuiker refers to Dark Origins as the “world’s first interactive crime novel”, which betrays an appalling comprehension of the word “interactive”: Passive consumption, even across multiple linked media, is not interactive.)

    Level 26 is underwhelming starting from its very premise: A super-competent retired FBI profiler is brought back in service to track down a super-competent serial killer…  Yes, indeed, “visionary creator” Zuiker couldn’t be bothered to do better than yet another Thomas Harris rip-off as the basis of his “bold new creation”.  If you haven’t yet overdosed on quasi-supernatural serial killers and the tortured profilers who can’t stop tracking them, then Dark Origins may push you over the edge.  All of the usual components are there: The family suddenly threatened by the killer, the inexplicably rich and competent psycho, the elaborate games that the antagonist plays with the police… it’s all there, down to the reluctant ex-boss, regular doses of meaningless gory deaths, kidnapping of the hero’s love interest, final horrific confrontation, and so on.

    But Dark Origins can’t leave a clichéd formula alone without adding its own special brand of stupid sauce.  Perhaps the worst is the titular “Level 26”, which presumes a scale of evil from 1 to 25 so finely graduated that we can just imagine FBI psychologists arguing the merits of a 17 rating versus a 16.  (To quote, once again, from the tedious dust jacket: “It is well-known among law enforcement personnel that murderers can be categorized as belonging to one of twenty-five levels of evil, from the naive opportunists starting out at level 1 to the organized, premeditated torture-murderers who inhabit level 25.”) But the “Level 26” nonsense also has to compete with a vision of the world so warped (even by the noir standards of serial killer glorifications) that it includes the presence of Homeland Security goons who follow the hero around with an explicit mandate to kill him if he stops tracking down the serial killer.  With allies like those, why bother having a serial killer?  Few will be surprised to find out that the killer’s formidable resources, available time and multiple competencies are never explained, since narrative coherence and logic were discounted in favour of video clips.  That’s how it goes in Digi-Novels™.

    (More pettily, that serial killer is seriously referred to as “Sqweegel”, bringing about unfortunate associations with Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.)

    For readers who quite like prose narratives and resist the corporate push to commoditize novels like other bits of safe and predictable multimedia entertainment, the creative bankruptcy of Level 26: Dark Origins as a novel is a bit of a balm.  It doesn’t herald anything like the “book of the future” nonsense that had been bandied about by breathless press clippings –This isn’t much more than another curiosity whose interest will go extinct at about the same time the novel goes out of print and the web site is closed down by the publisher. (I’ve got an entire bookmark folder filled with online supplements that didn’t last five years.)

    Attempts to reinvent the novel via trademarked multimedia gizmos are doomed to failure for a number of reasons, the biggest one being that it’s useless and expensive: the novel is not a broken form of entertainment, and attempts to shackle it to other audiovisual pieces that –significantly- take far more resources to produce than a-guy-typing-away are curiosities at best, shameless “intellectual properties”-building at worst.  I will note (with some schadenfreudian cackling) that adding a multimedia component to a book’s marketing campaign also increases the sell-through required to break even.  Dark Origins is billed as first novel in series: Given the results, I’m not seeing it going much beyond the contracted-for trilogy.  Unless the marketing database of email addresses ends up being more valuable than the royalties…

    So what’s left to say, other than Level 26: Dark Origins is a dull piece of fiction that’s not worth your time as a narrative nor as a “digi-novel™”?  That the commercial intent of the project reeks of desperation?  That Zuiker should leave books alone?  That the business model is flawed from conception? Maybe all of those things, but mostly none of those things: It’s not a fearless prediction that this project will sink without a trace and leave the rest of the industry unaffected.  Meanwhile, go read another novel without multimedia add-ons, celebrity endorsements or unwarranted self-importance: it’ll last longer.

  • Dreams with Sharp Teeth (2008)

    Dreams with Sharp Teeth (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, December 2010) Few contemporary writers elicit a variety of reactions like Harlan Ellison.  With his substantial body of work, long personal history and contentious personality, Ellison can be admired and reviled, often by the same people at various times.  Famously cranky, extremely intelligent, extraordinarily outspoken and connected to a variety of subcultures from Science Fiction fandom to Hollywood professionals, Ellison is an ideal subject for a documentary and Dreams with Sharp Teeth, twenty-five years in the making, is meant to offer an overview of the man and his career.  A compilation of archival footage, interviews with Ellison, readings, testimonies from friends such as Josh Olson and Robin Williams and a minimal amount of on-screen captions for context, Dream With Sharp Teeth is not an objective view of its subject: director Erik Nelson is too much of a fan to seriously question the Ellison mythos (although he lets Neil Gaiman come closest to an objective assessment by leaving a reference to Ellison’s career as performance art) and the film is substantially stacked in Ellison’s favour.  People familiar with the Science-Fiction field will delight in spotting appearances by Dan Simmons, Connie Willis (!), Michael Cassutt and Ronald D. Moore.  (Those same SF fans may quibble with how Ellison’s troubled relation with fandom is illustrated by his presence at the 2006 Nebula weekend: The Nebulas are a professionals’ event; couldn’t Nelson go to the fannish 2006 L.A. Worldcon instead?)   But the star remains Ellison… in all of his overblown personality, important friends, nice house and tortured history with Hollywood and the SF&F field.  Is it an interesting documentary?  Sure.  Is it the best possible documentary about Ellison?  Heck no –but documentaries being works of passion, it would be unlikely to see one made by someone who wouldn’t already be a fan of Ellison.  There are so many fascinating things that could be discussed about Ellison dispassionately, but for that, we will probably have to wait for an unauthorized biography.  In the meantime, Ellison fans and SF readers will be happy with the film as-is.  The DVD comes with a set of generally superfluous readings, but also an overview of the film’s premiere (with unlikely guests such as Werner Herzog and Drew McWeeny) and a curiously interesting pizza chat between Ellison and Gaiman, in which Ellison isn’t being Ellison (much) and in which, if you know what to listen for, you can even hear a reaction to Ellison’s 2006 L.A. Con IV fiasco.  As SF fans with poisonously long memories (or even a look at Ellison’s Wikipedia page) will tell you, Dreams with Sharp Teeth only tells a chunk of the full Ellison story –which can’t be solely told by his friends.

