Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Star Trek (2009)

    Star Trek (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, May 2009) I’m the worst type of Star Trek fan: A lapsed one. While Trek formed a good chunk of my formative Science Fiction viewing, the limitations of the series quickly led me to other things once I started reading more widely in the field. So it is that I had practically no baggage of expectations regarding this younger, hipper reboot of the original series to 2009 standards: They could have produced a musical comedy “with Kirk as an ocelot or something” and I still wouldn’t haven’t blinked. And yet this reboot seems exactly what the doctor ordered for a musty old franchise: Fresh, funny and captivating, the film roars past without too many lengths, yet stays true to a bunch of the original series’ strengths. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, mind you: The whole premise of reuniting all characters is a cheat from the get-go, and it begs for exactly the kind of coincidences, contrivances and clumsy plotting than we get throughout the entire film. The bad science is hideous, the misogyny is unacceptable (Uhura as a toy for the boys?) and the cheats required to bring all the characters together would be unforgivable if the rest of the film wasn’t so much compulsive fun. (Who would have believed a Star Trek film featuring the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage”?) What’s more, this Star Trek made me realize two things: First, that I had forgotten how much fun Kirk, Spock and company could be. Second, that despite my protests, I still had enough of an inner Trekkie to be annoyed at some of the more outlandish deviations from the canon. Spaceships being built on the ground? Vulcan destroyed? Uhura/Spock? Meerp? At least we get the single best-looking Orion Girl in the entire Trek filmography so far. As for the rest, well, I’ve got enough issues with the film to fill a full-hour panel at a convention, and that says far too much about me than I care to reveal: I, apparently, am a lapsed fan no more.

  • Back to the Future (1985)

    Back to the Future (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On DVD, May 2009) Now here’s a film that hasn’t aged a bit in nearly twenty-five (!) years. A snappy, energetic, refreshing blend of comedy with a loose science-fiction premise, Back to the Future exemplifies mid-eighties Hollywood film-making at its finest. The script is a well-oiled machine of setups and payoffs, with just enough cleverness to make it rise above the obviousness of its plotting. Michael J. Fox is the rock around which the rest of the film revolves, but there’s more than enough successful elements elsewhere (from Christopher Lloyd’s madcap Doc Brown to a surprisingly restrained turn by Crispin Glover as George Brown) to tie everything up. Perhaps the most interesting undercurrent through the entire film is the naughtiness of the subtext, not only linking the protagonist to his mother, but the suggestion that “the fifties weren’t as wholesome as you may have been told”. And yet the result remains squeaky-clean for the entire family. Sure, some of the SF elements (like the altering picture) make no sense except in script-logic. Yet the entire things feels solid and admirable even decades later: the “eighties” moments now have a historical charm, and the pacing of the result seems as fresh today than it did back then. Catch the film if you haven’t seen it, and re-watch it if it’s been a while: you may be pleasantly surprised.

  • Next, Michael Crichton

    Next, Michael Crichton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 2006, 431 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-06-087298-4

    It’s fitting that Michael Crichton’s last novel before his death in 2008 would encapsulate so many of the most distinguishing characteristics of his fiction. An alarmist techno-thriller with enough hypocrisy to choke two talking monkeys and a sentient parrot, Next is a polemic more than a novel, and it’s best appreciated with tons of contextual information.

    Intentionally structured in a scattershot fashion, Next reads like a free-form exploration of issues surrounding genetic research. For the first half of the book, readers will struggle to identify a plot thread as unrelated scenes pile up, starring dozens of characters that appear out of nowhere and seem to return to obscurity just as quickly. In interviews about Next, Crichton likens the novel’s various plotlines to DNA, with its genetic material that may or may not be important. It’s as fancy an excuse as one can imagine for a free-form whirlwind of loosely connected vignettes. After all, Crichton is less interested in telling a story than he is at baiting readers.

    For a man whose nonfiction writing career has been spent shouting down new technological development (starting with information technology in 1971’s The Terminal Man), it’s a return to basics more than a late-career affectation. Crichton even makes references to his own Jurassic Park (a novel that has aged far less gracefully than you’d expect with its gratuitous references to then-hot chaos theory) and how the state of genetic research has evolved since then.

    So it is that nearly all of Next‘s characters are either villains or victims: Rich businessmen trying to exploit genetic research for their own personal gain, or poor ordinary folks finding themselves in impossible situations —from a man whose DNA is patented by a commercial entity to another one who’s framed for proclivities blamed on genes. Not all victims are humans, this being a novel with an inordinate fondness for talking animals.

    It all gets ridiculous after only a few pages. Crichton’s accumulation of manufactured outrage gets tiresome and transparent; it doesn’t help that after a dozen novels of contrarian shtick, his methods are more obvious than ever. Everyone with money is evil; anyone with power can be counted upon to do the wrong thing; there are no solutions. This knee-jerk cynicism gets as tiresome as idealist naiveté, but reaches exasperation much, much faster.

