Another One Bites The Dust: Terra Nova Axed

Stephen Lang (Avatar) and Jason O'Mara (right) starred in the
ill-fated Fox television science-fiction series

The Fox high-concept, big-budget, science-fiction family drama show, Terra Nova, has been cancelled. Many bloggers, yours included, are sad to see the show go, not because we don't think it should have been cancelled due to its numerous flaws and foibles, but because of the implications of the cancellation of a Steven Spielberg-executive produced science fiction drama will have for the viability of the genre in the medium.

The Other Half is a much more reluctant (and possibly discriminating) television watcher than I am. He watched the pilot, on my suggestion, but although that (allegedly $20 million budgeted) 2-hour extravaganza generally received strong reviews the problems became clear very quickly. Ostensibly, Terra Nova was a story about people from the future (25th century) on an environmentally ruined Earth being given an amazing opportunity to go back millions of years into the past to colonize a pristine paradise when dinosaurs ruled the earth and avoid the mistakes that had ruined the future. (The plot is surprisingly similar to the Julian May Pliocene Exile books of the late 1970s.)


The main problem was that Terra Nova was trying to be multiple shows simultaneously and many of these visions were anti-thetical to each other. For example, it tried to be family friendly by having a too-cute 5-year-old daughter be the focus of multiple plot points, as well as "tension" around teenage angst caused by the presence of a 17-year-old son with daddy issues and a 16-year-old daughter experiencing her first romantic crush. The attempts to try to attract the 18-49 demographic to the show were pretty extreme, such as having co-star Jason O'Mara show off his furry, chiseled torso as well having a group of rebellious teens caught in the forest and menaced by marauding dinosaurs. The structure of the Terra Nova colony was bizarre, with the benign dictatorship of the Stephen Lang character barely questioned, except by the rogue, non-conformists "Sixers" who preferred to live out in the jungle with the deadly dinosaurs instead of in the relatively safe confines of the Terra Nova complex. So the show had family drama, a teenage love triangle, a teenage first-love story, an insurgent war storyline, a police/scientific procedural AND there was an entire series-wide arc about the entire time travel mythology. Too Many Things!

Terra Nova also had very expensive visual effects (lots of people complained about the CGI dinosaurs, but my position was, hey this is TV not film, with proportionally reduced budgets and expectations of verisimilitude) and wildly uneven acting.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the cancellation of Terra Nova after Fox ate the tens of millions of dollars to produce the first few episodes (with ratings that were low but not disastrously so) chills the environment for other sci-fi flavored shows like Fringe and Alcatraz (both also on Fox) as well as, more importantly, future science fiction shows. There are so many amazing hard science fiction books that could be turned into well-done shows. It doesn't have to all be about the effects, one really just needs to be able to communicate a sense of significant difference from our current world.

I have been a longtime fan of Fringe which is now in its 4th season and is co-created by J.J. Abrams, the creator of Lost. Abrams has another new sci-fi-influenced show called Alcatraz which simply doesn't look interesting to me so I haven't watched it all.

It's interesting to compare the declining fortunes of science fiction on TV compared to the ascendant fortunes of its sister genre fantasy on cable (HBO). The new season of the critically acclaimed series Game of Thrones is starting on April 1 and HBO has committed to a huge investment in another fantasy series based on the work of Neil Gaiman called American Gods. 


I like fantasy and science fiction so I am happy about the success of Games of Thrones but still sad at the demise of Terra Nova.

Walking Dead Season 2 resumes this Sunday!

BOOK REVIEW: Neil Gaiman's AMERICAN GODS

During my 2008 birthday trip to Puerto Vallarta I read Neil Gaiman's American Gods. It is on the relatively short but prestigious list of acclaimed books which have won both the Nebula and Hugo awards, the most prestigious awards in speculative fiction.

Neil Gaiman is an incredibly accomplished writer, and unfortunately, he knows this very well. I previously reviewed his The Graveyard Book which won not only the Hugo Award (the most prestigious award in science fiction/fantasy) in 2009 but also the Newberry Medal, the most prestigious award in juvenile fiction. I was baffled by the critical acclaim for this book which I found trite and boring.

