Christopher East

One of the publishers-of-choice for high-quality genre fiction collections has got to be Golden Gryphon, and Nancy Kress‘ Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories (2008) continues that tradition nicely, collecting thirteen of the author’s stories from the 2000s.

By and large it’s a strong collection of mostly hard SF, focusing equally well on the immediate personal interests of its characters and the wider, larger concerns of its Big Ideas.  I tend to prefer Kress (as, let’s face it, I tend to prefer most SF) closer to home, so perhaps unsurprisingly the highlights for me were its near future tales — in particular, “Wetlands Reserve,” which regards a scientist’s investigation of a startling find in an upstate NY wilderness preserve, and “Computer Virus,” which contains some intriguing speculation on artificial intelligence.  Both these stories trend in the cautionary direction, and indeed that seems to be fairly common throughout the volume, from the amusing short-shorts “Patent Infringement” and “Product Development,” to the title story, “Nano Comes to Clifford Falls,” which involves the arrival of a powerful new technology at a small community that’s rather reluctant to embrace it.  Although interested by the subject matter, I found this particular story kind of flat and muddled, an odd choice to headline the collection.  (But if the author’s note is any indication, this one spawned a number of conflicting reactions, so clearly your mileage may vary here.)

The deep-future, space-based, Big Idea SF on display here isn’t without merit either, of course.  Particularly effective for me was “Ej-Es,” which involves an intergalactic Peace Corps and their investigation of an odd colony world struck with a strange, mass hallucination virus; this one pulls off a neat trick in its final moments that really sells its theme.  The deep, deep future of “Mirror Image” presents some of the collection’s most inventive and ambitious world-building (really I should say “universe-building”), and while I found this one perhaps a bit overlong, I was terrifically impressed by the breadth and detail of its setting and the scope of its ideas.  Alas, the only major “miss” of the collection for me also fell into this category — the predictable, retro space fiction “First Flight,” which celebrates old school, 1950s SF TV.  (Clearly I’m not the target audience for this one.)  Overall, there’s plenty of strong work on display here to recommend the collection.

I enjoyed a pair of Paul McAuley’s near-futurish thrillers from earlier in the decade, Whole Wide World and White Devils, so I was looking forward to his next, Mind’s Eye (2005) — which ended up never getting a US edition.  I finally tracked down a copy, and found it to be similarly satisfying, although I didn’t outright love it.

Not entirely science fictional, the premise of Mind’s Eye is nonetheless genresque and fantastical.  Unknown to most, there exist in the world ancient glyphs that, when viewed, have potent mind-altering effects on those who see them.  The story focuses on two people in London who take an interest in these glyphs when they begin popping up around the city in the form of anti-war graffiti.  Harriet Crowley is a freelance spook, and the descendant of a secret society dedicated to keeping these dangerous glyphs hidden from the world so that they aren’t misused.  And Alfie Flowers, a more unwitting descendent of this group, is a freelance photographer whose childhood run-in with the glyphs has  rendered him particularly susceptible to their effects. Alfie and his erstwhile friend Toby, a wise-cracking, chain-smoking journalist, attempt to track down the source of the graffiti, in the hopes of curing Alfie of the life-shaping seizures that have plagued him since the childhood incident.  Meanwhile, Harriet works behind the scenes trying to prevent the glyphs from falling into the hands of some decidedly villainous interests.  Their paths intersect when what begins as a search for an artist gradually grows more perilous as the protagonists cross paths with interests attempting to seize the glyphs’ power.

The plotting is quite well done, and McAuley’s prose is clear and engaging throughout, although at times it shifts gears awkwardly.  Particularly in the first book, set in London, the narrative lurches into flashback without warning on occasion, and at times the writing is a bit distancing.  But things speed up nicely later when the adventure takes the book’s heroes to the Middle East, and events ultimately accelerate to an exciting climax.

With its mix of politics, current events, mysterious secret history and gritty action, Mind’s Eye struck me as a very cinematic reading experience, conjuring early John Frankenheimer movies like Seconds and The Manchurian Candidate, which had similarly unsetlling  quasi-SF overtones.  Perhaps it was the politics, though, that kept it off U.S. shelves?  In spite of its fantastical MacGuffin, it definitely riffs off controversial real world situations — in particular the war in Iraq, and American and British involvement there — which might have been a tough sell here in the Bush era.  I mention this as an observation, rather than a criticism; I found the politics integral, and not that intrusive.  That the villains were pursuing American interests didn’t bother me either, as they were fairly cartoonish villains with a tendency to infodump and monologue at times — another issue entirely, and one of the novel’s more noticeable flaws in my opinion.  Ultimately, though, I found Mind’s Eye well worth the read, an intriguing thriller that, in the right hands, would probably make a pretty good movie.

