Reading S.M. Stirling's Draka Novels

S.M. Stirling's well-known Draka series presents a culture founded on a distillation of the most brutal elements in nineteenth century European thought (the proto-fascism of Carlyle, the pseudo-scientific racism of Gobineau, the Nietzchean will to power), and given space in which to develop and expand (nineteenth century southern Africa).

Thematically it is an interesting concept. However, Stirling's treatment is quite unconvincing, even by the standards of alternate history, which is quite a different thing from historical counterfactual.

It is nearly inconceivable that a feudal culture of xenophobic, Classicism-obsessed, warrior-landowner aristocrats, presiding over a population of illiterate serfs whose lot is no better than slavery, would succeed in building an industrialized society. These are, after all, exactly the kind of people who have held development back elsewhere, and if anything the history of both South Africa, and the southern United States (a major contributor to this culture), only reinforce this view of the Draka's prospects. That this society should not only industrialize, but do so in a part of the world that in real life has suffered greatly from what development theorists term the "resource curse" (the propensity of a natural resource-rich country to "underdevelop," in line with which South Africa was a developmental laggard); and then succeed at their task so completely that they technologically outstrip the rest of the world by the 1940s, and go on to push the envelope far beyond what our world achieved by that time; is nothing short of preposterous.

The idea that this mix of elements would at the same time produce such an atheistic, feministic and hedonistic culture as that of the Draka, and somehow harmonize this with a quasi-Spartan martial ethic, is that much less believable. It is hardly more credible that with their rather small demographic base (despite the infusions of Loyalists, Confederates and other immigrants into the region) they would succeed in conquering and developing sub-Saharan Africa in the space of a century, and Eurasia in another, even with their technical prowess and without the grave disadvantages of their social model. (We are given to understand that the ratio of serfs to Citizens gets as high as eighty to one, and that even serfs who serve in the armed forces have a very low glass ceiling over their heads – as does everyone else not born at the top in this extremely inegalitarian culture.) Stirling does make some concessions to the handicaps such a system would suffer in its pursuit of its goals, the Draka culture's limitations all too apparent by the time of the third novel in the series, The Stone Dogs – yet, they finish that book as masters of the planet, their enemies literally driven off the Earth's surface.

Reading the novels some readers have taken these aspects of the book for a wish-fulfillment, one which some readers have found appealing (Stirling himself has commented on those "who wanted to move there"), while others have charged Stirling with being a racist himself (Stirling remarking "Oh, all the time" when asked whether this happens). Of course, Stirling is contemptuously dismissive of those who read the book in such ways. However, it is worth noting that no one can mistake Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four for a wish-fulfillment – but the truth is that there is at least some scope for such a reading here. Orwell's Oceania was a very far cry from the world to which those who joined the Communist Party generally aspired, but the Domination of the Draka realizes a host of fantasies regarded as unseemly in the mainstream, but which nonetheless have their enthusiasts. There is a radical right-wing fantasy of a society built on the most harshly elitist principles, which not incidentally finishes off the Soviet Union and Communism by 1942. A militarist fantasy of a modern-day Sparta sweeping all before it (with much made of the softness of other folk). A Southern nationalist fantasy in which the South does rise again (even if it does so in another hemisphere), and takes on the Yankees and wins decisively (and on a global stage, an extension of the U.S. Civil War the final world war). And that is all without touching on the other fantasies (of power, sadism and other things) to which Draka culture speaks. (I leave it to the reader to judge whether the illogic of the outcome makes such appearances more or less pointed.)

Additionally, the novels focus not on the outsider or the rebel traditionally at the heart of the dystopian tale, but the system's biggest beneficiaries, the most privileged of the Citizens, who despite particular misgivings and occasional alienation, ultimately uphold the prevailing order. Their homes and estates, and their often brutal entertainments, are also described with a lushness that might not unreasonably be seen as romanticizing their world. Stirling contends that despite the Domination of the Draka being a dystopia

any society that lasted that long would have to have some attractive features. Besides, part of the challenge of using the bad guys for p.o.v. was to force people to identify with them and then go ICK! mentally.

This is, of course, plausible enough, but the approach does not always have the effect planned, and this time around there is little arguing that the Draka series is fairly susceptible to those interpretations he has dismissed in the above comments – even by those not given to "reading against the grain" and invoking the Founding Fathers of the Linguistic Turn with every breath.

The Myth of Liberal Hollywood

Back in August New York magazine's Jonathan Chait published an article titled "The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy is on Your Screen," which contended that a liberal view of the world pervades Hollywood and its product.

What was remarkable about the article was not the sentiment, but the author and forum. Jonathan Chait, after all, recently authored a noteworthy critical analysis of supply-side economics, The Big Con: Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America--and whatever else one may say about it, New York magazine is not The National Review or The Weekly Standard. (Indeed, the first sentence of the Wikipedia article about Chait pointedly describes him as a "liberal commentator.")

Naturally, the piece excited some critical comment, but that such an argument should have appeared in that forum at all--that this image of Hollywood's liberalism should be so enduringly pervasive--is astonishing.

Granted, it may seem that nothing would be more natural than for Hollywood to be a bastion of the left. It is, after all, a center of the arts, peopled to a significant extent by those who have chosen self-expression and the creative life over the "practical" world of the 8-6 job, and situated in one of the country's biggest and most cosmopolitan metropolitan areas, out on the west coast in youthful, forward-looking, forward-thinking California. And as all this might lead one to expect, some of its most well-known personalities do indeed speak unfashionably leftish opinions (as Sean Penn and George Clooney do).

Yet, Hollywood is also a place dominated by gigantic multinational corporations (like the Time Warner Company, News Corporation and General Electric), and, even where they are artists, a hugely wealthy elite who are living out the American dream of fortune and fame, and prone to believe they are doing so because they are deserving of every bit of it, and others aren't--or at least, prone to be content with the status quo and complacent about "playing the hand you're dealt" because, after all, their hand was a Royal Flush.

