All reviews copyright 1984-2011 Evelyn C. Leeper.
KONG UNBOUND: THE CULTURAL IMPACT, POP MYTHOS, AND SCIENTIFIC PLAUSIBILITY OF A CINEMATIC LEGEND edited by Karen Haber:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/28/2011]
KONG UNBOUND: THE CULTURAL IMPACT, POP MYTHOS, AND SCIENTIFIC PLAUSIBILITY OF A CINEMATIC LEGEND edited by Karen Haber (ISBN 978-1-4165-1670-5) is a collection of essays pretty much described by the title. Christopher Priest writes about how the introduction of Production Code affected the film, William Stout talks about the film's influence on art (and other fields), Robert Silverberg analyzes the script, and so on.
There are a few slips. Harry Harrison writes, "[The prehistoric monsters] were created by Willis H. O'Brien, assisted by a youthful Ray Harryhausen, who virtually invented stop-motion special effects for the film." This makes it sound as though Harryhausen invented stop-motion special effects--a better way of punctuating the sentence would have been to use parentheses rather than commas to set off "assisted by a youthful Ray Harryhausen". But it's wrong on a more basic level: Harryhausen did *not* assist O'Brien on KING KONG. (Harryhausen was barely thirteen when the film was made-- youthful indeed!) Harryhausen *did* assist O'Brien on MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, but that was made sixteen years later, in 1949.
To order Kong Unbound from amazon.com, click here.
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME by Mark Haddon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/23/2004]
Mark Haddon's THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME (ISBN 0-385-51210-4) will undoubtedly be compared to Elizabeth Moon's THE SPEED OF DARK by those reviewers who have read the latter. However, since Moon's book is science fiction and this is not, most mainstream reviewers probably will not have read the Moon. Both are about people with autism (Asperger's Syndrome), but there the similarity ends. THE SPEED OF DARK is told by a third-person narrator, and is set in a future when major medical advances have been made regarding autism, while THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME is told in the first person by its main character in what is very much the present. Only in the sense that the main characters have similar personalities are the books similar. Since they seem to have consistent views of how autism affects people, and since both authors have direct experience with autistic individuals, I am assuming the portrayals are reasonable. In Haddon's book, the narrator (Christopher John Francis Boone) is a fan of Sherlock Holmes (because he thinks Holmes has a lot of the same personality traits as he does). But though it starts as a mystery, the mystery is solved relatively early, and the book is more about Boone's learning to cope with his family and with the world at large. Perhaps because of the first-person narration by someone whose though processes are very different than mine, I was reminded more of FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON. (I hasten to add that this is not because Boone has a lower intelligence than average--it's quite the opposite, in fact.) For readers who want books examining "alien" ways of thinking, this is a reminder that sometimes other human beings can be the most alien of all.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/30/2006]
The regular book group this month read THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME by Mark Haddon (ISBN 1-400-03271-7); the science fiction group read THE SPEED OF DARK by Elizabeth Moon (ISBN 0-345-48139-9). I have already commented on both of these (THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME by Mark Haddon in the 04/23/04 issue of the MT VOID and THE SPEED OF DARK by Elizabeth Moon in the 03/28/03 issue), but I have to add that on second reading, the Haddon stands up much better than the Moon. One problem is that Moon's autistic characters have undergone a science-fictional treatment, "early intervention", which made them basically less "autistic" and more "normal". (Yes, I realize that the terms "autistic" and "normal" are both politically incorrect and medically inaccurate. But I am trying to keep this column short.) This treatment makes the story easier, but less interesting. Haddon's character is more authentic, which ultimately makes him more interesting. (I will note that other people thought the Moon was more interesting than the Haddon.) One thing everybody agreed on was that many of the symptoms displayed by the autistic characters in both books were characteristics of a lot of (presumably) non-autistic people that they knew. A lot of the discussion time, in fact, was spent discussing just what autism is and how one arrives at that diagnosis.
