I usually don't get around to finalizing my annual "Best" lists until after I've had a chance to catch up with all of the year's releases. Going by past experience, that means my 2008 Best lists wouldn't be ready until May 2009.
Here's something different for this year: a big, fruit salad list of my favorite arts/culture stuff from 2008* that I've seen/read/experienced in 2008.
I wanted to annotate each of the entries, but I also wanted to make sure I posted this before I went on my Christmas vacation - so there are some "blanks" here that I might come back to fill in later.
No music here, because I've mostly given up on listening to new releases, although I did like the Coldplay album quite a bit. No novels here because I'm a couple of years behind there, too. No a(r/l)t comix either, for the same reasons: I'm always playing catch up!
I'm on Christmas vacation now, so I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to respond, but questions and comments are always appreciated.
1. Lost Season 4 - In certain RPG circles there's a recurring debate that goes something like this:
On the one side, you have people saying that Star Wars is cool because of all the spaceships, aliens, and powers, so an RPG about Star Wars needs rules for all of the cool spaceships, aliens, and powers. On the other side, you have people saying that Star Wars is compelling because of its underlying dramatic and thematic concerns, so an RPG about Star Wars needs rules to help address these dramatic and thematic concerns. People on this side of the debate tend to dismiss all the powers, spaceships, and aliens as "mere color"- i.e. trappings that you could get rid of and still have something that was Star Wars-like (i.e. something that had the same kind of pulpy feel and mythic reach).
I take a middle ground: Star Wars is compelling and cool because of the virtuous cycle set up between its unique sci-fi trappings (the specific spaceships, powers, and aliens) and its thematic concerns. I think all of the best fantasy and sci-fi manages to find this kind of "sweet spot" where the "rules" of the mythos (i.e., how the Force works, how the Republic is organized politically, etc.) creatively constrain and shape the action and themes.
Sometime during it's second season I started describing Lost as a series that moment-for-moment was one of the most entertaining shows on television, but on a larger, "seasonal" scale was extremely unsatisfying. In other words, they couldn't find that sweet spot. All the little bits and pieces worked, but they didn't seem like they added up to anything and it was frustrating because it seemed like they were supposed to add up to something. In his piece on the Season 4 finale, Sean argued that getting too concerned about the big picture was, perhaps, not the best way to watch this show. But it's hard not to get caught up in all the details of the Lost mythos, since they're interwoven so completely into the action. Anyway, I think it wasn't until the end of Season 3 and (especially) the entirety of Season 4 that the Lost team perfected the balance between micro and macro: moment-to-moment the show was as strong as ever and the slowly but steadily emerging outlines of the "big picture" helped to ground these moments and give them greater thematic resonance because of the way they fit into the mosaic of the mythos.
2. Profit motive and the whispering wind - I want to write something of my own, but for now read this.
3. Cartooning class with Matthew Thurber - Taking this course was definitely one of the best decisions I made all year. Matt is a very good teacher and the class was laid back and a lot of fun. Plus, I learned a lot and even ended up getting to make my own minicomic. I've been a comics/cartoons fan for just about as long as I can remember, but the last time I ever really tried to draw a comic was back when I was in the third grade. What's interesting to me as a guy who spends a decent percentage of his spare time thinking about/writing about comics is how much insight making even a pretty basic minicomic gave me into comics in general. It was an eye-opening experience. Like - I love that part in Donald Phelps' essay on Gould's Dick Tracy where he talks about the way Gould uses blacks, but it wasn't until I tried (and failed) to get a similar effect that I was able to grasp exactly what Gould had achieved.
4. The revival of Last Year at Marienbad at Film Forum - What a difference a print makes! Fred Camper, one of my favorite film critics, always emphasizes that if you've only seen a movie on video, you haven't really seen it. After having first seen Last Year at Marienbad, years ago, on a pretty lousy VHS tape, watching it on a beautiful print at the Film Forum was a revelation. On video, the image was cramped and fuzzy. The subtitles were barely readable and incomplete: I could comprehend French well enough to know that stuff was left out, but not enough to follow the twisty-turny narration. At the Film Forum, everything was clear. This is a beautiful, clever movie - and it's also pretty funny.
5. The Fold - A funny, super smart erotic, sci-fi thriller webseries (co-written and produced by my friends Ray and Polly, but I'd recommend . Erotic, not so much because it's made to turn you on (although it might), but because, unlike most fiction, it acknowledges that the part of us given to erotic fantasizing isn't completely compartmentalized from the rest our lives. It's filled with lots of smart, sci-fi-ish observations about the way Web 2.0 has affected our sense of the border between public and private life and how that, in turn, has affected those fantasies.
6. Burn After Reading - I wrote about this movie already, here.
7. Tim and Eric's Awesome Show Great Job Season 3 - I've written a little bit about Tim and Eric before, here. This season of their show had some of their funniest moments, but it's also probably their most inaccessible body of work, in that it's more self-referential than ever, more focused on exploring its own little world. This has a downside - guests and bits trotted out seemingly as "fanservice" - but it also allows for stuff like the "Jim and Derrick" episode, one of the best takes on MTV-style youth culture since Beavis and Butthead.
8. Wall-E - I like that A.O. Scott has to qualify his praise of Milk as being the best live action mainstream American movie he saw all year.
9. Slam Dunk Vol. 1 - I've gotten back into reading manga, but on most of the series I'm following I'm waaaaay behind. Slam Dunk is the only "new" manga I've started and Vol. 1 is the only manga I've read that was actually released this year. So this was the first year ever that the bulk of my comics-reading enjoyment came from manga, so I'll Slam Dunk stand in for all of the stuff I read and enjoyed.
10. Jason Statham - Almost singlehandedly keeping the action movie alive.
11. The "Brand New Day" and Beyond Era of The Amazing Spider-Man - I read some comics that I thought were better than these and a few comics that I enjoyed more, but I really dig what the writing/editorial team is doing with this book. Which is, as I've written before, trying to elaborate and expand on the John Romita/Stan Lee run without straying too far from what makes the character and concept work. In theory, I'm all for wild and woolly super-hero comics that make no sense to outsiders and I genuinely like those idiosyncrasies of super-hero comics that get filed off when they get turned into super-hero movies, but, in practice, the decisions made by the Spidey Team have led to better super-hero comics (in just about any way you want to define "better") than the weirder/more ambitious ones made by the folks over at DC or in Marvel's "Event Department".
