Quote of the moment

Why would NOT having money make you better than those who have it?

— Herself, showing yet again why I love her.

The Sky People by S.M. Stirling, 2006

I wanted to like this book very much.

No, that’s not right. I wanted to love this book.

I’ve tried reading Stirling before, but never warmed to him. ((The books I tried were both in his Draka series, I think they were Marching Through Georgia and Under the Yoke, but don’t recall for certain.)) But when I read about the premise of this book (first in a series), I thought “Aha, here’s a book I can get into.”

The premise is that the solar system is more or less the solar system of early-to-mid-20th-century science fiction. That is, that Venus and Mars are both populated, and populated wondrously. Not only with primitive humans, but dinosaurs, giant flying birds, and suchlike. This is the solar system of Edgar Rice Burroughs to some extent, but also Robert A. Heinlein, early Robert Silverberg, Leigh Brackett, and countless others. But instead of outlandish pulp adventure, Stirling would treat everything else with rigorous realism, doing his best to keep it hard (that is, scientifically accurate) SF.

As I said, this is the kind of stuff I could get into. And when I thumbnail the plot, or even if I were to sketch it out a bit more than that, it will still seem like something I would love.

But I didn’t. I merely liked it. Somewhat.

In the 1960s, two space probes are sent, one from the USSR to Venus and one, offstage in this narrative, from the USA to Mars. They find life, including humans, and that changes history from that point on. By 1988, the time of the story proper, both the US and USSR have colonies on Venus.

After some time establishing character and setting, a Russian lander goes astray and crash-lands in the area where the first Russian probe landed in the 60s — thousands of miles away from either the Russian or American outposts. The American outpost is closer, however, so a small rescue expedition is mounted to fetch the pilot, if he survived, and any cargo that remains intact.

The expedition proceeds in a zeppelin.

A. Zeppelin.

Have I mentioned that I should totally love this book? Because I should.

Anyway, the zeppelin, made from materials native to Venus, proceeds, and runs into dangers and disaster, leaving its surviving crew to fend for themselves and figure out a way back home across thousands of miles of hostile territory, after finding the object of their expedition.

So it sounds like fun, like a real romp, even in explaining what happens in it. But it mostly isn’t, I’m afraid, and there’s several reasons for that.

The biggest problem I had with it was pacing, and several issues related to it.

First of all, most of the action is at the tail end of the narrative. Now, granted, that’s usually a good thing. The pace should build relentlessly. Unfortunately, as I finished the book, it felt like all of the action was in the last 50-100 pages, at least all of the important stuff. The first sections of the novel are purely stage-setting, with hints of stuff to come later. It’s really, really heavily back-weighted.

Related to this is the mystery. Stirling tells you in the first few chapters that there’s mysterious stuff going on. He keeps reminding you now and then throughout the narrative. But you don’t get any clear grasp of what it might be until halfway through, and there are no real answers to any of the mysteries until the very, very end, the next to last chapter. In which everything gets resolved all at once.

There’s no build to the mystery. No red herrings, false leads, false conclusions later proved wrong. You just are told that something Not Right happened, and only about halfway through do you get any clue at all to what it might be. Which was frustrating.

Another annoyance that I’m going to file under “pace” is probably a personal thing with me, because its a fairly common technique, but I thought it was ill-suited to this type of story. This is a physical adventure story and, if it were Burroughs writing it, each task would be narrated in more or less chronological order, at least insofar as the protagonist experiences it. But Stirling, more than once, skips ahead and then back-narrates the actual work the characters must do. Again, this is not an invalid technique, but in the context of this type of story, I found it frustrating.

For instance, in the latter half of the story, the protagonist and his compatriots need to capture a dinosaur, and have only the most primitive means available to them. The hero comes up with a plan, and essentially whispers it in the others’ ears so that the reader doesn’t know what it will be. Then we jump ahead to the actual capture, with each step presented to us, and then the preparations back-narrated to fill us in.

In Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, which is very far from Burroughs’s best book, or even his best Tarzan book, there’s a scene where a man has to build a door that will keep critters out, and has no real tools to do it with. Instead of jumping ahead in time and showing a working door already built, then sketching in how it was done, Burroughs takes you through the process of making it. You work right there next to Tarzan’s father, the labor leading to the successful working of the door is part of the satisfaction of the narrative. (Good westerns do this, as well. Think of Shane and Joe Starrett digging out the tree trunk in Shane.)

