Book Review: Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee

I have read a number of novels/stories by the authors focused on in this work of scholarship (Asimov, Heinlein, and Campbell) with the exception of Hubbard. I was always put off by the ridiculous TV advertisements with exploding meteors and claims of intellectual wonders used to promote Dianetics in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Nevala-Lee’s work here however brings all four of these individuals together and weaves their relationship with one another with their frequent editor, collaborator, mentor, and frenemy, Campbell at the center of everything.

I had not known how tightly they were associated with one another professionally and personally—from employment as writers to that as workers within industry during WWII…from sharing ideas on their work to familial relationships. Coming together and falling apart numerous times over the span of 40+ years, each on to their own deserves a deep biography.

Here it is more their interconnected stories and how they relate to Campbell as the force that pushed them out into worldwide acceptance that is the focus. The work stands as a fantastic primer for understanding any of these complex men who all had deep faults yet unique geniuses as well.

Nevala-Lee doesn’t preach at the reader regarding these faults and largely is able to stay in the background, revealing what they are without being overly judgmental—which must have been immensely difficult given what some of these faults were (gross racism, parental negligence, fraud, sexual assault, and so on). Now…to be fair, some of these behaviors were products of their time, simply doing business as business was done and what were acceptable societal norms at the time and so Lee does an excellent job of steering away from applying modern mores to distant years.

Leaving that behind, the work is stunning in its capture of the cultural impact that these writers and Campbell in particular have had on our views and media. With Dune coming out this year in its second full film workup, it is worth noting that as we see in Astounding Herbert was yet another of Campbell’s discoveries as a writer and had a major if not primary influence on other contributors to how we see science interacting with, benefiting, and threatening humanity including Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, and numerous others. Also note the recent Amazon development of Foundation as a long form series broadcast this year and George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones mid ‘10’s juggernaut as examples of Cambpell’s influence 40+ years after his death.

A very readable work of literary scholarship I’m sure Lee’s efforts here will spawn numerous imitators and inspiration for other works diving into these authors to treat them with the respect they deserve from the standpoint of real “art”. This may be one of the best (not first) steps towards putting Campbell, Heinlein and Asimov in particular on pedestals alongside others such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Mark Twain, Poe, and others who are deemed worthy of such examination. Not Hubbard though…I still can’t get past those exploding meteors…

Truly I am only scratching the surface of what is contained in Astounding. There is so much here that warrants mentioning that Lee goes into. Campbell’s story on the development of a nuclear bomb that came under scrutiny from the Feds during the Manhattan Project because it was felt that it was too close to the truth is one. The absolute batshit insanity of Hubbard and Campbell’s earnest beliefs that things like Scientology, psionics, telepathy, reincarnation and other such fantastical ideas were not only legitimate but that personally controllable, is another. There will be works to come that Astounding will be used as a primary source for a hundred years or more. It is not a good work…but a great one and one that anyone seeking to understand much of our modern culture and thinking must understand given how influential these authors have been on the great powers and thinkers of our time.

Book Review: The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

This will be relatively short.

The book should have been titled “The Big Suck”…cause boy does it disappoint.

Leiber is one of the biggies of mid to late 20th century Sci-Fi along with contemporaries of Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Hubbard, Clarke, Poul Anderson and others. I knew of him some near 40 years ago from my early D&D days with the connections there to the Fafrd and the Grey Mouser line of stories (though never read them), and I may go back and read some of his fantasy work given its supposed similarity to Lovecraft and Howard that I enjoy.

This however? Despite its having been awarded the Hugo Award 1958 it never should have even been published in book form. Starting as a serial tales in Analog magazine, it really should have been boiled down to a very short story and might have been better of.

Essentially a “closed room” or “lifeboat” story, it revolves around a handful of individuals who have been placed in a “R&R House” that is separated from ongoing space-time by a macguffin like device to allow individuals fighting in an ongoing war between unknown groups, to recover their mental and physical wounds. I guess the fact that some of these individuals are “aliens” is supposed to interest us. It doesn’t. beyond hearing that one has tentacles and another is centaur-like…we don’t really know or care anything about them. Nor do we learn to care about the German soldier from WWII or the English poet-soldier from WWI or the women/doctors/bartender who inhabit this R&R space.

