The Voting Horde

I recently saw the film adaptation of 1984. I’d hold it up right next to Gilliam’s Brazil in quality. The slower pace and quiet, thoughtful moments reminded me of some of Ridley Scotts more atmospheric movies.  As chilling a story as it is, I don’t think it’s very relevant any more. While its themes of the human spirit and danger of power are strong, Fascism of that sort really isn’t a danger anymore. While there’s plenty to be wary of, I don’t think it’s Orwell’s image of dictatorship.

Orwell took our tribalistic nationalism and inverted it. Instead of being afraid of the other guy’s nation, we become afraid of our own. However in today’s democracy, that nation is us. Politicians might seem like the cause, but they only get away with it because voters seem very open to deception. If we are to put a face on our national problems, they are ours. Or, if that is too scary, perhaps the faces of those around us. The grating drones with their cell phones, the wasting drunks in the street, the mindless consumers in the aisles; Anybody who can or will vote suddenly becomes the enemy of rationality.

This is one reason zombies have infested our pop culture so much. It’s the fear that we, as a people, as a collective, are not just a mindless crowd swaying about, but a bloodthirsty one that will devour the rational individual with an animalistic hunger.

If 1984 is fear of facism, the zombie apocalypse is fear of democracy. The crawling zombie hoard is reality television. It’s viral videos and Jersey Shore. It’s fear of the mindless, destructive masses whose numbers constantly grow and who will always win in the end. After they eat everything they get their hands on, they’ll eat each other, until they themselves are consumed.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping a human face – forever”-1984

1984 will remain a classic. Its exploration of the human spirit will remain timeless, if not its politics. However, if you want an exploration of modern political nightmares, I suggest you watch The Walking Dead instead.

First Generation Kindle: The Verdict

A few months ago, I picked up an old first-generation Kindle cheap on Ebay. Now that I’ve been using it for a while, I can say for certain that I LOVE IT.

It’s a qualified love, to be sure, but when it comes to the physical act of reading, I’ll pick the Kindle every time. It’s easier to hold. I can lie down and read without having to turn over or hold the book awkwardly to get to the next page. I can eat and read easily without having to hold down the pages with the salt and pepper shakers. This might sound lazy, but it wasn’t until I left it behind that I fully realized what a burden reading dead trees can be.

More importantly, I’ve found myself reading much more than I ever did before. I find myself blazing through 600-page books in under a week, record time for me. An ideal evening now is a nice cup of Earl Gray and a few hours with my Kindle.

There are downsides, of course. First, it’s really hard to simply flip through a book. Sure, there are a lot of ways you can search a book. Beyond the handy “search” function, you can highlight passages (which are saved in a separate entry for easy access) and you can dog-ear pages. However, the simple action of “seeing how many pages are left in this chapter” completely eludes the Kindle. Want to find a specific story in a compilation? Good luck. In both cases, you’re better off reading it straight through and just stopping whenever sleep overtakes you because it's easier than slowly flipping through the pages manually.

Another problem is vanity: I love physical books. Not necessarily reading them, but I love hunting for them in dusty bookstores and displaying them like trophies for everyone to see. I like having that huge collection of Erikson dominating my shelves, so that guests can look at their intimidating size and know that I conquered that. But pride aside, physical books can hold more than just printed stories. I like thumbing through my worn copy of Return of the King and remembering when I carried it on that backpacking trek through Arizona. I like remember that compilation of Alexander Pope I found in an airport bookstore on my way down to see my future Wife for the first time. Ebooks just don't hold that.

Ideally, every physical book I find buried in a used bookstore would contain an ebook, so I could read one and display the other, but perhaps that violates the principles of cake eating and having. 

Review: Yesterday

My review of the recent adventure game Yesterday is up on The Adrenaline Vault. It's telling that a terrible game can still be a pretty good example of the genre.

My aunt lives on a farm in the middle of the Wisconsin countryside. Like Keepers of the Citadel, innumerable cats run around, performing secret but essential tasks. As needed as they are, no one’s taken care of them in years. Once you could wonder into a barn and be greeted by a furry tribe of cuteness, but now you find a swarm of hideously inbred monsters. Adventure games are like those cats. Leave them alone in a vacuum for a decade and what comes out is a sickening mixture of all the recessive genes of 1990s point-and-clicks. Yet, where there’s a will, there’s a market. Some studios actually manage to craft fun games out of inventory puzzles. Adventure vets Pendulo think they can straddle the line with Yesterday and still deliver an approachable yet hardcore classic adventure game. Wrapped up with the styling of a horror thriller, is Yesterday a cute and cuddly kitten, or a mangled, inbred beast?

Myth Retrospective

The Adrenaline Vault has posted my retrospective article on the Myth series. It was New-Wave fantasy and had a narrative that was enhanced by the gameplay, not just featured along side it.

