I had heard that his movie was good, but I was surprised to find just how well this 1951 SciFi-Horror crossover has withstood the test of time. An intelligent script and believable characters, a stroy relying on try suspense instead of cheap effects, a truly frightening creature and well acted and filmed scenes all make this a gem worth remembering. While Carpenter’s remake, especially its intense atmosphere of paranoia, is superior in some ways, I would find it hard to compare the two overall. Which means that for its sheer age, Nyby’s version wins. Yay Nyby!
Don’t be mislead by the poster art, by the way, rarely have I seen a poster that was so far aesthetically and in content from the movie it represented.

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Trondheim’s marvellous style, applied to a quirky story of alien mishaps, told in hardly decodable symbol language and asynchronously. The result is a delightfully trippy little comic book. An interesting side note concerns the preface, which seems to have been written specifically for the american edition (which I assume is otherwise identical to the french edition, unless there are different kinds of unintelligible geometric symbols in the two cultures) and mentions a camping trip of Trondheim’s into the Catskills. Merely translation of ideas rather than words, or an attempt to conceal the European original of the work for sales’ sake?

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I like LeGuin’s work in general, but this tale of freedom and repression is not her best work. Two groups of exiles coexist on a wild, uncharted planet, one composed of the descendants of prisoners, the other of political exiles, sent away for their disturbing pacifism. When some people in the city try to increase their power and wealth by exploiting the pacifists, whom they perceive as weak, a struggle ensues, that ends in a murky compromise and further exile for a subgroup of the pacifists, who realise that they can only live their dream in complete isolation.
The book reads like a sketch or a first draft, with plot, background and philosophical implications all quite murky and unfinished. She’s still a good enough writer to avoid pitfalls a lesser writer would have fallen into (like the pacifists passive resitance succeeding, for instance), but overall, this book falls apart.

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While parts of the second season of the new Galactica drag just as badly as the first – in particular the plot elements concerned with the Cylon masterplan and the impending birth of the child of doom are stretched so thin as to be practically impreceptible. Also, the density of journalists and the political and social structure of the fleet still don’t make much sense other than as commentary on the US today. On the plus side, the acting, set design and the general military mood are great, and the writing, which is generally quite good, of the last few episodes of the second season in particular was excellent. Partly because the main plotline, stalled by the arrival of the Pegasus and its semifascist admiral, finally started moving, but also because the usual seriousness was spiced up with some nice humorous elements. A welcome relief from the heavy handedness which some of the political and moral issues were presented with. The explanation for how the humans were detected (the atomic blast was picked up a year later and a light year away) is a nice nod to physics (though you have to wonder where this nebula clad planet is located for there to be something of interest just a lightyear away. Ah, well). I’m looking forward to the next season, which is slated for airing starting October.

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How refreshing, after reading a lot of idea driven, gimmicky SF, to discover this. I found it in the bookstore run by the Friends of the Berkeley public library, among pulp paperbacks, and though I’d never heard of Wyndham, was intrigued by the cover art and the fact it had come out on Penguin. The story is a crossover between Capeks wonderful War with the Newts and Well’s War of the Worlds, with an extraterrestrial menace, quite possbily flying in from Jupiter, settling in the deeps of earths oceans, and proceeding to exterminate the bothersome land mammals. The story is gripping – though the solutions’s alomost perfect parallel to Wells’ is a bit disappointing – but the true strength of the book lies in the two main characters, a married couple of radio documentary writers, who witness most of the events from close up, but have hardly any active part in the matters at all. This viewpoint lends the story enormous credibility, based on the one hand in the strong execution of characterization and background, but also in the familiarity of events unfolding on a large scale that one is powerless to stop or alter, yet keeps reflecting upon and discussing as though one did. Finally, the acerbic depiction of cold war diplomacy at the height of madness is the crowning piece on a very nice cake.

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While certainly better than it’s two predecessors, this final installment in the Hyperion story still subtracts from the original book. Why do sequels always fall so badly short of truly adding to a work, and why do creators still have the urge too do them? The Shrike was a mythical force, the future a mysterious place, the present hardly comprehensible when Hyperion ended. Now all that is dissolved in an action feast full of explosions, a quaint patchwork of worlds the size of small villages and populated by caricatures of foreign cultures and a badly contrived plot. While it is challenging for an action driven plot to have a practically omniscient character, his solution of “I know but I won’t tell you yet” is infuriating. The fall of the Pax at the end is a complete Deus-ex-machina, and the twist ending makes no sense whatsoever. But the biggest failure of all three sequels lies in the delivery of what Hyperion wisely withheld – answers to the philosophical and ethical questions. Simmons goes on at great length about how utterly and fantastically otherworldly the Ousters are, yet their behavior, thinking, language and mores are indistinguishable from today’s middle class America. I also find the revelling in violence, torture and death on an enormous scale slightly disturbing. For someone proposing a culture of empathy and universal love, Simmons shows an odd fascination with intense cruelty and suffering.

