Arctangential

I finished Wolf Moon last night. It was actually OK.

Just like Mulengro, this was one of de Lint’s atypical works, and as such one of his better ones. It’s set in a nonspecific medieval town, and centers around a family that runs an inn in a remote valley. Two new people come to their small community: a werewolf named Kern, who falls in love with the dour and shy innkeeper’s daughter, and a harper/wizard who is not a very nice guy, but uses his magic and natural charms to convince people otherwise. The story is pretty standard fare: the werewolf, Kern, is basically a nice guy, and never hurts anybody, but the harper uses lies mixed with the truth to sow fear and hatred for the werewolf, and his magic to charm the inn folk to do what he says. This is made worse by the fact that Kern never told them he as a werewolf, and so when the harper reveals that fact, they are quite upset. Of course, love conquers all, the hero wins the day, etc. Overall it was not a bad book, for a light read.

Now I’m reading Expanded Universe, a huge collection of Robert A. Heinlein’s short fiction. It’s great stuff.

I finished Women Writing Science Fiction as Men yesterday afternoon. It was pretty good.

From the title, I had assumed that this would be a collection of short fiction by female writers writing under male pseudonyms. It turns out, though, to be a solicited collection of new short fiction written specifically for this collection; every story is written by a woman, in the first person, with a male main character and, in the words of the editor, “”if changing the narrator from Victor to Victoria didn’t invalidate the story we didn’t want it.” So the idea is that these are stories, written by women, but in the minds of male characters, and in situations which are uniquely male. It’s a pretty cool idea, and I think it turned out pretty well.

The only story I really didn’t like was one by Susan R. Matthews, called Thumping the Weaver, which was set in her “Under Jurisdiction” universe. I think the main issue I had with this story is that I at no point had any idea who any of the characters were or what was going on. It was completely packed full of jargon and slang, and it was very confusing. The rest of the stories I did like; one involving the confluence of the classic twin paradox and a paternity suit was particularly amusing. Another took place in a kind of gender-switched alternate universe of SF fandom, featuring such authors as Asa Ikamov and Sheldon Raccoon (an obvious nom de plume). I think my favorite was a story considering what would happen were Maxwell’s demon to get a job as a policeman.

I would recommend this book to anybody who likes SF. I’m now reading Charles de Lint’s Wolf Moon, and nobody will be surprised that it features a musician and a young woman discovering the world around her. The surprising thing is that, in this book, they’re not the same person!

I finished Future Imperfect yesterday afternoon. It was good, but… odd.

James Gunn (at least as a writer) was an angry man. I suppose that part of the issue might be that these stories were written in the mid-50s, so his ideas of gender roles and feminism were probably quite a bit different from yours or mine, but I don’t think that really accounts for everything. For example, the first story in the book is about a man who comes to the conclusion (through logical reasoning) that women are actually an alien species, slowly taking over the world. That night, he dies mysteriously of a heart attack. Another is about a man who inadvertently destroys humanity — shortly after an effective male oral contraceptive has been invented, he publishes an honest book about the realities of child rearing, aimed at a male audience. Within weeks, the birthrate (technically the rate of conception, I guess) drops to 0.

Not all the stories are about misogyny; one very clever story is about a woman who feels that she’s being hunted by a being from another dimension. She keeps being sent to psychiatrists who try to disabuse her of this absurd notion, but she remains convinced. She makes sure to always be with the psychiatrists when the beast finally reaches her, so that it will eat them. Another clever story is about an insurance broker paid 25 million dollars to insure the existence of a race of super-intelligent mutants on another planet, for 100 million dollars. He agrees, and then goes to the other planet, where the mutants are being ruthlessly oppressed. The story is all about how his wealth of experience and common sense are able to resolve the issue where the mutants’ super intelligence was insufficient.

Overall, I liked the book, although some of the more blatantly misogynistic stories were a little bit uncomfortable. Now I’m reading Women Writing Science Fiction as Men, and anthology of short fiction, edited by Mike Resnick.

I finished The Science Fiction Film Reader last night. It was generally not bad.

As one might expect from the title, this is a collection of critical essays on science fiction film. I was worried that I wouldn’t like it; I generally bristle at critical writing on art, as so much of it seems like masturbatory babbling. However, these essays were mostly pretty good, with a few exceptions.

The bad essays included: One called The Imagination of Disaster by Susan Sontag, written in 1965, about disaster films, or science fiction films, which she seems to equate. It’s possible that at the time of the writing, her opinions were more reasonable, but this essay felt to me like it was based off of information she got by talking to a nephew who was really into science fiction. Another terrible one was called Not So Long Ago and Far Away: Star Wars, Republics and Empires of Tomorrow, which was basically all about how totally awesome the Star wars movies were, even the prequels. This essay is proof that these critics can read any amount of brilliant commentary into even the most banal “art”. The last notable bad essay (that I’ll mention, anyways) was called Reproducing Ripley, a feminist discussion of the Alien films. Now I’m all for feminism, but I’m very much against feminist criticism — all of it that I’ve read seems to do nothing more than to associate every aspect of a piece of art with either phallic or yonic imagery, and then use those interpretations to show that the piece of art you’re discussing is subtly misogynistic. This essay was no exception, and I laughed out loud a few times while reading it.

That aside, most of the essays in this book were quite interesting, informative and enlightening. There was an interesting essay by Borges on the differences between HG Welles’ book Things to Come, and the movie of the same name based on it. Another was a very interesting interview with Robert Wise about his seminal science fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still. One called Intonation Please was about a terrible film called The Creation of the Humanoids, which managed to fail in almost all possible ways at being a good film. The essay goes into all of these reasons in detail and with humor, and it was really interesting to read. I also really enjoyed the essay entitled Alien Encounters: Science Fiction and the Mysterium by Karl Wessel, about human reaction to Otherness in movies like 2001 and Contact.

I would recommend this book, but I don’t know of anybody on my friends list who would really enjoy it, so I won’t. My book now is called Future Imperfect, a collection of short fiction by James Gunn. I like it so far.