Zombieland

Saw this movie in the theaters with friends. Didn’t know anything about it going in.

Actually it was pretty enjoyable. Pretty funny. We all thought it kept a nice balance between campy-ness and story. There was a little bit of character development underneath the humor and the plot and message was pretty simple and endearing without being too sappy.

It does have a lot of graphic violence, but the violence is not that realistic. I think that makes a difference.

Bad Boys

In general, I like this kind of action movie. It is an action movie first, but it also has a sense of humor. (As opposed to some action comedies, which are comedies first, and the action takes a distant second place.) Usually it has sort of endearing heroes too. A lot of Will Smith movies are like this.

Will Smith is a youthful fun-loving cop, but his partner is a mild-mannered married man. While investigating a drug heist and murder, they must swap identities, each posing as the other, in order to appease their only witness, a cute but annoying young lady.

I would say this movie was relatively fun, but it wasn’t my favorite in this light action genre. The identity swap is a little nonsensical – pretty much they have no good reason to keep up the charade other than its humor factor. It’s OK, but it’s not the best Will Smith movie.

Hythrun Chronicles: Demon Child trilogy (Medalon, Treason Keep, Harshini)

Hythrun Chronicles: Demon Child trilogy

(Medalon, Treason Keep, Harshini)

by Jennifer Fallon

Since I loved her Second Sons trilogy so much, I decided to try Fallon’s first series, the Hythrun chronicles. Medalon was her first novel, I believe. The Hythrun chronicles are actually two trilogies: the Demon Child trilogy and the Wolfblade trilogy. I read the Demon Child trilogy.

The Demon Child trilogy is okay. It was a bit of a disappointment after Second Sons. The political intrigue and scheming are less advanced and the characters lack depth, especially at first. There is a lot more list-like characterization (e.g. “He was [adj], [adj], and [adj] physically, and she could tell that he was also [adj], [adj], and [adj] in character.”) and the characters often seem a little polar (either really really bad or really quite heroic). The characterization does improve over the course of the trilogy – I guess this makes sense since these were the author’s first novels.

The story is all right, mostly it is exciting but sometimes it seems to drag.

The story has an creative take on the gods: they are real and can walk among humans and interact with them, and can have direct influence on people and things (e.g. the goddess of love can make people fall in love, the god of weather can create storms at will, etc). Like the Greek gods, they have a  lot of “humanity” in them and can be funny, capricious and fallible. There are two major types of god – Primal Gods, who represent fundamentals of the world or of humanity (War, Love, Thieves, Weather), and always exist though their strength depends on human behavior (e.g. the god of war is weaker in times of peace); and Incidental Gods, who exist only because they have followers who believe in them. There is also an race of demi-gods – the Harshini, who are able to use the gods’ power (and do so as a sort of check-and-balance against the gods themselves), but are unable to cause harm or commit violence.

Her take on the living gods was the most interesting and unique part of the story. The gods were also some of the most interesting characters.

Singularity Sky

Singularity Sky

by Charles Stross

Interesting story plays on the idea that faster-than-light travel is equivalent to time travel. It features a far-future world where a god-like artificial intelligence has decreed that NO ONE may use time travel to interfere with causality (that is, possibly interfere with the AI’s own evolution/existence). This god-like AI also scattered human life around the universe, effectively creating multitudinous alien races. Also there are amazing “cornucopia machines” that can manufacture any known physical object.

The penalties for  violating causality are severe and destructive, so much that various governments have secret agencies dedicated to ensuring that no one does it on their watch. The main characters are two such agents, independently visiting an anti-technology civilization whose oppressive government plans to use time travel to win a war against a mysterious alien invader.

But these aliens are no typical invaders – instead they are a sort of information transfer swarm. Their goal is to gather info about any foreign culture they visit, and also to “grant wishes” — to pass on the information they have. Naturally though, this wreaks complete havoc on a civilization that’s been kept in the dark for generations by its government.

The writing style has the dryness and the lack of appealing characters that often shows up in hard science fiction – but I thought the story wasn’t too “hard” itself. The story is interesting, though at times it is difficult to follow.

District 9

I liked this movie a lot. Saw it in the theater with friends.

I liked how even though I didn’t like the main character at first, throughout the movie he grew on me and by the end I was feeling quite empathetic.

I liked how the movie retained a realistic documentary-like feeling even once they stopped using mostly documentary-like clips and started using mostly traditional omniscent view. In other words, the transition from the introductory documentary style to normal movie style was very smooth.

I liked that it was a kind of tragic story, but was not the tragic story I’d been expecting (I had expected the classic first-contact misunderstanding story).

I liked that extreme stress had a noticeable effect on the main character and affected his decision-making capabilities.

I liked that the setting made the story seem more universal, and I liked that the government abuse theme was subtle.

And actually, I also liked the open-ended-ness. A lot of questions about the aliens (where did they come from? why were they starving? why was there only one smart guy among all of them?) were never answered or even brought up; however, all of the questions seem like they COULD have answers. That is, none of the unexplained elements seemed like they were left unexplained just because the creators didn’t have a plan or a background for them.

Eye of the Labyrinth and Lord of Shadows (Second Sons books 2 & 3)

Eye of the Labyrinth
Lord of Shadows
(Second Sons trilogy, books 2 & 3)
by Jennifer Fallon

Well, even though I ordered the books via Amazon Prime 2-day shipping, I absolutely could NOT wait to find out what would happen next, so I downloaded both books and tore through them, finishing both before the order even arrived.

