Game review: Harms Way

Here's an XBox Live Arcade game that everyone needs to get. If only because it's totally free.

Harms Way is a really sweet little Live Arcade game where you play as either a shooter or a driver. There are four teams, one shooter and one driver each. The drivers race their cars around a circuit with the first one to complete three laps winning; the shooters jump from turret to turret and shoot them, with the one destroying the most cars winning. The winning shooter and winning driver get the most points, and the team with the most combined points wins.

The single player or split-screen co-op is fun enough, but when you take it online, it gets really sweet. We've spent a good part of the past week in Harms Way's online multiplayer...

Seriously, you can download the full game for free. Do that. It kicks ass.

Sucker Punch

Just saw Sucker Punch last week. Of course, when I first heard about it, I thought it was a Tie Domi biopic.

My blog: your number-one shop for two-minute photoshops. Stay tuned for the sequel:

**

Now to the actual movie.

I can't believe the bad press this movie has got. You saw the trailer and the poster, and based on those, you should have been expecting an action movie with console game visuals.

Well, Sucker Punch is that, and it's seriously cool. I mean, look at it.

The action sequences are awesome, and I absolutely loved them. As an added bonus, the soundtrack is excellent. The narration is very crisp, with none of the usual repetition and beating us over the head with the clue bat that we're all getting used to.

There is, however, a sucker punch that you really don't see coming. Namely, that this movie has a real, serious, feminist message. Now, this is apparently too much for some critics. To quote Wikipedia for a particularly glaring example:

A.O. Scott of The New York Times described the film as a "fantasia of misogyny" that pretends to be a "feminist fable of empowerment" and found that the film's treatment of sexual violence was problematic.

Since movie critics are herd animals, everyone's jumped on this bandwagon. Ooh, it can't be feminist, they're wearing short skirts and they're objectified.

I mean, oh my God, you can see some of her thigh. Quick, call Andrea Dworkin.

As a feminist, this enrages me. There is a serious, powerful feminist message in this movie, but it seems that our movie critics go so bananas when they see Emily Browning in a miniskirt that they can't detect it.

Without spoiling anything, the central theme of the movie is the way in which men can use the structures of society to inflict violence on women. The film treats psychiatry as a charade to enforce proper gendered behavior and as a form of violence, used by men on women to make them conform. The plot of the movie is victimized women fighting against gendered oppression.

And because they do it while looking hot, it's suddenly objectification.

In many cases, including this one, objectification is in the eye of the objectifier. I can't think of anything more demeaning, oppressive and downright patriarchal as dismissing this movie by reducing its female characters to pure eye candy just because of the clothes they're wearing.

The film operates on multiple levels, kind of like Inception except that it doesn't suck. The critics seem to be totally fixated on the level that deals with sexuality, and can't see past that to the actual scope of the movie, which deals with psychiatry, lobotomy and patriarchy. Instead, the overwhelmingly male critics seem to be, quite frankly, thinking with their dicks. To me, and the people I saw the film with, characterizing it as pornography is appalling. That's seriously not far removed from calling Schindler's List a glorification of genocide.

But this is the world of movies. Had the same crew and cast made a dreary, depressing drama movie about a woman wrongly committed to a mental institution, the same reviewers would be hailing it as a wonderful paean to female liberation. But because it's a kick-ass action movie, it isn't allowed to have a real theme. If it has a woman in it, she must by definition be only a sexual object. The critics won't let her be anything else.

So in that sense, the film succeeds as feminist empowerment on two levels: not only is the story and theme itself a strong feminist message, but it very brashly exposes what radical feminism has turned into. The critics, in all likelihood believing themselves to be great feminists and doing a good thing, have taken a kickass feminist movie and in the name of feminism, condemned it for violating gender roles. The director is presenting women wrong! The radical feminist orthodoxy seems to currently be that women must not ever be presented as sexy, because that will always be objectifying.

So in other words, in the name of feminism, these "feminists" want to ban women as sexual beings from the movie screen. Female sexuality is only allowed to appear in strictly controlled, radical-feminist-approved contexts like a homemade porn movie shot with a cellphone camera that gets shown at movie festivals. If a female feminist director makes a movie about kickass women, that's great and empowering, but if a male director makes a Hollywood movie that's feminist and kicks ass, that's horrible objectification.

You know what? Fuck you. I thoroughly enjoyed Sucker Punch, and I think it has a very powerful and important message. That so many critics can't be bothered to watch it as a serious movie with a serious message but print their knee-jerk dismissal just confirms me in my belief that movie critics are among the lowest forms of human life to bedevil this planet.

So seriously, screw you guys. I'm going to go see it again.

Fantasy roundup: The Black Magician Trilogy

Or, next up on my fantasy book review-o-rama, at least the first two books of it.

Verdict: Don't bother.

The first book of Trudi Canavan's Black Magician trilogy follows the life of Sonea, a young slum girl. She lives in a city where the poor are kept in line by the Magicians' Guild, but it turns out she can do magic herself, and hijinks ensue. If you want a proper blurb, read the back of the book.

I liked the first book. Sonea is a decently-written, almost memorable young girl, and not only are there some good moments in the book, but you end up sort of caring what happens to her. That's why the second book is such a crushing disappointment.

This may be a mild spoiler, but it's on the back cover of the second book. The second book starts with the main character studying at the Magicians' Guild. The plot is mildly interesting, but there are several small problems and one really big one. For starters, the language gets a bit embarrassing at times, especially when one of the wizards goes on a boat with rooms in it. I admit that knowing something about sailing ships and having read some first-class nautical fiction may spoil a person, but everything even remotely sea-going in the book is, at best, not quite horribly wrong. As I said, it's a bit embarrassing.

