→ December 8, 2020
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Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.

Over the summer, I linked to an interesting longread in The Guardian, an excerpt from a new book by James Nestor called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. The excerpt and the title both promised an evidence-based approach to the rather fundamental act of respiration, one that comes up in areas from pulmonary and cardiovascular health to allergies to meditation and mindfulness. It was a huge disappointment: Breath is a lot of woo and anecdote, with a little bit of science hidden in the endnotes. It imparts very little useful information on how to improve your breathing, or address any problems with it.

Nestor starts Breath explaining an experiment he and a fellow “pulmonaut” underwent, where they agreed to block their nasal passages so they’d be forced to breath through their mouths for about three weeks , so they could see how much their health would deteriorate in the meantime. From there, he points out that humans are the only species with our wide range of dental problems, a product of evolution and our changing diet, and speculates that this has led to a constricted airway (which creates the conditions for sleep apnea) and says most of us are just breathing the wrong way.

One major way in which we do it wrong is breathing through our mouths, which bypasses the nose’s air-filtering, humidifying, and warming mechanisms, which came about via evolution and allow us to take less particulate matter into our lungs, while getting warmer, less dry air. Nasal breathing helps filter out some airborne pathogens, while the mouth has no such filtration. There’s even some evidence that breathing through the nose while exercising can improve performance, because “breathing through the nose releases nitric oxide, which is necessary to increase carbon dioxide (CO2) in the blood, which, in turn, is what releases oxygen.”

There’s at least some scientific evidence to back up the claims he presents in those parts of the book, and there’s copious evidence that sleep apnea is associated with serious health problems over the long term. As the book progresses, however, he veers farther and farther into pseudoscientific territory, discussing the Hindu concept of prana (the life force coursing through all living things in Hinduism) as if it were a scientific fact, which it’s not. He mentions how he breathes through his right nostril to improve his digestion, a belief from yoga that appears to have zero scientific evidence to support it. He also appears to advocate some extreme breathing hacks, such as the Buddhist method known as g Tum-mo meditation, that have little to no controlled research showing their efficacy or safety. There are even some internal contradictions here around hypoventilation and its effects, especially since there’s at least some literature showing a connection between hypoventilation and obesity.

I have some very mild breathing issues, mostly connected to sleeping, and thought I might get some useful tips from Breath to help with that, but all I really got out of the book was the advice to breathe more slowly, and remind myself to breathe through my nose when exercising. The former is something you’d get from any resource on mindful meditation, all of which start out with awareness-of-breath exercises. The latter is something I tried on Monday during a run … without success. It turns out that when it’s 40 degrees outside, breathing through your nose is not all that effective in delivering warm, moist air to your lungs, which is counterproductive when you’re trying to run at peak capacity. Apparently this is something you can build up to doing through practice, which I will continue to try to do over the next few weeks, but this isn’t advice for the larger audience.

There’s probably a decent book to write on this topic, but Breath isn’t it. With too much reliance on anecdote and the eventual devolution into woo, it’s not the kind of evidence-based argument I’d want to see for anything related to health or wellness.

Next up: I’ve got a few other books to review, but at the moment I’m reading Jude the Obscure.

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→ October 2, 2020
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Enola Holmes.

Enola Holmes is utter dreck, a mediocre mystery wrapped in the cloak of a superior writer’s creation and some quality set design, wasting two solid actresses on a script desperate to tell you how clever it is. There have been worthwhile adaptations and continuations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work and iconic character, but this is just plain boring.

Enola Holmes, you see, is Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister, a fabrication by the author Nancy Springer for a series of books that posit that this 14-year-old girl, unmentioned by Doyle, was as quick-witted as her older brothers, with a special talent for cryptography. When her brothers try to send her off to finishing school, she absconds to London and starts a detective agency of her own, specializing in missing persons cases (as, I presume, murder was a bit much for the young adult literature market).

This Netflix adaptation of the series’ first book, The Case of the Missing Marquess, starts with Enola (Millie Bobby Brown, so critical as El on Stranger Things) at home with her mother (Helena Bonham Carter), but when the latter vanishes, Enola’s brothers show up to decide her fate. Mycroft is especially disdainful of her most unladylike ways and thus the stronger advocate of sending her off to a finishing school run by a Miss Harrison (Fiona Shaw, also wasted in a minor role), while Sherlock (Henry Cavill, decidedly un-super here) equivocates and shows a soft spot for his younger sister. Enola takes off and encounters another fugitive, Lord Tewksbury, and the two pair up while on the run, separating in London before circumstances throw them together again – while both are pursued by a mysterious, creepy man named Linthorn who looks too much like a young Willem Dafoe. Enola tries to secure her freedom while figuring out the mystery around Tewksbury’s flight and avoiding her brothers and the interference of Inspector Lestrade.

