Raritania

New in Print . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:24:00 +0000

My novel Guardians, which is available in both trade paperback and e-book editions.

You can sample the first chapter here.

Literary R & R Reviews Surviving the Spike
1/12/12
Indie Snippets
12/20/11
Surviving the Spike: A Sample
12/1/11
Call for Reviews of Independent SF
11/22/11
A Call for Guest Bloggers
11/22/11
Interview With Maria Violante
11/19/11
The Indie Publishing Scene: Book Review Blogs
11/19/11
My New Goodreads Page
11/17/11
On Publishing
10/30/11
My New Facebook Page
10/20/11
New in Print . . . (After the New Wave: Science Fiction Since 1980)
8/21/11
New in Print . . . (Surviving the Spike)
8/7/11

Guardians (Chapter 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:23:00 +0000

April 1987
Bucharest, Socialist Republic of Romania
Nick looked out the porthole-like helicopter window. Below him the valley of Baia Mare gave way to the Gutai Mountains, peaks rising mile-high in the darkness around them.

He returned his attention to the bus-style passenger cabin of the aircraft and saw Candito checking his watch.

They didn't have much time left before sun-up, and Candito wasn't happy about the fact. It really was best they finish the job under cover of darkness.

Still, they were doing well to be there at all.

It was only a few hours earlier that Candito woke Nick up with a knock on his door.

Candito was wearing his sunglasses then, same as now.

"The Soviets have lost a prototype of a new aircraft they've been working on, up in Maramures County," Candito said, speaking English with a pronounced Hispanic accent that reminded Nick of some of the guys who'd worked with him back in Central America. "Probably never intended for it to end up there, couldn't help its crashing on this side of the border."

"And this involves me because . . ."

"You've got an 'in' with the government here," he said. "We want them to help us take it."

For the last three years Nick had been living in Bucharest, playing the part of an American businessman exporting Romanian agricultural products to the West, which let him get close to officials in the regime.

The idea was to keep tabs on how things were going inside the dictatorship, and to provide an unofficial line of communication between Bucharest and D.C., with an eye to giving the Soviets the maximum of trouble they could get from this direction.

But getting the Romanians to help them steal a Soviet prototype crashed on their territory seemed like a bit much, and after getting dressed and riding off with Candito Nick told him so.

We're prepared to be generous, Candito said.

Nick phoned up the Minister of Defense, who was up that night, and then went downstairs with Candito to meet his little entourage in the car – the nerdish Elliott; Stockwell, who looked like an uptight G-Man out of Central Casting; and Ermey, who reminded Nick of his high school shop teacher.

Stockwell, who was behind the wheel, drove them through the dark streets to the Minister's house.

Candito asked Nick if he knew Romanian.

Well, obviously.

Good, because none of us do.

Great, Nick thought. He'd have to do the talking.

But what was he supposed to say?

Candito talked about debt forgiveness, oil sales on favorable terms, even technology transfers.

It sounded to Nick like a bit much just for a chance to look at a broken piece of junk (the thing hadn't flown right, after all), but he nodded and went along with it. And so they went, Nick pleading their case with the Minister over a cup of black Turkish coffee.

The Minister nodded, and left the room, to make some phone calls he said. When he came back into the room he told them that a car would be taking them to Otopeni International Airport. There they boarded a Romanian Air Force Ilyushin turboprop transport that was older than everyone in the group except Ermey and flew north to Baia Mare, the seat of the county containing the crash site. At the airport outside the city they met up with Colonel Agafitei of the Romanian Land Forces, who had a pair of Mil mi-8 helicopters and a platoon of soldiers under his command.

Nick, Felix and his staff got into the colonel's helicopter, while the other carried most of the troops accompanying them. They'd take possession of the site and move out the cargo if they could, or if they couldn't, start making the arrangements for getting it away and out of the country.

"We should be coming up on the site now," Agafitei told them just after the crack of dawn.

Nick spotted the gash the crash made in the greenery covering the base of the mountain, picked out the silvery-skinned, ovoid shape that damaged the foliage on its way down. What he took to be its front end looked like it was partially buried in the ground, perhaps after coming down on its nose.

They continued closing with it, enabling Nick to make out more of the details – or more properly, the absence of details. He couldn't see any windows in its body, or any other features, and even after borrowing Agafitei's binoculars he still couldn't. Of course, it might have been the early morning light, or the angle at which he was seeing the crashed aircraft. Maybe it had just landed upside down.

Still, it really didn't look much like any plane he'd ever seen, Soviet or otherwise. More like drawings of UFOs. It occurred to Nick that maybe the Soviets were working on something big, and that was why Candito and his party had been authorized to offer the Romanians so much for their cooperation. But he was no aerospace expert, and other details arrested his attention: several shapes on the ground, people who'd gathered around it. Hikers who'd just stumbled onto the scene? No, that was too much to hope for, the way they were moving.

Soldiers.

"They are not ours," Agafitei said.

And not regular soldiers. Nick thought of special forces types.

Spetsnaz, infiltrated into the country from over the border? It certainly seemed possible.

"Those aren't ours either," Agafitei added, pointing to the helicopters coming in from the east – Soviet airspace.

Nick started counting and stopped at a dozen. This was a battalion, maybe more, making a very large, very deliberate incursion.

"Reinforcements?" Candito asked, clearly grasping at straws.

The colonel hesitated. "They won't arrive in time. Not in the needed numbers."

Nick wasn't sure about their failing to arrive in time, but he knew there was no doubting him about the numbers. If the Romanian Air Force's MiGs challenged those helicopters, they'd have their heads handed to them in the short, inglorious war certain to follow when the Soviet Air Force came for payback. And there was nothing they could do about it.

Candito's frustration was evident on his face, but he didn't argue.

Nick started identifying particular types as the helicopters closed with them. Most of them were Mi-8 transports like the one they were flying in, likely ferrying in troops. Some of the aircraft looked like those transports but bristled with weaponry. He took them for Mi-24 attack helicopters – the kind the Soviet army was using in Afghanistan.

There were also some positively giant helicopters bringing up the rear. He recognized them from television footage he'd seen of the clean-up operations at Chernobyl the previous year as Mi-26s.

Nick knew they were the biggest helicopter ever put into production, a behemoth massing four times as much as the aircraft they were flying in, and capable of hauling twenty tons of cargo in a single flight. Capable of carrying away the helicopter he was flying in easily.

If any helicopter could remove the wreck, it was that one.

"Should we bug out?" Nick asked.

"No," Candito said, and they stayed, hovering near the crash site.

The thought that the Soviet helicopters would take a shot at them crossed Nick's mind, but the Soviets didn't so much as try to shoo them away. (If they'd even radioed them to warn them off, no one told Agafitei or Candito about it.) Maybe their orders were to take no aggressive action, or even to make no contact, unless they were threatened, and the Romanians weren't up for anything that futile.

The Soviets didn't care what the passengers of these helicopters saw, just that they didn't interfere.

Maybe they didn't know there were American operatives on this helicopter, what the Romanian government had agreed to.

Maybe they did know, and the Romanians would suffer retaliation for it later on.

