06.23.09
Big Tall Monsters Alive and Well in Japan
I recently had an opportunity to see Big Man Japan at the Dryden Theatre in my hometown of Rochester, NY, at the George Eastman House. The film, which can be added to the ever-growing genre of mockumentaries, was absolutely brilliant. Hitoshi Matsumoto, a popular Japanese comedian, co-wrote and directed the film and stars as the middle-aged and depressed Daisato, a sort of monster-anti-hero who dashes to the nearest power plant to transform himself via high voltages of electricity (through the nipples, ouch!) into the great, giant monster Big Man Japan.
It’s Big Man’s job to protect the people from the other towering monsters who roam the city randomly, for no apparent reason, just because they can, which is as good a reason as any if you are spoofing Japanese monster flicks. The film shadows Daisato, who struggles silently and painfully on screen with his dull, daily life; his low television ratings; the snarky remarks of his agent; and his doddering old grandfather who held the same job two generations ago in the glory days. These mundane but quietly funny scenes alternate with his moments of largess among the skyscrapers of Japan.
The film is saturated with angst and personality, and it is truly unique and hilarious in so many ways. The B-movie computer graphics work amazingly well and add to the strange quality of the monster scenes, and the monsters themselves are as inventive as you will ever see. The ending, which is as bizarre as it is ridiculous, can be stomached only if you are willing to embrace the true spirit of the film. This one is definitely worth at least a couple of viewings. Highly recommended.
Of further interest…
06.16.09
Wake
I’m sure the last thing Robert J. Sawyer needs is another review of Wake. The book was published in May and has received plenty of well-deserved attention and quite a bit of praise already. But heck, Rob is my friend and the editor of my first two novels, and I’m just as excited for him, personally, as I am about his first book in his WWW trilogy, so I guess he’s getting another review whether he needs it or not.
In general, one of the reasons I always read Rob’s novels is because he has a knack for asking the interesting high-concept questions.
Rollback: What would we do with our lives if we could be young again?
Mindscan: Would you scan your mind into an android body if you could leave all your troubles behind?
Flashforward: What would happen if, for just a fleeting moment, people saw a flash of their own personal futures? (ABC is set to ask this very question with a new TV series based on Rob’s novel this fall.)
Wake: Is it possible for the Internet to gain consciousness?
I’m oversimplifying, certainly, but Rob gets an incredible amount of value out of turning high concepts into novels, and Wake is another prime example. The Internet has recently developed as many connections as the human brain; does this mean it’s capable of making the intellectual advances that humans needed to make to become self-aware? And if it is capable of doing so, how might it be done?
The answer to the first question is obvious in Wake, or there would be no book. Rob mainly concerns himself with the second question: How will the Internet come awake? As Rob has mentioned in several interviews, he compares the Internet’s journey toward consciousness to the road Helen Keller travelled when she eventually learned how to interact with the world. (Helen Keller lost her hearing and vision when she was barely more than a year old.)
But as with Helen Keller, it doesn’t just happen. To help the Internet along, it takes the right person, at the right time, with all the right qualities, and in Wake, the person who first becomes aware of the Internet’s presence and figures out how to literally “wake it up” is Caitlin, Rob’s fifteen-year-old blind, female protagonist. I don’t want to give away too much of the story because, as with all good novels, the discovery is a big part of the fun, but I will say that Caitlin’s search for vision mirrors that of the Internet’s awakening; there is a direct, technological connection between Caitlin and the Internet as well as an instinctual, human connection, both of which are necessary to make this novel work. Rob manages, with cleverness, wit, and drama, to not only lead the reader through several extraordinary plot twists, but to keep us turning the pages, wondering where the story will go next.
As with Rob’s other books, the moral and philosophical issues surrounding the concept, the issues that make science fiction fascinating for many readers, are also thoroughly explored. Rob is one of the best at this sort of thing, and SF fans will not be disappointed: Highly recommended.
To learn a bit more about this book, check out the totally cool video clip of an animated Rob chatting it up.
Curious about the book deal? You will find this article veeeeery interesting!
06.12.09
Valley of Day-Glo Nominated for John W. Campbell Memorial Award
I’m very pleased to announce that Valley of Day-Glo, published under the Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint, has been named a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award — the principal juried award in the science fiction field, voted on by a blue-ribbon panel of American and British academics and critics. The award is considered the third of the big-three science fiction awards, after the Hugo and the Nebula.
Man, I’m honored, humbled, and just plain thrilled!
Thanks to Rob and all the folks at Fitzhenry & Whiteside who worked so hard on this book.
Of further interest….
Here are this year’s Campbell finalists.
Chadwick Ginther talks about the Campbell on the McNally Robinson site.
SF Signal announces the awards (and you can check out all the covers).
A Small and Remarkable Life, also published by RJS Books, was previously nominated for this award.
06.06.09
A Little R&R
Me (left) and Rob Sawyer relaxing in Winnipeg at the home of fellow author Bev Geddes during the “totally unofficial” KeyCon barbecue, Saturday night May 16. Rob had just wrapped up a reading and book launch at McNally Robinson, Winnipeg’s finest bookstore, for his novel Wake, which I’ll be reviewing here shortly. Hint: Great book!