    Hypocrisy has always been synonymous with Crichton’s fiction, and Next is no exception: Once the fiction is over, associated notes and interviews bundled with the book go on to reveal that Crichton basically feels optimistic about genetic research… provided that a few laws are passed. Not that you would know that from reading the main text: any optimistic viewpoints are carefully kept away from the plotting, and no solutions are portrayed during the course of the novel: It’s as violent a case of intellectual whiplash as you can get without reading an author’s note that says “I really didn’t mean what you just read.”

    But, hey: Michael Crichton. Hypocrisy and self-contradictions have always served him well. Frankly, it’s not as if he never gets anything right: In the middle of the whole reactionary mess that is Next, one can find this unarguable passage:

    Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. Its practitioners aren’t saints, they’re human beings and they do what human beings do –lie, cheat, steal from one another, sue, hide data, fake data, overstate their own importance and denigrate opposing views unfairly. That’s human nature. It isn’t going to change. [P.62]

    Replace “Science” with “writing a novel” and there aren’t many better epitaphs about Michael Crichton’s novels. I happen to believe that fiction should allow for the possibility of being better than our own natures, but you can chalk this up to a philosophical difference between Crichton and myself. At the very least, I’ll grant one thing —Next may or may not be very good, but it’s as entertaining in its own way as the rest of his fiction.

  • Back to the Future Part III (1990)

    Back to the Future Part III (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On DVD, May 2009) While no disaster, this third entry in the trilogy certainly brings to mind the law of diminishing returns. After the time and reality-hopping of the second film, this entry maroons the characters back in time, overplays many of the same jokes and gives the impression of turning in circles over familiar terrain. There are some wonderful things about this third volume (Mary Steenburgen, obviously), but a lot of it seems overly familiar. One suspects that not everyone will share the same fascination for the Wild West as the filmmakers and the ever-self-referential nature of the gags makes the film of interest chiefly for those who have paid a lot of attention to the first two entries. The linkages with the second part, which was shot at the same time, are more or less successful, although they all come into play fairly cleverly in the film’s extended epilogue. Some of the stuff is fairly clumsy (I was never fond of the whole “Chicken!” subplot), but the final few moments do evoke some of the sense of wonder that was so precious to the end of the first film. All in all, not a bad final chapter, but also a good excuse to end things there.

  • Back to the Future Part II (1989)

    Back to the Future Part II (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On DVD, May 2009) No mere follow-up could recapture the magic of the original, and while this sequel often has moments of interest, it ultimately makes the mistake of hugging its predecessor a bit too closely. The first half takes a welcome trip in the future, even though the situation it develops never completely lives up to the promise left by the last moments of the original film. A more interesting trip through a hellish alternate reality follows, but then the film sticks itself back in familiar territory by going back to the first film. While the concept is promising and rich in irony, the ultimate result seems self-referential to an unhealthy degree: at some point, the film cries out for an escape to someplace new. One thing is sure: this film hasn’t aged nearly as well as the first one. The vision of 2015 may be increasingly ridiculous (a minor sin in a comedy), but a lot of the concepts that seemed challenging or new in 1989 are now part of the assumed background of even unsophisticated SF viewers: Alternate realities are now mainstream, and the circumlocutions of time-travel have been explored many times since then –the various 1955 twists of the film now bring to mind Futurama’s overloaded time-travel storyline. Still, as a piece of self-conscious blockbuster movie-making, Back to the Future II takes a few more chances than strictly necessary and manages to deliver an experience that extends the original. A few good moments complete the film with style.

  • Angels & Demons (2009)

    Angels & Demons (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, May 2009) I really liked Dan Brown’s novel in part because of its preposterous eccentricities. But while Angels & Demons as a film does a few interesting things in smoothing out some of the book’s most ludicrous moments, it also loses a lot of what made the book so fascinating. The first and most significant victim is the book’s mixture of rapid pacing and endless exposition: What seemed so interesting on the page now looks contrived and perfunctory on the screen as the heroes race from a Roman checkpoint to another and keep telling themselves things that they are the only one to know and possibly care about. Tom Hanks is fine as Robert Langdon (while Ayelet Zurer’s legs practically deserve an award of some sort) and the cinematography features about the exact type of images you’d expect from a movie set in the Vatican. Fans of the book will notice that a significant portion of the book has been altered, from removing one set of antagonists entirely to changing the jaw-droopingly overdone parachute climax to something far more palatable. Surprisingly, the film is significantly less religious than the book: The alterations to the plot undermine the book’s anti-science subtext, while Langdon himself is allowed to remain atheist throughout the film without a nagging quasi-miracle to change his mind –a rare luxury in the middle of an American media noosphere that default to deniable theism whenever it can. (Of course, some will argue that protestant-dominated America can allow itself to be less than enthusiastic about promoting the Roman Catholic church.) Thematic considerations aside, it all adds to a bit of a misfire; a sometimes-ponderous thriller that doesn’t embarrass itself, but similarly fails to ignite much interest either. While generally better than the even-more-flawed The Da Vinci Code (Langdon is far more active a protagonist, for instance), Angels & Demons remains a bit dull, a bit long and -worst of all- a bit ordinary. Which certainly wasn’t the case for the novel.