The story is a convoluted mess, overly reliant on coincidence and failing to give Enola enough of a reason to solve the Tewksbury tangle. Enola’s character is just Sherlock as a teenaged girl, transmuting his disregard for rules and cold manner into a mischievous pixie who breaks the fourth wall with irritating frequency. (And of course she has to say “the game is afoot,” a hackneyedphrase Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes said exactly one time in all of the stories.) She takes off for London with a pile of money her mother presciently left hidden for her in a location she’s disguised with a cipher that Enola cracks, and has little trouble tracking her mother’s movements through the London underground – that’s another preposterous subplot that I won’t spoil because it’s just so stupid. While there, she just bumps into Tewksbury again, because the story needs them to run into each other.

The Sherlock character is a softer and kinder version of the one present in most of the stories and in film versions, which has made the film the subject of a peculiar lawsuit by the Doyle estate. (The character of Sherlock is in the public domain because most of the works that include him have lost their copyright protection; the estate claims that this film uses a later version of Sherlock where he shows emotion, and thus isn’t in the public domain.) This poses two problems: It’s not the Sherlock most of us know from canon or from depictions like Benedict Cumberbatch’s, and it also makes Sherlock really, really boring. There are no pithy observations, no witty ripostes, and none of the charm of watching his brain at work, which is a huge part of the appeal of Doyle’s writing – the same as it is for Agatha Christie’s Poirot or Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Wimsey.

This feels more than anything like an attempt to profit from someone else’s creation, because it’s devoid of anything original or interesting. Brown might play the single most important character in Stranger Things‘ ever-growing ensemble, although I think there are times the script pushes her to overact. She never inhabits this character, however, and the reason is probably that the character itself is two-dimensional and cartoonish. For a movie that’s been heavily hyped and received positive reviews, Enola Holmes is a shocking dud. If you’re a fan of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, you’d do well to stay away.

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→ September 9, 2020
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A Memory Called Empire.

Arkady Martine, the pen name of Canadian historian AnnaLinden Weller, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year for her debut work A Memory Called Empire, a pretentious anachronism of a book that spends far too much time and energy on arcana like its invented language or obscure terms from poetry and semiotics, and too little on matters like plot or character development.

A Memory Called Empire takes us to the Teixcalaanli Empire, an interstellar domain at some unspecified date in the future, where we meet Mahit Dzmare, the brand-new ambassador from a remote outpost called Lsel. Lsel is independent, although its status is precarious, located in a gravity well near a significant jumpgate used for interstellar travel, and Mahit’s predecessor died under mysterious circumstances. Mahit has a neurological implant called an imago machine that contains the memories and at least some of the personality of her predecessor, although it’s from fifteen years earlier, before he left Lsel for Teixcalaan. The Empire is in the midst of several political crises – an incipient revolution, a possible invasion by an alien race, and a question around who will succeed the aging Emperor. When someone also tries to assassinate Mahit, it becomes clear that her predecessor’s death was no accident, and leads her into an intrigue that will ultimately go all the way up to the throne.

The political story here isn’t actually that compelling because Martine doesn’t earn it with the setup. There’s no reason for the reader to care about who is going to succeed the emperor, or whether the possible civil war will come to pass, because we have no idea what the current regime’s policies are, or whether the people are satisfied or even prospering. The individual personalities involved in the intrigue aren’t well-developed and there’s zero sense of whether we should root for any person or faction other than the obvious question of who killed Mahit’s predecessor and appears to now want her dead as well.

Martine commits a pair of cardinal sins common to bad science fiction or fantasy: She obsesses over fake vocabulary, making it look alien with unusual or unpronounceable letter combinations; and she wastes a ton of time on specifics about the culture or science being depicted. You can see the former in the names I listed above; most constructed words in this book have at least one x or z, often several, and have a general lack of vowels in places where they’d be welcome. The latter problem pops up all over the place in discussions of linguistics, orthography, and especially in the Teixcalaanli method of communicating through poetry or verse, much of which people in the Empire memorize as did so many educated Britons a few hundred years ago. This presents myriad problems, not the least of which is that nobody gives a shit about this stuff and it has less than nothing to do with the plot. It’s abysmal, punctuated by Martine’s use of obscure terms from poetry analysis (ekphrasis, phatic, encomiastic, and scansion among them). It’s also hard to believe that an advanced civilization would be this hung up on traditions that, in our history, fell out of fashion several centuries ago. There’s probably some sort of correlation between the development of faster-than-light travel and declining usage of anapests, although I haven’t seen hard evidence on that. The result is a book that feels pretentious from its title on through the resolution.