Told from a first person perspective of one of the female “entertainers” the story jumps around and results in finding an atomic bomb being placed in this “room” and threatens everyone’s existence because for a period of time the “room” is cut off from other space-time access in a “bubble” that can’t be escaped. Within this trapped bubble the characters attempt to find out who cut them all off and put them at risk…within this various characters try to work out their issues with popping in and out of history to fight a war they don’t understand why they are fighting…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….

None of it is very enthralling, the characters don’t carry any weight, and there isn’t much development over the length of the work. The story doesn’t go anywhere literally or figuratively. No real lessons are learned by either the reader or the characters. It should have remained a brief snippet of a magazine rather than being dragged out for near 200 painful pages. Blech.

TV Review: Zero Zero Zero

What an excellent show. Largely unhyped here in the US, this show has been on Amazon Prime in recent months and stands up with anything HBO, Netflix, or any other network can produce. Admittedly its not an Amazon product other than the money used to acquire its rights but…It deserves watching over 99% of what is out there.

Americans likely aren’t enthused by it given 2/3 of the show is subtitled as it divides its interconnected stories between Italy, Mexico, and the US for their bases. Don’t let that put you off. If you enjoy dark, modern tales of how the dirty, violent, and unfair the world actually is…this is for you.

Beautifully shot across the globe (including some of my personal favorites in New Orleans, Dakar, Casablanca) the beauty of the natural world—oceans and deserts and mountains and forests—is contrasted with that of our world which seems to be strewn with blood, lies, deception, and betrayal. Production values here are as high as any Bond film…but the “heroes” don’t escape with parkour run across rooftops…they die of disease, knives, bullets and by human hands.

Comparisons?? Well, for me (admittedly short of experience with some of the writers and directors other works) it carries similarities in style and story and violence with Netflix’s Narcos, the Sicario films, and much of Ridley Scott’s portfolio—Blackhawk Down, Black Rain, The Counselor to name a couple. No one as a character comes out looking like a hero…but you do FEEL for these anti-heroes, becoming invested in their stories and outcomes. Which is what the best of these works do. You begin to enjoy Pablo Escobar in Narcos, you begin to empathize with the hitman in Sicario…The same holds true here with the drug dealers, cocaine middlemen and Italian Mafioso.

A revelation in the work is the actor Harold Torres, who has had roles in numerous Mexican films and been up for the equivalent of an Oscar (for whatever that means) a number of times already in his young career. Here as a corrupt Mexican army soldier forming his own paramilitary narco commander he dominates the screen whenever he appears despite a lack of dialogue.

The direction too is phenomenal. When my wife comments on how much she likes the tracking shots or camera movements as a scene transitions from a hospital birthing room to the loading of trucks with soldiers on their way to massacre a birthday party, you know there is some talent behind the lens.

Don’t miss this one. Its is superb from start to finish.

Book Review: Hammer's Slammers by David Drake

Wish I could say I got through this and enjoyed it. Not to be however. As I’ve stated previously, I have made an executive decision to put books down and move on that I don’t enjoy rather than struggling through them to completion as I used to. There is just too little time for bad books.

So what made me put it down? I mean its kinda in my wheelhouse being a military sci-fi work right? Well, it falls into a category of those same works that really turns me off…which are sci-fi books in general and military sci-fi books in particular that project waaaaay out into the future (interplanetary travel, multi-world empires, and so on) and yet incorporate so much of what is present in our current world as to be unbelievable. There is zero possibility of a suspension of disbelief on my part or an investment in a story when the author is project some thousands of years in the future and yet…here we are with protagonists using “guns” and fission power plants, and adhering to what we have as modern religions which drive entire societies. Sorry but your book felt aged a year after it hit print and it feels grossly aged now.

Drake, for whatever his military and educational background (which is seemingly deep and notable) lacks for imagination beyond what he sees in front of him today (or 1979 as it were when he wrote it). His military experience from Vietnam is taken and projected far into the future and it reads that way—a mishmash of militarisms from 50 years ago mixed with technologies that we are already familiar with but projected thousands of years forward. Sorry…but we have drones, we have fission, we have homosexuals serving in the military, we have advanced laser weapons, small scale nukes, and, yes, relevant here, even large scale mercenary armies operating at the whim of various governments. The book reads like someone imagined the military of 1985 from a position of 1979 and then picked it up and transplanted it to the year 3500 with nothing having changed in between. Been there, done that, and moved on. I much prefer a work like The Forever War by Joe Haldeman which also falls into the military sci-fi genre but is more focused on the depth of characters and human nature than machines and technology. Human nature endures. Technology does not.