  • The Next Three Days (2010)

    The Next Three Days (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) One of the keys behind a successful thriller is being absolutely, indisputably, unarguably behind the main character.  Moral ambiguity may be fine for dramas, but for straight-ahead thrillers, it’s better to be on-board from the get-go.  Alas, it’s one of The Next Three Days’ biggest flaws that it never completely allows the audience to get behind the protagonist as he reinvents himself as a criminal in order to save his wife from a life imprisonment murder sentence.  It says far too much about my own views of law-and-order to confess that I spent two-thirds of the film silently disapproving of the hero’s jailbreaking plans.  Even at the end, I was actively cheering for the police to bring them in, and for at least one of the so-called heroes to kill themselves.  Once you’re at that point in moral allegiances, it’s hard to come back.  Part of the problem is also that The Next Three Days leaves far too much time for the audience to ponder morality: At two hours, the film is too long for its own good, and part of the problem is director Paul Haggis’ lack of commitment to thrills: The screenplay can’t decide whether it’s marking time as a ruminative drama or if it’s moving forward as a suspense film, and no amount of clever planning can overcome the lassitude of a film that doesn’t quite know how to get going.  Russell Crowe is fine as a schoolteacher who reinvents himself as a mastermind criminal, but Elizabeth Banks isn’t particularly sympathetic as the object of the film’s affection.  The result is, even if you can go along with the protagonist’s descent into criminality, a bit of a waste of talent for everyone involved: A pile of contrivances amount to little more than a fairly dull way to spend much of two hours.

  • The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi

    The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2010, 330 pages, C$34.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-575-08887-0

    Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief was easily the most-anticipated first SF novel of 2010.  Helped along by enthusiastic praise by People in the Know (starting with Charles Stross, who not only provided an eye-popping cover blurb, but started talking about the novel months before publication), The Quantum Thief was eagerly awaited; an anomaly given the author’s thin bibliography at shorter lengths –The last first SF novel with so much buzz was Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, and it came after several Hugo-nominated short stories.

    A quick look at the cover blurb is enough to sustain any enthusiasm: We’re promised an exciting future adventure filled with reliable SF buzzwords from bizarre post-humans to dazzling hard SF.  Charles Stross’s cover blurb is designed to make any jaded hard-SF fan perk up (“Hard to admit, but I think he’s better at this stuff than I am.  The best first SF novel I’ve read in many years.”), and virtually everything else about the book seems optimized to appeal to genre SF quirks.  Almost as an afterthought, we’re led to understand that the plot outline has something to do with a super-competent gentleman thief, a daring prison escape and an even more daring heist.

    After reading the book, a few things are still true: The Quantum Thief is indeed the debut SF novel of the year and it does herald the arrival of a major new talent.  It’s invigorating, it’s filled with ideas and it’s firmly steeped inside the core assumptions of the genre.

    But you’re going to have to work in order to enjoy it, perhaps a bit more than you may expect.

    In-between gevulots, googols, Tzaddikim, Sobornost and spimescapes, there’s enough new vocabulary in The Quantum Thief to make you feel as if you’re learning a new language in order to appreciate the novel.  The opening segment is like being thrown in a lake with vague instructions on how to swim.  For a while, the narrative hovers at the edge of understanding, with just enough connecting tissue to keep going, but with a strong sense of alienation that underscores how different this future can feel.

    But this is a classic case of how high-end genre Science Fiction should work: From incluing to demonstrative definitions, SF has developed its own strategies for presenting imagined worlds, and Rajaniemi is playing that particular world-building game as well as anyone else currently writing.  It’s a challenge, but it’s a challenge that SF readers will relish; indeed, it’s one of the reasons why a lot of us read Science Fiction in the first place.

    At least there’s some comfort to be found in the plotting.  While the setting of The Quantum Thief is strange, its heist-based narrative structure is far more traditional: Our gentleman-thief protagonist is clearly inspired by Arsène Lupin, and the amateur-detective going against him cleanly echoes the traditional narrative structure of those novels.  No matter how tangled the technology and its resulting society, the storytelling heart of Rajaniemi’s debut is pure classical form.