The imago-machines are the one truly novel element in A Memory Called Empire, but Mahit’s malfunctions early in the book and we go a few hundred pages before she gets it back again, so the exploration of what that merging of memories and personalities might mean is limited. It’s a clever idea, and the absence of the machine that Mahit expects to be there, and to help guide her through difficult situations in her new role as ambassador, is a significant plot point for much of the novel – but to us, it simply reduces Mahit to our level. The chance of real insight into what makes us us, and how the experiences and thoughts of others help change and define who we are, is largely lost by the malfunction of Mahit’s imago-machine, reducing the novel to a somewhat slow-paced spy story, and one where even Mahit is so two-dimensional that I couldn’t get concerned whether she figured out who killed her predecessor or even whether she survived.

Next up: I’m hosting a livestreamed event with Chuck Palahniuk on Friday, so after finishing his new book, The Invention of Sound, I’ve started his previous one, Adjustment Day.

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→ September 3, 2020
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The Burnt Orange Heresy.

The Burnt Orange Heresy adapts the best-reviewed book by pulp author Charles Ray Willeford, a short 1971 novel where Willeford took aim at the worlds of art and art criticism inside the framework of a thriller. For about 80 minutes, it’s a great ride, a long con with a handful of actors at the tops of their games … and then it flubs the ending as severely as any film in recent memory, comparable to First Reformed but with so much less to redeem it before the missteps.

James Figueras (Claes Bang) is an art critic giving a talk to American tourists about how important art criticism is when Berenice (Elizabeth Debicki) wanders in towards the end of the talk; the two strike up a flirtatious conversation and quickly end up in bed. She says they’ll never see each other again, but he seems to have other ideas and invites her along for a weekend at the country house of the wealthy art dealer Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger, his first film role in two decades). It turns out that Cassidy wants to involve Figueras, who has some shady dealings in his past, in a scheme to steal one of the last paintings by the reclusive artist Debney (Donald Sutherland), who lives in the guest house on Cassidy’s estate and hasn’t released any paintings in a half century. This plot has unforeseen complications, of course, leading to tragic consequences.

While the film sets up the plot, this film is as tight as any heist movie from recent years – tighter, say, than Widows, a superior film overall that also featured Debicki – and largely gets you on the wavelength of the characters. I’m not totally sold on the chemistry between Bang and Debicki, but the dialogue works and when they disagree, the tension builds slowly from within. (It helps that they are both giants; Bang is 6’4″, Debicki 6’3″, so they’re eye to eye – and it’s funny how they tower over Jagger and Sutherland.) Bang is a very convincing con man; the entire opening sequence, where he delivers his seminar to the happy tourists, is a clinic in grabbing an audience’s attention and holding them rapt. He’s weirdly charming, although I’d say his charm works more when he’s playing the art critic than when he’s wooing Berenice. Jagger, meanwhile, is clearly having the time of his life as Cassidy, hamming it up in a way that might not work for a veteran actor but here, where you can’t exactly forget who he actually is, it works to his advantage.

When this movie hits the final stretch, though, it breaks a leg so gruesomely it should be taken off the track and shot. While it may adhere to the plot of the book, it hinges here on a character doing something so incredibly stupid that it destroys any suspension of disbelief, and then robs us of a fairly critical resolution to a particular arc. That forced decision does get a series of double entendres in an I-know-what-you-did ending, but by that point, I’d thrown in the towel on the plot.

If the novel’s intent was to parody the art world, it comes through in pieces in the film – and, although I’ve seen several reviews that say that aspect of the film is pretentious, I never found it so. It doesn’t expect you to know anything about fine art, and the wry humor of its satirical elements will work even if you don’t follow that world. But for the heist arc, and the way various hints and implications don’t actually pan out in the end, turned this movie from a B+ to a failing grade.

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→ August 10, 2020
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The True History of the Kelly Gang (film).

