Read these books

I'm granting myself amnesty for about six months of unreviewed books to mention a couple of recently read books.

Pirate Sun, Karl Schroeder

I think that of all the authors I enjoy, Schroeder is the most criminally under-read. If you like SF, I tell you that Virga -- the background of Pirate Sun and its two predecessors -- is the coolest SF construct since Ringworld. Schroeder could write novels in it for the next forty years and only scratch the surface of what's possible. And at that, I'm not sure that the three Virga books -- great as they are -- are his best. Permanence is an exceptional space-opera type book, and Lady of Mazes takes a background that by all rights should be nigh-incomprehensible and makes it clear, compelling, and fascinating.

Anyway, Virga is a 5000 mile sphere filled with air and intermittently lit by dozens of small artificial suns. There's not much metal, and electricity is somehow dampened. Most people live in towns that are basically the interior of cylinders that rotate to generate gravity. Because it's not a vacuum, you can travel between towns by almost anything: winged bikes, jet cycles, wooden rocket ships.

Pirate Sun is the third book in the series, and without getting into a jillion paragraphs of backstory, the main character is Chaison Fanning, a disgraced admiral hoping to get back to his tiny country to clear his name (I oversimplify, you understand). Along the way, he deals with war, a threat to the basic nature of Virga, not to mention the most amazing thunderstorm SF has ever produced (Hint: Zero-G = Large Raindrops).

You know how sometimes a book will have two viewpoint characters who are trying to find each other but keep missing and that's really irritating? Schroeder does something interesting with that here -- he never shows the second viewpoint character. We know she's there from the previous books, plus a brief showing at the beginning. The bulk of the book, though, is all Chaison -- we can infer what other characters are up too somewhat. It's very effective, and not at all irritating.

On top of all that, there's a city on city battle seen that is jaw-dropping, and Schroeder casually drops a really neat idea in the background that we're clearly going to hear more of later in the series (please tell me there's a later in the series...).

Zoe's Tale, John Scalzi

Scalzi, you're more likely to have heard of, since he's become a very popular writer, especially on the Internet. Zoe's Tale is the fourth book in the Old Man's War trilogy. And I mean that more literally then you might think, since it covers nearly the same ground as The Last Colony, only instead of being from John Perry's viewpoint, it's from his adopted daughter Zoe's (hence, you see, the name).

This works a lot better than you might expect, for a couple of reasons. First off, Zoe has a unique place in the OMW universe, what with being a near godling to an alien race, and her perspective is interesting. Second, Last Colony had a couple of obvious Zoe-sized gaps in the story that were worth exploring. Third, Scalzi is smart enough to tell a completely different story against the same plot background -- in this case how Zoe reconciles who she is with what she is.

Scalzi has said in a few places that he struggled a bit to find a plausible sixteen year old female voice. I'm not completely qualified to say whether he succeeded (it's enough for me to say the voice works perfectly well as the narrator of the story). But I will say there are spots in the story where Zoe's narration sounds much more like Scalzi-the-blogger than anything else he's written.

So, another great book from John Scalzi, and I hope he comes back to this universe a few years on to show the result of the actions of Last Colony and Zoe's Tale

Middleman!

It's been a while since I lost my geek heart to a TV show that was so obviously doomed. Which brings us to The Middleman, on ABC Family of all places.

I had been avoiding this on the grounds that it was just a silly-looking summer series and also the whole obviously doomed thing but a series of positive mentions on io9 and other Web sites (including a plug by Justine Larbalestier) led me to try the thing once.

I was hooked within the first five minutes, by about three very clever bits. That kept me going, but I was very surprised after a few episodes by how much I came to like the characters.

Five things:

• It's unabashedly geeky. I initially described the show as "Men In Black, if the characters had all seen Men In Black." It's awash in SF/Comic references, many of which are placed in the background to reward those who are paying attention.

• It's unabashedly heroic. The Middleman is the kind of square-jawed throwback that snarky shows usually make fun of. Not here. Somehow the show manages to make the hero retro and cool, without really making him just retro-cool. If that makes sense, which it probably doesn't.

• It's unabashedly silly. Plots to date have included fish loving zombies that shout "TROUUUUT", vampire puppets, and a grunge match between kung-fu masters and masked Mexican wrestlers. It's the goofiest show this side of Pushing Daisies.

