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Pulp Fiction

February 24, 2003
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Compare and contrast: Peshawar Lancers and Shanghai Knights.

We’ll do the movie first so you have time to skip it in the theaters. OK, that’s a little harsh, but it was really pretty uninspired. Good martial arts from Jackie, good comedy from Owen Wilson, rather lackluster script. I’m a sucker for Victorian pulp adventure, but this was really by the numbers without anything to distinguish it conceptually. I think moving the setting was a mistake. Leave the duo in the Old West where they’re working against our Western tropes, don’t move them to London and run them through the same dull paces every pair of Victorian pulp adventurers goes through.

Peshawar Lancers is decidedly more interesting, albeit still a failure. There are two sizable problems with the book. First, and most fatal, the plot really makes no sense. The entire book revolves around the need to foil an evil plot, and not surprisingly the plot is foiled, but it’s not foiled conclusively. There’s nothing at all stopping the baddies from making another run at the brass ring. The ending, as a result, was anti-climatic since I couldn’t really read it as anything other than a temporary triumph.

The second problem is that the alternate history is pretty flawed. Concept in a nutshell: a comet hits the earth in 1878, causing a second ice age. England survives by moving wholescale to India and points south. Japan builds itself up as a major power, as do the Ottoman Empire and a France that’s moved to Northern Africa. So far so good.

Russia survives by embracing a cannibalistic religious frenzy. Uh? Cannibalism isn’t going to provide enough food for a country to survive the ice age depicted; it’s just not a varied diet. There aren’t any plants growing in Russia. Where’d the vitamins come from, huh?

So what makes the novel interesting? It’d make a really rambunctious pulp setting, once you embrace the improbability of the evil Russians. (Hard to do that with the novel, since there are five appendixes given over to outlining the probability of the alternate history.) Huge swashbuckling fun, and you wouldn’t have to contend with a hobbled plot. If Peshawar Lancers had been an RPG sourcebook, I’d be recommending it.

Tales of ink and paper

February 24, 2003
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Saith Steve Lieber, comic book creator:

Thanks for asking. I’m working with a novelist on his first comic book project, and doing the research for another one that’ll be all me.

A fan replies:

Sounds good… Any publishers lined-up, or is that much further down the line?
(And any hints on the novelist’s identity?)

And Lieber spills:

No publishers lined up yet, but I guess there’s no reason to be coy. It’s Sean Stewart. He’s an s.f./fantasy writer, probably best known for GALVESTON, an amazing novel that won the World Fantasy Award in 2001. (Actually folks here might know him better as the story guy behind the webgame for the Spielberg film A.I.) He’s taken a serious interest in comics recently, and has a really good feel for how they work.

Woo hoo!

Meme watch

February 22, 2003
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Mr. Sterling — no, it’s OK! This is a technology post, not a review. Read on.

Mr. Sterling, which is continuing to be mediocre, had an interesting little moment last night. Senator Sterling was sitting in a committee meeting tilting at a windmill, while a press conference raged outside. One of his aides was at the press conference, keeping Sterling updated via BlackBerry. No explanation of what was going on, just a flash of one aide typing on a BlackBerry and the aide with Sterling getting the message. You know a technology’s becoming prevalent when it shows up in a TV show without explanation.

Small gathering

February 22, 2003
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If I still lived in San Francisco, I would go to Potlatch 12 this weekend. It looks distinctly like Readercon, an East Coast literary SF convention that started up after I left Boston. It seems to have good guests, there’s going to be a writer’s workship, it benefits Clarion West, and they make a good attempt to put panel notes online. Which is just so cool; I’ve always thought it’s a shame that SF cons don’t tend to preserve their panels. Wiser heads may realize that this is in fact a blessing.

Oasis time

February 21, 2003
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Phew. I finally hit the Warren Ellis run on Excalibur. After all the really bad stuff, it was a total breath of fresh air.

Ellis’ work on Excalibur is not of the quality of Stormwatch or Planetary, but it is very good superhero work. Despite his current distaste for writing ongoing superhero books, I think it’s an excellent form for him. Working within someone else’s continuity must be a pain in the ass, but the challenge seems to bring out his ingenuity.

