[Movie Reviews] – District 9

'District 9', directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson

I finally made it out to see District 9, which will probably be called the sleeper hit of this summer down the road when the DVD marketing begins. I’m certainly glad to see it doing well – I expected it to be a good film that no one saw, but fortunately, the marketing campaign for the film was really excellent, so awareness was high.

My friend Katie asked me to write up a review of the film, because she’s really eager to discuss it. After all, District 9 is a movie about ideas. It’s an allegory for apartheid and the formation of ghettos. It’s a movie that asks some serious questions by cloaking them in science fiction trappings. And there is plenty to talk about.

With that said, I need to divide this review into two sections: a review of the film as allegory, and a review of the film as science fiction. District 9 is a film that tries to ride two horses at once, and while I believe it is ultimately successful as a film and deserving of the positive criticism it has received, I also think that it is much more about the adrenaline rush than it is about telling a well-crafted story.

The Basic Plot (without any major spoilers)

The premise of District 9 is pretty simple: an alien spaceship comes to a stop over the city of Johannesburg in South Africa in the 1980s. Humans gain entry into the ship and find the aliens inside in deplorable conditions, malnourished and wallowing in excrement. The aliens are taken down to a temporary holding area called “District 9,” and brought back to health.

More than twenty years later, the aliens are still living in District 9, and it’s become a deplorable slum full of shanties built out of refuse. The aliens do not assimilate well with the humans, and are nicknamed “prawns” – a derogatory term meant to compare them to bottom-feeders. Banned from most public places, the aliens are forced to rely on an organization called the MNU for assistance… or to buy things from the Nigerian underworld.

Since the aliens have a particular taste for cat food that borders on addiction, they are able to be manipulated into giving away most of their weapons and technology. The aliens see this as a useful trade, because their weapons can’t be used by the humans. The humans, in the meantime, grow obsessed with finding ways to graft alien biology onto human hosts so they can put the technology to use.

The film centers around a man named Wikus van de Merwe who is put in charge of relocating the aliens to District 10 – an area outside of civilization where tents have been set up, not unlike a concentration camp. Wikus is not compassionate, is extremely self-centered and foolish. Apparently, his last name is a symbol of his stupidity; in South Africa, “van de Merwe” jokes revolve around a character who always does dumb things or who has bad things happen to him. There’s more than a little cultural reference in this film that requires knowledge of South African history to fully appreciate.

Wikus crosses path with an alien who seems a little smarter than the others who is officially named “Christopher Johnson” by the MNU. Christopher and his son have been gathering a strange liquid from discarded alien devices, and just as they find enough to achieve some unspoken goal, Wikus strides in, fiddles with the device, and accidentally sprays himself in the face with it. The liquid has a profound effect on his biology, and he finds himself slowly becoming an alien over the next several days, starting with his hand. As events unfold, Wikus finds himself on the run from the MNU and growing more sympathetic to the aliens and helping Christopher get back to the mothership hanging above the city, though Wikus remains self-centered and stupid through most of the film.

From this point forward, I’m going to discuss plot details of the film that will enter into the realm of spoiler territory. So, if you haven’t seen the film, go see it, and then come back to read the rest.

District 9 as Allegory

I would argue that District 9’s primary purpose is to serve as an allegory for human relations. Even though it’s cloaked in sci-fi, District 9 is really a story about how people treat other people who are different. It takes place in Johannesburg, a place where apartheid happened in a very similar fashion to what’s depicted here in the film. There is some irony that both white and black people are united against the aliens in this story, neither seeing any parallels to their own history.

The aliens are difficult for the humans to sympathize with, because the humans are focused on the aliens’ appearance and customs, and not on the point that the aliens and humans have in common. Humans don’t feel bad about discriminating against the aliens; in fact, many seem to view them as lower life forms, despite their advanced technology. The aliens are not actually that different from the humans in terms of their basic needs and desires, but they are different enough that they can be discriminated against without fear.

The aliens also represent a group of people who were once powerful, but who have been made powerless by becoming reliant on modern society. Aliens who become violent or who refuse to follow the rules are shot and killed without question. Sometimes, they’re shot out of fear. Sometimes, they’re shot out of sheer cruelty.

