Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

This past week I saw the film Children of Men and read Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (which was named by Entertainment Weekly the #1 Fiction Book of the Year).

I mention these together because my reactions to them are similar. Both are exceptionally well-crafted works of art, but both presume science-fictional premises entirely without examination, without in any way exploring the bases for those premises.

Children of Men, is set some 20 years from now when humanity has gone sterile, for some unknown reason, with no children born since 2009 or so, causing social unrest that apparently has brought chaos to virtually all the world except for Britain, which reacts with extreme measures against immigrants, forcing their exportation via coastal refugee (‘fugee’) camps. Equally unexplained, one woman has become pregnant after all, and to avoid exploitation by the UK government, must be ferreted offshore to a mysterious international organization aboard a ship called ‘Tomorrow’ with the help of the Clive Owen character.

Gary Westfahl’s review posted here makes the crucial point that the film is better at depicting social chaos and political turmoil than in imagining what a world *without children* would be like. Still, it does the former quite well, I thought, and I think the reason mainstream critics are reacting positively to the film is partly due to its depiction of a Britain under siege, with a great many incidental and background details, — with many obvious parallels to the ‘homeland security’ paranoia current in the US — and partly due to numerous examples of bravura filmmaking. The latter include at least two extended scenes filmed as single takes. The one most written about in reviews is the battle scene near the end, with Clive Owen dodging execution squads and military tanks in a Full Metal Jacket-like sequence lasting some 7 minutes (in a single, uninterrupted take, which required weeks of planning and rehearsing, reportedly), but also an earlier scene in which Clive and the pregnant mother and two other ‘terrorists’ are fleeing police in a small car, and the camera amazingly swivels and pans back and forth *from inside the car* to capture what happens to them as they flee down the road and are stopped by police. Yes, these might be filmmaking stunts (to some extent distracting to viewers who can’t help but wonder *how did they do that?*), irrelevent to the content and conceptual premise of the film, but they’re also effective stunts, truly enhancing the intensity of those events. And that intensity is in part what mainstream critics are appreciating.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a post-apocalypse novel in which a man and his 10-year-old-or-so son, born just after the barely-alluded to event that destroyed civilization, are scrambling across a ruined American landscape scrambling for food, trying to survive, and having nothing to live for but the arbitrary goal of reaching the coast. The writing is extremely spare: the characters are unnamed, dialogue is presented without quotation marks, and in fact McCarthy barely uses any punctuation aside from periods (full stops), breaking even subordinate phrases into separately stopped sentences. It’s emotionally effective and devastating, as the father remembers how the boy’s mother took her own life just after the apocalyptic event, how he wonders if it might even be better to take his son’s life rather than force him to endure endless hunger and trial, much less be captured by the various survivalist clans roaming the countryside. But McCarthy is concerned about that relationship between the characters, about what they think and feel from moment to moment, and in the context of their story, the cause of the apocalypse is irrelevant.

So are these works a victory of some sort? Have SF themes become such a part of popular culture they don’t need justification? Is this progress?

Happy New Year, 2007. I had this past week off from work (my day job), as usual, though somehow between holiday and social obligations I didn’t actually catch up on things during this time as I’d hoped I might; as of today I’m overdue on no less that four book/magazine listings for the website, the annual update to the Awards Index is only 1/2 finished, and so on. The major accomplishment of this holiday break was to set up the Blogger-based blog for Locus Online features, to ease somewhat the posting of reviews and essays to the site and more importantly to enable the receipt of reader comments, without my having to process and format and upload comments from e-mails onto separate webpages. (And I did read a book or two; continued on next post.)

Still, the comment function is filtered in two ways: the ‘word verification’ function is turned on, to deflect comment spammers; and comment moderation is turned on, which means that when you submit a comment to one of those posts, it’s sent to me as an e-mail, for me to accept or reject (click or click), and only if I accept it will it appear on the webpage. This means if I’m not in a position to check e-mail, it might be a few hours from your comment submission until its appearance on the site; so it goes. (It also means I can’t *edit* your comments for spelling or grammar or length; oh well.)

It also means that anonymous commenters who have nothing more to say than “this guy is an idiot, his review is worthless” will not be accepted. At the very least, you need to sign your name for me to consider posting your comment.

