In the past, I’ve said this is not a negative blog. I’ve
tried to avoid making negative comments on books and movies. This has prevented
me from reviewing some books, because to be honest I would have had to say some
negative things. From now on I’m going to give the sort of reviews one might
read in magazines, which discuss both strengths and weaknesses.
Also, I’m not going to give a SPOILER alert anymore.
Obviously, I will not try to spoil a book or movie for anyone. But the reader
should be able to sense that the farther one reads a review, the more that might
be revealed.
So this is still not a negative blog. But the style will
change to be more in conformity with professional reviews.
The March/April 2023 issue of Analog is well worth reading
just for the novelette “The House on Infinity Street” by Allen Steele. It’s a
variation on the standard line given when some fan asks, “Where do you get your
ideas?” The answer, given with a straight face, is “Schenectady.” It works as a
nonsensical answer. If the fan takes the answer seriously, the more elaborate
reply is that some mail-order place (I suppose nowadays it would be on TikTok
or something similar) in Schenectady, New York will mail an author a story idea
for a fee. Some people actually believe the answer, before realizing they’ve
been spoofed.
So in a completely serious tone, Steele tells the supposedly
true story of how a friend of his had the real experience. But it was in Deerfield,
Massachusetts. This was in the late 1950’s—the age of Automats, and also when
pulp magazines like Astounding and Unknown were in their heyday.
A fellow named Shelby Weinberg got writer’s block, and in desperation wrote to
a literary agency that dispensed ideas. What he got back was a description of a
futuristic device. Steele, in the present, realizes it’s a smartphone. Shelby
continued to get uncannily accurate future ideas, including technology like
solar panels. The ideas seemed too real, so eventually a friend persuaded him
to visit the literary agency, with unfortunate results.
“The House on Infinity Street” is an enjoyable stroll down
memory lane, with Steele naming pulp after pulp I had never heard of before. He
also details what it was like to be a struggling writer at the time, with one
writer “borrowing” an idea from another. Even if you are not up on the pulp
origins of science fiction magazines, this is an intriguing window into that
time.
Also enjoyable is the science fact article “Why are the Keplerians
so Different?” by Kevin Walsh of the University of Melbourne. The Keplerians are
the exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope. Contrary to what many
people believe, no one has seen any planets beyond our solar system through a telescope.
Their existence is inferred by a star’s light getting periodically dimmed for a
short time, which is presumably caused by a planet passing in front of that star.
Many Keplerians have orbits lasting less than ten days, which
would mean they are orbiting their stars at immense speeds. Others have very
low density, with one having only one tenth the density of water. Still others
are quite massive. Walsh freely admits that a couple of these more massive supposed
planets are probably brown dwarf stars. (My own take is that some of these exoplanets
are also small stars, but in a new category similar to brown dwarfs.)
In any event, the Keplerian exoplanets do not resemble the planets
in our own solar system.
So if you can order the March/April Analog or read it in a
library, you will find particularly good science fiction and fact to read.
Suzume is a high schooler in Kyushu who was orphaned when
she was a little girl. She has been living with her aunt for ten years. One
day a young man asks her if there are any ruins nearby. Intrigued, she goes
there herself. She sees a lone door standing amidst wreckage. When she opens it
she sees an otherworldly realm, but cannot reach it. She also sees a carving of
a cat, which see pulls out of the ground. It comes to life and runs away.
After that, a monstrous creature comes out of the doorway,
causing an earthquake. She and the young man—Souta—are barely able to close the
door and avoid disaster. It turns out the cat was a guardian meant to keep the
door closed. Suzume and Souta chase the cat across Japan, trying to shut other
doors and prevent ever-increasing disasters.
Suzume has flashbacks of herself as young child, wandering around,
looking for her mother. But are these memories? Or is she seeing herself in
that other realm?
Suzume ranges from scenes of delicate beauty to looming
horrific disaster. This is high quality animation, with good detail and
realistic motion, no matter how odd the chase scenes are. What stuck in my mind
was the kindness Suzume experiences on her journey: From a young woman her age
hauling fruit, to a mother who sees her at a bus stop where the next bus will
not come for hours, they all want to help her. Suzume does chores for room and
board, which is heartening so see.
The director, Makoto Shinkai, has openly said he was influenced
by Super-Frog Saves Tokyo, which also involves preventing an earthquake.