    Still, I suspect that the main complaint against The Quantum Thief will be that while world-building is a good thing in theory, it’s no excuse to make the novel harder to read than it should be.  Rajaniemi is showing off with this first novel, and his prose style calls attention to itself by being a bit more difficult (dense, verbose, indulgent; take your pick of adjectives) than SF’s usually more transparent standards.  It feels a lot like early China Mieville’s work in how it delights in baroque prose pyrotechnics; but readers will note that current-day Miéville seems eager to strip down his style.

    While I have my own reservations about the final result, there’s little doubt that as a debut SF novel, The Quantum Thief is a solid success.  Rajaniemi is writing from the perspective of someone who understands and loves Science Fiction, and so the novel is aimed squarely at other genre-SF readers.  It reminds me a lot of Stross’ own debut Singularity Sky, and considering the progress that Stross has made since then, the parallel suggests that Rajaniemi is a major author in the making.

    Constrained to a city on Mars, The Quantum Thief offers only a glimpse at the universe Rajaniemi wants to play with: The inevitable sequels have an entire universe to explore.  Considering that Rajaniemi has already sold an entire trilogy, we can only imagine how good he’s going to be by the time we’ll get to read the third one.

  • Unstoppable (2010)

    Unstoppable (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) Railroad nerds better steel themselves, because Tony Scott’s latest thriller is a feature-length paean to American rolling steel, from lovely shots of moving locomotives to numerous behind-the-scenes explanations of how this stuff actually works.  While it’s true that Unstoppable eventually becomes a competently-executed action thriller, it’s the film’s unusual focus on railroad mechanics that fascinate until the action truly starts.  Loosely adapted from a true story (Search “CSX 8888” for the details), Unstoppable is about a runaway train and what needs to be done in order to bring it to a stop without causing massive damage.  Denzel Washington is as good as usual as a grizzled engineer, Rosario Dawson does well in a role requiring no sex-appeal whatsoever and Chris Pine (stuck with a stock blue-collar character) solidifies his moderate credentials as an action hero.  Meanwhile, Tony Scott deploys but does not indulge in the kind of hyperactive style he’s been using for a decade: his shots of rolling trains can become a bit too frantic to be properly appreciated, but he’s able to keep his worst excesses under control.  Fittingly for its subject matter, the action scenes have the physical heft of colliding metal, the CGI gracefully bowing to physical effects.  Structurally, the narrative is a predictable succession of failed attempts until our heroes step in to save the day: it’s a bit of a bother when some plans are so obviously underdeveloped that we know they’re doomed from the get-go.  The “adapted from real events” presumably doesn’t extend to a few scenes milked for maximum suspense.  Unstoppable is not a particularly refined film, but it delivers on its promise, and the result is a fine replacement for Runaway Train as the film most people will consider to be the definitive railroad movie.

  • Fair Game (2010)

    Fair Game (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) One of the most unfortunate consequences of the neo-conservative fumbling in Iraq is that, for years to come, they will have to endure I-told-you-so reminders from liberals who were dead-set against the invasion in the first place.  So it is that Fair Game is a politically engaged re-telling of the events surrounding the White House’s public outing of CIA Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband’s public dissent on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  The story will be most familiar to those who have paid attention during the Bush administration, but the film does a fair job at contextualizing the issues in a way that should be accessible to those for whom this is a new story.  Righteously angry and not shy about letting some of this anger show, Fair Game is fodder for left-wing moviegoers in much the same way that Green Zone was.  (Extra trivia point for those who remember that Fair Game director Doug Liman directed the first Jason Bourne movie, after which the series was taken over by Green Zone’s Paul Greengrass.)  Shot docufiction-style with a camera that jerks around even in conversation scenes when it doesn’t need to, Fair Game is most fascinating when it offers a deglamourized portrait of real-world intelligence and the way partisan politics bandwagons can destroy people’s lives.  As for the rest, well, the film needs to be taken with a grain of salt, given the usual Hollywood dramatizations to make it all feel more interesting.  Sean Penn continues to prove that he’s becoming a more interesting actor with time, but it’s Naomi Watts who shines as Plame, a rare multi-faceted female character balancing work and family life.  While praise for the film is likely to cut along partisan lines, Fair Game itself is a fine piece of work, suspenseful while reasonably realistic.  It’s a deft dramatization of complex events, and despite a bit of a late-film lull, it achieves what it wants to do.

  • Age of Wonders, David G. Hartwell

    Age of Wonders, David G. Hartwell

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1996 revision of 1984 original, 319 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86151-6

    I must have read Age of Wonders three times in either of its incarnations, so I’m a bit surprised that I have never formally reviewed it on-line.  But my own search engine tells me that I haven’t… so here’s a quick recommendation for one of the best book ever published on the American Science Fiction genre and its subculture.

    (I might as well make a few pre-emptive disclaimers before going any further, since there are a number of links between Hartwell and myself: : I’m on a quest to collect all issues of his New York Review of Science Fiction magazine, he has edited novels by people I consider to be friends, I’ve got a handful of his books personally dedicated to me, we have shared a number of conversations throughout the years, I have moderated at least one panel with him and he has –briefly- driven me around Orlando.  We are, in other words, just a bit more than nodding acquaintances.)

