Derek Johnson finds little to love in this year's SF movies

[james_davis_nicoll]

WHich is only to be expected because SF movies are generally an even stronger proof of Sturgeon's Law than prose SF and prose SF is mostly forgettable crap. One detail did catch my eye:

You had to prepare yourself for the hate mail you'd receive if you said something even remotely negative about Ender's Game, despite the defensive, shrill tone taken by those who praised it.

This has never happened to me so I will take it as evidence of how experiences can vary widely on the web. I have seen something like that for other authors, though; the Heinleinophiles can be quite irritating in their insistence that everyone join in on the fawning adulation for Heinlein.

Comments

[mishalak]

Perhaps the OSC fanatics are inured to your opinions. Or they do not consider livejournal/dreamwidth opinions worth countering. Shall I see if I can get a deluge of hate mail on Tumblr? (Not really, I try not to purposefully try to get people to seek to destroy me.)

[andrewducker]

Heinlein: The Orson Scott Card of his day.


(Yes, that is terribly unfair)

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Well it's hard to argue that RAH wasn't at least GLBT tolerant, but I don't see any modern gay activists using him as a good example.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends when in RAH's career you're talking. His view on this got more liberal the older he got: in Stranger (I think) gays smell "wrong" but by Time Enough for Love, people hook up without checking gender first.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Never read "Stranger" for reason or another. I got most of his vibe from TEFL.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Also, Puppeteers used an ad hoc field test for the parasite that would have given false positives for any male who was gay as well as anyone for whom the female agent was not attractive at that moment. I doubt Heinlein thought that one through, though.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

I'd imagine even gays and straights with, say, a preference for morbidly obese women, would have some sort of reaction to a woman coming onto them, whether annoyance, amusement, whatever, and she would be familiar with such reactions. On the other hand, as well as aliens, a human sociopath insensible to social clues might also react to her as if she were an inanimate object.

[(Anonymous)]

didn't we just have a thread last week where a dude was annoyed a lady was trying to flirt with him instead of letting him teach her chess or something.

(sankritabelt)

[sanskritabelt.livejournal.com]

On further review, it was in that clarkesworld podcast: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4719304.html so it doesn't count.

[(Anonymous)]

So the field test would have eliminated sociopaths? I'm not seeing a downside…

[avram]

Yeah, that’s Stranger where Jill tries to explain homosexuality to Mike, and he fails to grok it, and then she suspects that he’d “grok wrongness” in gay men and they’d not be offered water-brotherhood.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

"(Jill wasn't sure how far this went; she had explained homosexuality, after Mike had read about it and failed to grok--and had given him rules for avoiding passes; she knew that Mike, pretty as he was, would attract such. He had followed her advice and had made his face more masculine, instead of the androgynous beauty he had had. But Jill was not sure that Mike would refuse a pass, say, from Duke--fortunately Mike's male water brothers were decidedly masculine, just as his others were very female women. Jill suspected that Mike would grok a 'wrongness' in the poor in-betweeners anyhow--they would never be offered water.)"

...So, is there Mike/Duke slash?

[matt-ruff.livejournal.com]

Are there any lesbians in Heinlein?

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

Just in general, you can expect a lot of grousing if you write a negative film review. I don't get all that much since most of the films I review are smaller/indie releases, but I imagine the combination of big budget and controversy would lead to to any reviewer of Ender's Game receiving a lot of heated comments.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

That reviewer must be travelling in somewhat different circles of fandom than we are.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

SF movies are generally an even stronger proof of Sturgeon's Law than prose SF and prose SF is mostly forgettable crap.

You know, I keep wanting to ask. How did you end up with a job reviewing sf, considering how much you seem to hate the genre as a whole?

I keep imagining that you must once in your youth have been rude to someone who turned out to be the goddess Athena in disguise, and she was all, "James Nicoll, this is my curse upon you - henceforth, you shall spend your life reading and reviewing pretentious, overly-cerebral garbage written by arrogant geeks who are weirdly fascinated by human excretion!" And you were like, "NOOOOOOO! ANYTHING BUT THAT!" and then she laughed evilly all at the way back to Olympus.

