Sunday was good, too
Yeh, overloading on the old blog, ain’t I?
Sunday I did not run. I was tired, and wanted to give my knees a rest – having a room on the first floor, and being terrified of the lifts after hearing about them breaking down all the way back at last year’s natcon, gave the knees quite a workout!
I went to another academic panel, On the Historiographic in the Fantastic. It was primarily about the engagement between history and fantasy. The presenter – whose name I’ve forgotten – made an interesting point to begin with: for a genre proud of transgression, it’s also obsessed with its own categories and delineation. Very true. Anyway – she said fantasy is always engaged with history: using ‘real’ historical stuff, and/or making up its own history. Post-Enlightenment, history came to be posited as rationalist, scientific, positivist, etc – in contradistinction to ‘romance’, myth-making, and so on, which is where fantasy is situated (or has been situated). I wrote down a lot more, but won’t put it here because at least some of it doesn’t make sense to me anymore! – suffice to say all this got me thinking about Geoffrey of Monmouth, and those other ‘historians’ whose works we read today as fantasy. Big crossover there.
After the panel I went to City Church of Christ, which was awesome – a very diverse group of people; the minister preached the gospel loud and clear! It was embarrassing to be from an Anglican church, though; there are some vocal Perth Anglicans who don’t believe in the physical resurrection of Christ which is just, like, stupid (if you’re a Christian).
Got back in time to go to Mark Bould’s talk, which I think I will blog separately because it was so damned cool. Anyway – then lunch with , and onto one of the highlights of the con: Rob Shearman and Ian Mond doing a live commentary on the Dr Who episode Dalek! We got front row seats, and it was fantastic. Had a drink with some friends – went to dinner with Kathryn, “MacDog,” and Matt… sorry we stooged you with the bill for a while there, guys!!
Then… oh then, it was Ditmar time. I won two of them! – well, the Snapshot team and my cohorts and I won one. You can see a full list of winners here. My row was the place to be. And didn’t we just love it!
Then, finally, the mother of all room parties. I don’t know how many people there were over the night – lots – probably 20 or 30 at any one time. Sean provided some mighty fine tunes, and someone else provided The A-Team theme. I kicked everyone out, finally, at about 2am. People keep making a big thing of me doing that, so I’m left wondering: do room parties never get moved on by the room’s inhabitants? Or did I do it in a particularly memorable way?
Deja-Vu
Another movie review…
We got Deja-Vu throuh BigPond Movies, and it waited on our shelf to be watched for a good number of weeks. We finally got around to it and… hmm. Interesting.
I really enjoy Denzel Washington movies. He’s a great actor. We had no real idea what this movie was about before we watched it, which might have been our mistake. The movie’s mistake is largely that it doesn’t really know what genre it wants to be. In general it is basically a detective story – quite an interesting one, too. And very clearly post Sept 11, too (as are many movies of this type, since they so often make use of the idea of rogue terrorists, or the safety precautions necessary to hopefully deterring them). But then it goes into this weird scifi thing, involving time travel and bizarro paradoxes (paradoces?) that just got, well, weird. And bizarro.
In theory I liked the idea behind the film, but I don’t think it was done with enough panache. Or gumption. Or balls, perhaps – “we like this time travel idea, but we don’t want it to be tooo out there, so reel it in a bit…”.
I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I could recommend it to anyone as a great movie. You’d have to be a mighty big fan of Denzel, or want to see how to mix (or not) standard detective work with scifi in a movie. Or, you know, at home by yourself with nothing to do on a rainy night. Possibly with chocolate, popcorn, and/or alcohol.
too much Stargate? Never!
I am lucky enough at the moment to have little bit of what I choose to call play money. My natural Scrooge tendencies are too painful to go into here, but suffice to say that splurging – even on thins that I really want and will get a lot of joy out of – is something I struggle with. So I thought long and hard, and eventually decided it would be worth it: I bought the 59 DVD box of Stargate: SG-1. This is a crazy extravagance; I know someone with them already – although theirs are pirated, and of course I don’t have easy access to them. Plus, this comes in a lovely big box, complete with tacky raised circle (aka stargate) on the front.
Anyway, it arrived on Thursday. We watched the entire first season on the weekend – my love didn’t get into show until about season 2 or 3 when we watched it the first time (oh, did I mention that I’ve already seen the whole lot?), so he enjoyed watching that; I also discovered that first time through I missed a disc – three or four episodes, including the wonderful Antarctic episode. We’re now into the second season, and we’re trying to limit ourselves to only two… or so… episodes a night. Hard, though…
Couple of things of note:
* Samantha is cringingly nerdy in the first couple of episodes. I am so glad they sophisticated her.
* Teal’c is fairly painful in these first few seasons; his facial expressions are just ridiculous. And not always convincing.
* Michael Shanks. Daniel Jackson. *sigh* Wonderful!
* Richard Dean Anderson. Jack O’Neill. As above!
I said something to my love as we watched an episode – something about enjoying the interaction between Jack and Samantha – and he turned to me, in ridicule, and asked whether I had bought 59 DVDs just for the sake of a few, frustratingly brief, interactions between the two.
Well, duh.
Planetary alignment
Yes, you guessed it, I am spending tonight watching the first Lara Croft film. Whee! It does have a brilliant opening, I must say. And some of the action sequences are marvelous. I love the bungee scene, between floor and mezzanine; giving her the bungee cord makes it at least vaguely plausible, unlike some other scenes of this type. And, you know, who doesn’t love a sexy archaeologist (talking about Alex West, aka Daniel Craig, of course – with a bad American accent)?