These are people who live within an enclave of privilege, who have often been born to it and never known anything else (the preponderance of working actors, directors and writers with significant familial links to the business can give the impression a caste system is at work)--or if they did come from humbler places, may be all the more dismissive of life's difficulties for it, because, after all, didn't things work out for them in the end? People whose income makes them investors and employers, and leads to their association with others of the same socioeconomic level but from quite different walks of life--like the actress who marries a financier. People whose particular way of making a living (not least the outsized claims for talent, conspicuous consumption and flamboyant display that make up so much of publicity) steeps them in a "leisure class" culture, to which they are all too susceptible (as demonstrated by their propensity for alternating between lavish excess, and spectacular bankruptcy). People who are, like everyone else, not unknown to become more conservative as they get older (or simply richer); to run their lives into the ground and, after hitting rock bottom, decide they've found Religion (usually, a severe form of it), or simply learned the Hard Facts of Life (about which it is always easier to lecture others from the lap of luxury); and on occasion, be reached by the same events, the same trends, affecting and afflicting the rest of the country in which they were born and of which they remain a part (and which has itself been moving steadily rightward).

The results of all that are predictable. There is no denying that there are actors, directors, producers and writers of liberal sensibilities in Hollywood, but conservative political attitudes have never been scarce there, either, and support for the Republican Party certainly no rarity, even among its Big Names (as figures ranging from Clint Eastwood to Adam Sandler, from Kelsey Grammer to Vince Vaughn, from Dwayne Johnson to Jon Voight, from Joel Surnow to Mickey Rourke, demonstrate). And these are by no means silent or inactive. They routinely lend their celebrity (and give their money) to conservative causes, media and political events (like the Republican National Convention), and on many an occasion, run for political office themselves (like the previous two-term governor of California, and the fortieth president of the United States, political heights no liberal entertainer has come anywhere near). Between the extremes the "center" is less liberal than libertarian, in the sense Michael Lind describes in his writing on the "overclass," of which Hollywood's glitterati are most certainly a part. Naturally they are to the left of the American center on sociocultural matters like GLBT issues and the legalization of marijuana (which, admittedly, are all that those who equate politics with the "culture wars" care about)--but hew much closer to the political right on socioeconomic issues like tax rates and spending on welfare programs (much less often talked about).

The product we get reflects the fact. Take, for instance, the economic sensibility prevailing in film. As conservatives often complain, we do frequently see the business corporation cast as villain--but the bad guy is usually a bad apple rather than The System. At the same time, there is also lots of CEO worship, endless celebration of wealth and "success," and the mentality of the Horatio Alger story, reflected in such things as the transformation of the "IT billionaire" into one of the screen's most tired clichés (such that, thanks to the man who brought us The Big Bang Theory, even the implausible Ashton Kutcher is playing one). David Fincher's The Social Network, so widely characterized as a "hatchet job" on Mark Zuckerberg, is actually just another piece of tech god mythmaking, and along with the success of Iron Man on the big screen in not one but two major franchises, is at bottom an update of that close relation of the Horatio Alger tale, the Edisonade.

That genre in which one might most expect to see teeth, the political thriller, similarly plays it safe with films like Syriana the exception, not the rule. The much more widely imitated Jason Bourne series does have its hero fighting his former employers--but drains the tale of anything remotely resembling political content, turning it into the spy film equivalent of Seinfeld, a "movie about nothing" (to paraphrase Roger Ebert). Meanwhile many of the thrillers that do espouse a clearer political position offer shallow orthodoxy, like The Kingdom or Vantage Point, while TV has offered NCIS, and the torture porn of 24, and the "allegory" of Battlestar Galactica, and . . . the list goes on.

And so on and so forth. Consequently, liberalism is a presence, but it is often of a limited, mild, muted or superficial variety (and always more evident in the sociocultural sphere than the socioeconomic)--with conservatism tending to fill in the spaces it leaves open, and frequently rather bolder and blunter in its expression. Indeed, looking at it all it seems that in Hollywood, as elsewhere, "postmodern" conservatism is king.

Star Wars: Episode VII?

One of the bigger stories of the past week (in and out of that part of the news media devoted to speculative fiction) was the sale of Lucasfilm, and the Star Wars franchise, to the Disney corporation for four billion dollars. Making the story even bigger was the announcement that Disney will use its newly purchased rights to make another Star Wars film, due out by 2015.

The Star Wars films were, of course, foundational for me when I saw them way back when. Later I enjoyed the prequels, which I regard as having been treated unfairly by many a fan of the original trilogy. Still, I'm not sure how to feel about the prospect of Episode VII. Certainly the series offers an appealing universe, without real parallel in the history of Hollywood space opera, and the idea of returning to it in additional stories has its attractions. And as the films are expected to be based on an original story, there is at least an avoidance of the obvious complications entailed in filming the Heirs to the Empire trilogy (which, at any rate, seems at best a postscript to the larger saga of Episodes I through VI)--like recasting the roles of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia.

Yet, this franchise has already been very heavily mined at this point, so much so that I'm not sure the company will recoup its outlay to buy Lucasfilm anytime soon. And Disney's crassness can be nothing short of spectacular. Consider their lack of compunction about debasing their hit films with cheap straight-to-video releases (Aladdin IV: Jafar May Need Glasses only a slight exaggeration of their practices), from which they have graduated to big screen sequels no one asked for (like 2011's Cars 2). And frankly, wouldn't it be nice if filmmakers were actually allowed to work with NEW IDEAS, instead of being pressed into feeding the studios' addictions to old IPs, with the result that (the recent and highly anomalous Avatar excepted) our grand-scale space opera franchises all go back to the 1970s (Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien)?

At best I'm ambivalent--though yes, I would enjoy a good, new Star Wars film.

Robert Heinlein's Friday - Probably Not Coming to a Theater Near You

io9 has just posted a list of "Ten Science Fiction Novels That Will Definitely Never Be Movies." Robert Heinlein's novel Friday made the #1 spot - and I'm pleased to note that there's a link to my 2006 article about the book, which has probably led to a record number of eyeballs looking at this blog at once, and certainly that posting (which originally ran in a peer-reviewed academic journal).

I suppose the fact that the words encompassed within the hyperlink happened to include "group marriage" was a factor.