Frustrated as Candito clearly was, surprise wasn't one of the emotions Nick was registering. "You expected something like this," he said.

"I knew we were in a race," Candito allowed. "I didn't know we were so far behind."

Or maybe he'd just hoped they weren't, Nick thought.

Several of the Soviet helicopters landed, disgorging troops, and the squad fast became a company. Overhead a pair of Mi-24s hovered, their wing stubs heavy with rocket pods and missiles.

One of the big Mi-26s descended toward the crash site, other helicopters moving out of the way so that it could move into a hovering position over the silver ovoid. Capacious as the big helicopters were, he didn't think they were big enough to hold the craft he saw inside its cabin, and so they weren't even going to try. Instead the soldiers on the ground slung the craft underneath the giant helicopter. They moved clear of the scene and the Mi-26 lifted it clear of the ground, then high into the air. Other aircraft landed, the soldiers boarding them and flying up into the air with them, their birds following the big Mi-26 east in the early morning light.

"Well, what now?" Nick asked.

"We go in and see what's left," Candito said, sounding like he had a mouth full of gravel.

The Soviets didn't leave them a thing as far as Nick could tell. But he didn't notice them picking up broken bits, just pulling away the body of that craft from the hole.

It seemed odd that they wouldn't bother to be more thorough. After all, Nick's team was operating under a real time pressure because they were far from home, and from help; but this was the Soviets' backyard. They could do what they liked without rushing.

But then maybe there was nothing to pick up, which seemed awfully strange to Nick. How was it possible that a plane could come down like that and stay completely in one piece?

Nick thought again of the odd look of the aircraft. Now that he thought about it, it seemed very odd that the Soviets would have been flying a prototype out here, very far from any of their aircraft design centers and test ranges. And Candito's behavior increasingly struck him as very odd.

Nick looked at the others who'd flown in with Candito, saw Elliott holding a small handheld device. He'd called Ermey over, who was bending down to take a soil sample.

He walked up to them and took a better look at the device in Elliott's hand. It appeared to be a Geiger counter, a device for measuring radiation. He figured that was why Ermey was taking his samples.

That wasn't a standard part of investigating a crash site, was it? Nick wondered what might have been radioactive on the plane. Nuclear weapons? Surely the Soviets wouldn't load live warheads into a prototype? He'd heard about attempts to build a nuclear-powered plane a long time ago, but he didn't have any idea if one of those could actually work, or if anyone was trying to build one now.

He looked back in Candito's direction, saw him saying something to the colonel that Nick didn't quite hear, after which he ordered everyone back to the aircraft.

Candito walked over to him. "We're going back," he said.

"Empty-handed," Nick said. "That wasn't some Soviet prototype, was it?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Our friends are making nice now, but I'll still be here when you leave. At the very least I'll need a better cover story than the one you've given me. Especially after the crazy promises you made me give them about what we'd do for the craft."

Candito took off his sunglasses, looked him straight in the eye.

"You want me to confirm some suspicion of yours, is that it?" he asked. "Why don't you tell me what it is you think I should have told you?"

"The Russians didn't build that thing they just flew off with. And I'm guessing, neither did we." Somehow he didn't think this expedition was about keeping a crashed American prototype away from Soviet intelligence, either.

The look Candito gave him was all the confirmation Nick needed.

"Are we done here?" Candito asked.

"Yeah, we're done," Nick said.

"Good." That was the last word Candito said as they got back in the helicopter and flew back to Baia Mare, then got into the Ilyushin to fly back to the capital.

Writers Write About Writerly Advice

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:48:00 +0000

Aspiring writers face many hardships as they learn their craft and try to break into the business. One of them is the bad advice inflicted on them by all and sundry, from casual acquaintances to authors of "how-to" books and articles swathed in the mantle of Authority. Perhaps worst of all are the lists of meaningless "do"s and "don't"s that inhibit and confuse instead of help.

On his blog Earth and Other Unlikely Worlds Paul McAuley (a real writer, unlike most of those so free with their advice) points to two pieces in which writers respond to some of those classic commandments.

Charlie Jane Anders - whom you might remember as not only a contributor to the ever-useful web site io9, but the author of the short story "The Fermi Paradox is Our Business Model" (collected last year in Rich Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2011, a review of which you can find here, and available at Tor.com) - presents "10 Writing 'Rules' We Wish More Science Fiction Writers Would Break." (I particularly like her answers to numbers one and three – "No third-person omniscient," and "Avoid infodumps" – as I've long felt that infodumps get a bad rap, and that the preference for narrower viewpoints is often a matter of sheer snobbery.)

Meanwhile, at Nihilistic Kid's Journal, Nick Mamatas offers "Ten Bits of Advice Writers Should Stop Giving Aspiring Writers." (I especially like his succinct two-word response to the old truism, "Show Don't Tell.")

In the end, it all boils down to the fact that there's usually more than one way to succeed – just as there's always more than one way to fail.

"Chuck Versus The Goodbye"

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:03:00 +0000

I first started watching Chuck mainly because it was on before Heroes, and wasn't sure what to make of it at first. For one thing, the blend of atompunk spy games with post-cyberpunk technology didn't quite gel for me. (The Intersect seemed an especially hokey gimmick.) For another, the villains were bland and derivative. (Fulcrum is no S.P.E.C.T.R.E.)

But the Buymore was great, an interesting contrast with the secret agent doings in which Chuck got caught up – and Morgan and Lester and Jeff and Big Mike and the rest were the source of much of the fun from the first. There was also the writers' handling of Chuck's geekiness, and geek culture more generally, which unusually for American TV did not come off as a caricature in the mind of a schoolyard bully (unlike one Chuck Lorre sitcom I can think of), and which they also managed to cleverly work into many a plot. These two elements turned out to be just the things to breathe new life into the half-century old game of parodying James Bondian espionage, helping to produce some memorable gags and set pieces – and at its best, episodes like "Chuck Versus Tom Sawyer."

Alas, Chuck peaked early. As the show's main character became more self-assured, more at home in this element – as he went from Nerd Herder-in-over-his-head to superspy - we lost the fish-out-of-water aspect of the story that was initially a source of much of the comedy. Bringing the other characters in on the craziness didn't compensate for it, the repetition producing diminishing returns, while also dispensing with much of the comic tension created by Chuck's keeping so much of his life secret from friends and family. And as the story of Chuck and Sara shifted from "angsty tale of a guy hopelessly in love with unattainable fantasy girl" to mundane boyfriend-girlfriend stuff one might see discussed with a therapist on a daytime talk show, this too lost interest. (To paraphrase George Costanza, "Relationship Chuck" was less entertaining than "Independent Chuck.")

Of course, such changes were inevitable (it's inconceivable that Chuck could have gone on reacting to things in exactly the same way, and TV show romances which just spin their wheels get tiresome fast), but along with them went much of what made the show distinctive and appealing. Meanwhile, really clever mixes of its diverse elements became rarer – the espionage and the BuyMore comedy and the geekiness happening alongside one another rather than coming together a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Still, the show managed to be entertaining enough to keep me coming back, all the way through its five season run, which ends with the pair of episodes airing tonight.

