Review: FlashForward, by Robert J. Sawyer

I was one of those who saw the TV adaptation of Robert J. Sawyer's Flashforward before I read the book.

But I did get to it not long afterward. Sawyer's tale of an international team of scientists at CERN coping with the implications of the totally unexpected event--that two minutes' of unconsciousness in which everyone got a glimpse of their future--was, for me, an appealingly old-fashioned science fiction novel. Reasonably compact, comparatively lacking in the bulkiness and clunkiness that has made me read less and less recent fiction of any kind, it was genuinely interested in its "What if" and straightfoward in its storytelling, as idea-driven fiction generally ought to be. Enough so that Sawyer didn't hesitate to follow his characters' trains of thought about the issue at hand, or permit them to have "explicit dialogues" in the Wellsian (or Shavian) manner. (I, for one, must admit admit I am fond of such dialogue, much fonder of it than the tenth rate Flaubert to which the advocates of "good form" expect us to aspire.) The kind of thing that, with so many people less inclined to it, encouraged me in the view that science fiction was waning as a distinct genre.

Reading the book so short a time after seeing the show I found myself inevitably drawing comparisons between one and the other. On the ABC version we got not an international team working at a particle collider outside Geneva, but a thoroughly Americanized cast of characters and setting, and these turned law enforcement types tackling an international conspiracy, the intellectual interest of the tale cast aside in favor of conventional thriller mechanics and soap opera, and mawkishness about Big Collective Moments like hack journalists write endless amounts of drivel about.

It was predictable that his idea would be forced to fit into the conventions of American prime time network television, and cease to be recognizable in the process. And there have certainly been worse shows. But I preferred the book all the same.

Remember Meg?

No, probably not.

But I do. I remember it because back in the '90s the terms of the publication of Steve Alten's Meg was the kind of media sensation the rags-to-riches story loving press likes to blow way out of proportion at every opportunity--a first novel by an unknown getting them a seven figure advance (impressive numbers today, even more impressive back in those comparatively uninflated, pre-J.K. Rowling, pre-E.L. James days). The big money was tied up with plans for a big movie, and why not, when Meg, short for the Megalodon that was at the center of the story, looked like it could combine the underwater terror of Jaws with the scale and sci-fi exoticism of Jurassic Park.

But the book's sales did not live up to the blockbuster expectations, while the movie plans went down quick into development hell.

For twenty years.

During which, as Jan de Bont and Guillermo del Toro and lots of other people whose names you know better than Alten's were attached and detached from the project, the summer blockbuster of the monster/disaster type went from being a seasonal treat to a week-to-week, year-round thing, not just on the big screen but the small, where Syfy supplied us with an endless string of deliberately bad movies about the theme (mostly because it's an easier thing to do than deliberately make good movies).

Hearing "This time they're serious" I'd think "I'll believe it when I see it," but last year I heard a report that the film actually was shooting, with a $150 million budget and Jason Statham in the lead (I don't think he's been that before in a megabudget movie like this one) as a Sino-American coproduction.

It seemed real enough this time.

I also heard that it would be coming out in March, which it didn't, instead bumped to August 10, as the commercial I caught on TV last week indicated.

Of course, getting one's release date bumped by five months is not a good sign. Still less is it a good sign when the new date is in August--traditionally a "dump month" where the competition is less intense and not too much expected from the receipts.

But then one might imagine that this Chinese coproduction (due to come out in China the same weekend as in the U.S.) is being timed to take advantage of China's notorious late summer blacking out of its film market, giving its domestic productions a chance to clean up, and that it will help the numbers in that country--by itself, quite enough to make or break many a big production. (And as even the quickest review of the numbers over at Box Office Mojo shows, monster movies certainly play well in the Chinese market. The Monster Hunt franchise, The Great Wall--while Hollywood's own Rampage did much better business in China than at home.1) And here in the States August sometimes produces a winner. (Guardians of the Galaxy proved a surprise hit in that period a few years back.)

