Media I Consumed This Weekend
1.) Childhood’s End
I’m on a roll with books this year. I’ve been going through an average of 1 a week for the past, erm, week. So that’s a roll. Anyway, Childhood’s End was recommended to me (and the entire internet community, I’m not special) by one of my favorite writers, Peter David, after Arthur C. Clark died a few weeks ago. He said it was the book that influenced him the most as a child, so I picked it up. The basic premise is kick-ass: humans are not alone in the universe, and are, in fact, a lesser species. Aliens arrive one day in big ships and basically say “we own you.” They’re not evil, just bigger and better. They actually set us on the right track: no war, no famine, world peace, etc. Then, you’re left to wonder if the so-called Overlord’s interests will always mean the best for humanity.
It interested me because the concept was actually an idea I had for a story once (sigh). My premise was that God was a member of this cosmic race of higher beings, and he was the owner of this region of space, and his mythology has been passed down in our society as the creator. And for the past thousand years or so he’s been relatively quiet. Then, a new alien shows up and says that God sold us to him and he’s not like the quiet and gentle God, but something else and he’s going to use the planet for something other than human life, and, well, it’s a story about humanity’s survival at the hands of the aliens, which is nothing new, which is why it’s not written. That, and I’m lazy.
Anyway, Childhood’s End is not really like that, but it’s still a decent story. It’s divided into three shorter “stories” and I thought it would have been great if it had been just the first and third stories. It’s a short book as is, but still seemed to drag. It’s that classic 50’s style sci-fi, which is retro-cool but still hard to read sometimes, with a multitude of interchangeable characters and dated dialog.
So, the story ends up being about (spoiler warning!) the Overlords, who look exactly like the Devil, and are here to guide us in our evolution into higher beings. The story briefly touches on the “Golden Age,” after their arrival and before the evolution, during the time when because of their presense, there was world peace. It implies that because of world peace and Utopia, humanity gets bored and things like art aren’t really around any more.
2.) Confederate States of America
TiVo’d this bad boy from earlier in the week. It’s a faux-documentary made in 2004 that centers around the idea, “what would have happened if the south won the Civil War?”
Basically, slavery would have not been abolished and therefore still legal and accepted all over the country, and the entire country would have taken on a… well, cowboy attitude.
Some parts were genuinely disturbing, such as the fake commercials throughout the show for places like “Coon Chicken Inn!” and “NiggerHair Cigarettes.” Then there was the electronic shackle that tracked your slave via wireless signals, and the fact that America allied with Hitler and Nazi Germany during WWII, because we liked the idea of establishing a superior race once and for all. Left me with a sour feeling in my stomach, because that kind of stuff could very well have happened.
The rest, I’m unsure about, mainly because I don’t know enough about actual history to comment. I am a shame.
3.) Alien vs. Predator: Requiem
I wonder if the creators of movies like this every really think they are creating something worthwhile. The only reason I wanted to see this is because I never get enough of the Alien imagry, but even that was kind of dull in this movie. Some scenes, in fact, reminded me exactly of previous Alien movies, specifically Aliens (2) when the marines take on a swarm of them, and Alien 3 when Ripley is pressed against the cabinet, her head turned away as the alien is right there in her face, staring her down.
The movie was bad, and even played with what’s been established about the Alien’s biology. Specifically, it takes at least hours for the egg to hatch after it’s implanted in someone’s chest, if not a few days. This time around, about 30 second after the “face-hugger” lays one in you, it pops right out of you. “Hey ya’ll. I’mma eat’cha.” And then, 30 minutes later, it’s full size. I’m okay with taking liberties, but this felt like exploitation.
Then again, I’m a nerd.
But! One aspect they didn’t play with was the alien’s method of evolving, which I always found really cool. Basically, the alien needs a host to grow in because it analyzes the DNA of the host, taking on certain survival attributes to be better equipped to handle it’s environment. For example: those who hatch from humans have two legs and two arms. Those that hatch from dogs run on four legs, etc. So when it hatched from a Predator, it took on certain attributes of the Predator. Neat-o.
Also, the entire movie was too dark, and even with the TV’s brightness all the way up, I barely saw half the movie. I wonder if they did this because it was scary. I was not scared.
The only cool scene was at the end (spoiler warning!). This movie took place in an American city, and because of how contagious the alien infestation is, the government decided to just nuke the whole city. So they drop the bomb, and that’s it.
