Young Geoffrey's lament

Young Geoffrey's Breakfast

By Geoffrey (A.A. Milne) Dow

Young Geoffrey asked
Da Google
And Da Google
Asked the Coder:
"Could we have some documen(tation)
For Young Geoffrey new website?"

Da Google asked the Coder,
The Coder

The best art looks upon the face of change without blinking; the best art acknowledges death.

That's why A.A. Milne's seemingly simple and superficial children's story's, commonly known as Winnie-the-Pooh, brought me to tears when I was very young and why it still does now that I am but one year away from being (forty) six.

That's right, reader, Winnie-the-Pooh makes me cry and I don't care who knows it. Further, it is heartbreaking because it is indeed, about the little deaths each of us face, over and over again, as we grow up. For, like snakes sloughing off a season's skin, to gain a new place in the race of our lives, is to leave the old one behind.

Children's stories or no, A.A. Milne's gentle, loving stories about a small boy and his menagerie of stuffed toys does not shy away from the hard truths of life.

* * *

The inscription (at right) is as simple as it is sentimental — and yet as profound as it is cognizant of the unusual boy that was my parents' first child, then making the transition from 12 to 13 years old.

I was a kid who read The Globe and Mail with breakfast and romped with Batman when I came home from school; I was as interested in politics as I was fanatical about the fate of the Montréal Canadiens; a kid whose long-term ambitions were torn between wanting to go into cosmology in one way or another, or into politics with an eye towards becoming Canada's first socialist Prime Minister.

I still built sand-castles in the summer, yet thrilled to CBC Radio's international affairs program, Sunday Morning, "a week in the life of the world." I was growing up, I knew it, but I happily embraced those parts of me that were still childish.

Renaissance genius meets the distant future —
But is the author's heart in his own conceit?

Galileo Galilei by Giusto Sustermans (Wikipedia)

"If I have seen less far than others," Galileo complained in irritation to Aurora, "it is because I was standing on the shoulders of dwarfs."

— Galileo Galilei explains his limitations in Galileo's Dream.

Is Kim Stanley Robinson getting tired of science fiction?

In the five novels since the final book in his already-classic Mars trilogy was published in 1996 and the North American release of Galileo's Dream just after Christmas, Robinson sojourned in alternate history with the excellent stand-alone novel, The Years of Rice and Salt and the very near future, with the not-entirely-successful "Science in the Capital" series; not quite abandoning the field, but staying on its peripheries.

Although his newest novel is an unabashed return to centre of science fiction, that the historical sections of Galileo's Dream are both more convincing and more interesting than those set in the 31st century, suggests that return is premature.

The novel opens in the late 16th century when a professor of mathematics at the University of Padua — as you may have guessed, none other than Galileo Galilei himself — is approached by a mysterious stranger who (I give away nothing that isn't on the dust-jacket) is a visitor from the far future. The stranger tells Galileo of a remarkable Dutch invention, a device which magnifies objects seen from a distance — a telescope, of course.

Intrigued, Galileo returns home to attack the problem and, in so doing, begins the process of invention and discovery that will lead to his eternal fame and to his eventual disastrous run-in with the dreaded Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church.

Robinson is probably the best writer there is when it comes to dramatizing not just the discoveries of science but the processes by which those discoveries are made. The sections which focus on Galileo the scientist are fascinating and brilliantly alive. And he proves he is just as good at historical fiction, clearly and engagingly showing us the intricate politics of late-Renaissance Italy.

It is the conflict between science and religion, faith and empiricism, which is at the heart of the novel and that, perhaps, is why those sections set in the future don't fully succeed.

In the long and storied SF tradition that sees such devices as Ursula K. le Guin's ansible become, in effect, an open-source idea, free to be modified, played with, argued about or even just used as a word to indicate "faster-than-light communication", rather than locked-down and copyrighted as le Guin's personal play-thing, "The Things" is Peter Watts' re-telling of John W. Campbell Jr.'s classic story, "Who Goes There?" and of John Carpenter's 1982 movie adaptation, The Thing.

Using the same plot and even the same character names, Watts, the author of the excellent novel, Blindsight (among others, all of which are available on his site under a Creative Commons license) re-tells the story from the monster's point of view. Or rather, from the (very alien) alien's point of view.

A biologist by training, in 7,000 words Watts has created what I suspect will be long regarded as a classic hard SF tale. There would be no story here (or at least, it would not be the same story) if this narrative was not about the shape-shifting alien's gradual discovery of the very strange way that life on Earth is organized.

Those who know neither the original story nor the movie adaptation might find "The Things" a little confusing, but anyone who knows the source material as something more than just a horror story will find it fascinating — and one of those rare, successful attempts in science fiction to depict an alien as genuinely, really, alien, not just in what in can do and what it physically is, but in terms of how those differences affect how it perceives the world.

A very good story from a very good writer. And happily, it is online at ClarkesWorldMagazine.com.

A city without alleys

A city without alleys is no city at all — and yet, here I now live (again).

In truth, I have not yet revisited enough of our nation's Capital to talk about it as a whole, save to note the obvious. Ottawa doesn't feel like a city.

At some point or another we've all heard the phrase, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, and most of us have probably used it.

"Easy" ways to make money, lose weight, find love, and cetera and cetera, are forever singing their syren songs from television adds, email spam and the self-help sections of bookstores, to name just a few.