After suffering through The Fountain, I wasn’t all that excited about Darren Aronofsky’s follow-up, but the acting buzz was too big to ignore, so I decided I’d give The Wrestler (2008) a try.  It’s the story of Randy “the Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke), an aging professional wrestler twenty years past his prime, now coasting on the remnants of his former glory and eking out a living on the east coast circuit.  Years of physical abuse, from blows sustained in the ring to the dangerous cocktail of pharmaceuticals he uses to keep himself going, have him on the brink of collapse, and when events transpire to threaten the only career he’s ever known, Randy is forced to make some difficult decisions about his future.

Rourke is phenomenal in the lead role, as good as all the buzz would lead you to expect, and really acting is the primary strength of the film, as able support comes from Marisa Tomei (as “Cassidy,” a stripper and Randy’s semi-girlfriend) and Evan Rachel Wood (as his estranged daughter).  The film-making is straight-forward and effective, and the script steers Randy through his journey deftly in a nicely laid out sequence of day-in-the-life scenes, punctuated by the film’s big events.  That said, the story didn’t really deliver anything I wasn’t expecting; as the summary might indicate, this is a tragic tale of someone who loses everything he loves in the pursuit of his own selfish interest — or is it his passion?  It’s an intriguing film thematically, reminding me on some level of Boogie Nights, a movie that put nails into the coffin of a certain aspect of permissive, liberated ’70s behavior.  The Wrestler does a similar number on a particular kind of selfish ’80s mindset, as symbolized by pro wrestling and unsubtle hair-metal, with Rourke as the aging man-boy unwilling to let go of his past.  Like Boogie Nights, The Wrestler is nostalgic for its material and critical of it at the same time, food for thought about changing attitudes.

But, if my clumsy thematic musings don’t interest you, check out The Wrestler anyway. The film’s dark moments aren’t always easy to get through, but I think it’s worth it for its moving moments and impressive performances.

Not a hell of a lot of news on the writing front for me lately…and that seems to include blogging!  Over the past couple of weeks, my usual lunch-break writing time has been taken up by composing silly little grooves on GarageBand (a music program), which I’ve been attempting to learn how to use, somewhat half-assedly, but with much amusement.

As for writing, well, occasionally the novel moves forward a few paragraphs, and a new short story is slowly taking shape, but mostly I’ve been a consumer for the past little while:  working my way through Futurismic submissions, going back to basics with Damon Knight’s Creating Short Fiction, and reading some other fiction.  Plus I just got going on a massive history volume about Allied military deception during WWII that looks really interesting.  So, more reviews and posts are in the pipeline eventually, but for now — nothing to see here, move along!

The Riches (2007-2008) has everything I like in a good TV show:  a strong premise, effective writing, terrific acting, realistic language, edgy themes, and the odd surprise along the way.  Even so, as I reached  the end of the first season DVD set — which took an uncharacteristically long time for me to get through — I’m just not feeling hooked.  And while I wouldn’t rule out following up with the show’s second and final season, I’m just not feeling at all compelled to do so.

The show follows the Malloys, a nuclear family of five off-the-grid travelers, scraping by on con games, graft, and petty crimes.  Early in the season, the Malloys run afoul of the greater community of travelers, steal some money from them, and make a break for it.  But their escape attempt leads to a  violent car chase, which unexpectedly takes the lives of lawyer Doug Rich and his wife, who are on their way to start a new life in Eden Falls, Louisiana.  The not-insignificantly-named Eden Falls is an opulent, plastic cookie-cutter community, where the Riches have just purchased a brand new McMansion.  Although most of the family is appalled at what’s happened, opportunistic father Wayne (Eddie Izzard) can’t pass up what is soon to become the family’s biggest scam — impersonating the Riches, and living the lives of actual, law-abiding, capitalist Americans (or “buffers,” in their parlance).

It’s well made, well performed, well written, an artistically successful show in most respects.  Minnie Driver is dynamic and effective as Dahlia Malloy, and the children — particularly Noel Fisher as son Cael and Shannon Woodward as daughter Di Di — are sympathetic and well drawn characters.  Wayne’s boss Hugh Panetta (Gregg Henry) makes an engaging quasi-antagonist, while Dahlia’s best friend and neighbor Nina (Margo Martindale) is a wonderfully played and memorable supporting character.  The plots are generally entertaining, and the subject matter is usually pretty interesting.