Add to that the “pulpy” nature of the work (just the name of the book alone sends shivers down my spine) and it feels like an unserious piece. Just couldn’t do it. Its content and flavor belong more in a pre-teen’s comic book than it does in a deep military-sci-fi work. Next!

TV Review: Long Way Up

As an avid motorcyclist both dirt bike and ADV in their forms and having read Ewan McGregor’s written recap of Long Way Down, I’ve always followed along with he and Charley Boorman’s motorcycle adventures around the globe.

Here on AppleTV the budget is definitely there and the videography is the best of the series taking full advantage of modern HD cameras and drone capabilities. Eye candy abounds in all the different, truly stunning locations.

Previously on much more dirt oriented BMW GS bikes and crossing much more “off piste” terrain, Long Way Up sees them on Harley Davidsons and modified, roadgoing, electric ones at that. There was a great deal of hand wringing in the ADV community over this feeling that such a choice took away from the true adventure nature of the prior trips, confining the riders to tarmac and more travelled locales.

It does end up doing so…no doubt about it. The choice also has significant impacts on the continuity of the trip as you’ll see in viewing, causing very specific decisions based upon the limitations of both the electric and prototype nature of the vehicles.

It is debatable just how different the trip COULD have been, even if on the most current big BMWs or KTMs. For one, Boorman has been through quite a number of severe accidents over the years, ravaging his lower extremities in particular leaving him with a pronounced limp, weakened legs and as I saw it, quite unable to manage a 600 pound bike in a deeply offroad environ. Even in the limited dirt oriented sections of this route he struggles in both strength and confidence. McGregor on the other hand, while healthy, does not have the skill his Dakar and offroad racing companion possesses regardless of his impairments.

Both are some 20 years older than they were in the first version of these trips and a pavement focus here was perhaps inevitable. None of this is to say it makes the trip in its TV installment version much less enjoyable. At its heart the show is still more about the relationship between two lifelong friends out on a adventuresome walkabout than it is about the choice of bike brand or knobbieness of their tires.

Seeing the great salt flats of Bolivia, mountains of Patagonia, ruins of Machu Pichu, and local people all along the route are the key memories one takes away and would have been included and visited no matter the bike capabilities and exchanged here for flat tires and mud-stuck bikes are electric range concerns, broken support vehicles and hostage taking threats. Its all good…just different.

Two items of note: 1) Mexico in its lengthy geography is almost skipped entirely. A bit surprising given the potential of the landscapes and events but was crammed into the length of a single episode largely due to security concerns real or imagined that force the riders off their bikes for extended periods of travel 2) this truly felt like the end of these adventures. Not said explicitly but in having going around the globe, from Scotland to South Africa and now from the southern tip of Argentina to LA, I’m not sure what a next trip could encompass. A circumnavigation of Australia perhaps?? But in all likelyhood given Boorman’s body, McGregor’s recent divorce, the exhaustion of long trip routes and the demands Father Time puts on us all, this feels like the end.

Its been a good run, enjoyable in all its forms and worth it for simply encouraging folks to get out there and experience all our tiny little ball has to offer, even if nothing comes of it more than dreams.

TV Review: Tiny World

This is one of the few shows to date that I’ve watched on Apple TV+ and its almost worth the service and its monthly sub $10 cost for this alone. This isn’t an Apple TV+ ad but I’ve enjoyed other programs from this service as well. We’ll see if their quality continues.

Tiny World narrated by Paul Rudd with a nice American voice spoken in a very calm and “nature show” manner with just a hint of his typical sarcastic and juvenile humor tone is focused on the small creatures that quite often go unnoticed in our natural world. At such a minute scale virtually all creatures become “cute” and are anthropomorphized so that the viewer can see themselves even in a spider.

The show nicely glosses over blood and guts of the natural world while still showing its kill or be killed nature…it just Disney-fies it a bit to make the show particularly viewable for children, likewise for mating and sex. Which I’m sure was deliberate. This isn’t a scientific discourse.

