reading

Not Getting It Right Versus Getting It Wrong

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

A little while back someone in one of the online writers’ forums I haunt asked about what, within our particular area of real life expertise, makes us throw up our hands when we see it in fiction. This was particularly in a sci-fi and fantasy context, so my own area of expertise – criminal law – doesn’t really come into play. But reading the discussion and thinking about the question made me realize there is a fine line in fiction between not getting something right and actually getting it wrong.

Exhibit A, since it’s right in my wheelhouse – Law & Order. I’m talking the mothership here, the one that effectively split its time between the courtroom and the police investigation. To put it bluntly, Law & Order very rarely actually got things right, but it didn’t very often actually get things wrong. The former is forgivable, understandable, and even to be encouraged in the interest of drama. The latter just makes me want to punch the TV.

An episode that was on the other day while I was knocking around the house provides great examples of each. “Charm City” is the first part of the first crossover between Law & Order and my favorite cop show of all time, Homicide: Life On the Street. A gas bomb attack in New York has ties to a similar attack years earlier in Baltimore, bringing Baltimore detectives to town to crack the case.

The eventual trial provides an example of the first situation – not getting it right, but in the understandable service of the narrative. Curtis testifies at trial and, among other things, tells the jury that a partial thumbprint was found at the crime scene and it matched the defendant. In no way would a detective testify about this in a real trial. That evidence would come in via an expert witness, probably from the state or city’s crime lab. But we’ve never seen a crime lab expert in this episode, so it’s a waste of narrative resources to introduce an entirely new character to pass on this single (uncontested) fact. Curtis is a main character, by contrast, so give it to him to carry. It’s not right, but it’s not all that wrong, either.

By contrast, earlier on is the kind of thing that Law & Order routinely does that makes me howl. The two New York detectives question the suspect, who gives up nothing. Their boss lets the Baltimore guys take a run at him. Homicide viewers knew that Pembleton’s great skill was extracting confessions in “the box,” and, he does, but only after the suspect says he “can’t talk about it.” Pembleton responds, “you mean you’re unable to talk about it, or you just don’t want to talk about it?”

The confession winds up getting suppressed because, in the Law & Order universe, “I can’t talk about it” is an invocation of the right to remain silent and the right to counsel. There’s even a good back and forth about how it doesn’t matter that such things will “fly” down in Baltimore. In truth, such things “fly” everywhere that Supreme Court precedent controls. Invocation of counsel, or the right to remain silent, has to be explicit before it keeps the cops from barreling on with their inquiries.

The ruling was, simply, TV-land bullshit, an attempt to throw an obstacle in the path of our heroes. This was getting it wrong, seriously wrong, more than just not getting it right. And, in the end, it didn’t really make a difference (the guy was convicted anyway, without much drama). The overly-defense friendly law is a staple on Law & Order, but it’s usually at least closer to getting it right than this.

In the end, does it really matter? No, because the vast majority of people watching Law & Order aren’t lawyers, much less criminal defense lawyers who might zero in on that kind of thing. For most viewers it’s just an obstacle for our heroes to overcome. That, after all, is why we’re watching. Which is why it’s important for “experts” to back off a little bit and give fiction some room to breathe. Everybody sing along:

 

My Watery Bridge Too Far

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

I’ve talked before about the flying snowman point, the point at which a reader or viewer is no longer willing to suspend disbelief to enjoy a story. There’s a similar thing that happens when certain things are depicted in the narrative, things that are so off putting that they ruin things, or at least leave a sour aftertaste.

I’ve read some people for whom that thing is rape, either survivors who don’t want to relive their trauma or people who just think it’s something that is too casually thrown around in fiction. For my wife it’s animal abuse or neglect. She can rarely push past that, once it comes up. I’ve always thought of myself as tougher than that, able to shrug off anything in the service of a narrative. A reader’s version of a cast iron stomach. Apparently, I was wrong.

Last year my wife and I took our belated honeymoon in Cambodia. It’s a beautiful, historic place, filled with friendly people. But it’s also the scene of one of the worst authoritarian regimes of the 20th Century. During the reign of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s up to 2 million Cambodians died, either worked to death in a program of rural fixation or outright murdered as enemies of the state.

While we were in Phnom Penh we went to the Killing Fields outside the city, as well as the Tuol Sleng prison, from which many of those doomed people came.

TS1

Tuol Sleng is a former school and it’s been left largely in the same condition in which the Vietnamese found it when they rolled into the city in 1979. In fact, rooms in which prisoners were murdered just ahead of the Vietnamese advance still have blood on the walls and ceilings. Of the 17,000 of people sent to Tuol Sleng only a dozen survived (we met one of them). It’s easy enough to be horrified at the place just be using your imagination.