It doesn’t have the same overarching story that his other superhero runs have had. He did a couple of good arcs, including the superb “London Burning” arc, and you can see him working on developing the style that led to the longterm plotting of Stormwatch, but this is definitely early Ellis. The characterizations are awesome. He turned Kitty Pryde into an adult, and Pete Wisdom is a neat anti-hero without being anything like Wolverine or Gambit. He’s an adult anti-hero. You don’t get a lot of that in superhero comics.

I’d recommend seeking out issues #83-103 of Excalibur, along with his miniseries, Pryde and Wisdom. You can skip the Age of Apocalypse stuff, which was four issues under the X-Caliber title. Slogging through the crap was worth it for the Ellis, but you shouldn’t subject yourself to the same pain and his issues are completely legible even if you haven’t read any of the earlier material.

I have also read all the Ben Rabb issues, which conclude the series, but I’ll talk of those when I’ve regained my strength.

And now?

February 20, 2003
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So where do we go from here? Terrorism is a real problem, and one that will only get more dangerous. I’ve argued that terrorism is well within the capabilities of the individual, with or without backing from rogue states. I don’t think removing Hussein will make us appreciably safer. Even if stopping rogue states is the best way to combat terrorism, we’re literally months away from seeing North Korea get more than enough nukes, and Pakistan is one coup away from being very unfriendly. As has been accurately observed, the problem of regime change in a rogue state with nukes is a far cry from the problem of regime change in a rogue state without nukes.

Or, in short: regime change in Iraq ain’t gonna make that much of a difference in the terrorism threat. It would feel good to believe that it does. Terrorism scares me. But the war on Iraq is not making me feel any safer.

So where’s safety?

One really obvious approach is to surrender our privacy to the government. Central London’s a good example of this; there are cameras everywhere. When you go down into the subway, there are posters encouraging people to pay the television tax — and they identify specific streets and specific numbers of people who haven’t paid the bill. It’s a surveillance society. There is not a lot of crime in Central London. It works.

The Patriot Act, Operation TIPS, and other such bills would work. There would certainly be ancillary damage to our rights. Some innocent people would get caught in the net. Misguided Presidents would use the technology to crack down on legitimate actions. Terrorism would be sharply reduced. It wouldn’t be worth the price.

So what’s worth the price?

David Brin proposes one method in The Transparent Society. He says we should give up our privacy — but not to the government. Rather, we should give it up to each other. He argues that we have nothing to fear from large databases and cameras, as long as they’re open to anyone who wants to look at them.

It’s an interesting argument. When I originally read the book, I didn’t think that there was any benefit to such openness that would be worth the sacrifice. My opinions have shifted somewhat since 9/11. It might be an emotional reaction, but I don’t think we’re as safe as I once assumed we were. I think that in the face of terrorism, maybe it would be worth giving up the privacy in a way that doesn’t force us to give up our freedoms.

A libertarian response (I hesitate to say the libertarian response) is withdrawal. Jim Henley, whose blog I linked above, argues that we should take a step back from our various international entanglements, thus reducing accidental resentment. There’s a lot to this; while Osama would probably still be a terrorist if we hadn’t stationed troops in Saudi Arabia, he might not have focused quite as hard on us. On the other hand, I think our relative wealth would still make us a target for resentment.

My anarchistic belief is that we’d be well served by going a step further (and one step sideways), and devolving as much responsibility as possible back to the states. The United States is a very large target. Few terrorists talk about going after the EU. Perhaps we should draw some conclusions from that. And, frankly, if the State of North Carolina feels compelled to involve itself in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I’d just as soon that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is clearly not involved in that decision.

Combine both approaches — decentralization of responsibility, and a transparent society — and you’ve gone a lot further towards preventing and combatting future terrorist attacks without spending tens of billions of dollars on bribing Turkey to let our troops attack Iraq from the north. Kind of radical concepts, I’ll admit, but it behooves me to fess up to what I have in mind given the amount of time I’ve spent criticizing Bush.