Futuristic Stories (1946)

The cover illustrates Asimov's little-known story, 'Shooting a Robot in the Groin with a Laser'.

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (dir. Thor Freudenthal, 2013)

Kids persuaded me to take them to this, despite my not having seen the first in the series. But I think I picked up its gist quickly enough: it's PerCGI Jackson: CGI of Monsters. Jackson, half-mortal son of PoCGIdon, lives with his pals, all of whom look like fashion models, at Camp Half Blood. They are protected by a CGI forcefield generated by a magic tree. TreeGI, if you will. Anyway, for arbitrary plot reasons he and his friends must embark on a dangerous quest for the Golden Fleece-GI. They must swim the CGI of Monsters to reach CirCGI's Island, where ... CGI is ... there's ...

Look: there's a lot of CGI in this film.

Yes. Anyway, if you like gawping at CGI sea monsters, CGI bull-monsters, giant CGI cyclops monsters, CGI half-hyena-half-giant-scorpion monsters and so on, then you'll love this. It is perfectly competently made. Other notes: (1) the director is LITERALLY called Thor! How mythological is that? (2) Everybody in this film pronounces the word 'satyr' as 'say "tier"', which distracted me; (3) Chiron is Giles from Buffy from the waist up, but -- if the complete lack of swinging equine wedding-tackle on screen be any guide -- a mare from the waist down. I choose to read this as a pro-Trans-rights statement on the behalf of the film-makers, and not mere 'no-horse-dong-allowed' prudery.

On the upside: my youngest is five. This means in a decade or so he can go to the movies on his own, and I might get to see a proper movie without having to wait year or more for it to appear in my front room on Sky Movies.

Planes (dir Klay Hall 2013)

Nightmarish stuff. The world of the film is recognisably our world, but all human life has been eradicated, and the conquerors have appropriated our infrastructure and architecture, pulling down the Statue of Liberty and replacing it with a giant statue of one of their own.

In the immortal words of terrified-Millhouse: 'if petrol is their food, then WHY DO THEY HAVE TEETH??'

Karen Lord, The Best of All Possible Worlds (2013)

So, Jo Fletcher, whom I have known for years, and whose taste in books I trust implicitly, kindly sent me a copy of this (seeing as how Jo Fetcher Books is publishing it in the UK). And so I read it. Lots to admire: it is proper grown-up SF, an emotionally complex, character-driven piece that held my attention all the way through. Its narrative is pleasantly inventive and varied, within the fairly generic-familiar Le-Guinly parameters Lord has taken as her mis-en-scene, it takes a group of characters on a work-related tour of many different communities and environments. Two characters are at the heart of it: the reserved Spock-ic Dllenahkh (we're told how to pronounce his name early on, but I never quite got it), one of a human-variant peoples called the Sadiri who are super-wise, emotionally-controlled, long-living, telepathic and so on. Then there's spiky, passionate, chatty Grace Delarua, a civil servant assigned to work with Dllenahkh. In a prologue we learn that Dllenankh's people were almost all of them wiped-out when their planet was destroyed. Most of the women were back on the homeworld when this catastrophe occurred, so the remaining Sadiri are in an Ents-minus-Entwives situation, something they handle with quasi-Vulcan dignity. D, G, and some others form a work-team tasked with surveying the disparate Sadiri settlements of the planet Cygnus Beta as part of a plan for the eventual repopulation of the Sadiri race. The group goes from place to place, encountering a variety of problems, and solving them. I liked the slow-burn of the narrative; I quite liked the deliberately wrong-footing way Lord focalised and defocalised her narrative; the episodic nature of the bulk of the book renders it bitty, but in a way that relates to the larger theme -- the fragmentation of peoples scattered by history.

With so much to like, I found myself a little surprised the novel didn't do more to my pulse rate. I ended up admiring rather than loving it. The Spencer Tracey (without the irascibility) meets Catherine Hepburn vibe of the Dllenahkh/Grace romance is traced out in a way that doesn't match the rhythms of the episodic things-happening narrative very well, and kept bouncing me out of that particular affective through-line. There were a couple of other things, but I'll confess they may be me post-facto rationalising the way the novel seemed to slide past my metaphorical 'Really Like' button.

For instance, I did like the way the focus was on work, and that work was conceptualised as more than just assembling Prodigious Machines or Massive Structures -- for most work has much more to do with human interaction and management than Big Physical Engineering Projects, and this novel groks that. It is one of the resonances of the Voltairian title of the novel, after all: and Lord understands that, come tragedy come joy, il faut cultiver notre jardin.

But then again, "Candide" is a satire; and I couldn't work out to my own satisfaction whether Lord's meditations on the dangers of intimacy, of traditionally conceived 'masculine' and 'feminine' roles, of monogamy versus polygamy, and of the question of how far the future of the species should be left to the individual whims of individual hearts, as opposed to being planned and structured at a macro level -- all fascinating questions ... couldn't work out whether these were framed by the novel in a François-Marie-Arouet-satirical manner. If they were then I missed the punchline. I found the garrulous ingenuousness of those sections narrated by Grace increasingly annoying. Garrulity is part of her characterisation, but in the same way its hard to write boring characters without boring the reader, it's hard to write an endlessly chatty person without it coming over like a tediously splurged blog-post about the Teleconference Blogger X had to sit through at work today:

The teleconferencing centre was state of the art -- it had to be, to give such clear reception ... I had to remind myself not to jiggle my feet or pick at my nails in the mistaken belief that I was not completely in view. I stood alone at the head of the table and waited for the holo of my interviewer to appear. When it did I saw that he had already seated himself, and he indicated with a nod and a gracious wave that I should do the same etc etc. [202]

That 'holo' feels like a layered-over detail on a recognisable early 21st-century circumstance; and this is all a bit flat. Indeed, the narrative is full of some minimally tweaked very early 21st-century references and tones:

We had washed up at one of the legendary monasteries via some underwater cave or passage or secret way that lurked behind or behind the falls. I wanted to feel excited about such a beautiful cliché coming true, but mainly I felt hungry, worried and very unsure. This was not an Indiana Jones classic holovid: it was real life.’ [109]

All of which brought my 'yeah, right' hackles into play. The de-emphasising of rockets and rayguns is commendable, but I could have done with more actively estranging stuff. Indeed, the main 'novum' here (holo-thises and groundcar-thats aside) is telepathy, which the novel uses as a trope for 'intimacy', and often as a means of saying, in effect: 'it's OK if you're a bit wary of intimacy, you know.' Which is fair enough.