  • Anathem, Neal Stephenson

    Anathem, Neal Stephenson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2008, 937 pages, C$31.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-06-147409-5

    Being a dialogue between a not-entirely-satisfied reader and Neal Stephenson’s Anathem:

    Anathem: Hey, reader. Do you know what I am?

    Reader: (Rolling eyes): Yeah, yeah, you’re Neal Stephenson’s latest brick-sized novel. Obviously, he wasn’t listening when everyone complained about the Baroque Trilogy. Did you know that I still haven’t read those books? When will I find the time to do it?

    Anathem: But you read me! Am I not clever, or what?

    Reader: You were also nominated for a Hugo Award shortly before I got stuck for three days in one of the dullest cities in Canada with nothing to do but read anything close by. So don’t flatter yourself.

    Anathem: I dismiss the rest of the Hugo Shortlist. I’m smarter than all of them combined.

    Reader: A propensity toward glossolalia doesn’t necessarily correlate with genius. The fact that you’re incomprehensible without a made-up dictionary doesn’t make you any smarter than the wicked storytelling of Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book, nor any more engaged than Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, nor any more sarcastically likable than John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale nor more interesting than the truckload of ideas in Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Childen. Try stopping being less full of yourself and we’ll talk on more amiable terms.

    Anathem: But… surely you must be impressed by how I re-invent much of human philosophy and science in barely less than a thousand pages!

    Reader: I hate to break it to you, but it’s been done before. Thousands of students do it every year, and they’re using the real words, not poisoning the information well of its audience with a made-up mythology. I understand that your point is to show off how intelligent you are, but that’s where our conceptions of the novel-as-a-novel may clash: Reinventing philosophy is not something I need from my pleasure reading.

    Anathem: But, but, but! You always say you like fiction that make you think!

    Reader: I also enjoy reading books that don’t send me back to my freshman year manuals in order to do my homework. You’re also ignoring the crucial point: I don’t mind a bit of thinking in addition to my fiction, but I mind when it displaces it. Face it: how much of a story is in your nine-hundred pages? How quickly would a more efficient author been able to tell it with a reasonable amount of detail?

    Anathem: You’re being unfair! I am a beacon of intellectual rigour and ambition in a wasteland of mere entertainment! You’re just indulging in cheap contrarianism for the sake of a querulous review!

    Reader: I’m perpetually guilty of contrarian sarcasm, but it comes from the heart. Look: You’re just too long and convoluted for your own good.

    Anathem: Ah, but admit it; after so long spent living in my world, you’re proud of what you have achieved! You’re feeling better for the effort you’ve spend reading me!

    Reader: So, what, you’re supposed to be my tough-love thousand-page buddy now? Did you see where I shelved Atlas Shrugged in my bookshelves?

    Anathem: (Horrified) Not… the… humor section?

    Reader: Fortunately for you, you’re too much of a stick-in-the-mud to be classified as funny.

    Anathem: But I’m the smartest book you’ve read this year, right?

    Reader: (Exasperated) Yes you are. Now here’s five bucks to go buy yourself a coffee.

    Anathem: (Walking away) Woo-hoo! I’m the “smartest book of the year”!

  • Nano, John Robert Marlow

    Nano, John Robert Marlow

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2004 (2005 reprint), 381 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-34071-2

    This isn’t a very good novel, but I’m sorry to have missed it when it was first released in 2004.

    Regular readers of these reviews have certainly noticed that I’m very lenient when it comes to high-tech thrillers. I’m biased, of course: However bad techno-thrillers verging on SF can be, they’re still speaking my language and engaging me on an level that I can’t find in other genres. The high-tech thriller is all about the technology, and preferably a whole lot of it. It’s a distilled, almost single-minded version of the genre, where two-page digressions about the characteristic of a gadget aren’t just acceptable; they become the reason why the novel exist.

    It doesn’t take a long time to figure out that John Robert Marlow’s Nano is more a piece of nanotechnology evangelism than a conventional work of fiction. Marlow’s biographical profile is a hit-parade of science journalism credentials with a heavy emphasis on nanotech. The foreword is by Chris Phoenix (“Director of Research, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology”) and the main text of the novel is followed by twenty-five pages of technical details. With that packaging, it’s not surprising if the plot of the novel itself ends up being nothing more than a showcase for nano-possibilities.

    The plot certainly isn’t much to brag about: After the public assassination of a billionaire who was on the verge of announcing the results of a major nanotechnology research effort, a (male) scientist and (female) journalist go on the run, chased by mysterious operatives but equipped with the latest nano-gadgets. Various chases and shootouts all lead to an ultimate confrontation between our plucky heroes and hostile elements of the government. If it reads like a movie, it’s not an accident.