Let's hope they make for a fitting finale.

Thoughts on "Brigadoom"

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:45:00 +0000

Watching the fourth season Sanctuary episode "Fugue," I was again struck by the tradition of "musical episodes" in recent television series, especially those in the science fiction and fantasy genres.

This is usually discussed as having begun with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Once More, With Feeling" – but as has been the case with many a genre trope, Lexx did it first, with "Brigadoom." And pulled off a very tough act.

It is worth mentioning here that when the show started airing on the Sci-Fi Channel back in 2000 (with a handful of episodes plucked out of the second series, without regard to the show's development, or the season's story arc), I wasn't impressed with what I saw. Lexx was certainly . . . different. I was intrigued by some of the characters and concepts, but the episodes themselves didn't amount to much. When I saw the commercial for a musical episode, I was skeptical.

But that didn't last, and neither did my earlier skepticism about the show. "Brigadoom" (cowritten by show creator Paul Donovan, and the late Lex Gigeroff) didn't simply have a few of the lines sung instead of spoken (the way Fringe's "Brown Betty" did, for instance), but instead offered a full-blown musical which dramatized the back story of a central character, and presented a turning point in the season's story arc (which was itself a whopper, the title of its final episode, "End of the Universe," not being overstatement).1 It helped, too, that the songs were memorable.

As the show's own writers have said in various interviews (mine included), the quality of the show varied wildly from one episode to another. "Brigadoom" was the show at its very best, which was great, and it has since been a fan favorite.

Alas, the achievement of cast and crew here has been overlooked in the general tendency to ignore or put down the show, which has been extreme, even compared with other TV space operas, toward which critics and audiences (hardcore fans aside) are famously ungenerous. Still, those writing about such episodes should remember that early moment in the history of television science fiction characters suddenly breaking out into song.

1. It is worth noting that this wasn't Lexx's first musical moment. The second part of the four-part miniseries that comprises series one, "Supernova" (which aired two years before "Brigadoom") also contains a brief but striking musical interlude.

On the Eureka Paradigm

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:41:00 +0000

Popular expectations regarding technological progress in areas from artificial intelligence to fusion, from cloning to space, have commonly been overblown. The response on the part of many is simply to regard futurists' predictions with irony, but this has never seemed a useful position to me. The reality is that we can hardly avoid making guesses about what's to come, given that we are so often obliged to think in the long-term, and to plan, especially where science and technology are concerned. Guessing poorly can have serious implications for public policy (some of which I recently touched on in my Space Review article, "Space War and Futurehype Revisited"). Consequently, instead of irresponsible dismissal of the whole enterprise of prediction, the appropriate response is to try and get better at making predictions, and at responding to predictions appropriately. (Even if the best we can hope for is to get things somewhat closer to right somewhat more often, or simply better-position ourselves to cope with the inevitable surprises, this seems to me well worth our while.)

That said, the number of pitfalls in the way of those studying such issues is staggering. Today it is almost impossible to point to any discussion of public issues which is not carried on in a fog of misinformation, and disinformation spread by vested interests and ideologues. The situation is even worse when expert knowledge is crucial (as in virtually any discussion into which science enters), and the uncertainties are large (as when one makes guesses about things that haven't happened yet, exactly the issue here), because of how much more difficult it becomes for even informed observers to make their own judgments. (Think, for instance, of how Creationists succeeded in manufacturing a "debate" over "intelligent design.")

However, this falls far short of exhausting the list, and I would argue that one big stumbling block has been a deeply flawed "folk perception" of science and technology shaped, in large part, by media produced for (and often by) people without expertise in this area. Consider, for instance, what we get in so much pop science journalism. News items about developments in science and technology, just like news items about anything else, are typically intended to be brief and punchy and accessible (read: attention-grabbing and entertaining). Breathless stories about exciting new possibilities fit these criteria far better than critical, nuanced pieces attentive to the obstacles in the way of realizing those possibilities. (Indeed, many of them make it sound as if the possibility is already a reality, as does the questionable title of this otherwise useful piece: "Quantum Keys Let Submarines Talk Securely.")

Such stories skew perceptions, and the press's lack of a memory worsens matters. After telling readers and viewers about the thrilling innovation that just might change all our lives (with the "might" sometimes in the small print), there is generally no proper follow-up; the story just fades away even as the impression it created remains. The failures lapse into obscurity, while successes are likely to get so loudly trumpeted that it can seem as if the latter are all that exist.

These attitudes may be reinforced by the endless repetition of the claim that we live in an era of unprecedentedly rapid technological progress, making historical precedents irrelevant, and implying the imminent bursting of all the old boundaries. The most extreme version of this may be Raymond Kurzweil's "Law of Accelerating Returns," which like thought on the technological Singularity in general, seems to be enjoying increased mainstream attention (as in this Time magazine piece from last year). They are reinforced, too, by a tendency to identify "technology" with "information technology" (which goes as far as Google's news aggregator compiling, under the heading of technology, numerous items that are not about technology as such, but rather the financial fortunes of IT firms). This has the effect of making the state-of-the-art in consumer electronics is taken for the yardstick of technological progress, a perception which can be very misleading given that other areas (like food and energy production, medicine and transport) have seen much slower change. Certainly there are many observers attempting to offer correctives, like Robert J. Gordon, Jonathan Huebner, Bob Seidensticker and Michael Lind, but their arguments seem to have had little traction with Apple brand-worshipping consumers who believe that their new cell phone is the telos of human history.

Still, for all its flaws, it has to be admitted that pop science journalism is far less influential than fiction, and especially television and movies, which appear to play far and away the biggest role in shaping the popular image of science. Last year a poll taken in Australia found that TV and movies were the primary source of information about science for three-quarters of those surveyed, a pattern likely typical for other developed countries. One likely consequence of this is our habituation to the thought of technologies that are only imaginary, with "hard," technologically-oriented, extrapolative science fiction set in the near future likely having the strongest impact on our thought as "rumors of the future" (as suggested by scholar Charles E. Gannon's study Rumors of War and Infernal Machines).

Additionally, science fiction routinely dramatizes the processes of science and engineering, and in the process propagates a particular view of them. The realities of science and engineering as specialized, collaborative, often slow-moving activities, participants in which often cope with multiple, knotty problems at once, some of which may be theoretical in nature; as dependent on massive amounts of organization, equipment and money controlled by people who are not scientists (indeed, often are scientific illiterates), and so susceptible to the vagaries of economics, business, politics and even personal whim; as under even the best circumstances subject to fits and starts, to dead ends and flashes-in-the-pan, with projects to develop new technologies often concluding in nearly useless prototypes, on the drawing board, or even at the concept stage; are given short shrift.

As an example of what we are much more likely to see, consider the Syfy Channel show Eureka, which centers on an imaginary town in the Pacific Northwest inhabited by a large portion of the United States' scientific elite. Eureka makes some concessions to reality in its depiction of the Global Dynamics corporation running the town, and the involvement of Pentagon functionaries in the affairs of its researchers. However, this is superficial stuff, the episodes mostly playing like twenty-first century "Edisonades," with geniuses equally adept at fields as diverse as astrophysics and molecular biology flitting from one project to the next, many of them undertaken singlehandedly in their garages; casually tinkering with toys as exotic as androids and faster-than-light drives; and during the inevitable crisis, inventing on-the-spot solutions to staggeringly complex problems that somehow always work.