Sonea's life in the magicians' guild comes over all Harry Potter, which I suppose is to some degree unavoidable, but therein lies the one thing that made me stop reading the book: in the second book, she's not the same character any more. In the first book, she's a tough, resourceful, streetwise slum kid, who, unlike the usual computer role-playing game incarnations of such, is somewhat believable. In the second, the street kid has been replaced with a scared, whiny little brat. To give you an idea, in the first book, when someone lays hands on her, she punches them in the face; in the second book, when a spoiled kid calls her a name, she starts crying and hides in her room.

For Harry Potter, going to magic school brought about a miraculous transformation from nerd to jock. In Cavanan's character's case, it does the exact opposite and transforms her into a sissy. Now, if the point was that her old skills and connections are useless in this strange new world and she's confused, that would be fine; I'd even expect it. What I can't stomach is that through the simple act of being accepted into a school, she completely jettisons her old personality. The plain fact of the matter is that there are two different protagonists in the first two books, and for a character-driven story, this is a bad thing. It's a crying shame, as after the first book, I was looking forward to the sequel; about a third of the way in, I couldn't be bothered to keep reading.

The first book was an entertaining read and showed promise, but on the whole, I'd advise against reading it. If you like it, you'll just be horribly disappointed by the sequel.

Fantasy roundup: part 1

I'm currently engaged in a large fantasy reading project, and every now and then I'll try to translate it into the odd book review.

Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun

I bought the two-volume set, and I have a quarrel with the blurb. On it, no less a writer than Ursula LeGuin calls Wolfe's work "breathtakingly original". No, it isn't. The Book of the New Sun can be truthfully summed up as Elric of Melniboné in Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Add a pinch of Lovecraft and trace amounts of other ingredients, run the whole thing through a thesaurus, and voilá: the Book of the New Sun. Breathtakingly original? Hardly.

If that's true, then why does the same blurb say that it's been voted the best fantasy work ever, after the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit? Because it is the best fantasy since Tolkien. Maybe it isn't built from the most amazingly original blocks, but I don't care, because it's mind-blowingly good. If you haven't read it, you must.

Wolfe is a narrator and, in Tolkien's terms, sub-creator, second to no modern fantasy or SF writer. The attraction of the books isn't so much the world itself, or even the narrative or characters, although I have nothing bad to say about any of them. It's the pure skill with which he weaves everything into an incredibly immersive and compelling text. The four volumes of the Book of the New Sun are that rare kind of fiction that you can't put down, and wish would never end.

I'm struggling to think of some kind of negative "however" here, but I don't really have one. Other than the afterwords, in which Wolfe pretends he's created the text by translating it from an original, which are stupid and only detract from the story. Don't read them, and you'll be better off. His taste for obscure words may take a bit of stomaching; it's a fine line between creating an exotic feeling and pure sophistry. I think it works, but that might conceivably be a sticking point.

Having said that, I can't recommend these books highly enough. If you're at all interested in fantasy and haven't read them, go do so. Now.

Minecraft

Minecraft. If you haven't heard of it yet, it's only the best computer game ever.

Minecraft is a first-person game where you build things from blocks. That's it. You mine blocks with the left mouse button, and place blocks you've mined with the right button. You can build just about anything. I've taken a fairly pedestrian approach, and am currently building a tower:

In retrospect, it was stupid of me not to take a "before" screenshot; that used to be a hill.

It's not just an endless game of Lego. At night, monsters spawn around you, so you have to build some kind of a shelter to not be eaten by the living dead or blown up by an exploding suicide cactus. To mine rock and other hard materials, you need tools, for which you need wood, both to make the tools and build a workbench to build the tools on. You can find ore, and smelt it into metals, but that requires a furnace. You get the picture. Here's a glimpse of the inside of my castle:

It's night, but no exploding suicide cactus of death can get at me in my tower. Fucking cacti. Here's another view of my tower, from the north.

As you can see from the mess around it, I'm still in the process of removing the remnants of the hill and landscaping the whole place so it looks neater. I just finished the walkway to the smaller tower yesterday. When I say yesterday, I mean last night. The only exit from my tower is down the walkway and through the smaller tower, to confound the exploding cacti. I'm happy to say it's working! Here's a view down onto the walkway from the main tower.

Words cannot adequately describe what a fantastic game this is. It's like playing with Legos when you were a kid, only so much better. Minecraft has already sold over 600,000 copies, and it costs a measly 10 euros; there's a version on the site you can try for free. The website is here; there's no documentation yet, but that's no problem at all, as there's an exhaustive wiki. There's an excellent tutorial that will get you started.

Believe me when I say that my tower is a ridiculous little hovel compared to the things some people have made. It's simply amazing what you can put together in the game. I was still quite proud of myself when I finished the first proper story of my tower! I'll finish off with a picture of the sun rising, as seen through my east-facing panoramic window.

So if anyone's wondering where I am or what I'm doing, this is the answer. Minecraft. I love it.

Best short fiction ever

Or at least the best short fiction I've ever read:

The book in question is a collection of short stories, all based on this Dinosaur Comic from five years ago. You can get it from Amazon. I suppose that in order for this to be a proper book review, I'd have to explain what it's about and then wax lyrical about how awesome it is. But this is the Internet, so just read the comic and you'll get the idea.

My biggest problem with the book is that I read very quickly. The stories are so good I don't want to finish the book too soon, so I'm trying really hard to pace myself and only read a couple a day. It's difficult.

So yeah, it's the best fiction I've read for a long time. That should be enough of a review.