    The prose isn’t elegant, the exposition is certainly not gentle and the characters aren’t much more than excuses for as-you-should-know-Bob dialogue. Taken at face value for its ideology, Nano is a clumsy mixture of adolescent libertarianism (“As you should know Bob, we can’t trust the government.”) and juvenile techno-boosterism. (“As you should know, Bob, technology is cool.”) While I’m quite fond of techno-utopianism myself, the political naiveté of the novel becomes an issue, especially when the protagonists gleefully kill dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people on their way to a conclusion where they set themselves up as not-quite-benevolent demigods. Having indulged in my lifetime quota of nerd exceptionalism, my comments regarding the novel’s underlying contempt for the masses would have been harsher if I actually took it seriously.

    Fortunately, it’s hard to consider Nano as a respectable piece of fiction when the action stops so often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Every few pages, there’s room in the chase for a “dialogue” on space colonization, the ineffectiveness of tear gas, or a flashback about a particularly vexing industrial-espionage episode. This is a novel of ideas in ways that would embarrass most professional Science Fiction writers: Marlowe has no shame in going off on tangents, and that does give a certain charm to the whole novel. Reading Nano is a lot like being stuck with a bright sixteen-year-old boy overdosing on Atlas Shrugged: his rants are lively, but there’s a number of rough edges to tolerate until he learns better.

    It’s not as if the novel’s completely unimpeachable on a technical level either: Marlow’s credentials as a journalist aren’t much of a defense against Nano‘s most embarrassing scientific mistakes. While the novel’s packaging swears up and down that everything in the story is true and possible, that’s not quite exact: This is a story where the characters can shoot special bullets that will assemble trees in the middle of the road fast enough to crash following cars… a kind of assembling speed closer to fantasy than SF. It’s always the little details that kill, and so Nano has little time to spare regarding issues of information management between assemblers, heat dissipation or where the raw materials come and go during assembly and disassembly. (In one scene, disassemblers get to work and produce a gulf large enough for the sea to rush in, but there’s never any specification as to where the disassembled stuff actually goes. It’s not called a gray goo scenario for nothing!) Again and again, Nano ignores edge cases or cleanup issues: This gets particularly bad toward the conclusion of the novel, during which a nano-infestation is dealt with an a searing fashion that doesn’t sustain real-world scrutiny: The problem with runaway disassemblers is that you still have a problem even if a few of them survive the solution. Understandably, the nanotech-is-cool fun of the novel doesn’t dwell at length on that issue.

    But as I’ve hinted throughout of the novel, the nature of the book makes it hard to dislike. Compared with alarmist nano-tripe like Michael Crichton’s Prey, Marlow’s Nano is optimistic, fun, brainy and light. It’s throwing ideas at the readers as fast as it can, so why be angry if a chunk of them just don’t make sense? As long as it’s taken with a pallet of salt, it’s a rare example of pro-technology progressive propaganda that acts as a counterpoint to more alarmist novels. I may dismiss it on dramatic, ethical and scientific grounds, but whatever is left is still close enough to my own interests that I can’t help but still give it a mild recommendation.

    Surprisingly, this 2004 novel completely failed to register on my radar until recently. I can almost understand why; despite its strong scientific content, it’s frankly not good enough from a literary standpoint to survive and be discussed in today’s top-tier SF market. In hindsight, I regret not only that I missed the novel at the time, but that it hasn’t been followed by a second Marlow novel yet. Until that happens, Nano remains an intriguing book whose particular strengths do much to compensate for some significant flaws. It’s pretty much the definition of a book for a narrow audience –if you like it, you will like it a lot… and will forgive it many things.

  • Prodigy, Martin James

    Prodigy, Martin James

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Sanctuary, 2002, 315 pages, US$18.95 tpb, ISBN 1-86074-356-0

    The March 2009 release of The Prodigy’s fifth studio album Invaders Must Die rekindled my interest in the band to such a point that I was primed to buy anything about them on sight. The Toronto HMV on Yonge having cannily placed copies of Martin James’ Prodigy on an end rack to promote the band’s recent local concert, I went from “I had no idea this book existed” to “I’m buying this now” in about a second.

    But don’t feel sorry for my impulse purchase: Prodigy manages to fulfill every expectation a fan could have regarding a musical biography. A much-expanded rewrite of a biography first published in 1997, it’s a complete narrative of the band from its early-nineties roots to 2002. It covers nearly every single piece ever produced by the group (some of them still unreleased even today), gives a fair impression of what it would be like to hang out with them and doesn’t shy away from covering the more controversial moments of their history.

    If you’re receptive to rock and techno music yet aren’t already a fan of The Prodigy, I would suggest listening to either The Fat of the Land or their greatest-hits compilation Their Law. Chances are that you too will be hooked by their infectious mixture of energetic rhythm. They bark their vocals over catchy melodies, but they’ve never forgotten their roots in the rave scene: Their music is meant to move you until you drop from blissful exhaustion as the sun comes up. If Martin James does one thing particularly well at the onset of Prodigy, it’s to give us a good idea of the music scene in the early 1990s as Liam Howlett started assembling the foundations of his musical group. James is no mere scribbler with a book contract and access to a good bibliography: As the first few pages of the book make clear, he’s a long-time friend of the band, and his own concert memories often dovetail nicely with The Prodigy’s growing success. The result is a biography with ready access to the band members, almost but not quite veering in hagiography: Prodigy doesn’t shy away from the band’s less glamorous moments, and while it usually presents The Prodigy’s version of events as the correct one, it never forgets to give at least a cursory summary of the opposing arguments.