I enjoyed Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang when I read it ten years ago, but the new film adaptation of the book, released briefly to theaters this spring by IFC Films (now available via amazon), is a huge disappointment. It bears little resemblance to the book, revels in pointless violence, and makes use of some confusing camera tricks that left me with the impression that the filmmakers were more impressed by their technical ideas than they were concerned with making the film comprehensible.

Ned Kelly is a real historical figure, a bushranger and outlaw in 1800s Australia who has become a sort of Robin Hood-style folk hero in the century-plus since his capture and execution. He was born to an Irishman who was forcibly transported to Australia as a convict, and fell in with horse thieves before a violent confrontation at his family house with a Constable named Fitzpatrick led to Ned shooting the Constable and taking flight. He stayed on the run for two years with a ‘gang’ of fellow outlaws, gaining sympathizers across the continent due to antipathy towards the English or distrust of the corrupt colonial police, before he was caught and arrested in a shootout and conflagration that led to the death of Ned’s brother, several hostages, and a 13-year-old boy. Ned was tried and hanged for the murder of one of the officers who had been hunting for him, whom Kelly and his comrades ambushed at Stringybark Creek.

Carey’s novel follows the true story of Ned Kelly fairly closely, at least at the level of macro events, but this film goes its own way, inventing new events out of whole cloth, often to try to amp up the violence or depravity of the story. More than half of its two hours pass before Kelly (played by George Mackay) goes on the run, which happens earlier in the book and opens the door to most of the action in the story. The film dwells too long on Kelly’s upbringing, overdramatizing his tutelage under the bushranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe), then dropping the latter with a one-sentence narration, and jumping ahead in time to show Ned getting out of jail for a crime he committed under Harry’s direction. There’s a lot of underexplanation in this film, and knowing the book or the real story of Ned Kelly isn’t a lot of help because the script deviates so far from both.

The movie has Dan Kelly, Ned’s brother, and his fellow horse-thief Steve wearing fancy dresses on their escapades, a disguise that Ned adopts as well for his gang – something that appears to be pure invention on the part of the screenwriters. The film also implies multiple times that Ned and his friend Joe Byrne were lovers, which doesn’t seem to derive from any historical evidence at all. There’s also a brothel where Ned first meets Fitzpatrick, who later tries to woo his sister; the wooing is true but the house appears to be a fabrication, one that appears multiple times in the story.

The one shining light in the movie is Nicholas Hoult, who plays Fitzpatrick with a sort of disturbing yet genteel charm, although this again doesn’t appear to match the historical record. The real Alexander Fitzpatrick was only a Constable for three years, was a longtime alcoholic, and had a reputation for arresting and charging men on dubious pretenses – such as spiking Ned Kelly’s drink and then arresting him for drunk and disorderly conduct, a probably true story that would actually have made for a good scene in this film. Hoult plays Fitzpatrick less as a lush and more as a proud yet unscrupulous man, one whom you could understand Ned briefly befriending and young women possibly admiring. You might know Hoult as the boy in About a Boy, but he came to my notice more recently in 2018’s The Favourite, where he played the only male character of any substance in the film, a foppish dandy of sorts whom Hoult played to the hilt.

Mackay, unfortunately, plays Ned as a bestial figure, one devoid of nearly all personality or reason; it’s unclear why anyone would follow this madman, let alone why he’d eventually become a folk hero whose legacy is still debated to this day in Australia. Mackay was very good in 1917 and a pleasant surprise in the uneven Captain Fantastic, but this script did nothing to make use of his talents. Dismissive of its main character’s complexity, obsessed instead with pointlessly graphic violence, and shot in eccentric ways, The True History of the Kelly Gang does a disservice to its protagonist and to the book from which it came.

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→ June 17, 2020
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Cyteen.

I started C.J. Cherryh’s Hugo Award-winning novel Cyteen back in February, which feels like a decade ago, but stopped after 190 pages because it was so slow and I was wrapped up in finishing the top 100 prospects package for The Athletic. I returned to it in late May and did indeed finish it the day before the draft last week, because I’m very stubborn, and it bothered me that I had just three Hugo winners left to read. (I now have two, the last two books in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, which in turn inspired the game Terraforming Mars.)

Cyteen is not very good, just as Downbelow Station, a novel set in the same universe as Cyteen that is Cherryh’s other Hugo winner, was not very good. They’re emblematic of what science fiction used to represent – books that were so heavy on the fictional science that they paid little attention to the aspects that make a novel good: plot, prose, and characters. Cyteen has a plot, sort of, although it’s paper-thin for a novel of more than 650 pages. The prose is leaden enough that you could use it at the dentist’s office to protect your chest during X-rays. The characters are at least moderately interesting, although I found it hard to get to them through the byzantine renderings of story and scene in the book.