At any rate, I found myself considering the film's likelihood of ever becoming a movie. As the blog suggests in its comment, the story's abundance of sex, which Friday has quite casually, with several men and women, is a complicating matter. On the whole Hollywood is rather more reticent than it used to be about depicting casual sex, especially where this is construed as pleasurable or fanservice-y, and is certainly unlikely to insert it into such things as feature action films, and certainly big-budget science fiction films. (Roger Vadim, who actually did feature casual sex in a science fiction film - the cult classic Barbarella - once remarked that "Hollywood is sometimes licentious, but always puritanical."1 So it remains today.)

It sometimes seems as if Hollywood is less bothered by sexually adventurous women than sexually adventurous men (James Bond had to clean up his act while Sex and the City was just taking off), but this sort of thing was clearly a problem for comparable material in the not-too-distant past. The 1998 TV movie Chameleon (a pilot for a TV series that never got made for the now-defunct United Paramount Network) had the titular character - like Friday, a sexy and sexual genetically engineered covert operative - hopping beds in its first half (mostly in the line of duty), and then giving this up as she became more self-aware, less an instrument of her employers and more her own person. She was not seen having sex again in that film, or the two sequels (1999's Chameleon II: Death Match and 2000's Chameleon 3: Dark Angel) which followed it. On the TV series Dark Angel the feline component in the genetic code of the Friday-like Max caused her to periodically go into heat, but the writers handled the material very carefully, keeping her out of the sorts of adventures and misadventures to which this could easily have led (though I imagine some of the fan fiction writers must have been less inhibited about exploring that side of her).

If anything, I imagine the studios to be more anxious about such matters today, and that is all without considering the story's handling of Friday's rape by enemy agents during an interrogation, which has understandably disturbed and offended many a reader.

One might also add to the list of problems the looseness of the story, the highly personal nature of the plot, the elaborate world-building required to faithfully render his version of Earth, the crowding of the tale with Friday's views on life, the universe and everything (all especially difficult challenges for anyone trying to build this into the kind of science fiction film that would sell enough tickets to cover the cost of a suitable budget). Consequently, it seems that too much would have to be cut out, and too much added, to turn it into a workable film - too much to seem worth the effort. All that said, I don't know that I would have come up with the same top ten, but I'm hardly surprised to see Friday on it.

1. The remark appears in his first autobiography, 1975's Memoirs of the Devil. Incidentally, this has likely been a stumbling block for that Barbarella remake long in development hell.

Of Science Fiction and Futurology

Science fiction writers have often displayed a propensity to downplay the extent to which the genre makes predictions about the future. (To name a recent instance William Gibson did it again in Wired in September.)

There are good reasons for this. A writer's purpose in producing a piece of fiction is much more likely to be the creation of art or the presentation of an entertainment than writing a manual to life at some future date. Serious guesswork about, for instance, life in 2050 might be secondary to what they are doing, or even incidental. They may also wish to distance themselves from the opprobrium some have directed at futurology.

Yet, in the process they sometimes exaggerate the distance between the two endeavors. The truth is that science fiction writers often ask the same questions as futurologists, and often arrive at the same answers. (After all, "extrapolation," labeled by John Campbell but long preceding him, is at the heart of the harder types of science fiction.) In the course of their work they often look at, and draw on, what their counterparts on the other side of the line have done, science fiction writers referencing futurology, futurologists drawing inspiration from science fiction, for a very long time now. (Looking at Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, for instance, the influence of predictions about aerial warfare by the military theorists of his day is very apparent in the book's often-denigrated early chapters.) And many try their hand at both games successfully (science fiction writers from H.G. Wells to Vernor Vinge becoming accomplished futurists).

Given this relationship it would seem natural that if one of these is stagnant, so is the other, and that has indeed been my impression. There is a wide, though apparently not dominant, view that science fiction has fallen short in the ideas department in recent years. (As Charles Stross recently noted, all we have to show for the last three decades in this respect is radical hard science fiction and the Singularity, both rather well-worn at this point.) It seems to me that futurology, too, has been short on ideas for many years now, evident all across the spectrum from optimistic techno-libertarianism, to pessimistic eco-catastrophism. The former shows little sign of innovation, which has tapered off since the boom in Singularitarian thought during the 1990s. (Since then we have tended to see the same names, the same ideas, those of Vinge and Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec and company cited over and over and over again rather than the production of original, compelling arguments for this idea – as demonstrated in Peter Diamandis and Steve Kotler's rather tepid Abundance.) The same goes for the latter. (While ably describing our problems, it has great difficulty describing how the plausible technical solutions might actually be implemented.)

These failings, in turn, point to still larger failures in our intellectual life. The technical frontiers appear to be the same one we've been looking at for decades, except that our prospects for conquering them seem more modest than in, say, the years of the tech boom. Meanwhile, there is a distinct lack of imaginative daring among our thinkers on social and political matters. And it is not only readers of science fiction who are noticing. When the hand on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock moved one minute forward this month, Kennette Benedict, the magazine's executive director, cited the lack of "new thinking" as a factor.

In short, this problem is much, much bigger than the doldrums of a single literary genre.

The Debate Continues . . . (As Paul Kincaid Answers)

Over at his blog Through the Dark Labyrinth Paul Kincaid has posted the first part of a response to the buzz his September review of three anthologies of year's best and award-winning science fiction for the L.A. Review of Books generated online, complete with links to dozens of essays and commentaries which caught his eye.

My post of September 17th made the list, and was actually addressed in his remarks. Kincaid makes it clear that he is "agnostic" about the idea that the future will be incomprehensible in the way that I mentioned, but that he finds the presentation of the future as incomprehensible an unsatisfactory approach to writing science fiction. He points to the experience of rapid change in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which led to things we take utterly for granted (trains, planes and the rest), and the way in which we quickly "domesticate the new" (as we have the personal computer in recent decades).1 Accordingly, he notes, writing a future-set story means dealing with the tension between the differences which "scream" at the reader, while being familiar to the characters, with the writer's job

negotiat[ing] that tension . . . display[ing] the strangeness to the reader while at the same time evoking its familiarity for the residents of that future. My feeling is that an increasing number of writers have taken this notion of the singularity as an excuse for not engaging with the familiarity of the future, only with its strangeness.

