Tag Archives: review

The Event – Season 1 Episode 2

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I didn’t comment on the first episode, but there were enough hints that the “people” that were locked up in the secret facility in Alaska weren’t humans. Well the second episode…

Wait…Sorry… Spoilers… (but honestly if you’re still reading and were to get upset about spoilers you’re kind of an idiot).

Anyway so we find out that the people in the facility were the survivors of a “plane” crash in Alaska and that….

“These survivors were determined to be not of Terrestrial Origin.”

Ok, so they’re not from earth….They sure look human though, even their leader Dr. Weaver. So then Agent Lee goes on in his brief…

“As you can see outwardly they look very much like us, which could indicate a common ancestor or even a parallel evolutionary process, but there are differences. Now, initially scientists were only able to detect small variations in their circulatory systems and blood composition, but over time it became clear they age at a much slower rate than we do, meaning there had to be substantial differences that we couldn’t detect and didn’t understand. Now, recent advances in DNA sequencing are starting to change that. We now know their DNA varies from ours by slightly less than 1%.”

Lots of shock and open mouths….

But wait…back up….These “aliens” have DNA? DNA that’s less than 1% different from ours? Ok sure yeah that’s alot of DNA so they’re whatever… super strong or super smart or just different and have a propensity for asthma and thin hair….But this show just got a weakness for me….

Now I understand the need for using human actors for aliens. I get it. But if you’re gonna do that then you can go different routes for WHY they look human. Possession, masks/costumes….Doesn’t have to be much, and doesn’t have to stand up to too much scrutiny, but it’s enough to make me not question it too much.

But to actually SAY that the aliens are not from earth but have pretty much the same DNA as us and writing it off to ‘parallel evolution’ or a ‘common ancestor’ is pretty lame.

I’ll give kudos to the show for admitting that the aliens were aliens by the second epsiode. It doesn’t feel like they’re stringing it out too long, and it doesn’t feel like they’re moving too fast (like the new V series did the first few episodes).  I like the pace of the reveal so far, and I like that they’re saying “aliens” but at the same time they aren’t really saying “aliens”.  What they’re saying is about the most improbably of alien scenarios.

So here’s what I’ll need. I’ll need the so called aliens to be from another dimension, or from the future. Or something similar. What they can’t be is just from another planet with no real connection to us and that was the showrunners explanation for why they look like humans but hey they’re really aliens.

Cause that’s the worst possible explanation, and one that really pisses me off. If you want human looking aliens, fine I can dig it…Just don’t tell me they are less than 1% different from us, but have DNA and whatever and look totally like us. I’d rather you tell me nano cloning or psychic possession etc.

As it is now, they need to be from earth, or a parallel earth, or this show ranks as dumb in my book. I’ll keep watching for now, but I need more info.

Review – Halting State by Charles Stross

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Well I’m continuing my reading journey. With a few exceptions here and there, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m basically reading the Hugo nominees. I wasn’t a regular reader for a number of years, but the past couple years of regular usage of the public library has both made me a huge supporter of our public library system in this country (and I think it’s criminal that we’re reducing it’s funds, when they require so little, and help so many) as well as a voracious reader.

To catch up, I’m still waiting for most of the 2010 Hugo nominees to be more readily available. I’ve only read one of them so far, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America by Robert Charles Wilson, which I really enjoyed (but never reviewed).

I’ve finished up my 2009′s having decided that I’m not so much upset that Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book won the Hugo, but that Neal Stephenson’s Anathem didn’t tie. It feels like in 20 years people will still want to be picking up Anathem, but The Graveyard Book might be more likely to slip into obscurity. I dunno.

So I’m now moving back in time (I know on io9 there is a guy moving forward, but I tried reading some of the older hugos, and so many of them are bad….just bad) and i’m on 2008. So far I’ve read 3 of them.

The Last Colony by John Scalzi, which I loved, but I love Scalzi’s writing. He’s probably my favorite current author, and I’ve read everything he’s written.

Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer. It was not terrible. I liked the concept, and Sawyer is a really good and clean writer that is easy for me to read. His writing is so… Canadian… Though this story just didn’t feel like one of his best. Hominids for instance from 2003 was far superior.

And now I’ve read Halting State by Charles Stross, which I’ll review shortly.

(I still have to read Ian McDonald’s Brasyl which i’m looking forward to, and then the winner from 2008 The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon, which I’m not looking forward to….Not a fan of Chabon’s writing style.)

