I guess that’s why I still watch Lost: despite all the crap they keep pulling, every once in a while they manage to have great moments. I didn’t think I’d care about any of what was gonna happen — none of which was a surprise, except for the Searcher — yet they managed to sell it all so well.

My immediate, and stupid, reaction to the first mention of the deceased’s name was to google it because it had to be a character I’d forgotten from earlier in the show (hence the “stupid,” because what are the chances of that, really?), so I completely spoiled myself on that one, but in the end I don’t think it made the double episode any worse — I hate that kind of artificial suspense anyway.

As much as I complained about Simmons’ pretentious writing, going back to Card’s childishness was a little painful in the beginning. It didn’t help that at least a hundred of the novel’s pages are just reminders of what happened in the previous books. Or it’s about goddamn midichlorians.

Yet once again the second half of the story is great, and I’m quite happy I stuck through the first chapters. I’m stopping there, though; this book’s ending is final enough for my taste (even though it clearly leaves a door open for its sequels), and I’m getting just a bit weary of reading the same plot over and over in each book of the series — aliens are just misunderstood, whether they’re man-killing insectoids, man-killing swinoids or man-killing bacteriods, let’s live and let live, and can’t we all just get along?

They could have spared us the hours of pseudo hesitation and forced suspense to reach the conclusion that was obvious the moment they talked about xxxx stepping down. (Oh wait, it couldn’t have been hours, could it? But it felt like it. Not enough Sixes in the counselor’s quarters.) And to make matters worse, the whole process was a setup to get Lee to recite another of his damn annoying pleas. I’m pretty sure I saw him talk on there, but I have no idea what the words were.

So… they haven’t invented beacons yet, have they? I figure that was secondary to not finding a cure for cancer.

The writing style put me off immediately — too pretentious and flourished, while descriptions are paradoxically lacking (I still only have a very faint idea of what a freaking tree-ship looks like) and the author has an irritating tendency to delay explanations of his sci-fi concepts and vocabulary for hundreds of pages when adding just a few words in passing would have made the reading so much easier — and it all became clearer when the poet character launched into a diatribe about writing, poetry and all that stuff.

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

I don’t care for poetry, I care about story. And the thing is… well, this happens to be a fantastic story (or, rather, collection of full-fledged stories, connected by tightening threads, in a consistent universe). On the other hand, it’s also a story that doesn’t have a fucking end — I was silently shouting “Asshole! Asshole! Asshole!” when I finished reading the last page… but couldn’t resist opening Amazon immediately to order the next volume.

Hey, he does have a nice voice.

P.S. I just realized — Battlestar is so much into mysticism, destiny and all, the Caprica prequel should star Edward James Olmos as the Adama patriarch and Mary McDonnell as his star-crossed lover. Reincarnation and all that.

That was interesting. Too bad it somehow still managed to be boring. The direction was way off; where the hell did they find the music they used in the final sequence?

So fiction blogs were already all the rage in 1966, were they? Like Ubik, the themes and treatments have been reused time and time again in more recent works — but you’ve still got a strong, simple story that works very well (even though I’m not 100% convinced by the narrator’s voice at both extremes of his IQ progression).

Funny thing when you read a forty- or fifty-year-old science-fiction story: it feels like it plagiarizes dozens of more recent books or movies. It’s hard to appreciate it fully under those circumstances.

Beyond that, though, it looks like Dick’s science-fiction is not exactly the geeky kind, but more of the poetic, dreamy variety that doesn’t really care about… well, the science part. In Ubik’s case, Dick writes a character who essentially has all the powers of a god, and he never addresses that, and it evidently doesn’t bother him a bit — but it bothers me a lot, and just keeps me out of the story.

And then, there are the long chapters about 1900s-technology that Dick remembers a little too fondly, which is pretty unhealthy for a scifi author.

Card only wrote Ender’s Game (ie, rewrote it as a full novel) as a prologue to this story, and it shows: the most interesting parts of the first book were the final chapters that laid ground for Speaker, and they felt a little out of place.

For some reason, the author’s introduction spoils most of the science-fiction mystery that’s developed over the entire book, so I strongly recommend you skip it (or maybe that’s what you’re always supposed to do? I don’t know; it’s printed in front of the book, so I just read it first). But then, Card isn’t the most subtle author when it comes to managing suspense, anyway.

The book could probably be a bit shorter (as often happens, I guess), but Card’s obsession with designing and presenting alien lifeforms and their thought processes is as interesting as ever — especially if you skip the aforementioned spoilery introduction.

I only noted this quote because it was funny, coming from an author who’s more famous now for his recent declarations against gay marriage than his books:

Marriage is a covenant between a man and woman on the one side and their community on the other. To marry according to the law of the community is to become a full citizen; to refuse marriage is to be a stranger, a child, an outla, a slave, or a traitor. The one constant in every society of humankind is that only those who obey the laws, tabus, and customs of marriage are true adults.

If the memoirs are as authentic as the author says, he must have wanted to kill himself when he saw the movie. Please spare yourselves. Funny, witty writing, with some strong bits in passing; undoubtedly good reading.

I’d watch a show with Sixes and only them. Well, maybe a hybrid and some centurions. Just let everybody appear for a couple minutes per episode.

The backstory was a little too cheesy, but at least things are moving. It’s interesting (and probably a bit sad) that, in an entire episode about xxxx, the cool character was Ben and his twelve seconds of screen time.

Meh. More setting up, more development, but more importantly more delaying with nothing new happening. And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, god oh god why did they have to make him important? I hate him so much.

For a Jack-centered episode, it was good enough.

Now I’m not a doctor, but can I call bullshit on the “we can’t move him” plot point anyway?