Christopher Johnson seems to be a leader of the group, and he’s the alien who can pilot the control pod for the mothership, though this does not become clear until later on in the film. His given name is very important – in literature, it’s common for messianic characters to have the initials “J” and “C.” Christopher Johnson is not a dead ringer for Jesus Christ, but he does depart so he can return as the savior of his people, and the question of his judgment of the humans is left unresolved at the end. I’d be willing to guess a lot of people missed this point, but it’s very important in understanding the message of the film.

Wikus represents humanity itself, and his progression from being human to alien-human hybrid to entirely alien is meant to show that the only way we can truly become compassionate of those we oppress is to be like them. Even in his hybrid state, Wikus makes decisions that result in hurting those he’s trying to help. Even at the end of the film, Wikus longs to be human again so he can return to his wife and his comfortable life. He is a tragic figure in that he never seems to learn anything; he is forced to learn based on circumstance, not growth. As such, Wikus is a troubling character, because he represents a cynical view of humanity. To call him the film’s hero would be far too charitable; even in his semi-heroic actions towards the end, Wikus is not trying to defend an oppressed people, but resigning himself to the fact that his only chance to being made human again rests in the hands of Christopher Johnson.

And so, we get to the message of the film, which is very simple: “We despise that which is different from us, and we can only outgrow our disgust by becoming like that which we dislike.” I’d say that’s a fairly bleak, yet insightful, view of humanity. The idea that an alien might live among us, leave us, and return in judgment simply reinforces this concept; “So be good to each other, or else.”

District 9 as Science Fiction

District 9 is not nearly as strong of a science fiction film as it is an allegory. The problem is that this is not a story; it’s a conceit. Science fiction has always been plagued by conceits, and they tend to result in weak storytelling. A good example of a conceit would be a story where a character does some odd things and sees the world in an odd way, and the story ends with, “because, you see, I was the dog!”. That’s a conceit.

District 9 is similarly a conceit. The idea is, “let’s take apartheid and do it with aliens.” There’s no rhyme or reason to this, and the explanations given in the film are pretty filmsy. Aliens would be a curiosity to people on Earth; they would be welcomed to other places and given special treatment. If aliens had advanced technology only they could use, they would be compensated with food or water or whatever they needed in exchange for using it. I seriously doubt defense contractors would spend so much time and effort oppressing aliens when they could be hiring them as mercenaries.

No, the film forces the idea of the “loathsome alien” into the plot so that the story can happen. The humans don’t like the aliens, but there are few explanations why. The aliens don’t want to leave Johannesburg, despite their conditions, but again, there’s no explanation why. The aliens understand human English perfectly, and even pick up on idioms and figures of speech. The humans similarly understand the aliens. In the real world, humans often can’t even understand each other when speaking different languages. None of this is remotely logical, and again, there’s no explanation why.

The aliens have advanced technology, and they’re quite capable of annihilating the humans. Instead, they foolishly sell their weapons off for cat food (which is the equivalent of drugs to them). The aliens are quite strong, and capable of killing humans with a single blow. And yet they let themselves get pushed around by a handful of Nigerians armed with guns. The aliens aren’t afraid of humans – look how many get killed in the first half hour of the film doing stupid, aggressive things! The film never really develops the reasons why the aliens are so compliant, nor does it make any logical sense for them to behave the way they do.

There are many other nagging details as well. Why does alien ship fuel turn humans into aliens? Why haven’t other humans, who have surely studied the stuff, noticed the change? Why do the aliens behave so much like humans, erecting shanties and filling their homes with trash? Why don’t the aliens seem to have a culture of their own, or a religion, or a reverence for their own technology? Why aren’t some of the aliens rising up as community representatives to work with the MNU? Why don’t other nations of the world intervene to offer the aliens a nicer place to live? Why in the world are aliens having sex with human prostitutes? (This seemed like one of the most gratuitous details in the film to me.)

As science fiction, the film never answers these questions – and perhaps can’t answer these questions. It’s a testament to how well-made the film is that you don’t ask them while it’s running. I didn’t start thinking about them until a few hours later. But these questions are troubling, and no amount of apologizing by the fans is going to resolve them. The problem is that the story is meant to be an allegory, not a true work of science fiction, and the sci-fi elements included are a conceit as a result.

If ever a film required another hour on an extended DVD to fill in the plot holes, District 9 is it.

Conclusion

I liked District 9, and I think it’s a worthwhile film. It’s got some depth, and it makes use of aliens to look at race relations in a new way. It’s certainly worth checking out at some point, though I am not sure I’d argue that it’s imperative to see it in the theater.