Taken together, all this leaves most people imagining science as nerd-magic, and picturing R & D as a matter of omnicompetent nerd-magicians pulling solutions out of thin air – so that if a problem does need solving all we have to do is get the nerds on it and, voila, it's solved. (And if the nerd-magicians don't work quickly enough, we just have to hector them until they do, the way Sheriff Jack Carter, like many another rugged sci-fi hero, hectors the science types for a fix when there's trouble.) It also leaves audiences thinking that, to use William Gibson's phrasing, "The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed" in the literal sense of thinking that every gadget one has ever heard of must be out there, somewhere.

In short, it has them believing in the "Eureka Paradigm" of scientific and technological R& D.

Of course, there are lots of reasons why fiction still depicts science and technology in this way, long after such depictions have lost any credibility they may once have had. A fairly good one is that this simplistic approach is a better fit with dramatic requirements, easier to turn into a compact, intelligible, accessible story in which we get to focus on a few characters as interesting things happen – and to be fair, the point is to entertain, not inform. Yet, it is an appalling basis for actual consideration of how research actually proceeds, and we take such images seriously at our cost.

A Primer on the Technological Singularity
10/31/11
Why I Can't Stand The Big Bang Theory
2/1/11
The Syfy Channel: Year One
7/20/10

New and Noteworthy (Manga Industry Report, BSFA Nomination)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:59:00 +0000

In today's edition:

* From io9's Jason Thompson, an admirably comprehensive and informative article about the challenges facing the manga publishing industry in today's market, and how it might meet them.

* The British Science Fiction Association has released the shortlist for its 2011 awards. (The longlist can be found here.)

Review: Deep Six, by Clive Cussler

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:49:00 +0000

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984, pp. 432.

Clive Cussler's Deep Six (1984) can be thought of as something of a transitional work for the author, occupying a space in between his early, tightly focused, short novels like Raise the Titanic (1976), Vixen 03 (1978) and Night Probe (1981), and the later, sprawling, epic action-adventures which began with Cyclops (1986).

Even though I usually read right through Cussler's books after picking them up (back when I did read them), I started this one a few times before making much headway in it. This had much to do with the structure of the book around two main plot threads, initially quite distinct – the first, an investigation of a marine disaster in the northern Pacific, and the second, the mystery following the disappearance of the presidential yacht (with the President, Vice-President, Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate all aboard). The first mystery engages Pitt and his friends from NUMA exclusively for the first third of the book or so. They only become involved with the second mystery in the book's middle, and play only a minor role in that investigation until the last third of the story, when the two threads finally converge.

Filling the gap is a great deal of inside-the-Beltway intriguing among officials of the National Security Council and the Secret Service – which at times left me with the impression that I'd put down Cussler's book and picked up one by Tom Clancy instead. As is usual with such thrillers, Cussler's portrait of D.C. struck me as simplistic and inauthentic, devoid as it is of the sausage factory-like quality of real-life politics. His is a Washington without lobbyists and political action-committees and revolving doors between industry and government, where politicians who take campaign contributions from shady special interests are "bad apples" and the "power elite" is described as "elected," so that it seems almost a civics class textbook version of governance. The foreign politics are equally lacking in nuance, down to the foreign villains (which are, as one might expect, one-dimensional clichés that occasionally verge on racism). Indeed, the Soviet strategy comes off as astonishingly clumsy, in stark counterpoint to the tactical and technological genius the KGB and its partners display in executing the scheme.

In short, others have done this stuff before and after and in many cases better, and it is poor compensation for what is missing in the earlier parts of the story, where in their limited appearances Pitt and company do not do much more than contribute to a couple of underwater searches (the second of them treated rather briefly), and engage in some mostly stationary detective work. We are more than halfway through the story before Pitt has his first brushes with the bad guys, and it is some time after that before he gets up to his usual antics. The result is a story that gets better as it goes along, with the last third providing exactly the kind of thing for which Cussler's readers come to his books, especially in the action-packed finale full of over-the-top heroics, flashy military hardware and creative anachronism as the clock ticks down to disaster – but getting there is occasionally a slog.

Mad Men: A Second Look

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:01:00 +0000

I recently finished watching the first three seasons of Mad Men.

The second viewing confirmed many of my first impressions, but I have come away with some new thoughts as well.

Where the acclaim is concerned (the show won its fourth Emmy for Best Drama in a row last year), it would seem critics are responding not only to the aesthetic-nostalgic appeal of the show's recreation of a more glamorous-seeming era; or its iconoclastic portrayal of the early 1960s, (the echoes of Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool and Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road not groundless, but greatly exaggerated); or even its giving the audience the guilty pleasure of vicarious indulgence in un-p.c. behavior while still feeling superior to it.

The truth is that almost everything about the show is a perfect fit with highbrow critics' views on what constitutes Good Drama – the slow pace and the heavy use of indirectness and implication (e.g. subtext) to drop a massive freight of irony on the heads of its mostly unlikeable characters might seem like liabilities to many a viewer a plus in their book. The upper-middle class social setting, and the premise's allowing for a great deal of writing about writing, media about media, the positioning of identity, domestic life and suburban dissatisfaction as central themes, are likewise much in line with their tastes. And the association of show creator Matthew Weiner with the last cable drama to win such heaping (over)praise, The Sopranos (which worked in a not dissimilar manner), only helps.

All this makes the show not just a triumph of style over substance, but a reminder that pandering to the snobbery of the upmarket review pages (and the viewers who mindlessly follow their lead) can pay real dividends.

Mad Men: My Two Cents
7/31/10

Bestsellers in 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:13:00 +0000

The various publications which track book sales have, of course, compiled and published their lists of 2011's biggest sellers by this point. Here is USA Today's list of the hundred biggest sellers.

As it happened, apart from perennial mega-sellers Stephen King and Dean Koontz, and George R.R. Martin and Sookie Stackhouse (whose books are not only part of a long-running series, but enjoying greater attention because of HBO shows based on them), speculative fiction is represented predominantly by young adult authors, particularly Rick Riordan (who has an amazing seven books in the top one hundred) and Suzanne Collins (whose three Hunger Games trilogy books are numbers two, five and seven on the list, with the first book running behind only Kathryn Stockett's The Help).

This came as something of a surprise – not because of what was absent (genre fiction commands only a limited part of the market), but because of what was so strongly present. As you might have guessed, I haven't paid much attention to the YA market, despite the praises sung of it by many a genre observer. (The last one I read was Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which I found a bit of a letdown given the honors showered upon it, and in comparison with Doctorow's previous work.) To be frank, it seemed to me as if genre insiders were grasping at straws in the cause for optimism about science fiction's future they found in it; that a major reason so many major authors were turning to it was the chance to publish short books; and that even here science fiction was running a distant second to such fantasy successes as J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter saga, or Stephanie Meyers' Twilight. And at any rate, it seemed that Japanese manga and anime writers did a much better job with young adult stories than their American counterparts. (As far as I'm concerned, Buffy the Vampire Slayer can't hold a candle to anime's many high school-age action heroes – and while we are on the subject, such things as the cliffhanger in the middle of Firefly's two-hour pilot only makes the unacknowledged debts Jess Whedon owes to Japanese comics and animation that much clearer. I will also add that I wasn't in the least surprised about the comparisons between Collins' books and Koushon Takami's Battle Royale - of which I was reminded by the description of the story's premise even before running across the rip-off charges.)

