Anomaly Reviews

"The Magician's Apprentice", Trudi Canavan

2010-10-18T13:14:00.000-07:00

"The empire had been at peace for a thousand years". If there's one line than can reliably cause me to throw a fantasy or sci-fi book across the room with a scream, that's it.

Trudi Canavan is the exact opposite of that kind of lazy writer. (And no, that doesn't mean the even more dumb "The war had gone on for a thousand years"). Other writers have perhaps captured a fantasy society at a point in time that's more engrossing or vivid than Trudi Canavan's Kyralia, but I've never got such a strong feeling of a society that is living and changing, that is the result of the things that happened decades ago, which are the results of the things that happened decades before that, in a way that is coherent and believable but not pat and predictable, nor copy-and-pasted from some handy chunk of real history.

The Black Magician Trilogy hooked me slowly, as the pace and the stakes ratcheted up from the rich but slightly sedate opening to the sprint finish of The High Lord, which justified every chapter of its lengthy buildup.

In The Magician's Apprentice, Ms Canavan takes on the prequel problem. I've said my piece on prequels before — the constraint of an already-known future presents the author with the dilemma of treading a plot already sketched out for the readers, or else descending into something inconsequential enough to have not left its mark in the already-published later stories.

The Magician's Apprentice very nearly threads the needle — it takes advantage of one mystery left unexplained in The High Lord, it explores a society whose character had been forgotten by the time of Rothen and Sonea, though its effects were well remembered. Best of all, it extends the history further, giving the backstory of The Black Magician a backstory of its own just as rich and plausible. However, it still suffers somewhat from the reader knowing some of the things that have to happen before the end, and that detracts from its impact. I think it's fair to say that nothing really shocking happens in the whole book, the way The High Lord or Last of the Wilds are able to confound the reader's understanding of events and characters.

I've read some criticisms of the book along those lines, that it's a bit dull. It's a mistake to read it without having read The High Lord — the context of the later events do lend significance to episodes in this book that would otherwise be uninteresting. The alternative criticism is that the heroine of this book is too similar to that of the trilogy. That's hardly rare - I could name a dozen successful writers who have written volume after volume with the same character appearing under a different name in each new book.

Despite the lack of twists, the story keeps on pulling. I bought the book about midday on Saturday, and finished it on my way to work on Monday morning. Trudi Canavan isn't a deep or challenging writer; she writes entertaining stories about characters that you like enough to care about, and still want to know more about after you've finished. A bit of mystery, a bit of excitement, a bit of romance (yes, that will be off-putting to some younger male readers), layered with the virtuosity of an original fantasy setting without hard edges in time, without the absurdities of economics or politics — "how does that army eat?" "Why is that group in power when that other group could have easily take over?" — that mar lesser writers' creations.

The next book — a first sequel to The Black Magician — is in hardback only until April, but I will certainly grab it then.

Knight Rider (2008-9)

2010-10-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

The 2008 relaunch of Knight Rider, starring Justin Bruening (as David Hasselhoff's son) only lasted one season. It modernised the original well, exemplified by the theme music that started with the iconic theme from the old series, then crashed into something much more metal. (OK, my idea of "modern" isn't quite everyone's).

Time was a challenge for the development of the car. While many of the features of the old KITT are now standard issue, the central premiss of the AI is more futuristic today than it was in the 1980s - back then there were research programs that were trying to approach the sort of abilities KITT had, but they have all long since given up. The idea of incorporating a prototype into a sports car is more glaringly daft now than it was a generation ago, when one could still propose that AI involved some secret technique to be discovered, rather than, as is now assumed, decades of grind of increasing computing power to the point that what is easy for a human child is possible for a machine.

Still — no intelligent car, no Knight Rider, so the producers accepted the situation and gave the car equally glaringly daft additional features to go with it. Fair enough. The important thing was to recapture the awesomeness. That's a tall order, partly because the original is a hard act to follow, but mostly because I am no longer 12. It did manage it on occasion, though — starting with the end of the pilot, when KITT for the first time does the "driving off the ramp of a moving truck" thing, but after he hits the road, the camera angle changes and you see it wasn't a truck, it was a C-130 - which then takes off. Oh yeah.