American Gods is a very interesting book and I am glad that I read it but one can't really say that I enjoyed it like other Hugo-Nebula winners which are instant favorites like Connie Willis' Doomsday Book and Blackout/All-Clear or Frank Herbert's Dune, just to name a few.

The basic premise of American Gods is the idea that gods and other mythical creatures are real because they are believed in. In particular, there are specific American gods which have been created by various segments of the American populace, who brought the spirits and fables of their homelands when they immigrated to America. Gaiman also introduces the idea of new American gods based on different aspects of modern life such as the Internet.

The story follows the main character named Shadow who meets a man called Mr. Wednesday and they travel across America until Mr. Wednesday becomes another casualty in the war between the New Gods and the Old Gods. There are many, many scenes between characters who are representatives or symbols of various Gods. The references are so multifarious and obscure it is doubtful that anyone can recognize them all but one has to admire the creativity of the central conceit although I do think it takes a toll on the readability of the book as well as the integrity of the plot.

Interestingly, HBO has decided that the rich diversity of the world Gaiman has created here is worthy material for a blockbuster new television series in the vein of Game of Thrones. It was announced in Summer 2011 that the network intends to produce six(!) seasons of American Gods starting in 2013 with each season budgeted in the $40 million range. I predict that a well-done television series is probably a more enjoyable way to consume and appreciate Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

Author: Neil Gaiman

Title: American Gods.

Paperback: 624 pages.
Publisher: Harper Perennial.
Date: September 2, 2003.

OVERALL GRADE: B+.

PLOT: B+.
IMAGERY: B+.
IMPACT: B
WRITING: A-.

BOOK REVIEW: China Miéville's Embassytown

I have been a fan of China Miéville ever since I picked up his mind-bending books The Scar and Perdido Street Station after trawling through the Award Annals website looking for award-winning speculative fiction. China Miéville's writing has won him many, many awards. His work is generally relegated to "genre fiction" but the question is which genre? Miéville often doesn't just stick to one, or he purposefully reinvents and reimagines the genre he is working in.

His latest books, The City & The City (2009) and Kraken (2010), have been somewhat disappointing. They are still as hard-to-classify and mind-bending as his earlier works but they are not as rewarding (to this reader).

Embassytown was expected to be different, since it was announced as China's first book with actual spaceships. Expectations that it would be a true science-fiction book, instead of another one of his genre-benders were raised.

Unfortunately, China being China it means that even though Embassytown is definitely science fiction, it is also Weird.

The basic outlines of the story is that it is told from the first-person perspective of Avice Benner Cho, a "Immerser" (someone who helps pilot spaceships at faster-than-light speed through something called The Immer) who returns to her home town of Embassytown on her home planet of Arieka after a successful career with a husband named Scile who is a linguist. Embassytown is inhabited by aliens known as the Ariekei or Hosts. The Ariekei have multiple mouths and produce word simultaneously from two mouths simultaneously to produce what is known as Language.  Language possesses multiple unusual properties, the most important of which is that it is more than just sounds. If the sounds of Ariekei producing Language is recorded and played back for them they do  only hear it as noise. Somehow the Ariekei can only understand Language that is spoken with meaning by an intelligence. Another property of Language is that the statements and thoughts communicated using it must always be true, Ariekei can not lie. The Ariekei have advanced bio-technology and provide it to the humans (and other aliens) who inhabit Embassytown, which happens to be an important way-station on to a whole other section of the galaxy. In order to communicate with the Ariekei humans have produced Ambassadors, who are twinned humans (i.e. Cal and Vin become CalVin) who are so closely aligned with their thoughts that they can speak simultaneously and produce Language which the Ariekei can understand.

The plot is unsurprisingly complicated, and involves the arrival in Embassytown of a new kind of Ambassador which eventually results in the entire structure of Language being challenged and changed. The Ariekei are also forever changed, as well as life on Arieka itself.

Of course the reader is supposed to connect to the story through the lens of Avice. Avice, is a celebrity among the Ariekei because as a young girl she became a simile in Language, "the girl who sat in the dark and ate what was given her without question." Her husband becomes obsessed with the Hosts and plays a very important role in the development of the plot.