That in turn must have been influenced by the Japanese myth of Namazu, the giant
catfish beneath Japan that causes earthquakes.
The movie has a couple of weaknesses. I suppose this is
where I put SPOILERS. Suzume and Souta spend the movie as travel buddies. Then towards
the end she tells her aunt that she loves him. This is very sudden. Also, her
aunt becomes unaccountably cruel in one scene and tells Suzume she wasted the best years
of her life caring for her. It is unclear if another door guardian is making
her say these things, but it is unsettling.
So Suzume is well worth watching. Definitely do not
walk out the minute the credits start rolling. For those of you who are Makoto
Shinkai fans and love his movie Your Name, have your friends watch Suzume
first. It is hard for Shinkai to live up to his masterpiece, Your Name.
Last year, I took a lot of pictures, which took a long time
to post. This year, I took much less.
Below, we see Batman and Robin getting photobombed by the
Penguin.
Torrey Stenmark is in her floor costume below. She has the
kind of light saber that sizzles. She recognized me, so she flicked it and made
it sizzle as she walked by, which startled me.
Here she is in her Masquerade costume. I asked her who her
character was. She asked me if I had seen Top Gun. I hadn’t, so I was a
little puzzled.
Norwescon was held at a hotel near the SeaTac airport. Here’s
a view with an airliner taking off in the upper left.
I should have said in yesterday’s post that Kimberly Unger
was one of the speakers on the subject of AI—or not really AI, just machine
learning.
Later, she won the Philip K. Dick award for best paperback
novel (science fiction of fantasy) published last year. Here she is with the award for her book, The Extractionist.
For me, the best event was a
workshop called “Plotting Your Novel with Save the Cat!“ A lot of people have
good writing skills. They can write interesting scenes. But they are told their
story structure will not attract readers. Our instructor, Emily Leverett, went
over in detail the best story structure that works over and over again, using
the book Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, by Jessica Brody.
As Emily Leverett emphasized,
this is not a matter of imposing a wooden template that gets rid of
originality. The story template comes from observing successful novels and
movies. It can be seen in stories as diverse as The Lord of the Rings
novels, the Star Wars movies, Jane Austen novels, the movie Legally
Blonde, etc.
As to what the phrase Save
the Cat! means, buy the book. It will do you good.
Hello, HAZZARD. If you are reading this, it was pleasant to talk
to you. You may already be familiar with the Medieval play “Everyman.” If not,
I strongly encourage you to read it.
Norwescon is the biggest science fiction/fantasy convention in
the Pacific Northwest that has a good focus on writing. Interestingly enough,
the subject of AI was big. Although, panelists who spoke about it did not see
it as an end-of-the-world development.
What they said is we do not have true AI (artificial
intelligence) yet. What we have is machine learning that can do specific tasks.
This machine learning is becoming rapidly more sophisticated. A number of editors said they are getting submissions written by these supposed AI programs.
They say they can easily spot them.
So it is not a threat. Yet.
As an odd coincidence, the hotel parking lot has a robot security
drone. An anonymous source said they had had some catalytic converters stolen
out of cars, but this drone took care of the problem.
One conventioneer said he looked out his window one morning
and saw a Dalek in the parking lot.
Never fear, there was a real Dalek there.
I thought it would be cool to have designed the security
robot like a Dalek. But it might not be taken seriously. The sleek functional
look is better.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods starts off where the first
movie left off, in terms of storytelling. If you did not see the first movie,
it is not clear at all which high school kid turns into Shazam. It’s Billy Batson.
But his foster brother Freddy Freeman kind of dominates the first part of the
movie, so a viewer might conclude it’s Freddy.
So to get people caught up, when Billy yells “Shazam!’ he
turns into that superhero (played by Zachary Levi). Now his foster siblings
(Mary, Freddy, Darla, Pedro, and Eugene) can do the same.
It turns out their powers were stolen from certain obscure
Greek gods, and now they want them back, hence the title of the movie.
The Shazam! movies are not the dark sort of DC movies.
They are meant to be more lighthearted, to draw children as well as teens and
adults. So I have to warn you there is a scene where an adult commits suicide.
I do not want anyone complaining I just did a spoiler. They want children and
teens to see this. I am not under any obligation to hide what they show.
The original Shazam! had a good amount of humor, much
of it childish. It was genuinely funny. This sequel also has humor, though not
as much. I didn’t find most of it funny, but other people in the audience laughed.