    Originally published in 1984, Age of Wonders was last revised in 1996 to incorporate a number of changes in the field.  While that revision is now fifteen years old, don’t let the pre-Web publication date distract you from the book’s vast and timeless understanding of Science Fiction.  Its first point of interest is the way it explains why “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve”.  It’s at that age, after all, that bright teenagers pick up a chronic reading habit, a reading regimen that often contains a large proportion of Science-Fiction.  From his understanding of the field, Hartwell shows how disaffected teenagers often find in SF a literature that appeals to their sense of the world, and how they never completely let go of their affection for the genre after that.  Ask around SF conventions, and you will often find people who correspond exactly to this profile –including myself.

    Hartwell then proceeds to sketch a history of the fannish subculture that has, since the beginning, surrounded the Science Fiction genre.  It has forever been in the nature of SF’s readership to communicate among itself, and the presence of fandom is one of the things that still makes the SF genre so different from other literary fields: It fosters SF’s awareness of itself as a distinct entity, structures the conversation within the field and provides authors with encouragement that, in some cases, is more valuable than the potential monetary rewards offered by a wider readership outside the genre.  Science-Fiction fandom is small, but it’s concentrated.

    Age of Wonders also spends quite a bit of time discussing the nuts and bolts of the impact that SF has on its readers.  Hartwell dedicates entire chapters to the study of the “Sense of Wonder” so particular to SF, to the tortuous relationship that Science Fiction has with real science and reality, to the reasons why clear prose has long been SF’s dominant stylistic requirement and to the biggest historical controversies within the field.

    Hartwell illustrates those points with anecdotes drawn from fandom’s long history, quotations from other writers, informed opinions and, in one case, a deconstruction of a short story to see how it works.  It’s worth noting that Hartwell writes Age of Wonders from a well-rounded perspective drawn from his experience as a fan, an academician and an active editor within the field.  While the book is immensely useful as a pedagogical resource (it comes with a few appendices to provide a solid bibliography of essential works), it’s clearly written and immediately accessible to non-academician.  Its affection for the genre is obvious, but that doesn’t blind it to some of SF’s structural faults.

    Whether you’re an insider looking for a theoretical framework, or an outsider trying to understand what makes Science Fiction so different, Age of Wonder is an essential resource. Reading though it once again, I was struck by how much material I once knew and had forgotten since then: it reminded me that, without any doubt, Hartwell has forgotten more about SF than I (and most other people) will ever know.

    Fifteen web-dominated years after its publication, it’s worth pointing out that in many ways, Age of Wonders reflects a certain experience of Science Fiction that will remain of its era.  Today’s SF fan is markedly likelier to discover the genre through media sources (film, TV or video games) than to come across paperback spinners at their local drugstore.  The factors leading to a chronic teenage reading habit (ie: isolation, boredom) may not be as acute given today’s multiplicity of web-driven entertainment options.  The experience of fandom has also changed dramatically over the past decade and a half, web sites taking the role once played by local generalist conventions as gathering places for the casual fan.  Conventions have grown at once bigger and more specialized, as Hollywood-dominated Comic-Con now makes headlines while literature-focused Readercon can still thrive.  Most notable, however, is the way the geek experience that Hartwell describes has become a fairly mainstream lifestyle in-between massively successful entertainment such as Halo, Inception and The Big Bang Theory.

    I would be the first in line to buy a third edition of Age of Wonders.  Any update would have to navigate a path between a historical acknowledgement of the fannish experience, and the way geek culture has become just another market segment.  Is there anything in the written SF subculture that still distinguishes it from a more casual acquaintance with SF media?  Is written-SF still a vital side-stream of American culture, or is it merely another competing entertainment option?  Is there still something significant to a love for Science Fiction that links with a lust for the future, sympathy for technology and a self-imposed marginalization from society?

    Leaving aside the still-hypothetical question of a third edition, 1996-era Age of Wonders remains an essential component of any serious non-fiction collection about Science Fiction.  It clearly and usefully describes the genre, its readers, its reasons for existing and its essential inner workings.  It’s good enough to re-read every decade, no matter which edition you can get.

  • Pirate Latitudes, Michael Crichton

    Pirate Latitudes, Michael Crichton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Weekend, 2010 reprint of 2009 original, 419 pages, C$13.99 tp, ISBN 978-1-55468-811-1

    A close look at Michael Crichton’s bibliography shows a sometimes-baffling mixture of commercial instincts and contrarian beliefs.  Crichton always wrote to market, and this eventually came to justify novels that challenged orthodoxy; his belief that he was smarter than everyone else meshed well with the commercial opportunities offered by controversy, and that’s how we ended up with carefully crafted alarmist screeds such as Jurassic Park, Prey and Next, or critic-baiting reactionary tracts such as Rising Sun, Disclosure or State of Fear.

