As an aside, my father became increasing disgusted with the Gerrold series when he concluded that the guy is a pedophile given his lavish descriptions of characters having sex with young boys.
Terrific review! I love waking up to original content on Horrorthon.
One of the things that put me off originally were these sloppy jokes (?) about people being gay and indiscriminate use of the word "fag" without having earned it. It wasn't homophobic, just seeming more at home in 1963 instead of 1983. I wasn't hard to figure out the author is gay, but pedophile is a surprise. Guess I have that to look forward to.
1) I wish my Patton Oswald post had "dominated the blog over the weekend." It only got three comments; I assumed that everyone missed it.
2) The Emperor's lightning sound was, I believe, a reference to Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me.
3) I saw Lynch's Dune before I read the book, actually. So I kind of dug it. I had nothing to compare it to, so all I got from the movie was that it was an attempt at a genuinely different approach to epic sci-fi. Later (Junior Year of college, actually) I read the book and realized how badly they'd screwed it up. It was kind of like all those idiots who admired Francis Coppola's Dracula ("He added a sexual subtext...and a commentary on Victorian mores! Brilliant!" Jordan: "He didn't 'add' anything, you idiots") but with me, Jordan, as the idiot.
4) If I don't ignore your detours through Gibson and Phillip K. Dick, I'll never finish this comment!
5) You've hit on the basic conundrum of written sci-fi. A movie shows you several ideas at the same time, but a novel is only one sentence (and one word) at a time. (J.J. Abrams on the Star Trek commentary track, during the shot of Kirk and Bones on the Starfleet Campus discussing the upcoming Kobayashi Maru test: "I wanted to start with an establishing shot that was already a genuine story shot, with action and dialogue." Right, and he did it, but just try that in written prose! You can't.) So the trick of making a locale visible to the reader without interrupting the action is a constant struggle for the fiction writer (and I've got the empty Tylenol bottles to prove it). The problem is compounded in sci-fi, where nothing is taken for granted and every object could be some weird-o version that the reader can't picture properly unless the writer takes a sentence or two to clue you in. I like the way Larry Niven does it, personally. David Gerrold actually collaborated with Niven on a couple of books; they have (I think) similar approaches (at least based on your example). Ultimately, as a writer, I find the whole thing so tiresome that I've completely back-burnered any desire to try my hand at prose-based sci-fi. (Prose-based horror is much more approachable, and I'll be hitting the bookstore shelves with that shit in the first week of July.)
6) Above, I made it sound like the cinematic approach (discovering the environmental details around the edges of the story) is some kind of basic, obvious trick. But it's actually not, as any connoisseur of older sci-fi movies can tell you. It took Kubrick and Lucas to create that approach, where the story is the main focus and the gizmos and vehicles and floating platforms and crazy rooms are just there unremarked upon. David Gerrold discusses this in one of his Star Trek books, talking about how 1930s-1950s sci-fi was so damn "talky," with every machine being explained verbally and with ridiculously elaborate establishing shots conveying everything to you in the most laborious possible way. Lucas gets more credit than Kubrick for fixing this, because Lucas made it work in a colloquial action-adventure setting (rather than Kubrick's magisterially-paced cerebral sci-fi movie); all the stuff is just there, and the characters don't remark upon it at all.
7) Despite all this, I find myself reading less and less sci-fi, and losing my patience with older sci-fi movies more and more often. I have trouble sitting through the stuff when the visuals are so damn primitive, and I have trouble reading the newer stuff because of the cloying, overly-clever stylistic bullshit that takes the place of the traditional turgidness of older "classic" sci-fi. I'll probably change my mind, later. My friend Barney is watching first-season Star Trek and I repeated my claim that it's basically like Shakespeare (e.g. basically literary): the sets and props and effects and production values are so miserable that the entire story is carried by the writing and the acting. (Basically the opposite of Revenge of the Sith.)