• The heroes have fun. The series creator said he wanted to get past the current idea that comic-book-esque heroes need to be dour and wear their responsibilities like a 2000 pound weight. In this show, the Middleman pulls a rare reverse Peter Parker, telling his sidekick Wendy that if she falls in love and doesn't follow it, that's on her, she can't blame it on the job.

• I also really like that, in a show that features a character who uses a "NDBS Detector" (Not Detectable By Science), they've also made Wendy's best friend a Carl Sagan reading skeptic (among other things).

So, go watch the one remaining episode next week. And then say good bye. Let's just say the ratings were so low that ABC Family won't even release what the ratings were. Plus they cut the series order to 12 episodes from 13. The outlook isn't good. But the whole season is on iTunes...

Parenthetically, if you can believe the numbers that the series creator threw out in an interview, the show, which is ridiculously low-budget, still costs roughly 1.5 million dollars an episode. (He said ABC Family spent 17 million on the series as a whole.) That's staggering.

Things I Need To Write About, Part Two: The Dark Knight

I have about seventy-million little things to say about this movie. I will try, and probably fail, to keep this brief.

Spoilers definitely ahead:

• The movie is really, really good. It's not flawless, but it covers it's flaws through a very strong sense of what Batman means and doesn't mean as a character, and also because it's very intense. The movie spends most of the time feeling like its on the very edge of chaos and conflagration -- it's probably the first time that I've genuinely felt that the hero wouldn't "win" in superhero movie.

• Heath Ledger is getting a lot of praise, and deservedly so, he's outstanding. I'm also interested in how the movie manages to capture the icon of The Joker while using almost nothing from the canonical comic version. (Early on, Gordon or somebody calls The Joker just a guy in makeup and I thought, okay, nobody knows that's what he really looks like. But in this movie, he is just a guy in makeup.)

• The comic version is, at least recently, usually shown as already the head of a large empire, and also usually as having a plan. In Alan Moore's Killing Joke, which is probably one of the main comic book influences on this movie, The Joker plans to destroy Gordon by giving him the worst day of his life. In this movie, the idea to destroy Harvey Dent is more of a target of opportunity. The movie Joker doesn't really plan -- he's the anti-plan, just chaos. And the movie doesn't flinch at showing how scary that can be with very little effort.

• Often, superhero movie series come to feel like the hero's greatest hits album -- a series of unrelated stories. One thing Dark Knight is very smart about is exactly how The Joker arises in direct response to Batman disrupting Gotham's mob scene in the first movie.

• I really never thought I'd see a Batman movie go all the way to, "Is Gotham really better off with Batman there". It's a common feature of superhero sequels to have the hero struggle with giving up the fight. But in Superman 2 and Spiderman 2, the hero is trying to decide whether they can be personally fulfilled while being the hero. Batman is beyond that, in Dark Knight he's trying to decide if he's done any good at all.

• Which brings us to Harvey Dent and Two-Face. Who, interestingly, is much closer to the comic version (although in the comic version, the Dent defaces the coin himself after he's injured -- actually, the movie version is better...) I really like how they kept contrasting what Batman could and couldn't do in the shadows with what Dent, as DA could and couldn't do in the public eye, and how Batman was almost eager to have Dent be Gotham's by-the-book hero.

• The sequence where Rachel dies was a bit odd. My read on it was that the Joker didn't really care which one Batman tried to save, he just wanted to make sure that he'd fail no matter what. Still, it seemed out of character that Bats would go after Rachel.

• The movie's use of the Chicago locations is outstanding. (Frankly, everytime I'm on Lower Wacker, I always kind of feel like I'm in a creepy action movie). Despite the fact that Gotham is nominally fictional, the locations ground it in a way that say, the Spidey movies don't quite get even though they use New York as itself. Or maybe that's just because I'm more familiar with the Chicago streets used.

• One question that I keep wondering about is whether these two movies would have been successful 20 years ago in place of the Burton movies. Assuming, of course, that the studio in 1989 would have let that movie be made. I'm not sure. I know the fan base would have still loved it.

• Also. Is it the best superhero movie ever? Right now, I make the top four, in no particular order, as Spidey 2, Dark Knight, Iron Man, and The Incredibles. There's another story about how the movie that would have been considered as the best for years and years (Superman 2) has had it's critical stock bottom out recently. I'm not sure on the order of my top four, though..