There is a problem with the series' setup. Silly is OK, but as silly as it is, it cannot afford pretentiousness. It's nowhere near X-Files territory, but it does take itself a bit too seriously — particularly Mike Traceur's mysterious backstory. The program that developed KITT is made into a proper military research establishment, and where the original had occasional glimpses of one suit, a truck driver, and an improbably young and attractive female mechanic, we get as regular characters the inventor, his improbably young and attractive daughter assistant, a geek stereotype, an improbably young and attractive female general assistant, a slightly sinister boss, and an improbably young and attractive female FBI agent. (There are some advantages to not being 12.)

Making it a team was probably an improvement, but the shady government involvement meant that in many episodes there wasn't much to choose between the merits of one side or the other. A serious thriller can carry that, but something this silly has to be good straightforward fun, at least most of the time.

They did abandon that three-quarters of the way through — ditching the official setup and re-instituting it as a private gang of do-gooders. Not terribly realistic, but better much suited to a car that can transform into an SUV while driving at speed. The point at which this transfer happened was almost worthy of discussion on my other blog — by making the team themselves the highest authority in their own right, it freed them from the necessity of following an agenda dominated by hanging on to the power they held. They would use power better, not because they were better people, but because they were freed from politics — KITT as the ring of fnargl.

With that, the series was set up to really work. It is not conceivable to put on a TV show today with acting a bad as was the norm in the 1980s, and the cast are good. But it only lasted another 5 episodes. What undid it really was not the concept, but the writing. The single episode plots were too clichéd, and their details too cringingly stupid. There was the "Fast and the Furious" episode, there was the "Ocean's 11" episode, with 15 minutes of stock footage of Las Vegas and breasts. There were so many countdown timers stopped at 1 second that even the characters got bored by it. There were the three Russian spy women who'd walked straight out of Austin Powers without changing their costumes. It didn't need to be very intelligent, it just needed to be nearly average, and it fell far short. Technological realism was always out of the question, and things like the random hex dumps and chunks of PL/SQL code scrolling over 8 different windows on every "technical" character's screen are both normal and expected, but you don't need a computer science degree to know that when a file is downloaded from the internet, it is still there, or a pilot's license to know that a damaged C-130 cannot fly to 50,000 feet, no matter how grizzled and unflappable the pilot. The designers, FX teams and actors were in the end all sold short by the scripts.

It's a shame, because it could have been really good.

The Bourne Ultimatum (film)

2009-03-01T11:55:00.000-08:00

As promised, I've watched the third in the series.

It doesn't have what made The Bourne Supremacy so outstanding:

The plot is complex enough to be interesting without being absurdly intricate. It is politically relevant without being ham-handed or preachy. It's vaguely plausible, with only a few small holes.

The plot of Ultimatum is trivial - bad guys try to hush up a secret, good guys try to expose it. None of Bourne's antagonists have any agenda other than being against Bourne.

I generally don't like prequels, because the fixed future constrains the story too much. Ultimatum is not a prequel, but by using the throw-away ending of Bourne Supremacy as its central pivot, it voluntarily suffers the disadvantages of a prequel.

There's no real reason why a series of films (or books) have to represent one history without contradictions. If they are really parts of one story, then that's OK, but if not, why not make them alternate versions of the same story? Or different events that could happen to the same characters, but needn't necessarily all have done so. Really long-running series have to accept this - there's no way the events of every Bond film from 1962 to 2008 could have happened to the same person. Terry Pratchett is quite willing to contradict events of one book in another, and handwave it away with reference to History Monks. But it's still not quite admitted outside comedy that a series can reuse characters without being a continuation of the same story.

Back to Ultimatum, it's no mystery why, despite the relative weakness of plot and paucity of character, this film was so well-received. The action scenes - the chases and fights - are much better. They are far more convincing than the ones I didn't like in Ultimatum without being any less spectacular. I would have traded them all in for a plot twist like Danny Zorn's death and a climactic scene like the one in the Moscow apartment.

And it does still have the excellent acting and respect for the viewer's intelligence. Bourne doesn't have to explain that he'd like to keep the girl around, but he can't accept the risk to her after what happened to his previous one - his expression as she cuts her hair is enough for us to know what he's thinking. And if some people miss it, it still adds to the realism that there are things going on that you aren't quite catching. That's what the world is like.