Anyway, this has gotten me back in the comic store on a weekly basis, something I couldn't have imagined happening at this time last year.
12. Rambo - I want to write about this movie, but don't have time to do it justice right now. I'll just say that I think this movie is a kind of inversion of Saving Private Ryan, esp. in terms of how salvation relates to warfare and in terms of how it addresses the question "what good can come of the kind of mechanized violence that rips people to shreds". It's The Wild Bunch for the new millennium. (And this reminds me that I still need to see JCVD.)
13. The Happening - I wrote about this a couple of times.
14. Black Summer by Warren Ellis and Juan Jose Ryp - I wrote about this comic already, here. I'm not as into their follow-up, No Heroes - it's #0 issue was really great, the next two issues were a bit of a let down - but I still think Ryp is one of the few guys drawing super-hero comics who'd be worth following no matter who was doing the writing. Frank Quitely would be one of the others. Luckily, they both tend to work with guys who know how to write these kinds of things.
15. All of the classic comic strip collections that I hope to either get as Christmas gifts or get for myself with any B&N gift cards I might recieve - Kind of cheating since these aren't things I've actually read. But it definitely makes me very happy that there's the distinct possibility that I'll be able to spend New Year's Eve pouring over that Scorchy Smith collection.
*More or less: I always allow for some wiggle room.
Showing posts with label sci-fi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sci-fi. Show all posts
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Plague War by Jeff Carlson
Plague War suffers from the same problem as John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigade: it's a sequel that isn't as immediately gripping as the first book in the series. Plague Year hooked me after the first sentence, but I stalled out after about 30 pages with Plague War. I had put the book aside for a few months while I devoted most of my reading time to comics and picked it up again yesterday because I liked the first book enough to want to give it another shot.
I'm glad I did: while the first 30 pages dragged a bit, the next 250 flew right by. Part of the issue is that the action starts up immediately after the events of Plague Year, so instead of dropping us right into the middle of an obviously desperate situation as in the beginning of Plague Year, Carlson has to spend some time reintroducing us to the characters and the world before we can really grasp all the dynamics of what's going on. It all feels a little repetitive, but eventually it does take off.
It still isn't as solid as the first book. Plague Year gave us characters who, in true Romero fashion, often made the wrong choice for the right reason, while in this book the protagonists have turned into more conventional action/adventure heroes, and they're able to get away with things more often.
In my favorite apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fiction, the characters are faced with situations where all the options available to them are undesirable in some way. No matter what they choose, they're faced with losing something. (Early episodes of Battlestar Galactica work this way, for instance). Here, though, there are too many situations where the true costs of the heroes' actions don't seem to be taken into account: Carlson is too focused on the benefits.
This is part of a larger, general problem with adventure fiction - especially serial adventure fiction: the tendency of creators to be overly protective of their characters. Not just protective in the sense of "keeping them alive", but also keeping them from doing things the audience might not find appealing. I understand why creators feel they need to do this: serial fiction is generally character-based - rather than situation-based - so protecting the characters - keeping them healthy and likable and attractive - is seen as being necessary to ensure longterm commercial success. However, I don't think it's a coincidence that the last few years have given us critical and commercial successes like Lost and The Walking Dead that gain a lot of their oomph from not treating their characters with kid gloves, while similar shows that tried to keep everything "just the way the fans like it" (like, say, Alias) stumbled.
On the other hand, Carlson has a pragmatic p.o.v. towards romantic attraction which gives the developing relationship between the lead characters a real edge. This is definitely a refreshing element as too often even the hardest-nosed adventure fiction is slips into the most obvious Hollywood sentimentality when it comes to romance.
I'm glad I did: while the first 30 pages dragged a bit, the next 250 flew right by. Part of the issue is that the action starts up immediately after the events of Plague Year, so instead of dropping us right into the middle of an obviously desperate situation as in the beginning of Plague Year, Carlson has to spend some time reintroducing us to the characters and the world before we can really grasp all the dynamics of what's going on. It all feels a little repetitive, but eventually it does take off.
It still isn't as solid as the first book. Plague Year gave us characters who, in true Romero fashion, often made the wrong choice for the right reason, while in this book the protagonists have turned into more conventional action/adventure heroes, and they're able to get away with things more often.
In my favorite apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fiction, the characters are faced with situations where all the options available to them are undesirable in some way. No matter what they choose, they're faced with losing something. (Early episodes of Battlestar Galactica work this way, for instance). Here, though, there are too many situations where the true costs of the heroes' actions don't seem to be taken into account: Carlson is too focused on the benefits.
This is part of a larger, general problem with adventure fiction - especially serial adventure fiction: the tendency of creators to be overly protective of their characters. Not just protective in the sense of "keeping them alive", but also keeping them from doing things the audience might not find appealing. I understand why creators feel they need to do this: serial fiction is generally character-based - rather than situation-based - so protecting the characters - keeping them healthy and likable and attractive - is seen as being necessary to ensure longterm commercial success. However, I don't think it's a coincidence that the last few years have given us critical and commercial successes like Lost and The Walking Dead that gain a lot of their oomph from not treating their characters with kid gloves, while similar shows that tried to keep everything "just the way the fans like it" (like, say, Alias) stumbled.
On the other hand, Carlson has a pragmatic p.o.v. towards romantic attraction which gives the developing relationship between the lead characters a real edge. This is definitely a refreshing element as too often even the hardest-nosed adventure fiction is slips into the most obvious Hollywood sentimentality when it comes to romance.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Grant Morrison's Dr. Who #1
"Changes", the first story in this collection is a standard Doctor vs. monster story in two parts. It has nice art by John Ridgway that seems completely in line with (the relatively little I know of) the conventions of 1980s British sci-fi comics. Nothing makes it stick out as a "Grant Morrison" comic, although there is some clever dialogue that plays off the monster's shape shifting abilities.
The second story, "Culture Shock!", is a one-parter and, at first glance, seems more like filler. It also has a standard set-up: the Doctor shows up just in time to help some alien creatures in need. But Morrison's take on the creature and its plight - linking the microscopic to the cosmic by dissolving the conceptual barrier between them - is distinctively his own and anticipates some of the ideas that show up in Animal Man, JLA, and The Filth.
