Matthew Hunter

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is an early attempt to bring foreign films – specifically, the Chinese kung fu fantasy – to an American audience with high production values and more sophisticated plotting than the usual chopsui. It succeeds admirably, and was justly recognized with multiple awards. As a fan of chopsui, I was not disappointed. The kung fu is powerful in this movie. Although much is fast, it is not too fast to follow, and the camerawork does an excellent job of maintaining a smooth visual continuity that showcases even the more complex fighting.

Destroyer is the latest in Cherryh’s Foreigner series, the tale of Bren ameron’s tempestuous relationship with the alien atevi. As the paidhi, Bren is the sole human permitted to enter atevi society, and on his head rests the task of translating not only language and culture, but also the instinctual behaviors that can seem deceptively similar … with sometimes deadly results. As Destroyer opens, Bren returns to his adopted planet following the 2-year space mission to retrieve human colonists from a remote space station.

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.

Having set aside my higher expectations after Earth Unaware, I was anticipating pretty much a simple adventure story this time around. That’s pretty much what I got with Earth Afire. Unexpectedly, though, we were introduced to Mazer Rackham in this book, and he was unfortunately less than impressive as a character. In Ender’s Game, Card writes Ender as a character who is convincingly super-intelligent yet childish. Mazer is supposed to be cut from similar if not quite identical cloth, but he doesn’t carry it convincingly.

I ended up reading Orson Scott Card’s First Formic War series because of a discussion I had with a friend of mine about the central moral question of Ender’s Game: was Ender’s action to end his war moral or not? It would be a spoiler to describe exactly what he did; suffice it to say that it’s a close call based on the available information, and our opinions differed based primarily on whether the books in this series were considered canon or not.

Ursula K Leguin’s EarthSea trilogy broke new ground in the fantasy genre, and has truly earned a place of honor. Unfortunately, as with many television adaptions, the Sci-Fi Channel’s attempt to bring that story to the television screen preserved almost nothing of that. Although the miniseries is less bitter and painful than Tehanu, it lacks the qualities that made the original trilogy such a wonderful creation. It also lacks the special effects to effectively carry out the magic that is such a vital component of EarthSea.

Expanded universe is an odd collection - unlike every other author’s volume of short stories you’ve read, EU is half author musings. It is almost as if Heinlein sat down to fill 500+ pages with social commentary, and used the short story format for about half of it. If you are a fan of all things Heinlein you will doubtless enjoy this cross-section of his mind. If you were born in my parent’s generation, say around 1950 (or earlier), you will likely find a lot of his essays more relevant than I did - for many of them were written in the shadow of nuclear weaponry, and his predictions for the future (of which there are plenty) were made while you were alive.

Fevre Dream is an eloquent and retrospective novel, taking as its setting the Mississippi steamboats and the decadence that characterized the city of New Orleans, and adding a dose of the supernatural that fits right in with the rest. The title is derived from the christening of the steamboat by the same name, the magnificent creation of the owner of a shipping firm fallen on hard times and a mysterious foreign benefactor.

Firefly is a TV series that ran for a single short season (12 episodes) before being canceled. The driving force behind it’s creation was Joss Whedon, and it’s received rave reviews from lots of libertarian types. As such, I thought I’d give it a try. The series is set in the far future, focusing on the Firefly-class spacecraft Serenity and it’s crew of criminals, smugglers, and generally ornery types. One of the recurring villians is the Alliance, which did some conquering in the backstory and in the series present plays the role of overbearing, aggressive government.

The series follows a human paidhi (a diplomatic specialist in alien cultures) in his career as liason between a colony of humans and the native race of the planet, the Atevi, who are undergoing a dramatically accelerated transition from the beginning of their industrial period to a human-guided space age. Although a certain initial investment is required, the tale rapidly becomes engrossing. The paidhi’s unenviable status as the sole human permitted in close contact with the Atevi, with responsibility for interperting all contact between their cultures, embroils him in labyrinthine politics that threaten his life as well as planetary war.