Posts Tagged ‘Science Fiction’
I Am Legend the movie
I first reviewed the original I Am Legend book back in October 2011, it was a really great book but there were things I didn’t understand at the time, some of them were explained nicely in the movie but some are still left hanging.
Here be spoilers, but as I’m sure you’ve already seen the movie it won’t matter much.
The premise of I Am Legend, the movie starring Will Smith is very similar. There is a new cure for cancer which causes a plague, 90% of the population around the world die while most of the rest become very aggressive to the point of throwing themselves at their target, whether it be a person or a wall, until it breaks, not the person but the object, the others are immune. Robert Neville, played by Will Smith, is an army scientist and immune. His family were accidentally killed while being evacuated from New York city, he is left alone with his daughter’s puppy there seem to be no other immune survivors. He uses his own blood to help find a cure and manages to do so just in time to pass it on to Anna and Ethan who have heard his message of hope broadcast every day, they then take it to a survivor’s colony while he protects them.
This helps. If Neville is already a scientist and understands the virus before the book/movie begins then it makes enormous sense for him to continue working on the process of finding a cure, it wasn’t clear in the book what his occupation beforehand was and how it would help him work through the chemistry needed.
There were many differences between the movie and the book but it made no difference to my enjoyment of both of them. They’ve taken the essence of the book, distilled it and made it into a really good movie. Yes, I know I’m partial to Will Smith and that’s one of the reasons I had to see it but it is still a good movie. It has all the horror of being the only person alive while other beings are trying to kill you, it shows animals roaming the streets, it has some awesome special effects and it shows how nature will take over a city when people vacate it.
I bought the DVD and watched some of the extras as well which were well worth it. The movie only looks at the situation from a specific viewpoint in one specific city, it does its best to show some old news programmes showing the problem being replicated world wide and Neville does explain using some numbers how it’s affected the entire world but it still seems rather distant. The extras change that. They’ve been organised by Smith’s wife, Jada Plunkett-Smith, who is a very good actor in her own right, and they are four animated stories of different people in different cities around the world. They show stories of immune survivors and of plague ravished survivors, they are really powerful in their own right and support the main film immensely. I sat back having watched the movie and all four back to back stunned, in shock, it was challenging to come back to normal life. One of them was written by Orson Scott Card who is an excellent science fiction author in his own right but also co-authored The Abyss with James Cameron, you can find this book and two others by Orson Scott Card available for sale here.
Squid Ink – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dreaming of a new life
Squid Ink has hit the nail on the head with this one. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick is a classic science fiction novel, it was made into a movie with Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard under the title of Blade Runner. It’s the story of androids who don’t want to be decommissioned (i.e. killed) and they fight back, I think we all dream of a new life. One of the questions that could be asked is whether the androids are considered sentient and this question could be extended to all life that isn’t human.
It’s one of those books I really recommend everyone read. I have one copy of Blade Runner available for sale.
May the Fourth be With You!
May the Fourth be With You
This special Squid Ink celebrates Star Wars. It’s being published on the wrong day for a reason and you get 10 points for figuring it out. There’s a vague hint on Wookieepedia.
2001 by Squid Ink
Squid Ink meets Hal
Squid Ink’s reading is wide and varied. This week he’s been getting in Arthur C. Clarke and finding out all about 2001, hope he didn’t see the movie.
I’ve seen the movie of 2001 a couple of times and didn’t understand it either time, it did give us some great lines such as, ‘Open the pod bay door, Hal’ but sense is something it didn’t make to me. I haven’t read the book but I hope when I do take the dive it will make more sense. One thing I’ve found with movies and books is that often the book explains the movie and I have a greater understanding of it. How does this work for you?
The Cause of Death – Roger MacBride Allen
The is the first of three exciting novels following the adventures of Hannah Wolfson and Jamie Mendez, agents of the Bureau of Special Investigations. The BSI is assigned to handle any investigation with non-human involvement. When a human is accused of a crime on an alien world, it’s their job to go in and sort out the guilty from the innocent — while protecting the interests of the human race.