The main problem is that China is more interested in challenging (and impressing) the reader than actually entertaining them. He has interesting things he wants to show that he can do within the confines of familiar sci-fi tropes (faster-than-light travel, real-life aliens, human-alien contact, planet colonization and advanced technologies) while also incorporating things like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But China spends so much time on these other things, in my view, he neglects to make the reader really CARE about the characters, and thus we really don't care what happens to them in the end.

Title: Embassytown.
Author: China Miéville.
Paperback: 368 pages.
Publisher: Del Rey.
Date: May 17. 2011.

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).


PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson's Spin is one of the great science-fiction reads of the past decade. It is the first book in a trilogy of books with similarly succinct titles such as Axis and Vortex. Unfortunately, the latter books of the trilogy were unable to match the brilliant heights reached by the first book in the series, though they are above average reads and I am glad that I read them.

The world of  Spin is one in which mysterious aliens, dubbed The Hypotheticals, have placed some kind of membrane around the entire planet Earth which causes the stars to disappear from the sky. eventually we discover that time outside of the membrane is passing by at orders of magnitude faster than time on Earth, and that the membrane is also protesting the Earth from the Sun's increased radiation as it accelerates its lifecycle as a star. Spin resonates with the reader because of its amazing premise: One night the stars disappear. How would humanity react? The various characters respond differently but happen to be intimately involved in finding out the cause of the phenomenon (which happens decades after the event).

More amazing events happen,  but the most significant result is the creation of gateways which allow humanity to move from Earth to other planets (which also have Spin membranes surrounding them). Axis, the sequel to Spin takes place primarily on one of these new planets, with characters related to the ones introduced in Spin. Wilson primarily organizes his books around these characters and how they react to the incredible events and circumstances.

One of the main problems is that the characters get progressively less interesting in the later books. For example, in Vortex the main characters are a psychiatrist named Sandra Cole, a police officer named Bose and a mysterious drifter (and patient of Sandra's) named Orrin Mather. These characters are interestingly set in the same time period that the events of Spin occurred in, while simultaneously there is a another storyline which is set more than 10,000 years in the future which involves Turk Findley (a character which appeared in Axis) and another new character named Allison Pearl who may or may not be a figment of the imagination of a character named Freya.

Other people had a more positive reaction to Wilson's characterizations but I think there is universal agreement that neither of the sequels to Spin do not match the unvarnished brilliance of that masterwork. Vortex is probably worth reading if you have already Spin, but if you haven't I would say you could just read Spin and save yourself the disappointment of a lack of a satisfying resolution of all the many issues raised in Spin.

Title: Vortex.
Author: Robert Charles Wilson.
Paperback: 336 pages.
Publisher: Tor.
Date: July 5. 2011.

OVERALL GRADE: B+ (3.33/4.0).


PLOT: B+.
IMAGERY: B+.
IMPACT: B.
WRITING: A-.

BOOK REVIEW: Leviathan Wakes

One of the best new hard science fiction reads of the year is Leviathan Wakes from James S.A. Corey. Corey is actually a pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Surprisingly, both of these guys are known for their fantasy bona fides. Abraham is the author of The Dragon's Path, the first book in the Dagger and the Coin trilogy while Franck is George R.R. Martin's assistant. Martin, is, of course, the author of the wildly popular A Song of Ice and Fire series, whose first book the Emmy award-winning HBO mini-series Game of Thrones is based on.

It's interesting that with all this swords and sorcery experience that these two guys have written an absolute kick-ass hard science fiction classic. The universe of Leviathan Wakes takes place in a near future where humanity has established colonies on some of the solar system's planets and large asteroids. To be more precise, Mars, the Moon, and Ceres all have substantial human populations, with distinct and disagreeing cultures. The two big fish are Mars and the Earth, with the Moon and all the inhabitants of the Asteroid Belt (known as "Belters"). There are no aliens, but there are generations of humans that have only lived in non-Earth gravity and have been physically modified as a result.

The story that is set in this universe is a doozy. It is centered around two main characters: Jim Holden and Detective Miller. Holden is the "good guy," an idealist who runs into some Lovecraftian surprises in deep space of galactic significance. Miller is the hard-bitten detective who doesn't even have a first name who doggedly follows his hunch about a case no-one else cares about while history-altering events are happening around him.