The result is that we get strangeness rather than a "sense of a lived future, . . . [a] thorough inhabiting of the world."

I agree. In fact, this tension was a significant concern for me when writing my future-set novel Surviving the Spike. As I told Maria Violante in an interview about the book last year, I specifically chose to eschew the common cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk approach of overwhelming the reader with flashy detail (what Bruce Sterling called the "literary equivalent of the hard-rock wall of sound," and what I described as "an ad for the future") in favor of a world just as densely imagined, but which was made to "feel like a place people lived in," those quite different lives ordinary to the people actually living them.

1. Of course, the claim of the Singularitarians is that the change ahead of us would simply have no parallel in our past experience, plausibly overwhelming our ability to domesticate change in this manner - but again, Kincaid's focus is on the quality of the results as fiction, rather than futurology. It seems worth noting, too, that there is little in the Singularitarian package that did not appear in, for instance, Arthur C. Clarke's 1956 The City and the Stars (mind uploading, designer bodies with 1,000 year life spans, immersive virtual reality, etc.), which he managed to present as something other than a succession of strange spectacles.

The Tea Party as a Steampunk Movement

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth thinkers like Frederick Jackson Turner and Thorstein Veblen expected that Americans would come to terms with the consequences of industrialization and the end of the frontier – a world of Big Business and Big Science, mass society, and finite natural resources, which necessarily brings with it Big Government, Big Labor and a more refined ecological sensibility as necessary features of everyday life. At midcentury, however, C. Wright Mills in books like White Collar and The Power Elite, William H. Whyte in The Organization Man and William Appleman Williams in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy all wrote of the failure of American culture to come to grips with these realities. Instead the predominant ideal remained a romanticized world of small business and small government, and unbounded economic expansion sustained by profligate resource use – an ideal which is not merely an object of nostalgia, but a key source of legitimation of rightist political initiatives. Some, like Richard Hofstadter, the historian of the post-New Deal "liberal consensus," or John Kenneth Galbraith in books like The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State, believed they saw the country adapting to the new realities, but the repeated and cumulative triumphs of the political right in the last half century has also been the triumph of those who idealize that lost nineteenth century world, and claim to be working to bring it back – the position still around today in the form of the Tea Party's platform.

And so here we have it: an economic model belonging to a world before railroads as a major political force in the twenty-first century, as retro-futuristic as the vision of a telegraph in every home, a steam-powered cars in every garage, and a little Babbage engine in every pocket. The fact that this persists as such a strong element in American life is, of course, worrisome. After all, the coming decades seem certain to pose profound challenges – in particular, challenges relating to technological change, demographic transformation and ecological constraints. The endurance of pieties already outmoded in the day of Queen Victoria, year after year, decade after decade, is a reminder that we never quite met the milder forms those challenges took in the twentieth – and considerable reason to fear that we will cope even less successfully with the problems so clearly coming into view now.

More Reactions to Paul Kincaid

Paul Kincaid's comments on the state of science fiction in last month's L.A. Review of Books is still sending out ripples through the critical universe.

Some of these ripples appear in a lengthy two-part interview Kincaid gave the site Nerds of a Feather Flock Together, in which he clarifies and elaborates some of the ideas he presented in that article regarding science fiction's crises of "ideas" (the lack of engagement with the genre's actual possibilities), "identity" (the tendency to write science fiction as fantasy to avoid science fiction-al rigor, or write fantasy sans the fantastic) and "confidence" (as writers eschew real exploration of their worlds).

Two other pieces seem especially worthy of mention.

One is Jonathan McCalmont's response to Kincaid's recent writing in "Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost The Future." There is much that I agree with here. (McCalmont's comments on the genre's refusal to take anything seriously, its tendency to push buttons without taking a coherent intellectual position, the unwillingness or inability to imagine serious alternatives, are all very much on the mark. So too his remarks regarding the attitude of the genre's "gatekeepers" toward the type of debate Kincaid has started.) There is also much that I disagree with. (His take on steampunk's appeal seems to me representative of only a part of that subgenre, and his readings of the Enlightenment idea of a universal subject, and of identity politics, differ substantially from my own.) But I found all of it worthwhile - and the same goes for the lengthier-than-usual comments thread following from it (thirty-nine posts, some quite long, at the time of this writing, with Pat Cadigan and Jeff Vandermeer among those who have dropped by to offer their thoughts).

The other, rather shorter, reply that caught my eye is M. John Harrison's "Pink Slime Fiction," in which he memorably sums up Kincaid's reading of the genre's prevailing pattern as

the intense commodification of ideas & styles evacuated of their original meaning & impact, an apparently deliberate industrialisation of the commonplace & worn out.

Kincaid, when asked for a prognosis, suggested in the interview that the genre seems to be "going through one of its phases of being inward looking, repeating itself rather than reinventing itself." McCalmont and Harrison, too, have some hope of the field's recovery, and all three can point to recent work in the field they have enjoyed, but as McCalmont's analysis demonstrates explicitly and at length, some of the problems of the genre appear to be not just genre problems, but problems broadly and deeply rooted in the cultural moment.

The Return Of Xander Cage?

The revival of Vin Diesel's career following his return to a starring role in the Fast and the Furious franchise in 2009 quickly led to a third Riddick film (shot earlier this year, and likely to be released in 2013), and talk of a continuation of the XXX series. However, for the time being it seems that the proposed XXX3: The Return of Xander Cage, is stuck in development hell. The exact reasons for this do not seem altogether clear, but the fact is less surprising than it may appear, and not solely because the second film in the series, 2005's XXX: State of the Union, was a flop. The fact remains that it has already been a decade since the first XXX movie came out, and even were the film to get a green light today it would almost certainly be 2014 before its release. A dozen years is a long time for a franchise--especially one which is premised on being an update of an earlier concept. XXX, after all, was sold as "James Bond for a new generation" in its overhaul of the idea of the adventurous and formidable, yet suave and high-living, secret agent who gets the girl(s) and saves the world from the depredations of assorted madmen.

