The acclaimed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was difficult to categorize. That's a compliment, but it also means much important critical work remains to be done.
Continue reading "Thoughts on Arthur C. Clarke" »
The mid-century mystery and science-fiction master Fredric Brown deserves much greater recognition, and his works should be brought back into print.
Continue reading "The Case for Fredric Brown" »
Continue reading "The Light in "Dark" Fiction" »
My favorite BBC programming has always been its mystery series, and the best of those are not the ones that mimic American programs but those that have the most British feel to them.
Unfortunately, the BBC has almost fully assimilated former Prime Minister Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" notion, turning the government media service into a bastion of vulgar flash and nonsense designed to appeal to sex-addled teenagers of all ages.
Hence it's a happy day any time the BBC accidentally puts out one of its increasingly rare programs of intelligent and sensible entertainment. Life on Mars is just such a one and is not to be missed.
Continue reading "BBC's Excellent "Life on Mars"" »
Planned sequels to failed pro-atheism children's film are increasingly unlikely.
The controversial children's film The Golden Compass, which has accomplished only very weak box office appeal in the United States, has fallen off in foreign appeal as well, landing in second this past weekend, behind I Am Legend.
The Golden Compass has earned $130 million in non-U.S. markets and is fading.
None of this foreign money will go to the studio that made the film, New Line, because the company sold off the foreign rights a couple of years ago in order to raise enough money to produce and market the film. It has earned only $48 million in the United States since opening three weekends ago.
As a result of the poor U.S. showing, it is unlikely that any sequels will be made.
Continue reading "Golden Compass Sliding Outside U.S." »
The controversial fantasy film The Golden Compass opens today in theaters across the United States.
With a production budget reported to be in the $150 million range, the film will have to sell a boatload of tickets in the United States and abroad if the investors are to get any return on their money—and the controversy over the film's origins in the first novel of an openly atheistic trilogy of books does not help things from their perspective.
Continue reading ""Golden Compass" Movie Opens Today" »
Critic John J. Miller has published a very informative interview with Robert E. Howard scholar Rusty Burke on National Review Online, which merits attention.
The excerpts below provide a good sense of why the underappreciated writer of the Conan the Barbarian stories deserves more consideration. Howard wrote for the pulps in a variety of genres, and modern-day readers are rediscovering his non-Conan writings and realizing that he was above all a master storyteller.
Particularly praiseworthy is Burke's emphasis on the importance of story in narrative fiction, which reflects criticisms made in the prior century by G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and other such luminaries:
Continue reading "Master Storyteller" »
I'm not a big fan of science fiction, but this sounds interesting (from AP):
[Masters of Science Fiction is] a limited series of adaptations of short stories, offered in August by ABC.
In some ways, this is pretty amazing stuff: material from top-flight authors like Robert Heinlein and Harlan Ellison, directed by well-known directors like Mark Rydell ("On Golden Pond") and Michael Tolkin ("The Player"), with actors like Sam Waterston, Judy Davis, Brian Dennehy, Anne Heche and Malcolm McDowell. . . .
Continue reading "ABC to Present "Masters of Science Fiction"" »
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer topped the U.S. box office during the past week, performing very well at the box office while garnering generally negative reviews.
The audiences are right on this one (as usual).
Continue reading "The Admirable Conciseness of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" »
Matthew Bowman of Christendom College posted a very interesting comment on my article on Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy tales, which I think adds some value to the discussion. Matthew's comment indicates some reasons why the stories are so interesting, and suggests that a renaissance of interest in them is possible. Here is Matthew's comment:
Well, I have to say you've got good taste in fiction.
I only read Lord Darcy for the first time at the tail end of last summer, as I was getting ready for the new semester at college. I'd first heard about it from my father, thouh only iin very vague terms -- basically just "alternate universe where magic is used to solve crimes." Years later, following some "you'd probably like this links" on Amazon, I came across a book that sounded good. Noticing it was a Baen book, I immediately switched over to Baen.com to read the sample chapters.
