Why is it that some of the greatest sci-fi out there has everything to do with war?
I’m thinking of “Star Wars,” “The Forever War,” “Old Man’s War,” “War of the Worlds,” for example (and those are just some of the ones with “war” in their titles). But also “Ender’s Game,” “Battlestar Galactica,” and so many video games, from “Space Invaders” to “Halo” and so many in between.
This review was originally published May 8, 2005, in the Albany Times Union.
Kazuo Ishiguro is a master of the writing of memory. In fictions about an English butler, a Japanese artist and a world-renown pianist, he has found life-defining secrets, decisions and failures in the smallest moments, and uses them to create literary novels that read like thrillers.
His sixth novel, “Never Let Me Go” (Knopf; 282 pages; $24), includes emotionally engaging passages about friendship, love, duty, sex and betrayal in the lives of the three main characters; however, the effect is undermined by the world in which Ishiguro contains them.
The story centers on Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, whose friendship begins at Hailsham, a boarding school in the English countryside.
Kathy is reflective, passive and somewhat dreamy. She is the kind of girl who, while listening to a pop song, dances and holds a pillow, pretending it’s her baby. Ruth is bossy and likes to appear knowing; it gives her a power that attracts others to her. For example, she pretends to know more about chess than the older students, but when she shows Kathy how to play, she says all the pieces move in an L-shape. Tommy is athletic, warm-hearted and gullible, and he is mercilessly teased by his classmates. The boys enjoy setting off his uncontrollable rages, and the girls like to watch from the dorm windows.
Epic.
This post is part of Sci-Fi November, which you can read all about here.
I haven’t seen “Interstellar” yet, but I have seen the teaser trailer, the official trailer, TV commercials and some feature stories in the NY Times, so I’ve been given an impression of the film and know it will have moments of sheer transcendental brilliance, and it will be an overlong, bloated slog that will leaving me feeling dissatisfied.
Here’s my Half-Baked Theory on Movies Directed by Christopher Nolan: the shorter the running time the greater the satisfaction.
Case in point: “The Dark Knight” (clocking in at 152 minutes was a thrill ride, until it had to go and not end and follow through with the Harvey Dent / Two Face story). Thus it ranks as one of his least satisfying movies. “The Dark Knight Rises,” which is 13 minutes longer, is proportionally more dissatisfying: so much great spectacle (Hines Ward running as the football field behind him collapses? Wow!) and then so many stupid fist fights – FIST FIGHTS!?!?
Of course, I just came up with that theory off the top of my head, but the lengths of Christopher Nolan’s movies aren’t something that I alone am interested in. Peter Sciretta over that the Slash Film website even created this chart (URL for the chart is here):
What a great idea: a month-long gathering of bloggers to blog about all things Sci-Fi. The organizers of the event are book bloggers at Oh, The Books! and Rinn Reads. Thank you, Rinn, Kelley, Asti, and Leanne for hosting this event and letting me take part in it.
About me and Sci-Fi
You can read more about me here. My relationship to Sci-Fi goes way back, maybe all the way to the first book I remember reading, “Bears on Wheels” (does that count as Sci-Fi? Or is it sci-fantasy? Where do anthropomorphized animals exist within genre classifications if not Sci-Fi?). This is just my way of saying that, like many people, I was invested and interested in science fiction long before I knew the genre was called that. I consumed books, movies and TV shows that all fit within the genre. But I have my limits. I’m a big fan of the original series of Star Trek, but for some reason have never been able to get into Dr. Who. I really enjoyed reading Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (as well as 2010), but Kubrick’s movie always seems slow when it gets to space and bloated in the final third. Some of my all-time favorite books are set in post-apocalyptic zones (such as A Canticle for Liebowitz and the MaddAddam trilogy), and yet I’ve had a hard time getting into many of the post-apocalyptic TV shows like Defiance, Falling Skies, Jericho, and even, yes, BSG (though Walking Dead works for me).
I’m also a writer, and my recent publications have been in the speculative fiction genre, including stories in the anthologies Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History and Veterans of the Future Wars. I also have a day job, where I work in a very cool museum on a college campus in upstate New York.
What I’ll be doing this month
I plan on writing a handful of blog posts this month, including reviews of MaddAddam (thus completing a trilogy of reviews for the trilogy) and the movie Intersteller, and some posts that I hope will be provocative discussion starters about the relationship between science fiction and war, and about whether genre classifications are a necessary evil.
Most of the time, I will be reading what other bloggers’ contributions to the month. This, to me, is the best part, because so many of my fellow bloggers are new to me. So I’ll be searching Twitter for #RRSciFiMonth and reading and commenting on other blogs (this list of participants for Sci-Fi November is right here).
Thanks for reading, and please leave a comment to let me know you were here, even if all you want to say is “Hi!”
Poor mums. Oh, the humanity.
This is something I have always wanted to see. I understood the idea of it in physics class in high school, but I never saw this in action until now: that a bowling ball and a feather would fall at the same rate in a vacuum.
Enjoy!
I’ve never officially signed up for NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month — though I know many people who have, and today my social media feeds are filled with folks sharing their words counts.
I’d love to do it. And I agree with this great advice from John Scalzi that it can be done — you can crank out enough words for a novel-length manuscript in a month. And I also agree with these words of wisdom from Larry Brooks in a 2010 GalleyCat article: “Don’t finish. Make this the start of something.”
But I want to use this time to try something I haven’t done before: Outline a novel first.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
I’m sure I read a quote somewhere recently that said something along the lines that eventually a writer must decide to be either a reader or a writer.
Has anyone seen this quote? Do you know what I’m talking about?
The idea behind the quote struck me as intriguing (and maybe a little self-serving). After all, the common wisdom is that all writers must be readers. You have to read the language to know how to use the language, to know the history into which your words are joined. The thing is in my daily life I face a constant dilemma: when I’m not working at my day job, I can read OR write (or watch TV, sleep, do household chores, pay bills, cook, do laundry, buy groceries, socialize, etc.). Most often, though, it is choice between reading and writing. Writing usually wins out, and the guilt-inducing pile of books (in print and ebooks) grows larger and larger.
If I didn’t read, though, and if that quote that I think I saw recently that I can’t place now has any merit, then maybe I don’t have to feel guilty about not reading all the books that I haven’t been reading. (Though it isn’t clear to me if that quote means I can excuse my guilt when I’m not writing because I’m watching TV, sleeping, socializing, etc.)
The thing is, though, I’ve always been a big reader. A slower, reader, sure, but I have a large appetite for books. One of the best things anyone has ever said about me is that for me reading is like plugging me in.
There was a time when I only read big, old books: Les Miserable, Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Crime and Punishment. There was a time when I plowed through novels and short stories, consuming the published works of single authors such as Raymond Carver, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Chabon, Jayne Anne Phillips, Tolkien, and people whose new books I often consume right away, like Margaret Atwood. Lately, it’s taking me longer and longer to read anything.
My most recent purchase, the 1998 comic book series called Stone, which incorporates Philippine folklore in its story, has taken me more than two weeks just to read the first issue, and its not long at all — and its mostly pictures, too.
In some ways, with all the reading I do on the web — news, social media, work-related articles — I might be doing just as much reading, if not more, as I was doing when I was in graduate school, when the web was but a wee thing.
So instead of me thinking that my reading has slowed way down because of my age and my new need for reading glasses, I like to think it is because I’m a writer first and need my free brain time for not only the act of writing but also the thinking and processing and nurturing of the ideas, characters, actions and sensations that go into my writing.
