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SFRevu June 2015

SFRevuJune2015

 

There’s quite a lot of good content in this month’s SFRevu, starting off with an interview with Daniel Abraham on writing as James S.A.Corey and what’s happening with the Expanse on SyFy, as well as a look at Nebula Nominee Charles Gannon’s Trial By Fire, Simon R. Green’s Bond Pastiche, From a Drood to a Kill,  a review of Neal Stephenson’s new apocalyptic doorstopper, Seveneves, movie reviews of Tomorrowland and Mad Max Fury Road. Plus lots more book and short story reviews by Sam Tomaino. www.sfrevu.com

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Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory

harrisonsquaredMy father was a fisherman
My mother was a fisherman’s friend,
and I was born amid the boredom
and the Lovecratian horror.

Of course Paul Simon’s Duncan (1) doesn’t go quite like that, but if it was about the residents of the creepy New England town Daryl Gregory brings to life, though life seems too strong a word for the residents, so let’s go with being, the song might very well might have.

16 year old Harrison Harrison, H2 or Harrison Squared to hie marine biologist mother, isn’t a New Englander, but after four days of travel in a pickup with four large marine animal tracking buoys in the back and his mom at the wheel, he finds himself in the town that time forgot: Dunnesmouth, MA. Harrison knows that his mom is obsessed with finding a big sea creature, and that she can drop sync on practical daily matters, which is why he insisted on coming along. What he doesn’t know is that this isn’t just any weird New England town; it’s the one his father, mother, and he set sail from when he was an infant on what should have been a three hour trip. A three hour trip.

Let’s stop right there for a minute. OK, “three hour trip” is cleary a nod to Gilligan’s Island(2), and that’s funny in a pop culture sort of way. Daryl Gregory knows pop culture quite well, in fact he’s created more than a bit of it with contributions to comics and manga with Dracula and Planet of the Apes titles, and this book is aimed squarely at a teen audience. Daryl called it ‘Cthulhu for Kids.’ in a Locus interview. His biggest challenge may have been keeping it from being so scary that it wouldn’t keep a “parent (from) picking up a book and thinking it’s too scary for their kids.“(3)

It is scary. Harrison’s Mom disappears after another boating accident and the mythical Scrimshander bogeyman, who does intricate carvings on his victims bones, turns out to be not so mythical. And that doesn’t even get to the chuthianesque bits. At times, it’s almost too scary for adults, and there are some who would otherwise enjoy it that I can’t recommend it to. Still, I don’t think it’s too scary for teens. The teen protagonists quip their way through crises with just enough humor to keep the book from sinking into unrelenting grimness, and besides, kids don’t believe horror is actually real if they’ve only seen it in books and movies. Adults don’t have the necessary innocence to disbelieve it.

Back in the book, Harrison is certain that his memory of the accident that took his father is a fantasy built from mundane events; the ship capsizes,  his leg gets caught on the boat, his father drowns. But while he may doubt his memory of a sea monster grabbing him, his father tearing him free…and then being taken by its tentacles, we the readers aren’t so skeptical.

Dunnesmouth is a dump. They don’t have cable, there’s no cell signal, and they definitely don’t have fun. When Harrison gets dropped off to school, he asks what his schedule is, a question that has no meaning with a junior class small enough that everyone has the same schedule. Still, the teacher in his first class, Practical Skills (or more accurately, how to tie knots in nets) gives Harrison the best piece of advice (short of “get out of town now) he’ll get in the entire book. Follow Lydia .

Lydia Palwick is a dour dark haired girl that doesn’t seem to like the idea of being followed around, surrounded by her other townees who have all the affect of extras from the Children of the Damned(4), but at time goes on, and bad things happen, Harrison discovers its’ not the children he has to worry about, in fact under their grim exteriors, there’s a resistance movement going on.

With Harrison’s mother missing, his self absorbed Aunt zooms in from Manhattan to do an imitation of a responsible adult. Self absorbed works perfectly for Harrison, who needs to be able to sneak out and scour the town for clues as to the whereabouts of his mother, who he knows is still alive thanks to a note left by another unlikely ally, the boy Lub, who get’s mentioned in the author’s Novella, “We are All Completely Fine”.  Lydia and her friends may be on the strange side, but Lub is a whole ‘nother level of different, and threatens to steal the scene whenever he’s around.

