X: X-Men

Ah, X. Such slim pickings. Well, my choices were the Xanth books, Xanadu, and X-Men.

So we’ll go with the one I encountered most recently.

X-Men

Genre: movies, science fiction

I liked this Marvel franchise just fine when I saw it in the theater. Enough that I saw X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand, as well as X-Men Origins: Wolverine. But not X-Men: First Class yet. I keep going back and forth over whether James McAvoy’s presence is enough reason to watch it.

Considering how many of them I’d seen, you’d think I’d be less…lukewarm about it. But this is one franchise I’ve watched more for special effects and the caliber of actors than for the story. The first one was pretty cool, though. I guess I'm in a Matrix situation here. I keep watching them, hoping one will come along that will match the first.

In the meantime, I watch X-Men for these folks:

Hugh Jackman

Halle Berry

Patrick Stewart & Ian McKellen

Rebecca Romijn

James McAvoy

James McAvoy again

Oh, what the hell. One more. :)

Hmm. Maybe I’ll watch First Class after all. J

T: Timeline & Testosterone

Timeline by Michael Crichton
Genre: historical, SF, suspense/thriller

General premise A group of archeology students goes back in time to rescue their professor from 14^th century France, and find out that medieval times were even more brutal and ruthless than they’d thought.

It’s a typical Michael Crichton book – brilliant scientists with little common sense, backed by corporations with dollar signs in their eyes, and a bunch of well-meaning, highly-educated people stuck in the middle. Crichton is pretty much the only author I admire who did zero character development. At least, that’s what I remember of his books – thrilling stories, cardboard characters.

Gerard, looking hot
and mysterious.

I saw the movie first. It was terrible. It shouldn’t have been – I still don’t get how they messed this up. BUT. The premise was so intriguing that I thought, “I’ll bet the book is just incredible.” And it was my introduction to Gerard Butler, looking ridiculously hot in 14^th century period costume. J

There’s a jousting tournament in the book, so I’ll put in a quick plug here for the History Channel reality TV show Full Metal Jousting. It’s exactly what it sounds like – a bunch of guys competing in a modern-day jousting tournament for $100k. When I first heard of it, I thought, “You can’t be serious!”

And then I immediately set the DVR to record it.

I loved it. The guys came from all sorts of active backgrounds – one firefighter, one polo player, a couple of marines, a couple of rodeo cowboys, and then a handful of horse trainers, show jumpers, and a whole bunch of Medieval Times knights. That last bunch, oddly enough, were apparently at a disadvantage, because even though they were the only ones to have handled a lance before, theatrical jousting is not about eliminating your opponent. It’s about looking great in a saddle and falling dramatically out of it without getting hurt. They had to unlearn how they sat, how they held the lance, what to do when they got hit.

The horses were awesome. So gorgeous. So much personality. They ranged from those that were dependable but kind of staid, to those that took off like bullets, but constantly fought their riders for control.

And I loved the modern take on medieval armor.

 

Speaking of “manly men”…

Testosterone on This American Life

Genre: radio

This American Life is hosted by Ira Glass, one of the best story creators of our time. I don’t know of anyone else doing quite what he does. His radio show puts stories together around a theme for each episode. I’ve heard Ira Glass speak live twice, I’ve listened to This American Life for years, but it wasn’t until I tried to analyze how they put together such enthralling stories around usually-normal situations that I truly began to appreciate his genius, and the subtlety of it.

 

I could spend all day recommending specific TAL episodes, but for “T” I’ll stick with Testosterone. The First Act was an interview with a man whose body stopped producing testosterone for four months before the doctors figured out what was wrong with him. He talks about how lack of testosterone meant lack of desire for anything. And how unexpectedly pleasant it was, because if you don’t want anything, then you don’t psychologically want for anything.