If we’re identifying with our protagonists, as we should be, then their ordeals ought to be ours, and we should endure them together, not have the protagonists go off and plot in a corner, then come back and proclaim “See! See how clever we are?” Doing things offstage is a fine device when used properly, I do it myself all the time. But given the type of story Stirling set out to write here, it was incredibly frustrating to this reader. I wanted to watch that zeppelin get built! I wanted to be in on the plan to catch the dinosaur, not an outside observer who constantly has to be filled in on every little detail.

Stirling does get things right (as I state above, I enjoyed the book; I just didn’t love it the way I wanted to). The little details all feel exactly right. There is a verisimilitude to his Venus that makes you wish it really were that way. From the domestication of a greatwolf to the use of dinos as construction machinery, and dozens of other little details, everything in the milieu feels right, it all seems to fit together.

And the quiet parallels to the stories he takes inspiration from work very well too. For instance, that domesticated greatwolf is second cousin to John Carter’s companion Woola. No big deal is made out of it, he fits naturally into the story, but the parallel is there for those who will appreciate it.

On the other hand, there are some background details that seem to be pure wish-fulfillment, such as JFK’s legacy in this alternate reality. It wasn’t intrusive, per se, but it didn’t ring true either.

What was intrusive was a detail that seemed to have no point. Our protagonist and a female Venusian have dreamed of each other, in detail, before ever meeting. These prophetic dreams don’t really pay off, except that the two each recognize the other (to no end other than easing their meeting a bit). Perhaps more will be made of this later in the series, but in this book alone, it seemed pointless.

I’m going to read the sequel, and very likely the one after that. Because this wasn’t a bad book and, as I said, this is a very cool premise on which to launch a series.

But I’m afraid I found this particular exploration of the premise disappointing.

No mention is made of the color of his shirt

Despicable:

A man heckling First Lady Laura Bush and daughter Jenna outside the 92nd Street Y[MCA] was arrested after he punched a wheelchair-bound girl whose parents had told him to shut up, authorities said Wednesday.

But remember: Bush is the fascist, and his opponents are on the side of all that is right and good.

Argh

So I hosed the database at my own domain.

Well, actually, I deleted it, then uploaded a backup, which did upload, all 2.9 megabytes of it.

But when it was there, none of the data showed up.

I have an email in to tech support, should hear back by Monday.

Grr.

A silence in the heavens

Charlton Heston is gone, and I don’t have much to say. He was indisputably a great actor; anyone saying differently is probably a lefty who just can’t stand an artiste with views that challenge his own.

Here are two examples of just how amazing an actor he was.

First, a neat bit from Wayne’s World 2, wherein Chuck makes a handful of lines arguably the most compelling and memorable in the movie:

Then, in Kenneth Branagh’s film of Hamlet, taking flight on the wings of the Bard’s words:

RIP.

No, he’s not a Sith, he’s an ewok!

Murdoc looks at the many, many victory conditions of Al-Sadr.

Linkage

• When “the narrative” becomes more important to you than the facts, you become a truly pathetic creature.
• Two of the earliest Japanese animations have been unearthed. Hope they show up on YouTube at some point.
• A voice recorded in 1860 was played for the first time this year. Very cool.
• A megalodon tooth was found in the St. Clair River.
• Ian Fleming interviewed Raymond Chandler in 1954, and you can listen to it as an MP3. (I dispute that Chandler was the better writer, however. Fleming could keep track of his plots, something Chandler rarely cared to do.)
• Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, will boycott the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics due to China’s continuing abuses of human rights. Good for her, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that will drive Chinese leaders nuts — making them lose face.
• VariFrank tells us:
  

  This is why all Iraq war movies suck. They always fail to capture the essential truth of the event. Those of us who stayed home while it was being fought, only know about the war from the spittle of the people on the other side of the table at Starbucks.

  And he uses Kurosawa to show why.

*SMACK* Wanna die? Watch this trailer!

This is for the American remake of My Sassy Girl, starring Elisha Cuthbert:

I love love love the Korean original, but this looks like it might not ruin the story, so I’m hopeful. Except for the garbage music the trailer uses.

(The title of this post is in loving homage to the original film.)

Duckie Shrugged

I’m sorry, but this notion gave me giggle fits.