Taking place over six episodes, each in a different habitat and filmed over ten years, it is the camera work and imagery that you are left with. The colors are heightened for effect, music moves in time with animal displays and so on. Its a wonderfully enjoyable product helping you appreciate the world beneath all our feet and the fragility of life.

Taking things a bit beyond just the beauty of the show, it becomes to me an important primer for youth on evolution and species differentiation. Seeing the unique and remarkable adaptations to their environment and pressures of these animals makes you almost wonder if there isn’t some grand artist behind the scenes directing things…almost. Its when you make the logical connections behind each of these unique adaptations—from colors to arrow sharp tongues to poison spittle to predator mimicry that you understand the long paths that these species took to get there. This makes it all more impactful as you realize it has taken countless millennia to get these tiny wonders to the exquisite beauty and functions they have today…all of which can be wiped away in a fraction of time.

Absolutely worth watching yourself and should be viewed by every grade school class to fire their imagination and thinking.

Book Review: West With The Night

Just a brilliant book. Let’s start there.

Now many have compared it to (largely because of his flattering comments on the work) Hemingway’s works and I don’t find it too far off base. Hemingway I find deeper in its prose requiring rereadings to understand what is being truly said behind the simple language while this work is truly autobiographical in nature and more straightforward in its recollection. That said…its descriptions of flight, of hunting, of African life…all ring similar to Papa’s works.

Beryl lived an incredible life and shares it in unflinching memory here. From her life as an only child (she did have a brother but he is not present here) growing up on a farm and grain mill in east Africa, she inhabits the same lands as Hemingway’s stories and is in a manner…more scandalous. Her numerous affairs with members of British Royalty, Antoine de Saint Exupery, Denys Hatton and numerous others makes for great ink but its her independent adventurous nature that makes for the best tales. Savaged by a lion and later a warthog, raising, training and racing horses, largely left to her own devices amongst the tribesmen (she cared not for the activities of the tribeswomen) of Kenya, becoming a skilled pilot to the point of being the first PERSON to cross the Atlantic from East to West as well as the first commercial pilot in Africa and on and on. She filled her lifetime with enough stories, adventures, anecdotes and experiences to fill multiple lifetimes…this book capture a mere shadow of what she was.

The style is understated and rings true throughout. Having travelled to Kenya, Egypt and elsewhere that she describes one can see vestiges of what she saw some 90 years ago and feel the love she had for the continent and its people. The work is as quotable as near anything I’ve come across with just one example here though you could pick any page at random and find similar brilliant handiwork “I look at my yesterdays for months past, and find them as good a lot of yesterdays as anybody might want. I sit there in the firelight and see them all. The hours that made them were good, and so were the moments that made the hours. I have had responsibilities and work, dangers and pleasure, good friends, and a world without walls to live in.”

Great stuff…enjoy it. Its a rare gift.

Film Review: Midnight Special

Wow…what a gods awful film. I have rarely seen a bigger pile of dung and only goes to show what clickbait and media shills will do to try and drive views and revenue.

I came across one of those eye grabbing headlines on the Inverse website that was jammed into my brain by the Google algorithm seeming to key off my love of sci-fi. Well…Inverse is owned by “Bustle” which bought the old trash Gawker sites and has a ton of other “millennial” garbage sites as well. So I should have known.

But I didn’t. So when I saw the headline “The One Sci-Fi Movie You Must See Before It Leaves Netflix” I read through its article proclaiming how great Midnight Special was and then watched it the following weekend.

On the surface you’d think a film with Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Sam Shephard and Adam Driver would be a lock to be good or at least well produced and that the actors would demand quality writing. Not so much.

Never have I watched a film with as many holes and question marks at this. Nothing…literally nothing is explained. Nothing makes sense. Characters show up and leave without explanation. No exposition is provided on anyone. Primary characters divorced but now meeting up? No explanation. Key “bad” guy having left the “ranch” but now providing help to the protagonist? No explanation. Blue light coming out of a child’s eyes? No reason. The earth shaking and splitting when the boy has light out of his eyes? No explanation. Aliens showing up from an alternate dimension? No explanation. And the biggie…the boy with blue eyes born to the divorced couple ends up BEING one of the aliens…How’d that happen?? No explanation.

What a complete, gross example of waste and hubris. This film could not possibly be worse…yet there it is…across the internet proclaiming how great it is with “aggregate critic and public scoring” to back up its claims!! Its a sham…its all a sham. Never…ever…waste your time on this.