Cyteen is set on a planet and two space stations of that name, serving as the capital of the Union, which has itself declared independence from the Alliance … none of which is necessary to know to read this book. The intrigue here is all internal to Cyteen politics, as the wise, Machiavellian leader Ari Emory, who runs the cloning-research station Reseune and serves on Union’s executive council, is murdered early in the book, after which some of her adherents initiate a program she’d designed to raise a clone of her to take over where she’d left off. The bulk of the novel follows her clone, also named Ari, and sets her in opposition to two groups: her ‘uncles’ Denys and Giraud, who are both powerful figures in the Reseune hierarchy and would benefit from Ari’s return to power; and the Warricks, Jordan and his clone/son Justin, as well as Justin’s clone and companion Grant, who were implicated in the first Ari’s death and remain untrusted rivals as the second Ari grows up and gains authority.

That’s about enough story for a novel of half Cyteen‘s length, but Cherryh stretches this out to a needless degree, incorporating all manner of side plots or irrelevant details that make this an utter slog to read. The discussions of young Ari’s puberty felt made me feel like I was invading a fictional character’s privacy, and it’s discomfiting to see a young girl’s moods reduced to a function of her hormone changes. The details of the cloning program are not interesting in the least, nor are those of the Alliance-Union conflict or the internal intrigues of Cyteen and Reseune politics. It just doesn’t work: making readers feel interested in the details of politics of fictional entities requires a lot of effort, at the macro level and the micro level of individual characters, and Cherryh just doesn’t do it.

The character of Ari is by the far the most compelling, although it’s more for what she represents than who she is. Ari is genetically identical to her predecessor, and her guardians attempt to mimic as many conditions of her predecessor’s upbringing as possible, as if by creating a perfect facsimile of the original’s nature and nurture they will thus develop a perfect facsimile of the original person. Of course, it’s never quite possible to replicate the ‘nurture’ half of the equation, and Ari deux is still a person with free will and agency, eventually pushing back against the bounds of her strict environment. It’s also a meditation of sorts on predestination, whether the second Ari can escape the destiny that’s been assigned to her by her genes and her makers.

The Hugo Awards have recently faced and defeated an attempted coup by a small number of white, male, pathetic authors who claimed that their works were being unjustly overlooked in the voting in favor of works with more progressive themes. My interpretation is that these authors, whose leaders include an open white supremacist, want a return to the earlier era of the Hugos and sci-fi in general, where setting took precedence over story or character – greater reliance on the science part of science-fiction or heavier use of fantasy elements in fantasy. Cyteen is heavy on the science, both hard sciences and soft, and that might be why it won the award in 1989, but I don’t think it would get nearly the same reception, critical or commercial, today. Cherryh is still writing and I presume she still has an audience, since I always see new books of hers whenever I’m browsing in bookstores, but this type of science fiction is best relegated to the dustbin of history.

Next up: I’m about to start Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.

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→ December 17, 2019
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Booksmart.

I wanted to like Booksmart, now streaming on Hulu, and the first twenty minutes were so promising … but I don’t think it lives up to its opening, and while there are some clever running gags and a few good quips, in the end it’s another teen movie that’s just a shade smarter than some of the films it rips off. (You can also rent it on amazon or iTunes.)

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are best friends and massive overachievers who’ve spent their high school years studying and doing all the things you’re supposed to do to get into a good college, but never doing anything fun, only to discover that a bunch of their classmates who have partied their way through high school have also gotten into elite schools. Molly’s the Class President and has a crush on her Vice-President, Nick, who appears to be a dimwit but, of course, isn’t. Amy has been out for two years, but has never kissed a girl, and has a crush on a classmate, Ryan, although she doesn’t know if Ryan is into girls. The night before graduation, they decide to go to a huge party at Nick’s aunt’s house, and spend about the half the movie trying to figure out where the party is and then trying to get there. Once they do arrive, they go after their respective crushes, only to have things not go as planned (obviously) and then something else works out for each of them instead.