The Bourne Supremacy (film)

2009-02-15T08:14:00.000-08:00

My first film review ... for a 4-year-old film!

It's hard to put my finger on why, but I think this is the best action movie I have ever seen.

The plot is complex enough to be interesting without being absurdly intricate. It is politically relevant without being ham-handed or preachy. It's vaguely plausible, with only a few small holes.

One of the things that makes it work so well is the pace, not simply of the action, but of the story - time is not wasted explaining things that don't need to be explained, the viewer is expected to assimilate things in real time. And if you don't understand exactly what's going on - well, neither do the characters.

Possibly the lack of a sidekick helps in this - Jason Bourne has relatively little dialogue for a leading character, because he's on his own and has no-one to talk to.

The second thing is the quality of the acting, which makes every character believable. Joan Allen is every highly competent, highly strung American woman manager I've ever worked for (and I've worked for a few). Brian Cox is just as convincing. Julia Stiles makes such a distinct character out of a small part that I feel like I know her from somewhere, though I can't find anything else I've watched that she was in.

And it's easy to miss just what a superb job Matt Damon does to be so believable all the way through with so little dialogue and so much of the story going on in his own head. He isn't able to carry the story with monologues or blatant gestures, because Bourne isn't that sort of person, so for a lot of the film he's in tight close-up, taking us along with the smallest fickers of reaction in his eyes and mouth. Oksana Akinshina does just the same in her one scene at the end, though one might have thought being so beautiful that it hurts just to look at her ought to be talent enough.

The car chases are a weak point. They are a too implausible and go on too long. But I suppose there's some law or something that big-budget movies have to have long stupid car chases. The set-piece in the centre of Berlin is done brilliantly.

I went back to watch the first film (The Bourne Identity) again, to see if it was this good and I hadn't noticed. It isn't. It's just another average action movie.

Paul Greengrass directed this one and the third in the series (The Bourne Ultimatum) which I've ordered. I've heard some people say it's better than Supremacy, which would be impressive.

I also watched "Revenge of the Sith" recently. It seemed very significant that in the directors' commentaries, George Lucas went on and on about what a great job the animators and designers had done, while Greengrass went on and on about what a great job the actors had done. I suspect that goes some way to explaining the difference in the quality of the two films.

Chinese Democracy

2008-12-26T09:56:00.000-08:00

What better subject for a review blog that's been silent for nearly a year, than an album from a band that's been silent for 15 years?

I just bought it as a download for three quid from Amazon UK (and that's a step forward at least equal in significance to the release of the album - downloads should be cheap). The last track is still playing, and I haven't got to know any of the songs yet, but the sound is really good.

The problem GnR always had was that they were scared to even attempt to follow Appetite. They tried anything rather than produce a "same but less so" album, and some of it was good and some of it was bad. Now that so much time, and so many band members have gone by, the new album is really no more likely to be compared to what those teenagers did in 1987 than it is to what Elvis did. It owes more to the soft-rock-epic piano + guitar style of Illusion than to the punk-edged early music.

Like I say, I really like the sound. The songs have shape, the guitar has room to play in, it has none of the cringingly-bad stuff like "Get in the Ring". There has to be a degree of anticlimax - it would have to be worldshaking to justify its history, but on its merits its a very good album that I'll be listening to a lot.

Update

After a few days' listening, I like the album even more. The first two tracks are a bit modern for my taste, which put me off. Street of Dreams is quite similar to Locomotive from Use Your Illusion, but without the quotation effects. There Was a Time is a big pretentious epic rock ballad. I like big pretentious epic rock ballads. I.R.S. is outstanding - the only track that wouldn't have been out of place on Appetite. Most of the rest are solid stadium-rock, with a lot of very fast clean shred-style guitar bits, and the best engineered sound on any rock album I've heard - with the oversized band playing, each instrument still stands out. All those years of perfectionist editing were not entirely wasted.

I'm now hoping that with the curse broken, they can carry on and produce another album in only a few years.

His Dark Materials

2008-02-26T12:50:00.000-08:00

Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman, Scholastic.

I don't generally read books aimed at children; I have yet to catch up with the Potter phenomenon, and while I have read a few of Pratchett's YA works, that doesn't signify anything: I would read his shopping lists if I could get my hands on them.