    Pirate Latitudes, published after Crichton’s death, is another, happier kind of commercially-driven project.  Seizing upon the perennial craze for pirate-related material, it’s a novel that delivers swashbuckling action and adventure in a strictly conventional fashion ripe for cinematic adaptation.  It’s a lot like Congo or Timeline in that it exhaustively explores the dramatic opportunities a place and time (17th century Caribbean), every chapter showcasing a new thrill.  Stripped of political controversy and free to exploit the new dangerous technologies of a bygone era, it’s a novel that lets readers enjoy the core strengths of Crichton’s writing without suffering from any of its assorted baggage.

    The hero of Pirates Latitudes is a capable British privateer named Charles Hunter, hired by the Governor of Jamaica to take advantage of an unusually profitable opportunity: A Spanish galleon has been left behind by the main fleet, and is believed vulnerable to attack while it’s moored at a nearby island.  Gathering capable crewmembers, Hunter prepares his expedition and sets out for plunder.  As you may expect, the way to the treasure and back won’t be simple or easy: The 17th century Caribbean is a dangerous place, and readers are right to expect a steady rhythm of thrills and adventure on the high seas.

    Whether it’s navigating shallow waters, taking on other ships in naval combat or fighting off a kraken, Pirate Latitudes delivers everything we’d expect from a pirate-themed novel.  It’s perfectly balanced between fiction and fact, with a sea monster and an uncommon series of adventures on one side, and careful descriptions of the era and nautical details on the other.  Crichton’s fiction has seldom been subtle, but it has usually been skilful and the way Pirate Latitudes can exploit the popular idea of the pirate (as depicted in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, most notably) to develop it half-realistically is one of the novel’s most charming aspects.  There’s a ton of trivia about navigating sail ships cleverly meshed in the narrative, and it’s surprisingly enjoyable.

    Narratively, the novel is almost a complete success, save for the initially curious ending.  Unlike what you’d expect from a pirate novel, it doesn’t actually end with a massive naval battle and an all-out boarding assault: those occur earlier in the novel, as do the sea monster attack, dangerous island expedition and triumphant assault on the gold-filled ship.  As the first section makes it clear in rounding up the members of the expedition, Pirate Latitudes is structured around a caper plot rather than a more conventional kind of pirate adventure.  The ending will seem underwhelming if you’re not familiar with the kind of vengeful double-cross that the form dictates.  The characters are all exceptionally accomplished in their own way, which creates a lot of opportunity for extraordinary acts and solid dialogue.

    It all amount to a fun novel: not terribly deep nor as meaningful as Crichton’s other controversy-seeking contemporary thrillers, but a decent companion to some of Crichton’s more entertaining books.  It’s also, in its own way, a decent send-off for Crichton, who deserved better than the bitter aftertaste of State of Fear and Next as his final send-off.  One last novel by Crichton reportedly remains to be published, but it’s going to be assembled from notes and a partially-written manuscript: Pirate Latitudes is the last novel truly written by Crichton, and it’s a reminder that before he became the darling of contrarians, he had an impressive career as a fine popular entertainer.  Readers might as well enjoy the experience of a master craftsman deftly delivering one last crowd-pleasing work.

    Even if you can’t read, don’t worry; it’ll be adapted as a movie sooner or later.

  • Zendegi, Greg Egan

    Zendegi, Greg Egan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2010, 332 pages, C$24.99 tp, ISBN 978-0-575-08618-0

    After two quasi-incomprehensible novels that pushed the edge of what even jaded hard-SF fans were willing to stomach, Greg Egan’s latest novel Zendegi is a return to a more accessible style that will remind his faithful readers of Teranesia.  Set in a near future and focusing intensely on mid-step technological issues, it’s notable for its attention to characters, openness to non-western culture and pessimistic contradiction of previous Egan novels.

    Structurally split between a first third set in 2012 and a second section set in 2027-2028, Zendegi first spends time with Australian journalist Martin Seymour as he travels to Iran and gets involved in a second Iranian revolution.  While this first half is mostly told as a techno-thriller set five minutes in the future, a subplot featuring Nasim, an expatriate Iranian scientist working in neurobiology, suggests the novel’s ultimate SF goals.

    Fifteen years later, the novel comes closer to the kind of future imagined in Egan’s other novels.  Virtual Worlds are now fully immersive, and new techniques are helping digitize aspects of human behaviour as semi-autonomous agents.  It’s not quite artificial intelligence, but it’s steadily getting closer.  So close, in fact, that when Seymour is diagnosed with a potentially incurable cancer, he contacts Nasim to be partially recorded in order to provide guidance to his soon-to-be-orphaned son.  Meanwhile, the convergence between human brains and virtual models is raising both hopes and controversy –leading to a few scenes of virtual vandalism with a darker purpose.

    With Zendegi, Egan takes a closer look at the middle-steps on the way to the kind of fully-digital futures he described in books such as Diaspora.  SF traditionally assumes an intermediate “…and something magical happens…” in-between the present and an AI-enabled future, but a few writers are occasionally willing to dive into the morass and set stories in the messy interim period.  (Recently, both Robert J. Sawyer with his WWW series and Ted Chiang in The Lifecycle of Software Objects have treaded upon similar themes.)