8) Another interesting development in literary vs. cinematic sci-fi: Basically, everything used to follow what I think of as "Jordan's Rule" (and I will continue to think of it this way until it's demonstrated that somebody else said it): On paper, sci-fi is infinitely scaleable with no costs. In other words, a single giant robot destroying a house can become a single giant robot destroying a village or a group of giant robots destroying a city, or a thousand spaceships destroying an entire planet, with absolutely no cost overrun. The guy typing the book didn't have to spend another dime, and neither did the publisher. (It didn't cost me anything in terms of time, money or effort to escalate the scenario in my preceding example.) But with movies, it's completely different: just two people talking in a room in a sci-fi movie automatically costs five times as much as the same thing happening in a non-sci-fi movie. What are they wearing? What's the room look like? Is there a window showing the city? Etc. etc. etc. and already we've spent $600,000. This is the main reason cinematic sci-fi is so much more juvenile, by definition, than its written counterpart: youv'e got to pay for it, which means you need a huge audience to generate the box office to offset the costs. A sci-fi novel costs the same as a regular novel to publish, but once you film it, you're spending a fortune and if you can't draw in the kids, you lose. "Jordan's Law."
But what's amazing is that this is actually changing, thanks to advancing movie technology. I'm amazed at the sheer scale of what's presented in modern sci-fi movies (especially the expensive ones). For example, think about Star Trek (ironic example, given that they started with gypsum board sets in the '60s): Think through the movie. Not just the drill, but the aforementioned Starfleet Academy; that enormous Vulcan temple; the collapsing Vulcan landscape; the battle that destroys ten (!) starships completely; and of course Nero's ship. Any single one of these spectacles would be enough for an entire 70s or 80s sci-fi movie. It's such a big deal! But these days, it's approaching the freedom of the written word! "Ten thousand orcs"? Done. "Vulcan temple the size of a mountain, and it collapses?" Done. etc. etc. This means that we actually can have "boutique" cerebral space-movie projects like Soderbergh's Solaris which are totally adult and uncompromising, like good sci-fi novels, and yet are as well-made as any mainstream sci-fi and don't bankrupt the fucking studio if they flop (or don't do as well as Spider-Man). I think that's a really good development...Hollywood has actually found a way to break "Jordan's Rule." And now I'll stop before I start getting depressed at the thought of how much I just wrote vs. how few people will read it. (Blogger made me divide it up into sections, since it was so long.)
You should do what I do and write a whole new post.
1)I thought it dominated because it was at the top of the blog all weekend, but anyone who didn't listen to it should check it out.
2)Mmmm.
3)That's pretty funny, actually. I'm glad reading the book made you realize the scope of the cataclysm.
It will be interesting to reread Dune and see how it holds up to my "details details" test. As a completely different world, with no connection to our present (except as the distant, never-mentioned past), it has a different challenge to meet. I remember it meeting the challenge well, but we'll see.
"The trap my complaints fall into easily is this: I'm asking the authors to short circuit my own ability to visualize, or I'm saying they're leaving too much to the imagination because I'm lazy. Not so, I'm lucky to have a very good imagination. But in a book you travel landscapes of the mind, and if nobody bothers to mention what a room looks like, you can read the passage fully and it doesn't have to look like anything."
What a perfect description of the role of specificity in storytelling. Over a year ago, I read the opening few lines of Lonesome Dove to the twins, and to this day they still ask me about the blue pigs mentioned in the first sentence.
This is particularly what makes Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin series so addicting. The details of life in the 19th century British navy are fucking concrete and visceral--and far from stunting the imagination, such description supercharges it.
December 12, 2009 8:54 PM
When I was looking through I Watch Stuff for a bigger version of that Jurassic Park map on Tuesday, I came across the first of what would eventually be two Lynch/Jedi posts. It included the video above, which is Lynch telling the story of a meeting with Lucas about maybe directing Jedi. He's amusing in his cranky way, though not as much as Patton Oswald in the Lucas sketch that dominated the blog over last weekend.
The IWS post also included this challenge: "Internet, you now have twelve hours to produce an edit of exactly what that insane combination would look like." A while later IWS posted an answer to the challenge, which JPX posted below.
I have to admit, there were twenty seconds or so when I thought they maybe had something. Darth Vader sounding like the yawning vents in Eraserhead was not only fitting but also exactly echoed a joke I had heard (or possibly made) years ago during a geek chat about the hypothetical Lynch-directed Jedi. The shot of Yoda disappearing was an excellent and appropriate choice. But in the end, it devolved into a one trick pony, i.e. bits of the actual movie with Julee Cruise music playing in the background. I feel like some footage from some other movies could have been worked in there somehow. But I guess twelve hours isn't very much time.
Anybody know what bit of Lynch was supposed to be referenced when the Emperor's lightning sounded like that? I have no idea.