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When I reviewed Fall of Hyperion in this space, I said that I wanted to wait a substantial time before continuing on. Unfortunately I succumbed to the temptation. While I don’t really regret having read Endymion, it is yet another step down from Hyperion’s brilliance of vision and design. While Simmons world continues to amaze with its complex design and rich tapestry of culture and science – which, once again, becomes thinnest in the attempts of creating a cultural history of the future by combining ficticious future classics with actual ones – his characterization, plot and dialogue are bordering on the horrid. He often falls into the trap of having to tell us justifications and motivations instead of showing them, and the whole book has the wearisome feeling of being but a prequel to the final volume. The adventures of Aenea, Endymion and Bettik on their way to Old Earth seem arbitrary and unconnected, and while the multiple death ordeal of the Pax crew charged with tracking them down is chilling, their near success in the face of incredible odds is silly, and can in the end only be explained by the near omniscience of the dei-ex-machina in the TechnoCore. I’ll hold off final judgment until I’ve read Ride of Endymion, but so far I strongly feel Simmons should have stopped after Hyperion.

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Having cute and ferocious female tigers with big boobs might not be generally considered the peak of sophisitication among science fiction afficionados, but the level of plot and design in general is higher than the screaming tiger lady would have you expect. The Japanese is simple enough to give this apprentice at Japanese occasional thrills of recognition (He said Ikemashoo! He said Ikemashoo!), and that almost seals the deal. But I think I’ll still stop watching this after episode three. So much to see, so little time.

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An interesting anecdote which maybe doesn’t sum up this volume of writing advice, but certainly illuminates it, has Mozart being asked for hints on symphony composition by a young, aspiring composer. He advises to start with small pieces and work up, and when the composer is confused by this and points out that Mozart himself wrote symphonies at quite an early age, Mozart replies “Yes, but I never asked for hints”. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the advice in this volume only applies to writers of mediocre talent, or that it isn’t useful for experts. While the individual essays in this volume vary greatly in quality, with Asimov providing the largest number of essays, and has the least substance to his superficial und uncultered boasts, there are a few pieces that delve deeply into the problems of building entire worlds from scratch. This problem is arguably one of the most important reasons for the gap in literary quality between science fiction and the rest of it – where ordinary narrative can rely on the reader’s ability to fill in gaps in background, characterization and psychology, science fiction must often close them, using original material for it. The seams of implausibility that result whenever this goes wrong wreak havoc with characters, plot and world plausibility, requiring the aspiring writer to pay much more attention to minute details and work it all out. Incidentally and as an aside, the other big reason for the quality gap would be the fact that writers genuinely interested in general themes of human existence rather than scientific what-if-narrative will naturally shy away from setting their plots against an artificial background, leaving a large faction of people like Asimov, who openly admit that they care not one bit about subtelties of storytelling and characterization, and that ideas are all that matters. It’s too bad, really.

The high points of this collection are the essays by Poul Anderson on world building, Norman Spinrad’s somewhat dated sounding advice on how to project current trends using simple cyclical models – it’s a funny moment when he reports in awe that the spreadsheet he uses is a file of gargantuan 600 kilobytes. Good old days -, Hal Clements advice on how to create believable psychologies in an unknown world, and Connie Willis treatise on humourour writing – though technically that last one doesn’t belong here, since she herself points out that there is nothing peculiar to writing funny SF opposed to funny anything else. Also entertaining is Stanley Schmids list of cliches editors will not ever want the read, though I have to say that if you indeed want to write an Adam and Eve story because you think the idea is highly original, another line of work might be better suited.

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Zwei Knoten Wolle, oder wie heißt das, Ball, Bündel, Knäuel. Genau, Knäuel. Zwei wollknäuelgrosse Wollknäuel, was für ein bescheuertes Wort, Knäuel, als würde man auf blind gewordenem Klarplastik rumkauen, zwei Wollknäuel also, eins rot, eins schwarz, trage ich an die riesige Kassentheke. Riesig ist die Theke, weil auf ihr Stoffe aus aller Herren Materialien in Fetzen geschnitten werden können müssen, und nicht, weil meine Wollknäuel findlingsgroß wären. Sie sind eher klein. Trotzdem kommen sie mir vor wie kosmische Leuchtfeuer, genau wie die Stricknadeln in der anderen Hand, ein intensives Signal geht von mir aus, und auf dem Mars hebt ein Ding mit Tentakeln den hässlichen Kopf, zeigt lachend in den Himmel und sagt: “Haha, Kai kauft Strickzeug!”. Verloren liegen nun die Knäuel und die Nadeln auf der Riesentheke. Die Handarbeitsverkaufsfrau trägt die Andeutung eines Spottgesichts, glaube ich, es ist schwer zu erkennen, sie ist so weit weg hinter der Riesentheke. “Is there a plan?” fragt sie nach einigen Sekunden Spottgesicht. Irgendwo lacht ein Marsianer.

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