But seriously. A planetary alignment I can just about come at, on a fantastical level; it’s not a new idea, and there are alignments of two or three (I’m including the sun and moon here) every now and then. But a meteor that strikes at the exact moment of the alignment? Not even I’m that gullible. And I don’t think it adds to the story, either – it’s not necessary for the plot to work.
Oooh, just got to the massive Buddha getting up and angry; very cool.
And Jolie’s hair? So very fake.
Stories I have known, ’07
Following on from the overall list of Great Stories We Enjoyed in 2007, here then is my personal list:
Absolute Favourites:
David D Levine, “Titanium Mike Saves the Day,” F and SF April
Martin Livings, “There was Darkness,” Fantastic Wonder Stories
Eric James Stone, “Tabloid Reporter to the Stars,” Intergalactic Medicine Show February
Honorable Mentions:
Manek Mistry, “Stories of the Alien Invasion,” Abyss and Apex 21
Karen Swanberg, “The Memory of Touch,” Abyss and Apex 21
Ben Burgis, “Three Perspectives on the Role of the Anarchists in the Zombie Apocalypse,” Afterburn SF July
Amy Betchel, “A Time for Lawsuits,” Analog July/August
Kevin Veale, “A Day in Her Lives,” ASIM 29
Charles Stross, “Trunk and Disorderly,” Asimovs January
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, “Recovering Apollo 8,” Asimovs February
Karen Joy Fowler, “Always,” Asimovs April/May
Lucius Shephard, “Dead Money,” Asimovs April/May
Allen M Steele, “The River Horses,” Asimovs April/May
Nancy Kress, “Fountain of Age,” Asimovs July
Darja Malcolm-Clarke, “The Beacon,” Clarkesworld 11
Bud Sparhawk, “Frost,” Darker Matter 1
Cherie Priest, “Our Lady of the Wasteland and the Hallelujah Chorus,” Dreadful Skin
M Rickert, “Memoir of a Deer Woman,” F and SF March
Carrie Vaughn, “Swing Time,” Baen’s Universe June
Grace Dugan, “Knowledge,” Interzone 211
Walter Jon Williams, “Send Them Flowers,” The New Space Opera
Nancy Kress, “The Art of War,” The New Space Opera
Joanne Merriam, “The Harvest,” Strange Horizons March
John Rosenmann, “Going Away,” Space and Time 100
Lee Thomas, “Sweet Fields,” Space and Time 100
PD Cacek, “The Way to a Man’s Heart,” Space and Time 100
Stephen Baxter, “Last Contact,” Solaris Book of New Science Fiction
Rachel Swirsky, “Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind,” Subterranean Online Summer
Ben Payne, “Inside,” Ticonderoga Online 11
Tansy Roberts, “Bluebell Vengeance,” ASIM 28
Kieran Morgan, “Finding Each Other Again,” ASIM 30
Sue Isle, “The Sun People,” Shiny 1
Things I think influence my thoughts on this:
I’m not an author
Until last year, I had read very few short stories
I’m the youngest
I’m a softie, unlike the other three who are hard-asses…Â =D
On women being published and such
So a friend of mine started a ginormous interwebs feud the other day, discussing the lack of women being published in speculative fiction. A lot of people responded; some very well, others (mostly men) extremely poorly. There was mud-flinging and name-calling and misrepresentations… all very interesting.
In response, and to get her own thoughts on the subject very clear and mused-through, the wonderful Tansy has linked to the debates and offered a coherent, sustained, and fascinating take on the whole topic. Sans mud-slinging!
Rise of the Silver Surfer
… was really, really crap. I liked the premise of the Surfer himself, but they really didn’t develop that very well – and even if he’s just a herald, they could have made more of that aspect. I even quite liked the idea of exploring their tension-filled relationship with their fame, but that was done quite poorly too. And except for a few moments between Reed and what’s-her-face, Alba, and some angsty moments between the whingy Human Torch and his sister, there was pretty much no real interaction between the Fantastic Four themselves. Essentially, it was SFX driven, and the plot – not to mention the dialog – really suffered as a result.
Fun to watch though, as long as your credulity is taking a long, long holiday.
More than meets the eye
We didn’t go to see Transformers at the flicks. I really wanted to, but my love had heard varying reports. Personally, I trusted ‘s assessment, and agitated for going, but we somehow never got around to it. So we got it through BigPondMovies, and every half an hour or so he was then heard to exclaim “This is fantastic! Whoever didn’t like this had no sense of humour!” Duh. Imagine how much more awesome it would have been on the big screen! I’m sure there were aspects that I missed, due to not being an afficiando, but that’s ok – the plot didn’t rely on them, I did get the “more than meets the eye” reference, and I’m happy for uberfans to get some smug enjoyment that I missed – because I like doing it when I can, too.
Things I really liked:
The fight scenes. Woohoo!
The CGI transformations. Very nice.
The dry sense of humour.
Josh Duhamel!  =]
The incongruity of the plot. Yes, there are several bits it’s best not to think about, but when it’s done in such an entertaining way I’m generally disposed to forgiving leaps of logic. After all, we’re talking about giant alien robots…
Things I got annoyed at:
Sam, the main human; especially at the start, very painful.
The Autobots being made to seem a bit lame. Optimus Prime, in particular, sometimes came off as less than heroic.
The bits that were blatantly put in for teenage boys – like Mikaela doing the stretch to look under the hood. Pft.
For those people who thought the movie was crap: we’re talking about aliens, robot aliens, who by all accounts were the indigenous life forms on their planet. So… what is your problem with the rest of the movie?!
Oh, and for a final touch, we two really were destined to be together: turns out we both owned a toy Bumblebee as kids. How sweet!
Randomly Yours, Alex 