    Accordingly, there’s nothing simple or optimistic about Egan’s treatment of the subject in Zendegi.  Various approximations, shortcuts and compromises are required before having even the simplest simulated personalities up and running, and much of the effort is motivated by strictly mercenary gain as various online services compete for profit.  The main plot of the novel itself is a mournful race against time, and it doesn’t end as optimistically as you would expect –especially if your idea of Egan’s fiction was shaped by his earliest novels rather than the more nuanced material he’s been writing in his short stories.

    The best thing about Zendegi as compared to Egan’s latest Schild’s Ladder and Incandescence is that Egan has taken a step back from the abyss of incomprehensibility and delivered an accessible novel with credible human characters.  It feels a lot like Teranesia in that it allows Egan to dial down the speculation and develop a richer recognizable extrapolation of our present.  With its deep immersion in Iranian culture, Zendegi also suggests that Egan can write near-future globalized SF à la Ian McDonald.

    Unfortunately, Zendegi also leaves itself open to more common criticism.  If Schild’s Ladder and Incandescence could use “I didn’t understand most of it” negative reviews like badges of honour, Zendegi won’t benefit so much from charges that it is short story material padded to novel length.  Focusing strictly on the SF elements, it’s possible to lose much of the novel’s first third, a good chunk of the redundant segments set in the Zendegi virtual world itself, and considerably shorten the remainder of the novel.  The resulting novella would feel a lot more energetic while delivering the same extrapolative charge; it would also feel closer to Egan’s recent short fiction than his novels.

    While the finished results will please readers looking for either a more realistic take on the near-future of mind uploading or globally-aware genre fiction, Zendegi also carries a penalty by virtue of being published under the Egan brand name: It’s more timid, less fizzy, and nowhere near as interesting as much of his other books.  It is, in many ways, a wholly average SF novel.  Not bad, not fantastic; just ordinary.  This will be a relief to some, a disappointment to others, and maybe even both at the same time.

  • Tales of the Madman Underground, John Barnes

    Tales of the Madman Underground, John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Viking, 2009, 532 pages, C$23.50 hc, ISBN 978-0-670-06081-8

    One of the paradoxes of genre publishing is that it can be as comforting in its ghetto-like nature as it can stifle those looking to try something new.  Genre fans can provide a certain predictable sales baseline, but convincing them to try something outside the boundaries of the genre can be difficult.  For every Dan Simmons able to write equally well in science-fiction, horror, fantasy and mainstream, there are a plenty of other SF writers getting no success trying to sell techno-thrillers.

    Then there are those who seem to relish breaking genre conventions.  John Barnes is, in many ways, the model of a mid-list SF genre writer, but his lengthy bibliography is filled with oddities and small surprises.  In addition to a solid core bibliography of Science Fiction novels written for adult and young adult audiences, Barnes also wrote less conventional speculative fiction: From a trilogy of men’s adventure thrillers to a light-hearted fantasy to a meta-SFictional tall tale to hard-SF novels written in collaboration with Buzz Aldrin, Barnes manages to defy and subvert expectations once every two or three novels.  I’ve got most of his bibliography (Heck, I even have his early obscure “Time Raider” trilogy in my stack of things to read) and I’m still surprised by what he dares to do.

    Now, with Tales of the Madman Underground, he turns his attention to mainstream young adult fiction.  Taking place in 1973 Ohio, this YA novel shows a few hints of Barnes’ SF pedigree: The main character read Philip K Dick and has to turn to a convention-going classmate for explanations.  A few other references can be read as reassuring winks to Barnes’ existing audience (who may be familiar with Barnes’ other young-adult Science Fiction novels), but Tales of the Madman Underground is otherwise a completely mainstream teen novel.

    It takes place over the first six days of Karl Shoemaker’s senior High School year.  He has the best of intentions: To be normal.  “Normal”, in Karl’s case, is a challenge.  Not everyone lives with an unstable widowed mother and dozens of quasi-feral cats.  Not everyone works five jobs and has to hide their money from their flighty mom.  Not everyone is a recovering alcoholic teen.  Not everyone has been branded a psychopath, sent to group therapy and pre-emptively condemned to a permanent psychological record.  Karl’s goal is to take his last year one day at a time, and be as normal as possible to avoid returning to “the Madman Underground.”  It’s not that his best friends aren’t Madmen… but he’d rather try to be normal for a while.

    I’m not going to attempt guessing how much of Tales of the Madman Underground is nostalgia for Barnes (who was 16 in 1973); it’s more useful to note that this is a novel by an experienced novelist, and that the result is a solid success.  The atmosphere of a small Midwestern town is described with idiosyncratic flavour and the characters that surround Karl are richly sketched.  The titular Madmen may have been designated as broken minds by the system, but the novel shows how even the most distressed of them can depend on each other for support and so deserve our sympathy.  (In one of the book’s best scenes, they show up the school’s newest therapist… and find out that she’s an unexpected ally.)  Karl himself is a likable protagonist, emboldened and hardened by situations that others would find desperate.  We root for him to a rare degree, and the small victories that constitute his ultimate triumph are earned many times over.