Book Review: Stranger in a Strange Land

I REALLY wanted to like this work…Heinlein is a great SciFi novelist having written at least one of my all time favorite sci-fi works in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as well as Starship Troopers which is also great but just short of TMIAHM.

Unfortunately I have to agree with some of the quotes from the original NYT review which included a feeling that it is “a disastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire and cheap eroticism”. While “disastrous” is a bit of a stretch, this overly lengthy work is of Heinlein’s lesser ones despite the platitudes it has been given and that it is his best selling work.

Crafted over a decade SIASL feels like it….in fact it feels like at least two separate novels in one. The first is more traditional Heinlein with an individual caught up in strange circumstances beyond their control and having to deal with it as the sci-fi part is brought in with the central character being a human who was born on Mars and raised by Martians, arriving back on Earth as an adult with capabilities far beyond those of existing Earth residents.

The second novel and the part that is the most tedious develops as this “Man From Mars” attempts to reshape humanity into a new ideal. Inclusive in this new ideal are commune living, spouse sharing, psychic powers, teleportation, and more. Zzzzzzz….Now Heinlein himself has said that he wrote this as a challenge to existing social mores and could not have published it when he first thought of it in 1948 due to then cultural restrictions—to which I say “hogwash”. There is nothing here that Hemingway, Henry Miller, Shakespeare or a 100 other known writers hadn’t already published…nothing scandalous beyond its peers certainly. Instead I believe his delay in publishing was simply that the story wasn’t good enough and was just adding to it and adding to it and by a certain point, his initial structure went by the wayside and he got waylaid by his puerile focus on “free love”…Now this was prior to the big hippy movement, so of course this book sometimes got thrown in with the Beats and similar and called a great piece deconstructing our existing society but I think Heinlein ended up with this content as many sci-fi nerds do—curiosity due to repression and inexperience.

Regardless of how he came to it, the second half of the work’s focus on “free sex” being a key component to transcendental growth of humanity comes off grossly juvenile. As Heinlein drags on and on and on as more and more of the central characters get drawn into the “free love” circle of the “Man from Mars”, one, as a reader responds with “OK, I get it…move on…” but Heinlein never does.

Referring back to the prior statement that Heinlein wanted to “challenge current mores”, he doesn’t really have any mores he wants to challenge in detail other than monogamy….race isn’t really brought up, nor is capitalism in any meaningful way. Religion gets a bit of a critique but gets wrapped directly into the “free love” commentary as well so doesn’t stand on its own. Again I revert to Heinlein’s lack of focus, length of the novel’s creation and fixation on his personal values than any desire to critique others or drive meaningful discussion. This one will NOT be going on my shelf alongside his better works…

Three Sci-Fi Novels...Two Good...One, Not So Much...

Maybe I’m just a classic Sci-Fi fan and am officially an “old”….

But then again…I’ll take the fact that I greatly enjoyed Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and could not stand Consider Phelbas as a sign that I’m not quite ready for “retirement” yet.

Philip K. Dick’s seminal “DADOES” is of course the basis for the movie Bladerunner and one of if not the most well known of his works. Having read other novels by Dick I was not prepared for such a straightforward read. Less psychedelic than something such as Lies, Inc. or retro as The Man in the High Castle DADOES is more of a futuristic Raymond Chandler work than anything else with the beaten down gumshoe, perpetrators in hiding and femme fatale all included. Its a bit hard to read without picturing Harrison Ford as the protagonist and Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty given how closely the movie hewed to the book but seeing the film first and then reading the novel does not ruin the experience and each stands on its own as a masterpiece of its format. Ridley Scott’s film ends up being far more cyberpunk in nature and while still a core of any sci-fi curriculum, DADOES resembles The Man in the High Castle than it does something like Neuromancer or Snow Crash. Regardless, you will still be stunned by how prescient it is and how many underlying themes of AI, the nature of consciousness, role of media, etc. that are present here look out from their post some 50 years ago at today’s world. Putting this up there with 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 is completely appropriate.