Book review: A Wolf at the Table

Here's another bildungsroman.

Augusten Burroughs: A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father



This one deals with a darker subject matter. A Wolf at the Table is a prequel of sorts to Augusten Burroughs's autobiographical Running With Scissors, and like it, this is billed as a memoir. It is the story of a young child brought up by a mother whose mental health is failing, and a psychopathic father. It's a very powerful, dark story that I can't in good faith recommend to any sensitive readers.

There's a fundamental problem with writing all fiction. If I recall correctly, it was Russian playwright Chekov who said that if a pair of pistols is seen above the mantlepiece in Act 1, they must be used in Act 3. The problem is familiar to anyone who has ever read a detective story: the murderer must be one of the people we're introduced to at the beginning of the story. This forces the narrative to be, in a sense, predictable.

Burroughs's memoir suffers from a form of this. It is so dark, so miserable, so psychotic, that the reader very quickly becomes inured to the darkness and lunacy of it all. From the beginning, all of the young protagonist's attempts to win his father's heart fail, and all the pets he has meet unfortunate ends of some kind. To be blunt, by the time he gets a guinea pig, you know it's going to end up dead. I think this is a terrible shame, because it really detracts from a well-written book, but it is its major weakness. The author paints a powerful picture of living with a psychotic father, but trivializes it by heaping misery upon misery, fear upon fear and disappointment upon disappointment until it all becomes predictable and, frankly, boring.

On the other hand, the last chapters of the book, set in the protagonist's youth and later days, seem strangely detached from the whole. It's as if they were pinned on as an afterthought, as forced closure to create a "story arc" worthy of Hollywood. They don't really seem to add anything to the story.

In between the rather formulaic recitation of family misery are excellent moments of storytelling. At times, Burroughs (an assumed name) creates a very convincing, engrossing narrative that one can't help but be immersed in. These flashes of brilliance are too few for me to really recommend this book to anyone unless the subject particularly interests them, but they're there. It's a strangely dual book: on the other hand, the power of personal experience shines through it, but on the other hand, it seems to be so rigidly welded to the conventions of storytelling, story arcs and literature in general that much of that power is wasted. This combination makes the book memorable and forgettable at the same time, which is an odd experience.

In short, A Wolf at the Table is memorable, powerful, tragic, and forgettable, conventional and trivial at the same time. Technically, I suppose that makes it a very accurate memoir of life, but at the same time, a strangely split reading experience.

My recommendation is sadly banal: if the subject of a boy growing up with a psychotic father fascinates you, give it a shot; otherwise, don't bother.

Book review: Look elsewhere, reader

For reasons known to at least some of my readers, I've been busy with bildungsromaner lately. It occurs to me I should probably write up small reviews of them as I read. Here goes.

Thomas Wolfe: Look Homeward, Angel



On this business of bildungsromaner, it seems impossible to avoid Thomas Wolfe. According to the back cover, Look Homeward, Angel's "largely autobiographical story about the quest for a greater intellectual life has resonated with and influenced generations of readers." It is "rich with lyrical prose".

Here's some. It's part of his description of the protagonist as an infant.

And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight printed in bars upon the floor, he felt unfathomable loneliness and sadness creep through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know anyone, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never. (p. 32)

Not just never, but five never. The reader is powerfully reminded of terrible poetry. Generally, the quality of the prose is acceptable, but I'm tempted to say that overall, Look Homeward, Angel manages to capture everything that's bad in American literature.

First, there's a terrible mania with family history. I don't know if it's because the United States has such a short history of its own, but for some reason many American writers are obsessed with totally trivial family histories. Mostly it must reflect the mania with family and heritage that so many Americans have. In keeping with this, Thomas Wolfe starts his story with the protagonist's father's early days. We're given a detailed account of his business dealings, his alcoholism, his marriage and his property deals, not to mention the construction of his house.

I need to digress for a moment, because there may be some younger people reading this. In the old times, before digital cameras, after a vacation you had to take the film from your camera to be developed in order to get your holiday snaps. There were two options you could pick from. Normal people got them developed into, well, photos. If, on the other hand, your sole thought in taking the pictures in the first place was the future torment of your friends and relatives, you got slides. These could be loaded up into a projector and shown to hapless guests ad infinitum. It was a form of torture, sure, but you have to remember this was centuries before the Geneva convention.

Reading Thomas Wolfe's chronicle of his protagonist's family, like nearly all other American authors' similar chronicles, is exactly like looking at someone's vacation slides. You want to stand up and shout: "I don't care!" The first three chapters of Part One are dedicated to the mind-numbing tedium of the Gant family. Matters of business and property, family history, and especially money, are dealt with in suffocating detail. This chronic overexposition stretches to cover food, too; there are endless lists of foodstuffs and desriptions of eating, cooking and of the food itself. None of this has any conspicuous literary merit, or any storytelling purpose: the author just seems to be convinced that it's vitally important for us to know what kinds of fruit the Gant family ate for its own sake. At one point, there's a multi-page list of the smells the young protagonist has encountered. Smells.

This might not be so bad, but it's combined with another problem of American literature: flowery prose and pathos. The great, overflowing emotions fairly gush off the page in paragraph upon paragraph of "oh, woe is me". Wolfe indulges in entire paragraphs where he lets the pen fly and describes, in his own pseudo-poetic style, the terrible angst and pathos of his characters, from the drunk father to the frightened mother and even, as quoted above, the entirely implausible existential angst of a year-old child. One expects the baby's first words to be an eloquent lament to the sky on the crushing misery of the human condition.

