One thing that's remarkable about all speculative literature, including horror, fantasy, and science fiction, is its ability to use its completely imaginary elements to help answer deeper questions about who we are as a collective human race, what it means to be human, and what value life holds. By being able to carry out problems we face past the bounds of the reality we experience, we can gain a greater understanding of them. A good example of this is the novel World War Z, written by Max Brooks. This novel has taken the rather simplistic myth of the zombie and used it to explore mankind's large-scale response to a nearly unstoppable force. Zombies were a great choice for this theme, as they present themselves as the perfectly unsympathetic enemy: they're already dead, they can't think, they have no sense of empathy, and their only motivation is to feast on the flesh (and brains) of humans. While a human in a zombie story will usually be some shade of moral gray, a zombie will always be pitch black, and thus the audience will feel no remorse when the main character smashes their face in with a shovel. This intrinsic property of the traditional zombie myth helps to foster a militant sense of moral absolutism in the characters. As the situation becomes more and more desolate, the measures taken to ensure at least some survival of the human race become more and more drastic and previously held moral values become less and less important. People in charge decided to use half the world's population as bait for the other half. Others resort to cannibalism to live. Brooks is trying to say that when our lives are on the line, a surprising amount of things we previously valued and viewed with high prestige become very trivial. While this message could also be conveyed in a regular war story, the question that a zombie story answers is slightly different. While a war story can answer the question, “How far have we gone?”, World War Z answers the question, “How far can we go?”
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Having seen the movie and read the first four books of the Hitchhiker's Guide series, I enjoyed the opportunity to revisit this story once again in radio form. It's interesting to compare the different formats of the story. They all seem to stick pretty close to each other for the first half of the series and drift off from there. Even the same auxiliary jokes are preserved from format to format in the first few episodes. One “addition” I noticed (I guess it's an omission, since the radio series came first) was the character Lady Cynthia Fitzmelton, who appears in the bar scene before Earth is destroyed. The humor did lose a bit of its charm though from the book, as a lot of the non-dialogue descriptions were simply not there yet, such as the digital watches gag (one of the better jokes from the first book, in my opinion). The radio version also seems like it has less channels to communicate humor with than the other formats. Radio misses out on the visual gags that the TV series and movie get (my favorite being the gags in the “Don't Think” sequence of the movie), and due to pacing/length, misses a lot of content that the book receives. These shortcomings aside, I enjoyed experiencing the root of the whole Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.
Oryx and Crake
Oryx and Crake takes a really interesting look at what our current society would be like if it was pushed not too much further from where it already is right now. The dystopia that the author creates is unsettling because of how closely it mirrors reality. I enjoyed what I read of the novel, since in addition to the overall world and concepts, the writing style and humor is enjoyable as well. One of the more clever puns in the story I enjoyed was the company name "OrganInc Farms". Another aspect of the book that I liked was how the inner conflicts in the characters was very believable. Snowman/Jimmy's desire for love/approval was handled particularly well. The only parts of the story that I would consider unsuccessful are just specific technical details about this dystopia that break the believability of the rest of the novel. An example of this is the games that Jimmy and Crake find themselves playing for fun. If Jimmy is being portrayed as a disenchanted and generalized example of American youth at that time, he would probably spend his time on games that incorporated immersive and real-time interaction rather than board games. Luckily, these parts don't occur that often within the novel.
Primer
It was cool how realistically Primer handled the concept of time travel, and how the film deliberately avoided dumbing down any of its technical aspects. Although the approach didn't always help contribute to the cinematic and storytelling qualities of the movie, the experience was very fresh. I'll begin by describing the more realistic elements of the movie that separated it from most science fiction films I have seen. The people who discover time traveling actually behave like people who might discover time traveling. By trade, they're really intelligent when it comes to logic and science, and the decisions and planning they make throughout the movie reflect that (their sense of morals and ethics is a different matter). Another element that adds to the realism is the limitations set on time traveling. Since only the objects inside the machine experience time travel, you can only travel back to when the machine was turned on. You're also limited by the supply of oxygen you can bring with you, so the movie sets the time travel window to around 6 hours. The movie also obscures many of the layers of time travel that occur in it, to put the viewers in a similar state of confusion as the main characters. While this addition was certainly an interesting experiment, I think that it ultimately caused me to lose any connection with the characters' thoughts or motivations. After reading some explanations of the plot online (it's nearly impossible to fully understand the plot structure upon first viewing) and watching the film again, the themes of control and greed become more apparent and you can start to see the statement the director was attempting to make. However, the mental model required to reach this understanding does take a substantial amount of time to comprehend, and loses some of the initial punch of the movie in the process.
Johnny Mnemonic
Johnny Mnemonic was pretty cool. It was a short story in the cyberpunk genre. It had a lot of cool things about it. One thing I liked about the short story was its pace. The story went at a really fast speed, and it built a rich and dense world for the story without needing any exposition. One thing I like in both fiction and nonfiction is “jumping straight into the action,” where the jargon of the world/subject is in full effect. When it comes to nonfiction, I'll usually consult additional reference if I get lost, but with fast-paced fiction, things usually seem to work out without outside resources. Even within the first paragraph, lots of cultural aspects of the world are established without being explicitly told to the audience. People are divided into “technical” and “crude” groupings. The protagonist falls into the technical category, but is making himself appear crude. He's prepared a shotgun that he's planning to take somewhere. Information can be stored in objects called microfiches. The meaning of all the terminology is clearly implied through its surrounding context, and any remaining ambiguity stays in the background instead of hampering the story.
Dune
Dune was definitely not a quick read. While I gave it a good try, I was not able to finish the thing. I don't really find myself drawn to reading politics, and that's what the majority of the portion I read felt like. The pace of the book was painfully slow, and although there were elements that seemed interesting that were going to be explored later in the book, it seemed as if it could take months or years to arrive at them. When the Baron was explaining the setup of the plot to his nephew, I. The worst example of pacing and politics I encountered during my reading attempt was when the Baron was explaining the setup of the plot to his nephew, Feyd-Rautha. I can understand why Feyd-Rautha was constantly growing more and more impatient in that scene, since I was waiting for that scene to end with greater and greater anticipation as well. In almost direct opposition to my personal tastes, the book spends an awfully long time on exposition rather than focusing on the present moment, and that scene highlights it especially. The Baron and Piter have a very extensive discussion about the politcs of Arrakis, and the only thing of real meaning revealed (given what we know so far in the story) is that Paul is in danger because they're plotting to kill him for political reasons. In my opinion, the specifics of the politics of a society only matter in a story when they directly affect the characters in a meaningful way. Even then, I feel it's only necessary to only reveal elements that pertain to the characters, and omit explaining the rest.
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