The ironic thing is that seeing the alien and predator get nuked was kind of sad.
But it also explained why “The Company” in the alien films wanted to get their hands on an alien. They had footage of what they’re capable of, and wanted one for their bio-weapons division. And, like in the last film how we met Weyland, we meet Yutani at the end of this one. Weyland-Yutani: “The Fucking Company.”
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“Replay”
My good internet buddy Mike had a blog post about a book called Replay, and made it sound interesting enough to the point that I actually added it to my Amazon wish list (of things I probably won’t spend my own money on, but sometimes would if I have some extra cash.) Anyway, one day not too long ago I went to pick up my mail and you can imagine my surprise when I found the book in the mailbox from Amazon, with the return address listing him as the buyer. What a guy, that one!!
The book was put near the top of my “to read” stack, and I was able to get through it last week sometime.
The book is classified as ’sci-fi,’ and the premise is much like Groundhog Day, but instead of a guy reliving one day over and over again, this guy relives portions of his entire life over and over again. That is, he dies at age 40-something only to wake up 20 years in the past, as a college freshman. The catch is, he remembers everything about his life up to the point that he died, so he knows everything that will happen in the next 20 years and can use that knowledge to his advantage.
The book might have seemed like a Groundhog Day rip-off, except Groundhog Day was definately not the first and only story to use that premise. In fact, Replay was published before that movie, so I read keeping in mind that at the time, Replay was a relatively fresh idea.
Anyway, you can imagine the hijinks that ensue. There are no doubt things you’d do differently in your own life if you woke up in your own past. If I woke up as a college freshman, that would mean I’d get to relive the last 7 years of my life, and sure, I’d do things differently. We make the decisions we make based on logic and the level of risk (at least, we should). Well, for at least one decision, you know for sure the level of risk, so you can alter things knowing that.
Of course, knowledge of the future leads the main character to do some other things, as well. Namely, gambling. So in his first “replay” of life he wins big, invests more, and becomes a megamillionaire. He does this in every subsequent replay of his life (and really, why wouldn’t you?)
(Next three paragraphs will spoil if you’d think you’d like to read the book).
All in all, he replays his life about four or five times. There is no explanation about why he got to relive his life, such as a “temporal anomaly” or a broken “causality loop,” but attempts are made. The biggest reveal to me was that there are other replayers, other people he meets that have been replaying their lives, and one of them tells him that it’s “the aliens” who like watching us over and over again so they distort time for certain people. This was a cool thought, and I wouldn’t have been disappointed if it ended up being the truth, but it’s never really confirmed.
The idea of others who replay their lives becomes more interesting when they realize they can meet-up after they die again, and do things over. One of the more powerful lines in the book comes when he and another replayer that he has fallen in love with have a lifetime of falling out, and meet up toward the end of that cycle and say, “Next time will be for us, I promise…” The idea that there is a next time is very attractive and you envy the characters.
The one gripe I have is that not once does he consider he might be in heaven. He immediately is confused by his predicament the first time, and sets to find out what happened, as if it all can be explained scientifically. This might sound depressing, but college was the best time of my life so far, so if I died tomorrow and woke up in my bed my freshman year of college, I might be thinking that there really is a heaven.
I also kind of feel like the character should have grown a lot wiser by the end of the story. He has replayed his life more than four times, over twenty years each time. He was 40 when it first started, so that’s 40 years, plus twenty, plus another twenty, plus three more twenties (give or take). That’s at least 120 years worth of experience. Think about how wise your grandparents are, just about life-in-general. But this guy just seemed like he had an average 40 year old intellect all the way through.
The ultimate lesson learned is nothing else but “live one day at a time and cherish all you can when you have the chance,” but it does get your mind going about what you’d do if you were in his situation. It’s a nice fantasy and a good story and time well spent reading it, but I wouldn’t necessarily put it in my Life Changing Books category.
So, Mike, I need to return the favor. If you give me the link of your Amazon wish list, if you have one, I’ll hook you up! 
Otherwise maybe I can send a blind recommendation next time I read something I think you might enjoy.
Approximate Hours Spent Reading This Book: 6 hours
Mammoth
Brief note: Somehow I’ve lost over half my general subscribers, and all of my Lost subscribers. What happened? What’d I do?? Unless feedburner is broken and given me inaccurate results, tell me so I can make it all better.