    Karl’s narration is direct, suitably profane, and addictive from the very first few pages.  The terrific dialogue is a joy to read, making the 500+pages book seem much shorter.  The narrative flow isn’t complicated, but it’s enlivened by numerous subplots (many of them relating to Karl’s numerous side-jobs) and a series of stories about the Madman Underground’s most memorable adventures.  Set in 1973, it seems just as relevant today.

    Anyone who has read more than two Barnes novels knows that he can write dark-and-repulsive like the worst of them.  And while Tales of the Madman Underground has its share of uncomfortable moments (including a sequence where we’re temporarily brought to doubt the reliability of the potentially-psychotic narrator), it features one of Barnes’ most sympathetic character yet and it leads to an unusually triumphant conclusion.  The obstacles facing Karl are formidable, but they’re overcome fairly and the last few pages are smiles upon smiles.  It adds up to one of Barnes’ most enjoyable books yet, and a rare one of his that can be described as unabashedly upbeat.  Even die-hard genre SF fans willing to genre-hop and follow Barnes in his historical adventure will get much out of it.

  • Skyline (2010)

    Skyline (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, November 2010) First of what seems to be a long list of alien-invasion films to appear in 2010-2011, Skyline takes a low-budget high-concept approach to a well-worn story: Aliens attack Los Angeles, and a few human characters are stuck in a high-rise apartment watching the action.  Perhaps the most astonishing film about Skyline is its reported cost of about ten million dollars, only half a million of which was spent on principal photography.  The rest is all CGI, and the on-screen result veers between digital home-movie quality and feature-film CGI effects.  It’s an audacious bet, but the film does feel a lot bigger than its budget.  Unfortunately, intentions aren’t the only thing that matters, and so Skyline missteps badly in about three major ways, two of whom are related to its ending.  (Spoiler ahead!)  The first issue is the lack of interest in the characters, none of whom have enough personality to be sympathetic.  Their self-indulgent dialogue is annoying, and there’s not a lot of sympathy to be felt for overgrown teenagers living large in a luxurious condo.  Skyline laboriously sets up its first act and then slowly moves through its second one; only the last thirty minutes truly move.  But the film’s most interesting characteristic is also the one that kills it: Anyone criticizing why alien-invasion movies always end up with the humans winning may want to take a look at Skyline to understand why it’s a better story to cheer for the human underdogs rather than letting the aliens do whatever they want anyway: it’s the difference between a short film and feature-length one: Don’t turn around in circles for 90 minutes to say something patently obvious from the moment the film’s premise is explained.  Skyline’s final problem stems from the second one in that it stops at an awful moment, either five minutes too late or fifteen minutes too early, ending with a futile nihilism that will make viewers turn against the film in its entirety.  (I’m not even going to comment on the patently absurd rationale of why the aliens seem to invade.)  Oh, there are plenty of things to like in the film’s individual moments: The special effects are often as good as any other alien-invasion film put on-screen.  (It helps that the Strauss Brothers writers/directors have an extensive background in visual effects.)  In the end, however, we’re left with a poisoned alien-invasion candy, not worth revisiting again knowing how it ends.  Skyline makes marginally more sense as a horror film rather than a science-fiction one, but not that much… and not enough to care.

  • Under the Dome, Stephen King

    Under the Dome, Stephen King

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Scribner, 2009, 1074 pages, C$39.99 hc, ISBN 978-1-4391-4850-1

    Frankly, there’s just one thing you need to know about Stephen King’s Under the Dome:  It’s big.  It’s really, really big.  Count the pages and recall the two other King novels of similar heft: The Stand and It.   The page count shows that Under the Dome is King’s third-longest novel, and it certainly feels epic.

    The premise is simple: When a small Maine town is cut off from the world by an invisible but impassable barrier, its residents struggle to understand what’s going on and survive the experience.  But such a plot summary glosses over the totality of King’s presentation of the event.  He’s got two thousand viewpoints to play with, and if the action wisely focuses on half a dozen main protagonists, at times it feels as if the omniscient narration gives us a glimpse of every single citizen of Chester’s Mill.  The first chapter alone takes a kaleidoscopic view of what happens when the dome falls, with crashing vehicles, cut-off body parts, interrupted streams, accidents of fate locking some people in or out and other assorted phenomenon.  The omniscient narration can be chatty, but it also goes quiet when it’s time to focus on the main characters.

    Because there’s a lot more to Under the Dome than a town physically cut off from the rest of the world: Chester’s Mill has its share of bad apples, and they control the place.  When media attention brought on the city following the fall of the dome threatens to expose secrets that the guilty would rather keep hidden, the dome itself becomes less dangerous than the people inside … Psychotic murderers, crystal-meth entrepreneurs, power-crazy policemen and panicked citizen all show their true colours during the days that follow the fall of the dome.

    But it’s the details through which King tells his story that make Under the Dome such an impressive and frustrating book.  On one hand, there is enough time and space here for elaborate plotting, reversals of fortune, copious inner monologues and ample character growth.  When King activates his omniscient narration, it’s like floating above a small town and having direct access to two thousand minds in all their diversity.  On the other hand, that amount of verbiage slows the action down and frequently makes readers wish for the next plot point.  King pulls a bit too obviously on familiar plot threads about religion, serial killers, corrupt authority and civil unrest to avoid a feeling of familiarity throughout much of Under the Dome.