It’s a race against time, taken at a plodding pace, as Harrison and his friends try to find his mother before whatever arcane ritual the townsfolk have planned comes to pass. It’s a pretty great book, all told.

If you’ve read “We’re all Completely Fine(5),” which takes place years later and features Harrison Harrison and others touched by the same supernatural horrors in a therapy group, you know a few plot points, but not so much that it will get in your way. What you don’t know until the end is that this is only the beginning, but what a very good beginning it is.

Links / References

We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory (A Novella)

WAACFI picked up We Are All Completely Fine on a whim over at NetGalley.com without realizing either that it was shortlisted for the Nebulas or that Daryl Gregory had also written Afterparty, which is one of the few books I’d give four stars to. Out of four stars. I probably shouldn’t confess that, because I’m supposed to have a clue, but this is a safe space, right? You’re not all monsters, are you?

We Are All Completely Fine is every bit as good as Afterparty, but being a novella, gets the job done a lot faster. That book was about a drug that blurred the line between you and whoever your notion of god was, but this work goes in the other direction, bringing together a disparate group of damaged people who’ve all survived something horrible. To the world, their different stories were separate and testimony to the worst that humans can do. As a group they discovery that there’s nothing separate about their experiences at all, and very little that’s human in the horrors that were visited on them.

Dr. Sayer has brought together the therapy group from hell. Not quite literally, but not far off. Each of the members, Martin, Stan, Barbara, Harrison and Greta have suffered horribly, some in the recent past, some in events decades before, but all deeply scarred by the experience. For Stan, who survived prolonged captivity by a family of cannibals, Barbara who’s bones were etched like scrimshaw, and Greta who’s entire body is covered with intricate tracings left by razor blades in the cult she grew up in, there are visible marks, but for all the pain goes bone deep.

Harrison was the boy that stopped a madman called the Scrimshander, whose beautiful scrimshaw scored the bones of his victims, who like Barbara, another member of the group, would always wonder wonder what story they told, hidden away under their resealed flesh. At seventeen Harrison stopped the monster, and a massive supernatural event, and if it hadn’t been for someone getting hold of the story and telling it to the world as fiction, he might have been able to move on. Maybe not.

Martin wears dark glasses and lives in a VR world of his own, but the funny thing is that he’s not doing it to hide from the real world, but to see it more clearly. And there’s Greta, but she keeps her story longer than the others, and I won’t tell it here.

So, they’re all marked by some devil or other, and you have to ask what coincidence would get them all together. I mean, if you believed in coincidences.

Daryl Gregory has clearly been somewhere close to where these folks have been. He clearly knows what therapy looks like and every bit of it rings chillingly true. The man is a truly gifted writer and We Are All Completely Fine is just more evidence to the fact.

Links / References

Ex Machina

ex_machina

Ex Machina – To erase the line between man and machine is to obscure the line between men and gods
IMDB: tt0470752
GENRES:Drama Sci-Fi
DIRECTORS: Alex Garland
WRITERS: Alex Garland
CAST :Domhnall Gleeson / Corey Johnson / Oscar Isaac / Alicia Vikander / Sonoya Mizuno / Claire Selby / Symara A. Templeman  / Gana Bayarsaikhan / Tiffany Pisani / Elina Alminas / Chelsea Li / Ramzan Miah / Caitlin Morton / Deborah Rosan / Johanna Thea / Evie Wray

In Ex Machina, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a twenty-something programmer who works for Bluebook, the world’s dominant search engine company, wins a week at the remote estate of the company’s CEO, hanging out and male bonding, or something. Sounds like the perfect setting for a horror movie, doesn’t it? He should be so lucky.

Nathan (Oscar Isaac), is a monomaniacal asshole, you know, like that social media CEO guy from the company that ends in the same word as Bluebook, except that his two main pastimes seem to be beating a punching bag into submission and drinking himself into a stupor. So just hanging would be stressful enough.

But Caleb isn’t really there to hang out and share endless beers with his bro boss. He hasn’t even really won a contest (spoiler, sorry about that). He’s here so Nathan can can get his take on the next big thing. Hot robot chicks. Fully-functional hot robot chicks.