We’re doing something a bit new here at Locus Online (and Locus Magazine), for which I’ve created a new Blogger blog for ‘Locus Online Features’, and have re-posted the Graham Sleight retrospective review of Arthur C. Clarke and George R. Stewart using that function with a new URL. The point is to more easily enable commenting from readers, which will appear almost-automatically (I did enable comment moderation, which means the comments you post are sent to me via email first, for my approval or rejection, as a means of blocking spam).

Gary Westfahl’s review of Children of Men has been posted the same way.

More sample reviews from Locus Magazine are on the way — Graham Sleight’s columns, as well as one or two reviews from each issue by Gary Wolfe, Faren Miller, and the others. The idea is to drum up interest in subscribing to the magazine! Of course surely anyone reading this blog is already a subscriber.

OK, here are a couple of my own. After Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan was the writer who alerted me to the wondrousness of reality, of the universe, of everything beyond ordinary life and antique religious verities. As a teenager I was sufficiently up-to-speed about current books to put The Cosmic Connection on my Christmas want-list, distributed as was our custom to other family members. In those days if a bookshop didn’t carry a particular title, you had to place a special order and wait 2 or 3 weeks for it to be delivered. My grandmother placed such an order and made it her gift to me. I’m sure she must have blanched at the image on the back cover — the Pioneer 10 plaque engraving, which shows a naked man and woman alongside a diagram of the solar system — but she never said anything.

A few years later there was Cosmos, the TV series, which at the time I watched on my 12-inch black and white TV. I’d read enough astronomy books so that the material was mostly familiar, but the presentation was mesmerizing, and some of the musical selections, Shostakovich’s 11th symphony and the electronica of Vangelis, have remained favorites.

And then came Contact, a surprisingly intelligent novel, I thought, by someone not known for fiction and whom one might suspect had hired a ghostwriter. I talked about it at work one day with a friend, a week later saw another employee who I think had overheard us reading it himself. (I was irritated by the movie, which gave all the best lines to Jodie Foster’s evangelical critic, played by Matthew McConaughey.)

I’ve read most though not all of the later books, of which The Demon-Haunted World may be the most significant, and prescient, in light of the current, remarkable and gratifying, books by Michael Shermer and Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and others about atheism and reason against the rising tide of religious fanaticism.

I never met Carl Sagan, or even saw him in person.

There’s currently a hiatus with the website’s security certificate, which a couple visitors to https://secure.locusmag.com/About/Subscribe.html and similar pages have complained about (while many others have proceeded unawares). The nice folks at CI Host seem to be very busy this holiday season, and entreaties to ssl@supportteam.net have so far gone unreplied. Real soon now, I’m sure.

Follow-up on my cruise: the onboard comedians were Lowell Sanders and Merl Hobbs, and there was also a card-trick magician (whose credit was some recent Disney movie called Now You See It) named Bobby Borgia. Quick Google checks show their claims to fame are… doing acts aboard Carnival’s Paradise.

Coming soon on Locus Online: sample reviews from Locus Magazine. Including Graham Sleight’s “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” columns. (Why hasn’t such an idea occurred to any of us before? Hmm.) And special to Locus Online–reviews of Children of Men, Perfume, and Pan’s Labyrinth. And end-of-year features…

UPDATE Friday morning: the SSL issue seems to be resolved; CI Host finally got back to me about renewing the certificate.

Starting on last week’s cruise and finishing over the weekend, I read the latest Michael Crichton thriller, Next, which is about the thrills and perils of biotechnology. It’s less strident than previous book State of Fear; his messages here, spelled out in several pages of afterword, aren’t so one-sided or anti-scientific as that book’s.

The main plot thread of Next concerns a southern California biotech firm called BioGen, which has rights to a cell line derived from a UCLA leukemia patient who’s now suing the university for some of the big bucks they made selling his tissues. BioGen needs investment money, but an appeal for help from ruthless industry leader Jack Watson sets off a chain of events seemingly designed to ruin the company, prompting BioGen’s leader to set a bounty hunter on the trail of the leukemia patient’s daughter and grandson, an extended chase sequence that drives the second half of the book.

