Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Alpha Centauri, William Barton and Michael Capobianco

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon/EOS, 1997 (1998 reprint), 438 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-380-78205-7

    Science-Fiction used to be devoid of sex. Aimed at a teen market and conscious that any risqué content could provoke a backlash from parental authorities, magazine SF was kept suggestive, but mostly clean. While often ludicrous, this wholesome spirit helped the genre mature intellectually, a lot like the teens who were reading the magazines.

    Things changed in the sixties, with new authors and new markets. For the first time, SF was a genre that could be sold in books, and with this new readership (well, often the same readership, but now older) came the freedom to experiment with new things. Including sex.

    The so-called “New Wave” not only brought a new writing style to SF, but also added a sexual dimension to characters, who could now consume their lust after triumphing from impossible odds. A few writers never caught on; some succeeded brilliantly.

    And so SF evolved.

    Or devolved, according to some. The plain good old wholesome field of SF was now awash in sexual perversions and evil thoughts. The old stuff was clean, PG-rated and completely safe for children. The new stuff was decidedly different.

    Today, things are more balanced: While the newness of perversion has worn off, characters haven’t gone back to their eunuch selves. SF is now comparable to mainstream literature (and considerably tamer than romance!) in terms of sexual content. But there are occasionally a few novels that bring back all the excesses of the sixties, making readers and reviewers question the appropriateness of SF’s sexual revolution.

    Alpha Centauri manages to ruin a potent Science-Fiction novel with incessant sex… and that takes some (misguided) talent. What could have initially been a reasonably good and original novel about humans exploring Alpha Centauri is now peppered with thoroughly unpleasant sexual issues.

    Now, your reviewer isn’t a stranger to porn, but only the sickest wacko could find arousing material in Alpha Centauri. One character is of both sexes, and he’s the healthiest psyche aboard. Another has been ritually abused by her own family as a child. Another is psychologically programmed to have sex with every crewmember in order to infect them with a sterility-inducing virus. Another is insanely jealous. Another has affective disorders. Quite a bunch of dysfunctional astronauts for a single mission.

    All of which, still, could have been handled in a mature fashion. But not with Barton and Capobianco: At almost every single page, the sexual dimension of the story is brought up. Again. Again. Again, until the frustrated reader can’t do anything but scream out “Enough, already!” Every single character in Alpha Centauri is obsessed with sex, and most of this obsession is definitely not healthy, enjoyable or even necessary. Sex is pain. Sex is anguish. Sex is death. Sex is everywhere.

    Yes, there’s another story in Alpha Centauri, about a bunch of human discovering a fallen extraterrestrial civilization on Alpha Centauri, and them using hyper-advanced technology to reconstruct images of them, but you have to wade though pages of unpleasantness to discover it. And when you do, it’s only to find out that the aliens are at least as seriously screwed up -in, yes, a sexual sense- as the humans of the story.

    In the end, Alpha Centauri isn’t completely worthless, for it teaches an interesting insight in the workings of SF. If sex remained taboo for so long, and isn’t that important even today, it’s not because SF-fans were immature, because sex is immoral or because editors were prudes: It’s because sex bogs down a story and teaches nothing new. It hinders SF’s natural strengths and annoys the reader.

    Got that, author-boys?

  • Biohazard: The Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World, Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House, 1999, 319 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-375-50231-9

    It’s one thing to read a thriller about a mad bio-terrorist planning an attack on a major American city. It’s entirely another to read an autobiography by someone whose job was to do such things.

    Ken Alibek -born Kanatjan Alibekov- was born in Kazakhstan in 1950 and joined Biopreparat (a pseudo-pharmaceutical soviet company that was really the USSR’s biological weapon program) in 1975. He quickly ascended the echelons of the program, developing strains of smallpox, anthrax and other tasty treats. He became Biopreparat’s deputy director in 1988. His dissatisfaction with the aims of bio-weaponry and with the state of things in a post-cold-war Russia lead to his defection to the United States in 1992. Biohazard is his autobiography, and it makes for fascinating reading.