06.02.09
Philosophy and Comics
The new issue of Philosophy Now is available. The May-June 2009 issue is all about comic books and philosophy. Lots of fun and interesting as always. Included is my review of one of my favorite novels, Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible. The review follows, but PLEASE SUBSCRIBE! It’s a great magazine.
Nick DiChario finds out what it’s like to be the bad guy.
What is the nature of good and evil? This question has vexed philosophers throughout the ages. But philosophers aren’t the only ones to have grappled with it. Comic books have pitted good against evil since the 1930s, when they first appeared. In fact, the superhero form of this age-old battle seems more popular than ever, recently conquering the silver screen: The Dark Knight and all three Spider-Man movies are among the top 20 grossing films of all-time. Watchmen, one of the most anticipated films of 2009, based on Alan Moore’s comic book, pulled in 70 million dollars during its opening weekend. X-Men Origins: Wolverine just came out, with more planned. Some might argue that people are attracted to the special effects, or maybe just the spectacle; but being a writer myself I prefer to think that the story has something to do with it.
Enter Austin Grossman and his debut novel Soon I Will Be Invincible (2008). The plot is pretty standard comic book fare. Soon after the superteam the Champions breaks up, their big-time hero CoreFire unexpectedly disappears. The team decides to reform to find out what happened to him. Prime suspect in CoreFire’s disappearance? The team’s arch-nemesis, Dr Impossible, who has suddenly escaped from prison. The Champions will spend most of the novel searching for Dr Impossible while trying to learn what happened to CoreFire. Dr Impossible, who is actually innocent concerning CoreFire’s disappearance, will spend most of the novel evading capture while trying to find CoreFire so that he can kill him…
But Grossman, a video-game designer and a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is a clever writer. He approaches this work with a keen eye for human nature and a shrewd kind of playfulness. He takes the traditional comic book contest of good versus evil and turns it on its ear by telling most of the tale from the point of view of the uncompromisingly bad supervillain, Dr Impossible. There is a second voice in the novel, the superheroine, Fatale, a woman of steel with a digitized brain, and she is integral to the plot; but it’s Dr Impossible who drives the action, and he’s the character we long to hang out with, narratively speaking. Grossman succeeds in teasing the reader into first not hating the evil doctor, then sympathizing with him, and finally going so far as to actually cheer for the guy. The author seems to grasp that our fascination with the ancient battle of right and wrong is not so much with the good guys, with whom we naturally relate, as with the bad guys, whom we yearn to understand. What makes villains tick? Why are they so rotten? Must they be vanquished, or can they be saved? Grossman invites us to take our curiosity one step further. Be the evil character for a while, he seems to be saying. See what it feels like from the inside: isn’t it fun? And yes – as a matter of fact, it is.
Dr Impossible is not self-delusional. He knows that he’s a bad guy (as opposed to just misunderstood). In true existentialist fashion, he embraces who he is and takes responsibility for his actions. He reflects on his childhood, his university days and, with a refreshing clarity, the moments he chose evil over good. As the Roman poet Juvenal once said, “No one becomes depraved all at once.” Grossman writes these self-reflective passages with a healthy dose of dark humor, making Dr Impossible almost charming, even if he is rotten to the core. Although he sometimes feels sorry for himself, Dr Impossible mostly just wishes that he could have been better at being bad:
“How do you take over the world? I’ve tried everything. Doomsday devices of every kind, nuclear, thermonuclear, nanotechnological, gadgets that fit in a shoe box and that were visible from space. I’ve tried mass mind control; I’ve stolen the gold reserves in Fort Knox, only to lose them again. I’ve traveled backward in time to change history, forward in time to escape it; I’ve stopped time altogether to live in a world of statues. I’ve commanded robot armies, insect armies, and dinosaur armies… Each time, it ended the same way. I’ve been in jail twelve times.”
In the philosophical universe, the road to understanding good and evil is fraught with danger and complexity. Susan Neiman in her book Evil in Modern Thought (2002) writes, “One could easily spend a lifetime studying the problem of evil and be no better for it.” In fact, Neiman refuses to so much as attempt to define what evil is, instead laying out her case that it might just be the one philosophical concept from which all other philosophical concepts are born. The world of comic books is not quite so convoluted, and maybe this, ultimately, is what appeals to us. Sociologist Irving Sarnoff’s brilliantly simple definition is worth noting: “Evil,” he says, “is knowing better but doing worse.”
For better or worse, Soon I Will Be Invincible gives us a chance to live on the dark side for a while. We are the Joker, the Red Skull, Lex Luthor, Magneto, the Green Goblin. We are Dr Impossible. Whether you’re a fan of comics or literature, there is plenty here to enjoy. And there’s plenty for fans of philosophy, too. I highly recommend this book.
© Nick DiChario 2009
Nick DiChario was nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards. His novels A Small and Remarkable Life (2006) and Valley of Day-Glo (2008) are published by Fitzhenry and Whiteside.
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman, Pantheon Books, 304 pgs, 2008, ISBN: 0718152913
US Cover
UK Cover