But would I say it’s a new direction for science fiction? Honestly, no. Science fiction has always been about exploring social issues through unusual means, but in order for it to rise about the level of allegory, it’s got to offer enough explanation that it doesn’t leave the audience wondering at all the loose threads. District 9 appears to be hard sci-fi at first glance, but it’s as soft as Star Wars in the end. And that’s fine, really, because Star Wars is a great film that is also built around a conceit – the idea of presenting a modern myth with sci-fi trappings. But I hope that District 9, like Star Wars and The Matrix and other films before it, does more to influence the visual style of science fiction storytelling and not the story style.

[Book Reviews] – ‘The Chronicles of Prydain’ by Lloyd Alexander

'The Book of Three' by Lloyd Alexander

When I was younger, Disney released an animated film called The Black Cauldron. As Disney films go, it wasn’t the greatest — I remember being more excited about my adventures with the computer game than with the film itself.

A couple of years later, I ran across a copy of the novel The Black Cauldron at my library, and had a hard time reading it since it was so different from the film. I kept expecting things to happen like they had in the movie, but the book was so different that I gave up on it. I felt like I’d missed out on part of the story, too — the book had a movie cover and gave no indication that it was part of a larger series.

When I was a little older, I found out that The Black Cauldron was actually part two of five. And so I picked up The Book of Three (which, as it happens, formed the basis for most of the plot of the film) and found myself drawn into Lloyd Alexander’s fantasy world of Prydain.

The Book of Three is about a boy named Taran who lives on a farm with the old scholar Dallben and the farmer Coll. Taran longs to be a hero, and as he hears the stories about the Death-Lord Arawn and the war leader known as the Horned King, he daydreams about leaving the farm in search of adventure. Coll gives Taran the title of “Assistant Pig Keeper,” since Taran’s job is to help care for Hen Wen, a prophetic pig. It’s meant to be a joke, but as the story progresses, the title becomes much more important.

Something upsets the animals, and Hen Wen escapes. Taran goes chasing after her and loses her in the forest. He runs smack into the army of the Horned King and is wounded. A heroic prince named Gwydion finds him and tends to his wound, and the two go out looking for Hen Wen. They meet a hairy little creature named Gurgi (who isn’t quite a man, but isn’t quite a dog, either) and discover that the Horned King is after Hen Wen. Gwydion and Taran have a frightening encounter with undead warriors called the “Cauldron born”, and they are wounded and imprisoned in the Spiral Castle. There, they meet Princess Eilonwy and the two resolve to escape. Taran persuades her to free Gwydion from the dungeon as well, but since he is not specific about who his friend is, she frees a bard named Fflewddur Fflam instead. The castle collapses due to an enchantment being broken by a magical sword Eilonwy had pilfered, and the characters believe that Gwydion has died.

Taran decides that he must warn Gwydion’s kingdom about the Horned King, and the three set off with Gurgi in tow. They realize they’re being followed by Cauldron-born, and are driven off course. Several adventures ensue before they find Hen Wen and the Horned King’s army. Taran challenges the Horned King to combat, and the evil adversary smashes his sword with a single blow. Taran grabs the magical sword from Eilonwy and is barely able to budge it from its scabbard because of its great power. Just pulling the blade out slightly causes lightning to shoot out and burn him. Taran blacks out as Gwydion emerges, uttering a weird word. The Horned King bursts into flame. It turns out that the only thing that could destroy him was hearing his secret name.

Gwydion explains the series of events that allowed him to survive, as well as to learn to speak to the hearts of all living creatures. He gives each of the companions gifts; Taran forgoes his own and just asks to be taken home, where he can be an Assistant Pig-Keeper in peace. Eilonwy and Gurgi go with him, since they have nowhere else to go.

That’s an awful lot of adventure for a single book, and there are four other books in the series: The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer and The High King. All of these are reimaginings of Welsh mythology, and they take place in a world where humans have had all of their special skills and tools taken from them so that they have to toil at anything they do. The Death Lord Arawn is the source of evil, and until he is killed by Taran in the last book, he commands the Cauldron-born,  a vast legion of undead soldiers made up of the dead warriors of Prydain’s past.

So, what makes these books worth reading? First of all, they’re funny. Alexander managed to work a lot of humor into these books, from the bizarre antics to Gurgi to the lying tendencies of Fflewddur Fflam to the emotional outbursts of Eilonwy to the designation of Taran as the “Assistant Pig-Keeper.” Things get very dark and serious at points, but there’s usually a light touch somewhere to brighten the mood.