What's your guess on how the movie will do?

1. Rampage pulled in $99 million in America (yes, just shy of the $100 million mark), but took in $156 million in China.

Review: Trojan Odyssey, by Clive Cussler

New York: Putnam, 2003, pp. 496.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Clive Cussler's Trojan Odyssey marks the end of an era in many ways. Not only is it the case that this is the last Dirk Pitt novel on which Clive Cussler's name appears without a coauthor. It is also the first novel to include Dirk Jr. and Summer in the adventure, just as the single, adventurous Dirk Sr. puts that part of his life behind him, marrying his longtime girlfriend Loren Smith and taking over the directorship of NUMA from Admiral Sandecker. These changes of life will pretty much keep him out of the field (in both those ways), and pave the way for the principal "Dirk Pitt" of the novels to be the son from this point on.

Naturally I would like to be able to say that the sequence of "Dirk Pitt Sr." novels goes out strong. Alas, the first time I tried to read it I didn't make it past page one hundred and fifty. I suppose that part of the problem was that I had become less forgiving of Cussler's literary weaknesses in the decade since I started the series. However, it is also the case that this part of the book--which consists mostly of an ocean resort and the Pitt twins being inconveniently in the way of a hurricane--comes across as both overfamiliar to readers of his previous books, and agonizingly slow.

Hoping that the rest of the book would be better I later returned to it and pressed on. Having done so I can say that the pace and interest do pick up in the second half of the story. Still, while the book gets better, it does not get very much better. Despite being shorter than many of the preceding Pitt epics, ending on just page 485 in the hardback edition, it felt overlong, with many later bits excessively drawn out.

Moreover, that sense of overfamiliarity remained. Cussler's previous novels are not merely referenced (as would be appropriate in a transitional work like this), but recycled. There is a lot of Sahara here in particular--for instance, in the spread of conspicuous, rapidly spreading, ocean-killing pollution from a mysterious source ("brown crud" in the Caribbean), and the dispatch of Pitt, Al Giordino and Rudi Gunn aboard a disguised high-tech vessel to check it out early in the story. Same as in that other novel, the subsequent adventure involves a river journey, an old colonial fortress, an ecologically destructive high-tech facility incorporating cutting-edge energy technology, action underground, and a party of foreigners enslaved by the baddie.

Where the book does not reuse familiar elements it is often simply hokey--as with the holographic pirates Pitt encounters off the coast of Nicaragua, which as a deception intended to keep people from the area would embarrass the clumsiest Scooby-Doo villain; or the unmasking of a major villain in the middle of a Congressional hearing, which likewise comes across as something out of a Scooby-Doo episode. One does not expect, or usually get, much logic in the schemes of supervillains in novels like these, but the connection of their revolutionary technological breakthrough with a plan to change the climate of much of the Earth seemed especially shaky. At the same time, while the novel's exercise in fringe history is one of Cussler's more intriguing--an alternative explanation of the true history behind the legend of the Trojan War based on the work of Iman Wilkens--we never quite get clarity on the meaning of of the revelations (like why a Druidess is buried in an elaborate tomb in the West Indies).

The handling of these elements also leaves much to be desired, Dirk and Al's Central American adventure paling next to what we saw in earlier installments (not least, the West African adventure Cussler recycled so much of here). When the narration remarks Pitt and Giordino feeling more tired than they can remember ever being, this comes across as a reflection of their aging bodies, rather than the author's topping his earlier efforts. It may also be that advancing age is the reason for the painful slowness of the protagonists to grasp what became obvious to the reader--the secret the villain conceals behind the unusual attire, the source of the brown crud. It does not help that NUMA's next generation--Dirk Jr. and Summer--have little interest in themselves, and what Cussler does with them this time around, at least, is not terribly interesting either. Nor does it contribute meaningfully to the sense of transition the rest of the book seems to strive for. Rather than their being given a chance to come into their own, which would give us a sense of the torch being passed, they come off as marginal and hapless in the tale's bigger events.