    Biological warfare is a type of weapon that no self-respecting nation should contemplate using. Indeed, a treaty banning their usage was signed in 1972. Convinced that the United States was using the Treaty as cover to hide their operations, the USSR immediately strengthened Biopreparat—thus bringing Alibek in their program. In the 1990s, however, several Russians became convinced that there was no such thing as an American bio-warfare program. Alibek even describes an inspection visit in December 1991, where his group of top-notch bio-warfare experts failed to detect any sign of American bio-weapons.

    The collapse of the USSR has been remarkable in that it has allowed a flood of hitherto top-secret information to reach civilian ears. Most of what is told in Biohazard is so unprecedented that it would have been heavily protected by intelligence agencies not even ten years ago. Alibek’s picture of Soviet bio-weapon programs is so complete that the reader doesn’t once doubt the authenticity of his subject.

    And what a subject it is: The USSR had perfected the bulk manufacturing of diseases, calmly packaging them in “delivery vectors” in a decidedly industrial fashion. Far gone were the old-style witches’ brew: what replaced it was a diabolically efficient wholesale process of disease manufacturing. KGB agents across the world were collecting strange diseases, sending them to Biopreparat, which isolated the strain and found out how to mass-replicate it. Workers infected by disease ran the risk of seeing their remains being ghoulishly exploited for a stronger strain of the disease. [P-126-133]

    Reading Alibek is an experience that goes beyond simple scientific or military relevance, for his narrative is the closest that one can approach to the mindset of the “mad scientist” of so many bad novels. Alibek, “the inventor of the world’s most powerful anthrax”, calmly describes the process in which he was an integral part. He’s inordinately proud of his accomplishment; he may not agree with the end result, but it was a job well done. He was following orders… and we know where that might have led.

    Still, despite a rather unusual subject matter and narrator, Biohazard has its flaws. The structure isn’t coherent, jumping all over Alibek’s history. The ghostwriter’s style is competent but pedestrian, contenting itself with basic journalistic prose without embellishments. Fortunately, a good index completes the book.

    Still, for fans of Douglas Preston’s The Cobra Event, for cold war buffs, for bio-warfare doomsayers, for readers interested in a bit of real-life thrills, Biohazard delivers on its promise. Just remember: It’s not fiction. Alibek’s neat little plagues still exist.

  • Heart of the Comet, Gregory Benford and David Brin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1986, 468 pages, C$21.95 hc, ISBN 0-553-05125-3

    The passage of Halley Comet in 1986 was, to the layman, almost the definition of a non-event: It passed too far away from Earthy to be easily visible to the naked eye and all the media build-up was reduced to naught. (Fortunately, ten years later, the spectacular Hyakutake comet proved to be far more spectacular, satisfying all of us “once-in-a-lifetime” astronomical freaks.) Still, Halley provided a reasonably good excuse to vulgarize information about some of the solar system’s most fascinating subject.

    In 1985-1986 -probably envisioning a truckload of media-derived money- hard-SF authors David Brin and Gregory Benford collaborated on a themed novel titled Heart of the Comet. Even though the result didn’t set the world of SF on fire, it still proves to be a reasonable read even more than a decade later.

    The novel follows three characters as they embark upon a massive expedition on Halley. Far from being a joy-ride, this scientific mission aims to stay on Halley for a complete 76-years orbit. The story begins in 2061 as the hundreds of scientists, engineers and other personnel attached to the Halley mission board the comet and burrow inside in an effort to make themselves at home. Everything seems to be working for a while, until the colony faces the first of the innumerable dangers of the voyage…

    The scope of Heart of the Comet is large enough to satisfy most readers, spanning more than fifty years and the whole solar system. The novel plays with most of Science-Fiction’s usual devices, from space exploration (naturally) to artificial intelligence, body modification, longevity, etc… It’s a Big SF Book, and nearly succeeds as such.