Several parallel and intersecting plot threads involve ‘transgenic’ animals — an orangutan in Sumatra, an African grey parrot living with a Parisian family, and a chimp in a US primate facility — all of whom can talk (the parrot can do arithmetic too), having been infused with human genes and then apparently forgotten or abandoned. The ‘father’ of the chimp takes him home to San Diego, where his wife, after the initial shock, gives ‘Dave’ a haircut and sends him to school as a child with a very rare genetic deformity… which works, for a while.

As usual with Crichton, the book is composed of many short chapters, multiple story threads only some of which eventually merge, and occasional sidebars of mock news items or speeches. The prose is flat and to the point, characters are one-dimensional, and usually (not always) greedy, hypocritical, or merely stupid, and plot contrivances are sometimes awkward or transparent. (Two women in the book both have sons named Jamie, a circumstance which at first I thought was an egregious authorial oversight — but no, it’s a setup for a chase-scene confusion that is only temporarily consequential.)

However creaky Crichton’s book is as fiction, you have to hand it to him that, whatever his political sway, he’s writing books these days that address serious issues of technology and science in a direct, popular way that virtually no one else is attempting. (The closest might be the occasional SF thriller from Benford or Bear or McAuley, without anywhere near the visibility.) He’s raising issues that matter, and at least in this book he’s not setting scientists up merely as ruthless monsters whose work could destroy the world and who therefore must be suppressed. If anything Crichton’s message here is that the legal system needs some serious adjustment to handle the implications of biotechnology — his point #1 is that genes shouldn’t be patentable, as they are now, a situation which leads to counter-intuitive notions about ownership of bodily tissues, and disincentivizes research into genetic diseases where ownership of the gene is lacking. And another of his points is that prohibitions, on types of research or anything else, simply don’t work. He spells all this out in the afterword (recapitulating points of a judge’s decision late in the story) which can be skimmed at the bookstore, perhaps, by those uninclined to read the whole book…

At the same time I admit not entirely trusting an author who can be so cynical (as in State of Fear) as to sound ideologically paranoid, and who would commit the gratuitous slur against a columnist who wrote a mildly unflattering article (now subscriber-only) about Crichton a while back (Crowley’s response is here). Just think if a Michael Crichton novel were to contain a character who was a bestselling novelist on contemporary scientific and technological themes who was taken so seriously as to be invited to meet the President(!), the devious motivations that would be impugned upon him. Still, Crichton does raise pertinent issues, even if we might suspect he’s giving us only his side of the argument.

I’m home from my cruise, a four-night expedition on Carnival’s Paradise, out of the port of Long Beach, with one day at Catalina (one of the Channel Islands off the southern California coast), one day at Ensenada, Mexico, and a final ‘funday’ on board simply sitting out at sea, unmoving.

I’ve never been on a cruise before and I’m not sure it will ever occur to me to go on one again. It’s somewhat analogous to going to a science fiction convention, in that you are isolated from the everyday world, enclosed in a pocket universe with its own protocols, except that on a cruise the goal is simply to have ‘fun’, with random strangers. That means eating and drinking and shopping and attending shows. The decor of Paradise is not unlike a Las Vegas casino — in fact it does have a casino aboard — with glittery lights and fancy furnishings everywhere, and a huge 5 or 6 story atrium in the center of the ship with glass elevators running up the middle. (And this is a nearly 10-year-old ship; newer ones are bigger and more elaborate, I’ve been told.)

My impressions of ocean cruises were formed by old movies and the TV series of Brideshead Revisited, I’m afraid, but I was not surprised by the many noisy children running around and obese middle-America couples aboard, taking advantage of every open buffet and splashing in the pools and jacuzzis dotting the decks. I have a friend whose partner is a cruise-ship aficionado, who sneered just a bit when I told of booking a cruise on Carnival. No doubt other lines cater to different clienteles.