    It goes without saying that the best way to read Prodigy is to do so with your favorite MP3 player and the best possible assortment of the band’s tracks. I ended up listening to my entire Prodigy catalog a few times as I was making my way through the book, an approach made easy by a single-by-single discussion of the band’s discography as it is assembled. Since the video clips are also discussed, you may as well start looking for the DVD anthology of The Prodigy’s video clips while you’re collecting the complementary material. The various spin-off albums from members of the group (such as Flightcrank, the Dirtchamber Sessions or Liam Prodigy’s “Back to Mine”) can also help in rounding up the remaining references. (As luck had it, my first visit to a used record store after completing the book ended up netting two Prodigy singles and a copy of Flightcrank!)

    One of the best things about the book is how is contextualizes many of the tracks for those who weren’t in the scene at the time. For North-American fans, for instance, it’s hard to understand the political subtext behind Music for the Jilted Generation without understanding the changing nature of the British rave scene due to authoritarian clamp-downs: “Their Law” indeed!

    Weighing in at 120,000 words, this revised and expanded biography leaves little uncovered, although its 2002 publication date is getting more frustrating every year: A lot has happened in the band’s life since then, including the “Baby’s Got a Temper” episode, the mixed reception for Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, a few more side projects, the reunion of the group and the well-received release of Invaders Must Die. The Prodigy is still touring, and their music is still unmistakably as hard-hitting as it’s ever been. If someone’s paying attention over at Sanctuary Books, a third edition of the book would be more than welcome.

  • Bad Luck and Trouble, Lee Child

    Bad Luck and Trouble, Lee Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 2007 (2008 reprint), 512 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-440-24366-3

    Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series turns eleven with this latest tough-guy thriller, and as it enters its troublesome teens, it becomes a series that is starting to ask questions about its own existence. Reacher’s getting old, and the issues that were raised in The Hard Way are getting more and more uncomfortable here. So much so that Reacher’s getting some help this time around.

    It starts as one of Reacher’s friends and ex-colleague is brutally assassinated, thrown off a helicopter over the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Reacher’s in Portland when it happens, but it doesn’t take a long time for a coded signal to make its way to him and bring him to California. That’s when he meets an old friend, Frances Neagley, who informs him of the situation: One member of their old military investigative unit has been killed, and Neagley’s bringing them all back together to figure out what’s going on. As their old team slogan had it, You do not mess with the special investigators.

    For readers used to a lone wolf such as Reacher, the dynamics of a team investigation are almost new: While Reacher’s been part of small teams before (most notably in Without Fail, where Neagley also had a strong supporting role), Bad Luck and Trouble brings him back to the dynamics of his old military unit. They may now be in the private sector, but they still work well together and they all have their own specialties. In some ways, Bad Luck and Trouble is an intriguing follow-up from Reacher’s military days described in The Enemy, while creating some space for another prequel in a similar vein.

    One thing’s for sure: Reacher certainly needs the team this time around. He spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about his slowing reflexes, his increasingly outdated knowledge of the world and even his dwindling financial resources. Incongruously, he also gets a new skill this time around as he abruptly becomes an arithmetic savant just in time to benefit the plotting of this newest adventure. [May 2009: Those new math skills seem to have disappeared in the follow-up Nothing to Lose.]

    Fortunately, it’s not all contrived math tricks on the road to the end of the mystery: Bad Luck and Trouble goes from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, oscillates between weapon-contracting concerns and gambling schemes, features a smashing sequence with a Chrysler 300 sedan and provides a satisfying give-and-take between Reacher and some old friends we didn’t even knew he had. It’s also, significantly, a far more personally-motivated story than usual for the series, and it avoid most of the coincidences that have plagued some of Child’s premises so far.

    As usual, the novel couldn’t be more compelling with its sentence-by-sentence prose and convincing details. Reacher is still a supernaturally effective investigator, and his skills for tactical thinking are still as mesmerizing as they ever were in previous installments. This volume’s standout action scene takes place on a deserted Las Vegas sidewalk near a casino construction site, as Reacher and friends take on a would-be assassin with maximum prejudice. It’s a beautifully choreographed sequence, taking place in bullet-time as Reacher’s brain races to out-think his opponents and trust his colleagues to do the same.

    After eleven installments, it’s almost normal to find out that the series is having growing pains: Child must be itching for a chance to try something new (if he hasn’t done so already, knowing his history of multiple aliases), and it’s not unreasonable to wonder if Reacher’s musings about his own limitations don’t reflect some of the author’s growing doubts about his character.