    Given the academic pedigree of both co-authors, it’s no surprise to find out that the science of Heart of the Comet is reasonably exact, or convincingly faked. No faster-than-light gizmos, but plenty of paragraphs of we-did-our-research information on comets. A few welcome diagrams and plans punctuate the book, providing occasionally very helpful ancillary material.

    Unfortunately, the book proves to be less successful outside the realm of straight scientific knowledge: Several annoying SF clichés are used without apology, and the result diminishes the impact of the book. The most egregious is the character of Saul Bellows, who proves to be not only a scientist on the order of Newton and Einstein combined, but also the co-father of genetically-enhanced human group and an immortal. (!) Though it’s certainly handy to have someone like this around, it strains credulity to use such a character as a universal solution. The treatment of the AI is also weak, bringing little of importance to the plot besides a happy (deus-ex-machina, literally) ending. There’s yet-another-war-between-humans-and-superhuman. The oh-so-bad “irrational” religious sects also make a wholly expected appearance. You gnash your teeth in frustration at a the characters’ blockheadedness.

    But if it’s a comet SF story you want, then this is what Heart of the Comet delivers. A decently enjoyable mix of hard-SF and gritty adventure. You could do worse than pick up this book. At nearly 500 pages, chances are that it’ll last until your next peek at a comet.

  • Three Kings (1999)

    Three Kings (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, October 1999) An uneven but mostly good-to-great film about the Gulf War and its aftermath. George Clooney is as solid as in his previous films and Mark Wahlberg continues to turn in decent performances. Director Russell makes a few disputable choices (his usage of a grainy Ecktachrome film stock wasn’t a good idea; the film will look better on TV) and can’t manage a consistent tone from one scene to another, but these are mild concerns compared to the guts of making an unflinching film about recent American failings. Some scenes are very very good, though one would almost wish for the black comedy of the film to be carried through all of it, not only the first hour.

  • Et Tu, Babe, Mark Leyner

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harmony, 1992, 168 pages, C$21.50 hc, ISBN 0-517-58335-6

    On the reviewing slate today: Funny weird stuff from 1992.

    Captain Jack Zodiac begins as Cliff Koussevisky wakes up in the morning. His daughter is still missing, lost in the mall as a disembodied ghostly presence. His son is a space cadet. One of his neighbor battles a carnivorous lawn. Another neighbor has become an invincible superhero. Cliff wants to marry Marsha, but Marsha’s Jewish mother objects, and ever though she’s dead, her ghost can still wreak havoc on an ordinary household. The runaway hyper-inflation has everyone paying millions for engagement rings. The Russians start World War III. The traffic is literal murder. And as if that wasn’t enough, there’s a garbage strike.

    Et Tu, Babe‘s premise is most neatly stated on the book’s dust jacket: “In 1990, following the publication of his extraordinary first novel… Mark Leyner was hailed by [numerous magazines] as ‘the cult author of the 1990s.’ Tragically for Leyner, the acclaim and publicity were too much for the young author, irreparably loosening his grip on reality.” The book is a portrait of the author-as-mega-pop-star, presenting a larger-than-life portrait of Mark Leyner, über-macho-icon. He’s got tattoos on his internal organs, holds writing workshops to exterminate potential rivals, performs his own appendicectomy and gets high on a whiff of Abraham Lincoln’s morning breath.

    As I said, weird stuff. From 1992.

    Captain Jack Zodiac is the first book I’ve read from Kandel, but if it’s any indication, it certainly won’t be the last. It’s preciously rare to find something as perversely funny as a book like this, so consider this review as an exhortation to track down this book. If nothing else, you’ll meet Bob Petruzzo, whose lawn is about to take its revenge for years of torture.

    It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense at first. Multiple threads are introduced, and one begins to wonder if they’re even taking place in the same universe. But as the book advances, things cohere and the nice thing about Captain Jack Zodiac is that it is coherent without having to make sense. When the ending arrives -kind of THE MATRIX as written by Douglas Adams,- it feels as if it’s too soon, that things were just getting started! Progressing steadily from suburban satire to metaphysical trip, this novel shouldn’t be missed.