Act Two was about Griffin Hansbury, who started out as a woman, but got testosterone injections and now lives as a man. This one’s particularly interesting, because you can hear the interviewer’s horrified fascination as Hansbury “confirms” pretty much every stereotype you’ve ever heard about men vs women, and, as the interviewer puts it, sets gender relations back about a hundred years. I put “confirms” in quotes because the testosterone injections meant that for a while, Hansbury (who is 5'4" and smallish) was walking around with the testosterone levels of two linebackers, and so I’m assuming the effect was somewhat exaggerated. Hansbury talks about everything from the change in his interest in science to how hard it is to concentrate around women. But he also talks about how he’s gone from being this really cool woman everyone admired to being a nerdy-looking guy who’s now caught up in this very male fight for dominance every time he steps out on the street.

Act Three follows the staff at TAL after they decided to get their own testosterone levels tested for the show. First they ranked each other, guessing who would have the highest levels. Everyone agreed on which woman would have the highest (except that woman), but for the guys it was a toss-up, because they each had traits that tend to go with high testosterone (one of them created the show and was the boss, one of them was muscular and balding, one of them played lots of sports, etc), but none of them considered themselves to be “manly men” (like NFL football players or whatever). And as the day of the results grew closer, more and more of them agreed that this had been a terrible idea and it would forever change the way they related to each other – but they still wanted to know who “won”.

M: Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) & Mirror Of Her Dreams

Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
Genre: nonfiction, psychology

Just looking at this book makes me want to read it again. The subtitle describes it better than any description I can come up with: "Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts".

Written by two psychologists, it delves into all sorts of reasons why people dig in and defend beliefs or opinions even when they're clearly wrong and everyone involved knows it (e.g. why law enforcement officials might continue to insist someone is guilty or innocent because they originally labeled them as such, or why politicians make excuses and tell lies even when the amount of attention being paid is so intense that it’s only a matter of time until the truth comes out). It has chapter names like "Knaves, Fools, Villains, and Hypocrites: How Do They Live with Themselves?", "Cognitive Dissonance: The Engine of Self-justification", and "Pride and Prejudice...and Other Blind Spots".

This is a book I can safely recommend to everyone. It's easy to read, it's fascinating, and you'll never approach disagreement (or your own memory) in quite the same manner again.

The Mirror of Her Dreams by Stephen R. Donaldson

Genre: fantasy

Terisa Morgan lives in a fabulous New York apartment paid for by her neglectful-yet-overbearing father. When Geraden comes crashing through her wall-sized mirror looking for a champion to save his land, he insists she's the one he came to get.

This is one of my favorite books. It bucks the current (and I must say, IMO, very American) trend of super-active single-protagonist books. I know we like to read about people doing things and taking control of their own destiny...but there are other stories, too. Terisa spends most of the story being dragged into things she would never have done if given a choice, and it makes her story no less fascinating for me. I like books about cautious introverts. They're so rare in fiction now. Every time I hear that a recently-published book has an introvert for a protagonist, I know in a few pages that character will just turn out to be an extrovert who was having a quiet day and soon shakes it off.

http://aliettedebodard.com/2011/08/31/on-the-prevalence-of-us-tropes-in-storytelling/

This blog post is by Aliette de Bodard, winner of the Writers of the Future Contest, finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer , nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula, etc etc. She states what I feel (perhaps more strongly than I feel it), but in short, there are lots of valid stories out there. I remember feeling such relief as I read her post, because for many years now I'd feared the world had moved on without me.

I'm happy reading stories about individuals who control their own destiny, people who save the day, people who lead. But I'm also happy reading group stories, stories of people who aren't immediately equipped to deal with what life throws at them, stories where violence has lasting consequences for everyone involved, stories where someone isn't becoming a larger-than-life superhero in order to deal with problems. There's room for all of it on my bookshelf!