So Halting State. It’s interesting, because it feels like it’s in a very similar universe to the one that Vernor Vinge laid out in the 2007 Hugo winner Rainbows End (Ok so i’m reading all over the place, I’ve read alot of the winners from past years, sue me). It’s a world of the near future, that you can almost grasp as being possible in 10-20 years. Glasses with HUD overlays and different virtual realities laying on top of our own. “Copspace” which only police can see which puts information about people they look at in their heads up, or over buildings, or trouble in the distance etc. Subtle additions to the world that make sense, without totally obliterating the world we’re in now. It makes for an interesting, and realistic view of the future, one neither utopian or dystopian. One that is all the shades of grey of today, just with better video games, and cars that have computers that drive them for you.

The story itself is somewhat interesting, involving a ‘break in’ of a virtual bank, with bread crumbs leading to international cyber warfare, and criminal stock manipulation, etc, etc. My problem with the book though was that the story was hard to get at, mostly because of the way it was written.

Charles Stross. He’s a better writer than I’ll ever be, and his books work my brain harder than some, but I still enjoy what I’ve seen so far. Saturn’s Children from 2009 was hard for me to jump into, but once I adjusted to his writing style, and the radically different world, I really liked the book, and I’d say the same for this one, but about 50% less.

See Halting State is written in the 2nd person.

Most people kind of stare at you when you say something like that in real life. “What do you mean?”

I mean that the whole book consists of three different characters and each chapter it’s in the second person of THAT character.

So you’d have “Chapter 2: Sue Reads a Blog”

You are still rubbing the wetness from your hair, wrapped in the far too white to be natural towels the hotel has provided for you, when you sit down at the mahogany desk to check your email. You impatiently tap the space bar to wake up the laptop, and look to your left out the window at the morning sun filling the streets.

etc (that was me writing an example, not an excerpt)

It was jarring. Both just to read a fictional story set in the future in 2nd person, as well as having that second person change from character to character, particularly when two of them were working closely together, and you could easily get confused as to what was what, and have to turn back to the chapter head to see who you’re currently inhabiting.

Maybe if it was in 3rd person it would have been a more boring book. I don’t know. I just think that being in 2nd person felt like it took away from the whole thing, and was just…. uncomfortable and unweidly.

Kudos for trying it I guess.

Which brings me to my second complaint. This book, like Saturn’s Children, also has a very quick wrap up. There’s not really any epilogue or anything. You’ll have 300 pages of introducing the world, and building up characters and a plot, and then 10 pages of plot resolution, and done. Halting State along with Saturn’s Children feel like they wrapped up very fast, overly fast even. Maybe that’s more realistic to the way the world works, but neither were particularly gripping to get to, ie they weren’t very climactic climaxes, and then the books were just over.

Maybe that’s just his style. They’re still good books, it just feels like more climactic climaxes would improve his book, and not have them end as soon as the climax is done.

Anyway. I’d give it 3 stars out of 5. If it weren’t in 2nd person I’d push it up to 4 stars, I just had trouble with that. I can see why it was a nominated book, but at the same time I’m somewhat surprised. It feels like it could have been so much better.

Up next….Well don’t hate me, but I’m skipping back to 2007 and staying with Charles Stross because i’m curious now if all his books  are this way (complex and well written, with quick resolutions and climaxes at the end) so back to Glasshouse by Charles Stross nominated for the 2007 Hugo (which lost to Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End).

2009 Hugos Review

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So I’ve finally finished reading all the Hugo nominees, and the Hugo winner, from 2009. This was a pretty amazing group of books, I’ll be perfectly honest. I haven’t read every nominee from every year, so me making a statement that this was an amazing year for the top books doesn’t hold as much weight, but my goodness. Each and every one of these books was great.

I started with the nominees, and just finished reading the winner (The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman).

Anathem by Neal Stephenson was up first. I really enjoyed his early books. I was introduced to him like many through Snow Crash, and then backtracked and read Zodiac, and I even dug up a copy of The Big U from a library before it was back in print. However as he went on, I got more and more disinterested in what he was writing. He was a great author, and the detail was remarkable, but it was like each book the editor got more and more slack. Cryptonomicon was long and meandering and I still don’t know what it was about really. It seemed way too long and lacking in a plot. The Baroque Cycle….It was like he went so far off the deep end that he couldn’t just write one long book anymore, it was so long and lacking in editing that they broke it up into three. Maybe that’s not how it was, but that’s how it felt to me. I couldn’t read them. Anathem is a return to form for Stephenson. Yes, it’s still long but it’s cropped down from his previous efforts, and yes the book takes a bit to get off the ground as it creates the world but it’s a completely different world from Earth so it takes a bit to set it up. It’s possibly his best book.  It’s an interesting and new world, it’s got interesting characters, and a plot. And it’s got his trademark asides, tangents and conversations, but they’re great, and they tie in to the story well. An amazing book that all lovers of sci-fi and smart fiction should read.