    Most of the same comments also hold true for Mark Lerner’s Et Tu, Babe, though Leyner’s humour is far more risqué than Michael Kandel. Leyner’s alter-ego thinks of himself as the epitome of maleness and his obsession tends to run into narcissistic bodybuilding quasi-erotica. Digressions in self-performed appendicectomy and visceral tattoos are also prone to annoy certain weak-stomached readers. But otherwise, Et Tu, Babe is a wonderfully megalomaniac work, just sufficiently warped enough to avoid upsetting the inferior reader with the thunder of his greatness.

    The style is crunchily macho, with Leyner killing most of the rock-star-eccentricities clichés by one-upping them once more. The variety of styles and approaches to the material (pseudo-interviews, news-segment transcriptions, fiction excerpts, etc…) keeps the humor fresh and unexpected. It’s often a laugh-aloud riot. A common failing of most humor writing is the tendency to run too long after the punchline, but here one fells almost disappointed that Et Tu, Babe doesn’t run even longer. What will it take to bring back Mark Leyner?

  • Shallow Grave (1994)

    Shallow Grave (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1999) This manages to be a good film despite a couple of Stupid Screenwriting Mistakes (eg; not turning in the corpse, not disposing of the body more efficiently, not splitting up the loot, not transferring the content of the briefcase), mostly due to effective direction, good acting and adequate pacing. Ewan MacGregor has a good role. Suspicious psychology, but it works. Shallow Grave attains a level of competence that should be the norm for the genre.

  • Scream (1996)

    Scream (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1999) Not quite the ultimate horror-movie post-modern deconstruction I had been led to believe, but it works relatively well as a psycho movie, and does contain a few precious lines (“It’s the millennium; motives are irrelevant.”) Unfortunately, writer Williamson falls in love with his own wit (which isn’t all that witty) and the film does have a few looong stretches and unexplainable events. (Witness the amazingly contrived reaction of the students upon learning what happened to the principal) As demonstrated in his latter The Faculty, Williamson doesn’t allow audiences to play fair, mostly because otherwise his tricks are too transparent: in the case of Scream, the fair part of the whodunit is too easy to guess, so he throws some kind of where-did-that-come-from twist. Neve Campbell contributes significantly to the film’s sex-appeal factor. Worth seeing—if only for the copycat impact it had on the subgenre.

  • Runaway Bride (1999)

    Runaway Bride (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, October 1999) This shows how difficult it is to talk about a competent romantic comedy. Yes, Richard Gere and Julia Roberts make a beautiful couple. Yes, the script follows the boy-hates-girl, boy-likes-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-marries-girl scenario. Yes, the romance and the laughs are there. Beyond that… not much to add. A pleasant, but otherwise empty film. Not that you’d feel cheated.

  • The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

    The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1999) In retrospect, it’s easy to see why this film has become the cult classic film of all cult classic films. Despite the (intentionally?) awful dialogue and overall silliness, the film manages to be weirdly appealing. “The Time Warp” is still a great dance track. Tim Curry makes a strong impression despite running around in drag for most of his screen-time. Who would have thought that Susan Sarandon would win an Oscar twenty years after first starring in this film? No way to ignore it, The Rocky Horror Picture Show remains delightfully weird and packs in more than curio value: a must-see.

  • The Nutty Professor (1996)

    The Nutty Professor (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1999) There is a bit more to this film than fat jokes and juvenile gross-out humour, but not that much more. Some of the screenwriting is so obvious that it’s painful. The romance between the two leads isn’t exactly believable. On the other hand, there are a few cute visual gags (the hamster invasion, the Fatzilla dream sequence) and the remainder of the film flows relatively well. Not worth bothering yourself, but a good past-time if ever it plays on TV while you’re washing dishes.