It’s understandable that Bungie would want to leave the Halo business. Once upon a time, they developed a host of different games. Around the new millennium, a bright-eyed stranger with deep pockets arrived and offered a deal they couldn’t refuse. By June of 2000, Bungie moved into the Microsoft harem, leaving behind all their children except their latest and most promising one, little baby Halo. Among those left behind were the Myth twins, two real-time tactics games known as The Fallen Lords and Soulblighter. Oppressively dark and punishingly difficult, Myth was an ancient burial ground of narrative. The bleached bones of fallen empires and the rusted armor of deadly warriors lay half-buried, whispering warnings to the players that they’ve never played something like this before. Nor have they ever since.

How Not To Write a Villain: The Horus Heresy

 My gleeful slog through pulp continues, this time into the world of Warhammer 40K, “Where there is only war”. The Horus Heresy series takes place ten thousand years before the 40k games and stories. It shows the slow decent of the Imperium of man from an empire of reason and science hell-bent killing everything alien to a theocracy that’s hell-bent on killing everything. It’s not much of a change, but it’s Warhammer. That means gritty, violent, and dark. Regardless, at the center of this transformation is Warmaster Horus, the greatest Primarch the Emperor ever made. The Horus Heresy novels open with a trilogy of books that set the stage. During the second book, False Gods by Graham McNeill, we finally see what caused this great and honorable warrior to become a dark servant of Chaos. Or rather we would, if the author didn't duck behind a curtain first.

Because the reader is (assumedly) approaching these books with knowledge of Warhammer 40k, we know that Horus is going to be a bad guy. We already know that everything going to go belly up and we’re just holding our breaths as to when and how. Even so, the first impressions of the Warmaster are positive. He’s shrewd, honorable, and full of more sense than we usually ascribe to Space Marines. At one point, he decides not to murder a peaceful race of distantly-related humans, a rarity in this xenophobic universe. After a while, we start to forget how twisted he’s soon to become and actually like him. This was how first book, Horus Rising by Dan Abbnet ended.

After an amazing introduction, I had to dive right into the second book. This is where everything has to get juicy, right? We see more of the dark conspiracy dedicated to warping Horus, and the tension ramps up. At the climax two-thirds of the way in, Horus is finally caught in the trap. Finally, we get to see what can change this paragon into a monster, right? Instead, the scene cuts away and next we see Horus, he’s an evil, bloodthirsty guy talking about overthrowing the Emperor.

 That’s right, instead actually showing us what we waded through 1000 pages for, we get a quick edit that explains nothing. I read Warhammer for the grand, bloody space operas, not the literary depth. Even so, it’s an incredibly unsatisfying resolution. If you’re going to go through the trouble to add a deep backstory to a villain, it’s a good idea to include why he’s a villain in the first place.

The Man With The Golden Gun: How Not To Write A Villain

With my recent acquisition of an old, first-generation Kindle, I realized that I could quickly and easily read just about anything I wanted. After working through some truly great works, I started eating up all the pulp that I’ve always wanted to try, but never got around to. The Man With The Golden Gun is apparently Ian Flemming’s weakest work, but I didn’t know that at the time. I’ve had the Shirley Bassey song stuck in my head for weeks now, so I really can’t be blamed.

Before continuing, note that the movie is only “inspired” from the book. While I haven’t seen it yet, I can only hope that it's far more inspired than its source.

Scaramanga has all the makings of a great villain. He’s a world-class assassin whose signature weapon is a gold-plated colt peacemaker with an extra-long barrel. He’s a dangerous man with plenty of special agent kills under his belt. He has a deformed anatomy with a creepy third nipple over his heart. In addition, he’s also reported to have homosexual tendencies because he can’t whistle (no, really). He has all the makings to be the Moriarty to Bond’s Holmes.

Yet, when we finally encounter the man, he’s nothing more than a gangster who can do trickshots. We never see him assassinate anyone. He doesn’t lead Bond on a thrilling chase, always one step ahead.  Instead, we see him as a ring-leader who’s gotten in over his head and needs Bond (undercover as a security guard) to pull him out. Yes, that's really the plot.

After the imaginative title and the awesome theme song, I had high expectations.  Yet, the more we see of Scaramanga in the book, the less terrifying he becomes. He’s easily deceived and never acts like a true assassin. Instead of being a terrifying professional, Scaramanga never rises beyond being an arrogant gunslinger, despite how many times Flemming tells us otherwise. As a corollary to the old storytelling rule, no amount of telling can cover up not showing.

This is a shame because he truly can be a great bond villain. Instead of pulling the strings from the shadows like Blofield, he ought to be like a dangerous predator stalking our hero. Perhaps Christopher Lee infused more danger into the role. I can only hope.

The Ender Trilogy: Some Thoughts

I’ll be discussing quite a few plot points in this review, so expect spoilers. These books are classics, so you should be reading them anyways. My short advice is to read Ender's Game without hesitation, but pause before reaching Xenocide.

