books

(in no particular order, except Training Day)

Training Day
Road to Perdition (Sam Mendes--ugh)
The Matrix Reloaded
Matrix Revolutions
V for Vendetta (bad decade for the Wachowskis)
Wrong Turn
Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut (see the original if you can)
Minority Report
War of the Worlds (Cruise/Spielberg--nightmare combo)
Collateral (Cruise + "hit man helps cabby realize his dreams")
Changing Lanes
Batman Begins
The Island
The Incredibles (and all Pixar)
Assault on Precinct 13 (crapping on genius)

No one ever talks about the moral redemption in Philip K. Dick novels. (There are too many other interesting things going on in them.) It's ironic that one of Dick's largest supporters is Jonathan Lethem, who helped Dick executor Paul Williams raise the science fiction writer's profile in the '80s and recently acted as a kind of guest curator for Dick's Library of America volumes. (Would PKD have been chosen for the series if not for Lethem's imprimatur? It can't have hurt.) Lethem's early sci fi-ish novels weren't big on moral redemption, either. But he ascended to the upper literary strata, in a position to put his damaged idol over the top, by demonstrating to earnest book reviewers that he, Lethem, could write about growth and such. A couple of sound bites from the NY Times regarding his newest, Chronic City:

Chronic City
By JONATHAN LETHEM
Reviewed by GREGORY COWLES

Headline writer: "This exuberant novel set in a drug-addled, alternate-reality Manhattan is at its heart a traditional story of moral and intellectual development."

Cowles: "Chronic City is a dancing showgirl of a novel, yet beneath the gaudy makeup it’s also the girl next door: a traditional bildungsroman with a strong moral compass. Under Perkus’s tutelage, Chase moves from placid compliance toward engagement and self-­determination; the actor learns to take action, not just direction."

Have been reading this Wikipedia summary of Dr Bloodmoney and wondering how it could ever be a great book or a Hollywood movie without the obvious moral education of one or more characters. Dr. Bloodmoney turned over a new leaf after he poisoned the world with radiation but then was killed by Hoppy Harrington the waldo-assisted mutant. Bill, the fetal conjoined twin who then defeats Hoppy became, one supposes, a whole person as a result of his experiences.

Greg Egan critiques a pompous and off-the-mark review of his book Incandescence. He didn't need to--the writing is effectively self-negating.

A bit of a culture clash here: the critic, Adam Roberts, who teaches English literature as well as writing and reviewing science fiction, has rather conventional expectations for a novel. Science fiction writer Egan is, if not exactly poMo, then what I would call a genre experimentalist who is well known for inserting slabs of uncut scientific prose into narratives. Incandescence, his latest, is ballsy in its "notion that the theory of general relativity — widely regarded as one of the pinnacles of human intellectual achievement — could be discovered by a pre-industrial civilisation with no steam engines, no electric lights, no radio transmitters, and absolutely no tradition of astronomy" and also that readers can be walked through this premise.

In his analysis of Roberts' hatchet job for Strange Horizons, Egan contemplates the unthinkable, that readers will have a pad and pencil handy to jot notes on the physics he describes in thought experiment form in Incandescence. The book hopes you will draw conclusions by thinking across the gap between its two narratives--those of the pre-industrials and the post-humans who are tracking them. That's a gap some readers consider unbridged--I have my own theory of the ending but since so many reviewers are avoiding spoilers my universe for comparison has been tiny.

As Egan states, Roberts obviously just hates Incandescence and lobs one nitpicky dart after another hoping one will strike an artery. He complains about Egan not using compass directions when the whole point of the book is describing physics in a world without compass directions. Roberts quotes a memorable description of alien sex and attempts to ridicule it by "creatively" rewriting a love scene from Henry James in supposedly similar clinical terms. This flight of fancy is wince-inducing, all right. Roberts works in plugs for his own books and then writes a mock-humble comment (after Egan blasts him) that Egan "will still be a major figure when this review, and reviewer, are forgotten." That's for sure!

Recent reading (as in books, paper ones):

1. Richard Stark's "Parker" novels slug you in the gut and walk away. The stories, being republished by U. of Chicago press, have new forwards by John Banville and Luc Sante in the proud tradition of explaining to dumb Americans how good their "popular" writers are. The adventures of an amoral heister who, like the author, has everybody's number. Just learned from Wikipedia that the Godard movie Made in USA was based on The Jugger. The late Donald Westlake (Richard Stark's real identity) sued to stop distribution in America. Wikipedia is silent on whether the movie's belated release stateside had anything to do with Westlake's death.

2. Donald Westlake's "Dortmunder" novels. More trifling than the Parker books but amusing for their in-depth New York locations.

3. Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. 800 pages of literary scientifiction puzzlement set in a dying Earth landscape. This is considered a classic but I wonder how much appeal it has outside the hard core of genre readers. Much of the draw is figuring out which tropes (laser weapons, dimensional gates, neurological drugs) are being described by the ignorant, unreliable narrator in this post-apocalyptic medieval setting. Wolfe's visual imagination (strangely claustrophobic and inward-looking even when the vistas are soaring) and his oddball archaic language (based on historical research rather than the usual penchant for calling aliens names like "Qwarlo") keep you reading.

4. Kingsley Amis, One Fat Englishman. The friend who lent me this tells me it is Amis' self-caricature. In the mold of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One and Nabokov's books where a sophisticate from across the pond recoils in horror at American slick empty-headedness. Roger Micheldene, the narrator, offers no alternative: for all his verbal dexterity he is a consummate horse's ass. I found myself looking forward to Micheldene's sparring with a young beat-ish writer, who is also a jerk.