The book is an interesting melange of multiple genres; it is definitely hard science fiction (there are space battles with sub-light space travel in the very first chapter) but veers sharply into horror (there are things called "vomit zombies") with a sprinkle of noir (Miller's character is clearly supposed to be some kind of 23rd century Sam Spade).

I don't want to say too much about the details except to say that the story hurtles along at breakneck pace, and although many issues are resolved, one can clearly see how this works as the first book of a planned trilogy. I can't wait until the next book in "The Expanse" series is released; if you read Leviathan Wakes, you will be hooked as well.

Title: Leviathan Wakes.
Author: James S.A. Corey.
Length: 592 pages.
Publisher: Orbit.
Published: June 15, 2011.

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

Lost Producers Confess They Made It All Up Ad Hoc

Damon Lindelof (left) and Carlton Cuse were the showrunners on Lost

As you may recall, I was a huge fan of the television series Lost and was verklempt when it went off the air Sunday May 23, 2010.

The story was so complex that there was always a suspicion about whether the writers and producers really knew what they wanted to do all the time and was the intricacy intended genius or unintended confusion.

One of the main executive producers, Damon Lindelof, now admits it was more of the latter:

"The biggest issue with a desert island show was the audience is going to get very frustrated that the characters were not getting off the island," he said. "My solution was, hey, let's get off the island every week. And the way we're going to do that is we're going to do these flashbacks. We'll do one character at a time and there's going to be like 70 characters on the show, so we'll go really, really slow, and each one will basically say, here's who they were before the crash and it'll dramatize something that's happening on the island and it will also make the show very character-centric."

Abrams liked the idea, and also had another: "'There should be a hatch on this island! They spend the entire season trying to get it open. And there should be these other people on the island,'" Lindelof recalled Abrams saying. "And I'm like, ''We can call them The Others.' And he's like, 'They should hear this noise out there in the jungle.' And I'm like, 'What's the noise?' And he's like, 'I don't...know. They're never going to pick this thing up anyway.'"

Lindelof said the idea to tell the story out of chronological order came in part from "Pulp Fiction," in which John Travolta's character is killed about halfway through -- and viewers learn only at the end that he had failed to heed Samuel Jackson's speech in the diner about the path of the righteous man.

"That sort of flipped the switch in me, and was something that I really wanted to do as a storyteller and 'Lost' was really the perfect opportunity to do it," Lindelof said.

The most amusing revelation is that Lindelof really just wanted to get a job on J.J. Abrams' hit show Alias (which I also loved) which is why he originally met with Abrams and then was offered his new show while Abrams went off to direct movies like Star Trek  and Mission Impossible 3.

2011 Hugo Winners Announced!

The 2011 Hugo Awards were announced last weekend at the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, Nevada. Two of my favorites, Christopher Nolan's Inception and Commie Willis' Blackout/All-Clear won the major prizes of Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form and Best Novel, respectively. Willis becomes the second female author to win the prestigious Nebula/Hugo double for the same book twice. She won the Nebula award for Blackout/All-Clear earlier this year and had previously won the double for an earlier book in the series, Doomsday Book, one of my favorite books of all time. The only other authors to win the Hugo/Nebula double for the same book twice are Joe Haldeman (The Forever War, Forever Peace), Ursula K. LeGuin (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed), and the now-odious Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead).

Here's the full list and here's the list of the winners in the most important categories::

BEST NOVEL

Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra)

BEST NOVELLA

The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (Subterranean)

BEST NOVELETTE

“The Emperor of Mars” by Allen M. Steele (Asimov’s, June 2010)

BEST SHORT STORY

“For Want of a Nail” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s, September 2010)

BEST RELATED WORK

Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It, edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O’Shea (Mad Norwegian)

BEST GRAPHIC STORY

Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse,
written by Phil and Kaja Foglio; art by Phil Foglio; colors by
Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM

Inception, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Warner)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, SHORT FORM

Doctor Who: “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang,” written by Steven
Moffat; directed by Toby Haynes (BBC Wales)

What's nice about the Hugos is that they also release the detailed breakdown of the preference voting results every year as well. It would be incredibly awesome if other awards (Oscars, Emmys, are you listening?) did that as well.

Also, notice that the titles of the winners of Best Novella, Novelette and Best Short Story are hyperlinks. By clicking on the links you can see these award-winning pieces of speculative fiction for free. Enjoy!