Bryan Hitch is the artist here and his work was the only thing that really surprised me in the entire comic. But that's only because I had forgotten that he used to be a real cartoonist. Hitch is very talented and I like a lot of the stuff he does, but while his current style seems to be pretty suited to an action-movie take on super-heroes - like The Ultimates - it feels out of place in a book like Fantastic Four that (at its best) has never been about "realism" of any sort. Dr. Who is definitely more on the Fantastic Four side of the spectrum, so it's nice to see a bit of "cartoony expressiveness" in his work.
From a completist's perspective, I'm glad that these stories are being collected. But even though I'm a reasonably big fan of both Dr. Who and Grant Morrison, I don't think anything here is essential reading. Neither story added anything new to the way I look at the Doctor or at Morrison's work.
Monday, September 8, 2008
The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
The central concept of John Scalzi's Old Man's War hit the sweet spot between originality and inevitability that makes for particularly resonant science fiction.
The Ghost Brigades isn't as original and doesn't seem as inevitable, which, early on, I took as two strikes against it. With Old Man's War the question was "Why haven't I seen this before?", but with The Ghost Brigades the question was "Where have I seen this before?" It felt more conventional and the "world building" of the earlier novel seemed to be replaced by "world elaboration".
But this is a case where my first impressions of a book really fail to do it justice. Though it isn't as immediately gripping as Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades develops into a story that is just as thematically compelling and full of great neo-Heinlein nuts-and-bolts details.
But here's what I really want to talk about:
I recommended Old Man's War to a number of people who I knew weren't really "sci-fi fans". Like Starship Troopers or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, it's a book that, IMO (based on reports back from friends), works pretty well for the non-fan. But even though The Ghost Brigades is, in the final analysis, as good a book (if not a better one), I don't think it has as wide an appeal.
How much should accessibility or universaility of appeal count for in terms of how "good" we think something is? If we're talking about most kinds of art/culture works, while we might look at universality of appeal as one measure of greatness, it's hardly ever the only, or even dominant, measure used and, in fact, the opposite law is often evoked (i.e. lowest common denominator criticism). But I do see the whole accessibility/universality stick getting pulled out quite a bit in internecine nerd debates about comic books, sci-fi books and movies, video games, role-playing games, etc. (Related: the phenomenon Jim Henley is talking about,here).
The Ghost Brigades isn't as original and doesn't seem as inevitable, which, early on, I took as two strikes against it. With Old Man's War the question was "Why haven't I seen this before?", but with The Ghost Brigades the question was "Where have I seen this before?" It felt more conventional and the "world building" of the earlier novel seemed to be replaced by "world elaboration".
But this is a case where my first impressions of a book really fail to do it justice. Though it isn't as immediately gripping as Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades develops into a story that is just as thematically compelling and full of great neo-Heinlein nuts-and-bolts details.
But here's what I really want to talk about:
I recommended Old Man's War to a number of people who I knew weren't really "sci-fi fans". Like Starship Troopers or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, it's a book that, IMO (based on reports back from friends), works pretty well for the non-fan. But even though The Ghost Brigades is, in the final analysis, as good a book (if not a better one), I don't think it has as wide an appeal.
How much should accessibility or universaility of appeal count for in terms of how "good" we think something is? If we're talking about most kinds of art/culture works, while we might look at universality of appeal as one measure of greatness, it's hardly ever the only, or even dominant, measure used and, in fact, the opposite law is often evoked (i.e. lowest common denominator criticism). But I do see the whole accessibility/universality stick getting pulled out quite a bit in internecine nerd debates about comic books, sci-fi books and movies, video games, role-playing games, etc. (Related: the phenomenon Jim Henley is talking about,here).
Friday, August 17, 2007
Movie Chat: Deja Vu
Deja Vu
Note: There are some mild spoilers here. I don't give away the specifics, but if you don't know anything about this movie other than that it is a techno-thriller with Denzel Washington and if you are interested in watching it - don't read on. FWIW, I knew very little about this movie before watching it, which was probably a good thing. If you're on the fence about whether or not you wanted to see it, what I have to say below probably won't help any. I thought it was okay, but I really wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I mean, if your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife really wanted to watch it, you might as well humour them - it certainly wasn't painful to sit through. But no need to go out of your way.
My guess is that if David Cronenberg's name was on this movie (i.e., if it were the exact same movie otherwise), film critics might have gone into overdrive praising its dissection of the way digital technology has affected the way we deal with the past and the way we relate to each other. Luckily, Tony Scott's name is on it, so we can easily see it for what it is: a thriller that is just barely good enough for the kind of thing it is that you don't feel like you completely wasted two hours of your life watching it.
There are two main problems with the movie.
Maybe it's all relative, though: compared to many action-thrillers, this might come off like Vertigo. Denzel is pretty good, even he's not doing anything new (which I guess is kind of a bummer after how exciting he was to watch in Inside Man).
Hmmmm... I'm so "meh" about this movie it's kind of depressing. I mean, in lots of ways it's better than you're standard Michael Bay fare, but at least Bay's movies have their own personality. They're full of lousy filmmaking and empty spectacle, but they're also kind of quirky. I find myself rooting for something like The Island, just because it's such a misguided idea. And, though I was bored at first by Bad Boys II, I can do nothing else but stand up and applaud a movie that decides to, almost out-of-nowhere, at its hour-and-a-half mark, invade Cuba.
*As opposed to technology there for its own sake. Earlier this year, I wondered why Monster House had been done as an animated CGI film and came up with the unsatisfactory response: because the filmmakers could do it that way. Likewise the new Robert Zemeckis-directed Beowulf movie: Zemeckis seems to be in love with this motion capture technology to the extent that he wants to use it even on projects where it doesn't really seem to fit.
Note: There are some mild spoilers here. I don't give away the specifics, but if you don't know anything about this movie other than that it is a techno-thriller with Denzel Washington and if you are interested in watching it - don't read on. FWIW, I knew very little about this movie before watching it, which was probably a good thing. If you're on the fence about whether or not you wanted to see it, what I have to say below probably won't help any. I thought it was okay, but I really wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I mean, if your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife really wanted to watch it, you might as well humour them - it certainly wasn't painful to sit through. But no need to go out of your way.
My guess is that if David Cronenberg's name was on this movie (i.e., if it were the exact same movie otherwise), film critics might have gone into overdrive praising its dissection of the way digital technology has affected the way we deal with the past and the way we relate to each other. Luckily, Tony Scott's name is on it, so we can easily see it for what it is: a thriller that is just barely good enough for the kind of thing it is that you don't feel like you completely wasted two hours of your life watching it.