Cussler partially redeems himself in the final chapter, which manages to be suitably charming, and takes some of the sting out of the disappointment in what came before--but just as Loren Smith may feel that she has waited longer than she should have to make her longtime relationship with Dirk legal, the reader may come away feeling that this should all have happened a few novels earlier.

Review: The Rise of the Novel, by Ian Watt

Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1957, pp. 319.

It is a commonplace that the literary genre of the novel is distinguished by its telling about the lives of everyday individuals in everyday circumstances, in a manner distinct in two ways--its plainness of style, and its attentiveness to the "inner lives" of its characters.

In his classic discussion of the matter in The Rise of the Novel Ian Watt does far, far more than present that view, instead getting to the root of the matter. As he makes clear the ancient-Medieval tendency had been to think of the "universal" and "timeless" as real, and particularities as ephemeral and meaningless. That earlier logic had authors striving to portray the universal above all, serving up characters who are "characteristic" types down to their names, and time and place often conceived imprecisely, with the authors' ornamentation of the portrayal the principal object and measure of their skill.

By contrast, this era saw writers aspiring to tell the stories of particular individuals, in particular places and times--and indeed, the unfolding of the events of their lives through cause and effect sequences, over time. That shift, in turn, was the reason for the plainness of style--the prioritization of a denotative, descriptive usage of language, with the lavishness in detailing taking the place of the old lavishness of ornament. He stresses, too, how this came together in a genre of private accounts, read privately, permitting an "intimacy" unattainable in other, publicly performed and publicly enjoyed styles of work (plays, poems) that both extended the bounds of what seemed permissible in art, and allowed a new intensity of audience identification with protagonists.

All of these features--the strong sense of particularity, time and cause and effect; the use of language as description rather than ornament; the private, "intimate" novel-reading experience--seem implausible outside the rise of a rationalistic, individualistic, science-touched Modernity that afforded individuals a meaningful range of economic choices (a capitalism, increasingly thoroughgoing and increasingly industrialized), and sanctioned them ideologically (Puritan ideas about salvation, secular Enlightenment thought). And indeed, Watt's classic is best remembered for its stress on the historical context in which the novel emerged, which reflects a good deal of what Mills was to call "the sociological imagination."

Appropriately the book begins with a good deal of historical background, specifically two chapters regarding the philosophical developments underlying the rise of what we think of as "realism," and a reconstruction of the eighteenth century reading public from the concrete facts of the era. In these the territory ranges from the epistemology of John Locke to the nitty-gritty of how many and who would have had the time and money to buy this kind of reading material and a place in which to read it in that private way he described (delving into prices and incomes and the rest). Afterward, when turning to the founding authors and works themselves--Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones--he continued to draw on historians' understanding of aspects of the period ranging from the rise of Grub Street to the rise of suburbia, and how these factored into the authors' creative work by way of their personal backgrounds, and quite profitably. (Wary as I tend to be of the biographical approach, I found it impossible to come away from this study thinking it accidental that Richardson, a retiring, low-born, Low Church suburbanite earnest about "middle class morality" wrote epistolary novels about domestic themes, and Fielding, a robust Tory squire who attended Eton with William Pitt, served up Jones' picaresque adventure.)

Watt is all the more effective and interesting for his attentiveness to the finer points of form so much more difficult to discuss than content, and the ways in which form, too, was remade by practical imperatives of the writers' business. (That exhaustive descriptiveness, and the need of the writer to make themselves understood to readers of a less certain educational level--both connected with their selling to a wide public rather than catering to an elite patron--combined with per-word pay rates to put a premium on prolixity.)