Consider Phelbas on the other hand is an overly long, meandering, mess of a “space opera”. I began reading it as, well, Elon Musk kept naming his drone ships used to recover SpaceX rockets out in the ocean after ships present in these novels and I kept hearing about how these series of books by Iain Banks were so great and such a wonderful representation of AI, that I had to read them. I could not have been more disappointed. Outrageously long (seriously, do some authors get paid by the word?), silly in its action, disjointed, muddled, without purpose and seemingly just a series of ridiculous mishaps befalling the main character over and over. Throw in moronic depictions of “aliens” all over the place and you have a cajun soup of spacefaring tropes….I’ll pass regardless of who may think the book is worth it. Musk likely enjoyed it during an acid trip or two where everything seems “cool” without real analysis…

Lastly and unmentioned till now is Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers which is barely a sci-fi novel to begin with and unlike DADOES, its film version is NOTHING like the novel and in fact rather than honoring the novel, the film seeks to repudiate and make fun of the novel (connecting the Starship Troopers film to DADOES, Paul Verhoven the Starship Troopers director also filmed Total Recall, a film version of We’ll Remember it for You Wholesale another Phillip K. Dick short story). The written work contains nothing of the “action” one would expect. Outside of a short battle scene at the very beginning of the novel and a somewhat longer one that concludes the work the vast majority of the book is alternatively a description of training and integration into the Mobile Infantry as well as what are long, descriptive viewpoints given by various authority figures under which the protagonist receives his tutelage. Many a critic has taken issue with this, seeing it as merely being a mouthpiece for the author to express his views on the military, evils of communism, and growing softness of the West in general. Others have taken it further and put the work under scrutiny for racism, misongynism, and all sorts of other perceived evil “isms”. Critics, like Verhoven the direct of the film “version” miss much of the underlying themes or care not to find value in them. Heinlein was a well known Libertarian…not a facist, not a racist (hell, the main character here is of Philippine lineage). Heinlein was also vehemently anti-communist—thus the communistic nature of the “bugs” that are fought here. Value is placed in sacrifice of self for the benefit of society and I can hardly think of a more “leftist” viewpoint…but that is ignored by critics because of the positive light the military is given. Here the military is the savior of society…not just a somewhat necessary evil that many liberal school indoctrinated critics and “artists” see it as. Pairing this work with Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a phenomenal start for anyone interested in looking at the world through eyes which do not distinguish between race, religion, or any other characteristic other than what an individual brings of value to their fellow humans. Great works both.

True Detective Season 3 Review

I had hopes coming into this season…not high hopes….just hopes.

After the disaster that was Season 2 that contained some of the worst dialogue and writing this side of a B-movie the producers tried to revert to the form of Season 1 which was some of the most intense drama ever created for the small screen.

In some respects Season 3 staring the now multiple Oscar winning Mahershala Ali succeeds and in others it falls far short. The acting is solid all around with exactly zero over the top, out of place performances like Season 2 was filled with from Vince Vaughn in particular. Ali and his cop partner played by a surprisingly effective Stephen Dorff are compelling characters each with their own vulnerabilities and both worth investing in. Carmen Ejojo, Ali’s wife in the series is less engrossing and is actually a turn off for the series with her portrayal of an independent, driven wife often distracting and not really pertinent to the core issues. Time and again we return to her as a token lead female for the sake of doing so but without real purpose.

I suppose the writers intended for her to be Ali’s anchor…the rock on which he would break…but in fact that role is already filled by Dorff who by the end clearly realizes that the most valuable person in his live has been his male partner…someone he can’t live without.

But I digress…the real issue here is the lack of real drama. Brooding music and a crazy Indian who blows up his house aside, I came away surprisingly bored. Skewer Season 2 all you want….and its a disaster…but I never found myself falling asleep during it. Here? We end up with a decidedly non-interesting finale in which everything turns out pretty much OK and we find out that the reason for all the not-really-that-horrible things we’ve witnessed was a sad daughter who wanted a surrogate child to take care of and then had a mental breakdown…not exactly the Satanic cults, human sacrifice, and frightening atmosphere of Season 1 nor the political and business infighting and violence found in Season 2.

Was Season 3 “bad”? No, not really. Was it a step up from Season 2 and redeem the series for the possible development of Season 4? Yes. Are critics climbing over themselves to declare it the best of the three seasons? Absolutely…and for various reasons including their own agendas. Don’t feel you’ve missed anything if you haven’t seen it. You haven’t and its not driving the common discourse the way Season 1 did week after week. As the police might say “Move along, move along…nothing to see here…”

Black Mirror Bandersnatch

Black Mirror as a series is one of my favorite items on all of TV. I was an early adopter on this and it rarely lets me down. Seminal episodes like “San Junipero” and others are simply the best of what has been produced on all visual media in the past 20 years.