[Image]
Anyway, I was going to make this two posts; my second subject is that I picked up the above book on JPX's recommendation.* But HandsomeStan provided some unexpected connective tissue with his Dune discussion on the Awful Avatar Poster post yesterday.
I loved the novel Dune. Just loved it. I've read it at least three times, and thinking about it I probably could read it again. I didn't care for the sequels; I read the first two and found them very disappointing.
I was, as you would guess, extremely amped up about the movie version. Unfortunately our lovable crank (and dearly departed friend) Mike Cain saw exactly what was coming: "I don't trust him to do it right" he said, "He directed Eraserhead, that's no reason to think he can do a big sci-fi flick."
So right! Extremely disappointing. Watching it again later, having seen more of David Lynch's work, I was able to spot the similarities. Lots of impressionistic montages like Blue Velvet, but... who cares! Why are you wasting time on this when there's so much of the book you're skipping! I know Jedi has severe problems, problems that anticipated the prequels' problems, but I think we're all better off without the Lynch version. Anyway, Dune the novel provides my link... let's talk about science fiction and the written word.
* The recommendation I speak of occurred around 1983, when the book came out. You see, old friend? I do listen to you, it just takes a while. As I recall JPX and his dad had both gotten into this series and described it to me in glowing terms. David Gerrold is one of those guys who's been around forever; one of his claims to fame is "The Trouble with Tribbles" episode of original Star Trek.
I had no plans to pick it up, but I found a used bookstore I had never seen and did what I always do in used bookstores: look for first edition paperbacks of William Gibson's first three novels.
If you don't know who that is, here's a bit of Wiki: "Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s."
Over the years I've insisted that people read Gibson so much I keep giving away my copies of his books. So I'm always hunting for replacements, and I always want those same editions. I had no luck at this new store, but they did have the Gerrold book and I wanted something to read.
Now, I am a longtime lover of science fiction, but I've read very little of the prose that's out there. There's the old chestnut that these guys have groovy ideas but that doesn't mean they can write. That does account for some if it (although personally I also think most of Philip K. Dick's ideas were crap too, but that's another rant), but for me it's something more specific.
The reason I like Gibson so much is that he shows you everything. The bars, the hotel rooms, the fashions, the weapons, the streets, the shopfronts, the furniture -- everything gets enough deft bits of description to really ground you on what these places look like. Without cluttering up the words he manages to be cinematic, and I love that.
A Matter for Men, for example, takes place sometime in the 21st century, with some hints of advanced technology. But they're just hints, like "The handsome woman was in a lab coat and was carrying a clipboard. She switched it on while she waited and began reading through some notes." Okay, so in the future we switch on our clipboards, but what else ya got? In a Gibson book it would say "she carried one of the new Chanel clipboards, encased in deep green translucent plastic."
Or something like that. If you think about how much information bombards you every time you leave your house, you'll wonder why you'd want to visit a fictional world in which most of the same details are swept away. An essential part of what makes Blade Runner so good is all the brand names in neon (hated that book too, but... later). Details! I want details!
The trap my complaints fall into easily is this: I'm asking the authors to short circuit my own ability to visualize, or I'm saying they're leaving too much to the imagination because I'm lazy. Not so, I'm lucky to have a very good imagination. But in a book you travel landscapes of the mind, and if nobody bothers to mention what a room looks like, you can read the passage fully and it doesn't have to look like anything. And that lack of visual grounding means the cover artist can basically draw any damn thing and it's fine, like that foolish, skin-tight, sleeveless military uniform in the picture above. Fucking Boris Vallejo. Good painter, but does he really know what he's doing?
As far as I can tell, what I'm bitching about is a feature of a lot of what's out there. In 1997, anticipating Starship Troopers like a salivating dog, I got a copy of the book. I was kind of dismayed to find it was a really long civics text about the fictional progressive/facist society bookended by two too-short action scenes (the movie, however, did not disappoint). Ideas over images, yet again. I think that was my problem with Larry Niven's Ringworld, which I kind of liked although I wasn't inspired to check Niven out any further (Jordan's a big fan, and he later convinced me I should).
So there I am, reading Gerrold book. I Wikipedia The War Against the Chtorr books and find out the damn series isn't even finished yet, so I'm even more discouraged. I come upon a scene in which the main character listens to a famous professor guy pontificate at a party for pages and pages, my eyes droop. There are a few flashback chapters about the main character's high school civics class that are extremely remeniscent of stuff in the book Starship Troopers, and I start to get annoyed.