They continue the exciting story and are just as un-put-down-able.

The characters also round out a little more.

My only warning is that there are quite a few lucky coincidences that are necessary to drive the plot. The ending also has a lot of coincidental-seeming happiness in it. But I thought it was fine, didn’t feel too contrived to me. Also, you might be able to figure out the hero’s clever schemes before they’re revealed. Again, I thought it was fine, even being able to guess what would happen didn’t spoil the reveal.

However, I won’t spoil it with a plot summary either, since “what happens next” really compelled me while reading these books.

I really liked this trilogy a lot!

The Lion of Senet

The Lion of Senet
by Jennifer Fallon

This is the first book in Fallon’s Second Sons trilogy. It is fantastic.

The characters seem a little cliche at first, but throughout the book their personalities are developed through their dialogue and actions and they become a lot more real. The villains are evil, but they are evil in a human way – hungry for power, misguided, etc.

The story is about a powerful king and a self-styled high priestess that controls him and his people with a subversive religion, a small neighboring country that lost its independence due to the priestess’s lies, and a small group of revolutionaries from that nation that still want their freedom back. The main character finds himself in the middle of the mess because he is the unnaturally smart bastard son of the revolutionaries’ leader. It is a story with many political schemes and plots and various characters’ attempts to manipulate each other.

The story is really exciting, and Fallon’s timing is really good, both in character development and in plot. It makes the book easy to read and hard to put down.

I bought the two sequels as soon as I finished, because I could not wait to find out what would happen next.

The Stoneholding

The Stoneholding
by James Anderson and Mark Seabanc

The Stoneholding is really long, but not that much actually happens. The plot is simplistic and characters lack believable motivation. You have to “take it for granted” every time a character does anything. Instead, the author spends an abnormal amount of time talking about geography. He describes every hill, rock, grove of trees, etc in painfully lengthy detail. Somehow, in spite of this, you’re still not left with a coherent sense of setting. These passages feel more like hearing a laundry list of the landscape’s various features.

Worse, these verbose wastes of time tend to interrupt the plot whenever it comes even close to moving. For instance, in one scene: Old Wise Man sees assorted symbols of doom. He feels a sure sense that something terrible is about to happen. !! So he… spends the next 12 pages musing about the various landmarks around his house.

And no, the landmarks don’t become relevant once the terrible thing actually happens, nor are they relevant at any time during this book. So it’s not “immersive”, it’s just really boring.

Also, the author has a bad case of thesaurusitis. Thesaurusitis happens when an writer, afraid of using simple vocabulary, or of using the same word twice in one paragraph, uses a thesaurus to find some synonym – any synonym! – with which to replace the offending words. The substitute words may be big and fancy, but often sound unnatural and sometimes don’t even make sense in context. The result is very awkward writing.

This book was really bad. Avoid.

Zoe’s Tale

Zoe’s Tale

by John Scalzi

Zoe’s Tale retells the events of Last Colony from the perspective of Zoe, the teenage daughter of  Last Colony’s protagonist.

It’s a quick easy read and is pretty enjoyable; though the first-person voice of a teenage girl can be a little grating at first, the voice smooths out over the course of the book. It is very different from  Last Colony as well, even though it takes place at the same time, and centers around the same events. The plot is very different.

My only complaint is that there are really only two important things in Zoe’s Tale: when she fends off the werewolves by treating them fairly, and when she makes the Obin take her to see General Gau and secure her a way to protect her home. It’s great that these two points answer some questions left over from Last Colony. But I kind of felt like the rest of the story was just constructed AROUND these two ideas, and was treated as less important.

It’s a pleasant visit back to the world and characters of Old Man’s War, but it’s not as actually good.

Sandman Slim

Sandman Slim

by Richard Kadrey

The blurb says “Nicotine and octane in equal parts might come close to the high-energy buzz from Kadrey’s Sandman Slim“. When I look at the first page, it’s written in first-person, present tense. I feel dread. I remember how much I hated Snow Crash, which had a similar blurb, and a similar first page.

But I guess I shouldn’t be so prejudiced, because I actually liked Sandman Slim. Could hardly put it down, even. It has a lot of things to like. First, the hero/narrator is a likable guy. He’s a little bit gunslinger, a little bit vigilante – he’s got cool fighting skills, a hot temper, and a dry sense of humor. The basic idea is that he is a bad guy: violent, angry, murderous tendencies. But he is out for revenge against Even Worse Guys – guys who ruined his life and who might even be out to destroy the world. So, he’s the “monster that kills monsters”, as they say in the book. Of course, he’s a good guy at heart who cares about the people close to him and worries about the condition of his own humanity.

So that’s right – end of the world, revenge story, vigilante, bad boy monster-hunter. Stuff that appeals to pretty much anyone.

And the writing style is fine. I fear present tense writing because it’s often so gimmicky: an author uses present tense to force the story to seem more immediate, faster paced, closer. But it’s often annoyingly obvious what’s going on, because the present tense narration is weird and jarring. In Sandman Slim though, the writing is actually pretty smooth. And the fast pace comes from an actual plot, not from writing style trickery.

A lot of the elements in the story are unique as well. I liked the hero’s sarcastic magic coin, which he flips for questionable bitter advice. I laughed pretty hard when the hero visits the Room with 13 Doors (the method by which he can travel anywhere in time/space), and his friend says “My God. It really is a room full of doors. I assumed the doors were a metaphor.” Ha.