Category: Science Fiction and Fantasy

Here’s dorable on Nightwatch:

I had read reviews saying that Night Watch immitates every Hollywood SF/fantasy movie ever made, and it does. I had also read that the movie is blatantly un-Hollywood in essence, and it is. But mostly, it’s just a huge campy mess. The script, the dialogue, the editing — it’s all overdone and rushed and confused, which is also why you won’t be bored in this movie: you’ll keep busy trying to figure out what’s going on.

No, forget about what’s going on; it’s hard enough to figure out which character you’re looking at, what with the dark lighting and non-distinctive (non-Hollywood) faces. No, forget that, too: it’s hard enough to figure out who’s looking at whom or who’s opening which door, because the hilariously over-enthusiastic camerawork and effects do not stop for a single second. Protagonist goes to the kitchen — zoom through keyhole! Protagonist opens the fridge — bullet-time! Protagonist says “da” — quick zoom in, quick zoom out, bullet-time, echo effect and x-ray vision! No wonder everyone looks so haggard in this movie; I’d be a bit tired too if every time I peed I had to worry about rogue cameras flying into my urethra.

NRG article about ICon, apropos the Narnia movie [ via Kinnblog ] – when I was a journalist (cue yawns), I learned painfully that using “colorful” descriptive prose, like in this article, is a sure way of inadvertantly insulting people.

And here’s a more literary article about CS Lewis in the NY Times [ via Neil Gaiman ].

All things were reduced to their elemental being. Water was ocean; air was sky; earth, their ships; fire, the sun, and their thoughts. The fires banked down. Some days Kheim woke, and lived, and watched the sun go down again, and realized that he had forgotten to think a single thought that whole day. And he was the admiral.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt.

I’m only 200 pages into the book, but this paragraph made me go Like my Life.

Oddly the book I read before, Robert Silverberg’s The Gate of Worlds, is also an alternate history based on the same premise: the Black Plague is much deadlier than in our timeline, allowing historically marginalized cultures to take center stage. Silverberg’s juvenile novel has Europe conquered by the Turks, and focuses on a young (English and Christian) adventurer’s travels in the Americas. The Aztecs, Chinese, Russians and Africans are the new great powers in this timeline. The “gate of worlds” of the title is introduced only as a philosophical concept, to allow the hero to feel some speculative colonial guilt. The funniest line in the book is when the Hero’s romantic interest, the daughter of a pacific coast chief, tells him that she learned Turkish so that she could read Shakespeare in the original…

Robinson skips the use of a European viewpoint character: his Black Plague is even more lethal than Silverberg’s, and white, Christian Europe is basically erased in this cataclysm. I personally think that’s too convenient – it smacks of a plot device rather than a piece of messy history – but I guess it helps him avoid distractions. The moslem, Chinese and Indian parts of the world go on as usual, more or less, with the lives of his constantly reincarnating characters, the rebelious K, the inquisitive I and the steadfast B (as well as that meanie, S.) weaving in and out of history. Right now, K and I (currently called Kheim and I-chin – the characters’ personalities and first initials remain fixed) and their Chinese fleet, which set out to conquer Japan but drifted past into the ocean, are probably about to discover America.

I hope that’s a good omen.