There are two main problems with the movie.
- This may be one of those bug/feature things, but it seems like the premise of the movie grew out new digital filmmaking technology that allows filmmaker's to do all sorts of crazy swooshes and zooms: where the "camera" is no longer something moving through and capturing images of "reality" and is, instead, a our p.o.v. into a digitally created world. On the one hand, it's nice to see an effects-heavy movie where the signature effects actually have some thematic weight*. On the other hand, the movies feels like it was built around this effect rather than the other way around. It stops dead in its track for the big scene where the filmmakers get to show it off. And, unfortunately, the way they show it off isn't really all that clever or engaging.
- The bigger problem is that while watching it I couldn't help thinking of similar, better movies. Ugh - I know, I know: the title makes it almost impossible for a film critic not to say something like this, but it's true! Deja Vu is dumber than Primer and doesn't have the emotional depth of Twelve Monkeys.
Maybe it's all relative, though: compared to many action-thrillers, this might come off like Vertigo. Denzel is pretty good, even he's not doing anything new (which I guess is kind of a bummer after how exciting he was to watch in Inside Man).
Hmmmm... I'm so "meh" about this movie it's kind of depressing. I mean, in lots of ways it's better than you're standard Michael Bay fare, but at least Bay's movies have their own personality. They're full of lousy filmmaking and empty spectacle, but they're also kind of quirky. I find myself rooting for something like The Island, just because it's such a misguided idea. And, though I was bored at first by Bad Boys II, I can do nothing else but stand up and applaud a movie that decides to, almost out-of-nowhere, at its hour-and-a-half mark, invade Cuba.
*As opposed to technology there for its own sake. Earlier this year, I wondered why Monster House had been done as an animated CGI film and came up with the unsatisfactory response: because the filmmakers could do it that way. Likewise the new Robert Zemeckis-directed Beowulf movie: Zemeckis seems to be in love with this motion capture technology to the extent that he wants to use it even on projects where it doesn't really seem to fit.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Ron on Sci-Fi, Sean on Sci-Fi
A while ago, I had a back-and-forth with Joshua A.C. Newman - the author of the very interesting and fun story-game Shock: - regarding the definition of science fiction. Now, on this Forge thread dealing with some actual play of Shock:, Ron Edwards offers his own definition:
Now, I like the first part of what I've bolded a lot. In fact, I like it better than anything I've come up with, in that it includes things like like Star Wars (exaggerated elements and codes = "aliens", "robots", "psychic powers", "Intergalactic rebellion", viewpoints regarding today = ) and The Matrix (exaggerated elements = "virtual reality", "transcendent AI", "robot-human war"), which other definitions seem designed to exclude.
That second part - "to generate some viewpoint regarding today" - is a bit trickier, especially if, as Ron goes on to state, we don't have to take the author's motivations into consideration.
Here's why it's tricky: how can any piece of fiction - science or otherwise - not generate a viewpoint on the time and place in which it was written? I'd guess that a writer who didn't want their fiction to generate this kind of viewpoint, would have to consciously try very hard not to do so.
(For instance, Gore Vidal's Lincoln generates a viewpoint about post-Vietnam America, even though the events in the book all take place in the 1860s. I'm also reminded of Pauline Kael's argument that Bonnie and Clyde is "about Vietnam".)
Still, even though this might be redundant, it's probably a good idea to point out that sci-fi isn't really about, say, predicting the future.
Now, Ron writes that it doesn't matter "whether the themes involved are critical and nuanced vs. simple and brightly-colored", but he then goes on to argue that
But this doesn't seem to follow, at least if Ron is serious about it not mattering "whether the themes involved are critical and nuanced vs. simple and brightly-colored".
There's more:
So I have a couple of thoughts about this:
I'm tempted to say that when he talks about generating a viewpoint on today, he really means "generating a certain kind of viewpoint on today" and I'd further guess that that certain kind of viewpoint is a critical one, and, perhaps more importantly, a political one.
But that doesn't really make sense to me, either: maybe I'm just reading lots of different science fiction than Ron is. I mean, looking over the Hugo nominees and winners from the last ten years, I see Joe Haldeman, Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, John Scalzi, Iain M. Banks, Dan Simmons, David Brin, Michael Swanwick, Bruce Sterling, and Kim Stanley Robinson, among others. This stuff doesn't seem "intellectually spineless" and most it strikes me as being pretty politically aware. And these guys are some of the biggest names in science fiction right now. Hell - we can add in blockbuster authors like Orson Scott Card and Michael Crichton and we're still well within the bounds of Ron's original definition. (And don't forget The Matrix, either, which, after all, is all about political awareness and is one of the biggest pop culture sci-fi hits of the last twenty years).
Maybe I'm spending too much time on this, but I think the progression here is both strange and interesting: Ron starts with a very sensible definition of science-fiction and ends up with a rant that boils down to "sci-fi was better when I was a kid and it's all those other sci-fi fans who are responsible for it turning to shit".
Now, I have no problem with Ron (or anyone else) thinking that things have gone to shit (I'm enough of a "Tory pessimist" to sympathize with these sentiments a lot of the time and I'm also in favor of kicking Harlan Ellison in the ass). But I think that he shouldn't have tried to tie his personal preferences and disappointments into his attempt to define sci-fi, mainly because his "polemic" muddies what is otherwise a very useful and clear definition.
Plus, placing the blame on "the whole SF fandom culture" ignores the idea that there's more in common between the kind of "good sci-fi" of Ron's youth and the degenerate "faux sci-fi" of the last ten years. This is related to what I said in my earlier post, but I think there's a non-trivial connection between the appeal of Star Wars and the appeal of Asimov's Foundation stories. If sci-fi has been corrupted by pandering to its fan base, that's only because sci-fi has always attracted the kind of fan base that was there for the "pandering". That is, the rocketships and robots and inter-galactic societies were a huge draw to the kids who first got into Asimov's Foundation stories. The trappings themselves - the "exaggerated elements and codes" - were always at least a big a deal as what the authors did with them - "generate a viewpoint regarding today".
