Network Effect

I finished reading Martha Wells' new Murderbot novel Network Effect this morning.  The previous books in the series, the Murderbot Diaries, are four... novellas is what they were called when as a voracious reader of science-fiction I made my way through all the early Nebula award winners.  And in terms of the criteria for awards in science-fiction, that is what they are, all under 40,000 words.  The earlier Murderbot stories were however all published as individual books, so it might be more accurate to refer to them as short novels, without any of the embellishments that once implied not only a shorter word count, but also a particular kind of dramatic form peculiarly its own.

The Nebula awards, and the Hugo awards as well, set out a continuum of short story, then novelette, then novella, then novel.  Novellas were defined as being between 15,000 and 40,000 words, not enough to amount to a novel as defined by science-fiction publishers, but far in excess of the tautness of the short story format.  In mathematical terms, a novella occupies a finite interval of possible narrative length whereas the novel can be infinitely long; hence a novella must partake of the finitude of the short story even as it stretches.  Commonly, a novella used to serve as a kind of trial run for a full-length novel (and the novelette, when not just a long short story, could similarly serve as a kind of outline).  In the case of the Murderbot Diaries, however, the stories are each fully realized and contribute to the development of the protagonist, which culminates in Network Effect.

Thus another way to approach the Murderbot books is as a single serial work, and for those interested in reading them, it's pretty important to do so in their intended order.  Martha Wells is a marvelous author of serial works -- I can make that assertion based on the complete arc to date of the Murderbot books, as well as based on another book of hers I've read, The Wizard Hunters, first in her series "The Fall of Ile-Rien."  Wells takes full advantage of the ability to refer to events offstage, which have a resonance whether one has read the original source or not, in adding dimension to events and characters who would otherwise require too much space or not move the story along at just the right pace.  In the Murderbot stories the pace is almost always hell-bent, but the Ile-Rien book used the same devices in a much more leisurely and intricate way.

But the greatest strength and pleasure of the Murderbot stories is, as I suggested, the realization of the central character, both human and not, one of the best usages of the artificially intelligent superhero trope you'll ever encounter.  Depending on your tolerance or need for science-fictional escapism, you should definitely put them on your list.

The Lady from Shanghai

Friday being "family movie night" here, we watched Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai this week, it being the May entry in Charla's 2020 film noir calendar.  I have to place it among the strangest movies I've seen, up there with the entire ouevres of David Lynch or Luis Bunuel or Maya Deren.  I received it as a complete surprise, never having been warned of its strangeness.

Thinking about movies like The Lady from Shanghai made in the period right after the end of World War II, I hypothesize that creative ferment had multiple sources and could yield messy results.  I wanted to be smart here and refer to the specific technological advances that must have happened in movies over the course of the war years, but my googlesearch didn't yield anything specific. 

It seems clear from the variety of locations used over the movie's journey from New York to San Francisco that the freedom to travel (after the restrictions imposed by the war) was liberating for Orson Welles' creative juice-flowings.  The movie includes a whole anthology of mini-movies enclosed in the overarching structure of the story.  The Caribbean picnic, the Acapulco layover, the Chinese theater... each of these sequences is etched in my memory album already.  These sequences and others are masterpieces of cinematography, really, attested to by the fact that the best article I've found on the web about the movie so far focuses on the cinematographer rather than Welles.

What is puzzling about The Lady from Shanghai is that the acting is stylized to the point of being inhuman, the writing laugh-out-loud pretentious, and the story a gobbledygook mishmash of fantasy and plot points that makes no sense except in an assumed dream world within the cranium of Orson Welles.  Puzzling because Columbia must have known they were taking a flyer on a story both unsympathetic and confusing, with only the face and body of Rita Hayworth to pull in the masses.

Hypothesis one: The Lady from Shanghai takes its liberties from the world of "theater" (pronounced in as high-falutin a manner as possible) in which primadonna actors pronounce and enunciate and preen and strut rather than interact or attempt to convince the audience that what they are doing is natural.  This fits an image I still have of the decade prior to my birth as a period, now identified as "middle-brow," in which the number of Americans who hungered for intellectual nourishment and high art was greater than ever before or since, and that ambition was fostered because it fit our Cold War need for exceptionalism so well.

Hypothesis two: Orson Welles made movies as a hybrid of radio and visual scene construction, and wasn't concerned about the seamless integration of the two.  If you were to listen to the dialogue of The Lady from Shanghai on the radio, the anti-naturalistic speaking of the actors would be exactly what was expected and needed for transmission over the era's highly unreliable networks; the lack of visual cues would probably sometimes, but not always, make the story more confusing and wild than it already is.

Hypothesis three: Welles' anti-naturalism is a deliberate attempt to bring the incredible into a contemporary environment, a form of mythologizing or mythic storytelling that can't be judged by any normal criteria of credibility.  The character played by Welles combines superhuman capabilities and charisma with seeming passivity in the face of others' manipulations: he's a mix of Odysseus, Orpheus and Hercules (at a minimum).  And Rita Hayworth plays multiple incarnations of the Goddess over the course of the film and up through its stupefying conclusion.

So good and so bad...  I'm not willing to recommend the movie, but I recommend that you watch it.

Escape from Facebook?

On Facebook today I wrote my status as:

Trying to figure out how I can stay connected with my friends and not support the evil that is Mark Zuckerberg.

This in response to Zuckerberg's personal defence of Trump's lying advertisements on his platform versus the comments posted on Twitter indicating that the Donald's allegations of the fraudulent nature of mail-in voting are themselves false and harmful.

Beyond that, Zuckerberg has been raising funds for Trump, and taking personal meetings. That adds up to more than the expected trimming political behavior of corporate moguls (not to say that that might not be pretty evil in itself).

I got lots of helpful comments to my post on Facebook, as well as one old friend from many years back contacting me on LinkedIn to encourage my separation from FB. Among the comments was one from my sister:

Or how about an Alva mailing list or newsletter? Is that too old fashioned? I'd subscribe!!

Considering that comment, I realized that I can attempt to do just that with this blog, which has been moribund as you'll see for more than a year, but which was intended to serve just such a purpose, once upon a time.  So I'm starting up my blog journal once again.  Consider it an Alva mailing list or newsletter.  And I promise to try to keep it up if some of my friends subscribe; and I promise even harder to try to keep it up if some of my friends occasionally comment on my posts.  The equivalent of a "Like" or emoji would be perfectly fine...

And if you choose to do the same, I will subscribe to your blog too.

What do you say?