But I picked up Northern Lights in a charity shop, and the story had enough momentum to induce me to buy the other two, just to see how it ended. That is not remarkable: I not only finished The Da Vinci Code on the same basis, I even read Angels and Demons to the end, though morbid curiosity played a part in the latter - it was hard to absorb the idea that Brown had had to improve to write Code.

His Dark Materials is not as bad as that. It lacks the relentless stupidity. The characters are mostly believable, but the fantasy settings aren't. New fantasy elements appear without reason at regular intervals to meet the needs of the plot. There is less of a feel of a consistent, plausible universe than there is in C. S. Lewis, and nothing approaching the depth and solidity of Tolkien's world.

What the series really made me think of, more than anything, was Robert Rankin. The Amber Spyglass, in particular, feels like Armageddon, the Musical without the jokes.

I sometimes think that the book industry is about marketing and fashion more than content, even to a greater extent than the record industry. Fantasy has become acceptable reading to the mainstream, and new fantasy coming out now will be something one can be proud to read, provided it half-camouflages itself as "for the children". The previous camouflage of jokiness is right out - it must all be drenched in pretentious seriousness, even if the premise, as in this case, is as daft as that of Power Rangers.

With Pullman, of course, there is also the religion angle. I've nothing against bashing religion, but it's impossible to read much fantasy or SF without seeing it done much better than HDM. Try almost anything by Harry Harrison, for a start. Again, the religious aspect is more reminiscent of absurd comedies like those of Robert Rankin or Tom Holt

As I said, I'm happy with a book if the plot keeps moving, and I don't grudge the time I spent reading His Dark Materials. It upsets me, though, that something as mediocre as this gets awards and arts TV programmes and film adaptations, while something as exceptional as Gate of Ivrel is out of print.

Entering the Mandala, The Hsu-nami

2008-02-20T12:53:00.000-08:00

I was wandering around the vicinity of Union Square on my first day visiting New York, last May, when I heard a very strange noise. Following my ears (so to speak), I stumbled upon this:

My plan to see the downtown landmarks was shelved as I listened to what was fundamentally good old-fashioned heavy metal, but with no vocals and the with the melody carried by the young man in the baseball cap playing some weird Chinese instrument.

I headed back North only when the rains seemed imminent, abandoning the show halfway through the band's interpretation of the theme from "The Godfather". Back at my hotel room, Google revealed the band to be "Hsu-nami", and the weird instrument to be an er-hu.

They have several of their songs streamable at their website, and there are quite a few clips on youtube and so on. The album due to be released in "Fall 2007" finally became available to actually buy a couple of weeks ago, and my copy arrived yesterday from CDBaby.

The 45-minute CD contains the four songs that are on the myspace page, plus the Godfather cover, a beautiful little piano solo moving from that to "Rogue Wave", and a slightly odd dance or funk type thing called "Beautiful Night". I thought that might be a cover or something, but it's not credited to anyone on the sleeve notes. There were then live versions of "The Rising of the Sun" and "Entering the Mandala", the former an unplugged version, also with some very nice piano by Adam Toth.

There are a few points to make about this band. First, the er-hu really works. Unamplified, it sounds almost like an electric guitar with feedback, and when the band really gets headbanging it screams the melody.

Second, these are superb musicians. Hsu is clearly some kind of mad musical genius, but the lead guitar and keyboard are excellent too. Brett Bergholm plays the kind of technical rock guitar that unfortunately went out of fashion about twenty years ago, and the great keyboard playing I have already talked about, because I hadn't really noticed it before listening to the CD.

The third thing is that if you like instrumental rock, you need to go straight over to myspace, confirm to yourself that I'm not talking rubbish, and then buy the album. CDBaby were able to get it to me in Britain in about a week.

There's one video clip on the internet I can't resist linking to: it's the best version of Pachelbel's canon you've ever headbanged to.

Iron Maiden Live At Donnington 1992

2007-10-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

Here was a classic picked up in a 2 for £10 sale at HMV last weekend.

I was slightly apprehensive that this "enhanced" CD would be made useless to me by copy protection, but sound juicer on debian Etch ripped it without a hitch.