Not that you’re limited to that. Several rooms are given over to exhibits about what went on there. In one room there are implements of torture, as well as paintings done by a survivor of the various torture techniques. Take a look at this picture:

TS2

See the painting in the right, behind the rack upon which victims would lay while their fingernails were pulled out? It depicts waterboarding, simulated drowning, which was a crime against humanity when the Khmer Rouge did it, a war crime when the Japanese did it in World War II, but mere an “enhanced interrogation technique” during our glorious War on Terror. Whatever it’s called, it’s torture and the thought that it’s been done in my name turns my stomach.

Which brings me to Channel Blue, a comic sci-fi novel by Jay Martel. In the book a down and out Los Angeles screenwriter, Perry, accidentally learns that the Earth is actually a huge reality TV show run for the benefit of an alien race. Even worse, ratings are down and the show’s been cancelled – in other words, the Earth is to be destroyed. Perry does his best to save it, but each attempts tends to fail miserably and leads to Perry suffering in all kinds of ways.

The other night, while going through another of these episodes (it gets kind of tedious), Perry is identified as a potential terrorist, taken to a secret location, and waterboarded. Not for any good reason (he’s back on his way quickly enough), but, there it is – a depiction of waterboarding in what’s otherwise been a funny, light bit of entertainment. It stopped me cold.

It’s not that I object to any depiction of torture in literature or film. But it’s one thing to depict it as part of a serious work, perhaps shedding light on the brutality of the whole process. It’s quite different to put it in a comedic work even if the act itself wasn’t played for laughs.

But if that’s true, what about one of my favorite books (and others) of all time? Very early on in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the entire planet Earth is destroyed. It’s played completely as a joke – the Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Billions of people are killed. That’s never bothered me – why not?

I think it comes down to realism, oddly enough. Realistically, the Earth is not going to be destroyed, certainly not to make way for a hyperspace bypass by an alien race spouting awful poetry. The idea is so absurd that it’s not worth taking seriously. By contrast, waterboarding of alleged terrorist suspects is something we’ve done, and not in the recent past.

I’ll admit this is probably not a rational response. Most things like this are more visceral than intellectual (although not all). There’s nothing wrong with that, so long as people recognize it. I guess I do now.

I Want Swoopy Spaceships!

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

Confession time. I have been a consumer – reader, watcher, even listener – of science fiction for most of life. I consider it my first love, even though when I write I tend to drift into fantasy more often than not. That’s not the confessional bit (not in 2016, for crying out loud!). No, the confessional bit is this:

I don’t really care that much about the scientific accuracy of my science fiction.

There, I said it!

Now, I’m not saying I completely switch off my brain when something walks into the room with “sci-fi” written all over it. We all have our flying snowmen points after all. But some of the things I see other sci-fi fans complain about – like movies with sound in space or faster-than-light travel – just don’t bother me that much. I kind of appreciate it when somebody decides to get it “right” and see where that goes, but I’m perfectly happy to nod and move on otherwise, so long as the story and characters are engaging.

All this is a way of saying I’m deeply bummed by the current state of spaceship design in visual sci-fi. Particularly, I’m disappointed that the ships in The Expanse look so damned ugly.

The Expanse is another attempt by SyFy to regain its footing as a decent home for science fiction on television. Based on the novels by James S. A. Corey (actually two authors working together), it’s set at a time in the future where humanity has expanded into the solar system, but not yet beyond it. With that caveat, it’s a space opera as you can get, with character shuttling off from planet to asteroid to space station as the plot requires. The books (at least the first two) are damned good and the TV series is doing an all right job with the adaptation.

A big part of said shuffling involves a ship called the Rocinante. Yes, it’s named after Don Quixote’s horse. It also happens to be the name of the narrator’s ship in Rush’s epics “Cygnus X-1” and “Hemispheres” in which he is “sailing through the galaxy.” When I pictured the Roci in my head (because I don’t remember a description from the text) I imagined something sleek, swoopy, and sexy. Truth is, I almost always think of space ships like the Heart of Gold:

one hundred and fifty meters long, shaped like a sleek running shoe, perfectly white and mind-bogglingly beautiful.

On TV there is no such leeway, however. The Roci looks like it looks and, depressingly, it looks like this:

Rocinante

This may be a very realistic conception of what such a ship would really look like. But, damn, it’s dull. Others will disagree – some folks value practicality when making an aesthetic judgment and who am I to say they’re wrong? It just bums me out a bit.

I’ve seen a similar transformation in the design of race cars over the years. When I was younger and first getting into racing, this is what a top of the line prototype sports car looked like:

Jaguar-XJR-8

lowenbrau-porsche-962_16c_apr-86

Mazda-RX-792P1-500x250

Now, as the black science of aerodynamics has continued to develop and every part of the car has to produce downforce, they’ve become this:

Audi R18 at the 1000km of Spa 2011. Picture was taken during the warm-up.