The first line is:

“Who is John Hughes?“

The last line is:

He raised his hand over the desolate Hollywood Hills and traced in space the sign of the Breakfast Club.

Yeah. I’m weird.

More epistemological funny business

NPR is rather charmingly blind to having one of their sacred oxes gored by reality. In an article headlined “The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat“:

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

That’s the first paragraph. Notice anything missing?

That’s right, it’s not even possible that the “global warming” hypothesis might be wrong.

Later, they quote Josh Willis of JPL, and add in some editorial comments in what’s supposed to be a straight news story:

“There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant,” Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. “Global warming doesn’t mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming.”

Notice the bit that’s not in quotes? The buildup of heat on Earth is not even questioned, even though just a few paragraphs earlier, the article plainly states:

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can.

The only measurements that can be questioned are the ones that don’t support the Global Warming faith:

One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded — and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.

But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?

You cannot question the warming, or that there must be extra heat, even though the actual measurements don’t show it at all. That’s not allowed.

At no point in the story is the Global Warming dogma questioned, even though it’s far from proven (advocates always rely on “consensus”, which is, to put it mildly, unscientific).

But you’d never know it from the way this is written, not at all.

Clarke, slander, and gross epistemological errors

Sir Arthur C. Clarke has passed away, but this mostly won’t be about that.

Yes, I read his books when I was in high school, and very occasionally thereafter. I liked them for the long view that they took, seeing sometimes to the end of time. I didn’t like the coldness, and sometimes brutality, of them, but that was part and parcel of the long view that he took.

I learned in a university science fiction course that he was probably a “confirmed bachelor” (homosexual, but not public about it).

Today, I told a friend and fellow SF fan about Clarke’s passing, and he made a face, saying that Clarke lived in Sri Lanka for one reason — “the age of consent”. He further claimed that he had seen a video an interview in which Clarke admitted being a pedophile. I was good: I didn’t say “horseshit” to his face. I refused to concede the point, politely, because I actually know what underlies that urban legend.

Arthur C. Clarke was to be knighted in 1998. On 1 February 1998, the Sunday Mirror of London printed a contemptible story titled “Child Sex Shame of Arthur C. Clarke” containing supposed direct quotes:

Clarke’s interest in boys stretches back over the 40 years he has lived in Sri Lanka, the Indian Ocean island. He meets poverty- stricken lads who are easily persuaded by men to become partners for 1,000 rupees, just pounds 10.

Clarke has written more than 80 books about space travel and science fiction, and has been hailed as the 20th Century’s prophet and is consulted by world leaders.

But at his luxury beach house in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, he said: “I’m trying to think of the youngest boy I have ever had because of course you can’t tell here. It is very difficult here.” Clarke said boys are ready to have homosexual sex as long as they have virtually reached puberty.

But asked what was the youngest boy he ever had a liaison with, Clarke said: “Most of them had reached the age of puberty.”

He insisted: “I mean I have never had the slightest interest in children - boys or girls. They should be treated in the same way but once they have reached the age of puberty then it is OK.

“I think most of the damage is done by the fuss made by hysterical parents. If the kids enjoy it and don’t mind it doesn’t do any harm…there is a hysteria about the whole thing in the West. I don’t think anyone should have a relationship unless it is entirely free and open and the boy will know what he is doing.”

Asked if he had had sexual relationships with them he said simply: “Yes”.

He added: “I know once many many years ago when I first came here I did and the going rate was about two rupees. Money has never been part of a relationship. But of course when you are fond of them you give them money or a watch or something, whatever.”

The article itself gave some very good reason to doubt its own veracity:

In Sri Lanka homosexuality is against the law and punishable with a prison sentence of up to 10 years’ jail AND a flogging.

I mean, seriously, why would anyone go on the record under such a circumstance. Sir Arthur was many things, but never a fool.

Anyhow, there was a brouhaha that, in the end, came to exactly nothing.

The Sunday Mirror, after Clarke vehemently denied the charges, claimed that it had tapes of an interview with him.

But they were full of shit.

Sri Lankan police and Interpol both investigated the charges. Both agencies repeatedly requested copies of the tapes. The Sunday Mirror claimed they sent them once, but that Interpol “apparently” did not receive them (the dog ate their evidence, “apparently”), and never did give the evidence to, well, anybody at all.

Clarke was cleared of the charges.

There was no evidence on which to proceed.