In my effort to keep up with my New Year Goal of reading 25 books this year, I can finally make another hash mark next to the massive one I already have from Steven King’s “Bag of Bones.” Next up was a surprise to me, because I just picked it up and started reading the first few sentances, and before I knew it a week had passed and it was done.
A week! I’ve never finished a novel in just one week! Some people can finish one in a few days, but for me it’s always at least two or three weeks.
Anyway, the name of the book was “Mammoth,” and it’s written by John Varley. And like I say when I finish any book I read, it was the best book I’ve ever read. I read another book of his last September called “Millennium,” about a group of people from the future who travel back in time before major catastrophic events and steal the human bodies before they all die, in hopes of repopulating their own world in the future where everybody is sterile. His ideas and writing style are similar to mine (or, at least, how I wish mine to be), so I picked up another one of his that sounded like it might be good, and that was “Mammoth,” and like I said, it was good.
It centers around two main characters, Susan, a circus performer and elephant trainer, and Matt, a brilliant but socially awkward physicist. They were both hired by billionaire Howard Christian for their unique talents… see, Howard, using all that money, has unearthed the greatest scientific discovery of our time: a frozen, in tact, woolly mammoth, complete with a frozen, in tact caveman. His goal is to clone the woolly mammoth and use it to make even more money. So he hires people to clone it, and Susan to oversee that project. But there’s the first twist: the caveman is wearing a wrist watch.
Wait a tick! Cavemen didn’t wear wristwatches! It’s either a hoax, or…
…time travel, friends, so Howard hires Matt to rebuild what can only be a time machine, which is in the form of a briefcase next to the caveman.
Well, Matt is (semi)-successful, and rebuilds something, which ends up throwing Susan and Matt 12,000 years into the past. They spend some time there before Matt can figure out how the time machine works, and when he does, they’re avoiding a group of mammoths… but when they blink back into the future, the mammoths have come with them.
So, now, Howard not only has a time machine but 6 or 7 mammoths. Well, you can imagine what would happen of 7 mammoths were let loose in downtown LA. One survives, Howard keeps it, trains it, etc., and it turns into a King Kong story. The whole caveman-wristwatch thing takes a backseat to that story, which is surprisingly entertaining, if not a bit padded and long. The whole story could have been about 100 pages shorter and not lost a thing, but any interaction between Susan and Matt (especially when Matt dorks out and gets all technical on her) is great.
I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say the caveman is not a caveman at all, and may or may not be someone we all know. But I will say that the book dealt heavily with what I like to look at as the cyclical nature of time, how time may not be linear at all, free will, pre-determination (or pre-destination?), all things that time travel conjures up.
If that’s not your thing, at least you have some pretty touching scenes between a woman and her pet mammoth.
Anyway, I’d recommend it.
Science Fiction
It’s a slow week with nothing much to talk about. I am in the middle of a great book called “Mammoth” by John Varley, and have a few work related tasks keeping me busy. I’m working on a story that is, for once, coming along nicely. Saturday was my birthday, and even though I turned 25 for some reason my auto insurance rates didn’t go down. That, or my insurance guy is a moron, which could very well be true. Also, I’m learning the guitar since Katy bought me one for my bee-day.
Other than that, I was thinking about science fiction the other day, and what exactly makes it science fiction. For example, stories about aliens are automatically science fiction because life forms other than those on Earth are both scientific in nature and fictional, since they (to our knowledge) do not exist. But on the day that aliens arrive on Earth, are we going to have a mass re-categorizing of all alien-visitor related science fiction to just fiction? I don’t think so. It would be too expensive. For that reason alone, we’ll never make contact with aliens and we’ll never invent time machines. Evil robots remain a possibility since the first thing on their agenda is always annihilating everything with nuclear weapons, thereby destroying all of the fiction anyway.
Anyway, I do not have a point. But Arthur C. Clark died last week, and that means people will automatically like his books more. Case in point, I bought one of his books thanks to a memorial article recapping his work. I was also reminded of the story, “The Nine Billion Names of God,” which I read in 2003 and remember, almost word for word (okay, paragraph by paragraph), which is huge considering I forget nearly everything.
Read it here. (It’s short, I promise, and like biscuits and gravy, will stick with you).
