2011 Books

As 2010 closes out, there's the inevitable looking forward to the new year. There's already a small, but growing list of books that are coming out that has been percolating in the back of my head. Some of these are authors that I've never read before, some are ones from familiar people, but all looked interesting to me. Here's what I've got thus far:

Hull Zero Three, Greg Bear

This is actually a 2010 release, but by the time that I buy it, it'll be well into the new year. A man awakes on a far out spacecraft from hibernation and takes stock of his surroundings. It looks like a fast-based, stripped down sort of novel. Hopefully, it'll be better than Pandorum.

The Habitation of the Blessed: A Dirge for Prester John Volume 1, Catherynne M. Valente

I'm not usually moved by covers (There are some exceptions, like The Windup Girl), but this one looks interesting, and the blurb hasn't deterred me at all:

This is the story of a place that never was: the kingdom of Prester John, the utopia described by an anonymous, twelfth-century document which captured the imagination of the medieval world and drove hundreds of lost souls to seek out its secrets, inspiring explorers, missionaries, and kings for centuries. But what if it were all true? What if there was such a place, and a poor, broken priest once stumbled past its borders, discovering, not a Christian paradise, but a country where everything is possible, immortality is easily had, and the Western world is nothing but a dim and distant dream?Brother Hiob of Luzerne, on missionary work in the Himalayan wilderness on the eve of the eighteenth century, discovers a village guarding a miraculous tree whose branches sprout books instead of fruit.

Spellbound, Blake Charlton

Spellwright, by Blake Charlton, was a fun read that I came across earlier this year, and from the early (and now cut section) look that I had earlier, this looked very interesting, and a cool continuation of the world that he's set up. I can't wait to see what happens next.

Leviathan Wakes, James A. Corey

Another one where the cover grabbed me, this start to a series looks to interstellar space, colonies, and ancient secrets lost in the solar system. Looks like it could be a promising romp in science fiction. Blurb:

Humanity has colonized the planets – interstellar travel is still beyond our reach, but the solar system has become a dense network of colonies. But there are tensions – the mineral-rich outer planets resent their dependence on Earth and Mars and the political and military clout they wield over the Belt and beyond.Now, when Captain Jim Holden’s ice miner stumbles across a derelict, abandoned ship, he uncovers a secret that threatens to throw the entire system into war. Attacked by a stealth ship belonging to the Mars fleet, Holden must find a way to uncover the motives behind the attack, stop a war, and find the truth behind a vast conspiracy that threatens the entire human race.

Fuzzy Nation, John Scalzi

John Scalzi's an author that I've followed quite a bit over the past year, and while I haven't read his followup books to 'Old Man's War' (have them, haven't gotten to them yet), Fuzzy Nation is probably going to jump to the front of the list. It's a reboot of a hugo-award winning novel, Little Fuzzy, something he doesn't think has happened before. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that, and there's no doubt in my mind that Scalzi can put together a fun tale.

Embassytown, China Mieville

The City and The City is one of my favorite books that I read over the past year, and as he turns to science fiction and aliens, I'm confident that he'll be putting a unique twist and look on the genre. In the meantime, I've got Kracken to read.

Bright’s Passage, Josh Ritter

I actually don't know anything about what this book will be about. But, it's by Josh Ritter, one of the best singer-songwriters out there, and if this is anything like his music, it's going to be a very good read indeed.

The Magician's King, Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman blew me away with The Magicians last year, and this followup to the book has me really intrigued. Where the first one could be described as the anti-Harry Potter, I have a hard time seeing how this one could play out. The ending moved to a bit more of a traditional fantasy novel, and if he can craft something in the same vein, that should be interesting indeed.

Unknown, Austin Grossman

Brother of Lev Grossman, Austin is known for his fantastic novel Soon I Will Be Invincible. Nothing much has come from the author since that was published a couple of years ago, but reportedly, he'll have something coming out. I'll be checking it out as soon as I get more information on it! Of course, all of these books could be horrible. They could be brilliant. Time will tell, but I can't wait to find out. Hype in any form is a dangerous thing for a book: it can raise expectations beyond what is reasonable, or it won't be enough for a brilliant book to get off the ground. Things like cover art, while cool, aren't the literature world equivilent of trailers, although they're hyped up to be, and while I do love great cover art, it doesn't always pay off by translating into a good book. Most of the authors on this list are ones that I've known and read before, although there's a couple of newcomers. Fortunately, this is a small risk to take. I can buy a book based on the cover and advance reviews, and hope for the best. In some cases, it's paid off. In others? I have a book that sits on my shelf, looking nice. Here's to hoping that 2011 will be as good of a year as this year was.