All this is considerably enriched by a good many observations of wider literary significance. Not the least of these concerned the tendency of writers to essentially write themselves when presenting a protagonist, especially in a first-person narrative. ("Defoe's identification with Moll Flanders was so complete that, despite a few feminine traits, he created a personality that was in essence his own" (115).) Interesting, too, is his quip about an aspect of the style of fiction Pamela helped pioneer far less likely to be acknowledged by any critic in our day wishing to retain their mainstream respectability. ("[T]he direction of the plot . . . outrageously flatters the imagination of the readers of one sex and severely disciplines that of the other" (153-154)--the female and male sexes respectively here.)

Indeed, the breadth of his vision and scope of his interest is such that some of his more interesting remarks have nothing to do with eighteenth century fiction at all. (As Watt observes Shakespeare, the "inventor of the human," is less a modern than a Medieval--similarly different in his thought about time and causality so that these come across as loosely handled, and different in his thought about language, too, so that the propensity for the purple prevails over the comprehensible in his poetry, some of the reasons why he is less accessible and compelling to most of us than we think he is "supposed to be.") Watt is attentive, too, to the trade-offs that writers have to make when they actually create something--like that between plot and character (the one as a practical matter attended to in "inverse proportion" to the other (279)), and many of the pitfalls of literary criticism in his time, and our own. ("Coleridge's enthusiasm" as critic, he remarks in one instance, "may . . . serve to remind us of the danger . . . of seeing too much" in a work (120).)

As the cited passages indicate, Watt, for all his richness in insight, is also extraordinarily accessible, partly because in comparison with our pretentiously and trivially theoretical, jargon-laden contemporary work Watt is clearly focused on his subject and straightforward in his communication, while also exceptionally gifted as a wordsmith himself. Altogether this makes the book not just a key work for anyone trying to understand eighteenth century literature, or the novel that remains the central fictional form of today, but literature in general.

The Best Words Ever Written About "Human Nature"

Back in tenth grade I was first introduced to F. Scott Fitzgerald, by way of The Great Gatsby. I wasn't all that impressed with the book at the time, but I later came to be more appreciative--in part, I think, because I happened to run across Fitzgerald's earlier book This Side of Paradise.

The book has its quirks and limitations--its at times' ostentatiously Modernist experimentation, for one. Still, I was impressed with some of its more substantial exchanges, which happen to include, as the title of the blog post implies, the last of them, where the protagonist Amory Blaine debates the Social Question with an acquaintance of his dead college friend's father. Said acquaintance, dismissing socialism, speaks of "'certain things which are human nature' . . . with an owl-like look, 'which always have been and always will be, which can't be changed.'"

Amory's response, after astonished looking from one man to the other, that he "can name offhand over one hundred natural phenomena that have been changed by the will of man--a hundred instincts in man that have been wiped out or are now held in check by civilization," and that to imply that such things cannot be is not only false but "a flat impeachment of all that's worth while in human nature" that "negates the efforts of every scientist, statesman, moralist, reformer, doctor, and philosopher that ever gave his life to humanity's service." Indeed, far from being the argument-ender that speaker with the owl-like look thought it was, it was in Amory's view "the last refuge of the associated mutton-heads of the world," such that any individual "over twenty-five years old who makes that statement in cold blood ought to be deprived of the franchise."

Alas, a hundred years later we are still apt to hear that inane use of those two words, "human nature," most dismayingly of all, from ostensible progressives. But at the same time, Fitzgerald's reply to it still stands.

"Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity"

Back when I wrote the first edition of The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond I included in the appendix a brief essay discussing Britain's extraordinary industrial, imperial and military predominance at its nineteenth century peak, and its subsequent passing over the following hundred years. Basically what it came down to was the spread of industrialization as other nations increasingly consolidated. One result was larger-scale industrialized states, another was states which evolved a more sophisticated form of industrialization, and still another were states which combined both features, epitomized by the United States. The balance of economic power shifted in a hurry, the balance of military power with it. Meanwhile the declining acceptability of colonial rule, and the cost of two world wars, accelerated the unraveling of Britain's empire, but that economic change was first and foremost.