    There is, however, quite a bit of allegory going on under the surface of the text.  It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see the parallels between an isolated and paranoid Chester’s Mill and Bush-administration America.  The division of power between a ruthless sheriff and incompetent politicians has real-world parallels, and much of the popular hysteria cuts a bit too close to headlines of the last decade to be entirely accidental.

    Where Under the Dome doesn’t do so well is in its ultimate justification for the Dome.  It moves the novel from the Horror to the Science Fiction genre.  This is not by itself a bad thing, but it will make a number of more rigorous readers cringe given the thinness of the premise and the somewhat arbitrary way the novel is resolved.

    Still, that ending is preceded by an apocalyptic sequence that leaves few people standing, so it all evens out.  While Under the Dome can occasionally be exasperating, annoying and underwhelming, it’s also a novel that disappoints because it attempts so much: Even if he misses a few targets along the way, King still manages to hit plenty of them.  The result may not have the quasi-mythical heft of The Stand or the tight focus of “The Mist”, but it’s the kind of wide-screen horror/thriller that has become a bit too rare lately.  King being King, it’s also a book written with clean prose, compelling characters and a thicket of plot developments.  It is, in short, a perfect book for those who want to sink into a lengthy reading experience and blink their eyes back to reality a long time later.

    In its own four-pounds fashion, it’s also a powerful advertisement for ebook readers.

  • The New Face of War, Bruce Berkowitz

    The New Face of War, Bruce Berkowitz

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Free Press, 2003, 257 pages, C$41.00 hc, ISBN 0-7432-1249-5

    Released in March 2003, just as Americans were invading Iraq, Bruce Berkowitz’s The New Face of War is already showing a bit of its age.  Seven year later, thanks to two ongoing wars involving the most powerful military force on planet Earth, we’ve seen the new face of war: It’s about IEDs and insurgency and asymmetrical force projection and wireless communication and missile-armed drones.  Then again, age can also mean respectability: How best to evaluate a book dealing with future war than to measure how right it has been years later?

    Perhaps the first thing to do is to ignore the all-encompassing title.  The New Face of War doesn’t present a set of prescriptions and predictions for future warfare as much as it focuses on the changes already imposed by information technology.  It doesn’t get down into the nitty-gritty of what weapons soldiers will be using in the future as much as it charts how military forces have been refining their use of information technology to shorten their decision cycle, read enemy messages, or mount elaborate deceptions.

    For a book dealing rather heavily in abstract strategic concepts of no use to most lay readers, Berkowitz does an impressive job at vulgarizing his subject matter and offering interesting ways to ease into his most esoteric concepts.  In order to explain how information technology is revolutionizing warfare, he starts by drawing an analogy between NASCAR and Formula One, illustrates his point with a lengthy description of the Gulf War’s logistics innovations, touches upon the creation of ARPANET and ends up summarizing his main points about “the new face of war”. [P.75] It takes a special kind of military nerd to jump enthusiastically into a book that draws parallels between the Internet and warfare, but Berkowitz makes it easy with plenty of illuminating links and a helping of wry humour.

    Berkowitz knows his stuff, and the book goes deep in historical examples that are fascinating in their own right.  Perhaps the most interesting parts of The New Face of War are the illustrative digressions taking a quick trip down military history in order to show the evolution of information in warfare.  There’s a fascinating side-note about the development of torpedoes, for instance (including how they relate to The Sound of Music), and a much longer explanation of how accurate positioning systems were developed (from finding a reliable way of determining longitude to the post-Gulf War civilian co-optation of the GPS).

    It probably goes without saying that Berkowitz writes from the paranoid school of military analysis: His view of the world presupposes that America is constantly threatened and that most means are subordinate to the cause of maintaining American superiority.  This can be a bit annoying for foreign readers, or people who don’t have a built-in terrorism persecution complex.  On the other hand, Berkowitz can be reasonable in his analysis: A chapter-long discussion of the ethics of strategic assassination ends up concluding that there is no defensible rationale for it –a far cry from the right-wing pro-torture apologists who seemed to bloom so bloodthirstily during the second half of the Bush administration.

    In evaluating whether The New Face of War had survived the past seven years without losing too much credibility, the conclusion is that the book remains just as interesting and through-provoking now than in 2003.  Events since then have suggested that the information component of warfare remains crucial –US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan vastly out-powered their opponent, but local knowledge allowed insurgents to strike back effectively through very different tactics.  In dealing with a conventionally powerful enemy, insurgents have understood that they must attack in ways designed to take advantage of their strengths and minimize their exposure –a point that Berkowitz explains through the example of terrorist strikes.  Perhaps most striking is what has not happened since the book’s publication.  Berkowitz, despite spending much of his time discussing information warfare, remains sceptical about “cyber-war” and the myth of hackers bringing down modern civilization (or at the very least power plants) through the web –and in fact, there have been no significant incidents of the type since 2003.

    In this light, the years have been kind to Berkowitz’s theses as developed in The New Face of War.  The only disappointment in reading the book is to find out that the author doesn’t seem to have a blog or web site on which we can read about his latest publications.  One wonders what he’s thinking these days…