Movie Review: Pandorum

This past weekend, I rented a recently released film called Pandorum, a sci-fi horror film that, while deeply flawed, was a fairly entertaining flick that I've had a couple of thoughts on. At some point in the future, a man awakes violently in a pod, unaware of where he is, how he got there or even who he is. He's onboard a dead spaceship, with little power and no lights. As events transpire, he and a fellow crew member are on board a space ship, and they begin to remember more and more as time goes on. As they work on getting the ship back online before that becomes impossible, and in doing so, discover that what's happened to them is both horrifying and eye-opening.

This film reminded me a lot of Vin Disel's 2001 movie, Pitch Black, in a number of respects, and there were points in the first half of the film that were just downright brilliant, harkening back to what is possibly one of the best space-horror films, Alien. As Bower awakes, he's essentially released into a dark and empty ship, one that has clearly been abandoned for quite some time. Where Pitch Black really utilized a minimal approach to horror while building up the suspense for most of the film, Pandorum should have done much of the same, and did for the first half-hour or so, as Bower and Payton escape from their pods and then out of the room to try and explore much of the ship.

It's there that the film runs into problems: in the time that the ship has been off-line, people have escaped, and a whole new species of humans have arisen (later explained because of some drugs in the hyperbunks to help promote adaptation on a new world) that are predatory and violent. A few random survivors have made their homes in this environment, resorting to cannibalism and hunting to evade the predators. While watching this rather long part of the movie, where Bower tries to get to the ship's main reactor to restart everything and get their bearings, I found it neither scary or all that suspenseful, unlike the first part of the film. While the creatures made for an interesting plot point, they deviated from a point that seemed almost an afterthought at the end: the relationship between chaos and order.

This is a central theme in many books and films, especially when it comes to religion and a number of science fiction books/movies that I've come across, and when this point was brought up in the last act, I realized exactly what this film could have been: a brilliant science fiction thriller, rather than an average chase movie that rarely rose above any sort of interested level.

At two points in the movie, it was revealed that humanity had vanished, as Earth was destroyed for some indeterminate reason. The ship was the last vestige of humanity, and that knowledge drove the original crew mad, and one of the members, Payton, killed his fellow crew members and left the ship to die. He notes at the end that the ability to live without consequence or fear of reprisal is an incredibly liberating one, while Bower worked to preserve the mission and lives of the remaining survivors. In a way, there's a neat relationship there between a life of chaos (life on the ship under Payton's rules) and that of order, as Bower seeks, and eventually achieves, with the death of Payton. The television Babylon 5 is a great example of where this sort of storyline has worked extremely well, with the Shadows war towards the end of the series. I particularly like this storyline because of the ambiguity involved with it, and the lack of any clear direction for the characters. In a way, neither choice is wholly the correct one; either side presents its advantages, in its philosophy, and the true good nor evil comes in the behavior of the characters. In this case, the chaotic route is clearly not a healthy one, as the characters run the risk of getting attacked and eaten.

This is a story point that is ultimately lost in the chase, but is one that could have worked extremely well for this sort of film, as the two characters have forgotten everything, and remember and relearn their surroundings. What's the most frustrating element of the movie isn't what's there, but what isn't there. The mutated humans, while an element that could have provided some shock and awe for the characters, really only exists to add in some extra blood and gore, in the most gratuitous and unnecessary manner, and really only serve to slow the characters down a bit. One of the characters, a Vietnamese man that joins the party, is killed almost as an afterthought at the end, and when we got to the end, I realized that this film was essentially a video game set to film.

There were some good concepts and ideas in Pandorum, and certainly worth the $1.06 that I spent out of Red Box for it. But ultimately? The movie was forgettable and uninteresting, save for a couple minutes here and there. What is set up is a cool universe, not unlike what happens in Pitch Black, with its own rules, appearance and feel, and the hints of a story that could have been brilliant.