Second, they’re well-written. Alexander wrote these books for children, but he didn’t dumb them down at all. He uses complicated names and complex stories, and he isn’t afraid to allow some of the characters (like Arawn and Gwydion) to personify good and evil. He also skillfully weaves in characters like Gurgi, who are humorous and melodramatic, but who play an important role in the growth and development of Taran.

Third, they’re epic. But unlike other fantasy epics, these books are not about one giant quest to destroy evil and make the world right again. Rather, they’re about the growth and development of Taran and Eilonwy as they mature from youths into adults. The fourth book, Taran Wanderer is both tedious and fascinating in its lack of action and insistence on Taran’s growth as a character. He really transforms from being a boy to a man ready to become a hero, and it’s fun to watch because you’re already so invested in the character.

Overall, I’d highly recommend this series. It’s easy to read, it’s a lot of fun, and it’s much, much better and deeper than the Disney film would lead you to believe.

Sean recommends: Start with The Book of Three, and if you like it, read the rest. As good as the first book is, the last two are the high points of the series.

[Game Reviews] The Pandemic Games

Pandemic 2 from Crazy Monkey Games and Dark Realm Games

I’m a sucker for a game with a good concept, and the rush of protecting the world from micro-organisms is a great way to introduce your inner geeky scientist with your inner super hero. In fact, I’ve happily killed an hour here and there with the board game Pandemic, where you play as a CDC scientist trying to save the world from an onslaught of diseases!

But every now and then, I get crabby and want to destroy human civilization instead of protect it. What’s more, I want to do it in such a way that no one will see it coming until it’s too late… with a minimum of personal discomfort, of course. And that’s why I love games like Crazy Monkey Games / Dark Realm Games’s free flash-based games Pandemic, Pandemic EoM and Pandemic 2, where you get to create your own infectious creation and send it off into the world to do some damage.

Pandemic 2 is really the best of the three, so I’ll discuss it for a moment. You start off by naming your virus, bacteria, or parasite, and begin in a randomly selected part of the world. Your job is to get the virus out and infecting the rest of the world before everyone catches on. Then, your job is to evolve the virus and kill as many people as possible before a vaccine is created. You accomplish both of these goals by upgrading your virus periodically with “evolution points,” which you earn as your virus does its damage and time goes by.

There are two ways to play the game, really: to try to get a high score (which seems to be related to how many people you can kill in how short a time) or to try to annihilate all traces of human life. Since you’re likely to have trouble figuring out how to accomplish either goal, here are some tips:

• High score: Pick virus, make your starting symptom “fever,” and quickly ratchet up your transmission stats so you can start infecting the world quickly. Focus on upgrading your drug resistance, and don’t really worry about the others so much. Instead, upgrade your killing power quickly to Tier VI and pick up a nasty fatal condition like heart failure or kidney failure. Your goal is to kill as quickly as you can. Don’t worry about how many you kill; just how quickly you kill everyone you infect.
• Annihilation: Pick parasite, sell your starting symptom, and then upgrade to “drug resistance II” and “rodent transmission.” Then, walk away for a half hour or so, and come back. Don’t do anything until all the islands (particularly Greenland and Madagascar) are infected. Then, ratchet up the four transmission methods, moisture resistance II (to activate “waterborne”) a fatal condition (like heart failure) and wait. If everything works out, you’ll overwhelm the hospitals, shutting them down before they can develop a vaccine, and you’ll kill every single person on Earth. Well done.

I really like this game — it’s a fun little simulation to have running in the background when I’m doing something more important, and it gives me an opportunity to cackle evilly when things go my way.

I do have some criticisms, though:

1) Transmission between regions only occurs through human means (borders, planes, boats, etc). This is not realistic at all, since birds, fish, foodstuffs, and other methods can spread disease. As such, it’s very irritating that island nations like Madagascar and Greenland can shut down their boats and be immune to disease. Unless they’re reverting to a primitive state, they’re still going to be somewhat vulnerable.

2) Vaccines take effect immediately across the world. They should spread from the region of discovery like a virus, coming to the Third World last.

3) The scoring system doesn’t make any sense. Why should you get fewer points for killing off humanity than you would from just killing off Europe?