Meanwhile, Sean posts about the "current" trend of dystopian sci-fi. I think Sean's major points are right on. (I agree with him that "a belief in the imminent apocalypse--best exemplified by religious millenarianists, although as the excellent Children of Men... would indicate, that lot by no means has a monopoly on the doctrine--is 100% pure vanity, a reflection of the deep-seated conviction that one is part of the Most Special Generation EVAR.")
My take is that dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction has always been around (from The Time Machine to Panic in Year Zero! to Blade Runner), so what we're really noticing now is the absence of any other kind of sci-fi, at least when it comes to sci-fi that reaches the mainstream of pop culture. It will be interesting to see what happens when/if the more optimistic kind of sci-fi of "the new space opera" and Singularity fiction reaches a big popular audience.
All right, I must now deliver a brief polemic: science fiction is a distinct form of fiction. It is always concerned with today, or rather, the date at which a particular story was created. It is snapshot fiction, using exaggerated elements and codes ("future," "alternate dimension," "aliens") to generate some viewpoint regarding today (the date it's created) [emp mine -JH]. Whether the author's motivations concerned any such thing, or whether the themes involved are critical and nuanced vs. simple and brightly-colored, are totally not part of the definition.
Now, I like the first part of what I've bolded a lot. In fact, I like it better than anything I've come up with, in that it includes things like like Star Wars (exaggerated elements and codes = "aliens", "robots", "psychic powers", "Intergalactic rebellion", viewpoints regarding today = ) and The Matrix (exaggerated elements = "virtual reality", "transcendent AI", "robot-human war"), which other definitions seem designed to exclude.
That second part - "to generate some viewpoint regarding today" - is a bit trickier, especially if, as Ron goes on to state, we don't have to take the author's motivations into consideration.
Here's why it's tricky: how can any piece of fiction - science or otherwise - not generate a viewpoint on the time and place in which it was written? I'd guess that a writer who didn't want their fiction to generate this kind of viewpoint, would have to consciously try very hard not to do so.
(For instance, Gore Vidal's Lincoln generates a viewpoint about post-Vietnam America, even though the events in the book all take place in the 1860s. I'm also reminded of Pauline Kael's argument that Bonnie and Clyde is "about Vietnam".)
Still, even though this might be redundant, it's probably a good idea to point out that sci-fi isn't really about, say, predicting the future.
Now, Ron writes that it doesn't matter "whether the themes involved are critical and nuanced vs. simple and brightly-colored", but he then goes on to argue that
[t]he commercial and subcultural labels that go by the name "science fiction," on the other hand, are artifacts and of no special interest whatever except as artifacts (causes include bookstore categorization, investor jargon, and product placement). Suffice to say that of material published under/within that label during the last 10 years, I would be surprised if even 5% were admissible as science fiction by the above definition...
But this doesn't seem to follow, at least if Ron is serious about it not mattering "whether the themes involved are critical and nuanced vs. simple and brightly-colored".
There's more:
Anyway, to someone whose thinking inclines in the above direction, Joshua A. C. Newman is bucking for hero status. He is the only person with the guts to tackle this issue in RPG terms. All other science fiction role-playing games have been written in the sense of the commercial and subcultural trappings rather than the core concept. Shock is a first, a de novo, an innovation. But more than merely an innovation, it's not only what I wanted, but what I needed. In this day and age, I am not going to get science fiction consistently anywhere else. The person typing this post is Shock's target audience.
(Ooh, I can't stop ranting. All that polemic up there? I must spew more! ... [this] speaks incredibly badly of the design community since RPGs first appeared; it speaks of our collective intellectual spinelessness, our fascination with trappings and bogus pastiche, our complete loss of political awareness, and our willingness to buy things because they remind us of something good ... which, also, reflects most of my thinking regarding science fiction as a written and film medium since I entered my teens in the late 1970s, and for which I'd like to snarl, at the whole SF fandom culture, "thanks a lot, you fucking imbeciles," and oh yeah, pausing to kick Harlan Ellison a good one in the ass on the way. Talk about co-option. Graaaarrrhhh!) [italics in original - JH]
So I have a couple of thoughts about this:
I'm tempted to say that when he talks about generating a viewpoint on today, he really means "generating a certain kind of viewpoint on today" and I'd further guess that that certain kind of viewpoint is a critical one, and, perhaps more importantly, a political one.
But that doesn't really make sense to me, either: maybe I'm just reading lots of different science fiction than Ron is. I mean, looking over the Hugo nominees and winners from the last ten years, I see Joe Haldeman, Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, John Scalzi, Iain M. Banks, Dan Simmons, David Brin, Michael Swanwick, Bruce Sterling, and Kim Stanley Robinson, among others. This stuff doesn't seem "intellectually spineless" and most it strikes me as being pretty politically aware. And these guys are some of the biggest names in science fiction right now. Hell - we can add in blockbuster authors like Orson Scott Card and Michael Crichton and we're still well within the bounds of Ron's original definition. (And don't forget The Matrix, either, which, after all, is all about political awareness and is one of the biggest pop culture sci-fi hits of the last twenty years).
Maybe I'm spending too much time on this, but I think the progression here is both strange and interesting: Ron starts with a very sensible definition of science-fiction and ends up with a rant that boils down to "sci-fi was better when I was a kid and it's all those other sci-fi fans who are responsible for it turning to shit".
Now, I have no problem with Ron (or anyone else) thinking that things have gone to shit (I'm enough of a "Tory pessimist" to sympathize with these sentiments a lot of the time and I'm also in favor of kicking Harlan Ellison in the ass). But I think that he shouldn't have tried to tie his personal preferences and disappointments into his attempt to define sci-fi, mainly because his "polemic" muddies what is otherwise a very useful and clear definition.
Plus, placing the blame on "the whole SF fandom culture" ignores the idea that there's more in common between the kind of "good sci-fi" of Ron's youth and the degenerate "faux sci-fi" of the last ten years. This is related to what I said in my earlier post, but I think there's a non-trivial connection between the appeal of Star Wars and the appeal of Asimov's Foundation stories. If sci-fi has been corrupted by pandering to its fan base, that's only because sci-fi has always attracted the kind of fan base that was there for the "pandering". That is, the rocketships and robots and inter-galactic societies were a huge draw to the kids who first got into Asimov's Foundation stories. The trappings themselves - the "exaggerated elements and codes" - were always at least a big a deal as what the authors did with them - "generate a viewpoint regarding today".