    But even if his doubts are growing, the thrills are still up to expectations. A look at Child’s bibliography to date suggests that there are still two more Reacher adventures to go (the thirteenth, Gone Tomorrow, was published this month). While the series may be weakening, it’s still running at a level that would intimidate most other thriller writers. With a track record like that, there’s no rush in replacing Reacher.

  • State of Fear, Michael Crichton

    State of Fear, Michael Crichton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 2004, 603 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 0-06-621413-0

    Few novels ever achieve the kind of over-the-top notoriety that Michael Crichton’s State of Fear immediately earned upon publication. Released during a crucial election year, it immediately became infamous for dismissing global climate change and environmentalism. Crichton got a warm reception from the Bush administration and associated right-wing groups, earned a critical trashing from most of the scientific community, and shot to the top of the best-selling lists.

    That, right there, tells you all you need to know about Crichton’s marketing instincts. This isn’t the first of his novel to tackle an issue from a contrarian perspective: Rising Sun (1990) could be seen as xenophobic race-baiting about the influence of Japanese interest over American business, while Disclosure (1994) was recognizably a reaction to the then-heated discussions around workplace sexual harassment. Even as far back as 1975’s The Great Train Robbery (which began with a foreword warning against the idea that all criminals are stupid), Crichton has been an admirably canny writer with a good instinct for themes that would promote themselves by ruffling established sensibilities. State of Fear may have been the least subtle manifestation of those instincts, but it’s hardly an exception in his bibliography.

    What is most unusual, though, is the extent at which it fails at being more than a controversy. Rising Sun may have raised the hackles of non-reactionary readers, but it remains a terrific mile-a-minute thriller. The same goes for most of Crichton’s fascinatingly uneven bibliography: his willingness to deliver thrills and chills could usually overcome and compensate for his hypocritical trolling. State of Fear, alas, lets the controversy take center-stage, with the sad result that even the narrative is undermined.

    You don’t need to know much more about State of Fear‘s plot than the following: It’s basically a “young man learns better” plot in which likable lad Peter Evans learns that global warming is a sham, science is corrupted and environmentalism is a religion. The novel is a series of lectures, one-sided discussions, myth-busting and overdone action set-pieces during which Evans gradually comes to accept the truth.

    In short, it’s more than six hundred pages of on-the-nose didactics, complete with in-text graphs, footnotes and no less than forty pages of appendices, sources and bibliographical references. All of it meticulously chosen, twisted and forced in service of Crichton’s rabble-rousing thesis. As with so many works in which the Holy Truth is gradually revealed to the innocent, the dramatic structure of the so-called fiction is thin. Here, every environmentalist is revealed to be a dupe or a mustache-twirling villain: Hollywood tree-huggers are unmasked not only as idiots, but female-molesting egomaniacs whose limousine lifestyles are dramatically at odds with their stated ideals. Other environmentalists are either bloodthirsty terrorists or greedy hustlers living large on donations to their movement. They gleefully kill people using esoteric means and plan global catastrophe for their own purposes. It’s as ridiculous as it’s unconvincing, and it’s a good thing that the polemic aspect of the novel is there to distract from the pulpish plotting.

    Crichton has always been a complex personality, equally admirable for his polymath skills and frustrating for his hypocritical ramblings. He railed against information technology in The Terminal Man in 1972, yet created a computer game in 1984 and won a technical Academy Award in 1994 “for pioneering computerized motion picture budgeting and scheduling.” Few other science-savvy writers have so consciously written to blatantly reactionary purposes, their fiction running against everything else in their backgrounds.

    State of Fear is not a bad example of his contradictions: It seems ruthlessly well-informed, and starts from ideas that any intelligent reader would consider to be reasonable: Science is corruptible, environmentalism has become a dogma, and it’s important to study the evidence before coming to an informed judgment. (The title of the novel refers to the somewhat accurate assessment that our society is being manipulated for material gain to go from one unthinking fear to another by the media, politicians and activist groups. Although what this has to do with Crichton’s own novels is a delicious irony best savored at length.) But from those self-obvious premises, Crichton hammers his way to an outlandish set of conclusions that ignore the vast wealth of information available on the issue of climate change and environmentalism. State of Fear is fascinating for Crichton-watchers, but it’s not convincing in the slightest when comes the moment to promote its agenda. It makes a great case of Crichton as an entertaining iconoclast, but not so much as a fact-finding truth-teller, or even a professional storyteller.

    It also sets the stage for Next, a similarly alarmist novel about the “dangers” of genetic manipulation that went from obvious premises to ludicrous conclusions. But let’s hand it to Crichton: this is a guy who, from the early seventies to the late aughties, was able to remain almost continuously in the spotlight with a variety of button-pushing ideological positions and media incarnations. He designed computer games, directed movies, wrote novels and became a celebrity in his own right. While most novels of 2004 have already faded in obscurity five years later, State of Fear remains interesting even if it falls apart as a work of dramatic suspense. Frankly, I’m going to miss having Crichton around to plot his next coup d’éclat.