There’s a lot of promise in this premise, and the two leads are both quite good. Feldstein is wonderfully annoying throughout the movie, and handles the transitions well from earnest to flailing to, at one point, shockingly rude to her closest friend in a way that makes the character feel entirely coherent and three-dimensional. Dever has somewhat less to do until they get to the party, and even then plays an unfortunate second fiddle to Feldstein until she has her unexpected tryst and can be the main character on the screen without her co-star. Billie Lourd is hilarious as Gigi, a prominent side character with the best running joke in the film, and some of the other kids are effective in narrow roles, although half of the actors are in their mid-20s already and look it. There are a couple of gay kids in their class played by Noah Galvin and Austin Crute who play both their characters as if they’re acting in a play within the movie, and most of their scenes are well-written and funny in an absurd way. (I’d watch a movie that starred just those two.) In fact, just about all of the actors playing the students are good at what they’re asked to do – in contrast to the adults in the movie, most of whom look out of place or uncomfortable, and all of whom are poorly written.

The story is nothing you haven’t seen before, unfortunately. A couple of kids want to have fun/drink too much/get laid before they go to college, and have a hard time doing any of these things correctly at first, only to get to the big party and have things go wrong before they go right. There’s some witty banter early in the film, but the script can’t keep up the pace, and things start getting progressively weirder as the film progresses. Their principal (Jason Sudeikis) moonlights as an Uber driver, and the situation gets kind of creepy. Another of their teachers has serious boundary problems, leading to a seriously cringey movement at the party. Amy’s big moment is sort of marred by a bad writing decision at the end of the scene that was unnecessary. One of the girls ends up in jail – seriously, the entire plot is ripped from Can’t Hardly Wait, which isn’t a good enough movie to rip off in the first place – and the way they get her out is a ridiculous plot contrivance. And how are they totally unable to figure out where Nick’s aunt lives in an era where most addresses are listed online and everyone has the internet on their phones? Oh, in the span of a few seconds one of the girls loses her phone and the other’s runs out of charge, because of course it does. These characters deserved a smarter story, right up to the resolution.

It was just too easy a movie to pick apart. Very little of it seemed realistic, and the script couldn’t maintain all the energy from the first few scenes – especially the one scene in a classroom, where the one-liners are flying back and forth and the kids all show their most interesting sides. This movie took in around $22 million at the box office, beating its budget comfortably but spurring a weird social media campaign, led by director Olivia Wilde, that made it seem like the movie was a flop. The better explanation is that the movie didn’t find a big audience because the script wasn’t good enough. Feldstein and Dever did their parts, but this is a forgettable entry in the sad tradition of mediocre teen comedies.

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→ November 11, 2019
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The Calculating Stars.

Mary Robinette Kowal won the trifecta of sci-fi literary awards this year for her novel The Calculating Stars, taking home the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus prizes for the year’s best novel. (The Hugo’s list of nominees included six titles, five written by women, which I think is a record.) The book seems destined to hit the screen somewhere, given its popularity, themes of feminism/misogyny, racism, and climate change. It’s also utterly awful, a bit of trite juvenilia, easily one of the worst Hugo winners I’ve read, with silly plotting, stock characters, and prose befitting a first-time author. How this book won any of those awards, let alone all three, is totally beyond me, because, while I finished it since it’s an easy read, it is treacly nonsense.

Elma is the protagonist, and as the novel opens, she’s on a hillside north of DC with her husband, where they’ve flown in a private plane to get away for a little sexytime, only to have their reverie interrupted by a massive explosion somewhere to the south. After their initial fears that the Soviets have launched a nuclear missile appear to be unfounded, they realize it was a massive meteorite strike into the ocean, which they learn shortly afterwards has vaporized the mid-Atlantic coast, killing millions, and will eventually lead to runaway global warming because of all of the water vapor the impact sent into the atmosphere.

Elma and her husband Nat both work in aerospace, she as a computer (a term that used to refer to people, not machines), he as an engineer, and both are immediately involved in the international effort to race into space to try to get off this planet before it boils. Elma is also an experienced pilot, having worked as a WASP (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, although I’m sure Kowal intended the wordplay around calling Elma, a somewhat observant Jew, a WASP) during World War II, and she seethes when she realizes that NACA (the actual predecessor of NASA) is only considering men as astronauts, even though colonizing the moon or Mars or anywhere else would obviously require women. (Actually, it only requires women; you can send the male contribution to reproduction to space in a test tube.) The bulk of the book covers her quest to become an astronaut, to change hearts and minds, to fight a little garden-variety racism, and to overcome her anxiety disorder enough to get a seat on the rocket.