The first story blew me away. It not only sounded like the story my father had alluded to years before but couldn't remember the title of, it was also a fantasy story with a strong base in Roman Catholicsm. (I later found out that Randall Garrett was actually a member of the Old Catholic Church, but it doesn't change the way the world he created is structured.) I was surprised that my father, being a diehard and vocal atheist, liked it so much. As a strong Roman Catholic myself, I'd like the Lord Darcy stories just for that.
But, of course, that isn't the only reason I like the story. Going into the story "cold" (with no knowledge of the story except what was on the pages, both expressly stated and what I could figure out myself), I came up with almost exactly what you described in your NRO article. That is, I saw a well-organized world without the modern mess, with paralells to our world but still obviously unique. It was like Garrett had discovered, not created -- the same feel from all great stories. True "sub-creation," as Tolkein called it.
There is something objective about it that speaks to us. It is a world where life can still be seen in white and black without losing sight of humanity. It is a country where one can excell at one's task, and find happiness as a person among people, rather than a simple individual in society. It is a world that almost audibly says "this is how it should have been."
Currently, I'm writing a term paper on the Lord Darcy stories -- for a history credit, no less; and whle the class is cross-listed with English Lit, Lord Darcy is not directly connected with anything we are studying. However, my professor (Dr. Schwartz) was so intrigued by my description of the series that he suggested it as my topic on the very fi[r]st day of class, even though I pointed out to him that it didn't fit the criteria that he'd just listed for the students. (Arm-twisting? Heck no. There wasn't even finger-twisting.)
Actually, I've been talking it up so much at the college that both of my dead-tree-and-pigment copies (yes, I got two) are being lent out, while I use my ebook copy from Baen to do research. Another professor was so taken by the idea of the story that he express-ordered it from Amazon for himself -- I walked into his office and found him reading it. The library even got in its own copy last week.
Lord Darcy's taking off. I love it.
Matthew Bowman
Christendom College
Front Royal, V
Thanks for the comment, Matthew.
I stirred up some concerns among PKD fans with my Philip K. Dick article, which was cross-posted at The Reform Club site. Francis Poretto commented thoughtfully there, suggesting that there is no way to discern true greatness in a writer. After stating, "For my money, a great writer is one who inspires me to great emotion," Francis asks, "How shall I judge Dick, or any writer, great, even if permitted to use my criterion?"
It's a fair question, and one that I implicitly answered in my original comment on PKD. Francis correctly observes that a numerical analysis of how a particular author measures up to an individual's chosen standards is impossible. Hence, he suggests, it's silly to engage in such discussions. "I think you can see where this is going," he concludes.
I can indeed see where that is going, and I am rather surprised to see someone who is most decidedly not a philosophical relativist taking the position Francis is staking out in regard to literature. Certainly it's true that we cannot hope to judge the quality of literary works and the overall achievements of their authors by some sort of quantitative analysis, but that is absolutely not the same thing as saying that there are no qualitative differences between such works and authors. And if there are such differences, then it is most certainly useful and salutary to discuss the matter.
Francis points out the following as possible standards, but then dismisses them:
-- Widespread critical acclaim?
-- Volume of sales?
-- The length of time his works have been read?
-- His avoidance of modifiers?
-- The effulgence of his imagery?
-- Some other criterion?
The answer, as you will have already guessed, is (f), some other criterion. Or, more accurately, some other criteria.
To wit:
Most assuredly there is a certain something at the heart of all great literary works that cannot quite be identified, much less quantified. Rather like the human soul, we perceive it but cannot isolate it. However, just as the human soul is held in a body that makes identifiable and even quantifiable actions, this heart of a novel is contained in (and indeed suffuses) a book that has identifiable characteristics. These characteristics can even be usefully quantified in some cases, though I believe actual numerical quantification to be unnecessary for a valid literary analysis.
