How The Hobbit Should Have Ended

Weekend Update!

Hugo nominations are now being accepted.  If you read something last year that you think deserves recognition, and if you're a member of the 2012, 2013, or 2014 World Science Fiction Convention, you can nominate things for the 2013 ballot.  LoneStarCon 3 is the venue of the World Science Fiction Convention, where the winners will be announced this coming August-September and you can find the rest of the details here.  I think Osama by Lavie Tidhar has my nomination this year.  What do you think?

Warner Bros. announced they're making a new Terminator movie.  What is this, number five or something?  I thought the franchise was adequately concluded with Terminator 2, and went along for Terminator 3 because nothing was better in theaters.  But I never saw Salvation and I have a hard time working up any sort of excitement for numero cinco.

DC has announced its expansion of digital lending to libraries.  That's quite the move and I'm sure one that parents and librarians are going to love (please note the sarcasm in my tone).  While you could make the argument that any reading is good, I beg to differ and suspect that reading at low levels or engaging in prurient fiction will not inspire children toward higher levels of maturity or intelligence.  I'll get off my soapbox now.  Because I love the idea of me.  I'm excited for the opportunity to get my comic fix without having to shell out five bucks an issue.  So go DC.

While I've been saying for a while that on-demand printing is the wave of the future, and with physical book sales dropping nationwide an average of 9%, Penguin finally got wise and has put much of its backlist up for on-demand printing using the Espresso Book Machine.  With the upcoming merger with Random House already in the works, this looks like a seismic shift in the way physical books are distributed and consumed.

And in an effort to improve recognition of great books, the National Book Award will include a longlist in 2013.  Like the Man Booker Award, the National Book Award will choose ten titles (but with a twist, it's ten per category of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and young people's literature) for the longlist and then shorten that to the appropriately titled shortlist, which will be announced five weeks later.

NASA got Leonard Nimoy to do the voice-over for a video detailing their Dawn mission, which intends to visit and study two asteroids, named Ceres and Vesta.  Leonord Nimoy, much like Morgan Freeman, could narrate the dictionary.  Check out the video below.

Declaration of Independence from Violence in the Media . . . Or, Do Video Games Kill?

By Steven McLain

Critics and social commentators have once more identified violence in the media as one of several causes in a recent spate of violence in the United States, prompting the President to request another study from the CDC about the links between the two.  While violence itself is on the decline, popularized violence is ever on the increase.  Violent scenes abound in video games, in movies, in television shows and on the news.  While violence is probably going to be an inescapable part of the human condition, tangible steps can nevertheless be taken to minimize the risk of encountering violence, and the possible harm that violence can cause.

On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I'm reminded of his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and "Declaration of Independence from Vietnam."  Both emphasize Dr. King's resolution toward love and non-violent demonstration, but his true focus is on identifying justice and the laws which prevent it.  He sees systems of injustice in place that regularly denigrate human personality.  Racism, materialism, and militarism gnaw at the soul of the United States, according to MLK, and erode the moral fabric of its people.  To him, injustice is anything that degrades human beings as moral individuals.  And I have to wonder if our culture of violence is itself an unjust system.  Is it perhaps evil?

Certainly, people kill.  Guns themselves are tools for good or evil, protection or harm; the moral evaluation of the act resides in the heart and mind of the individual pulling the trigger.  But I have to wonder about the system that allows guns into the hands of those incapable of discerning right from wrong, reality from fantasy, or who are simply incapable of rendering a moral judgement either way--those who are hopelessly distanced from the society they parasite.

Those people, however, lay at the heart of the issue.  Because as we increasingly glorify murder, and violence in all its guises--from the news media who inculcate hatred to the television shows that fail to address the shattering heartbreak of violence, to the video games that blur the line between what is real and what is fantasy--we've created a system that regularly denigrates human life.  In a popular meme that's been floating around the internet, Samuel L. Jackson is purported to have said that growing up in the South he was surrounded by guns and no one ever shot anyone else.  The real problem, he says, is not guns, but the people who no longer value human life.

So I have to wonder if representations of violence in the media have created a system whereby people are desensitized to violence in general, and acculturated to the idea that human life is expendable, cheap.  If that is the case, then Dr. King's comments are valid.  In perpetuating the denigration of human life, these systems are themselves unjust; they are perhaps evil.

The flip side, your immediate reaction, I'm sure, is that you played violent video games, you watch violent movies, you see shootings on the news and you turned out okay.  First, I wonder if "okay" is really good enough.  I wonder at the kind of person that allows himself or herself to compromise excellence for cheap entertainment.  But that is beyond the scope of this post.