The most recent episode if you can call it that is a one off “movie” of sorts released just a few days ago and if are here, I’m betting you’ve heard of it given its hype. The series pushes the envelope a bit with this one and it doesn’t completely succeed. The whole “audience chooses the outcome” movie/TV thing has been done in the past and this is probably the best effort in this direction to date but the whole format, while interesting for artists, always leaves the audience experience lacking.

The acting and story are great and hop on the retro-cool of the 1980’s thing that is popular at the moment and carry it off well. Throw in the geek-chic dialogue and mentions of Commodore computers, early stage video game industry, new wave music drops and it all seems like a home run.

The conceit here is that as you progress through the movie, you, the audience get to chime in with what you want the main character’s decisions to be. What you choose through a click of your remote determines various outcomes in the film—Will the character listen to this music or that music? Will he accept the job or not? Will he punch his dad or run out of the room and so on…

In the end there are really about (I say about because there are numerous rabbit holes you can go down and lots of easter eggs to be found) five endings to get to and I got to all five making different decisions and being looped back to redo decisions when my original ones end the film quickly. In all my experience lasted close to an hour and a half and much of it was enjoyable…but I couldn’t help feeling like there was only one true ending that the directer really wanted and every time I made a decision that branched off from that ending, it would loop me back eventually. Great…I get to see what the director thinks of my decisions but I don't get a complete narratively cohesive work. Watching a film and seeing that the story can have multiple endings takes away from the emotional impact of all of them…Its like watching the Godfather and being told—Well, Don Corleone only has to die if you choose for him to die…great…that totally ruins the weight of the work.

I applaud Netflix for attempting this and Black Mirror was certainly the right vehicle for the effort. While supremely interesting and among the best things on TV, this singular episode is both a success and a failure at the same time….much like its audience driven methodology.

Oh and in case you were wondering…”Bandersnatch” Its a silly word for an imaginary creature coming from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”, the companion piece to “Alice in Wonderland” and specifically the “Jabberwocky” poem contained within it…

Too Old for Bad Books

So this is where I’ve gotten to be in life…

No longer am I willing to continue slogging through books in order to get to the end and claim that I’ve finished it, no matter how revered the book is or what status it may imbue upon me to be able to legitimately claim to have read it. Life is too short.

Up first on my “discontinue” list? Two revered books from completely different genres.

Initially I thought “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” was going to be an interesting reflection and wise observation on the protagonist’s life intertwined with the focus and simple mechanics that make a motorcycle run. In reality it immediately devolves into the author’s cult like psychobabble that appeals only to those hippies who have dropped acid too many times to know the difference between good and bad material. The fact that this book has been purchased so many times only means there are a lot of brain dead people out there…Not worth my or your time…

I did get several hundred pages into the book because Pirsig weaves a thread into the work covering the protagonist’s (really Pirsig himself) travels with his son cross country on, yes, a motorcycle. This real world story is far more interesting than the metaphysical babble (author was a philosophy and journalism major and went to Zen conferences and studied “Eastern Thought”…) the author tries to impart as advice on his audience. The father-son interplay is far more interesting…but not enough to keep one reading

Second on my list? Another beloved work but here from the SciFi genre. As a youth there were always peer geeks who slavishly spoke about how great and how funny “Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” was. Maybe if I was an 11 year old boy I would have been able to finish this but certainly not now. Its not that I’m humorless, I find many things to be funny. It’s not that I don’t enjoy different strains of humor—Monty Python to Beavis and Butthead I find humor in. And geeky? Well I’ll have you know I think I still have some D20s rolling around my house somewhere. This work is just “silly”…and not in a good way. It is so nonsensical as to dull the wit. Words are fabricated, tangents are taken, non-sequiturs used…all to little effect. Adams (author) does not bring me in to care about Arthur Dent or Ford Prefect (the two main characters) and they remain cardboard cutouts of zero consequence in the first 100 pages where I left it off to be moronic and useless and sold on Amazon for 25 cents.

So there is my philosophy for the day…life is too short...there is too much rare good out there to spend time wasting with the popular bad…