  • Earthdoom!, David Langford & John Grant

    Earthdoom!, David Langford & John Grant

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    BeWrite, 1987 (2003 reprint), 283 pages, C$24.26 tpb, ISBN 1-904492-11-8

    I don’t usually recommend books because they’re awful, but I’ll make an exception for David Langford and John Grant’s Earthdoom! for one good reason: It’s intentionally, skilfully, almost masterfully awful. It’s a parody of the type of bottom-basement catastrophe Science Fiction novels that are published with monotonous regularity whenever there’s a paying audience for that kind of stuff.

    Earthdoom! has its roots in the boom of disasters SF novels that populated much of the British mid-list during the seventies and eighties. Not that the formula has entirely disappeared… Even unseasoned readers with a general education in the field will be able to distinguish the familiar dramatic arc as it emerges: The portents of doom, the various incidents leading up to the catastrophe, the wide-screen scenes of death and destruction, and then the efforts of the plucky survivors to survive and prevent something even worse from happening.

    Here, it’s not one catastrophe than threatens the Earth but half a dozen of them ranging from the serious to the ridiculous. It’s one thing to suppose comet strikes and an accidental nuclear detonation in the London underground; it’s quite another to feature Hitler’s clones, the Antichrist, invading aliens and the Loch Ness Monster. Not that the heroes are any less ridiculous, in-between oversexed astronauts, clumsy psychics and lovelorn mathematicians. No cliché does unturned, no character has less than a master’s degree of exotic expertise and and no female character is (repeatedly) described as being less than beautiful.

    But people who know David Langford and John Grant may already be familiar with the whole approach. Earthdoom! is in many ways a companion volume to Guts!, their subsequent effort to parody horror novels in most of their repugnant permutations. So it is that we get a large cast of deliciously stereotyped characters, countless vignettes of destruction, dozens of unfolding subplots, intricate wordplay and a sense of fun that can’t be overstated.

    Trying to summarize the jokes is useless: They span techniques from conceptual set-pieces to knock-knock jokes. Like many full-length comic novels, Earthdoom! is best read in small doses in order not to rush through every page’s minefield of jokes. Like other spoofs, it’s heavy on snark and is probably best appreciated with a good knowledge of the subgenre being mocked. Finally, don’t form lasting attachments to any of the characters, as few of them can expect to survive, much less be ennobled as protagonists/victims in a disaster novel.

    It has survived the decades since its original publication better than you’d expect: If a number of references don’t make much sense any more (and that’s even accounting for the possibility of a slight re-write to accommodate the 2003 edition of the book), the musty charm of the whole is starting to look like a reflection of another generation. North-American readers are likely to have a tougher time puzzling the localized British references than dealing with the dated feel of the story.

    The first edition being long out-of-print, Earthdoom! is now available almost exclusively online from a publisher whose books feel a lot like print-on-demand products. The result looks a bit cheap (and the interior design could certainly be more readable), but the content is worth a look, especially for those who are already fans of David Langford’s brand of dry humor. Earthdoom! is a must-read for those growing numbers of Langford completists: Not only are you unlikely to read a better spoof of catastrophe SF novels, chances are that you’ll be unwilling to do so.

  • State of Play (2009)

    State of Play (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2009) It has been a long time since the last solid thriller to focus of the world of journalism, and this one acquits itself fairly decently. Russell Crowe is compelling as the crusty veteran that anchors the picture, although more could have been done to resolve the old-paper/new-blog dynamics between him and Rachel McAdams. Handled with competent care, the picture manages to wrestle a complex story that touches upon a number of sizzling contemporary issues. This being said, the picture twists one time too far: While the last plot curve-ball strengthens the lead character’s ethical dilemma about his definition of good journalism, it undermines a lot of the picture’s solid thematic material against private military contracting. But that’s a small last-minute complaint about a thriller that’s quite a bit better than most: There’s a lot going at this intersection between politics, business, romance and truth-seeking, and it’s to the filmmakers’ credit that the result remains intelligible throughout. There’s a refreshing contemporary feel to the picture’s musings about journalism at a time where the very fundamentals of the profession are being questioned from all angles. With a bit of luck, this may become a time capsule of the times, like so many of the seventies’ most competent thrillers.

  • The Boys on the Bus, Timothy Crouse

    The Boys on the Bus, Timothy Crouse

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House, 1973 (2003 reprint), 383 pages, C$20.00 tpb, ISBN 978-0-8129-6820-0

    My ongoing Hunter S. Thompson reading project is taking me to some fascinating places. Take, for instance, Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus, a book-length study of the media during the 1972 elections: I probably never would have been tempted to read it if it wasn’t for its association with Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.

    It’s not a thin connection either: Hired by Rolling Stone magazine to, essentially, baby-sit and post bail for their star writer Thompson, Crouse not only played the straight man to his colleague’s impressionistic wildness, but also spent his time studying the press corps surrounding them. An article on the media snowballed into a full-length narrative and then on to an enduring classic that, like Thompson’s book on the campaign, remains just as readable and worthwhile today than when it was published.