In short, the book is rich with lyrical prose in the same way that nuclear waste is rich with radiation: true, but you sure don't want any on you. The syrupy prose, gushing adjectives, endless exposition of inanity and interminable lists combine for a reading experience "rich" enough to induce vomiting.

My recommendation? I don't know. I couldn't be bothered to finish it. The book is massively long and tremendously boring. About a hundred pages in I still didn't care about any of the characters, or feel like suffering through another "stream of consciousness" narrative or account of a land deal. I predict most other people won't, either. Give this one a miss.

Game review: NHL 2K10

I think this is probably the most awful XBox 360 game I've ever played.

The initial impression is, to say the least, dramatic. For a long time, hockey games sold in Finland have come with several language options. This one, too, has English, Swedish and Finnish. Once you pop the game in, you learn that it automatically sets the language to your Xbox's "Locale" setting, and you cannot change it. So if you play 2K10 on any console in Finland, it's going to be in Finnish, and you can't change it in-game. The only way to get English menus is to change your console's locale to the UK or USA; the console's separate language setting doesn't matter. So sorry about that if you're, say, Finnish-Swedish, or a foreigner living in Finland. Our XBox is set to Locale: Finland and Language: English. That gets you a Finnish-language game, and let me re-iterate, you cannot change the in-game language in-game.

This is so shockingly idiotic we couldn't wrap our minds around it. We spent at least ten minutes looking through the confusing Finnish-language menus, trying to find a language option. The menus themselves are thoroughly confusing. When the game starts, you're thrown into a screen where you can start a random NHL game. If you want to get to the main menu, you have to move the right stick to get to a really confusing pop-up menu. You have no choice but to browse them aimlessly, because there is no on-line help, and the manual only explains the controls.

Wait, did I say the manual explains the controls? It doesn't. Some years back, both EA and 2K started using the "Skill Stick", which means using the right thumbstick to basically control your player's hockey stick. 2K10's "Pro" controls use the Skill Stick, so all the manual tells you is that the right stick is "Skill Stick". It doesn't tell you, um, how to use it. Or what it does when you, say, push up on the thumbstick. And again, there is no online help (or if there is, we can't find it).

So interfacewise, we can't work out how to play the game properly, because it won't tell us. No matter, I gave it a shot anyway. The box advertises "intelligent hockey", and sure enough, when your opponent is on the power play, for the first time in NHL 2K history, it actually kind of looks like they're trying to play an NHL power play. Other than that, though, I've seen few signs of it.

The AI opponent's ineptitude was only one failure of intelligence in previous 2K games: far more frustrating was your own players' utter stupidity. I'm unhappy to report that that, at least, hasn't changed a bit. While the AI plays the aforementioned power play, your own players are content to stand around in their penalty kill formation, and ignore everything that happens around them. So in short, they're still the brainless position-playing zombies they were in all the previous installments of 2K.

In the offensive zone, your players are just as moronic. To set the scene, I watched the Tampa Bay-Montréal game a few nights back. Montréal scored three goals (IIRC) on backdoor plays, i.e. where the player with the puck passes to the other side of the net. Just try setting one up in 2K10! If the player with the puck is somewhere between the net and the faceoff dot, most of the time the other forwards are either behind the net or out behind the faceoff circle. You simply cannot execute perhaps the most basic scoring play in modern hockey, because the AI-controlled players on your own team play like idiots. Not that you can usually pass to anyone, really, because I've never yet seen a player even try to get open, much less into a scoring position. Nothing makes you really believe Alex Ovechkin is on the ice like seeing him aimlessly wandering around behind the net on the power play when the puck is in front of it.

In most other respects, too, the gameplay feels identical to 2K6, 7, 8 and 9. Your players, from Ovechkin to Brooks Laich, all feel totally and identically incompetent. Even the simplest action takes ages to execute, and it feels like everyone is skating in tar. Nothing they do feels or looks like NHL hockey.

Add to this the build quality we've come to expect from 2K games. In every game we've played so far, at least one forward has gotten inexplicably stuck in the offensive zone, causing an offside. They face the boards and stand there, shaking, until they either snap out of it or the offside is called. The commentators are using exactly the same lines as they were in, um, 2K5, and in the first game I played, the commentary consistently failed, calling a 5-on-3 goal a 4-on-4 and similar dumb mistakes.

So in short, this is an awful game. We bought in on sale for a ridiculously low price, but it wasn't worth it. Just don't get it. There's very little discernible improvement over 2K9 or 2K8, and in many ways, this seems to be much worse. I'm starting to think the high-point of 2K games was 2K5, and if you've played it, you realize how pathetic that is.

2/10, only because I have faith that there are even worse games out there.

Book review: Legacy of Ashes

This time, a book recommendation! Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, the 2007 National Book Award winner for non-fiction.

The book is exactly that, a history of the CIA from its founding to 9/11 and beyond. In my opinion, this is one of those books that anyone really interested in the way the world works today, or in global history from 1950 onward, needs to read this.

Weiner draws together a narrative of the CIA's history, and highlights the one fact that has very often been its most conspicuous trait: sheer incompetence. As Weiner explains, the agency's covert operations have been at best questionable and at worst downright amateurish.

A far more serious failure has been the CIA's failing as an organization providing intelligence to the President. Over the years, the CIA's analysts and intelligence gatherers have consistently been neglected in favor of covert operations, sabotage, election-rigging and assassination. Having read Weiner's book, it's fair to ask what, exactly, a succession of American presidents and intelligence decision-makers imagined the job of an intelligence agency to be? It certainly doesn't seem to have been gathering intelligence.

How good is the book? So good, in fact, that the CIA has issued a rather sniffy rebuttal. This prompted my co-blogger Juho, currently reading the book, to wonder how long it took them to realize it had been published.