As an attempt at a "neo-Bond," however, XXX had its share of problems. In contrast with other Bond-inspired Hollywood blockbusters, like Indiana Jones (with its archaeological theme, fantasy elements, period setting, and homages to yesteryear's movie serials) and True Lies (with its heavy element of suburban domesticity borrowed from the French film La Totale!), its reworking of the material was superficial. The early part of the film certainly succeeds in establishing a different tone with an opening scene in which a tuxedo-clad operative's conspicuousness at a Ramstein concert gets him killed, and the antics of its rebellious, extreme sports-loving protagonist. However, once Cage has been drafted into the service of the National Security Agency the innovation becomes almost completely aesthetic--Cage's conspicuously not walking and talking like an Etonian, meetings in dance clubs instead of casinos, fur coats instead of evening wear. Everything else is standard Bond imitation, the mission, the gadgets, the villain, the bad girl who turns out to be a good girl, the assault on the bad guy's lair with the clock ticking away to oblivion and the final pursuit, all of it much more copied than reinvented, down to Cage winding up at the wheel of a missile-firing car racing down a Czech road with the Russian villain's former girlfriend in the passenger seat. One might add, too, that while the execution of much of this was competent enough, the film displayed neither the flair or the scale to out-Bond Bond (was the ski chase, for instance, really so "extreme" as to put it in a different class from those already seen in the Bond films?), while some bits were decidedly sub-par. (The villain's plan is especially stupid, all the more so for being explained through reference to "anarchism.")

In short, XXX was a serviceable action film which had some fun with its idea of a Generation X/Y version of Bond, but which fell short of properly realizing that ambition, which at any rate is already showing its age ten years on. The "extreme" label has from the start seemed to many like a mere matter of marketing rather than substance, and in any case has long since been played out as superlative, gimmick and brand--so much so that it is no longer even the butt of jokes.1 Vin Diesel is now forty-five years old, a fact which has not been an obstacle to his continued participation in the FF films (he appears in Fast Six next year), but which makes him less and less plausible as the star of "the new generation's" version of anything--especially if one considers how much older he would be in further sequels (the prospects for which are naturally a crucial factor in any decision to continue the series). Meanwhile, even the Bond films have stopped trying to be Bond films of the kind it took as its starting point. Indeed, rather than the start of some new wave XXX now looks like the last major attempt by Hollywood to make an actual action movie using the Bond films as a model--virtually everything seen since then conceived as parody, from Cody Banks to Get Smart to last summer's Cars 2--while makers of more serious spy thrillers take their cues from Mssr. Bourne.

The result is that that update would now seem in need of a massive update itself. Even if this were feasible, and frankly I'm not sure that it is, it would probably leave the series unrecognizable, little of the original XXX's concept (already thin stuff to begin with) remaining but a title, a couple of character names, a casting choice or two--and it hardly seems strong enough to survive that. At this point I think it simply isn't going to happen, and that it's going to keep on getting less likely with time, the window in which the project could have looked like a good idea closed.

1. Stargate fans, for instance, will remember the episode "Wormhole X-Treme!"--which aired way back in 2001, almost a year before XXX came out.

Review: The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey Into the Disturbing World of James Bond, by Simon Winder

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006, pp. 287.

In writing The Many Lives and Deaths of James Bond I found myself revisiting the vast literature about the character, taking a new look at books with which I had been long acquainted, and checking out newer additions to this corpus for the first time. Of these the book that made the strongest impression on me was Simon Winder's 2006 The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond.

Unlike most of the books published about Bond for popular consumption, Winder's book was not put together as a compendium of production history, plot summary, reviews and trivia, but rather uses the series as a lens for looking at post-war Britain – both the stuff of the history books, and his personal, lived experience of it, while offering a range of thoughts on the series itself. At once a piece of film criticism, cultural history and memoir, there is a thesis of sorts running through it all, namely that James Bond offered a British image of power, relevance and glamour in those post-World War II years when Britons keenly felt the lack of these things.

As might be guessed, his doing so many different things in a single volume makes for a loosely structured and unsystematic book best taken as a collection of bits. However, these bits come from an author with a broad vision of the last two centuries of British history, a striking sense of the quirky ways in which the world-historical and the personal can connect, a wonderfully eclectic literary taste and a deep and subtle appreciation for film as an art form. It also happens to be the case that, at least in this telling of it, Winder does seem to have lived a life oddly explicable in the terms of the subtitle ("A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond"), supplying him with an anecdote appropriate to just about every wrinkle of the phenomenon he considers. To Winder's credit, his writing is also brisk and colorful and humorous to the point of frequently being laugh-out-loud funny. When reflecting on such matters as how the leading political figures of the interwar era look on film or the bizarrely anachronistic boarding school to which his parents packed him off, the career of actor Walter Gotell or the echoes of World War II in his childhood pastimes, the musical scores of John Barry or the manner in which a younger Winder conducted himself as an international traveler, he deftly and entertainingly combines autobiography with wide-field political, military, social and economic historiography, with results that are frequently as incisive as they are flip.

Still, Winder's take has its limitations. Like many another commentator on things Bondian he fell in love with the films (and the books) when he was rather young (as a ten year old watching Live and Let Die in its first run), and then grew apart from the series, especially as the series grew apart from its own '60s roots. While still greatly admiring of much of what he sees in From Russia With Love and Goldfinger, his later reaction against the series is nothing short of blistering. Certainly a sardonic touch is commonly a component of such reflections, while the sociological aspects of his study make a critical take on the material and the history it reflects (the hard facts of what empire involves, the neurosis that sets in when empire goes, the racial attitudes of yesteryear, etc.) natural. However, Winder seems to have gone from the extreme of adulation (the extent of his youthful devotion to The Man With the Golden Gun will astonish even hardcore Bondians) to the opposite extreme in his apparent determination to repudiate his Bond-besotted past (the rapid piling up of one denigrating remark after another regarding just about every aspect of the series equally astonishing). At the same time, while he has an exceptionally sharp eye for the ways in which the novels and the films appealed to Britons of the '50s and '60s (and to a decreasing extent, after), the reverse side of this seems an obliviousness to the ways in which they could have engaged just about anyone else. The result is a number of bits which don't work. Winder's remarks about such things as how non-Britons respond to the films (that, for instance, Bond's appeal to those of us on this side of the Atlantic is only comprehensible as a matter of his giving Americans a chance to laugh at British delusions) can only be read ironically by those generously disposed toward him, while a handful of his barbs (for instance, his wholesale dismissal of the Bond girls as lacking in sex appeal) can come across as a strained effort at iconoclasm.