Consequently, I was only dimly aware of The Hunger Games phenomenon until a few weeks ago - just as I hadn't heard about Twilight until a month before the premiere of the first movie in the series. Still, even if it seems that more was happening here than I appreciated when making my assessments about the state of the genre these past several years, its meaning seems more ambiguous given the scarcity of other science fiction on the list.

New and Noteworthy (Cora Buhlert, "Why I Hate Albert Brooks")
1/12/12
2011 Round-Up, Part II: Reflections on the Year That Was
1/2/12
On the New York Times Bestseller List . . .
10/8/10

Coming This Year: Genre Movies in 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:25:00 +0000

After a relatively quiet couple of years where the superhero movie genre has been concerned, they will be prominent again in the summer of 2012 with the release of reboots of Spiderman, the first movie in the aspiring Avengers mega-franchise, and Christopher Nolan's third Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises – and one might add, Men in Black III. (Arriving at other times, and with less grandiose expectations, there will also be Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance in February, and a new crack at the Judge Dredd franchise, Dredd, in September.)

Given this schedule the superhero movie seems poised to set movieland on fire again - though I wonder if a hard crash isn't also a possibility. Certainly I've enjoyed the genre, but the truth is that the current wave of them has been ongoing for over a decade now, rather longer than any comparable trend I can think of, and to me it has come to feel something like a financial bubble, overinflated and bound to pop sometime. (I wonder, too, about the coming crop of films. The Spiderman reboot has come along way too soon, especially given how good the first two films of Sam Raimi's trilogy were. I was impressed with The Dark Knight, but the third film in the franchise has tended to not go well for superhero movies, artistically speaking.)

The end of this year will see the release of Bond 23 (titled Skyfall, and currently shooting). Given the producers' continuation in the direction established by Casino Royale I suspect I'll have my usual gripes when I get around to seeing it, but that audiences and critics will be kinder, and the film gross a half billion-plus at the box office alone. Bond will be joined by a number of other, familiar fictional spies at theaters this year, including Jason Bourne in The Bourne Legacy (based on Eric Van Lustbader's continuation of Robert Ludlum's series, and about which I will likely have similar gripes), and Bryan Mills comes back in Taken 2, while the '80s-style action movie sends another ripple down to our time in the form of The Expendables 2.

There will be other sequels to recent hits (like the Clash of the Titans' sequel Wrath of the Titans, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Resident Evil: Retribution and the Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2), prequels to well-known properties (The Hobbit, and in a looser sense, Prometheus) and remakes (like Total Recall and, appallingly, Red Dawn). There will be 3-D reissues of '90s-era blockbusters like Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace and Titanic. (Disney's Beauty and the Beast is already in theaters now.) There will be . . .

In short, there will be much, much, much more of what we've already been getting, so much so that I feel exhausted just having gone over the list. Still, Hollywood will bring a few other well-known genre novels to the screen. John Carter (based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels about that character) is hitting the big screen in March, but there will also be big-screen versions of newer works, like The Hunger Games (also a March release), Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (June), and World War Z (December), as well as a movie based on the old Battleship game, creatively titled Battleship, which I guess is about all they were able to take from it. There might even be a movie or two that are actually not based on something else (like Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity). The result is that this year will have plenty of big "events" (with such films as The Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit and the end of the Twilight saga - enough, I suspect to quiet those observers who obsessed over weak ticket sales at the box office during 2011) and perhaps a fair amount of lightweight fun too, but few real surprises – the status quo restored to the satisfaction of all those but viewers demanding originality and other such commercially irrelevant qualities in their cinematic entertainment.

2011 Round-Up, Part II: Reflections on the Year That Was
1/2/12
Reflections on the Jason Bourne Series
10/27/11
A Fragment on Indie Film
10/18/11
From Screen to Page: Reading Ian Fleming
10/3/11
The 2011 Summer Movie Season
9/14/11
"Was 2010 the Worst Year for Movies Ever?"
1/7/11
2010 in Review
1/3/11
Give the Superheroes a Rest?
9/14/10
The End of James Bond?
8/28/10

SOPA Blackout Protest

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:23:00 +0000

I found out about the protest against SOPA (H.R. Bill 3261, innocuously named the "Stop Online Piracy Act") too late to participate properly. So I'm posting this message to indicate my solidarity with the protestors - and offering this link to blackout participant Wikipedia's FAQ on the subject.

Until tomorrow, please regard this site as also blacked out.

This blog will resume its normal operations then.

Blog Talk Radio Interview

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:40:00 +0000

I went on Alchemy of Scrawl's Blog Talk Radio show today. You can check out the interview here.

Literary R & R Reviews Surviving the Spike
1/14/12
Indie Snippets
12/20/11
Surviving the Spike: A Sample
12/1/11
Call for Reviews of Independent SF
11/22/11
A Call for Guest Bloggers
11/22/11
Interview With Maria Violante
11/19/11
The Indie Publishing Scene: Book Review Blogs
11/19/11
My New Goodreads Page
11/17/11
On Publishing
10/30/11
My New Facebook Page
10/20/11
New in Print . . . (After the New Wave: Science Fiction Since 1980)
8/21/11
New in Print . . . (Surviving the Spike)
8/7/11

Literary R & R Reviews Surviving the Spike

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 21:20:00 +0000

The blog Literary R & R recently reviewed my novel Surviving the Spike. You can check out the review here - and sample the novel itself, here.

Indie Snippets
12/20/11
Surviving the Spike: A Sample
12/1/11
Call for Reviews of Independent SF
11/22/11
A Call for Guest Bloggers
11/22/11
Interview With Maria Violante
11/19/11
The Indie Publishing Scene: Book Review Blogs
11/19/11
My New Goodreads Page
11/17/11
On Publishing
10/30/11
My New Facebook Page
10/20/11
New in Print . . . (After the New Wave: Science Fiction Since 1980)
8/21/11
New in Print . . . (Surviving the Spike)
8/7/11

New Review: Scarecrow Returns, by Matthew Reilly

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:17:00 +0000

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012, pp. 368.

Matthew Reilly's Scarecrow Returns (published last year in his native Australia as Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves) opens with a burst of action as a mysterious "Army of Thieves" captures a Russian island in the Arctic Sea – one which happens to be home to a secret Cold War-era research installation, and the site of a Soviet superweapon now in play. This event marks the beginning of a global crisis as seen by the American and Russian crisis response teams. As luck would have it, Marine Recon Captain Shane Scofield, and his longtime friend and comrade-in-arms "Mother," are with an equipment-testing team nearby – and virtually all that the American government can call on to save the day.