  • Notting Hill (1999)

    Notting Hill (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, October 1999) The manufactured product of some people who obviously know what they’re doing. The radiant Julia Roberts is as comfortable in her screen personae as floppy-haired Hugh Grant is in his character. (Even though his infamous blinking-eye tic nearly destroys one of the film’s most dramatic scene) The script is carefully crafted to elicit the desired emotions from the viewers. The comedy is introduced, however unsubtly, at the appropriate moment. The English locale is exploited with maximum colourfulness. There’s even a nice element of fantasy as the female actress protagonist wins an Oscar for her role in a science-fiction film. (!) The result is as pleasant as the filmmakers intended.

  • Fight Club (1999)

    Fight Club (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, October 1999) So what is this film? It’s an insanely dense, non-stop cinematographic delight. It’s a mesmerizing big-budget social satire about consumerism. It’s a triumph for director David Fincher and actors Brad Pitt and Ed Norton. It’s more than the Gen-X equivalent to American Beauty; it’s a declaration of war between Gen-X and the Baby-Boomers. It’s a raucously funny, intensely cool film. It’s a multi-level script rife with quotable material. It’s aimed straight at young single males. It’s a wonderful soundtrack. It’s something that stays in your mind for a while. It’s something to be talked about. It’s easily one of the best films of 1999. It’s a must-see.

  • Trouble and her Friends, Melissa Scott

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1994, 379 pages, C$31.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-85733-0

    Has it already been five years since the end of cyberpunk? Even though only half a decade passed between the release of Trouble and her Friends and me reading it, this novel seems much more dated than even works from the eighties.

    The plot is unmistakably cyberpunk as we know it: A hacker retires after the adoption of some stringent anti-hacking laws, leaving her lover as easily as she leaves her old job. A few years later, another hacker steals her name (“Trouble”) and attracts unhealthy attention from authorities, who think it’s the old Trouble who’s doing the jobs. Now Trouble must ally herself with her old lover in order to catch the hacker who stole her name…

    Beyond the “closing off the wild west” atmosphere, there’s not much new or innovative here. (Any SF novel blurb beginning triumphantly by “In less than a hundred years from now” is hopelessly naive) Compounding the problem of staleness is that Scott is content with recycling the cyberpunk clichés without modification. Of course, the weather is screwed up. Of course, cyberspace is a three-dimensional virtual area filled with colorful shapes. Of course the best hackers plug themselves in the matrix with a direct neural interface. Of course, the big corporations are evil and scheme against governments. Or course… Trouble and her Friends has fewer relevance to the real-world than to the cyberpunk universe first defined by Gibson and his acolytes. Unfortunately, most readers have been there before to see the same things.

    No doubt that fans of the book will herald Scott’s usage of lesbian protagonists as “fresh and innovative”, but is it, really? Sexual definition was a staple of cyberpunk (with the real/online identity dichotomy) well before Trouble and her Friends. And the original cyberpunks had at least more subtlety than to underline their characters with heavy-handed “Boo-hoo, we’re gays and everyone hates us” gloom. (Missing the point that in cyberpunk novels everyone hates each other.)

    Scott also mixes feminism in her ideological viewpoint… which would have been fine if she hadn’t also underlined the idea with big honking “SEXUAL DISCRIMINATION!” authorial messages everywhere in the text. Generally, I find progressive messages more efficient when presented in a matter-of-fact fashion, not the strident “We’re persecuted! You’re Nazis!” wailing tone of Trouble and her Friends. Scott tries to have it both ways by presenting a far-away future with yesterday’s prejudices.

    Said far-away (late twenty-first century) future become even more ridiculous when the technologies used are already so primitive compared to what we’re anticipating for the next decade. Obviously, Scott is more interested in relationship issues than coherent extrapolation.

    Which would have actually been fine if it hadn’t dragged down the narrative by at least two hundred extra pages. For its length, not a lot happens in Trouble and her Friends. It takes a long time for the novel to get moving, and sagacious readers will find themselves skimming over the reams of monotonous prose that’s simply not worth the trouble: Scott ain’t Gibson and this is a wannabee net-novel with your grandma’s writing style on Prozac.