What I'm trying to get at is that of course you are probably not the kind of person that would commit a violent act.  You're probably a very nice person.  Are you willing, though, to allow the impressionable and the vulnerable access not only to images designed to excite the most violent tendencies but also give them access to weapons of increasingly deadly design?  I would hardly argue that video games cause violence.  But I do believe that a correlation exists between those games and the devaluation of human life.

And I believe that devaluation is a cause of violence.

So I'll let you decide if video games are a system of injustice that promotes violence; I'll let you decide what needs to be done.  

When Houses Fall . . . A Game of Thrones Readthrough Update

I'm on the final leg of Game of Thrones!  What's that mean?  It means it's finally getting interesting.  Stuff went down.  I suppose, if you thought of it as a chess game, then the queen just took the knight.  What's most interesting so far is the way in which Martin has set up the rules of the world; I'm impressed by his world-building on the cheap, and I think I can see where he's going from here.  I'm interested to see what he's going to do with the dragons, and especially with magic, since this doesn't seem to be a world in which magic plays much of a part.  But on the whole, I gotta admit that it hooked me, and I'm really excited to finish the books now.

Kickstarting Cancer's Ass

Jay Lake (author of clock-punk classic and the recently released Kalimpura) has a particularly rare form of cancer and as one of the options to fight it, he needs to sequence the DNA of the cancer against his own DNA.  It's been done before.  By isolating specific genes, doctors have successfully shut down cancer in the past, and both Jay Lake and his friends are hoping they can do the same with his.  Genomic sequencing, however, is expensive, and not covered by Jay's insurance so a couple of his friends started a fund-raiser to get him the money he needs.

I met Jay once at a book signing at the Cedar Hills Powell's here in Portland and was surprised by his humor and friendliness.  Authors at book signings can run the gamut from awkwardly shy to down-right hostile (though, fortunately, the latter is very rare), and I remember thinking how much I'd enjoyed the reading of Green, by Jay Lake.  I was more familiar with his novels set in the Mainspring universe, a kind of clockwork steampunk that defied what I thought punk and science-fiction were.  But at that time he was reading from Green, the first novel in his Green series.  I was intrigued (and it didn't hurt that the cover was one of Dan Dos Santos's).

But I lost track of the author until I heard about the fundraiser for his benefit.  I want to read his work, and I'd like to see him survive his cancer, and I wholeheartedly endorse the fundraiser.  It has succeeded financially, at least, surpassing its goal by nearly 200%; in doing so, however, it caused a minor kerfuffle that brought PayPal's policies and lapses once more to the internet's attention.  Basically, PayPal locked Jay's account due to what it suspected was fraudulent activity.  He invoked Twitter and the blogosphere, and leveraged the influence of his friends and their readership, to motivate PayPal to fix the problem in a timely manner.  John Scalzi has a pretty nice account of what happened, but in reading the comments to his story, I noticed something interesting.

Scalzi has an international audience.  He's popular the world over, and it's no surprise that people from other forms of health care would use this opportunity to lambast American health care (or even for Americans to criticize our healthcare system.  The tenor of the criticism seems to revolve around the recent use of the internet to fund-raise for healthcare.  We're probably all familiar with the concept of micro-loans to start small business in developing countries; we're well aware that Kickstarter has revolutionized creative start-ups.  What's less well understood is the way in which the internet allows people with needs to actively engage humanitarian impulses throughout the world.

The humanitarian loop used to go something like this: A need is identified (either through journalism, word-of-mouth, or more or less official channels including diplomatic); once that need is identified, people with resources have to be able to extend their largesse to those with the need.  Somewhere between those two, however, an organization or individual had to handle the money and see that it was delivered.  The internet takes out the first step, greatly simplifies the final step and most importantly allows everyone with any excess to contribute.  Philanthropy was once the purview of the rich; it now exists for everyone with a couple bucks and an internet connection.

Zero Dark Thirty Review

By Steven McLain

Spoiler alert: bin Laden dies at the end.  But we all knew that going into the theater.  The really intriguing part of the movie isn't the outcome, but how it was achieved.  Like most things in life, the journey is just as important as the destination.  Especially when that journey comprises the biggest manhunt in human history, and is fraught with moral conundrums and political machinations beyond the movie theater.  The reason for all the fist wrangling is that the film-makers had extraordinary access to CIA agents and information about the manhunt for bin Laden and because the movie depicts aspects of "heightened interrogation techniques" beyond what was officially acknowledged.  Simply put, Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Jessica Chastain, takes a hard look at the methods used to gather intelligence not only about the location of Osama bin Laden, but also forthcoming attacks such as the London and Madrid bombings.  In this respect, the filmmakers make a hard decision about how to portray coercive interrogations--torture. 