Ender’s Game:

Ender’s Game is a classic for a very good reason. I also think that its subject matter had a lot to do with its popularity in geek circles. The way that Card gets into the minds of super-gifted kids delights those of us who lived with the gifted label. Sure, they might talk like adults, but that’s the point he’s making. When you take a child away from normal life and drill him into a creepy child soldier, he’s going to be pretty haggard, whether or not you think it’s for a good cause. Card does an outstanding job making you think about the events from moral perspectives.  

Ender takes the classic alien invasion story, mixes it up with dual shots of philosophy and physics, and then turns it on its head. It’s not only a fantastic stand-alone novel, it also serves as a solid launch pad for a much larger story. Not too much to say about it besides you’re crazed if you don’t read it, nerd or not.

Speaker of the Dead:

When I first read Ender a year ago, I was a bit apprehensive to continue the series. I heard that the other books were very different, and I wondered how they could ever top this one. I figured they were just the author’s attempt to milk a popular series.  I was quite wrong, and I wish I had read them sooner.

While Ender’s Game was content to focus on one person’s development, Speaker throws the doors wide open. A dozen Ender’s Games are in Speaker, plot-wise, and each thread is just as taught. Speaker not only works so well with Ender, but it adds so much depth as well.

Speaker was the book Card originally had in mind when he wrote Ender. Instead of simply picking up from where Ender left off, it leaps three millennia into the future.  On one hand, I was hesitant to leave the familiar world of Ender behind, but the new wonders awaiting me in Speaker coaxed me out of my shell.

Card writes characters very well, so the increased cast size works. Andrew works his way into the family drama, telling them what they need, not what they want. This entire plot-thread echoed so very much of a personal Christ that I looked up the author to confirm whether or not he was a Christian. Like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, Speaker shows that it's possible to write Christian stories without devolving into the starchy pulp that gets sold in most religious bookstores. 

The mysteries do a good job of holding the plot together. Why did Novinha marry a brute of a man instead of the one she loved? Why did the Piggies murder two xenologers? Why does the ecology of Lusitania feature such a sparse biological landscape? They drive the plot forward and keep everything flowing at a good pace without seeming artificial or boring.

The mysteries resolve mostly satisfying. It was beautiful to watch Card slowly unravel some of his delicately-wound characters so we can see every stich and seam. The human mysteries are truly the best, while the scientific mysteries are more flat. Perhaps this is only so because the human stories are so rich by comparison. In retrospect, Speaker seems more about people then about any larger sci-fi motif. Then again, perhaps this was also true for Ender’s Game.

Besides personal drama, Speaker loves dealing with the philosophy of aliens and intelligence. The categorizing of beings into levels of familiarity and intelligence did a lot to facilitate the discussion of the destruction of other species for self-preservation. It’s these discussions that make it more then just family drama and sell the novel to the geek sci-fi crowd. They’re some of the finest parts of the book by far.

However, the thread about the descolada virus is not quite so good. The reveal at the end works I suppose, but it seems far too weird for my tastes. I swallowed it regardless and the rest of the story went down just as well.

At the end, many plot threads are left untied. I didn’t mind it because the story was truly about Novinha and her family. These parts resolve into satisfying conclusions, so I didn’t feel like I was taken for a ride. Xenocide on the other hand….

Xenocide:

I dived into Xenocide right away, excited to see the larger threats in Speaker resolve. So many juicy plot threads were left dangling to me to resist the pull of the sequel for long. I spent half as much more time slowly following their winding trails only to be left disappointed.

The progression seems to flow naturally from Speaker at first, but there’s a twist at the end that tangles everything into a nasty knot. Xenocide first introduces the idea of Philons. If the full revelation of the Descolada in Speaker was a bit off, Philons is full-on midichlorian weird. If it sounds like an idea that belongs in a different series of books, it’s because it was (but the publishers encouraged Card to merge them). 

The Philon idea then leads everything into a magical dreamscape that recreates old characters from Ender’s Game and leaves you on the promise that you get to watch them run free in the next book, Children of the Mind. It felt unnatural and I cannot conceive of any way for the narrative to resolve in a way that doesn’t feel fake.

I’m aware that it’s a bit awkward to end on Xenocide, when by the authors admission, it and Children of the Mind were conceived as a single book. I should likely finish the fourth book before making a judgment, but I don’t care that much any more.

What started as bubbling excitement in Speaker ended in disappointment in Xenocide. The big threats, such as the fleet destroying the colony and the fate of the piggies have been teasing me for two whole books without any satisfying conclusion. Someday I’ll finish what I’ve started and perhaps learn that I was wrong again, but in the mean time, I have Steven Erikson tickling every Post-Modern element of my brain right now. Another time, Card. Perhaps another time.