If you’re curious what I’ll be up to at CONvergence this year, you’re in luck because I’ve just dropped a not-quite-full schedule over on the Skiffy and Fanty Show blog! The schedule will be updated later w/ other happenings; for now, enjoy the huge list of panels, some of which I’m actually on!
John Chu’s recent post over at The Booksmugglers is a must read. He talks about the difficulty of including foreign language in works of fiction and has some truly interesting things to say on the subject. An excerpt: Whereas listeners might reasonably experience that orchestration both ways, readers either understand a foreign language or they don’t. However, like how the orchestration of the Carousel Waltz must be compelling in either instrumentation, a story that makes use of dialect or foreign language must be compelling either way. Non-fluent readers must never feel as though something is missing but fluent readers must never feel as though anything is extraneous. Go on. Read the whole thing.
I had a bit of an disaster today: I got stuck in a thunderstorm, which resulted in my backpack, my notebooks, and my copy of Ink and Steel by Elizabeth Bear getting soaked through. Since the Bear book is the one I’m supposed to be reading for MMPB Bingo, I’ve decided to temporarily jump ahead to the next shelf on the same bookcase (front row of books) so I can at least start reading something else while Ink and Steel dries out. If you’ve not seen this before, here’s how it works: You find a book in one of the images below that you’d like me to read (if you load the images on their own, they should be large enough to read everything without squinting). You leave a comment below telling me why you’d like me to read and review it. There are no guidelines for this part. You can say something silly. You can be dead serious. You can appeal to my corrupt side. Doesn’t matter. I’ll pick whichever comment sounds most appealing to me. I pick a winner, and then I read and review the book. It’s pretty straight forward, no? So have at it. Here are the images:
I didn’t come to this novel with many expectations. The cover description didn’t exactly entice me, but I figured I could give it a shot to surprise me. And surprise me it did. This is by far my least favorite read of 2014 thus far, though the Hugo Award packet may offer a few surprises in the near future. From the first chapter, I knew I would hate this book, and by page 100, I gave up because it showed no signs of improving. If there’s one good thing to say about having picked up RedDevil 4, it’s that I learned never to read anything written by Douglas Preston or Steve Berry, both of whom provided cover blurbs; if Preston found anything here that “blew [his] mind,” he clearly doesn’t know a cliche when it smacks him repeatedly in the eyes. And if Berry thought I’d “[savor] a peck into the psyche [and] one into the future as well,” I’d just assume he doesn’t know what words mean. In short, this is going to be a mean review. Prepare yourself. Here’s the cover description: Renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Hagan Maerici is on the verge of a breakthrough in artificial intelligence that could change the way we think about human consciousness. Obsessed with his job and struggling to save his marriage, Dr. Maerici is forced to put his life’s work on the line when a rash of brutal murders strikes St. Louis. Edwin Krantz, an aging, technophobic detective, and his ex-Navy SEAL partner, Tara Dezner, are tasked with investigating the horrifying killings. Shockingly, the murders have all been committed by high-profile citizens who have no obvious motives. Seeking an explanation for the suspects’ strange behavior, Kranzt and Dezner turn to Dr. Maerici, who believes that the answer lies within the killers’ in-brain computer implants. Soon Tara Dezner begins to suspect that the doctor himself is a key piece of the puzzle. As the investigation turns to Dr. Maerici’s own work, it threatens to expose the doctor’s long-buried mistake–a mistake that now stands to endanger the lives of millions. With time running out, this trio of unlikely allies must face a gauntlet of obstacles, both human and AI, as they attempt to avert disaster. Ultimately, the key to survival may lie in the boundary between man and machine…a boundary that is becoming more ambiguous by the minute. Almost all of RedDevil 4‘s problems are a result of its structure. Billed as a thriller, Leuthardt’s novel follows the typical structure of a James Patterson-esque novel. This might not be a problem if the novel remained focused on a title character, as Patterson mostly does in the first of his Alex Cross novels, Along Came a Spider; RedDevil 4, however, shifts between multiple characters: Hagan, Krantz, Trent (a seemingly random virtual reality user), Reverend Elymas (who uses special drugs to enhance his “performance”), the Chameleon (a drug dealer), and some other mostly irrelevant figures. There are so many POVs in the first 100 pages that the novel’s main plot points — mysterious murders and Hagan’s invention — make little to no progress. This is a 300-page novel, and yet barely anything of note actually occurs in the first third. Even when things do happen, they are painfully cliche and hopelessly detached from anything resembling actual people. These are the second and third biggest problems with this novel. A poorly structured novel is fully capable of transcending its limitations if it can provide adequate characters to distract the reader from the other issues. RedDevil 4, unfortunately, doesn’t have adequate characters. Hagan, the apparent protagonist of the novel, is about as wooden and cookie-cutter as you can get. Scientist working overtime to create some newfangled thing? Check. Is he pressured by corporate interests? Check. Does he have marital problems because he works too much? Check. Does he try to justify those problems by saying “but I is gonna make sumfin good, dood”? Check. One can certainly write a scientific cliche well, but Leuthardt provides so little actual emotion and depth to Hagan’s character that you could have deleted him from the first 100 pages and not have noticed at all. There’s nothing new about Hagan’s archetype. We’ve seen this dozens of times before. It’s like being on autopilot. When I see scientists in this situation, I desperately hope they won’t be like Hagan. In this case, I found myself utterly disinterested in what was happening with Hagan; I didn’t care about his marital issues because they felt as common place and desensitized as breathing. The other characters are equally as undeveloped. Trent doesn’t appear to have any real connection to any of the other narratives, nor are his internal emotions, motivations, or desires demarcated in any way other than the most basic sense. Like Hagan, Trent (and most any other character here) could be deleted without causing any real damage to the