    Still, even despite the unsubtle sexual politics, dated future, unoriginal extrapolation and stuffy prose, Trouble and her Friends isn’t all that bad. Readers of the genre will recognize the place: Kind of a lesbian SF Harlequin. With appropriate skimming, a fun read for a rainy Saturday afternoon.

  • Bloom, Wil McCarthy

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 1998, 310 pages, C$24.00 hc, ISBN 0-345-40857-8

    Many Science Fiction authors are said to be heir to the grandmasters of the field. People are constantly trying to find “the Next Heinlein”, with the mantle passing from author to author, stopping by such choices as Spider Robinson, John Varley and John Barnes. Wil McCarthy hasn’t widely been recognized as the successor of any Grandmaster, but with Bloom, he evokes fond memories of Arthur C. Clarke’s best travelogues.

    Indeed, Bloom begins on Ganymede, an orbit away from Imperial Earth‘s Titan. But where Clarke traveled through a solar system dominated by humans, McCarthy has a much weirder -and dangerous- future in mind.

    By design or accident, some nano-critter (“mycora”) has managed to eat Earth in classic gray goo fashion. A small fraction of the human population managed to escape on the moon, and then farther out beyond the asteroid belt when it became obvious that mycora was also taking over the entire inner system. So Bloom opens on a solar system whose inner planets are all inhospitable and where humans are holed up here and there in the outer planets. Still, there are occasional incursions of mycora in the human settlements. There much be fought decisively, or else the bloom replicates until it destroys the habitat.

    In the middle of all this, high authorities decide that mycora has to be studied, so they send a starship in the inner system, ostensibly to drop off sensors. Our viewpoint character is John Strasheim, part-time journalist and full-time shoe manufacturer. He’s not the only one to ask himself what he’s doing with the spacemen and scientists making up the remainder of the crew. As they set out for their trip to the inner system, -battling the constant threat of spaceship bloom- the question of whether they can all be trusted is raised, and then precipitated.

    The atmosphere of constant paranoia -both external and internal- is part of what makes Bloom so special. The constant threat of mycora when the expedition enters the inner space system is convincingly claustrophobic, creating a real sense of dread for the characters. All of this leads to a few efficient sequences of almost pure terror as all hope seems to be lost and the crew has to fight a seemingly invincible array of threats.

    McCarthy sets up his world and his characters effectively, leading up to some interesting situations. The characterization is only adequate, however, as it does take some time to differentiate between the small cast of characters and even then they never really become fully realized. No matter; they’re still serviceable in the usual SF fashion.

    There are a lot of cool gadgets in Bloom, (like the tickle implant and the fear dolls) and McCarthy is scientifically-literate, so the jargon sounds right. Though not exactly an ultra-hard-SF novel, Bloom does play according to the rules of the genre, and is more convincing because of it. It simply makes sense, even in the action scenes.

    Better yet is the simple, direct and enjoyable prose style of the book. The viewpoint character is a part-time journalist used to writing for a layman audience, and the narrative reflects this superbly. Especially fascinating are the snippets of text sent by Stratheim, balancing humor and fear. (Or unsent; see Chapter 19) The book is compulsively readable… a civilian’s account of combat in deep territory, a Science-Fiction version of APOCALYPSE NOW.

    But like APOCALYPSE NOW it’s a slight shame if the conclusion is so disappointing. It would have been interesting to see McCarthy do something more with this predictable finale. As it stands, it’s almost as if McCarthy shies away from really interesting revelations.

    Still, Bloom is a pretty good SF novel. Fans of McCarthy won’t be disappointed by this, his best novel so far, and non-fans might take this opportunity to discover an interesting author. A worthwhile choice for a fun, quick, thoughtful and interesting read… just like the best Clarke novels. Definitely a 1998 core-SF essential.