Think of the movie Training Day. His first day on the job as a narcotics officer, Jake (Ethan Hawke) is assigned to accompany Alonzo (Denzel Washington), and what follows is the most horrifying day of Jake’s life. Despite the awards they won (Denzel won best actor, Ethan Hawke best supporting actor), from a storytelling point of view, it’s Jake’s story we’re invested in, his thoughts, fears, and decisions that are the focus of the story, which makes him the protagonist. He spends most of the movie being dragged into things by Alonzo. I'm not sure he makes a single active decision until near the end of the movie. And yet it's one of the most thrilling, edge-of-my-seat movies I've ever seen.

I want more stories like that. Because while I’m entertained by people who always rise to the occasion, say the wittiest possible thing and do the best possible thing to resolve the current situation, I identify better with someone who’s overwhelmed by situations they’re not equipped to deal with, and have to muddle through solving problems, sometimes with the help of other people. As long as it’s written well, I see no reason why every single action that moves the story forward has to be the protagonist’s.

And that's it for M!

Best World Building

I had planned a second post on the spectacular world of The Cloud Roads. But since I've finished reading The Serpent Sea (and yes, I love and highly recommend it), which takes place in the same world, I'll cover this one instead.

The Serpent Sea by Martha Wells

Genre Fantasy

How it starts The court is moving on air ships (not like steampunk dirigibles - these have sails, and their flying mechanism isn't... mechanical) to their new home. Moon is strolling across the deck and getting dirty looks from some of the warriors, who hate that a feral consort now has such an important place in their court. He's still recovering from having his body broken in a fight, but tries to look tempting so they'll attack him and he can beat the crap out of them.

General premise The Indigo Cloud Court arrived at their ancestral home, a gigantic mountain-tree, to find that the tree is dying because the seed has been stolen. Only someone who understood the tree could have done such a thing, and Moon feels conspicuous as rumors fly about a feral solitary (like himself) betraying the court. If the tree dies, the court will have to move again, and they have nowhere else to go. Afraid of embroiling himself and his queen in more political squabbles he doesn't understand, Moon is happy to set out to recover the seed. As the only one who has lived among outsiders, he's included in a team led by his queen and comprised of the old consort who found him, his mentor-turned-warrior friend who's also an outsider at court, and several of his rivals.


Page 13 quote

Moon leaned over the railing and tried to see the ground, but it was hundreds of paces down, lost in the shadows. Not far below the ship he could see platforms covered with greenery standing out from the trees and completely encircling the trunks, connecting the trees to each other in a web, many more than large enough for the Valendera to set down on. They looked like tethered chunks of sky-island, covered with grass and flowers, dripping with vines, most supporting glades of smaller trees. But as the ship drifted closer to one, he saw the platforms were thick branches that had grown together and intertwined in broad swathes, catching windblown dirt and seeds until they built up into solid ground.

Page 2 quote from The Cloud Roads

Hac looked like a typical Cordan: short and stocky, with pale gray-green skin and dull green hair. Most Cordans had patches of small glittering scales on their faces or arms, legacy of an alliance with a sea realm sometime in the history of their dead empire. On some of the others, especially the young, the effect was like glittering skin-jewelry. On Hac, it just looked slimy.

Best world-building

I love that this world seems to be based on the animal kingdom rather than on human history. Inhabitants have blue or green or bronze skin, hair or feathers or scales (or all three), and live everywhere - in hives, on the ground, in the sea or the sky, and in one striking case, in a rotating city built on a giant wheel turned by a waterfall. The author makes the varied creatures of her world believable and relatable. Based on the cover illustrations I imagine them as humanoid-ish, but I don't know if that's what she pictured.

Usually when I'm bowled over by a fictional world, it's because of the intricate and original political/cultural structure. And these books definitely have that - the Raksura courts seem to be based on colony-dwellers like ants or bees, with a powerful queen, warriors, consorts, and various types of workers, all different sizes and abilities when in their altered (winged or climbing) forms. But I was left breathless by the physical world and its brightly-colored beauty.