Specifically, it is possible to put individual tastes aside and discuss literature and the other arts in a rational and salubrious way.
We can observe, for example, that some books have deeper, more true, and more convincing characterizations than others. We can see that some have plots that are more interesting and diverting than others. Some have stories that are more plausible, convincing, and usefully reminiscent of reality than others. Some have descriptive passages that make the fictional world come alive more convincingly than others. Some have prose that is so beautiful and artful that it gives us distinct pleasure to contemplate. Some have moral implications that bring our human condition into greater focus and give us real insights into our position in the cosmos. And so on.
Yes, we cannot always quantify such things, but we certainly can make comparisons and discuss what is most worthy of our time and energy. And the point of my post was that a good many of the writings of Philip K. Dick are much more worthy of our time and attention than those of most mainstream American literary artisans of the twentieth century.
So let us indeed feel free to discuss the quality of authors' works, singly and in toto. We should always recognize that there is much room for disagreement, awareness of ambiguity, and differing assessments of how various works measure up to the ideal characteristics of literature, and that individuals can hold different rankings of importance among the various aspects of literary excellence, but that it is nonetheless both possible and necessary to discuss these works objectively and with a sincere search for truth at the heart of the matter.
It's official: Philip K. Dick is a great writer, according to the Library of America. As the Galley Cat at Media Bistro reports:
Buried at the tail end of Mark Sarvas's interview with Jonathan Lethem comes news of one project on the novelist's plate: "I'm helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my (formerly outsider) heroes, Philip K. Dick: I'm writing endnotes for The Library of America, which is doing a volume of four of his novels from the sixties, which I also helped select."
I suppose that if Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and H. P. Lovecraft are great writers, then Dick is too. But in my view, this event is most important as further evidence of how poor the mainstream American novel was during the previous century. Solid but unspectactular and fairly uninsightful genre authors (though this last limitation does not apply to Dick) are touted as among the best the nation had to offer, and this is true because the mainstream novelists were so often confused, self-important, and wrongheaded.
A good many of Philip K. Dick's books and stories are well worth reading, but he really worked largely on frankly pulp material. His great contribution was to convey interesting, provocative, and important ideas in a pulp context, but that is like making a really fast production automobile. It's fast, but it can't run with the custom jobbies.
Dick stands out as an author because the "custom cars" of his time were so shabby.
PKD's prose was usually serviceable at best, although better than, say, Theodore Drieser's glop. But whereas Dreiser's characterizations could be immensely powerful and the conflicts highly real and dramatic, Dick's characters are usually unable to sustain much interest, and the stories depend almost entirely on their ideas and interesting plot angles. Some of those concepts and ideas are so good that his writings have gained a strong foothold in the culture through film adaptations. For that reason, he's certainly one of the more important American writers of the second half of the twentieth century.
Philip K. Dick was indeed a great pulp writer, if there can be such a thing, and a very good writer within his limits. I'll call hiim a very good writer overall when at his best. And his elevation to Library of America status points out once again that genre literature, despite its limitations, was where it was at in American literature during the past century.
Time travel fictions are certainly interesting and have been around for a long time. Peter Suderman suggests, in National Review Online, that their appeal is based on a natural human obsession with mortality, which time travel naturally brings to the fore. I can't say I agree that human mortality is a special interest in time travel fictions, given that pretty much any narrative has a good deal to do with human mortality.
I think that the real appeal of time travel is in the possibility of changing things—time travel is the ultimate power trip. We've all done things we wish we hadn't, and failed to do things we wish we had. (Cf. the Lutheran rite of confession and absolution.) And we've all experienced things that we wish hadn't happened. Thinking about what things would be like if we had done things differently is a natural human endeavor, every bit as natural as mortality itself. And this is a particularly strong element in time travel narratives, such as the recent BBC-TV mystery series Life on Mars, and is in fact the central issue in time-repetition stories such as Groundhog Day and Daybreak.