There's also a longer review of the book on the CIA website, where they lambast it for some factual errors. I'm in no position to disagree with them, but as something of a historian, in my opinion the most signal merit of Weiner's book is that it has such explanatory power. This account of America's consistent failure to supply its decisionmakers with good intelligence goes a long way toward expaining some of that nation's greatest failures in the 20th century.

A significant trend that develops very early in the book is the distortion on intelligence to fit either the White House's or the CIA's political agenda. As this book makes manifestly clear, the Iraqi WMD episode was not the first time intelligence data was manipulated to serve political ends. As it stands, it won't be the last.

This book will expand your understanding of the political history of our world immensely. A must-read.

Brief book review: The Middle Sea

Here's another review of a disappointing popular history book, this time by the Viscount Norwich! I mean, of course, John Julius Norwich's The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (Vintage 2007).

In brief, it's a popular history book on the Mediterranean. And it's that one little word, "history", that gets it in trouble. Here's some examples.

First, in Chapter I: Beginnings, he tells us all about the Hebrews, the Exodus, King David and the kingdoms of Israel and Judaea, basically recounting the biblical narrative. As it happens, there are a few problems with that. The simple fact is that the archeological record just does not support the historicity of any of the events he recounts. For at least a good part of his first chapter, Norwich has seen fit to completely abandon sources and simply recount the Bible as fact. Now, if this was a book on the Bible, why not, but this is presented as a history book.

Another tidbit from the first chapters: in Chapter III, titled "Rome: The Republic":

The rise of Rome was due, more than anything else, to the character and qualities of the Romans themselves. They were a simple, straightforward, law-abiding people with a strong sense of family values, willing to accept discipline when required to do so (...)

It feels like the entire passage was lifted from a Victorian schoolbook. The national characteristics of the Romans were the reason for their success. Obviously, that implies that the national character of other Mediterranean peoples must have been inferior, because the Romans were able to subjugate them. See where we end up? He is basically reiterating the classic, racist paradigm of history where "superior" nations triumph over "inferior" ones because of their "racial characteristics".

**

After a beginning like this, I didn't hold out much hope that the book was going to be worth reading, and it isn't.

In a book that purports to be a history of the Mediterranean, there is a surprising lack of attention given to, well, the Mediterranean. The sea itself is barely present in the narrative. Instead, Norwich is content to recount the basic political history of nations on the Mediterranean coast at a high school level, albeit at some length.

The simple problem of the book is exactly this. If you have any knowledge of the history he writes about, you will find this book largely trite and uninformative. I would advise you to not read it. If, on the other hand, the subject is fairly new to you, I strongly caution you to not read it, because you won't be able to tell which parts are actual history and which are pure hogwash. So in a very real sense, this is a book no-one should read.

Brief book review: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Last weekend, I took it upon myself to read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Having read it, I can't understand what all the fuss is about. Also, it was apparently an influence on Fallout 3, and that influence is responsible for all the stupidity I complained about in my game review.

Basically, the Road is a rip-off of JG Ballard's early sci-fi novels, most notably Drought. The novel is startlingly similar to Ballard's stuff, but with the imporant difference that it's stylistically decisively inferior. McCarthy writes a very simple, down-to-earth style, which he occasionally interrupts with ridiculous flights of purple prose. The impression is occasionally very jarring. Overall, the writing and plot is captivating enough that it keeps you reading, but the purple prose is sometimes so awful it reminds me of Andy Remic. Seriously.

I didn't think the book really had any theme or message. Of course, I could be wrong. From the Wikipedia article:

British environmental campaigner George Monbiot was so impressed by The Road that he declared McCarthy to be one of the "50 people who could save the planet" in an article published in January 2008. Monbiot wrote, "It could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem."

Oh, for crying out loud. You needed a novel to tell you that we would find it hard to live without any plants or animals at all? That, though, really is the sum total of the environmental message of the Road.

On a Fallout note, this is apparently the reason there isn't any vegetation in the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3. Having read the book, I now understand that the makers of Fallout 3 were trying real hard to give the game a "Road" vibe. I wish they hadn't, frankly.

To rant for a moment, I feel like these days, entertainment and art only comes in one of two varieties. Either it has no theme at all, no message, nothing to say about anything, or it has a single message that it bludgeons you senseless with.

The Road is firmly in the first camp. I didn't think it had any meaningful theme. Overall, it's captivating enough to make you read it through, but it's short enough that that isn't any challenge. It's a forgettable, mediocre novel. I can't for the life of me understand why it won awards.

Verdict: don't bother. Read J.G. Ballard's Drought or Drowned World instead.

"Star Trek"

So I saw the new Star Trek movie. I need to review it twice to be fair. First as a movie, then as a Star Trek movie.

As a movie: bleah. If I did stars, I'd say 2/5. I didn't think it was particularly good. There isn't even an original story: the main plot is a total retread of Star Trek: Nemesis, of all movies, with its Romulan villain and his planet-destroying ship, combined with the original "Starfleet Academy" idea for Star Trek 6. Everything else is cobbled together from a mix of tropes stolen from the previous movies, and as Anthony Lane puts it for the New Yorker:

He [Kirk] is played here by Chris Pine, who struggles with a screenplay, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, that could have been downloaded from a software program entitled “Make Your Own Annoying Rebel.”

As near as I can tell, the movie had no theme. The annoying rebels were pointlessly annoying rebels who had no meaningful conflict, and barely even a sensible character arc. The plot is not only a pastiche at best, but any aspect of it falls completely apart under any kind of logical scrutiny. Basically this is a mindless action movie.

