Culture

Recently watched:
Spider-Man 2, which is great -- I love the romance and the simple heroism it promotes. The morality is no more complex than in the original Star Wars trilogy, although slightly more interesting: Peter Parker's great temptation is not to evil, but to neutrality. The movie makes its moral points in bold strokes -- to do the right thing you must make sacrifices, good people can be corrupted yet remain at heart good people, "With great power comes great responsibility" -- but it does so with such good-natured and childlike earnestness that you can't but love it. Plus it has some great self-aware lines ("Guy called Otto Octavius ends up with eight arms! What are the odds?"), and Kirsten Dunst is lovely.

Recently finished reading:
What Does a Martian Look Like? by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (the authors who brought you The Science of Discworld, The Science of Discworld II and, apparently, an original sf novel called Wheelers). It's an entertaining book, and I have a lot I'd like to say about it. At some point I may even do so, here or on the book reviews section I keep meaning to add to my website. Suffice it to say that, while I'm fully convinced that Cohen and Stewart know what they're talking about when it comes to science -- and they can write it clearly and compellingly -- their attempts at cultural analysis, and evaluation of extant works of science fiction in particular, frankly suck.

Their eagerness to promote "correct" science in SF, and deride (as "lazy", "wrong" and at one point even "discourteous") SF which doesn't consider this to be a priority, leads them at times onto distinctly unsteady ground -- which they then stomp around on, throwing their weight about like Godzilla. (Speaking of which, surely you realise that bipedal dinosaurs were nowhere near that big? Godzilla would be far too heavy for its bones to support its weight -- thus rendering the spectacle of a gigantic dinosaur pounding New York or Tokyo into rubble entirely unbelievable.)

Currently reading:
The Lonely Dead by Michael Marshall. I've been a huge fan of this author since he was known as Michael Marshall Smith and wrote SF novels (or -- as some of his less charitable readers aver -- the same SF novel on three separate occasions). The Lonely Dead is a sequel to his earlier horror-thriller The Straw Men, and on first opening it I found myself slightly disconcerted. The first chapter was, somehow, nowhere nearly as involving as his other work. Distressingly, I thought that something must have gone wrong -- and I confess, shamefully jealous non-genius writer that I am, that I felt a moment's schadenfreude at the prospect.

Marshall was just easing us in gently. After the second chapter I was utterly sucked in, and have been having trouble since letting go of the book even when I'm supposed to be asleep, eating or working. Marshall has a deceptively conversational style which keeps sucker-punching you with unexpected jokes and subtle metaphors, even when he's writing about faceless conspiracies of serial killers. It's fantastic stuff -- unfortunately, both for my writerly self-regard and for my various ongoing projects.