The scenery's so lush and gorgeous. It brought me back to that awed longing I felt when I read Enid Blyton books as a kid, or watched cartoons involving fairy rings and toadstool houses or Wind-in-the-Willows-style panoramic views. Having lived in deserts all my life, visiting Sweden brought this same feeling - as if people shared enchanted space with nature rather than beating it into submission, or being beaten by it.

rainy pond in a Swedish city

Except the parts of Sweden I've seen are really, really green, while the world in these books is vibrant with all colors of the rainbow: flocks of flighted lizards in blues, golds, and violets that flutter away when startled; flurries of tiny yellow frogs that play in waterfall spray; flying islands covered in crumbling ruins that contain abandoned libraries of disintegrating books, overrun by wild vines.

stone bridge in Sweden

Anyway, non-earth-based worlds weren't uncommon in books I read in middle and high school. They tended to be science fiction, with FTL flight and a universe teeming with non-humanoid aliens, both of which seem to be making a comeback in science fiction after disappearing behind generational ships, worlds populated with humans who originally came from earth, and most recently, humans who never left earth at all.

I think it's a good thing fantasy moved away from LotR-style magic that seemed to be able to do everything and yet never actually did anything. But the other extreme is magic that's so much like science that people are afraid to play with it, and so we get minor variations on the same traditional magic over and over and over, until now I'm actually surprised when I come across fantasy that reads like a whole new world, rather than like medieval Europe with some of their less-interesting superstitions come true (vampires, werewolves, witches, what have you).

Thank you, Martha Wells.  I hope this isn't a trilogy. I hope you keep these books going forever.

More books with nontypical, excellent world-building:

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Genre: magical realism/historical

Celia and Marco have trained their entire lives for an epic duel set up by their instructors, and the black-and-white Night Circus is the magical battle field. Despite their growing love for each other, leaving the fight is physically impossible, and only one of them can win.

Currently reading this. It's definitely earth-based, but the magic is so free of constraints that I have to just marvel at how coherent Morgenstern makes it all. It's a lush, achingly beautiful book.





Avatar directed by James Cameron
Genre: SF/F movie

Yes, I know it's fashionable to hate this movie, but I love it. The story's not particularly original, but the way it's told certainly is. My husband's done over 600 scuba dives, and says there's nothing original about the Avatar world, either. But for those of us who prefer our water in a glass or a shower, and prefer our fish...well, elsewhere, bringing the underwater world to the surface was just magical.



Old Man's War by John Scalzi
Genre: science fiction

I just about cried when I read this book (I DID cry when I read the second one, The Ghost Brigades). It was like revisiting the classic SF I'd loved as a kid, where people hopped from one planet to another, where authors took the swashbuckling of the high seas and transferred it to outer space. Perhaps the world-building here isn't unique in the sense of Martha Wells's books, but it is fascinating.






And while we're on science fiction that's a throwback to the older stuff, I'll go ahead and recommend
Orphanage by Robert Buettner
Genre: science fiction

This is like Old Man's War; it's military SF that's a lot more like stuff I remember reading as a kid. I keep hearing that no one reads science fiction anymore. I don't think that's true. I do think there's a difference between science fiction aimed at people who have followed the genre's evolution since the 1950s or whatever, and those who want to be entertained by a good story that involves spaceships without having to retake AP physics first (though of course, if you took AP physics the first time around, understanding the science is probably not your biggest problem with the SF genre).

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Short version: I liked it. I don't actually remember the other Mission Impossible movies, so it's hard to compare. I'm assuming that means I liked this one best.

The mission was interesting enough. When their early plan to infiltrate the Kremlin goes terribly, terribly wrong and results in the shut-down of the IMF, the team has to carry out their main mission without backup. So all the spy gadgets I remember from past Mission Impossible movies aren't used here in quite the same way, or malfunction at the least convenient moments. Salt with Angelina Jolie (which did so many things right in its portrayal of an action-movie woman that I'm still amazed it got made) also started a great movement - women in action movies no longer have to run in heels. When someone takes off their stilletos before kicking your ass, you know they mean business.