On top of that, I truly loathe Abrams's "breathless" directing. The movie is constantly in such a terrible hurry that it rushes from scene to scene like a sprinter on meth. So as a movie, the whole thing is a madcap rush through a nonsensical plot that fails to engage me on any level. The quality of the acting varies tremendously, but most of it is frankly piss-poor.

Overall I'm not impressed.

**

As a Star Trek movie, well, it isn't. I need to give some background here. I saw my first episode of Star Trek: the Original Series when I was something like six years old. In a way, I grew up with Star Trek. My interest in movies, literature and everything has lead me to read up on Star Trek and its antecendents, specifically some of the ones that inspired Gene Roddenberry. In other words, I've done the kind of thing you might expect someone who's going to create a Star Trek re-make to do.

Coming from this background, the first half hour or so of the movie felt like a calculated slap in the face. All of the fundamental ideas and themes of Star Trek have been abandoned. In the first 30 minutes alone, Starfleet has changed into a quasi-miltary organization where officers snap to attention in the corridors when the Captain walks past, during a catastrophic emergency, behavior never seen in Star Trek before. Despite being seemingly more militaristic, the movie has also totally abandoned the original Star Trek's navy background; an unimaginably awful moment comes at the start when Kirk sr. orders his crew to "evacuate ship". After this, we're transported back to Earth where a young Jim Kirk uses a Nokia telephone and listens to the Beastie Boys. This is a terrible scene, but moreover it finally destroys any impression that you might be watching a Star Trek movie.

Later on we begin to meet the cast. At best, they behave like caricatures of the Original Series crew. Karl Urban delivers a fair impression of Deforest Kelley's Dr. McCoy, but it's an impression, not an acting performance. Zachary Quinto's Spock is occasionally almost good; every time you start warming to him, however, he starts talking like Conan O'Brien's caricature nerd. Chekov is on board in defiance of original chronology, but apparently it was thought necessary to have someone with an accent they can make fun of.

By the way, Spock speaks bad English several times in the movie. His line about "performing admirably" is hideously clunky, but unforgivably, he at one point wonders if he can "ask a query". I do major in English, and if you give me a Vulcan who speaks bad English, I can't take you seriously. Of course, this is a minor gripe given that "alternate Spock" is a raging psychopath who physically assaults people who insult him and maroons subordinates on dangerous planets.

On the topic of characters, it's worth remembering that the original series was politically and socially extremely progressive, even revolutionary. The series that boasted the first interracial kiss on network television, even if the actors didn't actually quite kiss (because the show wouldn't have aired in Klan country if they did), also added a Russian character in the second season. This was a powerful message at the height of the Cold War, telling viewers that in the end, Russians and Americans are both people, and can work together as equals. Contrast this with the movie's Chekov, who is only present to be mocked for his funny accent.

Most insultingly, the movie fails to be a Star Trek movie in the one way that counts the most. Previous Star Trek movies had intelligent content. They had themes. They had something to say. One of the dictums of the original series was that you should be able to watch the show as a kid and enjoy the action, and you should be able to come back to it as an adult and realize that there's a real issue being discussed in a meaningful way. This is one of the essential characteristics of science fiction proper. Another is at least some kind of respect or even lip service to actual science, of which the Original Series is a shining example. Its list of technical consultants is probably the most impressive of any TV show in history.

Abrams's Star Trek, however, is totally brainless. The movie has no discernible theme, and has nothing to say about any issue bigger than itself. As I said, the plot makes absolutely no sense, so the first moment you stop to ask the movie a question, it falls apart. What's more, the physics and science of the movie are, even for latter-day "technobabble" Star Trek, downright insulting. There are thousands of grade school students in the world who understand more about our universe than the screenwriters. Anyone with the slightest idea of astronomy will be stunned to hear Spock recite probaly the most inept "astro-babble" in Trek history.

In other words, Abrams has made a Star Trek movie that can be fun as long as you don't think about it. That's not science fiction; that's definitely not Star Trek.

**

I could go on for ages. In fact, I may yet, as taking apart everything that's wrong with this movie would take a lot of writing. My overall impression is that I'm far more disappointed by this movie than I thought was possible. Not only have Abrams and co. made a remake that abandoned all the core ideas of Star Trek, they've made it ineptly. They didn't bother to write their own plot; instead they created a mishmash of "Starfleet Academy" and ST: Nemesis. Their script is totally brainless. Their characters are at best caricatures, at worst one-dimensional cutouts. The mindless action movie they're calling "Star Trek" isn't even good.

Overall this was the most disappointing movie I've seen in years. It was just awful. I'm unspeakably disgusted by the reviews that say Abrams's team has respected the show's legacy. Given that they've abandoned all the core ideas of Star Trek, from what I know of Gene Roddenberry, he would have hated this. His show, which had a theme and a message, and his characters have been reduced to a one-dimensional parody of themselves to flog a bad action movie. This movie is an insult to his legacy.

**

Seeing this movie was actually one of the most depressing single experiences I've had this year. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it leaves me feeling disappointed, depressed and alienated. I was planning to do this anyway, but J.J. Abrams made my decision for me: I'm retreating to the Finnish countryside to recuperate. Things will be pretty quiet on this blog for most of the summer, but I'll make the occasional post, and be back for good latest in August.

Have a nice summer, everyone!

Book review: A Splendid Exchange

I recently picked up William J. Bernstein's A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, and was quite disappointed.

According to the back cover blurb, he "tells the epic story of global commerce, from its prehistoric origins to the myriad crises confronting it today". Obviously, I was interested.