Ah well… hopefully, these issues will be addressed in Pandemic 3. And I’m not going to gripe too much about a game that is free, fun, and flash-based.

Play Pandemic 2 on CrazyMonkeyGames

[Book Reviews] ‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson

"Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson

Every now and then, I read a book that makes me want to give up the idea of being a science fiction writer. Sometimes, it’s because the book is so popular, and yet so awful, that I don’t think it’s worth my trouble to write for an indiscriminate audience. Other times, it’s because the book is so good, and so far beyond what I could accomplish on my own, that I just want to curl up in a corner and sob while I reread it.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is definitely one of the latter books. How I’ve made it through 17 years without knowing that this book existed is a testament to the terrible science fiction I’ve been reading, I suppose.

I don’t think I could fully describe this book if I tried. It’s wonderful. It’s part cyberpunk, part dystopian satire and part linguistic primer. The story takes place in a future where government is broken down and people live in territories controlled by franchises sold by organizations like the Mafia, Mr. Lee’s Hong Kong, the nation of Nippon and yes, even the United States government. The world is a lawless place where violence reigns and the authorities are privatized. One of the main characters, a 15-year-old girl with the moniker Y.T. (“Yours Truly”), is a Kourier — a skateboarding delivery girl who catches rides on the back of cars with a magnetic “poon” cable. Her partner in crime is a half-Nipponese, Half-African man named Hiro Protagonist, the last of the freelance hackers and the world’s greatest sword fighter (if you can believe his business card, anyhow). Hiro and Y.T. are working together to gather information for the CIC (a combination of the CIA and the Library of Congress that has since become the backbone of the Internet) about a street drug called “Snow Crash” — a strange new synthetic drug that can wipe out a human mind like a computer virus. Their quest takes place both in the real world and in the Metaverse, a 3D virtual world where users interact with lifelike avatars and own virtual property (think Second Life, but keep in mind that Snow Crash was first published in 1992, long before most people were even talking about the Internet). The idea is like the Virtual Reality concepts of the early 1990s, but far more developed.

The “snow crash” virus turns out to be something that’s rooted in Sumerian mythology and linguistics, and Hiro spends a good chunk of the book investigating its origins. Y.T., in the meantime, gains the attention of the Mafia boss Uncle Enzo and is recruited to run several missions that involve a lot of danger and explosions. She also attracts the attention of the villainous Raven, a giant Aleut with homicidal tendencies. Raven is a unique villain in that there is a disincentive to stopping him — he lugs around a hydrogen bomb that’s wirelessly linked to his brain. If he dies, it detonates. Thus the private law enforcement tries to contain his killing sprees instead of taking him out.

Snow Crash has a great sense of humor about it, and the first chapter, while a little out of place thematically, offers a nice introduction to the world and the two main characters by chronicling the adventures of “The Deliverator,” a high speed pizza deliveryman who faces certain death if he misses that 30 minute delivery guarantee. As the book goes on, it gets a little more serious, and I was actually quite annoyed to see the main characters (particularly Hiro) start dropping into soliloquy mode towards the end. The near-final showdown between Hiro and Raven involves a long, drawn-out conversation between the two characters about their fathers which is seriously hard to believe. I suspect Stephenson was running out of room to cram in all the story he wanted to tell, and this was the only way he could do it. (His solution in more recent books is to just keep on writing, and reader be damned; his last series, The Baroque Cycle, was 2700 pages long across three volumes!)

Still, I’m stunned by the “big ideas” in this book, of which there are three: the idea of franchise-states, the idea of the Metaverse, and the idea of a linguistic virus. The third one is by far the centerpiece of the book, and something I find quite annoying because a) I came up with a similar idea a year ago and b) Stephenson did it so much better than I could have that I almost want to fold up my laptop and forget about writing ever again. I have to take consolation in the fact, however, that Stephenson’s first two novels bombed before he achieved success with Snow Crash, and despite the many, many great reasons for reading this book (if you haven’t read it, go get a copy right now and get started!), I still spotted minor grammatical errors, continuity blips and plot holes, suggesting that the novel still needed another pass in the revision phase. But those are microscopic gripes for such a magnificent novel. It’s one of the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read, and I highly recommend it.

I’ll be reading Stephenson’s next two books, The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon, once I finish off the stack of science fiction books I just picked up, so check back in a few months for reviews of those. Hopefully, by then, I’ll be over having my creative soul crushed by Stephenson’s amazing talent and back to working on developing my own ideas again.