On the plus side, I was fascinated by the layout of the ship and enjoyed exploring the decks with its many restaurants, auditoriums, bars, libraries, lounges, and other facilities. The top front deck held a gym, with huge slanted windows across the front like the windshield of the Jupiter 2, and on top of that, a running track (11 laps per mile) that I had to try out for 10 minutes, and inside that a miniature golf course. The evening shows were actually quite spectacular, song-and-dance revues with singers and dancers the equal of any I’d expect to see in Las Vegas. There were two stand-up comedians, doing open and R-rated shows on two nights each. Food, included sit-down dinners where in practice you can order as many items off the menu as you like, was fair to very good, and covered by the cruise fare — but they charged extra for drinks, even Diet Cokes.

On the down side, I never found a quiet chaise lounge, away from the kids and bustle, where I could sit and read for hours at a time as the ocean slid quietly by — my cruise fantasy. (I did get about 3 hours reading done, anyway.) The room was cozy, as you’d expect on a ship, but the window was sealed and unopenable, a frustration. (Newer ships have almost all rooms with balconies, I was told.) And the cruise format itself presumes that you need to be busy at every possible moment; thus daily stops at Catalina and Ensenada provided numerous ‘excursions’ onshore to tour or shop. Avalon on Catalina is a fascinating community, a mile-square city on a 26-mile long island that is otherwise almost entirely a wilderness preserve, bought by William Wrigley (of gum fame) in the early 20th century, whose family built the largest mansions on the hilltops of Avalon, where the number of autos is now limited and many of the residents drives around in golf carts instead. (Avalon was the location of a key scene in Chinatown.) I can’t say much for Ensenada, however; some 400,000 population, supported by fishing (for legal reasons, high-quality tuna for sushi goes to Asia, but not the US) and tourism, hillsides around the harbor dotted with shanties and mansions, but nothing much to see in the city as such. Shopping — a few nice shops selling silver jewelry and leather, and many many street vendors selling tourist junk. Well, there was also the tequila.

And the third day was a ‘funday’ at sea — which meant that this huge cruise vessel, with 2000 passengers and a staff of 920, sat unmoving out in the Pacific (but within sight, barely, of the coast), for an entire day, bobbing up and down with the swell, so that the passengers could enjoy simply being aboard the ship, eating and drinking and seeing shows and splashing in the pools and playing miniature golf. More than anything about the whole cruise this struck me as bizarre, somehow metafictional — cruising for the sake of cruising. Can you imagine buying a ticket on a 767 just to fly in circles for a day and enjoy the onboard experience? Or sit on a train unmoving on the tracks for the occasional pleasure of visiting the dining car? Of course the cruise ship is only incidentally a vehicle; moreso it’s a destination, a resort on water, and the evident fact of the enormous cruise ship industry (the staff sign 6-month contracts to live on board and work 7 days a week, before a 2-month break and an option to re-sign, I learned; and can you imagine the employment behind the ongoing construction of these ever-bigger ships?) testifies to the popularity of this kind of experience. Which I enjoyed, pretty much, at least this once.

Shopping, mexican food, tequila. The civic center was originally a casino built by ‘Bugsy’ Siegel. Nice weather. Email downloaded OK, managed to post a couple blinks. Tomorrow at sea; Friday back to real life.

The cruise ship I’m on has an Internet cafe and even wireless service in areas of the ship. The wifi signal came up in my cabin, albeit weakly, too weakly to maintain a signal long enough to completely download the half-day’s e-mail. This meant that once I re-established the connection, my Pop3 server began downloading the half-day’s email all over again, from the beginning. Then the signal failed again. Later, the time allotment I’d purchased ($24 for an hour) ran out, breaking the signal one more time. Finally I accessed my inbox via the web-based email utility my hosting service provides, thinking this would be faster (at least I could delete those 2 and 3 Megabyte e-mails with photos attachments I’d already retrieved) forgetting that doing so moves the email to separate server for that purpose, so that I can no longer download any of it to my Outlook inbox on the laptop. Oh well. It’s remarkable I can do any of this, I suppose, out at sea, even if so far I’m only 26 miles from Long Beach. More tomorrow.

I’ll be away from keyboard most of the next few days, aboard a ship somewhere in the Pacific between Long Beach and Ensenada. I should be able to check e-mail, and post anything urgent, but it may be Friday before anything routine appears on the site. (Sorry, I’m behind looking at suggestions for Blinks, as usual.)