In the first few chapters of the book, Bernstein touches on a couple of areas that I happen to know someting about: the history of Islam, and sailing. That's where the trouble starts.

To start with sailing, on page 76 Bernstein says this:

Even so, Mediterranean shipping did benefit from the introduction of the Arab triangular lateen sail, which enabled vessels to tack into the wind, a feat not possible with the square rigging of Western antiquity.

First of all, as even the Wikipedia article will tell you, the lateen sail did not originate with the Arabs. Much more importantly, though, I'm baffled as to what Bernstein thinks tacking means. Again, the Wikipedia article is perfectly clear:

Tacking or coming about is the maneuver by which a sailing vessel turns its bow through the wind so that the wind changes from one side to the other.

The question is, what other kinds of tacking are there, apart from tacking into the wind? The reverse maneuver is called wearing. Much more importantly, though, square-rigged vessels, of antiquity or later times, are perfectly capable of tacking "into the wind"; it would be strange indeed if they couldn't.

The confusion persists later, when Bernstein talks about Chinese junks (p. 98):

The Chinese military leadership made maritime engineering a high priority, and their boatyards began to turn out many types of huge military and maritime (!?) vessels with... advanced fore-and-aft sails (which enabled ships to tack almost directly into the wind).

What on earth is a non-maritime vessel? The confusion with tacking continues; here Bernstein seems to confuse tacking with sailing close to the wind.

The larger point, however, is that on the topic of sailing, Bernstein clearly has no idea what he's talking about. This doesn't stop him from making statements about sailing. The question obviously becomes: is he taking other matters he's writing about equally lightly?

I can attempt a partial answer by looking at his chapter on the birth of Islam; Chapter 3: Camels, Perfumes and Prophets.

Bernstein discusses the birth of Islam in strangely contradictory terms. Pages 66 and 68-69:

66: "There [Mecca], the incense trade catalyzed the birth of Islam, whose military, spiritual and commercial impacts transformed medieval Asia, Europe and Africa."

68-69:

Exactly how Mecca became a bustling commercial center is something of a mystery; it produced nothing of value, was not a great center of consumption or government, and had little strategic worth. (...) The role of the incense trade in the city's rise is also uncertain: ther eis controversy as to whether or not the main caravan route bypassed the town. (...) In a narrow sense, Mecca may be thought of as a miniature, parched, landlocked Arabian version of Venice, whose food supply and rhythms of daily life hummed to the tunes of trade, whether or not it actually sat on the main incense route.

The problem is that Mecca was never any such thing. Here the reason for Bernstein's confusion is amply clear: his bibliography and notes omit any mention of the definitive work on the topic, Patricia Crone's Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam. Crone's book makes it perfectly clear that Mecca was only a bustling center of commerce in later Islamic traditions. There is absolutely no historical evidence to support those traditions. Almost unbelievably, Bernstein credits the siting of Mecca 100 miles away from the trade route to Nigel Groom's Frankincense and Myrrh; apparently Bernstein is unaware that Crone's book even exists.

Bernstein, has been quite content to write a chapter on the topic without even consulting such standard texts of Islamic studies that should occur to every undergraduate student. He doesn't seem to use any of the current scholarly works on the topic, but instead references books like Karen Armstrong's biography of Mohammed. Karen Armstrong is not a trained historian or islamicist, but an ex-nun. He quotes her work, but ignores any serious academic sources. The source material for the chapter is at best haphazard; in my opinion it can fairly be described as inept.

**

So far, I've read Bernstein's work on two areas that I have some knowledge in, and in both I've found his methods leave much to be desired. Despite what seems to be a total ignorance of sailing, he glibly makes statements about it. In writing on Islam, he is quite content to use sources that seem to have been selected at random. I stopped reading the book shortly later, as I don't see that a more comprehensive criticism is worthwhile. The way he treats these two areas is so incompetent that it throws the entire work into question. Has he been as haphazard in his source material for other claims? I'm not competent enough in those areas to say, but I have my doubts.

**

As a sidenote, reading reviews of the book is frightening. In lieu of a review, the New York Times printed a page-long summary of the book and called it a review (here. According to its back-cover blurb, the book was selected as "An Economist Book of the Year".

Most frighteningly, historian Paul Kennedy reviewed the book for Foreign Affairs, no less. Here's what he said:

A Splendid Exchange is a work of which Adam Smith and Max Weber would have approved. And it is all the more interesting because it is written by someone who is deeply knowledgeable about and active in the financial world yet finds the time to write graceful and insightful history with a delicate display of scholarship that conceals a vast erudition.

I find several of his insights to be, at best, questionable, and the scholarship he displays in the chapter on Islam is delicate in the sense that a car crash is a delicate display of driving.

I would assume that anyone who has the slightest background in Islamic studies could poke considerable holes in Bernstein's work. That even someone like Paul Kennedy seems to accept the entire work at face value is a powerful reminder of how important it is for us to read critically.

**

Having said all this, I certainly can't recommend Bernstein's book to anyone. The inept scholarship of his chapter on Islam is enough to raise serious doubts as to his methodology and rigor; serious enough to me that I can't take his book seriously as a work of history, even popular history. If all of his facts have been checked as rigorously as those on sailing and Islam, I can't even imagine what the rest of the book might contain.

Game review: Fallout 3

Great game, shame about the plot. 8/10

The good part is that Fallout 3 is a tremendously enjoyable and somewhat addictive game. Most of the game mechanics work just fine, as does the user interface. As a level design issue, I'd just like to say that I got really tired of the practically identical dark, ruined buildings after the third one, and there were still, what, 500 more left? Okay, you don't have to explore them, but still, there's been a tremendous amount of level design done, with nothing to show for it except dozens of identical levels. That's a bit lame, really.