Also, if you are a sci-fi fan like myself, you sometimes lose sight of how awesome (as in awe, not “duuuude”) the universe really is. It’s hard to believe that stuff like this actually exists out there:
My Media Week Meme
As far as I can tell, a “meme” (pronounced like dream) is the offical name of those surveys that people post as bullitens on MySpace. High School is the first time I remember doing one, and back then there wasn’t any MySpace so we pompously emailed them to everyone in our address book.
Anyway, the rules for some of them is that you can “tag” someone else and they have to do it on their blog, then they tag other people, and so on. Mike tagged me, and that’s why you’re reading this post.
It’s about the media I’ve consumed (hungry, hungry, hungry) this past week.
*BOOKS — It was my resolution this year to read lots of books. So far I’ve only completed one this year. I would have finished more, but I have about 5 started, and when I start so many books, they all fight for my attention until none of them get it. I currently have a bookmark in: The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, Love + Sex with Robots by David Levy, Everything’s Eventual by Steven King, and a pretty bland Star Trek novel. I also have a reservation to pick up “Virtual Girl,” by Amy Thomson at the library. It’s a story about a guy who creates a sentient female robot, and I love that shit. I also have a stack of unread comics that grows week by week.
*TV — Believe it or not, I really don’t watch that much. There are only a few shows I actually turn on, and I never really sit and flip through the channels like some people. The few shows I’ve watched in the past seven days are Lost, the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and a few Discovery/History channel shows like Man vs. Wild and a bad ass documentary showing seven ways human life could become extinct.
*MUSIC — I listened to half of a Tina Turner song yesterday. I also downloaded the song from the MacBook Air commercial because it was catchy, only to finally play it out yesterday and run out of stuff to listen to. I’m just not a music kind of guy, it seems, which is crappy. On the drive to and from work, my Sirius radio is usually on Howard Stern or Spa 73 for ambient music.
***
So TAG! Who’s it? I don’t know many people with their own hosted blog, or at least I don’t know them well enough to pass this on, and those I do know well enough have never commented so I’m not sure if they even read this. However, I know lots of people with MySpace blogs so…
Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughn
Pride of Baghdad is a graphic novel (okay, comic book) about a group of lions that escape from a Baghdad zoo during the US invasion in 2003. I’m not sure why I just heard about it now, and why it was on the Borders New Releases shelf last week if it came out in late 2006, but I saw the name of the author and had to pick it up.
Brian K. Vaughn is the writer of the Y: The Last Man series I’ve talked about, as well as one of the writers on everybody’s favorite TV show, Lost. So I’m pretty much going to try and read anything he puts out.
This is a stand-alone story, and, for the most part, the pictures kind of tell the story. (So is it a picture book?) The dialogue is strong but if there was one negative thing I had to look for in Brian K. Vaughn’s writing it would be that he doesn’t really take anything seriously and always kinds of jokes in the wrong place.
However, he handles death scenes very well. In an earlier issue of Y: The Last Man, the crew finds themselves having to live with a group of escaped (female, of course) prison inmates. Well, the main character falls in love with one of them, only to have it end in tragedy as his sister shows up and shoots the girl. As she lay dying she tries to tell him “something I saw on TV once, about lions…” She says, “lions…. ” and you’re thinking, as you turn the page, she’ll say something about lions falling in love or finding each other or some other kind of sweet piece of dying-dialog, only to see that she died never finishing her thought. What was she going to say?! Scenes like that really make the death have more impact, because people die all the time never really finishing what they started, or never really getting to say goodbye. More on this in a minute.
I tried to think hard about this story and what it meant. I mean, anything having to do with talking lions in Baghdad has to have some kind of message behind it. As far as I can tell, it has to do with the nature of freedom and what it means to be “liberated.” These lions were set free after a bomb blew apart their cage at the zoo, so they set off, not really knowing what they were getting in to. They searched for food, but having too much compassion for the “keepers” (humans), refused to eat them. These animals weren’t necessarily meant to be free, being raised in captivity most of their lives, so, I think the message is… what does that mean for the war in Iraq? If freedom has to be earned, are we just setting up the Iraqi’s for disaster by “giving” it to them?
I don’t have an answer. But the way the animals view the war and human civilization (they have no idea what anything is or what it means) is amusing. A wise turtle tells them, in passing, that they’re fighting over black water, and the way they talk about it makes you think “is that really it? We’re stupid.”
The death scene comes in the end and (well, I guess I should put a spoiler warning here… so)… (more…)