I'll probably think of a dozen things after I post this, but that's all for now.

Thing I Need To Write About, Part 1: Dr. Horrible

It seems like I'm forever mentioning that I'm not posting here as much as I'd like. I said a while back that between here and the Pathfinder blog I'd be posting two to three times a week. Turns out that's actually been more or less true, just that all of it has been on the Pathfinder side.

I do miss it here, and there are a few big genre/geek things in the last couple weeks that I really wanted to write about here, where nobody can interrupt me.

First up: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. I have to admit that I was ridiculously over-psyched about this project from the beginning. Joss Whedon, musical, hapless supervillain, Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion. They didn't just have me at "hello", they had me at "h". Honestly, I was worried that no actual project could live up to my expectations.

Well, a week later, having basically memorized the songs, I'm pleased to say that it's still fantastic.

I want to talk about this as a business model first, since it lets me put spoilers at the bottom.

• There's no question but that this is a huge test of whether online-only content is financially viable. If Joss Whedon can't turn a buck on this, given his huge existing support and the amount of buzz this show has gotten, then it's going to be very hard for other established creators to justify web-content. As much as I don't like judging movies or TV by their bottom line, in this case, if it's a gold rush, then we're going to see a lot more of it.

• That said, it's not completely clear this has much implication for a more typical web video project, like Felicia Day's The Guild, which would have a much smaller budget and much less entrenched fan base. I think the main implication is "get it done and get it out there".

• A back-of-the envelope guess suggests they haven't made a profit yet (or not much of one), but almost certainly will shortly. Hard numbers are scarce, two that have been released publicly: Whedon said the budget was "in the low six figures" (and that may be without paying the cast and crew), and that there were about 2 million individual hits on the web site for individual episodes.

• So.. that's probably around 500,000 people who streamed all three episodes. No idea how many people have bought it on iTunes yet, but I'd be surprised if it was more than 50,000 and very surprised if it was more than 100,000. Again, no clue what their deal on iTunes is, but I'd be surprised if they got more than about $2 per download of the episodes in a bundle. Add that up, and they are break-even at this point at best.

• But there are more revenue streams. I don't know what their arrangement with Hulu was for streaming. There's merchandise. There will be a soundtrack, and there will be a DVD release. And people are still buying it on iTunes. So in the end, I expect it will more than financially justify everybody's time, while not exactly being a Scrooge McDuck level of money pile.

That's more than enough on financial stuff, let's talk about it as a show. Spoilers ahead, I guess.

• All three of the main players are great, but Neil Patrick Harris takes it to an entire other level. Really, there's very little in the entertainment world that I've enjoyed more in the last few years than watching Harris methodically take it over. This part is a perfect showcase for everything he does well -- it's dark, it's light, it's funny, it's serious, and he sings amazingly.

• I'm not really qualified to judge the music, but it's been stuck in my head for the last couple of weeks, so I'm going to confidently say that it's pretty catchy. Some great lyric work here.

• After some back and forth in my head, I've come to accept the ending, even though it's a bit depressing. Here's why: For about 30 minutes of show, Whedon is deliberately ambiguous about whether Billy Horrible (not his real name) is actually evil, or just playing around. He calls himself Dr. Horrible, but he's kind of a buffoon (at first), he kind of is creepily stalking Penny, but Captain Hammer is an even bigger jerk, he wants to join the Evil League of Evil, but is clearly squeamish about killing...

• What works about the ending is that it preserves the ambiguity in the most intense possible way. Horrible is willing to disrupt the event, but flinches at the moment when he could kill Captain Hammer. He's willing to reap the benefits of being perceived as a killer, but is obviously -- given the last line -- somewhat ambivalent about it. It'll be interesting to see where the character goes if and when everybody gets around to another shoot.

Hmm... that turned out longer than expected, no wonder I'm not posting here as often as I'd like.

Bind is actually rather an understatement...

Battlestar Galactica 403 (or 405) "Ties that Bind"

That was dark even by the really, really high standards this show has set for being dark and unsettling. It was an unrelenting parade of deeply screwed up people in torment, and the relationships that torment them. Naturally, I loved it, but if it wasn't so well written and acted, it'd be insufferably gloomy.