Meanwhile, Sean posts about the "current" trend of dystopian sci-fi. I think Sean's major points are right on. (I agree with him that "a belief in the imminent apocalypse--best exemplified by religious millenarianists, although as the excellent Children of Men... would indicate, that lot by no means has a monopoly on the doctrine--is 100% pure vanity, a reflection of the deep-seated conviction that one is part of the Most Special Generation EVAR.")
My take is that dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction has always been around (from The Time Machine to Panic in Year Zero! to Blade Runner), so what we're really noticing now is the absence of any other kind of sci-fi, at least when it comes to sci-fi that reaches the mainstream of pop culture. It will be interesting to see what happens when/if the more optimistic kind of sci-fi of "the new space opera" and Singularity fiction reaches a big popular audience.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
A quick note to fans of Paul Verhoeven's film version of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers
Say what you want about the film, but the novel (a) is not fascist and (b) is not racist (it very well might be species-ist, however, but that's a discussion for another time). I've written a little about this before (in fact this was one of the first things I posted on this blog), but circumstances have inspired me to bring it up again.
I'm going to spoil the book, so if you haven't read it but are just pretending that you have, stop reading now:
First, the book does celebrate the military, but it doesn't gloss over the "chickenshit" parts of military life, nor does it make war out to be anything less than Hell.
Second, the society depicted in the book is not one where you have to serve in the military in order to earn the right to vote. Rather, the vote is earned by entering into Federal Service, only a small portion of which is the military. As for being a militaristic society, the book makes it fairly clear that the Mobile Infantry is looked down upon by most citizens. It is a society that puts a lot of emphasis on civic responsibility.
Third, Juan Rico is not a blond, blue-eyed Aryan (like he is in the movie): he's Filipino, though we don't find this out until the last page. This is part of Heinlein's point, I think: all the non-Western/non-Anglo names for characters in the book are his way of suggesting that creating a functioning multi-cultural society requires something like the Federal Service, i.e. putting time in in order to become a fully-fledged citizen creates a bond among people that, if not stronger than kin and cultural ties, is at least as strong.
I'm going to spoil the book, so if you haven't read it but are just pretending that you have, stop reading now:
First, the book does celebrate the military, but it doesn't gloss over the "chickenshit" parts of military life, nor does it make war out to be anything less than Hell.
Second, the society depicted in the book is not one where you have to serve in the military in order to earn the right to vote. Rather, the vote is earned by entering into Federal Service, only a small portion of which is the military. As for being a militaristic society, the book makes it fairly clear that the Mobile Infantry is looked down upon by most citizens. It is a society that puts a lot of emphasis on civic responsibility.
Third, Juan Rico is not a blond, blue-eyed Aryan (like he is in the movie): he's Filipino, though we don't find this out until the last page. This is part of Heinlein's point, I think: all the non-Western/non-Anglo names for characters in the book are his way of suggesting that creating a functioning multi-cultural society requires something like the Federal Service, i.e. putting time in in order to become a fully-fledged citizen creates a bond among people that, if not stronger than kin and cultural ties, is at least as strong.
Friday, July 14, 2006
Robots and Rayguns and Defining Sci-Fi
So, over on Thor's blog, I (off-topically) made the comment that "Games with Sci-Fi color = Sci-Fi games". Joshua A.C. Newman (designer of the upcoming and eagerly awaited by me Sci-Fi RPG Shock: Social Science Fiction) disagreed and suggested we take up the discussion someplace else to avoid clogging up Thor's thread with internet craziness.
Here's my basic thinking:
If you ask the man/woman on the street to name some works of sci-fi. Responses might include Star Wars, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Aliens, Terminator, The Matrix. Depending on when they were born and whether or not they read books, maybe they'll mention Asimov or Bradbury or L. Ron Hubbard or Philip K. Dick, too.
So, most people identify Sci-Fi based on its color: robots, aliens, spaceships, clones, super-duper gadgets, etc.
Why pay attention to these average Joes and Janes? Why not go to the experts?
Well, genres aren't top-down affairs: they're created through the interplay between authors and audiences (made up of those average Joes and Janes as well as more dedicated fans).
I think it can be very useful to differentiate between various sub-genres of Sci-Fi - as in, Star Wars is Space Opera and Orbitsville is Hard Sci-Fi and A Voyage to Arcturus is Philosophical Sci-Fi. Especially if you are editing a short-story collection, writing an essay, trying to effectively market a story, or designing a super-focused narrativist RPG.
But I think it might be more useful (or at least, it's been more useful for me) to be able to look at the genre in the way it is commonly understood. (FWIW, I'm not alone in this: Tom Disch's interesting look at Sci-Fi, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, takes a very catholic approach to what makes up sci-fi: Star Wars, Heinlein, Stapledon, John Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, and Star Trek.)
And I think it is definitely useful (for anyone who's interested in the genre at least) to be able to consider the reasons behind this common understanding.
Take Star Wars and Asimov's Foundation Series: one focuses on pulpy adventure and the other focuses on social commentary. But both feature robots, galaxy spanning civilizations, and spaceships. (From an old-fashioned, Northrop Frye-ish lit-crit standpoint Star Wars and most of the Foundation novels are actually Romances).
Like I said, I get why people want to say that Star Wars and the Foundation novels are different beasts. But they do have shared features and it just makes the most sense to me that we acknowledge these shared features by lumping them both into the basic genre of Sci-Fi.
This is kind of an Occam's Razor thing: stories with spaceships and robots and other kinds of hi-tech, futuristic color certainly have something in common. Why come up with some other term/concept to describe what they have in common when we already have a perfectly good term/concept in Sci-Fi (as the genre is commonly understood)?
And I think Sci-Fi in this general sense is truer to the history of the writing/publishing/reading of these kinds of stories. Taking a more restrictive definition of Sci-Fi tends to retroactively un-Sci-Fi a lot of stories that were considered to be Sci-Fi when they were originally written/published/read. But we're dealing with a living genre, so I think things are too tangled together for this to work. For instance, there are a lot of books that, it seems to be, belong in the Sci-Fi genre, but that don't live up to the restrictive definition that guys like Heinlein (perhaps self-servingly?) proposed: like - Charles Harness's The Paradox Men or Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books.
(Another way to look at it: most people have no trouble lumping the Hopalong Cassidy movies together with Deadwood by calling them all Westerns, but they're certainly as different from each other in theme/focus/intent as Star Wars is to the Foundation novels).