Given my historical and other interests I did much more reading and thinking about the issue, unavoidably rethinking what I wrote earlier (just why did others make a bigger success of the "Second" Industrial Revolution, for example?), and writing more. Initially I intended to produce a longer, better-grounded version of the piece in my appendix, later a few short pieces, but it eventually blew up into the paper I have just published through SSRN, "Geography, Technology and Opportunity: The Rise and Decline of British Economic Power" (the second revision of which is now up). About 74,000 words long it is less an appendix than a book in itself--which I suppose offers the same explanation in the end. With (I hope) more rigor, in detail and depth (unexpectedly I found myself coping with matters raging from the comparative phosphorous content of different iron ores to waterway-territory ratios in countries around the world to the finer points of the 1965 National Plan), but nonetheless, the same essential explanation.

If nothing else, I've done a fair job of convincing myself.

Admiral Kirk and Captain Spock Ride The Bus

Recently I ran across Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home again--the bit where Kirk and Spock walk around twentieth century San Francisco and then ride the bus and have their run-in with the punk with the boom box. I was impressed by how much satire (remarking how we treat each other, what passes for literature in our era) was packed into this one little scene, and how gracefully, how entertainingly, how charmingly it plays (for a scene with an obnoxious punk annoying a whole bus and giving our heroes the finger, anyway).

Star Trek IV was, of course, a summer blockbuster in its day. And recently it occurred to me--when was the last time that our bombastic summer blockbusters gave us a scene that worked in such a way? Simple, straightforward filmmaking (two people walking around, getting on a bus, talking), which said so much and amused so much at the same time, and proved so memorable? Certainly I can't remember any such thing in the recent Trek films. Anyone else able to think of one?

Of Starhunter

Starhunter appeared at the tail end of the '90s-era science fiction television boom, and came into that long-crowded field quietly, at least in the United States. Rather than a prime time slot on even a cable network, it went to syndication--and in my area, late night syndication. It ran for only one year before getting a major overhaul (it became Starhunter 2300, with the principal cast mostly changed), then lasted for only one year after that during which, even in that period when I followed the scene very closely and caught something of just about every show (in fact, watched just about all of just about every other small screen space opera), I not only didn't see it but was scarcely aware of its existence until it was already off the air, past which it didn't have much of a life in reruns (not in my area, anyway), and only happened to see it years later on DVD. (Remember those?)

The slightness of the show's wiki (which, despite dating back to June 2009, has a mere 31 articles, most of them quite short) does not suggest much has changed since then.

All the same, a continuation of the show, Starhunter: Transformation is reportedly in the works, and perhaps that is why the show has recently been remastered and reissued as Starhunter Redux, while since May airing in prime time reruns on Robert Rodriguez's TV network, El Rey.

Catching one of those reruns recently the show reminded me of another space opera that flew under most people's radars, Lexx. Like Starhunter, Lexx was an internationally financed Canadian project, and relatively low-budget, but there they parted ways. Despite the slenderness of the resources put up for it, Lexx, packed with colorful sets and bright CGI and surprisingly globe-trotting location shooting (from Namibia to Thailand to Iceland the crew went, and it's all up there on the screen) inclined toward the exotic, the weird, the extravagant--the end of the universe in a gray goo-induced Big Crunch (and no, it wasn't just a dream, an alternate timeline or any other such lame cop-out, it really was the end of the universe) a mere season finale.

By contrast Starhunter, while having some hints of something bigger going on in the background (and not always just the background, as the season two cliffhanger shows), tended toward the low-key and small-scale in its plots and its look from episode to episode, the space ships and stations and colonies utilitarian to the point of being bare bones, and most of the episodes taking place in their dark, dusty interiors, which matched the tendency toward the noirisih and gritty in tone. Looking back on it I suspect this probably did not help it win over a broad audience, but it did set it apart from the generally flashier, splashier, zanier fare that characterized the genre then and now.