That's what is really behind Deja Vu. Denzel Washington plays a BATF agent investigating a terrorist bombing, who discovers that he might just be able to go into the past—at a good deal of risk to his personal well-being—and prevent the attack, thereby saving several-hundred lives and possibly the lives of his ATF partner and of a beautiful, young, single woman who was murdered as part of the "collateral damage."
Of course, he does what people typically do in such movies, but this being a Denzel Washington film, there is a good deal of Christian imagery and thematic material, including a couple of prominent acts of self-sacrifice and a resurrection from death. There is a brief exchange about morality early in the film, but what is always at the forefront of the story is the desire to change our conditions, to make things right and avert trouble for other people.
As in Back to the Future, The Time Machine, and other such narratives, Deja Vu is most intensely concerned with the here and now, the present conditions of our lives. That's what makes it so absorbing and interesting, and well worth seeing.
I have some good news for you regarding Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy mysteries, which I highly recommend for a bit of fun and somewhat meaningful reading—see article here and excerpts from that article below. The good news is that two complete Lord Darcy stories (novellas, really) are available online, at the site for Baen Books, the publisher of the Lord Darcy omnibus collection.
The Darcy mysteries were written in the 1960s and '70s and are set in an alternative twentieth century in which the Reformation never happened, the rules of magic were discovered during the Middle Ages, and technology has not advanced beyond the mid-nineteenth century. The stories (and one novel) combine dashing adventure, real fair-play puzzle mysteries, a world where magic is real but bound by definite rules, and some lightly presented insights into the human condition.
To read the stories on the Baen website, click here. Once you read them, you will want to read them all.
For more info on Lord Darcy and why you might want to read Randall Garrett's delightful series, click here for my National Review Online essay on the subject.
To buy a copy of the trade paperback edition, click here.
Here's some more info on Lord Darcy, from my National Review Online essay on the series:
First published in science-fiction magazines in the 1960s and '70s, the stories tell the exploits of Lord Darcy, a detective who bears a striking resemblance to Sherlock Holmes.
But if Darcy seems familiar, the world in which he lives is anything but. In this alternative universe, King Richard the Lion-Hearted did not die young, having narrowly escaped death at the Siege of Chaluz (the source of his demise in our world), and that particular event changed everything. The brash, irresponsible king's brush with mortality sobered him up greatly, and he ruled wisely and well for another two decades and ensured the continuation of a long line of great Plantagenet rulers that has lasted to the present day.
As a result, there was no break between England and France, no Reformation, no formal separation of church and state, and no Enlightenment. The world has thereby avoided the splintering of authority that has characterized the modern era. In addition, rather than the laws of science and technology being worked out into their now-familiar profusion, the laws of magic were developed instead, thereby retarding technological development by making the need for it less urgent.
The resulting world is certainly an enchanting place. In the 1960s and '70s, travel is still mainly by horseback and railroad, and the streets and buildings are illuminated by gaslight. Houses, furnishings, and clothing fashions have an 18th-century quality, and the feudal system is in full flower and is administered in a quite decent and humane manner, thanks to the precedent established by King Richard. The Anglo-French Empire is a place of great courtesy and formality, a huge contrast to the real 1960s and '70s in which these stories first appeared.
Even a largely just and harmonious political order, however, cannot nullify the human heart's propensity toward sin. That, of course, is where Lord Darcy comes in. In this alternative twentieth-century Europe, he serves as Chief Criminal Investigator for Richard, Duke of Normandy, brother of King John IV, Emperor of England, France, Scotland, Ireland, New England (North America), and New France (South America). Assisted by forensic expert and Master Sorcerer Sean O Lochlainn, Darcy investigates crimes, all of which involve some use of magic either in the commission or investigation.