The spaceship and raygun and robot part of these stories is supremely important for firing up the imaginations of the members of their audience, regardless of whatever else the story is up to. That is, there's a reason spaceships and robots show up in both "Star Wars" and the Foundation novels, despite the fact that these stories have different goals/themes/concerns.
Here's my basic thinking:
If you ask the man/woman on the street to name some works of sci-fi. Responses might include Star Wars, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Aliens, Terminator, The Matrix. Depending on when they were born and whether or not they read books, maybe they'll mention Asimov or Bradbury or L. Ron Hubbard or Philip K. Dick, too.
So, most people identify Sci-Fi based on its color: robots, aliens, spaceships, clones, super-duper gadgets, etc.
Why pay attention to these average Joes and Janes? Why not go to the experts?
Well, genres aren't top-down affairs: they're created through the interplay between authors and audiences (made up of those average Joes and Janes as well as more dedicated fans).
I think it can be very useful to differentiate between various sub-genres of Sci-Fi - as in, Star Wars is Space Opera and Orbitsville is Hard Sci-Fi and A Voyage to Arcturus is Philosophical Sci-Fi. Especially if you are editing a short-story collection, writing an essay, trying to effectively market a story, or designing a super-focused narrativist RPG.
But I think it might be more useful (or at least, it's been more useful for me) to be able to look at the genre in the way it is commonly understood. (FWIW, I'm not alone in this: Tom Disch's interesting look at Sci-Fi, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, takes a very catholic approach to what makes up sci-fi: Star Wars, Heinlein, Stapledon, John Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, and Star Trek.)
And I think it is definitely useful (for anyone who's interested in the genre at least) to be able to consider the reasons behind this common understanding.
Take Star Wars and Asimov's Foundation Series: one focuses on pulpy adventure and the other focuses on social commentary. But both feature robots, galaxy spanning civilizations, and spaceships. (From an old-fashioned, Northrop Frye-ish lit-crit standpoint Star Wars and most of the Foundation novels are actually Romances).
Like I said, I get why people want to say that Star Wars and the Foundation novels are different beasts. But they do have shared features and it just makes the most sense to me that we acknowledge these shared features by lumping them both into the basic genre of Sci-Fi.
This is kind of an Occam's Razor thing: stories with spaceships and robots and other kinds of hi-tech, futuristic color certainly have something in common. Why come up with some other term/concept to describe what they have in common when we already have a perfectly good term/concept in Sci-Fi (as the genre is commonly understood)?
And I think Sci-Fi in this general sense is truer to the history of the writing/publishing/reading of these kinds of stories. Taking a more restrictive definition of Sci-Fi tends to retroactively un-Sci-Fi a lot of stories that were considered to be Sci-Fi when they were originally written/published/read. But we're dealing with a living genre, so I think things are too tangled together for this to work. For instance, there are a lot of books that, it seems to be, belong in the Sci-Fi genre, but that don't live up to the restrictive definition that guys like Heinlein (perhaps self-servingly?) proposed: like - Charles Harness's The Paradox Men or Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books.
(Another way to look at it: most people have no trouble lumping the Hopalong Cassidy movies together with Deadwood by calling them all Westerns, but they're certainly as different from each other in theme/focus/intent as Star Wars is to the Foundation novels).
The spaceship and raygun and robot part of these stories is supremely important for firing up the imaginations of the members of their audience, regardless of whatever else the story is up to. That is, there's a reason spaceships and robots show up in both "Star Wars" and the Foundation novels, despite the fact that these stories have different goals/themes/concerns.
Thursday, April 1, 2004
From the Archives: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
I'd like to look at Pattern Recognition in three ways: (1) as a William Gibson novel, (2) as a descendent of and a variation on The Crying of Lot 49, and (3) as an attempt to deal with a post-9/11 world.
1) Though promoted as Gibson's first novel set in the present, Pattern Recognition reads almost exactly like one of his sci-fi novels. Maybe this is because the present looks more like the future everyday or it may be that Gibson's cyberpunk prophecy has come to pass. My own belief is that Gibson has always understood that you can find the future in the world around you, as long as you know where to look. And almost all of his novels, including Pattern Recognition, are about characters trying to find those places where the future reveals itself in the present.
In this case, our hero is Cayce Pollard, a "cool hunter," paid big bucks by corporations to sniff out the next big thing and to figure out future trends. In all of his novels, there's a loaded MacGuffin (i.e., a plot device that not only motivates the action but also has a symbolic meaning) that drives the story. In Neuromancer, it's AI, in Virtual Light, it's a pair of virtual relaity glasses. Here, it's "The Footage"--fragments of a movie that begin to appear mysteriously on the fringes of the Internet.
No one knows who's made them or why or even how they've made them, whether or not the fragments have been released in any kind of order, or what the fragments--by themselves or all together--actually mean, but a small group of dedicated Footage-followers have set up message boards in order to debate these questions, as well as any other Footage-related issues. Cayce, a fan herself, is hired by a shadowy corporate bigwig to track down the filmmaker and find definitive answers to these questions. The bigwig--who runs a cutting edge advertising company--sees the way the Footage has been distributed across the web as a revolutionary guerilla marketing tool.
Essentially, this is the same plot as every other Gibson novel: our hero uses her special abilities to track down an artifact that will reveal what the future will look like. But Gibson handles this kind of thing really well: the story is well paced and full of neat twists and turns and conspiracies within conspiracies. However, the story is really just a platform for Gibson's observations and commentary on contemporary consumer culture--on the nature and meaning of new fads, careers, and lifestyles that have emerged from the digitized, globalized world.
Unfortunately, Pattern Recognition not only has the plot of Gibson's other books but also their major weakness--their complete lack of humor. The relentlessly depressed mood gets to be a bit of a drag: it seems at odds with the Hitchcock-like thriller plot. Moreover, it makes Gibson's observations of the quirks of contempo-pop culture seem overly dramatic and pretentious.
2) Though it follows the pattern of Gibson's sci-fi novels, Pattern Recognition is also his version of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. The parallels jump right out. Both Cayce and Oedipa Maas are driven by their curiosity to follow the trail of a secret conspiracy. Pierce Iverarity appears in Pattern Recognition as Hugh Bigend, an advertising mogul for the 21st Century. Both center around the question of how are we to make sense of the patterns in the world around us. Yet, where Lot 49 is playful, Pattern Recognition is dour.