existing narratives. Additionally, none of the characters seem to be connected in any significant way, except for the Chameleon and Elymas, who have a “business” relationship (drugs). It’s as if Leuthardt started out by writing three bog standard genre novels, and then he shoved them all together and called it RedDevil 4. I’m sure the dots are connected later on in the novel, but I couldn’t get over the lifelessness of the characters to convince myself the rest was worth reading. Even if I could get over the characters, though, the rest of the novel reads just as cliche. AI inventions are not new to science fiction, nor are scientists with marital problems, virtual reality users who become obsessed with the virtual and unearth weirdness, etc. The closest thing to “new” in this novel are the religious elements, but these are mostly stuck in the background. A novel about the public’s debates over the moral and ethical questions raised by artificial intelligence (with a side of terrorism) might actually make for an interesting read. But, again, that’s not RedDevil 4. In short, I pretty much
I’m not going to re-hash old arguments about grimdark or gory fiction or whatever. Originally, I had meant to respond to the question “can fiction be too gritty?” I’m not convinced that fiction has limits in any standardized sense. Some of us may not like gore or grit (or that grr feeling we get when an author kills a favorite character), but others do; the idea that fiction as a whole cannot have material for each of us on the basis of some arbitrary standard about what is “too much” seems preposterous to me. You like gory fiction? Great, here’s a whole bunch of stuff just for you (says Fiction)! I think the more interesting question is “why does grit bother some of us?” There are a lot of ways to approach that question. Take Game of Thrones as an obvious example. (Spoilers ahead) As a show, Game of Thrones is often violent and “unsafe” in the sense that its characters are always on the chopping block. People die painful, horrifying deaths when we least expect them to. The recent death of Oberyn at the hands of the Mountain is a great example. Most of us who had not read the books had a few expectations: either he would defeat the Mountain, he would die by getting quickly cut down, or he would survive long enough to be killed at some other time. Up to Season 4, I think most of us loyal viewers knew that Oberyn was too good to be true (or too awesome to live). What we got was one of the most gruesome death scenes in the show’s history. Personally, I had two reactions to Oberyn’s death: one of absolute shock that a favorite character died (putting another favorite character, Tyrion, at risk) and one of horror at the imagery I was shown. Oberyn’s death was graphic. It was gory, it was “real,” and it was the kind of gritty realism we’ve come to expect from the show. And it shocked us (well, it shocked me). If you’re curious, the scene can be found here (I can’t watch it again… Warning: it is extremely graphic). Perhaps what bothers us about these instances is a kind of subconscious longing for a fantasy — not necessarily for a world that literally does not exist (i.e., a fictional fantasy), but rather for a fantasy of action wherein some small piece of the good vs. evil dichotomy is maintained. Game of Thrones consistently shatters that dichotomy. Villains survive while our heroes fall. Villains become our heroes. Heroes become our villains. Everything is gray and messy. Gritty fantasy represents a kind of hyperreal that counteracts our everyday fantasies — fantasies we maintain for ourselves by selecting what we see, hear, and read (and in a totally meta way, reading/viewing Game of Thrones is a deliberate action on our part). Fantasies about right and wrong, good and evil, life and death. They make up life on this planet. Those fantasies are, I think, partly why some hold onto the idea that Superman is a kind of adult boy scout. Man of Steel (2013) broke that — to a certain degree. It took what many have come to love about the character and shifted it ever so slightly to the side (in my estimation) so that what we saw was a Superman living in a world not unlike our own. A Superman who had grown up with the fantasies of everyday life tossed aside by the gritty truth of what it means to be an alien super being in a world that can barely handle its technological powers. Man of Steel never needs to talk about weapons of mass destruction, but the commentary is always there. Superman is a weapon of mass destruction. But he’s worse than that: he’s a weapon that nobody can seem to control, much like his Kryptonian counterparts. There’s a brilliant scene in Man of Steel where Superman willingly gives himself over to the authorities after the Earth is threatened with destruction by Zod; the military shackles him, but it’s all a show on Superman’s part, as he eventually breaks the bonds to make a point: Let’s put our cards on the table, General. You’re scared of me because you can’t control me. You don’t. And you never will. But that doesn’t mean I’m your enemy. In the context of the United States’ attempts to control who has WMDs, Superman is the ultimate threat — a veritable bomb waiting to go off in mankind’s backyard that nobody can control. And that bomb does go off in Man of Steel. Superman’s very presence serves as a flashing beacon that says “super beings can come destroy shit here.” And they do. Superman included. They destroy a lot of shit. It’s only a natural response on humanity’s part to try to determine where Superman lives at the end of the movie. That Superman tries to wave that away by saying “hey, no worries, I’m an American, dude” shouldn’t inspire any of us. After all, America is hardly the bastion of restraint. The attempt to make Superman a grittier figure is, for me, a good thing, in part because Superman is supposed to exist in our world. It makes little sense for him to have developed a sense of morality and justice that doesn’t represent a reality that is accessible. But I understand why people disliked Man of Steel and Snyder’s/Nolan’s gritty reinterpretation. The film performs the same attack on the fantasy of everyday life as Game of Thrones. Worse, Man of Steel shatters the double-fantasy of the comics by discarding the Superman many have come to love in favor for a gritty alternative. The idea that a fantasy pervades our everyday lives or that it can be supplanted by another fantasy property suggests, I think, the intersection between the desire for narrative depth and the relationship between grit and complexity. As television properties become increasingly more narrative-based and series like Game of Thrones or movies with the same agenda as
The following video is supposedly the only video interview with Arthur Conan Doyle. I don’t know if that’s true, but it fascinating as a piece of cinematic and literary history. Enjoy!