SEAN’S RECOMMENDATION: If you enjoy science fiction of any kind, you should read this book.  It’s a bit on the “hard” side of science fiction, and cyberpunk’s certainly not for everyone, but it’s plotted well enough that it’s a rewarding read.

[Book Reviews] ‘The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death’ by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

"The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death" by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

NOTE: Today’s book is also available as a free audiobook download that’s read by the author himself. It’s really funny. Get it here.

Daniel Manus Pinkwater (a.k.a. D.M. Pinkwater or Daniel Pinkwater — he likes to change it up to confuse librarians) is a fantastic writer. He’s also a fantastic storyteller. But where I mean the first use of “fantastic” as an adjective describing the QUALITY of his work, I mean the second use as an adjective describing the STYLE of his work. More than anyone I’ve ever read, Pinkwater is able to take fairly normal people and propel them into the purest realms of fantasy. He’s not writing about knights and wizards and dragons, though he could be if he wanted to. But his works take the reader into places unknown, places that have a certain magical quality about them, and which seem to be built partially on memory and partially on dreams.

And maybe “dreamlike” is the best way to describe The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, because it begins as a simple story about a boy named Walter Galt who is bored with his high school. Walter is a misfit, an intelligent person among a bunch of dullards. His only friend is a similar misfit named Winston Bongo, the inventor of “snarking out” — sneaking out in the middle of the night, riding a bus into Baconburg and watching movies at an old theater called The Snark. Snarking out helps Walter manage the tedium of high school and the insanity of his family — his mother is a terrible cook who believes communists are lurking around every corner, and his father is obsessed with avocados.

Winston and Walter eventually befriend a girl they call “Rat,” and they discover that snarking out is something that many people do, including Rat’s uncle, Flipping Hades Terwilliger, who never misses a show. But when Uncle Flipping goes missing (something he’s prone to do), the boys put their snarkout plans to the side and go on a quest to travel through the underworld of Baconburg (not necessarily a seedy place, but rather, a literal street underneath a street) searching for Uncle Flipping… and find themselves tangled up in an international criminal caper that revolves around a specially-bred avocado that can think like a computer.

OK, so the book’s a little bit weird. But it’s a good kind of weird, and well-written. It’s an adventure into places that no other writer will ever take you, with characters who could only exist in a Pinkwater book. There’s a sense of nostalgia to the book, a longing for old things and simple pleasures. The sequel, The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror, is also quite good, and though it’s a little more aware of how weird it is, it’s also worth a read. (As a child, I read the sequel first, and thus preferred it, but many people feel that the original is the better of the two books.)

Though this is a book you’d find the Young Adult section, it’s a great light read, for three reasons:

1) It’s unique. I don’t use that word often, but it applies here. I’ve never read a book like it.
2) It’s never boring. Even though the book starts to get a little farcical towards the end, it still moves along at a brisk clip, and the ebb and flow of characters makes for interesting reading.
3) It doesn’t talk down to its audience. Part of the reason I can read this book as an adult and enjoy it so much is because it’s written for an intelligent audience. Pinkwater never talks down to kids, even in his picture books. That’s one of the reasons I liked them so much as a kid; they didn’t demean me.

If I have one complaint about this book, it’s that the story turns into a mystery two thirds of the way in that is not developed or compelling. The Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson-esque characters, while amusing, wear on you after awhile because they have everything figured out already and take dozens of pages to fill in all the backstory. You also feel no real satisfaction at seeing the master criminal, Wallace Nussbaum, brought to justice at the end because he never threatens the characters in any way.

This is a great collection, and well worth owning.

But don’t let that dissuade you from reading it. It’s fantastic, and you can buy it in a collection with four other great books:

• Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars
• Slaves of Spiegel
• The Last Guru
• Young Adult Novel

Give it a try. If you like the weird, you won’t be disappointed.

GENRE: Magical Realism / Fantasy
STORY: *** 1/2
CHARACTERS: ****
CONCEPT: ****
RE-READABILITY: ****

[Book Review] ‘The Neddiad’ by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

"The Neddiad" by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

I don’t know too many kids who grew up reading the way I did. Most of the kids I knew struggled to read, and most of what they read was pretty trashy stuff. Thriller books, ghost stories, books about high school kids having sex and getting killed by serial killers, and so forth.

