Sanctuary: the place for speculative fiction in a modern world.

Why are all science fiction shows chock full of the scary business? I had been seeing ads for the new show Sanctuary for months before it appeared, so my anticipation was high. I couldn’t watch even 30 minutes of the pilot. Too much darkness with things jumping out. Hollywood seems to think of science fiction as a haunted house and I read science fiction and fantasy to explore interesting ideas like interactions between vastly different cultures. So I think of sff more like anthropology or politics or history. You don’t hear anthropologists and historians going around passing judgement before they have researched or talked to people. Assuming things that are different are going to be scary is a very non-sff concept, one I think is bad for society as a whole. Many people who read science fiction want to become scientists (despite the way scientists frown upon fictional science and its readers, there are a lot of people who treat their reading preferences as a dirty little secret) because they want to know more. If the books were all about how scientists’ need to know destroys the Earth and kills everyone, wouldn’t that discourage some of the brightest people? Many people who read some of the great modern fantasy absorb tolerance— I don’t know anyone who has read and liked Lackey’s Valdemar series who really thinks being homosexual is a killing offense, there are some who are still skeeved if they think about it too much, but we all got to know Vanyel and it’s hard to think he deserved to be tortured because he wasn’t attracted to women.

Personally I’ve read books that started from an Islamic basis, the story wasn’t about that, but there was an underlying premise. I got to know a little bit about what the differences are compared to my own upbringing. I find it impossible to assume every Muslim is inherently a terrorist. Because the fundamental core beliefs are not about that.  But if the story had been about being a woman in Saudi Arabia, I would have been too angry to keep reading and then I would have no connection to the characters.

Science fiction and fantasy differ in what powers everything, but they are both fundamentally about exploration of the human condition, regardless of shape or color or background or belief.

Hollywood’s tendency to make all science fiction and fantasy scary enough to be horror really undermines the globalization of society. Hollywood is trying to make us afraid of each other by making everything that is different jump out of the darkness with guns blazing.

It makes the title of the new show Sanctuary rather ironic.

Spook Country — William Gibson (sff)

Spook Country
a book by William Gibson
Wiki | Amazon
Overall Rating: 7/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 5/10

In my opinion, William Gibson’s novels vary, sometimes one book will be amazing and really resonate then the next (whether a sequel or no) might be mediocre. I doubt Mr. Gibson considers Spook Country to be a sequel to Pattern Recognition but a number of similar entities occur, namely “Blue Ant” which appears to be some sort of hyper-real PR firm that creates trends even doing R&D on them.

In Spook Country, there is that common cyberpunk technique (which was adopted by most science fiction writers) of multi-threaded plots. What I mean by that is one chapter has a character experiencing some aspect of the story, the next chapter will have a different character experiencing a disjoint part of the story— without any knowledge of the first character. At some later climactic point, these threads converge in some manner, usually bringing the various characters in contact with one another. This book has a handful of these threads and the reader is jarred sequentially through them in endless repetition so none of the characters becomes familiar and the end of the chapter is something to be dreaded. The transitions in this book are harsh.

The contrast with the relatively mono-focused Pattern Recognition book, where the more lyrical tendencies Mr. Gibson has available is tremendous. Oft times while reading Pattern Recognition, I found myself nodding while reading something insightful, like the main character’s belief that jet lag is caused by the soul’s inability to be carried via airplane and the body feels disconnected in the new place, not because of the time change, but because the soul is missing. Regardless of spiritual beliefs, that explanation makes a lot more sense to me than it being about the time change, since it is possible to rearrange one’s schedule in advance but this does not stave off jet lag very well.

At several points in Spook Country, the currently focal character was in deadly peril and my reaction was extremely negative… “Just kill [him/her] already. They’re obviously not important enough to star in a whole book.” I admit that there were some lyrical moments, but my irritation with the storytelling style tended to overwhelm them before they could sink in. I did not recognize any of them as profound. I was annoyed by the constant transitions. Partially because of inept technique, but partially because they seemed so unnecessary. We see lots of detail for innocuous characters’ lives, making them seem disproportionately important.

In discussing this with others, the common complaint was a wish for an electronic version which could be sorted by character’s POV/thread. The chronological approach, where every chapter break really needs to start with, “Meanwhile, back at the ranch….” but just drops the reader into a new pot of soup, that made me want to hand the author 600,000 Scrabble tiles and claim to have found a plagiarized copy of his novel. I doubt Mr. Gibson would understand from that, that I think the story was ruined by a lack of appropriate organization. In further thinking, I am not certain that 4/5 of the threads were important at all. I think it would have been better served as a book if it had been told with some sort of omniscient overseer for the plot and had a single character stumbling through the plot and discovering the hidden aspects of the story.

If I had to do it again, I would not read Spook Country, I would reread Pattern Recognition, but I do not think my disappointment is an accurate reflection of the quality of the second novel in this particular world setting. I really think it was probably an average book, unless you were comparing it to something which had been more personally satisfying.