Though Maiden are still around, by 1992 they were already old-timers -- which possibly accounts for the lack of power in Bruce Dickinson's voice. Or maybe he just had an off day.

If I buy a concert album, it's not for the crowd singalongs or the "let me hear you say yeah!" inanity, but because these traditionally allow for the musicians to add more to the songs. I wasn't necessarily expecting the 20+ minute instrumentals of, say, Deep Purple's "Made in Europe", but the solos here never really got going.

That is a great shame, because the twin-lead-guitar format makes for such good instrumentals. From Wishbone Ash and The Eagles to Judas Priest, it produces something impossible to duplicate with a single guitarist, even in the studio (though Tony Iommi occasionally came close).

So this is basically a best-of album with a poor vocal track. Since I don't have an Iron Maiden compilation, and I never set much store by rock vocals anyway, I actually find it very enjoyable -- certainly worth a fiver. The guitar solos are fast and unpredictable (I like Murray's on "Afraid to shoot strangers"), and the very melodic guitar lines are a startling change from modern heavy rock music.

There are quicktime videos on the CDs too (that's the "enhanced" part). They're low quality but enough to give a feel of the event. They have the usual rock-video "feature" that during the guitar solos they always close-up on the bassist. I've never understood that: I wonder if it's related to the phenomenon of BBC Snooker producers who don't like snooker and therefore fill up the programming with musical interludes, competitions, and interviews of the players' horses, even while the matches are actually going on. Are heavy metal videos edited by people who hate rock music and don't know the difference between a bass guitar and a normal six-string?

"Snowblind", PJ Tracy

2007-10-14T05:58:00.000-07:00

The latest book I bought was "Snowblind" by PJ Tracy (£4.00, Tesco), on Tuesday. The two earlier books by the author that I have, "Want to Play?" and "Dead Run" were good thrillers. This one is more of a police procedural, as it follows an investigation where the main characters themselves are not in any obvious danger. The urgency in the earlier books made them considerably more exciting than this one.
There's also a slight imbalance in the characters: the main characters are the two Minneapolis detectives from the earlier books, plus the newly-elected rural sheriff who is the real protagonist of this one. However, the Monkeewrench team from the earlier books are still hanging around, despite not really having an important role in the story.
I suppose, as a programmer, I have to comment on the technical aspect of the books (Monkeewrench is a small software house producing games and data-mining applications). Let's face it, it's crap. To be fair, I've read a lot worse. The jargon is in the right place, but the authors have no conception of what processes are involved in breaking into secured systems, or in creating games software, or of the lack of any very close connection between the two. But really, it's fantasy, and if that doesn't hurt my enjoyment of the stories, it shouldn't hurt yours. My rule of thumb is that if it's less stupid than the regular CSI trick of enlarging a photograph to the level where you can recognise a face or a document reflected in the subject's eyeball, then I let it pass. And that's very, very stupid -- nothing here comes close.
There's a general social point to the book, but to my mind it stops short of being irritatingly preachy. The way in which the detectives' dilemma is resolved in the end is, however, a bit of an anticlimax.

General Reviews

2007-10-14T02:14:00.000-07:00

I call myself amcguinn, and I write a mostly-political blog Anomaly UK. My possibly delusional belief is that I have truly original and insightful ideas to contribute to many matters of controversy.

However, like so many people, I also want to tell everyone what I liked on television yesterday, what crime thrillers are better than other crime thrillers, and other such trivia. Being unable to delude myself that drivel of that sort has any originality or insight at all, I don't want to dilute the purity of Anomaly UK with it. So I am creating this side-blog Anomaly Reviews, which is badly misnamed because my tastes are no more anomalous or unusual than they are cultivated or cultured. But it's all about the brand, you see.

So unless you are stalking me or are unhealthily obsessed with detective novels, 1980's heavy metal and pound-shop tat, you probably don't want to subscribe to this blog's feed. But it's food for search engines and I may occasionally drop a link to something here if I think it has wider significance.

I would also like to assure you that I'm not attempting to pull a Tim Worstall and milk my site's page rank for a few advertising bucks. If searches that land here end up driving a few hits to Anomaly UK, I'll take that, but this is an exercise in narcissism unsullied by any ulterior motive. I get about a hundredth of the traffic necessary to make any noticeable revenue anyway.