The Change by Longyear

My review

rating: 1 of 5 stars

Alien Nation: The Change brings to mind a recent metafilter comment by one of my favorite Mefits, Greg Nog:

It annoys me to see so many people making the deeply stupid argument that the weight of canon restricts writers. A good, non-lazy writer should be perfectly able to write within the canon they’re working with. When someone’s writing a novel that’s ostensibly about the real world, no one says, “Well, you have to understand that it probably won’t be very good; I mean, all the history is so well-established, there’s not really room to do anything new.” Who in their right mind would point to, say, The Grapes of Wrath, and call it continuity pr0n just because it deals with events that the author himself didn’t have control over? “Yeah, it was good and all, but I think Steinbeck was sort of restricted in that he couldn’t turn Tom Joad into a samurai with a laser-sword who has a climactic showdown with FDR in the last scene. And also, it turns out that Joad and FDR were secretly brothers, and that both have telekinetic powers.”

It’s too bad that Greg’s advice wasn’t around for Barry Longyear when he wrote The Change. This is truly a terrible licensed novel. It’s beyond obvious that Longyear was excruciatingly unfamiliar with the universe in which he was writing. Not only is the dialogue off, but he fails to respect even the most basic canon details–like, in more than one instance, a character’s full name. Names and biographies are changed freely, for no discernible reason.

Perhaps these changes would have made sense if they served a particularly excellent plot, but the story here is all over the place–poorly developed, loose ends abounding. There’s a subplot about race that’s painfully heavy-handed; though the original series was often allegorical for race and discrimination issues, it never felt nearly this pedantic. And Longyear’s overly simplistic message–that we’re all the same no matter our color–is weakened by the fact that his female characters are so poorly written and shrill. Every female character, both established and new, seems to suffer from women in refrigerator syndrome. If Longyear himself can’t treat established franchise characters with respect, who is he to preach to us about treating our fellow men likewise?

This is a really terrible book. If you like Alien Nation, please skip this–you’ll be better for it.

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Body and Soul by Peter David

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

I got impatient waiting for the second Alien Nation novel to arrive via paperbackswap, so I skipped directly to the third volume in the series, Body and Soul, written by Peter David.

I’m familiar with David’s writing through his Star Trek: New Frontier novels, as well as through his involvement in the kid’s television series Space Cases. He’s a known quantity, and his writing is appropriately solid here. His prose, though not quite as mature-feeling as the Reese-Stevens’, who wrote the first Alien Nation novel, is efficient. It does its job well, though he relies a bit too heavily on cliches . . . and ellipses.

The plot is very close to its eventual made-for-TV movie adaptation. There are a few scenes that didn’t make the transition to the small screen, much of it sexual content, but also a few scenes relating to the Francisco kids that were really quite nice.

David doesn’t break any new ground here. This is typical licensed fare, a fast and engaging, if not particularly satisfying or challenging read.

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The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

I wanted to like The Mote In God’s Eye–not only did it come highly recommended by both the denizens of metafilter and my good friend Karin, but it also centers on first contact with an alien race, one of my favorite themes in science fiction. Niven and Pournelle handle the species-building well–the Moties are strongly developed, emotionally believable, and consistent in their motivations. But everything else in this novel–not the least the human characters–felt extraneous and poorly developed.

There’s no plot here, not really. I suppose we’re supposed to be riveted by the painfully slow revelations about Motie culture–though if that were the case, I don’t know why we linger so long on the bland human characters, many of which are stock sci-fi archetypes–don’t get me started on the Scottish Engineer with his all-too-familiar–and painful-to-read–brogue. Each of the novel’s four sections are poorly paced, with fairly bland narrative used to fill in the history of the universe and move the plot (slowly) forward. The universe itself is quaintly Victorian and vaguely unbelievable. The single female human character demurely tells the aliens at one point that respectable human girls don’t use birth control.

Still, the conclusion to each section, and the parts of the novel most deeply involved in the story of the Moties themselves, move quickly and are engaging. This is particularly true of the parts of the novel told from the Motie perspective. Perhaps Niven and Pournelle should have spent more time developing the human characters–if they had been created with the care evident in their alien antagonists, this would have been a more even, and ultimately fulfilling, read.

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My post today will include some spoilers about last night’s Lost finale.