Bullet points -- if you haven't seen it, and plan to, look away.

• The directing in this show was very overt, a lot of very artistic effects -- Starbuck only being shown from the back, a lot of blurred backgrounds and voice in Cally's point-of-view shots, the rotating star design motif. Most of it worked -- I thought that keeping us from seeing Starbuck's face was very effective. I could have done without the kind of druggy shots of the kid's mobile or whatever the heck that was.

• I was spoiled on Cally's death, but the spoiler note implied it was a suicide, so I was surprised by both the addition of the baby in the scene (which made it about 100 times darker), and by Tory's involvement. I guess we'll find out next week whether Tory told Chief what she did.

• I realize this is an odd place to make a stand on plausibility but... let me get this straight. Kara's crew has her, presumably pretty widely known in the fleet even before she died and came back; Helo, notorious as "the guy who married the toaster", plus he ran the refugees for a while, and he was Galactica's XO; and Anders, world famous athlete. All three of these people can just disappear for three weeks without anybody noticing?

• This is true: at the beginning of the episode I was thinking, hmm... on a spaceship it's never warm enough for people to get uncomfortable and sweaty. Then they cut to the Starbuck ship, which made Cool Hand Luke look like Ice Age (Cool Hand Luke = sweatiest movie ever in the pilot for Cheers... so it's a joke. Get it?).

• Haven't even covered: They made clear some things about Cally that were almost subliminal, about how she feels about Chief and all... thought that was nice to see. Also, Lee remains the easiest person to manipulate in the entire history of the Galaxy. Presumably Zarek nominated him to the council so he could always have one person he could con into doing goofy things.

Boxcars

Battlestar Galactica 402ish "Six of One"

Some quick bullet points before the next one comes down the pike.

Very pleased with the first two episodes of the season -- I think it's encouraging that this episode, credited to a writer whose last couple were not that strong, was arguably better than the first.

• Katee Sackhoff had an amazing week -- Starbuck was all over the place, on the very edge of hysteria of not past it, a lot of great scenes. The Adama/Roslin scenes were also very good.

• If you are looking for a line to take a something other than face value, I'd recommend "I'm no more a Cylon then you are"

• How long can Tigh, Anders, Tory, and Tyrol meet together before somebody gets suspicious? It's not like they travel in the same social circles or that anybody is going to believe they've got a bridge game going...

• Loved the Cylon civil war idea -- it's very consistent with what Moore has said in a number of interviews about Cylon society being young and under it's first real stress. (This is actually where I thought they were going to go at the end of Season Two, after "Downloaded" first hinted at pro and anti human politics among the Cylons. Plus it's always nice to see Dean Stockwell. (The actual confrontation scene was capped by Tricia Helfer's look of shock at the end.)

• Okay, having two farewell ceremonies for Lee was a bit much, especially since you'd think that there would be some resentment over an able-bodied person leaving the military. That said, both scenes worked on their own, and I thought the aside in the bar scene of the group presumably strip poker was weird and funny.

• There are many reasons I like this show. One is that Baltar, after the events of last episode, still had a visible scar in this episode -- a point that many shows would ignore. Watching Callis play against himself was also fun.

I Believeth, I Believeth, Don't Die Tinkerbell...

Battlestar Galactica 4-1 "He That Believeth In Me"

I'm relieved, frankly. Not surprised, exactly. I liked Season 3 more than a lot of people seemed to, and I'm optimistic that Ron Moore and his crew understand what the problems were and how to avoid them. Still, it's good to see the show starting out it's final season with a strong episode.

This was basically the episode I was hoping for, with two extra plusses, and one kind-of minus.

Spoilers Ahead, I suppose

I really liked where they took the Final Four Cylon story. After three seasons of asking "What does it mean to be a human", they inverted it -- what does it mean to be a Cylon? What does it mean if your spouse, or best friend, or your whatever the heck Lee and Kara are, turns out to be Cylon? Does it matter? Should it? Great questions, and I can't think of a previous SF work that's attacked the basic what-is-human question from this angle.

The specific pieces of the storyline were well-done. Anders' nerves about going into combat, Tigh's general Tigh-ness. The bit where the Cylon Raider scans Anders and get's the blip response was very cool.