One thing the book brought home to me is the way our genre throws its unique light on one particular love-object fetish. Because we love our Vulcans. And actually, it occurs to me that what 'we' love are not actual Vulcans, but Spocks, half-Vulcans, the person who presents to the world their emotionally-repressed, buttoned-down self-controlled exteriors only until 'we' reach past their exterior to find and release their hidden heart of passion. That's what Dllenankh is: not a Vulcan, but a Spock, that unlikely but empirically demonstrable sex symbol. See also: Rochester, Darcy, 50 Shades of Grey guy. See all of them, actually. As to why 'we' love these figures, I can't say, because actually that's not the type that does it for me, and so I have to come clean and separate out myself from the 'we' of whom I have hitherto been speaking. The lack of spark undermined the central romance here, which I daresay is my problem. All those boys and girls who love characters like that may find themselves more persuaded by the Best of All Possible Worlds lovestory than I was.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Shaman (2013)

Ugg impressed by book. Ugg squat on ground and turn pages with chipped-flint tip of spear—Ugg read book. Words flow vividly into Ugg’s imagination. Ugg like. Appreciate scrupulous attention to paleolithic detail! Ugg liked hero, Loon, and can vouch for accuracy of portrait! Life hard! Ugg’s cranium hard, but that not important right now. Ugg urge you to hunt or otherwise gather copy of this book at earliest opportunity. Ugg urge you do this by poking flint tip of spear in small of you back. Contents of book tastier than seal fat, or bear penis.

The Wolverine (dir James Mangold, 2013)

Yesterday my wife, sister and daughter all trotted off to London to see Lee Nelson's alcopop-themed musical Wicked!, leaving me solus for the day looking after my son Dan and his same-age cousin John. So I took them to see The Wolverine, and by gum they loved it. There was lots of bouncing up and down in their seats, enthusiastic gobbling down of sweeties and above all laughing; which struck me as exactly the right frame of mind in which to enjoy a film like this. Early on Dan hit on the comedic strategy of repeating something that had just happened on screen, but prefacing his comment with a sarcastic 'oh that's a good idea!' Viz.: 'oh that's a good idea! fall off the really fast train!' 'oh that's a good idea! have your claws chopped off by the biggy robot!' 'oh that's a good idea! get a sword in your tummy!' Every time he said one of these, John and he would cackle and laugh like they were about to burst with sheer hilarity. It must have prodigiously pissed-off the hardcore X-Men fans also in the cinema with us, many of whom were late-teenager boys with leather jackets and sour expressions on their faces. So that was a bonus. Dan and John also had a series of, I think, rather pertinent questions, amongst which were:

'Why is he in that hole?'
'How does he wipe his bottom with those swords in his hands?'
'Why is his hair like that? Is it electricity standing up his hair?'
John: 'where's that?' Me (sotto voce): 'Japan.' John: 'why does he go to Japan? Why doesn't he go to London?'
'Why is that girl's tongue a snake?'
'Is the archer a goody or baddy?' [I have no idea of the answer this one, by the way]
'Dad, you never told me why he was in that hole! Daad!'

...and so on. I worried that they'd be too young (they're not yet 6); but in the event their attitude to the film was exactly right, and they came out whooshing and imaginary-fighting and had a whale of a time.

My main problem with the film was that the actress playing the love interest, Mariko (Tao Okamoto) was so thin she looked actively poorly. On the other hand, her complete lack of chemistry with Huge Ackman was, in a way, a testament to the Japanese immersion of the movie (on, you know, the popcorn level at which movies like this work): the Wolverine looked so like a huge reeky hirsuite brute of a thing, the very image of a hairy foreign devil, that I simply couldn't see what Mariko saw in him. Plus, their tender farewell scene went like this:

She (hugging him tenderly): please tell me you'll come back to Japan to see your princess?

He (gruff): I can't. I'm a soldier etc. etc.

Instead of like this:

She: Just to sum up, you killed my beloved grandfather, and you also killed my father who was a bit of a dick but, you know, my father for all that, so now I have literally no relatives left alive. You tried to kill my fiancé by throwing him out of a skyscraper window. You vandalised the bullet train and smashed up one of what is now my corporation's most valuable research institutes, causing billions of yen of damage. Plus I understand you killed your previous girlfriend. Remind me why I hopped into bed, or rather onto the futon, with you?

He: Is that the time? I really must be going

That said, I did enjoy it. Better than Wolverine: Origins, certainly. Although that's tantamount to saying 'Better than a dose of amoebic dysentery' and therefore not a particularly useful critical discriminator.

When I mentioned that I might take the boys to see this movie, Julie, my sister, replied: 'oh Brian [her husband] saw that! He really liked it. You have to stay until after the credits, though. Apparently there's an easter egg scene in which you see Magenta!' Colourful. She's not the world's biggest X-Men fan, my sister. Although she assures me she likes watching Huge Ackman in his vest.