The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl was written by Paolo Bacigalupi and published in 2009.  It won a Hugo and a Nebula award and is the most current offering reviewed on Modernmoonman so far.  It's taking me forever to slog through this book; seriously, I hit a wall here: this book (and Snow Crash) brought this blog to a halt.  It's written well, but there's no tension, no motivation to turn pages, no characters to care about, and it's hard to care about genetically engineered fruit, no matter how beautifully it's described... I dunno; still, there is some nice writing:

     "Ngaw.
     Piles of them.  The little red fruits with their strange green hairs sit before him, mocking him from within a photo of a farang bargaining for food with some long ago Thai farmer.  All around them, brightly colored, petroleum-burning taxis blur past, but just to their side, a huge pyramidal pile of ngaw stares out of the photo, taunting.
     Anderson has spent enough time poring over ancient pictures that they seldom affect him.  He can usually ignore the foolish confidence of the past--the waste, the arrogance, the absurd wealth--but this one irritates him:  the fat flesh hanging off the farang, the astonishing abundance of calories that are so obviously secondary to the color and attractiveness of a market that has thirty varieties of fruit: mangosteens, pineapples, coconuts, certainly...but there are no oranges, now.  None of these...these...dragon fruits, none of these pomelos, none of these yellow things...lemons.  None of them.  So many of them are simply gone.
     But the people in the photo don't know it.  These dead men and women have no idea that they stand in front of the treasure of the ages, that they inhabit the Eden of the Grahamite Bible where pure souls go to live at the right hand of God.  Where all the flavors of the world reside under the careful attentions of Noah and Saint Francis, and where no one starves.
     Anderson scans the caption.  The fat, self-contained fools have no idea of the genetic gold mine they stand beside.  The book doesn't even identify the ngaw.  It's just another example of nature's fecunfity, taken entirely for granted because they enjoy so damn much of it.
     Anderson briefly wishes that he could drag the fat farang and ancient Thai farmer out of the photograph and into hid present, so that he could express his rage at them directly, before tossing them off his balcony the way they undoubtedly tossed aside fruit that was even the slightest bit bruised."

There's also a "Windup Girl," a robot who is all too human and she gets humiliated a lot and is a combo of Asimov's Caves of Steel "Olivaw" Robot and Spielberg's A.I. pleasure robot....

I'm slogging through this sad and depressing novel, and as of pg. 67, I still can't wait to get back to the Van Vogt, but maybe I'll change my mind...(to be continued...)  I really wish this book would make me want to read it.  Farang this.

Splice

Saw Splice this week.  This sci-fi movie started out great, then quickly went banannas.  I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but it's not boring, that's for sure:

Martian Chronicles

     "The ship came down from space.  It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space.  It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm."
 

The Martian Chronicles was written by Ray Bradbury and published in 1950.   Some would say this book is pure fantasy, but I say look: it's got rockets, it's got Mars: it's sci-fi, and he can really write:

     "Suppose all of these houses aren't real at all, this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis through the Martians, thought Captain John Black.  Suppose these houses are really some other shape, but, by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions.  What better way to fool a man, using his own mother and father as bait?"
     "And suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are not my mother and father at all.  But two Martians, incredibly brilliant, with the ability to keep me under this dreaming hypnosis all of the time."

Ray Bradbury is such a good writer; Martian Chronicles reminds me of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, another classic that dwells upon the idea of the same city viewed from many different perspectives=many different cities.   I think these books are very similar in a way, but I digress...Ray Bradbury is a national treasure and  has inspired a Tina Fey-esque video, that is kinda funny and kinda obscene, but he said he liked it anyway.  Ray Bradbury is a good sport; and Racheldoesstuff is a riot that is worth watching at least once; here's the video: (WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT)

Olbermann leaves MSNBC/ NETWORK

****** Modernmoonman has learned that the world is a poorer place because Keith Olbermann just got fired from his job at MSNBC.********************************************************

He must have spoken truth to power one too many times, for he was given 10 minutes to say goodbye to his audience.  It was a complete surprise.  He mentioned the 1976 prophetic movie Network as he left, so, good-bye Keith, you will be missed, you were a class act, and here's a scene from the movie Network:

Snow Crash/ Just Kids/ Patti Smith/ Huck Finn/ Rock and Roll Nigger

Snow Crash is a novel written by Neal Stephenson and published in 1992.  He writes:

"This is America.  People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that?  Because they have a right to.  And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them.  As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world.  When it gets down to it--talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here--once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel--once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakastani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity"...