And then, the book turned around. The idea revealed itself to be very cool and very interesting (Earth is basically being invaded by an alien ecosystem. From an unknown source weird flora and fauna are showing up, more aggressive and able than the Earth critters in the same niche). Then the global political backstory got fleshed out and that was pretty cool, too. So I went back to the bookstore and got book number two, A Day for Damnation and another one besides. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I read an installment of a graphic version of this in Heavy Metal or something like that, and the title always stuck with me.
So it looks like I'm on something of a sci-fi novel kick. Maybe I'll see if there's any Larry Niven tucked away on those shelves.
"Two Davids"
8 Comments -
As an aside, my father became increasing disgusted with the Gerrold series when he concluded that the guy is a pedophile given his lavish descriptions of characters having sex with young boys.
Terrific review! I love waking up to original content on Horrorthon.
December 11, 2009 4:17 AM
Oh great.
One of the things that put me off originally were these sloppy jokes (?) about people being gay and indiscriminate use of the word "fag" without having earned it. It wasn't homophobic, just seeming more at home in 1963 instead of 1983. I wasn't hard to figure out the author is gay, but pedophile is a surprise. Guess I have that to look forward to.
December 11, 2009 6:47 AM
My God, Octopunk wrote a book!
1) I wish my Patton Oswald post had "dominated the blog over the weekend." It only got three comments; I assumed that everyone missed it.
2) The Emperor's lightning sound was, I believe, a reference to Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me.
3) I saw Lynch's Dune before I read the book, actually. So I kind of dug it. I had nothing to compare it to, so all I got from the movie was that it was an attempt at a genuinely different approach to epic sci-fi. Later (Junior Year of college, actually) I read the book and realized how badly they'd screwed it up. It was kind of like all those idiots who admired Francis Coppola's Dracula ("He added a sexual subtext...and a commentary on Victorian mores! Brilliant!" Jordan: "He didn't 'add' anything, you idiots") but with me, Jordan, as the idiot.
4) If I don't ignore your detours through Gibson and Phillip K. Dick, I'll never finish this comment!
5) You've hit on the basic conundrum of written sci-fi. A movie shows you several ideas at the same time, but a novel is only one sentence (and one word) at a time. (J.J. Abrams on the Star Trek commentary track, during the shot of Kirk and Bones on the Starfleet Campus discussing the upcoming Kobayashi Maru test: "I wanted to start with an establishing shot that was already a genuine story shot, with action and dialogue." Right, and he did it, but just try that in written prose! You can't.) So the trick of making a locale visible to the reader without interrupting the action is a constant struggle for the fiction writer (and I've got the empty Tylenol bottles to prove it). The problem is compounded in sci-fi, where nothing is taken for granted and every object could be some weird-o version that the reader can't picture properly unless the writer takes a sentence or two to clue you in. I like the way Larry Niven does it, personally. David Gerrold actually collaborated with Niven on a couple of books; they have (I think) similar approaches (at least based on your example). Ultimately, as a writer, I find the whole thing so tiresome that I've completely back-burnered any desire to try my hand at prose-based sci-fi. (Prose-based horror is much more approachable, and I'll be hitting the bookstore shelves with that shit in the first week of July.)
December 11, 2009 1:51 PM
6) Above, I made it sound like the cinematic approach (discovering the environmental details around the edges of the story) is some kind of basic, obvious trick. But it's actually not, as any connoisseur of older sci-fi movies can tell you. It took Kubrick and Lucas to create that approach, where the story is the main focus and the gizmos and vehicles and floating platforms and crazy rooms are just there unremarked upon. David Gerrold discusses this in one of his Star Trek books, talking about how 1930s-1950s sci-fi was so damn "talky," with every machine being explained verbally and with ridiculously elaborate establishing shots conveying everything to you in the most laborious possible way. Lucas gets more credit than Kubrick for fixing this, because Lucas made it work in a colloquial action-adventure setting (rather than Kubrick's magisterially-paced cerebral sci-fi movie); all the stuff is just there, and the characters don't remark upon it at all.