Don’t get me wrong – the modern car would run circles around the older ones. There’s something to be said for finding beauty in performance. But at the same time, it’s hard not to see that something’s lacking in the modern era.

Same goes with the modern visual depictions of spacecraft. Realism counts for a lot and I don’t begrudge anyone who prizes that in their sci-fi. But that doesn’t keep me from being disappointed.

I want my swoopy spaceships back. And race cars, too.

When Magic Isn’t

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

I recently got around to reading the first of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series, The Final Empire. It’s pretty good (full Weekly Read coming up later? Perhaps!). One of the distinguishing features of the series is the system of “magic” that it uses. The use of quotes is intentional, because about two-thirds of the way through the book I started to wonder if Sanderson was really dealing in magic at all.

The magic in Mistborn revolves around metals and what people can do with them. Allomancers can ingest small portions of certain metals, “burn” them, and thereby enhance their physical and mental powers. “Mistings” can burn only one particular metal, while “Mistborn” can burn all of them. Mistings are useful. My particular favorites were the “soothers,” who are able to calm or inflame another’s emotions to make them more cooperative. Mistborn, on the other hand, and basically superheroes, able to leap tall keeps in single bounds, possess extraordinary strength, and heal wounds more quickly.

Actually, the better analogy would be to characters in a video game. Indeed, one reviewer knocked Sanderson’s system for “sometimes feel[ing] a little like a video game trick (press X-Y-X-X to burn steel!). And, honestly, once you get past the “this is what this metal does” exposition, the constant references to characters burning this and pulling on that get old. It’s work-a-day, it’s formulaic it’s . . .

Not all that magical.

Which isn’t, inherently, a bad thing. I really like Allomancy (and the related Feruchemy that plays a role, too) – it’s certainly different than casting spells, waving around wands and such. But it does call for different characters wielding it. “Working magic” is my mind conjures someone like the wrinkled, slow, puppet-based Yoda of the first Star Wars trilogy, rather than the CGI-spawned ass kicker of the prequels. It takes some getting used to.

And it can seem kind of out of place for what is, after all, supposed to be fantasy. I’m not one to suggest fantasy has to have magic – far from it! The Water Road trilogy has not a whit of magic in it. But if you are going to build a world with magic, shouldn’t be a bit more magical and mysterious? Indeed, as one commenter put it elsewhere:

I’m inclined to label Sanderson’s Mistborn as hard sci-fi, because of the way he fleshes out the abilities of allomancers. This might seem odd, because the author really makes it look like magic. But the way they invoke their power, the limitations on its usage and strict adherence to the framework of physical laws that we the readers are already familiar with, strike me as less magical, and more of an empirically-discovered science, and thus some form of sci-fi rather than fantasy.

Putting to one side the hard/soft discussion, that sounds about right. Part of what makes magic special is that it’s inherently vague, squishy, and unpredictable. It shouldn’t work all the time, just because you know how to work with the constituent parts. It’s about corralling the elements and playing with the very stuff of existence, after all, not just figuring out how to use the natural world to do things better.

Or not. One of the great things about fantasy is that it’s only bounded by your imagination. I don’t think I’d come up with a system like Sanderson’s, but his works for his world and it’s consistent. It’s hard to ask more than that, even if, maybe, I do.

SpongebobMagic

The Trouble Of Quantifying Art

/ JD Byrne / 3 Comments

It’s received wisdom that movies adapted from written material are, to steal a phrase from an excellent album by The Tangent, not as good as the book. I tend to agree with that wisdom, but there are some notable exceptions (Dangerous Liaisons, The Sweet Hereafter, LA Confidential). Is there some way we can tell, with math and numbers and stuff, which ones work better than others?

No. No there isn’t.

That doesn’t keep people from tying. Back when the last part of The Hunger Games film saga came out, stats guru Nate Silver purported to identify the 20 “most extreme cases” of film adaptations that failed to live up to the quality of their book source material. When I clicked the link I was actually hoping Silver might have broken out of his usual routine and embraced the ambiguous in the world.

Alas (footnotes omitted):

there are extreme cases where book-lover rage is justifiable. Which cases? I pulled the Metacritic critic ratings of the top 500 movies on IMDB tagged with the “based on novel” keyword. I then found the average user rating of the source novel for each film on Goodreads, a book rating and review site. In the end, there was complete data for 382 films and source novels.

The results are kind of fun to look at. Remember, Silver’s most interested in the divergence between good books and bad movies, and vice versa, so a great adaptation of a great novel kind of falls through the cracks. Still, who knew that Up in the Air was so much better a film than the novel? But that list points out some of the problems with Silver’s undertaking. Is it completely accurate to call Apocalypse Now an “adaptation” of Heart of Darkness, or is it simply inspired by it? And Dr. Strangelove, while it may have adapted the plot of Red Alert, it turned the ideas of it on their head, playing it as dark satire, rather than serious, suspenseful drama (it got that from Failsafe). The reverse list is a little easier to understand, for the reasons Silver mentions.