Gibson shares his humorlessness with Don DeLillo, another Pynchon disciple. (DeLillo often tries to be funny, but the jokes in something like White Noise are more theoretical than real.) And Pattern Recognition shares Underworld's interest in post-Cold War Russia, urban legends, and the alienation of globalization. Though there are passages in Underworld, a Very Important Novel, where DeLillo's writing is on par with Pynchon's or Saul Bellow's, for the most part the book is not as satisfying as Pattern Recognition, which is merely a thriller that wishes it was a Very Important Novel.
After reading DeLillo and Gibson, not to mention those writers of lesser talent who have also appropriated Pynchon for their own purposes, I think it's time to call a moratorium on novels inspired by Lot 49. As much as I like that book, it seems that (1) it already said everything it needed to say and (2) it is simply too easy to rewrite it by dressing it up in contemporary drag, replacing Tristero with a mysterious Hotmail competitor.
3) Gibson's attempt to deal with the effects of 9/11 is only moderately successful. Part of his problem is that throughout the book he deals more the symbolic effect of 9/11 than with the terrorist attacks themselves. In fact, I don't think he uses the word "terrorist" at all during the entire novel. Gibson does get at the sense of what it was like to be in NYC in the days following the destruction of the WTC--the simultaneous pathos and nobility of the way no one covered up other people's "Missing" flyers while posting their own, the almost unbearable pain of not knowing whether or not a loved one had survived, the shell-shocked feeling shared by everyone in the city. But he really isn't interested in how the world really did, and not just symbolically, change after 9/11: how globalization looked radically different, much more dangerous, than it had before.
Pattern Recognition succeeds where it is least ambitious, in its slick technothriller plot and its commentary on digital culture, but it's take on 9/11--and the bigger picture in general--is too shallow. Nonetheless, it is an honest attempt to deal with a post-9/11 world, even if it falls short.
1) Though promoted as Gibson's first novel set in the present, Pattern Recognition reads almost exactly like one of his sci-fi novels. Maybe this is because the present looks more like the future everyday or it may be that Gibson's cyberpunk prophecy has come to pass. My own belief is that Gibson has always understood that you can find the future in the world around you, as long as you know where to look. And almost all of his novels, including Pattern Recognition, are about characters trying to find those places where the future reveals itself in the present.
In this case, our hero is Cayce Pollard, a "cool hunter," paid big bucks by corporations to sniff out the next big thing and to figure out future trends. In all of his novels, there's a loaded MacGuffin (i.e., a plot device that not only motivates the action but also has a symbolic meaning) that drives the story. In Neuromancer, it's AI, in Virtual Light, it's a pair of virtual relaity glasses. Here, it's "The Footage"--fragments of a movie that begin to appear mysteriously on the fringes of the Internet.
No one knows who's made them or why or even how they've made them, whether or not the fragments have been released in any kind of order, or what the fragments--by themselves or all together--actually mean, but a small group of dedicated Footage-followers have set up message boards in order to debate these questions, as well as any other Footage-related issues. Cayce, a fan herself, is hired by a shadowy corporate bigwig to track down the filmmaker and find definitive answers to these questions. The bigwig--who runs a cutting edge advertising company--sees the way the Footage has been distributed across the web as a revolutionary guerilla marketing tool.
Essentially, this is the same plot as every other Gibson novel: our hero uses her special abilities to track down an artifact that will reveal what the future will look like. But Gibson handles this kind of thing really well: the story is well paced and full of neat twists and turns and conspiracies within conspiracies. However, the story is really just a platform for Gibson's observations and commentary on contemporary consumer culture--on the nature and meaning of new fads, careers, and lifestyles that have emerged from the digitized, globalized world.
Unfortunately, Pattern Recognition not only has the plot of Gibson's other books but also their major weakness--their complete lack of humor. The relentlessly depressed mood gets to be a bit of a drag: it seems at odds with the Hitchcock-like thriller plot. Moreover, it makes Gibson's observations of the quirks of contempo-pop culture seem overly dramatic and pretentious.
2) Though it follows the pattern of Gibson's sci-fi novels, Pattern Recognition is also his version of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. The parallels jump right out. Both Cayce and Oedipa Maas are driven by their curiosity to follow the trail of a secret conspiracy. Pierce Iverarity appears in Pattern Recognition as Hugh Bigend, an advertising mogul for the 21st Century. Both center around the question of how are we to make sense of the patterns in the world around us. Yet, where Lot 49 is playful, Pattern Recognition is dour.
Gibson shares his humorlessness with Don DeLillo, another Pynchon disciple. (DeLillo often tries to be funny, but the jokes in something like White Noise are more theoretical than real.) And Pattern Recognition shares Underworld's interest in post-Cold War Russia, urban legends, and the alienation of globalization. Though there are passages in Underworld, a Very Important Novel, where DeLillo's writing is on par with Pynchon's or Saul Bellow's, for the most part the book is not as satisfying as Pattern Recognition, which is merely a thriller that wishes it was a Very Important Novel.
After reading DeLillo and Gibson, not to mention those writers of lesser talent who have also appropriated Pynchon for their own purposes, I think it's time to call a moratorium on novels inspired by Lot 49. As much as I like that book, it seems that (1) it already said everything it needed to say and (2) it is simply too easy to rewrite it by dressing it up in contemporary drag, replacing Tristero with a mysterious Hotmail competitor.
3) Gibson's attempt to deal with the effects of 9/11 is only moderately successful. Part of his problem is that throughout the book he deals more the symbolic effect of 9/11 than with the terrorist attacks themselves. In fact, I don't think he uses the word "terrorist" at all during the entire novel. Gibson does get at the sense of what it was like to be in NYC in the days following the destruction of the WTC--the simultaneous pathos and nobility of the way no one covered up other people's "Missing" flyers while posting their own, the almost unbearable pain of not knowing whether or not a loved one had survived, the shell-shocked feeling shared by everyone in the city. But he really isn't interested in how the world really did, and not just symbolically, change after 9/11: how globalization looked radically different, much more dangerous, than it had before.
Pattern Recognition succeeds where it is least ambitious, in its slick technothriller plot and its commentary on digital culture, but it's take on 9/11--and the bigger picture in general--is too shallow. Nonetheless, it is an honest attempt to deal with a post-9/11 world, even if it falls short.
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