However, it was a good laugh when Shazam mispronounced Solomon as “Solo-Man.”
The cast made an unusually good catch with Helen Mirren as
one of the Greek goddesses. Lucy Liu also looks great. But no offense, she
doesn’t seem like a deep character while sharing the screen with Helen Mirren.
Very few people can.
As for Billy/Shazam, he suffers from imposter syndrome. He
does not believe he deserves the powers he’s been given. So he overcompensates
by demanding the foster siblings always stick together for their adventures. But
his imposter syndrome stays with him. Will he be able to resolve this before
the end?
So in my last post, I reviewed the SyFy series The Ark
(also shown on Peacock). I have some additional thoughts.
At first, I thought that Richard Fleeshman (who plays
Lieutenant James Brice) was contractually obligated to take his shirt off,
since he did it in the first three episodes. But he hasn’t done it in the next
three episodes, so maybe they got past that initial Twilight silliness.
The blonde Valley girl turned out to be a counselor. She made
sexy remarks in the first three episodes. But they turned her into a serious character,
so I hope they are over that silliness, too.
The science is not getting better. It’s still silly. Um,
space is a vacuum. They don’t have to keep the engine running for the ship to go
through space at a constant speed.
But they do a good job with at least three intertwining plot
lines in each episode: the struggle for survival, the leadership struggle, and
ongoing mysteries (starting with a murder mystery).
On a personal note, it took me a while to watch through episode
6. That’s because I had to sign up for Peacock’s monthly plan. When they first
rolled out Peacock, they advertised it would be free, free, free, etc. Then it
turned out to keep watching a series, a viewer has to pay. I was so insulted, I
wouldn’t at first. But The Ark turned out to be so good, I signed up for
their paltry monthly fee. So there you go.
A sleeper ship containing dozens of people in suspended
animation has a violent impact just one year short of the planet they were sent
to colonize. The entire command staff was wiped out in the impact. But that is
just the beginning of their problems. They only have four weeks’ worth of
water. They have six weeks’ worth of food.
Lieutenant Sharon Garnet (Christie Burke) takes command. Everyone
on board is an expert in something: science, engineering, etc. She assigns some
of the crew to retrofit the water recycling unit meant for the
colony. This is no easy task: The right equipment has to be scavenged.
An attempt is made to grow food in a cargo bay. But the power requirements for
the lights can impinge on the search for equipment. Always, somebody disagrees with
her decisions.
There are so many problems with the premier episode of The
Ark. I don’t consider anything that follows to be a spoiler. When the crew
wakes up from suspended animation, they are instantly alert and able to sprint
to a safer part of the ship. Seriously? They later show the compression suits they
were in was what allowed them to run, but inflated pants don’t work that way.
They use the centrifugal effect (actually centripetal force)
to simulate gravity. One part of the ship stopped rotating. When it starts
again, people in mid-air immediately fall to the floor. Physics doesn’t work
that way, man! There is no reason why people in mid-air would suddenly fall
like that. They would bounce off the walls and possibly the ceiling first
before settling onto the floor. (The movie Passengers had the same
problem, but I digress.)
While we’re at it, the ship has two rotating sections. They
rotate the same way. That would make for an intense Coriolis effect, so the
whole ship would rotate against its axis. It would be better if the sections rotated
in opposite directions, or had one large section rotating one way, and two
smaller sections rotating a different way. (Look at Ragnar Station in the
premier of Battlestar Galactica. They almost got it right.)
For the more personal matters, some jerk sarcastically addresses
a woman he thinks is Russian as “comrade.” What? That was a term used in the days
of the Soviet Union. Why would someone a hundred years from now use it?
There is a blonde ditz who does “Valley Girl” talk. One scene
implies she is showing off her naked body. Save that for soap operas.
Two young geeky people wear geeky glasses. Why? To let us
know they are geeks. I didn’t see anyone else wearing glasses.
There are three lieutenants. The other two dispute whether
Lt. Garnet should be in charge, since they are all equal. Obviously they have
equal rank, but they wouldn’t have equal seniority. If one of them was promoted
even a day before the others, that one would be the senior officer. Lieutenants
would be well aware of who is senior to whom.
Believe it or not, this is not a negative blog. Despite all the
problems, I plan to continue to watch The Ark. The challenge of how they
will survive is intriguing. I like Lieutenant Garnet. Also, I like Lieutenant
James Brice’s (Richard Fleeshman's) Scottish accent.