With it's themes of virus as language and language as infection all involved in creating the next step from the internet: the Metaverse, Snow Crash is a prophetic....to be continued...this book is impossible for me to write about...because of too many kids and too many snow days...and because there is absolutely no redeeming qualities about the protagonists that keep the reader turning the pages....I've written about many books that are hard to put down....this one is hard to pick up....and what's really funny is that this quality has become a virtue of the book!...just look at the huge Wikipedia entry about Snow Crash and you will see 800 things that I never saw while reading this text.....BUT;  my friend V. gave me this, so I've been reading this:

Yes this is a sci-fi blog, but, (o.k. in it she talks of looking for UFO's with her dad through a telescope....I mean how many kids do that these days?  And of dating a science fiction writer for a swordfish dinner; wonder which one it was?) I started reading the Patti Smith book, Just Kids, got to page 87, yes I'm taking my sweet time with this one, and you know what?, it connects to Snow Crash (cos I said so)...with it's themes of biblical computer language and biblical voice cacophony of Babel, and guess what was the name of my very first Patti Smith poetry book:...............
 "Babel," yes; correct... 
So, it's a great book so far, and, in a month where they (they is "Big Brother," natch) are going to "whitewash," err...sanitize, uh, well "Huck Finn" is gonna be published with the word "Nigger" ....Orwellian?...well...

He who controls the past
Controls the present
He who controls the present
Controls the future

"Nigger" is a pretty bad word generally; unless speaking of Conrad's : "Nigger of the Narcissus", and now with Huck Finn sanitized, Keith Olbermann removed in a mini-purge...my only question is: Who's Next?

Here's one for the Huck Finn sanitizers: The great Patti Smith Band doing the incredible Babalogue and  "Rock and Roll Nigger:" (WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT)

La Jetee

Modernmoonman Friday Night Sci-Fi Film Classics Presents:  La Jetee (The Jetty) by Chris Marker, 1963.  This film inspired the movie "12 Monkeys," and in 2010, Time Magazine voted it #1 in it's top ten movies about time travel.

The Naked Sun

The Naked Sun was written by Isaac Asimov and published in 1956.  Like Caves of Steel, it's a "Lije Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw Novel."  The R is for Robot, of course, and Asimov crafts another masterpiece here, as the detective partners investigate a murder on the planet Solaria:  population 20,000 "spacers" (human aristocrats) and 200,000,000 robots (slave labor.)  As usual, sociology plays an important role, and Asimov describes the situation on Solaria like this:

     "Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure.  As on climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue happiness.  As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy more and more.  Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed.  And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, there are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex."
     "So there is always social friction in ordinary human societies.  The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated."
     "Now here on Solaria, for the first time, the apex of the pyramid stands alone.  In place of the dispossessed are the robots.  We have the first new society, the first really new one, the first great social invention since the farmers of Sumeria and Egypt invented cities."

Asimov is prophetic about the impact of communications technology (facebook, twitter, blogger, etc.) on humanity, as the "spacers" live in isolation; they don't like to see each other in the flesh, but prefer viewing each other via computer terminal:

     "In short, a Solarian takes pride in not meeting his neighbor.  At the same time, his estate is so well run by robots and so self-sufficient that there is no reason for him to have to meet his neighbor.  The desire not to do so led to the development of ever more perfect viewing equipment, and as his viewing equipment grew better there was less and less need ever to see one's neighbor.  It was a reinforcing cycle, a kind of feed-back.  Do you see?"

The Naked Sun has a heavy Brave New World vibe to it, but I like the chemistry between the characters very much; they are charming and, uh, likable, and it is with a natural writing style and some great ideas that Asimov demonstrates why he is sci-fi's great visionary.