So why do I feel like I don’t like the show all that much?  I’ve been trying to put my finger on it, and at first I thought it might be that it felt somewhat thematically derivative of other shows — in particular, The Sopranos and Weeds.  The three shows are tonally different, but cover a lot of the same ground.  Eachs suggests that the entitled American family is inherently leading a criminal way of life, merely by participating in the capitalist system, selfish and greedy and callous in its very essence.  I’m tempted to label it a reactionary trend against the me-first Republican regime under which these shows were developed; but that would probably be reading into it too much.

The Sopranos, of course, paved the way in this area, borrowing liberally from traditional crime family/mafia tropes, but then brilliantly layering that milieu over suburban American life and forcing its characters — and, by extension, its viewers — to confront their selfish actions in the name of satisfying their entitled lifestyle choices.  Not without humor, The Sopranos’ chief strength was its dramatic tension, as its appalling anti-heroes went to greater and greater lengths to justify their brutal, selfish activities.  Is a murderous thug like Paulie, ready to kill for his piece of the pie, that much worse than the outwardly reasonable Carmela, willing to turn a blind eye to atrocities she’s tacitly a party to?  The Sopranos fascinates with these moral conundrums, challenging the viewer to question why they’re rooting for anybody.

If The Sopranos punctuates its dark, dramatic focus with moments of unexpected comedy, Weeds takes the reverse approach, maintaining a zany, witty surface while darker materials lurk below.  But Weeds is treading the same thematic ground, successful in its own, entirely different right.  In some ways, the behavior of Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) and her family in Weeds may even be more appalling, in some respects, because it doesn’t have the heightened reality of epic mafia tropes enabling the viewer to hold it at an arm’s distance.  The Botwins are the essence of entitled American money-grubbing, refusing to play by the rules that impact their comfort — regardless of the consequences.

Enter The Riches, then, which plies similar territory, but doesn’t quite succeed at the same level.  I think, perhaps, the main problem is that The Riches doesn’t really nail its tone.  It’s often too serious to sell its comic shenanigans…or it’s too wacky to convince us to take it seriously…and it’s always kind of hard to tell which way the show wants us to lean.  This tonal dichotomy is embodied in Eddie Izzard’s character, whose credibility hinges on the extremes of the weekly plot — the more ridiculous the scheme, the better he comes off, the more serious, the worse.  I both like and dislike Izzard in this role, depending on the scene.

Another issue is that The Riches critiques from outside, while The Sopranos and Weeds critique from within.  To me, the latter two succeed largely by inviting the viewer to see themselves in the shows’ anti-heroes; contrarily, the anti-heroes of The Riches never really buy into the system from which they’re benefiting, so it always feels a little like they’re talking down to the audience.  It’s a different approach to the thematic issues, and not invalid, but for me it just doesn’t come off as artfully.

Still, I frequently find The Riches interesting and worthwhile viewing — a late-season arc involving guest actor Arye Gross is particularly hard-hitting stuff — and if I can’t recommend it whole-heartedly, I’d surely recommend it with reservations.  It’s a peculiar product, and that’s always worth something in my book.

It may be a bit of a stretch to say the Pressure Boys were ahead of their time; as kind of a mutant mash-up of British ska, horn-heavy funk, hillbilly punk, and reggae, there’s plenty of eighties era precedence for their type of stuff (Fishbone and Oingo Boingo leaping first to mind).  Even so, these guys seem like the kind of obscure, niche group tailor-made for fringe creative survival during the internet era — not the old school workings of the music industry of their time.

Appropriate, then, that they should rematerialize on iTunes after years of being painfully out-of-print, and I couldn’t have been more jazzed when I found out.  The Incomplete Recordings: 1981-1988, released last April, finally replaces my lost, lamented, and horribly recorded cassettes of obscure-label vinyl I made at the college radio station back in Fredonia (which had been rife with skips, bad levels, and oops-I-pressed-record moments).