Caleb’s a nice boy, and that’s really why he was chosen, which seems like a pretty stupid criteria. He’s too polite to call his boss on being an arrogant asshole. He’s too nice to hurt the cute robot’s feelings, especially when it’s playing him by acting shy and helpless. So what’s the test? Can you get a lonely nerd, selected because he has no family, no girlfriend, and a good “moral compass,” to accept a cyborg with a pretty synthi-flesh face and a glowing blue pelvis as human?

We know from the outset that she’s not human. She’s a robot, dammit. So we’re really asking something else, like can Caleb accept her as a person. The problem is that Caleb wcould accept a dog as a person if it would only lick his hand. Forget asking if ‘Ava’ (Alicia Vikander) is a person. Ask if Caleb has free will. Just don’t put money on it.

This is highbrow stuff. We know because it looks like something Stanley Kubrick would have filmed, full of sterile interiors and stark scene titles between each of Caleb’s encounters with Ava. Weird music underscores the alienness of it all and Nathan watches the proceedings through cameras that see everywhere. You almost expect Caleb and Ava to get caught plotting together by lip-reading their dialog in an escape pod. Actually, the movie very nearly does just that.

Of course, coming off like Kubrick is no mean feat, and both the casting and acting are first rate. Director Alex Garland’s choice of Alicia Vikander was inspired, as her training at at the Royal Swedish Ballet School gave her the ability to provide a stellar physical performance as the fembot. Ms. Vikander managed to combine the deliberateness that is the classic definition of robotic motion with the fluidity and gracefulness that it will surely become. The resulting movement is beautiful, but not quite human Her acting is equally up to the challenge of the role.

In fact, the acting is very good throughout. If there is a fault, it lies not in the stars, but in their scripts.

There’s some good science in the mix too. The notion of using the massive data collection capability to create a model of human behavior is thought provoking, forcing us to ask whether Ava is operating by emulation or simulation(link). Caleb might have helped us explore that question as he tries to talk science to Nathan, but the audience will breathe a sigh of relief when his boss shuts him down, telling him that he wants to know what Caleb feels, not what he thinks.

All in all, it feels more like Nathan is conducting a focus group than a Turing test. That Ava can pass for human, especially after she slathers on pseudo-skin and a modest dress, is a foregone conclusion. In fact, the point of the exercise is the weak link in this film. Caleb and Ava have been selected and created respectively to complement each other, which seems like unnecessary stacking of the deck. Ava has Caleb convinced the moment she shyly looks away from him, and when he challenges Nathan on the choice of a female form as cheating, Nathan defends his choice by saying that gender and sexuality are part of being more than machine. He might well have been quoting Cole Porter:

And that’s why birds do it
Bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let’s do it, let’s fall in love(link)

There’s a lot of biblical stuff woven in here, starting with the character names, which makes it clear that on at least one level, this isn’t abut robots at all, but about people. Ava doesn’t steal knowledge from her creator, and may not turn out to be the ideal mate, but she’s no angel either. Though Nathan’s explanation of the choice of her sexuality is appealing, it’s equally likely that what’s really going on is more about misogyny than synergy.

Ex Machina covers a lot of territory in its 108 minutes, but it’s hard to believe that the Turing test is its raison d’être. In fact, most of the movie seems like prologue for the climax, just there to keep us engaged long enough for the director to deliver the punch line.

In the end, killer alien chicks and killer robot chicks turn out to be sisters under the skin, and you have to ask whether this is intelligent science fiction about alienation (seen through the eyes of an alien), or what it means to be human (from the viewpoint of a robot), or if the love child of Stanley Kubrick and Russ Myers has emerged from a test tube in some demented scientist’s lab to wreak havoc on us all.

maria-robotMainstream critics may try to tell you that nothing like this has ever been done before, but that slights Ava’s AII bloodline, which stretches back through movie history through the unquestionably human HAL-9000 to the robotic MARIA of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and a host of androids, AIs and cyborgs in between. What Ava brings to the table isn’t how like a person she seems, but how deep the resemblance actually goes. Then again, there are all sorts of people..

Links / References

Tomorrowland

tomorrowlandposter

imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1964418/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt

Remember Tomorrowland, the part of Disney;s theme park with all the rockets and visions of the future? What if it wasn’t really about when, but about where? That’s the engaging revisionist premise that Disney has come up with to provide a back-story for the theme park that resonates with today. Much as they tapped Johnny Depp to breathe new life into the Pirates of the Caribbean, they’ve picked George Clooney to bridge the gap for Tomorrowland.  And you know what? It works pretty well.

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