As a moral argument, few people would quibble over whether to use torture as a means to extract timely information that might prevent an attack, or save someone's life.  The old story goes something like this: a child has been kidnapped and the kidnapper has been caught, but the child has not been found and the kidnapper refuses to disclose the child's location.  Are law enforcement officers justified in using torture to extract that information and save the child's life? 

Lawmakers and intelligence agencies in the war against terror have contended that torture is a valuable and justifiable method for gathering intelligence that might prevent attacks against American interests.  But is torture justifiable in gathering information about the location of Osama bin Laden?  You could argue (and the movie does in passing) that by catching bin Laden further attacks could be prevented, especially attacks on American soil.  But politicians, and the American public, did quibble over the morality and legality of using torture to gather intelligence that would lead to his capture.  By that point, the war in Iraq had eclipsed the war in Afghanistan, and the hunt for bin Laden had been pushed the back burner.

Jessica Chastain as CIA agent Maya

The movie follows that back-burner effort, spearheaded by Maya's quixotic efforts to find Osama bin Laden.  Except that we know those efforts were far from in vain.  In fact, he was caught, he was killed, and it may have earned President Obama a second term in office.  It galvanized support for the president, and offered a viable excuse for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.  It was a literal nail in the war on terror's coffin. 

Zero Dark Thirty unflinchingly follows efforts to find bin Laden, and looks at the human cost (both to those being brutalized and the brutalizers) of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" and also at the way intelligence activities shifted toward electronic intelligence with the softening support of detainee programs on the homefront.  But the movie offers a look that is neither easy to classify, nor easy dismiss.  The character of Maya, whom the movie follows for much of the action (save the actual raid on the bin Laden compound, itself unsettling in its banality), is acknowledged from the beginning as "a killer."  She does not shirk from using torture, but the cost is plain on her face and we are left with a parting shot of her weeping--but are her tears catharsis or realization that her life is now meaningless, the majority of it devoted to finding and killing Osama bin Laden?

SEALs about to breach the bin Laden compound

Kathryn Bigelow manages to create a movie that is at once decisive and cloying, tempting the audience with answers but never fully revealing them.  Because, ultimately, the movie hopes to accurately represent reality, in which morality is never black and white, and answers are difficult to procure, if you can even stop to ask the right questions.  Are we, in those tears, meant to see ourselves?  Does Maya embody the American obsession with bin Laden?  And now that we took him out, the meaninglessness of our lives?  How do we confront the horrors of that obsession, and the cost we're still reaping in the Middle East?  These aren't easy questions to answer, but the movie declared brilliantly that they are questions we ought seriously to ponder.

Overall, I would recommend this movie to just about everybody.

Mickey Mouse, You're My Only Hope . . . Or, Use the Force, Disney

By Steven McLain

Star Wars VII is in a pretty bad way.  First, J.J. Abrams said he wouldn't do it.  And now, Guillermo del Toro turned it down as well, saying he's way to busy making remakes of classic 80s cartoons.  Word is even Brad Bird won't touch George Lucas's world with a ten-foot pole.  And it makes me wonder just what the heck happened to turn Star Wars from the most critically acclaimed space fantasy of all time, a perennial favorite with viewers and the basis of rabid fan enthusiasm, into something that the best directors of our age don't even want to associate with.  It sort of has the feeling of that popular kid in high school who ten years later got fat and calls you up around midnight to come score chicks with him at the bar. 

I don't actually Episodes I through III on the debacle.  Yeah, they were pretty bad, but they didn't ruin the franchise as much as all those Clone Wars cartoons, licensed action figures and midichlorians did.  I don't want to get too deep into the muck with this, but George took a bold leap with his franchise; and sometimes bold leaps just turn into belly-flops.  The crass commercialization of the franchise, however, sunk it completely (to mix metaphors).  What used to be something original and compelling became just another gimmick to turn a buck--and people caught on.  Especially the people who like to make original and compelling cinema (though del Toro's recent Voltron remake makes me wonder). 

That's beside the point.  The point is that Star Wars isn't a franchise that people want to get behind anymore.  It's too restrictive, too puerile (case in point: Han shot first).  It's too childish (but once more, Peter Jackson seems to be doing okay making childish adaptations of beloved stories).  Regardless.  If Disney want to turn the ship of Star Wars around, they need a serious marketing coup.  They need to address the silliness of the franchise so that it appeals to the hard-core fans, while accruing new fans along the way.  I think they should start pounding out the books again, leverage some of their capital into fan films, or maybe even a series of webisodes that could boost interest and drive sales.  Somehow, Disney has to make us all believe in the Force again.