The only thing wrong with this 18-track collection is that, well, yeah, it is incomplete…at the end of the day, I’m still craving a fully remastered copy of their 1987 album Krandlebanum Monuments, which is the one I played into the ground back in my learning-to-play-bass-by-ear days.  Indeed, this new release contains a number of tunes from that album, but out of order and with some exceptions (such as “A Chew and a Swallow” and the E-funk bass riffing that is “Lava Booger”).  Still, having clean copies of great tunes like “Around the World,” “Dial-Tone,”  “Terrible Brain,” and especially “Off to Lake Tumont” — all of which mash raw guitars, groovy beats, and tight horn arrangements to unique effect — is pretty priceless nostalgia for me.

The earlier selections tend to have more of a traditional ska feel, hardly unwelcome, but in the wake of my extensive over-listening to nineties ska a few years back, doesn’t strike me as quite as interesting.  Even so, I’m happy to “discover” some never-heard-before stuff like the unabashed funkiness of “Soul Chip” and the Madness-like groove of “Policeman in My Neighbor’s Yard.”  But generally, the Krandblebanum cuts are still the score of this re-release:  all the celebratory feel of ska, but with some infectious backbeats and gutsy dissonance setting it apart.

These guys may not seem all that special to people steeped in the easier-to-find postmodern genre-fusion of the past twenty years, but back in 1988, while trying to escape the cheesy synthetic dance beats and insincere hair metal of those bleak days, the Pressure Boys were a godsend, and it’s nice to see some of their material find new life.

My ever-continuing search for effective spy novelists takes us next to the unimaginatively titled At Risk (2004), the first novel by former MI-5 Director-General Stella Rimington, who brings years of experience in the real intelligence world to this fictional tale of British security service efforts to prevent an imminent terrorist attack.

Rimington’s hero is Liz Carlyle, an officer of MI-5’s counter-terrorist section, who finds herself running point on an important case, tracking the infiltration of an “invisible” — a terrorist agent who can move freely in the target country by virtue of ethnicity and language — onto British soil.  Saddled semi-reluctantly with an erratic MI-6 officer named Bruno Mackey, Carlyle puts her considerable investigative abilities to the test across the British coastlines and countryside, attempting to thwart a jihadist attack that ties into local organized crime, an immigrant-smuggling ring, the US military presence in England, and more.

Rimington’s writing is crisp and effective, with an authoritative voice, and the book is nicely paced and engrossing, focusing primarily on Liz, but also ricocheting through other points of views, including various bystanders and the terrorists themselves.   As one might expect in light of the author’s pedigree, there’s a unmistakeable ring of authenticity to the tradecraft and detective guesswork.  Indeed, there’s more conventional puzzle-solving on display than intelligence service politics — unfortunately, perhaps, as it gives the novel more of a conventional mystery novel feel.  Rimington introduces some late surprises that help, but also attempts to link her hero with the villain in a profound moment of mutual recognition, but it doesn’t entirely come off.  Even so, the milieu is promising, and these complaints feel pretty trivial in light of the book’s well handled mysteries and effortlessly read prose.  I’ll definitely be adding the author’s other novels to my to-read queue.

It was kind of a long, rough week, so Saturday came as a welcome respite, and Jenn and I spent a busy and celebratory day together.

First we went to Jenn’s studio in Burbank for a screening party of the new Slangman’s World episodes.  For those who aren’t aware, Jenn has been writing and voice-acting for this animated kids’ show, the next incarnation of which is debuting on Georgia Public Broadcasting tomorrow.  The new shows are a blast and it’s an exciting time for the studio as they anticipate further production.

Then we drove south to the Staples Center in downtown LA to watch the home opener for the Los Angeles Kings.  We’ve never had so much fun watching our team get destroyed.  The visiting Phoenix Coyotes, a team in financial disarray and with its ultimate future still in limbo, shredded our defense to win 6-3.  Decked out in our home blacks, we had fun anyway, and both of our jersey picks — Alexander Frolov and Anze Kopitar — scored goals, leading us to conclude that had we just worn four more jerseys, we might have pulled this one out!  Better luck next time, fellas…

In the aftermath of this busy and exhausting day, we stayed holed up at home on Sunday writing, drinking coffee, napping, watching TV, and generally chilling with the cats.  I also joined my first-ever World of Warcraft PuG raid, an overpowered Molten Core run this morning.  I usually hate pick-up groups but for some reason I got talked into this one, and had fun.  I also came out of it with this awesome screenshot of my orc taking aim at the final boss:

Overall a great weekend, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.  Life should always be all weekend-y!

Every passing month gives me another “holy crap, there goes another month” moment — followed thereafter by the happy realization that a new story has gone up at Futurismic.  Stop by the site and give Eric Del Carlo’s “Fluidity” a read!