Reconsidering Philo-Fiction

Some years ago the philosopher Terence Blake raised the question of "philo-fiction," fiction which uses philosophy the way science fiction uses science, and whether we might see it come into its own as a genre. Of course, that raises the question of what we mean by "philosophy." My initial thought was that philo-fiction as he used the term (fiction where the fundamental rules of the universe differed so deeply from our own) could be thought of a subset of science fiction, and so, perhaps.

My answer's changed since then. Fiction dependent on such a radical difference, it seems to me, is so demanding for the writer, and the reader, that it could probably never be very prolific--so that while we probably will keep seeing people try their hand at it every now and then, I don't think I could see it becoming a full-blown genre, certainly not on the scale that science fiction has at its peak.

However, I have also found myself thinking about the matter of philo-fiction another way, because I find myself ever less satisfied with the way we delineate "philosophy." After all, all intellectual investigation was known by that name, once. However, what happened was that proponents of a particular philosophical approach--old-fashioned induction and deduction, applied in a materialist, empirical way--was formalized by figures like Francis Bacon into the scientific method, after which it was known not as "philosophy" anymore, but a separate enterprise. This has in fact gone so far that many, maybe even most, of today's scientists actually have little intellectual grasp of the premises of their life's work.

So has it also gone with investigation of the social world. Studying International Relations in college we were exposed to a considerable amount of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Hegel, St.-Simon, Marx. In time the IR student (especially if they go past the B.A. level) is expected to read at least some of the actual texts deemed more important, which amount to a healthy chunk of the philosophical canon. Yet one is unlikely to read anyone labeled a "philosopher" from after the mid-nineteenth century, not because people stopped doing philosophy relevant to the subject, but because the labeling of those philosophers of obvious and direct relevance to the field changed to "economist" or "sociologist," "political scientist" or "social scientist," because of their use of a particular epistemological approach now labeled not "philosophy," but the science held to be a very different thing.

Now we use "philosophy" to denote inquiry into epistemology and ethics and little else, just those things that "we haven't learned to treat scientifically yet," with the invidious comparison between the rigorous applier of the scientific method and the fuzzy, verbal, non-quantitative folks with the ever-smaller turf not at all subtle.1 I remember, for instance, a scene in Robert Sawyer's book Flashforward where his protagonist Lloyd Simcoe reacts contemptuously to a philosophy professor's remark on the titular event. After reading it he "found himself crumpling up the newspaper page and throwing it across his office" as sighed and thought to himself "A philosophy professor! . . . Couldn't they have gotten a scientist to address this issue? Someone who understands what really constitutes evidence?" And then because he is that emphatic about it, once again "A philosophy professor. Give me a fucking break."


To my knowledge no reader of the book has remarked the scene in a significant and public way--and it does not strain credulity that they have not, because this attitude seems so commonplace. But perhaps that is one reason why it seems to me all the more important to argue that despite the relabeling, science did not stop being philosophy--perhaps the more so because of how invidious the comparisons between philosophy and science can get. Accordingly we may regard speculative fiction depicting or extrapolating from or simply playing with the theories, practice, knowledge gained by the sciences as "philo-fiction." Even if in deference to the irrationality of prevailing usages we only regard fiction which is more narrowly interested in epistemology or ethics as philo-fiction, then science fiction has been doing that too, concerned with what we can know and how, and what we ought to do about it, can go by that name as well, at times more recognizable than others, but by any plausible measure never rare or marginal, and by this point quite prolific. (I certainly would not deny that Isaac Asimov, in those early Robot stories, was dealing with philosophy, in "philo-fiction," even as he was producing some of what we think of as the hardest of hard Campbellian science fiction.) In fact, I will go further and say that, in this sense at least, science fiction has simply been philo-fiction all along.

1. I find myself thinking of other eighteenth century terms similarly narrowed--and impoverished. Take, for example, "manners," which has been reduced from culture to etiquette, or "education," which rather than a whole upbringing seems to mean formal academic training and that alone.