This book is Reilly's first Shane Scofield novel since Scarecrow (2003), almost eight years earlier, and naturally I was looking forward to it. Nonetheless, some aspects of the premise initially worried me.1 For one thing, it suggested that the globe-trotting and mystery-solving I had enjoyed in Scarecrow and the Jack West trilogy had been abandoned in a return to the more static adventures with which Reilly began his career, like Ice Station (1998) and Area 7 (2001). I'd enjoyed those books, but felt he'd since superseded them (Reilly himself has referred to them as the work of Reilly 1.0), and wasn't sure how much more juice he could extract from the older concept he'd already executed several times. Additionally, two decades after the Cold War's end the idea of a Soviet superweapon would seem to have passed its "sell-by" date – much as has long become the case with villains left over from the Third Reich. I also wasn't sure what to make of the "Army of Thieves" who comprised the villains, these seeming to be an especially senseless bunch in comparison with Reilly's previous bad guys, whose agendas, however horrific, at least had a recognizable rationale.

Fortunately, the book exceeded my expectations in all these areas. Like the books of "Reilly 1.0," Scarecrow Returns is a three-way collision between teams of special-forces soldiers at a high-tech facility in a remote, hostile landscape, but Reilly manages to keep the material fresh, the plot and action unfolding with a smoothness reflecting his now lengthy experience in telling this kind of tale. The battles are as readable as any Reilly has written (at least, when read with the aid of the numerous illustrations), while being as grand in scale and over-the-top as readers have come to expect – which is to say, unequaled by any writer working similar territory today. Reilly's particular variant on the trope of the "left-over Soviet superweapon now on the loose" is a good one, and his villain is in line with his predecessors, at least, when we get behind the mask. The novel also benefits from a number of new touches, ranging from a scene-stealing combat robot named Bertie, to a French vendetta against our hero – and a few memorable plot twists (which I won't spoil here). Additionally, cartoonish as Reilly's characters are, they are nonetheless a bit fuller and nuanced here, and their personalities do have a bearing on the tale.

That is not to say that everything is perfect. Readers demanding meticulous treatment of the technical detail will be irritated by such things as Reilly's depiction of a KH-12 satellite as a signals intelligence platform (its function is in fact optical imaging), and his repeated reference to an SS-23 as an intermediate range ballistic missile (when its 500 kilometer range actually makes it a short-range ballistic missile) – details that could have easily been corrected without requiring the slightest changes to the story. There is an incident in one of the battles (in the "Stadium") where the editing appeared to falter. (It seemed to me that Reilly wrote "trench" when he should have written "walkway" – though I'm less than a hundred percent certain of this, as those of you familiar with his action sequences can understand.) Such nit-picks aside, Reilly's use of his over-the-top plot to explore very real geopolitical issues struck me as less clever this time around, the rationale behind the action comparatively muddled, especially when compared with the almost psychic perceptiveness of the villain. (The fact that the weapon's activation frankly seems unlikely to leave any "winners" on the planet is only one of the reasons for this.)

Still, on the whole it's a satisfying read if you're up for this kind of adventure, and fans of previous books are likely to find it well worth their time. However, given the extent to which events in the previous novels bear on the story in Scarecrow Returns, readers new to the series might want to check out the previous installments (Ice Station, Area 7, and Scarecrow) first.

1. I use the original publication dates here, rather than the dates of their release in North America, my edition excepted.

Review: Matthew Reilly's Jack West Trilogy: Seven Deadly Wonders, The Six Sacred Stones, The Five Greatest Warriors.
8/20/10

On Blog Talk Radio . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:46:00 +0000

Indie writer Coral Russell, whose blog Alchemy of Scrawl has become a valuable tool for independent authors seeking to promote their work, also has a Blog Talk Radio show where they get to promote their work.

I will be on the show Monday, January 16, at 10:30 AM Mountain Standard Time, to discuss my novel Surviving the Spike (which you can preview here).

Lex Gigeroff, 1962-2011

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:58:00 +0000

As many of you already know, Lex Gigeroff, best known as one of the three principal writers on Lexx (as well as a sometime actor on that show, in such memorable roles as Barnabas K. Huffington), died last month, on December 24, at the age of forty-nine.

I had only one exchange with Mr. Gigeroff, when I interviewed him for my retrospective on that series back in 2007, but I found him friendly, witty and helpful, as he has generally been to those who knew him, and there is no question that he will be missed.

As might be expected, social media is one avenue through which these sentiments are being expressed: there is now a Lex Gigeroff Memorial page on Facebook (the page, and the memorial event it mentions, came to my attention only after they passed), as well as a tribute video on YouTube, which fans and well-wishers can check out.

New and Noteworthy (Cora Buhlert, "Why I Hate Albert Brooks")

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:54:00 +0000

In today's edition:

* An interesting post by Cora Buhlert, discussing several topics, including how the Singularity fell out of fashion, and her thoughts on the popularity of YA dystopia. (Interestingly, she finds the latter to be a specifically American phenomenon, reflective of the upbringing of American adolescents, whom she compares to their German counterparts.)

* For those who haven't seen it before, here's Wayne Sheldrake's "Why I Hate Albert Brooks" (originally published in the August 2008 Writer's Digest), which offers a much-needed corrective on that subject I've mentioned here before: the gross overabundance of movies about writers, almost all of which trot out the same stupid (and mostly baseless) clichés about "the writing life." (Frankly, I'm astonished that such films are so common – after all, they're written by writers, exactly the people who should know better – and that pieces criticizing them aren't much more common – given that many of them not only know better, but like Sheldrake, must be irked by the falsity of what they see.)

New and Noteworthy (Charlie's Diary, Syfy Programming)

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:51:00 +0000

In today's edition, a couple of items from the past few weeks:

* A number of interesting posts over at Charlie's Diary, including a string of guest posts by cyberpunk great Rudy Rucker (starting with a piece on mind-uploading, the theme of his classic 1982 novel Software), Charles Stross's offer of another "Rule 34 moment" (in a recent news story on the deliberate hiring of psychopaths by financial firms), and more recently, Charles Stross's own predictions for 2032.

* An update from Airlock Alpha's Michael Hinman on what the Syfy Channel's recent executive hires say about its direction. (You guessed it – more reality television. At this point, I shouldn't even bother saying what I think of that, if only because I've run out of new ways to say it, and at any rate, the comments already appended to this post make the point.)

2011 Round-Up, Part III: Things I Never Want to Hear About Again

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:38:00 +0000

Those who read this blog regularly are probably aware that there's rather a long list of pop cultural items I don't want to hear about ever again – not least because I wish I'd never heard of them in the first place. Many of them are grossly overexposed celebrities. (Like Jane Lynch.) Most of them are reality shows, and people (pseudo-celebrities?) who owe their fame to those shows. (Jersey Shore and its cast are examples of these items which joined the list this past year.)

Still, other material does find its way there – like The Big Bang Theory. This past February I shared my thoughts on the subject of why I can't stand that particular show, which has since confirmed its place in this list during the publicity for the show's explosion into syndication, inundating American television with reruns of the sitcom, and commercials for said reruns. All by itself TBS is broadcasting the show eleven hours a week, in prime time slots on four different nights, as if its name stands for T(he) B(ig Bang Theory) S(tation), which is a depressing thought indeed.