Dubai was cool in Ghost Protocol (especially an epic dust storm that, oddly enough, brought me some moments of nostalgia), but the Indian scenes were colorful and swirly and awesome. I'm always heart-swooningly happy to see non-European countries featured in movies as places that aren't all about squalor and bloodlust.

A highlight for me was the BMW i8 Concept. I don't remember who drove it. I don't think it was part of a car chase. I do remember gasping and clutching at my chest, and angels playing harps up in the theater rafters. I love concept cars. It's like bringing chrome-and-glass science fiction to life. I'm assuming the version of this plug-in diesel hybrid that makes its way across the Atlantic will be very different. I sure would love to see this version at a car show, though.

The movie is worth seeing for the BMW alone, but I really think the story progression was entertaining. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol won't change your life (probably), but maybe action movies are taking a turn for the better, after hitting rock bottom with a certain 3-film action-movie franchise which also strongly features cars. I will confess that, since I went to see those other movies despite knowing the story would suck, I am indeed part of the problem.

Action sequence

I just saw
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
It was SO much better than the first one, I don't even know where to begin. The first one wasn't bad - visually stunning, though I could take or leave the story. This one is my kind of movie storytelling! A villain whose motivations make sense, women who don't wait around to be rescued, great characters playing off each other, gorgeous steampunky elements. This is worth seeing for the action sequences alone.

On the other hand, my husband, who was eager to see it, didn't think it was better than the first one, and thought everything in Game of Shadows had been played up to attract a specific subset of American movie-goers (I disagreed, but we're assimilated Americans from different continents, so we always come at such things from opposing viewpoints). YMMV.

I loved everything about it, except my biggest complaint about all the Sherlock Holmes stories I've tried - he always solves crimes based on things no one bothered to mention or focus on earlier in the story. But the awesome movie led me to look up a bunch of stuff.

First, Guy Ritchie. I've seen Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and half of Snatch - brilliant, but just too violent for me. That's something I really like about his Sherlock Holmes movies - as the violence is going on, you're hearing Holmes's clinical breakdown of the fight moves, like he's delivering a chess match play-by-play. It's used to better effect in Game of Shadows than in the first one, though explaining how might be a bit spoilery (I've seen the explanation in other reviews, though).

I also love what they've done with the rather...um, complicated relationship between Holmes and Watson. This movie wasn't written with the assumption that the entire audience would be straight males dragging along reluctant girlfriends who would rather be at a chick flick. There's no gratuituous female nudity (though there is one hilarious scene where we see more of Stephen Fry than I'd expected), and no weak romantic subplot, either. Actually, no romance at all. Just delightful give and take between Holmes and Watson.

After reading an interview where they asked Guy Ritchie about the "even more overt man-love" between Holmes and Watson, and his response that he got that from the books, I thought, "Hmm." I remember fighting my way through two chapters of The Hound of the Baskervilles before giving up and immersing myself in The Elfstones of Shannara instead. I was also eleven years old. Which is not to say eleven-year-olds can't appreciate Sherlock Holmes. Just that at that age I wasn't likely to give a classic a chance to get interesting if it didn't grab me immediately. Incidentally, I'm even less likely to now, but my tastes have changed, somewhat.

I digress. I went looking for articles and found out that Holmes of the books was indeed a martial-arts-employing ass-kicker, something I'd assumed had been invented for the movies. And if that was true to canon, what else was?

So now I'm giving the Sherlock Holmes stories another shot. Maybe I'll get more out of them this time. I also plan to at least try every movie with a script written by Kieran and Michele Mulroney. This movie had so many great lines, though the only two I remember right now are "They spared every expense," and "satanic ponies" (which again, my husband doesn't think is funny at all, but which is so incongruous I can't stop smiling over it). The last script that interested me enough to look up the creator was Firefly. I'll blog about that once I get over it being canceled.

Here's a BBC article about how the story in the movie came together...