But the real problem isn’t in the particular results, it’s in the method. Mainly, Silver is comparing apples and oranges. He somewhat admits this in a footnote, when he admits that there isn’t a critic aggregator for books like there is for films in Rotten Tomatoes. But he falters in then assuming that there isn’t a like to like comparison he can make. IMDB also has user ratings, numbers generated by fans that are more like the Goodreads ratings than Metacritic averages.

The difference is important. Every few years you’ll see a think piece like this one about how film critics don’t appear to have much influence on what movies people go see. They routinely trash the kind of big summer popcorn movies that do billions of dollars in business. It doesn’t suggest that the critics are wrong or right, just that they have a different frame of reference than fans. A critic sometimes sees a dozen movies in a week, whether they appeal to her likes and dislikes or not. The typical movie goer, on the other hand, sees one or two and tends to pick stuff he thinks he’ll enjoy. So comparing book fans to movie fans would have been a baseline for a survey like this.

Another problem, that Silver doesn’t approach at all, is one of scale. Put simply, even really popular books are read by orders of magnitude fewer people than see adaptations of them. Going back to Up in the Air, how many people read that book? Yet it did more than $166 million dollars in box office. My thought is that book fans tend to be more passionate than movie fans, more invested in their favorites. Not to mention, if most of the people who see an adaptation never read the source material, how can they compare one to the other?

Ultimately, that’s all nitpicking. Trying to reduce art to numbers is a fool’s game. Fun to play sometimes, but ultimately like trying to light a cigarette in a hurricane.

UPDATE: Or, as James Poniewozik puts it in a New York Times write up of the best in television for 2015:

Art isn’t math.

Amen.

As I Was Saying . . .

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

Talk about perfect timing.

Last week I republished a piece from my old blog in which I rejected the classification of art into “high” and “low,” the former being real and important and the latter being fluff and meaningless. That post was originally written in response to some stupid things said about music. How was I to know on the very same day someone would come along and provide an even better example from the world of books?

Jonathan Jones is an art critic for The Guardian, which should be a good indication that anything he says about books should be viewed with a grain of salt. I mean, he’s entitled to his opinion as much as any other reader, but he doesn’t really have any authority when it comes to books. Except that most amateur critics (myself included) at least clear the first hurdle – read about what you criticize, particularly if you’re going to talk shit about it.

Last week, Jones wrote a piece titled “Get Real. Terry Pratchett is not a literary genius.” It’s a provocative headline and, to be fair, probably wasn’t Jones’s (writers rarely get to pen their own headlines). In addition, while I and many others are big fans or Pratchett it’s perfectly okay not to be and to even think he’s overrated. As I’ve said before, all art is subjective and things either connect with you or they don’t. It’s not a crime to hold a minority opinion.

Having said that, you really can’t start your piece slagging off on an author like this:

It does not matter to me if Terry Pratchett’s final novel is a worthy epitaph or not, or if he wanted it to be pulped by a steamroller. I have never read a single one of his books and I never plan to. Life’s too short.

Jones does cop to “flick[ing] through a book by him in a shop,” but that’s hardly enough.

I’ll let Sam Jordinson at The Guardian take on Jones on the merits. I’m more interested in the way Jones sets up his argument, because it’s about more than Pratchett:

In the age of social media and eBooks, our concept of literary greatness is being blurred beyond recognition. A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom. Thus, if you judge by the emotional outpourings over their deaths, the greatest writers of recent times were Pratchett and Ray Bradbury. There was far less of an internet splurge when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and Günter Grass this spring. Yet they were true titans of the novel. Their books, like all great books, can change your life, your beliefs, your perceptions. Everyone reads trash sometimes, but why are we now pretending, as a culture, that it is the same thing as literature? The two are utterly different.

In other words, there’s literature and there’s trash. Elitism doesn’t come any more stark than that, though I appreciate that Jones would at least allow everyone to read trash sometimes (if not, I’d never sell another book!).

Here’s a thought – maybe the passing of Pratchett or Bradbury caused more outpourings of grief because they were more popular that Márquez or Grass? It should not come as a huge shock that popular people are mourned more than others, regardless of why they’re popular. Popularity isn’t a marker of quality, anyway, so why does Jones care? Not to mention that history is riddled with artists (of various kinds) who died broke and unknown only to become regarded as masters years later.

I actually don’t disagree with Jones’s concluding thought that “we should stop this pretence that mediocrity is equal to genius.” But in this case, how the fuck would he ever know? He’s labeled Pratchett (and Bradbury and, one suspects, most others who write popular things) as mediocre without bothering to find out if they are.

In short Jonathan Jones – stick to art. And go fuck yourself.