After reading Anathem I decided to check out the rest of the 2009 class to see what could possibly be nominated next to it, as well as BEAT a book so good.

Next up came Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross. This book is in some ways an homage to books like Friday by Robert Heinlein, down to the buxom female on the cover. The book is set in a future where humanity is all dead, and the intelligent robots we created to be our servants and workers are left behind, still soldiering on. The main character a former sex robot now with no humans to service making her way through the solar system. The book itself took awhile for me to get into. The writing style, while good, was not necessarily elementary. My brain had to switch into a higher gear. ONce there though, and once I started understanding the world and what was going on, I got into it. Unlike Anathem, Stross doesn’t spend 100 pages establishing the world. He jumps into the action on page 1 and you have to figure out what’s going on as you read. That’s all well and good, but it was such a different world it was hard at first to get with the program. By the end though I was really enjoying the book. The visuals were astonishing, the story gripping.

Anathem still on top, but Saturn’s Children very good. What’s next.

John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale. Ok I have to admit, John Scalzi is one of my favorite active writers. One of my favorite overall really. I’ve read everything he’s written now with reading Zoe’s Tale, and I can’t say that for many authors. I love his brand of sci-fi, his space adventure, his non-space adventure. I just really enjoy his writing style and topics and humor. They mesh very well with my own. Zoe’s Tale itself is sort of an alt-perspective novel to his previous one in the Old Man’s War universe ‘The Last Colony’. This one is seen from the perspective of Zoe, the daughter (adopted) of the colony leaders (and main characters in his other Old Man’s War stories). It was interesting to re-read the story but from a different view, which has to be a difficult thing to do without telling the same story twice. On the whole though he did a great job, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. However, I couldn’t bump it above Anathem on my list. While I love Scalzi’s writing tremendously, Anathem was just a next level book.

Next came the last non-winning nominee Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. It was in the young adults fiction section which troubled me, but after reading it I have to question why it was considered young adult fiction (a couple of the characters get naked in it and have sex. Not exactly pg material) Anyway it was a well written story, near future, about a kid and his group of friends who get arrested by homeland security in the wake of a terrorist attack, and then how he gets back at ‘the man’. Interesting book, good for teen rebellion. It was Sci-Fi in that there were a few techs in it that weren’t real, maybe 5-10 years in the future if that. I enjoyed it, it was a quality book, but I threw it in last place.

So last book up. I was dreading it. It was “the winner”. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. How  could it beat Anathem, or even Zoe’s Tale, I just couldn’t conceive. Not only was it a children’s book (It not only won the Hugo but it won the Newberry medal as well for best children’s book) but it was set in a graveyard with ghosts and ghouls and vampires and werewolves, etc. That subject matter just feels so trite these days with the Vampire Tween movies and True Blood, etc. Anyway, I got it out of the library and gave it a whirl.

I take back my dread. It was really an amazing book. It was like the anti-Harry Potter in a way. A story about an orphan boy, raised by mystical figures who teach him magic, to overcome the evil nemisis who killed his family (whom he escaped from as a baby) and win and become an adult. Same basic story, but so much better. Condensed into one book, rather than spread over 7, it keeps an internal logical consistency that the Harry Potter books never did, and the characters make sense, and behave in rational ways (or irrational if they’re meant to). It was really a perfect book in that mold, and I have to give it props. I think Anathem and Saturn’s Children were both written ‘above’ the level of this book and make you think in ways this one doesn’t, but this was really a perfect amalgam of this traditional plot, in a new circumstance, with colorfull characters. I visualized it the whole time reading it. I’m sure the movie, should they make one, will be fabulous. I cast the movie while reading the book (Ian McKellen as Silas…) More than anything though as I said, it just made me realize how bad the Harry Potter books really were. Oh they were enjoyable sure, but I don’t know abot you but when I was reading them many times I wanted to poke my eyes out. Harry not telling the adults tthings, the adults keeping things from Harry, him not trusting anyone, nobody trusting him. God the books were one big trust issue. It made me crazy. The Graveyard Book though doesn’t have that. The boy as a boy is trusting as he should be, too much so, and the adults trust him with some knowledge, but protect him, but don’t lie to him or cover things up.

So there it is. The five Hugo nominees, including the winner from 2009. I agree with The Graveyard Book winning, though I’d have been happy if Anathem had won as well. No reason to not have two winners no? The rest I all whole heartedly recommend for all sci-fi fans, though if you’re going to read Zoe’s Tale be sure to read the whole Old Man’s War series first so you can enjoy it more.