Despite the presence of magic, the puzzles are fairly clued; once Garrett establishes the rules of magic, he sticks to them, and we can trust that all the evidence will be laid before the reader before Darcy presents his ingenious solution. The puzzles are quite good, in fact, which is particularly remarkable in that Garrett was mainly a science-fiction writer (and a widely admired one). Darcy uses deduction to solve the crimes, while Sean serves the function of a forensic scientist. The saga consists of three novellas written in the 1960s, six from the 1970s, and the 1966 novel Too Many Magicians. After Garrett's untimely death, sci-fi and mystery writer Michael Kurland wrote two more Darcy novels in the late 1980s.
Garrett's writing style is as elegant and charming as his setting, and his mastery of atmosphere is admirable. . . .
There's much more—the rest of the essay continues here.
The first installment of Philip Pullman's anti-Christian, pro-"Lucifer" children's saga His Dark Materials is coming to the silver screen. New Line will produce The Golden Compass, based on the first of the trilogy of young-adult novels, with shooting scheduled to commence on September 4 in the UK. New James Bond Daniel Craig will star as Lord Asriel, in a cast that also includes Nicole Kidman. New Line is the company that produced the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
The Hollywood Reporter observes that audiences and critics differed greatly on the merits of the two big superhero movies of this summer:
As summer nears its end, "X-Men: The Last Stand," which nabbed middling reviews, seems to have exceeded expectations with a $441 million worldwide gross, while "Superman Returns" -- though it earned a strong, positive ranking of 76 percent on RottenTomatoes.com -- has yet to break the $200 million mark domestically.
I agree with the audiences on this one. X-Men: The Last Stand was not exactly profound, but at least it kept things moving and had some interesting characters. The makers of Superman Returns clearly tried very hard, but the film had no charisma whatever, disastrously poor chemistry between the lead performers, and no charm at all. The Christian imagery was an interesting touch and made the film deeper thematically, but the entertainment and artistic value did not match up with it. And the idea of Superdude having had a child with Lois Lane while she married another man is just the sort of clever concept that filmmakers ought to know better than to do. No wonder, then, that audiences thought it OK but not a must-see or a must-see-twice.
Warners Bros. has announced that its film adaptation of I Am Legend, the 1953 horror novel by Richard Matheson, will be released on Nov. 21, 2007, according to Reuters. Matheson's novel has been seen as a response to McCarthyism, and it can be read as such, but that limits its meaning unnecessarily. In fact it is a strong assertion of individualism and against forced social conformity in general. As such it is very much a product of its time, as the Omniculture began to form after World War II. As I noted in my two-part National Review Online article on the subject, "the '50s culture was not quite what it has been portrayed to be [stifling, conformist, etc.]. . . . Far from being a hotbed of conventionality, the American culture of the '50s in fact did much to promote individualism, self-expression, egalitarianism, and a widespread reaction against mindless conformity."
The story has already been filmed twice. The first was the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price as the title character who spends his time fighting off vampire-zombies and searching for some sort of meaning to his life. It's an enormously bleak and apocalyptic film, yet there is also an important theme of Christian hope: Price's character's blood may just be able to save mankind. Interesting, then, is the fact that the actor playing this character is named Price!
The Last Man on Earth is probably the first prominent zombie film and kicked off a genre that has lasted more than four decades. Better known than the Price film is The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston and released in 1971. Here, too, the Christian symbolism is strong, with apparent references to Judas, Mary Magdalene, satanism (in the form of a vampire-zombie family evidently modeled after the Charles Manson cult), a crucifixion pose at the film's climax, and so on. Also dominant is the late-1960s/early '70s sense of impending worldwide catastrophe, in which population growth, pollution, nuclear war, and other human-caused evils were expected to end life on earth at any moment. Ah, nostalgia. . . .
Smith's films often have fairly evident Christian themes among the knockabout comedy and action-film mayhem, and it seems a natural step for the star of I, Robot to take on Matheson's novel. It will be interesting to see what he and his team do with it.