Books: Islands in the Sea of Madness

So, as the election screamed down the rails like Ozzy Osbourne's Crazy Train, not to mention the economy doing an imitation of the Hindenburg, we were all left with a little excess stress. And if you're like me, one way to deal with all of that is to escape into the world of books. Our loyal readers will know I like Sci-Fi, and the last three books I finished were all on the short list for the Hugos and Nebulas this past year. (The Sci-Fi equivalents of the Oscars/Pulitzers/whatever). Despite theoretically sharing a common genre, it'd be hard to find three books that are more different. I thoroughly enjoyed all of them, and wanted to bring you my recommendations...

The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon

This book is the most recent winner of Sci-Fi's highest annual honor, the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Chabon is one of American literature's brightest young turks, and in this book he's created something so unique that one wonders where he possibly could have gotten his ideas from. The most basic description for it is a noir set in an alternate history, though that doesn't quite do it justice. The story is set in the year 2008, in a district of Alaska specially set aside for Jews. The main language is yiddish, and the capital is the burgeoning metropolis of Sitka, with a population in the millions. Apparently there was an actual historical movement to do just this following the end of World War II, as opposed to, say, the creation of Israel, but it was scuttled by a congressman from Alaska. The novel diverges from our history simply by having said congressman get hit by a car.

Our protagonist is a down-on-his-luck detective, determined to investigate the murder of a heroin addict believed by some orthodox jews to have been a potential messiah despite the impending "reversion" of the District of Sitka to the United States (think of the situation with Hong Kong and China). His world is a cold, rainy place, populated by beautifully sketched characters and conspiracies. The real treat in the novel is Chabon's facility with language, which can make a strange kind of poetry out of descriptions of an old man's coat or a warm doughnut. Great stuff.

Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer

Unless you count Margaret Atwood, whose occasional forays into the genre have resulted in such classics as The Handmaid's Tale, Robert J. Sawyer is probably Canada's most successful Sci-Fi author. He writes hard science fiction, but general comes at things from an anthropological angle rather than one of physics, which makes him harder to categorize. His most famous work is probably his series that began with Hominids, in which scientists make contact with an alternate universe where Neanderthals became the dominant species of humanity.

Calculating God is obviously the work of the same author, though the storyline and the ideas set out are very different. The book begins, comical in its matter-of-factness, with the landing of an alien spaceship outside the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. An spider-like alien gets out, enters the museum, and asks if it could see a paleontologist. That paleontologist is the book's main character, and the book consists mostly of his internal debates and conversations with the alien, who is far more interested in scientific research than in meeting our leaders.

The twist is that the aliens, based on their observations of the universe, have come to the conclusion that science has proven the existence of God. Their observations of Earth only confirm this. The scientist is an atheist, and we discover he is dying of cancer. So the debates between the two, mostly regarding the nature of life and universe, take on an unusual, fascinating tone. The alien makes the scientific case for the existence of God, quoting statistics about the variance of constants, while the scientist makes the emotional, faith-based case against the existence of God. If there is a God who created the laws of physics, why would he create cancer? What possible being could morally justify so much suffering?

Despite the occasional bit of jargon, the book is one of the quickest, easiest reads I've come across in a while. It's hard to put my finger on why. It would have been easy for Sawyer to fall into the usual trap of Hard SF, to be distracted by the science at the expense of our own enjoyment of the story, but he avoids this with strong characterization, and a vivid depiction of the warm friendship that builds between the scientist and the alien. This is that rare specimen, alien who, without just being a human with pointy ears, feels like a real "person". The book isn't perfect, and there's a totally unnecessary subplot involving terrorists targeting fossils, but it was one of my favorite random finds in a long time.

Halting State by Charles Stross

Charles Stross is a British writer who has a way of making made-up technojargon sound like good, smooth writing. How he does this I have no idea, but I think it has something to do with strong characterization and not being afraid to make bold stylistic choices. Halting State is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is simple to read. It jumps among a number of characters, all the while being written in the second person, mixing a strong scottish brogue with internet-speak both real and imagined. How do you write in a scottish brogue? Again, I'm not really sure, but Stross definitely manages it. ("You cannae understand why the prize twat isna answering his IM") This is a story set circa 2020, and centering around the world of virtual reality gaming. Probably the main through-line is provided by a detective who is assigned to investigate a seemingly impossible bank robbery with real-world implications carried out in a sort of next-gen "World of Warcraft" by a band of orcs "with a dragon along for fire support." Science Fiction was slow discovering the internet, but between this book and others like last year's tremendous Hugo winner, Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge, the the web is building up its own field of SF lit. It's about time.

TV Is Back: Pushing Daisies & Life on Mars

There's actually a good new show this season! And another, probably even better show that was already here but you're not watching!