More detective than science fiction, some of the evidence is a cross between a gun from now and a gun from the future. This book was a rolicking good tale.
A new team, Jamie Mendez and Hannah Wolfson, have been put together to watch each other’s backs and see if working in tandem keeps agents alive. They’re sent to Reqwar to escort a human prisoner convicted of murder back to Earth for punishment, when they get there they find the reality differs. They do get to the surface and find some allies. While there the Thelm, the ruler of the planet, is murdered and they get together with their allies to unravel the clues and find out what’s really happening. The challenge is they only trust two of their allies, how can you share information and figure out what’s really going on when you don’t know if you can trust the others? They also have to work their way through the political and inheritence minefield that is the Reqwar system.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I look forward to finding the other two books and reading some more of the BSI operatives. The clues were all there to be able to figure everything out but I’m hopeless with detective stories and am generally the last person to get the solution. In this book I had an idea which turned out to be correct but I had totally the wrong reasoning. It had lots of action.
Confessions of a Pod Person – Chuck McKenzie
Ever since Borders and Angus & Robertson closed I’ve been saying it’s a good time to open a bookshop, it’s something I’ve been saying quietly to friends and wishing I had the capital to do it myself. Chuck McKenzie has taken the plunge (without talking to me, he had the idea all by himself) and opened Notions Unlimited in Chelsea, Victoria. It’s a lovely bookshop focussing on most of my favourite genres; fantasy and sci fi with some horror tucked away in there. I’ve been down there already and noted some exciting features including a lifesize cutout of the TARDIS. While there I bought a book, it was a hard choice the stock often mirrors my own bookshelves and if I don’t have the book, I’ve read it or I’m not interested in the series. Awkward. I did find one book on the Australian shelves I didn’t have and by an author I’ve been wanting to read so I bought it and refused his kind offer to sign it as I generally don’t do autographs.
Confessions of a Pod Person is a book of short stories with a very distinct science fiction and comedic bent. I enjoyed every single one of them. They range in length and have some violence, death and swearing in them. Just imagine aliens trying to use the idea of Christmas gifts to invade the Earth. Maybe having old people channelling to bring through an alien? Is it possible aliens have jobs intimidating people on Earth? McKenzie takes these ideas and gives them his own unique twist. They were a delight to read and I’d recommend them to any sci fi fan.
Chuck McKenzie is an accomplished science fiction author as well as being a bookseller of note.
My favourite is the title story – Confessions of a Pod Person. It’s the idea that aliens were infiltrating Earth by replacing specific people and then imitating them, perfectly and without deviation. This story had me thinking about many people with depression who feel they don’t fit into the world and who feel they could possibly be aliens from another planet.
Studying genre
Last night I came across this article which had me intrigued. It talks about writing professors being partial to literature and against science fiction. The comments are even more interesting as some of them show not all professors are against science fiction. And this morning I was directed to this letter from Daniel Abraham, a genre writer.
It’s very interesting how so many literature writers, readers and reviewers still look down on genre books, books written in a particular genre such as science fiction or fantasy and it doesn’t really make much sense as some of these genre books are much better than some literature books. They make a lot more sense, are easier to read and have messages inside them which are the equal of literature.
Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series have distinct messages about women and their strength and show women to be extremely capable of thought and action. Many of the women in Pern are capable and run things quite nicely while in literature such as Bleak House the women are depicted as being rather silly and pandering to the men. I know Bleak House is based on people Dickens knew but surely he knew more capable women than that, there’s only a couple of decent women in it, most of them are silly and fluffy and only do what they’re told.
There are many examples of messages about society within the pages of genre books. Take Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and 1984 by George Orwell. Both of these genre books take society into the future and show us what it could be like. Literature readers will often read these books and tell us they transcend genre, they mean this in a derogatory fashion but it’s not really because they’re using the wrong words, they mean they cross the borders between genres. These books are science fiction and literature together, what I’m really saying is that literature is a genre so the idea of calling a book a ‘genre’ book is actually really silly.