So... was it something like that? ;)

(okay, so my less interesting but more plausible theory is that because you review sf for a living, you have learned to thoroughly despise it - familiarity breeding contempt, and all that...)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

But sometimes there *is* a pony:

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

"I will return tomorrow night with High Expectations. Pray you don't disappoint me."

--is a pretty good quote for a critic. Maybe you should limber up, before you write a review, by repeating those sentences in a mirror. A few times.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

There's an unspoken "I" in there. Snark may be fun to write but not as much fun as reading a good book or eating a good meal.

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

I thought it was a command...like "KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!"

ahem.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

Exactly. No reviewer wants to go into work and have their job suck thanks to a crappy book/movie/whatever is being reviewed.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I love this movie with the fire of a thousand suns. Why do I not have my own copy?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

But to answer your question, "dumb luck".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I personally find that my standards changed over time, and that a lot of stuff that I found absolutely brilliant when I was 20 might now either bore or bother me.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Going with two pop icons in pop music: I used to think Joni Mitchell sublime, The Kinks pretty damn pedestrian. Thirty-five odd years later, I think just the opposite.

Otoh, I find that while classic sf writers drop off my 'like' list with depressing frequency, very, very few ever get added to it. And when they do, it's because classic now extends into the 1980's.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

Oh, to be sure - there are plenty of sff books I viscerally despise, and many of them are ones that I used to really like once. But I still like sff as a genre. Not some rarely-encountered ideal of what sff should be, but sff as it is, right now, in the form you can find plenty of books and shows and movies in (yes, even with its excessive know-it-all geekery. Hell, because of its excessive know-it-all geekery). If I thought that the type of books was inherently prone to badness, not just having its share of it like every other type of books, I'd go look into some less ill-favoured genre.

Of course, I realise that James doesn't have that option - he reads sff, or he doesn't get paid. But that just raised the question I asked, namely, however he ended up in a career that forces him to read books of a type he despises.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Actually, I read a wide range of things for review; I could very easily eliminate SF entirely as I have tried to do with any fiction featuring cats. I choose not to because I love SF. I just want it to live up to the standards it claims to have.

Unfortunately contact with other genres makes it painfully obvious the standards in SF tend to be notably lower in SF than over in, oh, mystery, from every element from prose to 'what the fuck do you mean, continued in next volume?' This isn't to say it's all crap, just that a higher fraction is than in other genres.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

I just want it to live up to the standards it claims to have.

Ahhh, see, that's what I would regard as a big mistake. Never expect people to live up to their self-proclaimed standards. They never do. Look at what people do, and learn to appreciate mediocrity - don't listen to what people say about their aspirations for excellence, it will just make you depressed when you compare it to reality. :P

For instance, I expect fantasy to consist mainly of the author geeking out over how cool it would be if he could throw fireballs (and have sex with exotic women after rescuing them from dragons), and I expect science fiction to consist mainly of the author geeking out over how cool it would be if he could upload his consciousness into ten wildly different bodies simultaneously (and have sex with... well, pretty much everyone and everything, really), and both genres deliver entirely according to my expectations. Any claims of writing ZOMG THE LITERATURE OF IDEAS!!!!eleventy!! I have heard so many times and seen so little evidence for that I now ignore them completely.

This isn't to say it's all crap, just that a higher fraction is than in other genres.

Eh, if you say so. I can't say that other genres have impressed me especially with their beautiful prose and in-depth examination of the human condition. Now, the continued-in-the-next-volume thing, that I admit seems to be an affliction mainly suffered by the fantasy genre, yes...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think of it in terms of distributions: there may well be more crap in SF than in other genres, but there is some small fraction of material that I enjoy far more than I do the best of most other genres, so that old random-reward mechanism kicks in.

And I still do make some allowances. For instance, I'm currently belatedly reading Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief, a book Charlie has raved about. It's full of crazy ideas and lovely settings... and all of the characters are either stock pulp-adventure types, or people consciously playing the parts of stock pulp-adventure types (there's the Diabolik-type superthief, the stoic-warrior-race person, the consulting detective, and even a Justice League of masked superheroes), and the plot is like four or five different sets of shadowy puppetmasters engaging in endless backstabbing. Fleshed-out characters with regular human motivations aren't really there. But I'm greatly enjoying it.