First off, you should be watching Pushing Daisies. But you're not. The show's ratings have dipped lower than Knight Rider's, and that's a problem, considering Knight Rider is pulling down a 2.2. In previous years (or maybe just on Fox), that's been enough for instantaneous cancellation. Sure, its quirks have quirks, which is usually death on network TV. But it's just so whip smart. There isn't a single throwaway moment. It has genuine emotion beneath the cutesy/Tim Burton sheen. It's laugh-out-loud funny, all the time. And it's the only show on TV where they'll do a scene where they pull a clown car out of a lake, and have the characters watch as they pull the dead bodies of clown after clown after clown out... One of the show's nicer touches is the omniscient narrator, who uses a tone like he's reading a Dr. Suess book to describe the murder mysteries. It's like eating incredibly well-written birthday cake every wednesday, and there's never been anything really very remotely like it.

Earlier tonight, ABC debuted its new series, Life on Mars. It's named for the Bowie song, which puts in an appearance in the pilot. It's a remake of a BBC series, which I've never seen. There's a couple reasons normal US channels don't just show foreign series when they bring them over, other than that they're stupid. One, they're shot using different technology. British series look fundamentally different, technology that reminds Americans of low-rent home video, though that's mostly because of the conversion. Also, British TV works on a different business model. The original Life on Mars series is already over. I'd be surprised if they had much more than 20 episodes total. When networks in the US score a hit, they expect it to run for a hundred-some episodes. I'm not sure why those models evolved differently, but it's certainly the case.

The show itself? If you haven't been living in a commercial-free cave, you already know it's about a detective (a decent Jason O'Mara) who gets hit by a car in 2008 and wakes up in 1973, where's he's still a detective somehow, and Harvey Keitel, Michael Imperioli, and Gretchen Mol are working in the precinct. So the cast is very good (though his 2008 girlfriend Lisa Bonet is unbelievably horrible... fortunately she's not on-screen much). I was extremely surprised that they're basically not leaving any mystery at all... they're basically saying he's in a hospital, unconscious and making all this up. Maybe others will have a different reading, but it felt like it was pretty unambiguous. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

In the meantime, though, we have a show with a handful of interesting characters and some interesting things to say. Yes, we have big collars and big hair, but this isn't quite a 1973 we've seen before. It's not just the little things; this show gets how our very philosophy has changed in fundamental ways, and it explores that without smacking us in the face with it. And it has a scene where the hero seriously considers shooting a little kid, and we still like him afterwards. It has many flaws, don't get me wrong. O'Mara's cop acts way too crazy for this crowd to react with the relative apathy that they do. It's credulity-straining. I also have trouble buying Keitel's supervisor guy, but maybe that's because I've spent my entire life long after 1973.

Incidentally, Life on Mars is the first show I've seen to use the World Trade Center in the way that they do here. It threw me, but not in a bad way. We've had the WTC airbrushed out of films for a while now. It's nice to see it actually highlighted without some obvious heavy symbolism (a la the last shot of Munich). Anyway, it's worth watching, especially compared to some of, say, NBC's new slate.

p.s. It's not just Knight Rider... I saw the last scene of the Kath & Kim premiere tonight, and the sheer tone deafness of the writing was startling. I try not to judge the whole by parts, but I have trouble believing there's anything worthwhile there. And does anyone think Crusoe looks palatable. Somebody needs to come back from one of the 17 different apocalyptic alternate futures on Heroes and prevent these abominations from ever being born.

Someone Took "Advance Wars" Too Seriously

The big news from the gaming world this week wasn't the release of the latest big game. It was the real-life murder of one Matthew Pyke, a student at Nottingham Trent University in England. Pyke, age 20, was heavily involved with the community surrounding Nintendo's Advance Wars, a turn-based war tactics game for the video game company's hand-held Advance platform. Pyke ran a strategy website for the game with his girlfriend, as well as writing Advance Wars fanfiction and regularly posting to forums devoted to the game. Authorities are now saying they believe that the murder may have been because of a grudge that started in the virtual world and seeped into the real world.

According to a report from The Times of London, detectives are investigating whether this was some sort of revenge killing for events that happened while playing the game online. Among the strange events among investigation is a post by a german citizen on the Facebook page of Pyke's girlfriend, in which the poster, David Heiss, vaguely implied he was responsible for Pyke's death. A man matching the description of the Heiss was reportedly arrested by Nottinghamshire Police.

Obviously there are a lot of details about this that are still to come out, and we will try to bring you a follow-up. Many media outlets will immediately point to video gamers being somehow disconnected from reality. But, in my opinion, this is the sort of unfortunate incident that has the potential to happen in any competition that people start caring about out of proportion to its actual importance. Is this really so different from that Colombian soccer player who was tragically murdered after allowing an own goal to the USA during the '94 World Cup? Or from Tonya Harding's boyfriend hiring someone to attack Nancy Kerrigan? As video games and online interaction become important to more people, we'll see more of this sort of tragedy, not less.

In any case, my thoughts go out to Pyke's loved ones who are going through this difficult time.