I Am Legend

Now wait a minute. Why was I expecting this movie to be utter crap? Didn’t it have rather mediocre word-of-mouth? Well, turns out it’s just about as cool as you can make a movie about the last man on Earth and his dog, living the high life in New York, New York.

I spent the whole time waiting for the moment when the movie would turn into a brain-dead action fest, prepared to declare that you should just cut at the one-hour mark and forget anything that’s been shot beyond, but it never really happens. And, while the alternate ending, as described by Wikipedia, sounds a little too cheesy for me, I don’t really mind the… eh, deus ex-machina in a story like this one; I think it just makes sense.

It might have been a little more boring to watch in a theater (although the visuals must have been nice on a big screen), and my low expectations probably helped, but I am positive that there are lots of very cool scenes in the first half of the movie, and the second half is just bland (and short) enough not to spoil it.

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Unapologetically unlikable characters and intentionally tedious writing, culminating in a main character who speaks like the pompous, overliterate asshole that he is. I’m sure the story has a lot of merit or something, but I’m giving up on page 52.

Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous With Rama

Talk about classics. I used to be rather prejudiced against Clarke, until I read an early draft of the 2001 script and found out that it was actually supposed to be a sci-fi story, and not just the pretty sound-and-light show that Kubrick made out of it. (Did I ever mention I don’t like Kubrick?)

Now, this is geeky science-fiction at its best: unlike Stephenson or Card, Clarke never lectures you about how the whole science of Rama works. He’ll remind you in passing that gravity doesn’t work the same way in a spinning giant spaceship as on Earth, and he’ll definitely use every aspect of that in the story, but he’s not going to give you a physics lesson.

Rama just isn’t targeted at the same audience: while Quicksilver makes literary types feel clever because they learn and understand something scientific (which they’ll unlearn as soon as they close the book, of course), and Ender’s Game tries to explain enough about zero-G disorientation to be accessible to a teenager audience, Clarke’s story is evidently written by an artistically talented scientist (who knew that was possible?) for scientifically-minded people. I don’t think you really have to be a geek, per se, to appreciate the book, but you ought to have been moderately attentive to the science classes in high school.

Like any Clarke story (or so I heard), Rama benefits from scientific accuracy: the book is like a blueprint for an intergalactic ship that could actually work and transport lifeforms for thousands of centuries. What I didn’t expect, though, was how well it would be written, and how vivid the depictions would be — this is pretty much the first time I read a novel that focuses on describing a place rather than a story (and as unfamiliar a place as could be), and I didn’t think it could be quite so successful: the chapters revealing the inside of Rama are really breathtaking.

It may not work quite as well if you’re not a sci-fi geek, and I’ve got a feeling that the sequels aren’t going to be as memorable; but this is a great book (with an appropriately frustrating ending).

Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

How about a good sci-fi classic now, something’s that I see or hear mentioned just about once a month in blogs and podcasts (in reference to the advancement of modern videogaming)?

Ender’s Game starts out like a silly children’s book, with six-year-old brethren professing everlasting love, and nude, sweaty ten-year-olds trainees wrestling under the showers and… uh, yeah, it’s awkward like that sometimes (not least of all because I was right out of Stephenson’s 17th century, where the word “buggers” has quite another connotation).

But it’s still a pretty good sci-fi story, and it deserves to be a classic. Although it doesn’t look like it in the first chapters, the author doesn’t shy away from addressing the ambiguous morality of isolating and training kids to become great masters of war, or trying to wipe out an alien race in an extension of the concept of self-defense; and while the ending is more than predictable, what really got me was the epilogue — which also happens to be the introduction to the book’s sequels, that I’d already have if I could still rely on mail order.

A quick, easy read, definitely recommended.

Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

Okay, that’s not quite what I was going for. I enjoyed Snow Crash because of the story and the science-fiction, despite the archeological digressions that grew longer and longer (and drier) as the book progressed; with a title like Quicksilver I expected this one to be an epic fantasy story about alchemists or something, rather than a novelized history of the dawn of science in the 17th century.

Not that’s it’s a bad book; as long and hard it is to read (I can read English sci-fi or contemporary novels without a sweat, but I’m not trained for the vocabulary of period pieces), it managed to keep me interested until the end.

But the thing is, I’ve never been the mathematical kind of geek. I don’t care how algebra was invented, and while this book finally gave me an inkling of what’s so fascinating about the idea of equations describing and defining the world (which had always evaded me precisely because I wasn’t born in the 1650s, and always took math for granted, I guess), there isn’t much of it that’s remaining in my head after I’ve closed the book.

In many ways, the novel feels like a “modern science for dummies” story, using the setting to explain the bases of science to the New York Times readers — but I know how centrifugal forces work (and how they’re not forces), and almost everything else the book touches. And there’s this main character, who’s been witness, and often instrumental, to everything that happened during a whole century, and that somehow the times forgot; that same storytelling device that made me occasionally curse at the Rome TV show. Sure, it works, but I just don’t like it. Not to mention the Lost-style flashbacks that hint at plot points that’ll be explained later — which works better in a TV show, because with Quicksilver I just kept wondering if I’d skipped a paragraph somewhere.

Like I said, it’s not a bad book at all, and I’m not sorry I read it; but I’m not going to order the rest of the trilogy, and I don’t suppose I’ll be too eager to read anything else by Stephenson if he indulges more and more in his nerdiness as he gets more successful.