So you can imagine my scepticism when a friend gave me his copy of Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking. My friend told me he butted his final cigarette when he finished the book and he felt sure that I would do the same.

A young and brilliant^1. online friend of mine has recently been paying me the rather high complement of dipping into the archives of my Livejournal, and recently reminded me of a review I wrote back in 2004 of Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Volume One. To frankly toot my own horn, it's an excellent essay and so I am very grateful to her for reminding me of its existence. That it includes some reminiscences of my paternal grandfather makes it of even more interest to me (and, just possibly, to at least some of you). Click here to read the full 1,600 word review. ____

Notes:

1. Yes, yes, I know, it may sound as if I am returning flattery with flattery, but I have been reading her journal with a great deal of interest since she was something like 15 years old and so I don't hesitate to use the word. Also, it's not a word I throw around with reckless abandon. Back to top.

I was going to post an up-date explaining what's going on with the store (electrician's coming in on Tuesday, after which we'll really be able to start building!) and how I don't have a life worth blogging about — then I decided not to blog about them. Meanwhile, Sooguy has provided me with inspiration in another form. To whit, a meme — click the "Read More" button if you're interested in which movies pique this viewers fancies.

The New Space Opera 2

Opera or string quartet?

A review by Geoffrey Dow

"The true heart of science fiction has always been the space-opera story; the thrilling adventure tale of powerful rocket ships, dashing heroes, and far frontiers — stories of immense scope and scale, color and action, taking us to the ultimate limits of both time and space [...]"
— From the introduction to The New Space Opera 2)

There really is no such a genre as "science fiction". Unlike whodunnits or romances, SF^1. is a genre more by marketing fiat than by standard tropes or formulae^2.; there is no fixed plot, character-arc or even place or time required to define a work of science fiction as science fiction. Indeed, such a definition has been a matter of debate within the field for decades and I'm certainly not going to essay my own here.

How about space opera, then? That term too has a long and controversial history and for a long time it was used mostly as a pejorative, to indicate stories that were, essentially, mindless action-oriented adventures not to be taken seriously by anyone much over the mental age of 14. (Think Star Wars: wonderful to look at but dumber than a shuttle-load of trans-dimensional circuit-breakers.)

The "new space opera" then, presumably includes the "thrilling adventures" and "far frontiers" quoted above, but with the addition of more sophisticated characterizations and technological and political backgrounds.

If only The New Space Opera 2 had lived up to those introductory words, or to its excellent predecessor (The New Space Opera) this would have been an easy review for me to write. As it stands, the volume contains few thrills, frontiers that feel about as far as a trip to the end of the subway line, and socio-political speculation springing right out of 15th century Europe or even 1st century Rome.

With only a very few exceptions, in The New Space Opera 2, the "sense of wonder" for which science fiction — and especially space opera — is famous is pretty much absent. If The New Space Opera 2 tells us anything about the field in general, it suggests one that sees our future as one constricted by centuries-old political structures, threatened by eternal warfare and, perhaps paradoxically, one in which space travel is about as comfortable — and about as interesting — as a series of rides on space-going subway cars.

Half-way through my first read of this substantial anthology (Neal Asher's "Shell Game"), I felt as if the editors had opted for adventure in subway cars, whether or not that particular train was heading to the ends of time and space. Unlike the first volume in this series, which I thought a very good representation of the varieties of "new space opera"^3., The New Space Opera 2 feels less like a celebration of the far horizons to which SF can take a reader than it does a repudiation of same.

Not that it's all bad, of course.

Hard Candy is hard viewing — as it should be

Hard Candy Written by Brian Nelson Directed by David Slade Starring: Ellen Page Patrick Wilson Released April 14, 2006

Hardy Candy opens with an angled shot of a computer screen, where a flirtatious on-line chat is taking place between Lensman319 and Thonggrrrl14. Before long, we learn that the former is 32-year old photographer Jeff Kohlver (Patrick Wilson) and the latter, 14 year-old Hayley Stark (Ellen Page. After a brief on-screen exchange and as the camera moves ever-closer to the screen, Hayley types,

          "okay, let's do it
          hook up i mean"

and the viewer knows they're in for some kind of ugly ride.

The camera cuts to a close of a piece of cake being bitten into with a fork and we hear Hayley moaning with (almost) an orgasmic pleasure. When at last we see her face, she looks oh so young — and her lower lip is dirtied with chocolate.

Jeff approaches from behind, asks her name and Hayley, embarrassed, says she'd hoped to seem more sophisticated when they met. She asks if he wants some cake and he says yes, then cleans her lip with his thumb.

Page plays Hayley perfectly. Struggling for sophistication beyond her years, a little nervous, maybe even a little scared, but determined not to make a fool of herself.

Despite our knowledge that Kohlver is a 30 year-old man who has been knowingly flirting with that very young girl, Wilson makes him charming, even sympathetic. Maybe he's not a predator, maybe we're simply about to witness the blossoming of an unusual friendship, a la the under-rated 1999 Sarah Polley vehicle Guinevere, an age-gap relationship psycho-drama.

But this is not that kind of movie. No, it's a thriller (I prefer the old-school term, suspense, but that seems to have gone by the way-side) and I give little away by saying so.