But what really made the episode was the way that Starbuck's return integrated with the Final Four. Of course everybody would think Starbuck is a Cylon trick -- half the audience thinks so too. In the show, this allowed the characters to all talk about what it would mean to be a Cylon over the uncomfortable glances of the Fantastic Four. A really clever piece of writing structure.

The negative is the Baltar storyline. Not only does this put Baltar back in another situation where he's separated from the rest of the crew and in a place with creepy customs, but the whole thing is way too much like the telepath underground from the final season of Babylon 5 for comfort. (Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if the attack on Baltar was staged to make him stay with the cultists. But then, I'm cynical.)

• Some great acting work all around -- watch how much of the episode is carried by the reactions of the Fab Four. And James Callis' facial expressions were the most bearable part of the Baltar story.

• I thought that the tension between Lee and Adama was maybe resolved too quickly given how intense their argument was. I'm assuming the writers have bigger fish to fry.

• I watched this one on hulu.com, since I don't get Sci-Fi on my cable system, and they pulled out of iTunes. Overall, it wasn't bad. The video quality was worse than the iTunes files but still watchable. The biggest problem was the interspersed commercials -- not that I'm inherently against the commercials, just that they aren't synched right. Two of the breaks came about a second after the actual episode act break and one of them came right in the middle of Baltar being attacked. Annoying.

Cuts Like A Knife

SF Movie Review: Battlestar Galactica: Razor

(Continuing the enlargement of things I write about on this site, and I think this will be the last post containing a disclaimer about topics...)

I'm not sure what this says about me or my relationship to this show, but the following is all true:

• I bought this DVD the day it came out (I don't get Sci-Fi at the moment...)
• I then let it sit for three entire months while waiting for the right time to watch it in one sitting.
• I finally decided that I'd watch it in pieces, so I started it at about 10:45 at night.
• Got so caught up in it that I watched it all the way through, then read Jacob's incredible TWoP recap before sleep.

The movie is made up of several nested flashback stories (don't even try to use this movie as an introduction to the Galactica universe...), mostly unified by the person of Kendra Shaw, whose official title might be "Highest Ranking Pegasus Officer We Never Saw Before". Shaw arrives on Pegasus about fifteen minutes before the original Cylon attack, and has a front row seat for the craziness hinted at during the first time through the Pegasus story. Later, she becomes Lee Adama's XO, and leads a mission to a mysterious Cylon outpost dating from the first Cylon war. Add in a couple of flashbacks as to what the elder Adama and Cain were doing on the last day of the first war, and you've about got it.

The basic issue with a this movie, which is designed specifically not to be necessary to understand the main story, is for the show to justify it's existence as more than a way to move DVD's at Best Buy. I think it does, not so much at a plot level, but in the way that it deepens the Pegasus story, already one of the show's best storylines.

The Galactica story has always revolved around about three questions, how do you deal with overwhelming loss, how are you supposed to act in the name of survival, and how are you supposed to treat a mortal enemy. Razor encompasses all three. The earlier Pegasus arc was, in some ways, a little too easy -- Cain fits very neatly into the model of Crazy Commanding Officer Who Goes Too Far. By taking us through the all the steps from beginning to end, Razor makes it harder to dismiss Cain as a lunatic -- it explains her actions without excusing them. Kendra Shaw, who pretty much wears a sign at the beginning saying "I'm Not Crazy" gets drawn straight into the heart of it all. As a result, Razor ends up being a very dark story even by Galactica standards.

• My list of bedrock Galactica questions doesn't include the question of whether the Cylons are human. While that's frequently a topic of discussion on the show, it's clear to me that the creators of the show know the answer to that question... they use the human/robot question as a way of getting at the deeper issues.

• I liked the subtle ways in which the movie placed itself in the Galactica timeline, the exact number of survivors in the credits places it, plus there were a couple of background references to major events in the last half of season 2.

• Have they ever mentioned on the show exactly what caused the first Cylon war to end so abruptly? That's a possible plot issue to be dealt with in season 4. Or, I suppose, the on-again, off-again Caprica miniseries.

• Moore's commentary is very interesting -- as with many other Galactica episodes, this one changed dramatically in editing. Essentially, they turned the entire movie inside out, and what was originally the framing sequence became the ending mission, and the original meat of the movie became the framing sequence.