The Sunday Mirror was the only paper to make the claims. No charges were ever brought, no evidence — apart from that tabloid’s supposed transcript — ever has surfaced. Other interviewers dealt with the matter directly, and Sir Arthur treated the charges with the (humorous) contempt they deserved.

Oh, and the Telegraph obituary says that the Sunday Mirror later printed an apology, though I can’t find that online (of course).

Naturally, this cannot prevent people who want to believe it from believing it. There are people who remain convinced that the moon landings were fake. But all the evidence says otherwise.

(I was going to go on about the lazy thinking, even evasion, necessary to maintain such a belief, but I’m tired and this is depressing. Enough, I say. The onus of proof is on those making the positive claim, so if anyone wants to serve up, say, a YouTube video of an interview or something, let them. Otherwise, my initial judgement remains: the charges are completely unsubstantiated horseshit.)

Heh

I love reviews that try to imagine just what the hell the writers must have been thinking:

C-kun

“We have a problem.”

B-kun

“You killed the heroines again.”

C-kun

“Besides that.”

(þSteven Den Beste)

Bowman takes on Kurosawa

I just found James T. Bowman’s recent article on filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, “Samurai Sage“. In it, Bowman (whom I respect greatly as a thinker and writer, even as I tend to disagree with him and judge him to be entirely too cynical) lays responsibility for Hollywood’s and popular culture’s obsession with moral equivalence (what Ayn Rand termed “the cult of moral grayness”) at the great master’s feet.

Refreshingly, Bowman goes out of his way to acknowledge both Kurosawa’s greatness and that of his on-screen alter-ego, Toshiro Mifune.

It’s a bracing, thought-provoking read, and there is something to what Bowman says, but I (of course) do not agree with him. Not having the time to belt out a responding essay just now, I’ll give just an indication of where I think he’s wrong.

Bowman points out something he calls “the characteristic Kurosawan triangle”, a tripartite opposition that Kurosawa often used in lieu of the classic good versus evil paradigm, and sketches its use in several of Kurosawa’s movies.

In The Seven Samurai, this triangle is formed by the peasants, the bandits and the samurai, with Kikuchiyo — half-peasant, half-samurai — moving between the sides. In Yojimbo, it arises out of the opposition between the Seibei and the Ushitora factions on two sides and Sanjuro, the lone samurai all on his own or with the tavern-keeper, Gonji (Eijirô Tono), moving between the two on the third. In The Hidden Fortress (1958), later to be so influential on George Lucas in the creation of the first Star Wars movie, the perspective on the struggle of the forlorn remains of the Akizuki clan — the Princess Yuki (Misa Uehara) and her loyal General Rokurota Makabe (Mr Mifune again) — to escape their persecutors of the Yamana clan is provided by the two comic grotesques, Tohei (Minoru Chiaki) and Matakishi (Kamatari Fujiwara), the cinematic ancestors of R2D2 and C3PO.

He uses this to say that Kurosawa refuses to take sides, that he tries always to be the outsider, the observer.

But this is really a denial of responsibility. Responsibility is also binary: either you’re innocent or guilty, a good guy or a bad guy. Kurosawa always insists on carving out the third option for himself in the triangulating position of the observer, the watcher — the painter that he started out to be or the film-maker that he became — or the unreliable witness who was the figure at the heart of Rashomon. This person doesn’t take any responsibility because there is no longer any responsibility to take. The truth is unknowable. It only exists in the versions of it that all of us make up to excuse and justify ourselves for the things that we do.

While Rashoman certainly does paint a picture of the obscurity of truth in certain contexts, and can quite fairly be read to represent truth to be unknowable, this view simply does not hold across all of Kurosawa’s works, nor does he refuse to take sides.

To be certain, he finds the world messier than in older-style morality play types of story, and the truth to be harder to discern than simply looking at the color of the other guy’s hat.

I find it telling, however, that Bowman does not even mention two films of Kurosawa’s that are considered among his best. Ikiru and High and Low both argue against Bowman’s point. One is a story where there is a definite and knowable truth, even though just about every character in it tries to avoid knowing it. The other, while making use of the “Kurosawan triangle”, has definite good guys, vile bad guys, and also maintains that the truth is knowable (if difficult to arrive at). And you are definitely not invited to sympathize with the bad guys.

So, in my view, Bowman misreads Kurosawa’s work as a whole. Nevertheless, a very interesting read.