I want to talk about continuity in television. It seems like it’s only recently that TV writers and producers have realized the full potential in television–that its serialized and continuing nature is best exploited not through stand alone episodes but, well, through serialized development. Where did this start? While the soaps have been doing it for years, I don’t think it was fully realized until the trend hit science fiction–Babylon 5 and its Trek counterpart (rip-off?) Deep Space Nine. This doesn’t mean that science fiction serial shows have always done it right, of course. I got frustrated with The X-files after the film, when it became apparent that the producers were prepared to set up mysteries and character tensions without meaningfully or clearly resolving them. In fact, I’m still not really sure about what was really going on in that series’ narrative arc, despite my best attempts to answer my lingering questions through extensive wikipedia research.

The transient nature of television also screws with some these story arcs. Shows get canceled without their mysteries resolving. Or the show runners get forced out and a series’ goals change drastically and are no longer satisfying to those who watched from the beginning–I’m thinking of you, Sliders; war with the Kromaggs my ass.

I became hooked on the US version of Life on Mars this year. Like many other series, it was canceled before its time. But the show runners had a unique opportunity to nevertheless resolve the mysteries it introduced. While drastically different from its UK counterpart series, I’ve started to watch the show again from the beginning, and it’s helped me realize how the twist at the end of the last episode was, in fact, very well-supported from the second episode onward. Sure, it was a quirky and slightly gimmicky ending, but it satisfied; it resolved the character conflicts and the major mysteries. You can’t ask for much more in a series.

Except, perhaps,to ask for several years of build up with a really satisfying resolution. As Lost winds down to its final season, I’m starting to see it as the ultimate serial show.

There was a time, deep into the second season, when the writers were clearly floundering. Around that time, I started to refer to Lost as the abusive boyfriend of television–no matter how bad it was, I kept coming back, hoping for a change. But then the writers were given an end date for the series and things drastically, drastically turned around. And after last night’s revelations, I can clearly see how even the clumsy tail section plotline figures into the larger narrative.

In brief, last night we met Jacob, who seems to be the god-like prime mover of the island’s mysteries, as well as his rival, who I’ll call Esau. We discovered that Locke–particular his death–was little more than a plot of Esau’s to kill Jacob. We learned that the smoke monster is probably an agent of Esau’s, which explains not only his recent interaction with Benjamin Linus but also earlier interactions with both Locke and Eko, who was clearly an early candidate for Locke’s role.

And it also seems that the Losties who have been trapped in 1977 exist as agents of Jacob. Their attempts to stop their pasts from occurring all seem to cause those actions to happen, if that makes any sense. I strongly suspect that Juliet banging at a nuke with a rock caused the incident, and will also cause their return to the present. In fact, I think we’ve just seen a major shift in the rulership of the island–power shifting from Jacob to Esau–and I think we’re gearing up to see a war between their factions. I’m not sure how this war will end, but I have no doubt that it will make sense in the context of the series, because it’s clear that the producers and writers had a plan from the very beginning.

I’m sure none of this makes much sense to those who haven’t watched the show. In fact, during the series, it’s often made little sense to the viewers. This sense of mystery and confusion was key to the engagement of the viewers, and it’s amazing how the information we’ve slowly been given over the course of five seasons has enriched understanding, rather than robbing it of its urgency. This is the best kind of twist ending, the one which begs for a second or third viewing, a search for clues and an understanding of the writes’ overall plan.

And I really, really think that this is how television should be done–clearly planned and plotted, with information slowly released to the public to enrich understanding of the overall plot line. It’s the only way to give viewers a satisfying conclusion. Watching the finale of, say The X-Files, I felt duped–it was clear that the writers had no idea what they were doing; the plot was much too convoluted to arise out of careful planning or writing or even an adequate amount of respect for the viewers. There was no pay-out. The X-files was the abusive boyfriend who never turns around, who, years later, you look back on and wonder why you wasted so much time with him. Meanwhile, it seems clear that Lost is the opposite of this–not only has my man turned around, but I can now clearly understand and appreciate his actions in a larger context.

There’s a clear lesson here for writing generally, I think, not just for writing television. To be really fulfilling to your audience, you can’t just make shit up as you go along. You need to have a plan, and a solid, sensible one, to really earn the respect of your readers. Anything less and they’ll just feel like they’ve wasted their time. Which, of course, if you don’t provide satisfying endings, they really have.