To order The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time from amazon.com, click here.
THE GIFT by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/10/2008]
Of the great Islamic poets, the best known in the West are probably Omar Khayyam, Rumi, and Hafiz. I cannot say for sure, but I suspect that a fair part of Hafiz's fame may be due to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who has Sherlock Holmes say, "You may remember the old Persian saying, 'There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.' There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world." ["A Case of Identity"] I should note, however, that extensive searches by Holmes scholars have failed to find any such quotation anywhere in Hafiz's writings.
In any case, THE GIFT by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky) (ISBN-13 978-0-140-19581-1, ISBN-10 0-140-19581-5) is an attempt to create a modern translation of Hafiz. However, at times I think Ladinsky gets a bit *too* modern. For example, "The Clay Bowl's Destiny", Ladinsky translates the the last phrase as "In/His sublime,/Ball-busting course/Of/Spirit/Love." (Ladinsky also seems to want to maximize the number of lines, and minimize the number of words per line.) One also finds the word "dropkick" and poems called "The Bag Lady" and "There Could Be Holy Fallout".
A more representative sample of Hafiz might be "The Sun Never Says": "Even/After/All this time/The sun never says to the earth,/You owe/Mr."/Look/What happens/With a love like that,/It lights the/Whole/Sky."
To order The Gift from amazon.com, click here.
THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE by Joe Haldeman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/05/2007]
THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE by Joe Haldeman (ISBN-13 978-0-441-01499-6, ISBN-10 0-441-01499-2) is a return to classic science fiction themes. Matt Fuller accidentally builds a time machine that jumps forward into the future. But each time the button is pushed, the time jump is twelve times greater than the previous one. This is very reminiscent of H. G. Wells's Time Traveler stopping at various points, except that Fuller has no control over when he will stop. The only problem is the end, which seems a trifle contrived, but in spite of this I would recommend this to all of you who miss the good old stuff.
To order The Accidental Time Machine from amazon.com, click here.
FOREVER PEACE by Joe Haldeman (Ace, ISBN 0-441-00406-7, 1997, 326pp, hardback):
One, this is not a sequel to The Forever War. Two, the title of this is Forever Peace, not The Forever Peace.
Haldeman has claimed that Forever Peace is part of a triptych of thematically connected novels containing The Forever War and 1968. This is true, but only to the extent that they are all about war and what makes us fight and kill each other. And while the idea of Forever Peace is that there may be a way to end the killing, most of it is devoted to descriptions of battles and attacks and killing.
One problem is that the pacing is off. We spend half the novel following Julian Class, the operator of a "soldierboy"--basically a remote-controlled robot soldier. Then suddenly within a few pages, we find out that there is something happening that can destroy the universe, and that there is a way to convert humanity to a non-aggressive state. Another problem is that while the first plot twist is moderately believable, the second I found completely unconvincing. All the problems that are introduced are solved with a wave of the hand. It's as if we have a solution to world hunger that involves getting to Proxima Centauri in an hour, and then on the next page someone says, "Oh, by the way, we just discovered how to travel faster than light." (And while we're at it, Haldeman also postulates the miracle of nanotechnology, which can provide for all material needs.) Another problem (at least for me) was the foreshadowing, where you would read some first-person narrative from Julian, and then a third-person omniscient would break in to say, "But Julian had no way of knowing how wrong he was," or some such.
But Forever Peace is still worth reading. Haldeman is at his best when he is describing everyday life in the "permanent war footing" of the future, with all its restrictions and "acceptable" dangers. If The Forever War was the Vietnam War transposed to the future, then Forever Peace is Nicaragua, Kuwait, and Oklahoma City. It's a world full of security precautions that don't work, but which are followed because they make people feel better. (Exactly what purpose does showing a picture ID serve when you fly somewhere now?) It's a world of elaborate rules of friendship based on who gets paid what, and when, and how. (And haven't you heard of someone picking up a dinner check by explaining that they can claim it as a business expense?) One of the aspects of science fiction I like is the way it looks at the near-future and consequences of our current politico-economic situation. Had Haldeman just written about nanotechnology and the war between the haves and the have-nots, it would have been far more satisfying. As it was, there was too much going on here for any one thread to be given sufficient space.