When deciding which category to put books into on this website I often just take the most well known category, so Anne McCaffrey’s books could go into science fiction or fantasy. I tend to think her Pern novels are more fantasy but as there is a lot of genetic engineering in some of them and that then filters through to all of them they could easily go in science fiction. If I had a category for women’s fiction I’d put them there as well, but that assumes I’m classing strong women as women’s fiction. Women’s fiction could be chick lit or romance but that’s just silly as I know men who happily read both chick lit or romance and I don’t read either if I can help it. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire could be classed as horror or fantasy due to the vampires but there’s also a deep love element in there so could be slotted into romance, it also has a fair amount of philosophy so maybe I could stretch a point and file it under philosophy.
Anyway, I think I’m confused. I’m just going to finish by mentioning my English Literature teacher from last year who is partial to vampire fiction and even likes Twilight – I do hope no-one tries to categorise that as literature, maybe we could start a new category called Sparkly!
Ventus by Karl Schroeder
I picked this novel up at a library sale following a Nullus Anxietas meeting with a vague memory of someone having been looking for it. Later that day my DD enlightened me and I regretted buying it. She’d been playing an ARG (alternate reality game) called AAI (All Across the Internet) and they were considering using this book as a part of that, that is until the game folded due to lack of funds. I’m told there will be a movie, possibly later this year, but I have yet to find any evidence apart from a terribly hilarious Facebook page.
Back to the book. The description on the back goes as follows:
After terrifying and titanic struggles, a godlike Articifical Intelligence gone rogue has finally been destroyed. But not before it scattered seeds of itself throughout the galaxy.
On the terraformed planet Ventus, benign AIs – the godlike Winds – which shaped and guarded its transformation, have fallen silent. Calandria May is sent down to the surface where she quickly finds that an extension of the rogue AI, a cyborg called Armiger, has planted a strange and powerful device in a young man named Jordan Mason. Jordan has visions. He is desperate to find their meaning and source – desperate enough to risk awakening the Winds, perhaps invoking the power that can destroy technology to protect the environment they created.
Ventus is an epic journey across a fascinating planet with two big mysteries – why have the Winds fallen silent? And is Armiger, or Jordan, carrying a Resurrection Seed?
Wow! What a canvas! Very extensive.
I loved this book. It starts off nice and slow so you get the feeling of a slowly paced book but it then heats up and up. It was one of those books I didn’t want to put it down but I also didn’t want to finish. I felt for the characters and wanted Ventus to be my own world, it’s so nice…well, when they have all the problems sorted out it is.
Just imagine going to a new planet which is being terraformed for you by nanotechology, where the very plants, animals and almost the foundations of the world are composed of nanotechnology which is meant to make everything work specially for you and look after you. What an awesome idea. Things go wrong with every idea and that’s the crux of this book. I still love the basic idea and Schroeder makes us feel it’s alive.
Why were they going to be looking at the book as part of the game? I’m not sure and neither is my DD. We guess it has something to do with the nanotechnology that was in use in the game and is a fundamental part of the planet Ventus.
Judging by the prices I’ve found on the internet I think this author is underrated. You can donate and download this book on Schroeder’s website as well as finding more information on it. In his book he makes up a new word which has made it into Wikipedia and he’s written an article which you can read. I’m also going to be keeping an eye out for more books by him, he’s really worth reading.
Warning:
There is the odd swear word and the odd sex scene, both fit quite well into the book and don’t jar the senses.
Vale Anne McCaffrey
Squid Ink and I would like to take this opportunity to give Anne McCaffrey’s family and friends our condolences. McCaffrey was a fabulous writer and it is wonderful to have her books to stay with us forever more.
Squid Ink Impresses
I have written about McCaffrey before and I won’t bore you with the details but will point you in the right direction. Here is where I met her. Here is where I show how good her writing is. I particularly love her Crystal Singer books, the lead female is such a good role model, she’s abandoned on a deserted island and doesn’t bother waiting for rescue instead she finds her own way to civilisation. I just don’t get why she had to fall in love.
Nightfall and Squid Ink
Squid Ink reads Nightfall by Isaac Asimov
I hope night doesn’t fall, it could get a bit heavy to hold up.
Night falls with a crash, bang and wallop.