But not me. Nope. I was reading the works of Daniel Manus Pinkwater, an author whose surreal, fantastic novels were the closest thing to a drug trip my mind could endure without actually abusing some kind of chemical.

Pinkwater wrote a lot of strange children’s novels in the ’70s and ’80s. I’ll touch on some of them in other reviews. But for now, I want to discuss a recent title of his, The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization.

It’s hard to describe a Pinkwater book without first explaining that the plot itself is inconsequential. That might sound like a slam, but it’s really not. Pinkwater seems to start his books with some vague idea of where they’re going, and he occasionally remembers to use techniques like foreshadowing and plot structure to pull you along. But sometimes, he just gets lost in his own wackiness and lets things go crazy. This was definitely true in some of my favorite novels of his, like The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death and Borgel.

The Neddiad starts off with a young boy writing about moving to LA in the 1950s, and quickly gets derailed into the realm of the weird when young Neddie is accidentally left behind at a train station. He befriends the son of a famous actor, meets a phantom bellboy, and has a bizarre encounter with a shaman named Melvin who gives him a little stone turtle to take care of. Neddie’s adventures veer off into tangents, and there’s not much of a sense of purpose behind the plot until the last third of the book, when the villain is finally introduced and things rapidly move towards a climax. In the meantime, the reader is treated to some really wonderful scenes and characters that seem like they were thrown in simply because they were interesting to Pinkwater at the time. One such character, Yggdrasil (also known as Iggy), serves very little purpose in the story aside from being the smart female companion to Neddie and his friend Seaumus in the second half of the book. (She’s the main character in the sequel, so I’m assuming her limited role was included for introductions’ sake. But it’s hard to tell with Pinkwater.)

Though this is a children’s book geared at the advanced chapter book kids, I found it readable and rewarding as an adult as well. I’ve never had a problem picking up a book marked “Young Adult” and reading it for pleasure. Sometimes, those books are the most imaginative, and it’s refreshing to read a book where hammy love stories aren’t being forced in and awkward sex scenes don’t have to be skipped over. Plus, Pinkwater’s books tend to feature overweight characters who are interested in mundane things and who don’t mind getting themselves into odd adventures. I love that.

One scene with this book will stick with me for awhile. Neddie and Seamus make friends with a boy whose father owns a circus, and the children watch as an old horse is taken out to pasture and shot dead by circus handlers. The boys are surprised, but the son of the circus owner explains, “Well, the lions have to eat something…”. It’s a chilling scene, and one of those moments where the book leaves the safe confines of fantasy and edges into reality. Most writers couldn’t pull it off, but Pinkwater’s good enough that the darkness is contained by some truly wacky moments elsewhere in the novel.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who needs a light, humorous read with a hint of fantasy to it. Fans of Norse mythology will also get a kick out of some of the allusions in this title, though they’re not too pronounced.

GENRE: Magical Realism / Fantasy
STORY: *** 1/2
CHARACTERS: ****
CONCEPT: ****
RE-READABILITY: ****

[Technology Tuesday] – An Honest Look at the Blackberry Storm

I don't think I'd want a tiger staring back at me on MY Blackberry...

I don’t get excited about gadgets too often these days – they come out far too frequently, and they’re often too expensive to be worth my while. But as I began to experience some frustration with my Palm Treo 650 smartphone, I also found myself growing enamored with the Blackberry Storm – a Blackberry device with a touchscreen. And somehow, that excitement translated into my standing in line to get one on the day it came out.

I got my Treo 650 four years ago when I decided I needed an e-mail-capable phone. At the time, I wasn’t too impressed with the Blackberry devices – they had just recently started coming with color screens, and they seemed light years behind some of the other phones on the market in terms of features. The Palm Treo, on the other hand, was easy to customize and to modify, and it could function as an all-in-one media player to boot. I could even turn it into a cellular modem for my laptop with little fuss. That seemed like a good enough reason to me to make it my smartphone of choice.

But the Treo and I developed something of a love/hate relationship as the years went by, mostly due to an inconvenient glitch in the design of the headphone jack, which broke very easily and forced me to always use a headset in order to use the phone. I also hated the Treo’s web browser and its default email clients. I was getting annoyed with the stylus pen, too, since it was constantly slipping out of the phone and nearly getting lost for good.

So, I was ready for a change. There were lots of new smartphones on the market, but there was an obstacle in the way…. Read more »