Disney buys out Pixar in a 7.4 billion dollar deal. There were rumblings about this for several weeks, and now it appears official. I’m a little wary of this, as Disney really showed little creative output since 1989’s The Little Mermaid. Lately they have re-issued updated prints of their classics on DVD, alongside releasing clunkers at the box office. The failures largely suffered from a lack of story, followed by senseless sequels, which has has not been the case over at Pixar. Even their lone sequel, Toy Story II, stood head and shoulders above anything, um, original that Disney produced. Nor have I been impressed with DreamWorks, where all they do is produce re-treaded ideas then sold to the public by over-hyping the names behind the voices. I doubt we would have seen The Incredibles emerge from either Disney or DreamWorks. No new titles had been announced by Pixar beyond this year’s Cars, (which originally was slated for 2005 and then pushed back to mid-2006). Still, maybe with a new boss at Disney and John Lasseter still in charge things might be different.
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After almost four weeks without posting, it seems strange to write again here. I’m breaking a rule about not posting on a borrowed computer, but there’s some light ahead in the tunnel of computer despair so I’m taking that silly risk anyway. Looks like a hardware issue brought down my Mac (after fourteen years of using Macs, it’s the first time such an event happened), but no indication as to the cause or solution yet. I’ve let a multitude of posting opportunities go by, and if I write about them now they’ll seem dated (though I really do want to address a recent study on music availability and apathy, and list books received for review). Blame at least one week on my first vacation in two years, a brief sojurn in Southern California without any computer access. I decided to give up sodas of all kinds for 2006 (in particular Coca Cola), but I’m not sure if giving up computer access was harder, since I had fewer temptations while away. We hung out near Palm Springs for a couple of days, then drove to San Diego for another three. That latter part was mostly for the three-year-old in the family, and so the days were spent at the zoo, Legoland, and on the beach. This was only my second time in SoCal, and quite unlike Anaheim at the Worldcon in 1996, ten years ago. I had no idea the desert played such a huge role south of LA, nor that San Diego was that hilly, though I can see why people flock to San Diego, as it’s a beautiful city. Maybe next time I can hit some of the book stores we spotted along the way.
The good news is that I did manage to restore and complete the January issue of Prometheus, which goes to the printer next week and almost a month behind schedule. This issue contains 16 pages of reviews, letters, fiction, news, and an editorial. For now, here’s a brief review as an example.
3000 Years
By Richard Mgrdechian
iUniverse, 2005, $16.95
0-595-36072-6
Reviewed by Anders Monsen
3000 Years is a sharp thriller, one that at times sent my heart racing with excitement and anticipation. Richard Mgrdechian’s first novel blends scientific speculation with elements of the near-future thriller genre. Ostensibly the novel deals with a sort of time-travel, but the underlying focus really deals with human society and how individuals acting in certain, often narrow ways leading to far-reaching implications and unintended consequences.
Professor John Bennett is driven to find ways to cheat death. Motivated by the death of his dog during Bennett’s childhood years, and later his much-admired grandfather, he pours all his energy into physics. He also is a man with many heroes, studding his walls around his punching bag with images of boxing greats like Ali, Dempsey, and Marciano, and his office walls with Einstein, Newton, and other scientists. Bennett’s mood upon discovering a startling new application makes him almost ebullient. By slowing down the speed of light, Bennett is able to place living tissue in a stasis field, preserving youth over great lengths of time. He stands at the cusp of changing the world, granting him instant acclaim and recognition. He’s blessed with admiring students, a wonderful girlfriend—Dawn Whitmore, a cultural anthropologist—and a wide open future at PacTech; all seemingly intended to keep him anchored to the present.
Tom Walsh, the arrogant bureaucratic president of PacTech, despises Bennett for his success. In the aftermath of a bar brawl when Bennett protects one of his star students, Paul Branning, Walsh gets his chance to publicly humiliate Bennett. Yet instead of going down meekly Bennett resigns; he has other plans. He decides to make personal use of his discovery, placing himself into stasis. While the outside world continues along its unabated pace, Bennett will sleep for decades at a time, appearing briefly to witness the progress of history, skipping like a pebble across the river of time. When he finds out that Dawn suffers from incurable ovarian cancer with scant years left, he hatches a plan to place them both in stasis and leap forward until they find a future with a cure. Along for the ride is Sam Tobin, one of Bennett’s old college friends. They fake their deaths and enter stasis in an abandoned missile silo that they bought on the cheap from the government, setting the timer for fifty years in the future.
They arrive into a fragmented America, with California split in several parts, none of which seem enticing or welcoming. They still manage to somewhat adapt themselves into society, with a few mishaps along the way. Bennett secures a visiting professorship at a local college, while Tobin hooks up with Linda Moreno, an attractive attorney after he spends some time in jail for the unpardonable sin of the times, Abhorrent Vocalizations. Speak ill of anything, or have someone find offense in your words, and you end up jail. Farewell free speech. Political correctness runs amuck.