2011 Round-Up, Part II: Reflections on the Year That Was
1/2/12
2011 Round-Up, Part I: The Best of Raritania
1/2/12

Thoughts on W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:37:00 +0000

W. Somerset Maugham is perhaps best known for his books Of Human Bondage (1915) and The Razor's Edge (1944), but students of the spy novel know him by another book, Ashenden: Or The British Agent (1928), a collection of loosely connected stories about the adventures of the titular figure in the service of British intelligence during World War I.

In the course of the narration Maugham touched on many of the difficulties of turning the spy story into entertainment with surprising frankness, as when he observed that

Being no more than a tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine, [Ashenden] never had the advantage of seeing a completed action. He was concerned with the beginning or the end of it, perhaps, or with some incident in the middle, but what his own doings led to he had seldom a chance of discovering. It was as unsatisfactory as those modern novels that give you a number of unrelated episodes and expect you by piecing them together to construct in your mind a connected narrative (Maugham, 7).1

Rather making "a picture out of the various pieces of the jigsaw puzzle" was the prerogative of "the great chiefs of the secret service in their London offices" (Maugham, 101).

Maugham offered another thought of the kind in regard to Ashenden's routine as a case officer when he observed that:

Ashenden's official existence was as orderly and monotonous as a City clerk's. He saw his spies at stated intervals and paid them their wages; when he could get hold of a new one he engaged him, gave him his instructions . . . he waited for the information that came through and dispatched it; he kept his eyes and ears open; and he wrote long reports which he was convinced no one read till having inadvertently slipped a jest into one of them he received a sharp reproof for his levity. The work he was doing . . . could not be called anything but monotonous (Maugham, 101).

As Maugham's remark demonstrates, the "tiny rivet" problem has been a big one for writers across the whole history of the spy genre (though it has loomed increasingly large as time has gone on). Some have responded by contriving ways to put their protagonists at the center of events, so that only do they see a "completed action," but that the action can be thought of as in large part their own, as writers as diverse as John Buchan and John Le Carre, Eric Ambler and Ian Fleming, are known to do. (The approach tends to have the author writing in unlikely coincidences or exceptional organizational circumstances; forcing their heroes to become independent operators, whether as hapless outsiders or insiders forced to go rogue; or simply ignoring bureaucratic realities.) More recently they have deemphasized the rivets and instead concentrated on offering a broad picture of that "vast and complicated machine" – as Frederick Forsyth, and later even more completely, Tom Clancy have done. (These describe the machine's operations at length, and rather than focusing their narrative on one character, or a few characters, use a large number of viewpoint characters to show a great many aspects of the machine's functioning, so that the vast plot is really the heart of the story, and the national security state the real protagonist.) And on the whole, they have been far more prone to present their spies acting like detectives investigating a crime or carrying on a manhunt, heist men planning a black bag job, special operations soldiers, or fugitives on the run, than actual case officers in the business of handling agents.

Maugham, however, works within the reality he describes. Unsurprisingly, he eschews the thriller conventions writers like E. Phillips Oppenheim, John Buchan and H.C. "Sapper" McNeil had already popularized – and at the same time, the treatment of espionage as a dark, degrading drama of seedy little men, already demonstrated by Joseph Conrad in works like The Secret Agent (1907). Instead, the intelligence work tends to be a backdrop to other dramas, as with his adventure in pre-Revolutionary Russia (in which we see almost nothing of what he is actually doing as a British agent). Reading these I was often reminded of Maugham's irony and humor (at its best in the episodes involving the "Hairless Mexican," and Russia, the "Love and Russian Literature" being especially funny if you have the context for the joke). The result is, unsurprisingly, a book that holds up rather better than many contemporaneous classics of the spy genre.

1. The edition I have cited is the following: Maugham, W. Somerset, Ashenden: Or, The British Agent (Mattiuck, NY: The American Reprint Company, 199?), pp. 304.

Two Reviews: Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks and Carte Blanche by Jeffrey Deaver
11/1/11
Reflections on the Jason Bourne Series
10/27/11
From Screen to Page: Reading Ian Fleming
10/3/11
Returning to Sahara: The Dirk Pitt Novels On Screen
2/15/11
Reflections on the Dirk Pitt Series
2/10/11
The End of James Bond?
8/28/10

Over at My Other Blog . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 19:45:00 +0000

Over at my other blog I offer a round-up of my writings on international affairs, technology and space from 2011. You can check it out here.

2011 Round-Up, Part II: Reflections on the Year That Was

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:51:00 +0000

On the whole I read, and even watched, less science fiction this year, and little of this year's output. To be perfectly honest, I needed a bit of a break after the work involved in getting my two books – my novel Surviving the Spike (which you can sample the first three chapters of here), and my essay collection After the New Wave - into print (as well as being caught up in getting two more ready, work which is just about done now, and which you'll hear about soon).

As you might expect, I got in my two cents about the year as a whole over at Strange Horizons' "Year in Review," where you can also check out what all the other site's reviewers and writers have had to say about it for a really comprehensive picture of 2011. Beyond my comments there, here are my thoughts.

Television
The broadcast of the last episodes of Caprica and Stargate: Universe (the cancellations of which were announced in late 2010) have left North American television without a first-run space opera on the air. (By contrast, the boom years of the '90s often saw four or more such series airing at once.) Indeed, the genre's profile in this medium hasn't been this low since before Star Trek: The Next Generation helped launch a TV revolution in 1987 (which is only one reason why I'll miss SGU at least a little).

Syfy's Eureka is also on its way out (just one more season to go), though the channel's Warehouse 13 (a fantasy version of Eureka, which benefits from its chucking the nonsensical view of scientific R & D, and the tiresome scientist cliches), however, will be coming back, and the same remains at least a possibility for Sanctuary (best enjoyed as science fiction about science fiction, reminiscent of Warren Ellis's Planetary). (While I was initially ambivalent about both shows, and still regard them both as far from perfect, they have tended to get better as they went along, and have certainly grown on me.) Syfy also premiered Being Human (which I didn't watch, though not out of loyalty to the original, which I didn't see either), and Alphas (which certainly isn't ground-breaking, but managed to be more entertaining than I'd guessed another show about superheroes would be), and is set to offer more of the same, not only second seasons of these two shows, but another urban fantasy series with Lost Girl (which premiered in Canada in 2010), and a second superhero series, Three Inches (which, to go by the commercials, offers somewhat more parody than most of the recent shows with that theme).

NBC has put an end to the Monday science-fiction line-up which during the past five seasons offered viewers such shows as Heroes (2006-2010), Chuck (2007-) and The Event (2010-2011). The last season of the last survivor of this wave of shows, Chuck, was kicked over to Friday night, where it has been paired with another new urban fantasy series, Grimm. (Indeed, the famous "death slot" has been crowded with genre programming this fall, with CW airing the second season of Nikita head to head with Chuck, and the seventh season of Supernatural in the same time slot as Grimm, while FOX airs Fringe at 9 PM – which has all of them are fighting that much more over the same fan base, but then the reason they are in this slot in the first place is that the networks aren't all that invested in them.)