Even where the recapitulation of British history is concerned there is one point where the book struck me as weirdly self-contradicting. Despite the leftishness of his outlook much of his characterization of postwar Britain (his praise for Attlee and his lack of same for Thatcher aside) takes at face value the right-wing cliches about that history: the '50s as all grim austerity, the '70s as stagflationary disaster, the '80s as a time of national revival. There seems a disconnect here, though rather than some personal quirk of Winder's I suppose it is simply a testament to how pervasive that version of events has become in the popular consciousness. (It may also be a legacy of Winder's childhood in a Daily Express-reading household in the '60s and '70s, and a matter of the contrast of his early impressions of the world inside that context then, and his independent impressions later.)

Still, it would be unfair to linger on these points. If at times Winder seems overeager to provoke, he is much more often thought-provoking. If there are times when he is inconsistent or confusing, he more frequently cuts through the inconsistencies and confusion surrounding his subject. Even when he was at his most unconvincing, I never came close to closing the book, the eccentricities of The Man Who Saved Britain perhaps inseparable from what it gets right, which is considerable, and I dare say, also inseparable from its considerable charm.

Review: A Dance With Dragons, by George R.R. Martin

New York: Bantam Books, 2011, pp 1016.

George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has been widely admired for its sweep and scale, its vast and engaging cast of characters, the intricacy of its plotting, and the vividness of its world-building, which is not just full of memorable touches (like the "sky cells" of the Vale), but in the complexity of its politics far more like the Medieval world of actual history than we are accustomed to seeing from our epic fantasies. There is, too, its fiercely anti-romantic take on this genre, which can still seem an interesting counterpoint to the dominant fantasy tradition, and which Martin for the most part handles brilliantly. ("Life is not a song," Littlefinger tells Sansa, and Martin proceeds to prove it to her, and everyone else, time and again, in what it is that Sansa really finds when she meets her prince, the triumphal entry into the city after the Battle of the Blackwater, in the sagas of the lords who set forth to claim their "rightful" crowns and find something else instead.)

As far as I was concerned the first three books - A Game of Thrones (1996), A Clash of Kings (1998), A Storm of Swords (2000) - simply got better and better, and naturally I was eager to read the fourth when I got through them. As Martin made clear, it ended up being too big to conveniently publish as a single book, and so he ended up splitting it into two volumes, A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons. Moreover, he decided to have the events of the fourth and fifth books track different sets of characters through simultaneous events, with the two sets of threads only reconnecting in the latter part of the fifth book, A Dance With Dragons.

It is now apparent that a major reason why this installment got so large was that Martin turned Cersei Lannister and Brienne of Tarth into major viewpoint characters, while starting major threads concerning events in Dorne and the Iron Islands. Reading them I initially welcomed the increased attention to the Lannisters, but with Tyrion gone and Tywin dead, they proved a less interesting bunch, while Brienne's adventure likewise proved a letdown, admittedly widening our view of this world a bit, but not really advancing the larger story, or being interesting enough in itself to make us overlook the fact. The episodes in Dorne and the Iron Islands appeared unnecessary diversions cluttering up the narrative.

Unsurprisingly, the remarkable momentum the story had developed by Storm of Swords (the pace of which was positively giddy at times, as one chapter after another served up shattering twists) does not continue in Feast, the developments described appearing comparatively minor and marginal. Still, while my enthusiasm for the saga had been dimmed somewhat, Martin did end the story with a couple of compelling cliffhangers concerning Cersei and Brienne, and I hoped to see how those threads worked out. I also looked forward to the continuation of the stories of Tyrion, Jon and the rest. Naturally, I went straight to Dragons.

Alas, we only reconnect with the characters whose stories dominated Feast six hundred pages into Dance, and see very little of them in the three hundred pages after that - a disappointment, even considering Martin's advance notice about how this part of the narrative is structured. We do not see either Sansa or Littlefinger, and Jaimie rates just one chapter, while Brienne rates only the smallest slice of one (which reveals nothing of how she escaped the noose at the end of the last story, or where she will be going now). Cersei gets only slightly more treatment, rating a mere two scenes (though they are meatier).

Of course, that leaves the storylines totally left out of Feast. However, just as Cersei is less interesting without having her family around, so is Tyrion less interesting without the rest of the Lannisters (this group definitely more than the sum of its parts), or even Bronn and Shae, both of whom had earlier made their exits from the story's main stream. The picaresque adventures he has after King's Landing have their moments, but simply lack the charge of earlier parts of his story. Jon fares better, his struggles as a newly minted Lord-Commander of the Night's Watch having an intrinsic interest (helped by the secondhand view it offers of Stannis's continuing fight to claim the throne). We also learn something of young Bran's destiny, while Theon Greyjoy reenters the picture, and plays a larger role in the subsequent events than one might expect. Unfortunately, Daenerys' time in Meereen increasingly seems a detour along her path to what now seems her inevitable restoration to the throne - which is also what the plot lines he developed in Dorne and the Iron Islands still feel like.

The result is that Dance, despite some strong bits, is also overcrowded and bloated, and confirmed my suspicion that we already saw the story's climax in the third volume, leaving us with little to look forward to but the falling action winding everything up. The fact that not one but two volumes comparable to the one books four and five were meant to be, and the increasing length of time between the release of one book and the next (books two and three appeared just two years after the preceding volume, while it took another five years for Feast, and another six for Dance to come along) does not make me optimistic. Unless the pace picks up, it may be 2030 or later before we find out how it all ends up - and many devoted readers might not really care anymore by then. Given the stunning first three volumes, that would be a real shame, and naturally I'm hoping that things will go differently, Martin and his editor finding a way to wrap up the heart of the story in one surprisingly good volume (or two short ones released very close together) coming out sooner rather than later, and save the rest of the material for side projects like the tales of Dunk and Egg.