The second act of the novel thus deals with how the trio handles the fifty year leap into the future. Friends and family left behind now are dead, or aged naturally into post-retirement years. Almost alone they face a two-pronged threat: how can they integrate themselves—even temporarily—into a culture of fear and social repression, and also deal with an escalating threat of nanotech hackers bent on tearing apart integral communications technologies?
In their new world, the trio seeks others of like minds, from Sam’s attorney friend, to a student (who later proves false), and another professor that Bennett meets at his new university. Against the latter they team up with a former hacker, Harold Fu, who immigrated to America from China on the advice of his brother.
With Harold along for the ride, the novel takes on a thriller aspect, as they race to locate the nano-hackers, only to discover a ghost from Bennett’s past. Can they defeat this threat, and is there a chance of saving Dawn from her cancer? Indeed, the effects of the statis appear only to have accelerated her illness, and instead of a possible cure, time grows ever shorter, with another stasis trip seemingly impossible, even fatal. The twist thrown in here certainly highlights how deep-reaching a simple event can become, even decades after the cause.
Some of the secondary characters encountered in the novel receive short treatments. I expected more about the young boy, Tommy Vesely, who Bennett befriends as a fellow science fan. The swift transformation of Tinny Morrison, from flirtatious student to predatory troublemaker, took me by surprise, but played out well in showing the interplay between Bennett and Dawn. It also makes for one of the more interesting scenes in the book, in the virtual global “mood-bar.” Linda Moreno, the attorney who latches onto Sam, also is dropped later in the book, but not before she walks us through some of the stranger new legal aspects of this society.
Despite these few misgvings Richard Mgrdechian succeeds in writing a convincing thriller rooted in present day technological, social, and legal trends. Blending moments of fast-paced narrative with occasional and brief info-dumps, Mgrdechian crafts an enjoyable work that I believe many libertarians and futurists will enjoy. In fact, I felt many of the chapters were too brief, leaving some threads unfulfilled. I felt the title of the novel to be a little misleading, although the novel certainly leaves open the possibilities for sequels. However, writing about how present day people deal with events fifty years in the future probably is quite different from one hundred or one thousand, but not altogether impossible.
http://www.3000years.org/
Why We Fight may well become one of the most interesting and controversial documentaries of 2006. The trailer itself is a chilling insight into the current state of the growth of the American war machine. The website advertises the movies as “a bipartisan inquiry into the workings of the military industrial complex and the rise of the American Empire.” I did detect a focus on profit as the main motive, but sure there is more that this at work.
This weekend I suffered not one but two apparent computer deaths. The most critical is that main system, where I have all my 2005 documents and all my issues of Prometheus, including the oh-so-nearly completed January issue. Backed-up? Not really. I had used my old external harddrive to back up another system that I recently migrated to OS X Tiger, and this drive was full. As hard drives continue to grow in size, I failed to keep up, and now I need to spend a couple of hundred bucks on a 200G external drive, hope my machine can get fixed, and make sure to schedule daily backups. My secondary system, now ca. five years hold, was pulled into duty, but today also failed. So far I have made no headway in bringing either machine back to life, and so I’m using a third option, my trusty PowerBook from work. I have to hope it makes it through the last minutes of 2005 without crapping out. Offers have been made to certain computer gods, but these are notoriously fickle.
All this means that the January issue of the Prometheus newsletter, instead of going to the printer next week, is at least a week delayed, and the four reviews I wrote last week will not be posted to this blog as planned, until I know I can get the data back. Worst case scenario means installing In Design on a borrowed machine and writing all the reviews again from scratch, which means at least a month’s delay or more, something to which I do not look forward.
Mood: Grim.
Harald is the debut fantasy novel from David Friedman, libertarian writer and author of The Machinery of Freedom. You can read an excerpt at BAEN Books, publishers of the hardcover edition, due April 2006.
I just finished reading a new novel from Scott Mackay, called Tides.
I received a copy of the American edition of Justina Robson’s Silver Screen. Alas, the UK cover looks far cooler than the Pyr edition.
Another writer fined for Turkish insult against the state. Zulkuf Kisanak’s novel describes the forced evacuation of Turkish Kurds from their villages. How can Turkey expect to join the EU with these illiberal laws?
I’m working on a long review for Prometheus, but if you like adventurous science fiction that takes you back to the days of Robert A. Heinlein, Michael L. Wentz’s novelResurrection of Liberty is on sale for under $20. I really enjoyed this book, and highly recommend it. It’s hard to beat this price for a nicely bound hardcover book, and would make a great gift to youngsters and adults alike.
Over the Libertarian Enterprise, novelist and Prometheus Award winner L. Neil Smith shares a movie treatment he wrote called TimePeeper. Written in the 1980s, it’s an interesting addition to Smith’s North American Confederacy universe.