Smallville wound up its long ten season run, the remake of V died (unlamented by this reviewer), and the more recent The Cape (yes, another superhero show, but one which just about managed to get me following it) aired its tenth and final episode online only. On the other hand, FOX launched one of the most technically ambitious (and hard-sfish) science fiction shows to air on a major network in some years, Terra Nova. The show, which initially attracted a great deal of excitement in the entertainment press with its promising premise and abundant spectacle, finished its first season in December - without a decision on whether there will be a second, not a good sign given the (unrealistically?) high expectations which surrounded the premiere, big budget, and of course, FOX's well-known track record of killing off genre shows.

In short, I think I was right when I said that we are going to see less science fiction on the major networks for a while. But we are seeing something of a mini-boom of the genre on cable, where Falling Skies (TNT), Camelot (STARZ) and Game of Thrones (HBO) won second seasons, while The Walking Dead (AMC) and True Blood (HBO) continue to draw audiences.

Film
The end of the Harry Potter series, and new Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean and Twilight movies were, as everyone expected, huge hits. Superhero movies were a presence too, with several making decent money, but they didn't hit the highs of previous years (the biggest hit, Thor, fell well of the $200 million mark domestically, and the half billion dollar mark globally). Retro-sf and fantasy, and period adventure more generally (including the X-Men and Captain America movies, Super 8, Cowboys & Aliens, Hugo and Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows) were quite abundant, but drew an ambivalent response from audiences, particularly in the U.S.. Three-D may be wearing out its welcome (as 3-D surcharges certainly are). Indeed, such may have played a role in the relatively weak earnings of theaters over the year, with one weekend after another lamented by industry-watchers as a disappointment (the weekend of December 9-11 judged the worst in over three years, and one of the very worst over the past decade). This entailed some exaggeration, recent ticket sales apparently still within the normal range from the last three decades (four to five per capita annually), though there are signs that the demographics of the movie audience are changing, with young males becoming a tougher audience in the United States. (However, this seems unlikely to reduce Hollywood's emphasis on action and effects-heavy blockbusters, as these continue to do well globally, making for a record three movies breaking the billion dollar mark in ticket sales this past summer.)

Books
It is probably my reading that has been affected most of all by my break from the genre. In any given year, most of the science fiction I read is older material – often classics I never got around too, like M. John Harrison's brilliant The Centauri Device. However, in 2011 even the work I reviewed for outside venues tended to have been published before – as with the stories in Rich Horton's The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (a best of 2010 anthology), and Pat Cadigan's final novel, 2001's Dervish is Digital.

Still, it did seem to me that good genre books (and even though it seems less abundant now, good hard science fiction), are still being published, and even if the lists of releases I saw didn't tempt me enough to go back just yet, I did see some of this year's new stuff, including interesting signs of the times in editor Gordon Van Der Gelder's climate change-themed anthology Welcome to the Greenhouse (uneven, though it contains some interesting pieces), and the issue of two prequels to David Wingrove's Chung Kuo series. (I reviewed the first, Son of Heaven, for Strange Horizons.) Similarly worth mentioning here is the debut of a new genre magazine, Fantastique Unfettered (my review of the first issue of which you can find here).

Also notable (if comparatively marginal to a discuss of speculative fiction) is the release of a new Bond novel during the past year – Jeffrey Deaver's Carte Blanche, which instead of continuing in the retro approach of Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care (which picked up after Fleming's last book, The Man With the Golden Gun), did a reboot of the series comparable to Casino Royale (with similarly mixed results, in my view).

However, as I've said elsewhere, for me the really big story in publishing has been the explosion of the e-book, and its implications for "indie" authors, who may be a long way from displacing traditional publishing (even Amanda Hocking's ultimately capitalized on her indie success to make a deal with St. Martin's), but from which we can expect to hear more. At the very least, it's probably going to play a bigger role in the apprenticing and initial exposure of new authors, given how averse traditional publishing has become to this crucial aspect of the business.

Of course, a principal reason for considering what we've seen is always the better consideration of what we might see. What are you looking forward to seeing and reading in 2012?

2011 Round-Up, Part I: The Best of Raritania

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:50:00 +0000

Below is a listing of my more substantive posts from over the past year, organized by category.

Book Excerpts
Surviving the Spike: A Sample
12/1/11
On Publishing (From After the New Wave)
10/30/11

Republished Articles
"A Revolution of Falling Expectations: Whither the Singularity?" New York Review of Science Fiction 23.9 (May 2011), pp. 19-20.

Book Reviews
Fiction
The Centauri Device, by M. John Harrison." Raritania (November 30, 2011).

"Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks." Raritania (November 1, 2011).

"Carte Blanche, by Jeffrey Deaver." Raritania (November 1, 2011).

"Russian Spring, by Norman Spinrad." Raritania (October 30, 2011).

"Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, edited by Rich Horton." Tangent (September 3, 2011).

"Dervish is Digital, by Pat Cadigan." Strange Horizons (August 29, 2011).

"Welcome to the Greenhouse: New Science Fiction on Climate Change, by Gordon Van Der Gelder." Tangent (June 4, 2011).

"Son of Heaven, by David Wingrove." Strange Horizons (May 27, 2011).

"The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers." Raritania (May 12, 2011).

"Empress of Eternity, by L.E. Modesitt Jr.." Strange Horizons (February 28, 2011).

Nonfiction
"Review: Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard, by Mark Finn." Raritania (October 18, 2011).

"The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Books to the Big Screen, by Jeremy Black." Raritania (September 25, 2011).

"The Sound of No Hands Clapping: A Memoir, by Toby Young." Raritania (February 22, 2011).

"Wizardry & Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy, by Michael Moorcock." Raritania (January 11, 2011).

Other Reviews
"Fantastique Unfettered, #1, Winter 2010." March 24, 2011.

Other Posts
Happy Winter Solstice
12/21/11
On the Word "Lifestyle"
11/19/11
Watching Jeremiah
11/8/11
Trillion Year Spree, Twenty-Five Years On
11/6/11
A Primer on the Technological Singularity
10/31/11
Reflections on the Jason Bourne Series
10/27/11
Regarding The British TV Model
10/23/11
A Fragment on Indie Film
10/18/11
The Life of a Literary Genre: Considering The Mystery
10/16/11
From Screen to Page: Reading Ian Fleming
10/3/11
The 2011 Summer Movie Season
9/14/11
Of Mary Sue and Gary Stu
7/9/11
Returning to Sahara: The Dirk Pitt Novels On Screen
2/15/11
Reflections on the Dirk Pitt Series
2/10/11
Why I Can't Stand The Big Bang Theory
2/1/11
"Was 2010 the Worst Year for Movies Ever?"
1/7/11
2010 in Review
1/3/11

Happy New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Nader) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:49:00 +0000

Happy 2012 everybody. May this year be your best yet – and all of us, still here in 2013 to laugh at the "apocalypse 2012" believers who have made such a pain of themselves for a decade now.