The bad part is basically almost all of the writing. In parts it's good and even engaging; in parts it's so embarassingly bad you need to steel yourself to keep playing. I'll keep this spoiler-free, so I'll not treat the main plot other than to say that at times it's so mind-blowingly stupid it makes you want to bash your head into a wall.

There are two glaring flags of disbelief that the game can't help but make you hoist. The first, and most serious, is the claim made in the game that the events take place 200 years after nuclear war. When you play the game, it very quickly becomes obvious that that doesn't make any sense at all. In places they're trying to give the impression that it really has been ages since our civilization stood; in other places they give the impression that the bombs fell just last year. It feels like they can't make up their minds, and at times the discrepancy is really bothersome.

Another serious problem I have with the game, which might not be so bad if you don't know about these things, is that none of the damage you see in the game is in any way consistent with nuclear weapons. If I played the game without knowing it was called Fallout, I'd never guess they were trying to present a picture of a world after nuclear war.

There is radiation present, for example in bomb craters. This is totally ridiculous as no nuclear warhed would create radiation effects that persist for 200 years. Most of the radiation one encounters in the game, however, comes from barrels of nuclear waste or some other radioactive goo that seem to be basically lying around at random. There doesn't seem to be any reason or explanation for this, but apparently in the dystopian future of Fallout, people used to, um, store nuclear waste in subway tunnels before the war...

The game is set in the "Capital Wasteland", supposedly the ruins of Washington, D.C. Apparently nuclear war has dried up the Potomac river and turned DC into an arid wasteland where it never rains. Only it must rain, because there are pools of stagnant water everywhere, and that water has to come from somewhere. An easy guess would be those numerous clouds in the sky, but during the entire game, never once do you see it rain.

I can't for the life of me figure out how a nuclear war would turn the DC area into a desert or dry up the Potomac river. It should be pretty much exactly the opposite. But as we know, the earlier Fallout games were set in a desert, so maybe they felt this one needs to be in a desert too. And as we know, it's a generally accepted rule of fiction that postapocalyptic stories are set in the desert (Mad Max), where it doesn't rain. Therefore it can't rain in Fallout 3.

Overall both the plot and the overall writing of the game is designed to give you certain impressions and rather ham-handedly prod you into feeling emotions for your character or other characters. All of the writing places giving impressions far above realism, consistency or even sense. This is even more blatant because mostly the game is very atmospheric and great fun to play. You just have to grit your teeth and think of England when the cutscenes start.

I really wish this had been a better game. As it is, I really like it. It just saddens me to see such hideously bad writing in an otherwise well-executed game.

Book review: McMafia

Misha Glenny's book McMafia has such a hideously stupid cover that it put me off buying it for an entire year despite my great interest in its topic. I mean, come on:

What the hell is that, a Chinese GTA ripoff? It's awful.

What makes the cover art even more terrible is that the GQ quote on the cover isn't that far off. Glenny's written a wonderfully informative, perceptive book on global organized crime that I think really is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the world works.

The only unfortunate aspect of the book is that sometimes Glenny starts propounding solutions. Occasionally these are obvious ones; he agrees with such hideous left-wing anarchists as the Economist magazine that drugs should be legalized, and his book is an excellent argument in favor of legalization.

On the other hand, though, because he's mainly concerned with organized crime, this leads him to take rather a strange perspective on some things. For example, he details the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the criminal gangs, mafias and oligarchs that took control in Russia. Because he sees all of these as inherently negative, in Glenny's book Vladimir Putin assumes a heroic status as a champion of law and order! To anyone in the least bit familiar with Russia's burgeoning securocracy this is at the very least amusing, but really closer to frightening.

Sometimes Glenny calls for wider international measures to control something or the other, and several reviews of his book, like the one linked to on the Wikipedia page at salon.com, make the explicit comparison that international affairs must be regulated by a supranational entity just like the markets must be regulated. This is all so much left-wing claptrap, but luckily it very rarely distracts from the point of the book, which is to take the reader on a guided tour of the world of organized crime.

Mmm. Or-ganized crime.

**

Definitely a book worth reading, despite some of its biases. This should be essential reading to anyone who wants to talk about drugs, prostitution, human trafficking or terrorism.

Bioshock revisited

I finished Bioshock yesterday. Last month I gave it a grade of 9/10, and I'm afraid I have to downgrade that to 7/10.

On the one hand, Bioshock is a great game, and one that I'm sure I'll remember for a long time. On the other hand, it's kind of boring. Seriously. The game consists of something like eight levels, and from like the third one onward, it's just the same stuff.

And as for the vaunted "plot", it's necessary to make some distinctions here. In gaming, when people say plot, they usually mean either the plot, the backstory or the setting. Bioshock has no backstory at all, a fairly humdrum plot and a great setting. Seriously, the whole survival-horror-evil-genetic-manipulation-people-going-insane thing is getting more than a bit old.

I liked playing it, but sadly, it became a bit boring toward the end. Also, at times they were laying it on pretty thick, and the plot really doesn't live up to the hype.

I still liked it, and I guess my final recommendation is to get it, but not for full price. Frankly, I thought Mass Effect was better.

**

As it stands, Take-Two is making a franchise out of Bioshock. Wikipedia:

"In response to the game's high sales and critical acclaim, Take-Two Chairman Strauss Zelnick revealed in a conference call to analysts that the company now considered the game as part of a franchise."

The way I understand that, later this year we'll get Bioshock 2010, which will be exactly the same game, only with improved machine gun controls and some roster updates, and this time Houdini Splicer will get to be on the cover.