Cory Doctorow On Summer Blockbusters

Over at Locus Cory Doctorow recently published a piece on why science fiction movies "drive him nuts," in particular the big-budget blockbusters, with this summer's The Amazing Spiderman the case in point. There is much in here that is familiar, not least such films' combination of stunning visuals with intellectual hollowness (and the gratuitous Star Wars prequel bashing Doctorow throws in), but he does offer some comparatively fresh angles. His more interesting remarks mostly have to do with his take on "How Hollywood Does Science," particularly the tendency to think of science as a magical source of cool stuff rather than a process. As he notes, the labs in the movie look not like places where working people actually do things, but showcases for finished products, while "The characteristic tasks of science – arguing, staring intently at screens, begging for funding, writing down stuff and revising it, and getting heated up about something cool and unexpected" are absent from the scenes set in the "Science Billionaire’s Science Tower."

This removes the whole from anything like a recognizable reality. Granted, as Doctorow notes one can take it all as opera, "stylized, larger-than-life, highly symbolic work that is not meant to be understood literally," but this leaves him unsatisfied - because it seems to him unjustifiable on the grounds that scientific activity is "visually interesting." I'm personally doubtful that people "staring intently at screens" constitutes compelling cinema; indeed, this has long been a significant problem for computer-themed movies, resulting in many an unsuccessful attempt to make presentations of hacking seem more interesting, with the result that ultimately the industry fell back on integrating such activity into more conventionally action-oriented storylines. Still, Hollywood's tendency to not just cut "the dull bits" but act as if they don't exist has effects beyond irking viewers with a modicum of scientific or technological literacy (like Mr. Doctorow). It also has a massively distorting effect on the way the average non-scientist thinks about the subject - much like the god-like presentation of the "Science Billionaire" in the lobby has had a profoundly distorting effect on economic thought, such that the average person seems to think of the Edisonade not as an outworn Victorian myth, but a viable basis for a national economy in the twenty-first century.

Paul Kincaid and Last Year's Best

Receiving plenty of attention on the web recently is science fiction critic Paul Kincaid's review of three science fiction anthologies purporting to offer round-ups of the year's best (the annuals by Gardner Dozois and Richard Horton, and the Nebula Awards Showcase 2012) in the Los Angeles Review of Books in early September.

Unfortunately, Kincaid reports the experience as underwhelming. Reading the assembled stories it seemed to him that for the most part "the genre has become a set of tropes to be repeated and repeated until all meaning has been drained from them," rather than an engagement with the world. And where that repetition is concerned, we appear to have passed the point at which we have "rubbed away anything that was bright and new." The result is that we increasingly get science fiction about science fiction, and especially science fiction as it used to be, "older . . . familiar futures," (as in Elizabeth Bear's update of '40s-style robotics tales like "Dolly,") or science fiction that looks rather more like fantasy ("more and more of the stories shortlisted for the Nebula Awards . . . either overtly fantasy or else indistinguishable from fantasy for all practical purposes), often because of their presentation of futures which are "magical or incomprehensible" (as in Gavin J. Grant's "Widows in the World"). In either case, the results bespeak the writers' loss of all "real conviction about what they are doing." This seems to him a matter of a loss of "confidence in the future," or at least, the future's comprehensibility.

Just as the stuff of the stories is familiar, so is the stuff of Kincaid's commentary - in part because there is much truth in what he says. Indeed, I have written so much about all this myself that saying anything more about most of his points seems to me superfluous. The exception is his note about incomprehensibility, his remark that

somewhere amidst the ruins of cyberpunk in the 1980s, we began to feel that the present was changing too rapidly for us to keep up with. And if we didn’t understand the present, what hope did we have for the future?

I find that line of thought dubious. As those of you familiar with this blog have likely noted by this point, I (like Robert Gordon, and Bob Seidensticker, and Ha-Joon Chang, and Michael Lind) have been unimpressed by the claims that we live in some era of unprecedentedly deep and rapid change, the "information age" thus far a modest tweaking of the industrial age. What actually seems to me most striking when I reflect on recent decades is how little political, economic and technological change actually occurred, certainly in comparison with the expectations of an earlier and supposedly more timid generation of futurologists and science fiction writers. (Remember world government? The twenty-four hour work week? Space manufacturing? Contrary to many an expectation, the nation-state and the business corporation remain the dominant political and economic actors, people still devote the great majority of their alert, waking hours to work rather than leisure, and we remain very much Earthbound as a species.) In many ways it seems as if we are standing still, and that is what makes problems like climate change seem so frightening - the failure of needed new technologies and public policies to emerge at anything like the speed, or on the scale, necessary for effectively dealing with them. The conscientious can only wish that the reality matched the hype in this respect.

This raises an obvious question: if change is not so rapid as many suggest, then why the continued attachment to the theme? Part of it may simply be the sheer power of the hype, to which science fiction has been especially subject. That fact by itself means that even those who don't share the expectation can still find interest in it - like Charles Stross, who has expressed considerable skepticism about the idea, but continues to write in this vein, as in his latest collaboration with Cory Doctorow, The Rapture of the Nerds (a sample from which you can check out here), the ironic title of which suggests much about the nature of the work.

However, the insistence on the world's incomprehensibility can have yet another function, namely that of dodge. To throw up one's hands in confusion can be an understandable response to their genuinely intimidating largeness, but it can also be a convenient way of avoiding the serious social and ethical and political questions raised by our problems (like our ecological crisis). There certainly seems an incentive to take that route when so many of the obvious responses to such problems - substantive critique of the prevailing orthodoxies, efforts to envision really meaningful alternatives, despair in the absence of such - are regarded as naive, disreputable or simply risky for the career-minded, encouraging the ever-present temptation to self-censor. Postmodernism has always concealed a significant amount of evasion behind its smugly enunciated epistemological doubts, and postmodern science fiction has not been an exception to the pattern. Indeed, the lack of conviction Kincaid finds in the writing is best understood as a parallel to that lack of conviction pervading our broader cultural and political life.