7) Despite all this, I find myself reading less and less sci-fi, and losing my patience with older sci-fi movies more and more often. I have trouble sitting through the stuff when the visuals are so damn primitive, and I have trouble reading the newer stuff because of the cloying, overly-clever stylistic bullshit that takes the place of the traditional turgidness of older "classic" sci-fi. I'll probably change my mind, later. My friend Barney is watching first-season Star Trek and I repeated my claim that it's basically like Shakespeare (e.g. basically literary): the sets and props and effects and production values are so miserable that the entire story is carried by the writing and the acting. (Basically the opposite of Revenge of the Sith.)
December 11, 2009 1:51 PM
8) Another interesting development in literary vs. cinematic sci-fi: Basically, everything used to follow what I think of as "Jordan's Rule" (and I will continue to think of it this way until it's demonstrated that somebody else said it): On paper, sci-fi is infinitely scaleable with no costs. In other words, a single giant robot destroying a house can become a single giant robot destroying a village or a group of giant robots destroying a city, or a thousand spaceships destroying an entire planet, with absolutely no cost overrun. The guy typing the book didn't have to spend another dime, and neither did the publisher. (It didn't cost me anything in terms of time, money or effort to escalate the scenario in my preceding example.) But with movies, it's completely different: just two people talking in a room in a sci-fi movie automatically costs five times as much as the same thing happening in a non-sci-fi movie. What are they wearing? What's the room look like? Is there a window showing the city? Etc. etc. etc. and already we've spent $600,000. This is the main reason cinematic sci-fi is so much more juvenile, by definition, than its written counterpart: youv'e got to pay for it, which means you need a huge audience to generate the box office to offset the costs. A sci-fi novel costs the same as a regular novel to publish, but once you film it, you're spending a fortune and if you can't draw in the kids, you lose. "Jordan's Law."
But what's amazing is that this is actually changing, thanks to advancing movie technology. I'm amazed at the sheer scale of what's presented in modern sci-fi movies (especially the expensive ones). For example, think about Star Trek (ironic example, given that they started with gypsum board sets in the '60s): Think through the movie. Not just the drill, but the aforementioned Starfleet Academy; that enormous Vulcan temple; the collapsing Vulcan landscape; the battle that destroys ten (!) starships completely; and of course Nero's ship. Any single one of these spectacles would be enough for an entire 70s or 80s sci-fi movie. It's such a big deal! But these days, it's approaching the freedom of the written word! "Ten thousand orcs"? Done. "Vulcan temple the size of a mountain, and it collapses?" Done. etc. etc. This means that we actually can have "boutique" cerebral space-movie projects like Soderbergh's Solaris which are totally adult and uncompromising, like good sci-fi novels, and yet are as well-made as any mainstream sci-fi and don't bankrupt the fucking studio if they flop (or don't do as well as Spider-Man). I think that's a really good development...Hollywood has actually found a way to break "Jordan's Rule." And now I'll stop before I start getting depressed at the thought of how much I just wrote vs. how few people will read it. (Blogger made me divide it up into sections, since it was so long.)
December 11, 2009 1:51 PM
I should have said "basically theatrical" (not cinematic), rather than "basically literary" above.
December 11, 2009 5:39 PM
You should do what I do and write a whole new post.
1)I thought it dominated because it was at the top of the blog all weekend, but anyone who didn't listen to it should check it out.
2)Mmmm.
3)That's pretty funny, actually. I'm glad reading the book made you realize the scope of the cataclysm.
It will be interesting to reread Dune and see how it holds up to my "details details" test. As a completely different world, with no connection to our present (except as the distant, never-mentioned past), it has a different challenge to meet. I remember it meeting the challenge well, but we'll see.
I'll have to get to the rest later.
December 12, 2009 7:09 AM
"The trap my complaints fall into easily is this: I'm asking the authors to short circuit my own ability to visualize, or I'm saying they're leaving too much to the imagination because I'm lazy. Not so, I'm lucky to have a very good imagination. But in a book you travel landscapes of the mind, and if nobody bothers to mention what a room looks like, you can read the passage fully and it doesn't have to look like anything."
What a perfect description of the role of specificity in storytelling. Over a year ago, I read the opening few lines of Lonesome Dove to the twins, and to this day they still ask me about the blue pigs mentioned in the first sentence.
This is particularly what makes Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin series so addicting. The details of life in the 19th century British navy are fucking concrete and visceral--and far from stunting the imagination, such description supercharges it.
December 12, 2009 8:54 PM