There’s so much wrong with The Calculating Stars, but nothing is worse than how incredibly obvious the whole book is. Of course Elma is going to be an astronaut. Of course she’s going to fight racism and win. Of course everything she does is going to work out, because this is a children’s book – well, it would be, were it not for the frequent and very awkwardly written sex scenes, although even those are written as they might be in a young adult novel. Elma is ridiculously perfect as a person; the calculations she can do in her head defy credibility, and if there are people who can do what she does there couldn’t be more than ten in the United States. (Her obsession with prime numbers, however, is completely credible, and one of the only things about her character to which I related.) She nearly always has the right words, the right responses, and when she doesn’t, Nate does. It makes Kowal’s hamhanded attempts at cliffhangers fall totally flat, because they always work out within a few paragraphs in some ordinary fashion.

The science also feels incredibly dicey to me. Kowal refers to colonizing Venus, which scientists already suspect was inhospitable to life by this time period, as Rupert Wildt theorized that the surface temperature of Venus was above the boiling point of water due to all of the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. She later creates a sort of cold fusion mechanism in a chapter heading, where “a catalyst” allows rockets to combine atomic oxygen in the upper atmosphere into O2, releasing substantial quantities of energy for free. Even throwing those small points aside, Kowal has 1950s science building and successfully launching an orbiting space station and planning a lunar colony several years before the MOSFET transistor, without which modern computing would not exist, was even invented. It’s a fantasy, and it detracts from the realism Kowal is trying to infuse in the cli-fi aspects of her story.

If I had to speculate on why this book won the big three awards, I’d guess it’s because the novel is, indeed, a climate change story. The climate isn’t changing because of man in The Calculating Stars, but it’s changing, and because the meteorite in the novel hit water and not land, it has probably pushed the climate past the point of no return. Kowal simply accepts that as a given, and then uses it to give us Republicans in Congress denying the accuracy of climate models, or average citizens asking why the government is spending money on long-term projects instead of helping people who need it today. It’s so thinly veiled you can see right through it, and even though I’m obviously on the side of the world’s scientists who say that climate change is real, I found Kowal’s approach graceless and infantile, including how easily some of the climate change deniers in the book suddenly drop their opposition. I don’t see the present GOP changing its tune on climate change quite so easily.

That’s without even getting into how weak the characters are; most are more memorable for their names than anything about their personalities. Elma and Nathaniel are themselves just too good; he’s certainly a dream husband for the era, progressive and willing to stand up for what he thinks is right. People are flawed, even the best people, and protagonists like these two don’t really appear in adult novels, not in 2019, certainly not in novels that deserve consideration for major awards.

It’d be hard to be worse than the second Hugo winner, They’d Rather Be Right, which isn’t really even a proper novel, but The Calculating Stars comes close. After the Broken Earth trilogy won the last three Hugos – and while I had issues with those novels, especially the third, they are way better written and more intelligently plotted than this novel – Kowal’s book is a huge letdown. I need to read some of the other nominees because there is no way there wasn’t at least one sci-fi novel better than this one in 2019.

Next up: B. Catling’s The Cloven, the conclusion to his Vorrh trilogy.

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→ October 21, 2019
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High Life.

Claire Denis’ dystopian sci-fi film High Life, which just hit Amazon Prime earlier this month, is a strange and brooding film that uses its setting to distill life to its most basic functions. By putting her characters into tense situations that force them all to confront their mortality in a more overt way than we would normally face, she explores the darkest sides of humanity … but it is a long, slow drag to get there, punctuated by some highly disturbing sequences.

Robert Pattinson plays Monte, the sole surviving member of an interstellar journey whose purpose becomes apparent later in the film. His only companion on the ship is a baby, the one successful child to come from the ship’s scientist’s artificial insemination program – a program that, of course, causes a lot of outrage among the rest of the crew – all of which is explained in flashbacks over the course of the film. Without spoiling too much here, the gist is that these crew members were all criminals, given the choice to go on a mission that takes them well beyond the solar system rather than face life in jail or execution. Living in such close quarters, with the added stresses of both the control of the scientist (Juliette Binoche) and her bizarre effort to breed the crew members, only increases the odds of conflict, which is graphic and violent when it comes.

Before then, however, we see much more of the quotidian lives of the crew members through flashbacks, including their work in the ship’s gardens, the favorite spot of Tcherny (Andre Benjamin), and the use of what fans of the film have called the “fuck box,” a masturbation machine used by most of the crew members but not by Monte. Denis appears to want to strip her characters down to the basics – food, sex, shelter – to dehumanize them, making it easier to follow some of them down into a bestial sort of madness that ultimately leaves all of them dead except for Monte.