As I said, I think Forever Peace is worth reading, though not for the plot so much as for the setting. The obvious comparison will be to The Forever War, and it doesn't stand up to that--but then, that is very high standard.
To order Forever Peace from amazon.com, click here.
"Four Short Novels" by Joe Haldeman:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/09/2004]
"Four Short Novels" by Joe Haldeman is really four connected riffs on immortality, each linked with a classic title from literature. (I have forgiven F&SF for describing this in the previous issue as being "four short novels by Joe Haldeman", implying a rather thicker issue than either usual or delivered.) You could think of them as short-shorts, but they do relate to each other such that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
THE SIGN AND THE SEAL by Graham Hancock:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/25/2005]
A friend recommended Graham Hancock's THE SIGN AND THE SEAL (ISBN 0-7493-0186-4), which postulates that 1) the Ark of the Covenant is being kept in the church of Saint Mary of Zion in Axum, Ethiopia, and 2) the Ark itself is an amazing technological weapon. powered by tablets made of some radioactive material. I will state up-front that I went into this book skeptical, and that may have colored my reading. I found the book overly long and complicated, with too much time being spent on describing Hancock's travels and all his "amazing insights" (e.g., "What I found most exciting of all about the obelisk was that it was intact--not rusting and crumbling--and that it was covered with fresh red primer paint. Someone, clearly, was still taking an interest in the explorer...." [page 185]). I also thought he was too quick to grasp at what would support his theories and to dismiss conflicting evidence. For example, he makes much of the fact that Moses spent forty days on Mount Sinai: it should not take God that long to write two tablets, so Moses must have been building something (page 347ff). But he does not deal with all the other occurrences of "forty days" or "forty years" in the Torah:
Why forty? I could just as easily argue that many of those could be connected to gematria: "40" is the number for the verb "lamed- heh-heh" meaning to wander or to err. And all of these are connecting with wandering, or the erring of the Israelites, or both. Even if it was 42 or 38 days, perhaps there would still be something to explain, but there is no evidence to support the conclusions that Hancock draws.
Or when he proposes three possible explanations to account for the powers attributed to the Ark:
1) The Old Testament was right, and the Ark contains Divine
powers.
2) The Old Testament was wrong, and the Israelites were "victims
of a collective mass hallucination that lasted for several
hundred years."
3) A little bit of both: the Ark possessed powers which were not
Divine, but were man-made. (pg. 285ff)
Hancock seems to ignore a fourth possibility:
4) Various phenomena were misinterpreted, elaborated on, etc., to
fit in with the myth of Divine power in the Ark, or perhaps just
to make a good story that helped to justify devotion.
If you don't allow number 4, then applying Hancock's three limited possibilities to, say, various relics of the Catholic Church, says that if you do not accept that the relics have divine powers then you must think that Christians have been the victims of mass hallucinations or that the relics have some natural power, neither of which seems credible to most skeptics.
On the whole, while some of Hancock's ideas are interesting, I found the book too convoluted and unconvincing to recommend.
(Thanks to Mark for helping me figure out how to phrase some of this, particularly in trying to describe the visuals on page 117 of the first book. Truly a picture is worth a thousand words!)
To order The Sign and the Seal from amazon.com, click here.
"The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" by Elizabeth Hand:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/08/2011]
"The Maiden Flight of McCauley's Bellerophon" by Elizabeth Hand (in the anthology STORIES edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio) is a sentimental secret history of aviation sort of story. There's a fragment of a nitrate film showing some unknown flying machine, and all sorts of nostalgia for the early days of flight. Eh.