    Maybe even more worthwhile, even. Yes, political journalism has changed completely since 1972. The twin revolutions of cable-driven electronic news-gathering, and then the recent always-on pressure of the political blogosphere, have altered the field in ways that would have been unimaginable back then: One of the book’s first pleasures is in seeing the mechanics of reporting back then, with journalists depending on land-lines to report back to their papers, and the laborious process of (literally) cutting a TV spot every day to cover the campaign. Reading The Boys on the Bus, it’s not hard to imagine the all-male, all-WASP atmosphere of journalism in the early seventies, and to understand why alcohol played such an important part in their lives.

    Crouse notably uses his book to profile some of the foremost political journalists of the time, most of whom are only passing footnotes today. This is one book meant to be read with access to Wikipedia, if only to get a quick summary of what later happened to the careers of the various personalities mentioned along the way. Some profiles take up nearly a dozen pages. Hunter S. Thompson himself is described during the latter half of the book, although the profile has as much to do with the rest of the press corps’ reaction to Thompson than Thompson himself. (Through those reactions, though, Crouse highlights one crucial distinction between Thompson and the others: The Rolling Stone journalist was writing for a specific audience and could dispense with the balanced approach that big-outlet writers had to use. A number of mainstream journalists envied Thompson’s freedom, but Thompson was not exactly playing by the same rules as they were.)

    There are a number of highlights to The Boys on the Bus, but perhaps one of the most haunting ones are the two chapters dealing with the White House press corps which, at the time of the 1972 elections, had to contend with a Republican candidate who was barely campaigning and whose approach to the press was contentious at best. Where that chapter hits home is in comparison with the Bush-era press corps, which scarcely did any better than the cowered journalists that covered the Nixon administration. A number of White House official tactics described in the book are suspiciously similar to what occured during the Bush administration, and there is no comfort in reading Crouse’s explanation of why even the best reporters are neutered when they accept the White House beat: at the utter mercy of the President’s staff, they can’t do any serious journalism that would jeopardize this level of access for their organization. (In one of the bitterest ironies of the entire book, Crouse explains how and why the entire Watergate business was initially uncovered by crime beat reporters, with practically no input from political journalists.)

    That’s only one of the many aspects of the book that remain curiously relevant today, cell phones and digital cameras and Twitter updates aside. I’m sure that the excruciating toll of the campaigns on the press corp is just as awful today as it was in 1972, and that many of the pressures that Crouse describes haven’t gone away in the slightest. Some of The Boys on the Bus has the same startling conclusions than the often-merciless dissections of journalism practiced by some of the most insightful political blogs. The description of “pack journalism” (how journalists never go wrong by saying the same thing as the rest of their colleagues) is still as accurate now than then. Nothing ever changes, really.

    This being said, I’m not sure that the 1972 campaign -coming on the heels of the carefree sixties- has ever been equaled in matters of debauchery. If there’s a movie to be made about The Boys on the Bus, the screenwriters may want to begin with the lighter passages dealing with “The Zoo Plane”, the nickname of the aircraft carrying the technicians, backups, minor-outlet journalists or outcasts following the campaign: Hanky-panky at 30,000 feet (“The fourth [stewardess] had a thing for Secret Service men and entertained no less that eighteen of them before the campaign ended. [P.351]”), hotel key collections and prodigious amount of drugs and booze. The intensity of the campaign coverage is described just as well as the let-down once the last flight has returned to Washington and the reporters, now a band of brothers having been tested for months by an exhausting odyssey, part ways for the last time.

    The sober truth, more accepted now than in 1972 but not by much, is that the sober just-the-facts reports we read are in fact written by fallible humans taking notes in the middle of a hurricane of events. Crouse is not unsympathetic to them, and the failings he identifies are so systemic that they can be perceived even today. Politicians and journalists come and go, but there’s a sense that the game remains the same. The Boys on the Bus, manages to capture that truth so well that it has sailed through the years with few wrinkles. No wonder if I had fun reading for pleasure a book that is still on the syllabus of journalism courses today.

  • Captain Mike Across America aka Slacker Uprising (2007)

    Captain Mike Across America aka Slacker Uprising (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, April 2009) This weakest Michael Moore film yet has little of the wit or ferociousness of his other polemics: It’s not much more than a low-budget video chronicle of his 2004 efforts to motivate college students to vote against Bush. The effort failed, obviously, which takes away from the effort from the get-go. Moore can either be annoying or inspiring, and the limited material quickly wears thin. From time to time (such as when Moore deals with hecklers), the film picks up a bit; otherwise, it’s insipid partisan propaganda even to those who are basically in agreement with Moore’s policies. It doesn’t help that Moore is often his own worst advocate –and by making himself the focus of his own movie, well, he grates early and often. Obviously, this film (freely released as a download on the eve of the 2008 election) aimed to convince another political mini-generation that Obama was worth fighting for. But in retrospect, a more interesting piece may have been to compare 2004 activism versus what happened four years alter –with the added sweet bonus of Obama’s victory at the end of the narrative.