Matthew Hunter

Blindsight is a first contact story that turns out to be more about the humans than the aliens, something that was more than a little disconcerting. The narrator explicitly functions as an “interpreter” between pre-Singularity humans and a variety of post-Singularity humans, the types of which include functional multiple-personalities, cybernetic human-machine interfaces, a vampire, and an AI. None of the post-humans seem particularly incomprehensible in their thoughts and behavior, which makes me question the need for a translator – or perhaps serves to point out how effective he is at translating.

Yesterday, I went to see Fearless, Jet Li’s recent martial arts epic. It was pretty good, but also pretty much exactly what I expected. While there, I saw that the theater had allocated one of its screens to a flick called The Illusionist, a movie I had never heard of or seen previews or promos for. Based on the little title strip with showtimes, it looked interesting, and a few minutes wirelessly checking the reviews on Rotten Tomatos suggested it wasn’t awful.

I picked this up hoping for a mildly interesting tale of intrigue, and what I got was the renaissance through the eyes of a feminist who really, really wishes she could grow up to be a swordswoman. The Privilege of the Sword is not a bad book exactly; it’s an unrealistic premise handled reasonably well with a light dose of intrigue and humor on top. Interesting, particularly for the attention to detail given to the fencing, but not very meaningful.

Dzur is Brust’s long-awaited followup to Issola in the Vlad Taltos series. It’s an interesting mix of new material and old standbys of the Vlad series. In terms of series revelations and introductions, I counted at least five or six events of a similar stature to the Lesser Revelation of Orca. And it’s worth noting that the Greater Revelation of that novel is not directly revealed but gets enough in-jokes that it becomes tiresome.

Micah didn’t really do much for me. About equal parts sex, relationship angst, and supernatural spook. Nothing really to recommend it especially, though the sex didn’t grate nearly so badly as in the last full-length novel.

I have spoken before in this forum on my declining respect for, and interest in, the Anita Blake series. Nonetheless I have consistently picked up the latest book when it was released, hoping for something of a turnaround or change in direction. So far I have been disappointed, though not enough to make a firm commitment to refuse the next installment. Danse Macabre may well be bad enough to break that barrier.

So there’s a new vampire movie out, and I really need a few hours to sit and take in someone else’s vision of impossibility with the hope of seeing something cool. These factors combined to put me in a theater seat watching Ultraviolet, despite having nothing more than the posters and the previews to go on. I’ll give you the short version: it’s bad. Really bad. So bad I’m surprised I sat through the whole thing (which probably had a lot to do with the fact that if I didn’t, I would have to start thinking again – something that I was trying to avoid in the few hours between work and more work that I had).

The original Underworld could best be described as a movie made according to the rules of the World of Darkness roleplaying universe from White Wolf, postulating a supernatural underside to our familiar world where vampires and werewolves battle endlessly, with a plot based on cliches filtered through the rules of Hollywood scriptwriting. Despite that, it actually worked pretty well. The key, as with many such movies, is to ignore the plot holes, physics errors, and lack of characterization, instead focusing on shiny things that go bang, fanged cool factor, and Kate Beckinsale in a shiny skintight corset-enabled piece of tactical eveningwear.

So I went to see the first movie in the Narnia sequence last week. I was hopeful; the trailers presented an image of a movie in the tradition of Jackson’s Middle Earth, based around a classic fantasy series from the same period and sticking faithfully to the work of the original author. It should have worked out well, with the ground already broken, assuming the people involved were competent; instead, the result was disappointing.

The latest and long-awaited book in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, A Feast For Crows, was released on November 8. The book’s delivery represents the end of a long wait for fans of the series, although – prodded most likely by the degeneration of Jordan’s Wheel of Time series – most fans seem to prefer to wait long enough for Martin to get it right rather than demanding a quick release; and in the face of continuing difficulty with the scope of the work, Martin eventually split the book he had planned into two, publishing what he was done with and leaving the remainder of what he had planned for the next book.