You know, I tend to lust after Apple products…

But for the moment it looks like I’m better off as I am.

MacBook Pros apparently ship (þInsty) with crappy hard drives.

What, were they spending so much time and effort on the iPod and iPhone that they decided not to sweat their top of the line laptops?

Accents

English has lots of them:

Herself is studying for an English proficiency exam, and the tapes’ and instructors’ Brit accents are giving her some trouble. Somehow, this seemed appropriate.

(þMegan McCardle)

Pants on fire!

Disney CEO Robert Iger is possessed of massive amounts of chutzpah (þLibertas):

Top brass at Disney were called on Thursday to defend their decision not to release The Path to 9/11 on DVD and to justify CEO Robert Iger’s $27.7 million pay package.

Path was a 2006 ABC miniseries critical of President Bill Clinton’s handling of terrorist threats that was so controversial it prompted leading Democrats to ask Disney not to air the program. Disney, after making some hasty edits, ran it commercial-free.

At Disney’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Albuquerque, N.M., one mutual fund portfolio manager said it was high time Disney turn Path into a DVD and recoup some of the $40 million it spent on the project.

The fund manager, Tom Borelli, accused Iger of protecting HIllary Clinton’s presidential campaign at the expense of shareholders and pointed out that Iger has been a steady Clinton donor since before the former first lady was elected to the Senate.

He claimed to have a letter from a Lionsgate representative proving that Disney has no intention of even selling the DVD rights to another company.

The Path question came shortly after another shareholder objected to foul language and persistent sexual innuendos on such ABC shows as Ugly Betty and Good Morning America, prompting Iger to cite ABC’s right of free speech. Borelli demanded to know why Iger seemed more interested in protecting curse words than he was in protecting political speech.

The fund manager noted Disney’s reported $46 million profit on Fahrenheit 9/11, also a politically controversial project — though far more critical of Republicans than Democrats.

Seemingly taken-aback, Iger assured the shareholder that his decision on the DVD was based purely on business considerations and not on politics.

“Business considerations”? “Business considerations“???

Disney is $40 million in the hole on this — in fact deeper than that, since the miniseries ran commercial free in prime time over more than one night, thus incurring the further loss of whatever revenues would have been generated by running standard commercial programming in the same slots.

What possible business considerations could explain this?

Nope, Iger is lying. It’s political, there can be no other explanation for steadfastly refusing to recoup even a single dollar from a $40 million project.

Quote of the moment

Bill Quick:

If the Israelis threw a marble across the line, reports would indicate that the marble killed 17 Palestinians, of whom 35 were children.

What a decent chap!

Prince Harry, Yanked-out in Afghanistan before being yanked out of Afghanistan:

(Source. þGZExpat)

One gets the feeling that all of the Anointed in Britain, particularly those in the media, are going to try to take him down a notch or ten. One just doesn’t support the war or the colonies in this unseemly fashion.

I kind of hope he says something nice about Bush in the next few days, just to see if any aneurysms result.

I thought she was supposed to be smart

Hillary!™’s campaign is running a new TV ad against Obama. It’s brilliant, to the point, and insanely stupid all at once:

ABC News’ David Wright, Sunlen Miller, Andy Fies & Nitya Venkataraman Report: Closing in on the March 4 contests, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., debuted a campaign ad on Friday with ominous undertones.

“It’s 3:00am and your children are asleep,” a voice over says in the ad. “There’s a phone in the White House, and it’s ringing. Something is happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call.”

“Whether someone knows the world’s leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead. It’s 3am and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” the ad concludes.

It’s brilliant, because you really should be thinking in such terms.

It’s intensely stupid because, honestly, does Hillary!™ really want us to imagine whether we want her as President in a serious, life-or-death scenario? Is that truly her strength and appeal? Seems as likely to blow up in her face as to hurt Barry.

Good for him!

Britain’s Prince Harry is soldiering in Afghanistan:

The prince spent Christmas Day in a former Taleban madrassa, sleeping on a camp bed and having to wash outdoors.

In an interview while in Helmand Province, Harry - a member of the Household Cavalry - talked about life as a soldier on the front line.

“I haven’t really had a shower for four days, I haven’t washed my clothes for a week.

“It’s very nice to be sort of a normal person for once, I think it’s about as normal as I’m going to get.["]

And his nickname is “The Bullet Magnet”.