I’m not sure why this film exists, though. Pattinson is excellent – he’s turned out to be quite a good actor – and does everything he can to prop this movie up, especially in the torpid first half, but by the end I certainly had no idea why Denis had taken any of us on this particular journey. What does the rising tide of violence that engulfs the crew actually tell us about people as a whole or these characters in particular? Are we just to think that once a violent criminal, always a violent criminal? Or are they driven to madness and violence by the realization that their mission can only have one possible end?

The look and feel of High Life far surpass the content of the film. The spaceship’s exterior has a barebones look by design, as Denis has said she couldn’t imagine this dystopian future country spending on anything superficial for a mission of this kind. The interior also looks stark and grim, again fitting the nature of the mission, also enhancing the general sense of dread around the story and the fatalistic outlook of the various people on the ship. There are little details around things like resource management – including, of course, how they recycle their waste products – that give the film a layer of additional realism that would have really paid off if the story were better.

In the end, though, I never got on board with High Life‘s plot. Pattinson is good, but I didn’t relate to the character, and I think Denis’ decision to tell the story via flashbacks ultimately robs the movie of any real dramatic tension. It’s an experiment, with a decent idea at its core, but the experiment doesn’t succeed.

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→ August 21, 2019
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the second of Milan Kundera’s books I’ve read, along with The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting, and … I don’t get it. I admit this of my own free will: I don’t understand why his books are revered, but revered they are, with literature professor Daniel Burt including Unbearable Lightness on his revised list of the 125 greatest novels ever written at #112.

I do understand the core theme of this book, at least, since it is spelled out in the title and Kundera makes frequent references to it in the text. In direct contrast to Nietzsche’s idea that anything we experience just once might as well not be experienced at all, Kundera subscribes to the believe that we live just once, and that everything that we do and undergo is thus unique. He describes life in terms of contrasts, and how you can view life as having weight or, in the case of the title and most of his characters, as being unbearably light. It is as if he’s saying life is so nasty, brutish, and short that we might as well try to enjoy it in spite of ourselves.

His characters do seem to get after it, at least; Tomás, the main character, is a philandering asshole who refuses to keep it in his pants even when he belatedly realizes that his bed-hopping is making him miserable and that he actually loves his paramour Tereza, for whom he flees the communists of Czechoslovakia and, almost inexplicably, then follows her back into the authoritarian state even though he knows he will lose his livelihood and possibly his freedom for doing so. One common criticism of horror movies is that the plots require the characters to do dumb things so that the bad stuff can happen. Kundera makes Tomás do a dumb thing – really, who defects from a police state and then un-defects? – so he can move the story along too. He does have a bizarre philosophy to rationalize his womanizing, but I found it unconvincing.

Tomás is a man of principle at work, despite his utter lack of scruples when it comes to women or his one son, custody of whom he gives up to the boy’s mother so that he doesn’t see his own child for about twenty years. When Tomás is asked to renounce an essay he’d written for a newspaper about the meaning of Oedipus Rex because the Communist puppets in charge of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring find it subversive, he declines, even though he knows it will cost him his job as a surgeon, eventually leading him to increasingly menial jobs and out of the city entirely. It’s the contrast Kundera outlines in the first part of the book, although I found it hard to reconcile the two sides of Tomás’ character, since the area where he acts amorally involves causing pain to many other people.

These two are connected with another couple, Sabina and Franz, via, what else, Tomás’ affair with Sabina. Sabina is an artist who loathes kitsch, a term that Kundera takes from its normal denotation of tackiness in art to some broader connotation across multiple disciplines, including philosophy, that nearly put me to sleep. Franz is the least defined of the four major characters – the dog, Karenin, might have more depth – and I never quite understood why he ended up in a protest march in Cambodia alongside publicity-seeking American celebrities.

I hated this book – not so much while I read it, but when it was done and I realized how little I’d gotten out of it. Perhaps it’s a function of my lack of any philosophy education whatsoever – I probably got more from Monty Python than I did anywhere in school – but I didn’t take anything away from the book other than Kundera’s extreme materialist attitude towards life; his characters are inscrutable and unlikeable and they do and say things that feel unrealistic. I know a few of you mentioned absolutely loving this book, but it did nothing for me whatsoever.

Next up: I’ll be reading Wolf Hall for a while longer.

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