In Defense of the Star Wars Prequels

The denigration of the Star Wars prequels – Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (1999), Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005) – has been tediously ubiquitous ever since their release. What has been most striking is not the attacks coming from the expected quarters – those who have always been critical of the series, as with those dubious about the story's mythological underpinnings – but the hardcore fans who cherish the original movies most.

More than most, I tend to find prequels an exercise in the pursuit of diminishing returns, prone to depend excessively on the good will earned by previous works, mining less interesting parts of the tale than what we saw before for what riches remain, and often diminishing the whole in its failure to recapture the magic of the originals. And certainly episodes I-III had their flaws – weaknesses in the acting and dialogue, bits of story which seemed muddled or flat, inconsistencies with the original trilogy. Yet the criticism has long seemed to me excessive to the point of neurosis – and for good reason. Its expression has been so frequent and loud and strident that geek antipathy to those movies has become a pop culture cliché, casually referenced not just in genre-oriented films and shows like Spaced and Stargate: Universe, but more mainstream fare as well. (In the romantic comedy Failure to Launch, for instance, Patton Oswalt's character is identified as not just a fan of Star Wars, but one specifically devoted to the original trilogy, of course.1)

It seems to me that much of the reaction has really been about the audience itself. Between the special place the original trilogy holds in many a heart, the sixteen years that passed between Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace, and the predictably massive hype preceding the theatrical release of Episode I, expectations rose impossibly high – so that any conceivable movie would have been a letdown for many. And of course, much of the audience had changed during the wait. Those who saw the initial theatrical release of the trilogy as children were adults now – and in many cases, more sophisticated, more critical viewers who compared what they saw then with the earlier films as they recalled them through the rose-colored glasses of cherished childhood memory. (They were certainly less forgiving of weaknesses in acting or dialogue, which were hardly absent in Episodes IV-VI.)

But part of it is also the ways in which the prequels differed from the originals. In place of the clarity and simplicity of episodes IV-VI, there was a comparatively sprawling story with more complex plotting and world-building, and rather more politics along with the mythology. The originals had underdog good guys taking head-on, and beating, an evil empire – while the prequels have the guardians of order fighting an enemy that strikes at them from the shadows in what is ultimately a tale of tragedy rather than triumph. And in place of the youthful Luke, Phantom Menace put an eight year old Anakin at the center of events, while in Clones and Revenge the character was a really difficult adolescent. There is also no question that the lavish use of CGI gave the films a different look.

These are not, as such, bad things. Nor were they necessarily surprises. It was unreasonable for anyone to expect the prequels to simply be more of the same, for a tale of the Republic's fall to be the same in structure and tone and sense as the tale of its restoration, for the story of Anakin to be the same as Luke's, for the look of the films to be identical after nearly two decades of FX wizards upping the ante – the obvious appreciated by surprisingly, dismayingly, few viewers (among them, Scott Mendelson and Timothy Sexton, whose pieces I strongly recommend as a corrective).

Of course, one can still reply that these differences resulted in a less appealing, less compelling product. (The more complex world-building and plotting is a lot easier to do in a novel, or a TV series, than a two-hour movie, for instance, while the premise and the central character of the prequels do not lend themselves so easily to crowd-pleasing stories.) And that there are ways in which the new approach did not wholly succeed. (There is plenty of room for criticism of the films' handling of the Old Republic's politics, for instance.) But all the same, a more sophisticated, nuanced judgment was called for, and I, for one, found much to enjoy in the films beyond their indisputable appeal as spectacle. One thing the narrative cannot be faulted for is a lack of ambition or scope, and the plot did get more engaging as it developed, especially where it concerned Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader, and the slide of the Republic toward disaster. (Indeed, Episode III was justly the best-reviewed of the three films, quite well-received by a good many critics.) In fact, I will go further and say that, like no other Hollywood films since the originals, the prequels gave the big screen an epic science fiction tale (helped by that much-derided CGI, which afforded a much broader view of Lucas's galaxy) which lived up to the romanticism and scale the term "space opera" is supposed to denote.

For all their shortcomings, a general reappraisal is long, long overdue.

1. The relevant bit of dialogue is in an exceptionally stupid and patronizing scene in this exceptionally stupid and patronizing film. Ordinarily this fact wouldn't merit a footnote, but I wouldn't have felt right not clarifying that point, lest this mention be mistaken for an endorsement of this example of awful writing and (where the leads are concerned) really bad casting.

Remembering Babylon 5

Babylon 5 seems to have had a somewhat lower profile in its "afterlife" than might have been expected once upon a time, the show only infrequently discussed or referenced these past few years.

I can think of a number of reasons why this has been the case. One is that it appeared at a time when space opera was fairly plentiful on television (as many as a half dozen such shows in their first runs, compared with zero today). Another is that the franchise has had a fairly low profile since its run ended over a decade ago, as its spin-off Crusade lasted a mere thirteen episode season, the last tie-in novel appeared back in 2001, the 2002 pilot for another spin-off, The Legend of the Rangers, failed to spark enough enthusiasm for a series of its own, the straight-to-DVD The Lost Tales came to a halt after a single installment, and the one reported cinematic project (The Memory of Shadows) never entered production - while the reruns have been absent from American TV for years to the best of my knowledge. Meanwhile, J. Michael Stracyznski's next TV project, Jeremiah, didn't quite set the world on fire, after which Straczynski left TV-land for comics (working on series from The Fantastic Four to Wonder Woman) and feature films (where his recent credits include Chameleon, Ninja Assassin, Thor and Underworld: Awakening). And in the years since, much of the attention devoted to the genre has instead gravitated toward the more recent Farscape, Firefly, and of course, the grossly overrated Battlestar Galactica, widely hailed as the definitive anti-Trek.

Still, B5 was consistently the best space opera of science fiction television's recent "golden age," to say nothing of a crucial innovator (no one has handled story arcs quite like that show did), and its achievements are not quite forgotten - io9 recently looking back at the show's most game-changing episodes.