2003-12-17: A Fire Upon the Deep
Review: A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge
I should say up-front that this was my second reading of this book, and
sometimes reviews and opinions can be rather different between a first
reading and a second reading. Sometimes the likable parts of a book are
the discovery of reading it for the first time, although I didn't remember
much about this book at all.
On re-reading it, I realized why I didn't remember very much about it.
A Fire Upon the Deep just isn't that well-written of a story.
Don't get me wrong; it's not a bad book. In fact, it has some truly
brilliant ideas, including the most interesting and well-developed concept
of collective minds that I've read in science fiction. The Tines are truly
fascinating aliens, and the exploration of their viewpoints and how those
viewpoints affect their world are very much worth reading.
The concept of zones of the galaxy and changing possibilities in science
and technology between those zones is also an intriguing one, although it
gives the galaxy an oddly claustrophobic feeling at times. It's not one of
my favorite universe designs, but it is unusual and thought-provoking.
The problem is that Vinge doesn't do a very good job of integrating the
ideas into a story.
Part of the problem is that the story quickly sets up a situation where one
of the main characters is being deceived and the reader knows it, and then
maintains that for most of the book, something that tends to make me angry
rather than helping me enjoy the story. Part of the problem is that two of
the main characters are children, one of them young, and I don't really
like reading about young children. But there are more fundamental
problems.
Vinge's characters seem to be drawn in broad strokes and then change hardly
at all over the course of the book. They serve primarily as chess pieces
to move around the story, and while some of them are intricate and
interesting chess pieces, their static character leaves me feeling like
something is missing. The story has some nice touches, like the
Usenet-style net postings that I really enjoyed and were quite well-done,
but there isn't actually that much substance to the story in the end. And
the deus ex machina ending, even though it was obvious from the
beginning, still managed to be superficial and unsatisfying, not really
answering any of the fundamental questions raised by the plot.
This is not a bad book, but given that it routinely makes people's lists of
the best-ever science fiction novels, I think it's somewhat overrated.
Recommended as an idea exploration novel, but don't expect a particularly
deep or engrossing story or characters. I can attest from personal
experience that it ends up being fairly forgettable.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2003-12-17: Firefly
Review: Firefly
A DVD review for a change, as a break from the book reviews.
I never saw any episodes of Firefly while it was on TV (and from
what I hear about how horribly FOX botched the broadcast of it, I'm better
off), but I picked up the complete boxed set at the recommendation of
friends and based on my enjoyment of Buffy. I ended up staying up
until 4:30am watching the last episodes.
Wow.
This is, overall, the best science fiction TV series that I've ever watched
in terms of consistent quality, the dynamic of the cast, and the handling
of suspension of disbelief. There are other shows that have had more
exciting plotlines, have dealt with more sweeping drama, or have had better
individual episodes, but this is truly the best series.
It's hard to enumerate all the things that Firefly gets right. The
large cast has an excellent and believable internal dynamic, with complex
and changing character relationships that don't devolve into soap opera.
Several of the characters are particularly memorable and invoke a lot of
sympathy and curiosity, particularly Kaylee, the tomboy mechanical prodigy,
and River, the... well, that would be a spoiler. Even the more stock
characters (the ethical captain, the self-obsessed mercenary) manage to
have more depth by far than the norm and come alive in their interactions
with the rest of the cast. The writing manages to avoid stock treatment of
plots by throwing in enough twists or witty dialog to keep things fresh.
But two things stand out in particular.
The first sounds simple, but is exceptionally hard in practice: none of
the characters are stupid. Stupidity seems to plague action dramas, and
Characters miss obvious traps until after they're sprung, trust people who
obviously aren't trustworthy, miss the obvious in another character's
attitude, and otherwise act oblivious so that the lot doesn't finish too
soon. This is almost completely absent from Firefly. I routinely
had the experience of figuring out what was going to happen, and then
watching the characters reveal that they'd already figured it out before or
at the same time I had and were acting appropriately. At the points where
I'm used to thinking "why don't they just do X rather than angst about it?"
the characters just do X and go on with their lives. It's hard to express
just how refreshing and unusual this is.
The second standout aspect of Firefly is its handling of
technobabble and suspension of disbelief. Finally, someone did
this properly. Faster than light travel simply happens. There isn't any
extended explanation of why or how that doesn't make any sense and has
nothing to do with the plot; the writers just assume you can swallow that
FTL travel is part of the genre and that you care about the story rather
than the fake physics. The mechanic just fixes things, occasionally with
short and feasible-sounding part lists, but without any extensive and
inevitably stupid explanation of how everything works. It probably makes
little sense to have an engine that looks vaguely like a rotary engine and
spins when it's running, but no one tries to explain why it does
that, failing and just making the viewer painfully aware of the problem.
Instead, it's just there.
Technology is seamlessly integrated into the culture; people use guns where
it makes sense and lasers where they make sense and they don't wave the
technology around to make sure that you saw the special effects budget.
Out of the way planets use easy-to-make technology, and central planets use
high technology, without lots of in-show narration to point out the obvious
reasons why. In short, the science fiction is a consistent
background and gets out of the way of the really important part,
the story.
I've been trying to figure out why this show didn't do very well. One of
them maybe that it has quite a large cast, and particularly given FOX's
idiotic broadcast schedule, it could be hard to keep track of everything.
Nine regular characters is really on the high side for a series cast (and
believe me, all of them are used in practically every episode -- I
frequently started thinking "what happened to X" only to have that
character show up as an emergency backup or suddenly change the nature of
the plot). Another is that it's very much genre fiction, essentially a
western in space, created by someone who's famous for creating another
genre show, so it may not have crossed over into the mainstream enough.
But that means people missed out on some brilliant material.
One brief comment on the western in space idea, since I was leery of that
originally. I thought that sounded kind of stupid, and it was jarring for
the first 30 minutes or so, but then it just started working for me. It
really does work surprisingly well, and it's sort of fun to work out all of
the parallels, since there are a bunch. The original Star Trek started
with basically the same idea, as did Battlestar: Galactica, but neither of
them implemented the idea anywhere near as well.
Anyway, it's a crying shame that this series was cancelled. The only
positive is that you can get the entire series in an extremely inexpensive
DVD boxed set, and if you have any love for science fiction, witty dialog,
well-executed characters, or intelligent plot, I highly recommend buying a
copy. The beautiful DVD packaging is just icing on the cake.
Rating: 9 out of 10
2003-12-31: The state of X
Today's ponderings and readings have, at a whim, been about
the X Window System. No particular reason; there was just a
Slashdot story about a mostly
unimportant internal change in the XFree86 project, and then I started
reading through the comments at a whim and started getting interested in
the state of X development again.
I find X rather interesting, since it's an extremely old protocol with a
fairly old and crufty implementation that has proven to be stable and
sufficiently flexible that it's not at all obvious there's any reason to
replace it (although rewriting some of the core libraries is looking like a
good idea). In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Usenet and INN. I know
little to nothing about graphics and don't have a lot of desire to learn
more right now, but I like watching how software projects are organized and
developed and I get a boost out of interesting people doing interesting
things.
Anyway, I've been wandering through
freedesktop.org, seeing what
they've been up to, and have been quite impressed. (I also really am
starting to love wiki technology.) A few other interesting things have
turned up:
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