I admit, I did not watch Babylon 5 all the way through. I'd tried before to get into it during the earlier seasons, but just couldn't get past the stilted acting and dialog. Jumping in at the beginning of the fourth season proved just right; I got to see several characters' crowning moments: Londo's scheming against the Shadows culminating in a wonderfully snarky speech (with a flashback to Vir's earlier crowning moment, as added payoff), and Bester's calm exposition of what had really been going on for an entire season (to paraphrase Rommel: "Bester, you magnificent bastard.").
Great plots can't fix bad acting, but they can make up for it. Especially if there's some good acting as well: half the characters (Londo, G'Kar, Garibaldi, Bester, and Ivanova, to name as few as possible) sizzled, which made the deficiencies far more tolerable. Despite its corniness, the last episode left me full of bittersweet ache, showing just how much couldn't be fixed despite the best efforts of all involved. I can only hope that Londo's fatal visions concealed a larger story which saw his enemies choked metaphorically as he was literally, at the hands of his Alliance friends.
The metaphors are fairly easy to tease out: though complex and gritty, the setting is often unsubtle (e.g. - "OBEY" signs in the PsiCorps). The one that struck me most is this: the next wars being the Mind Wars seems a worrisome metaphor for the direction of human psycho-social research. Our understanding of the mind, though still somewhat infantile, is growing by leaps and bounds. To pretend that won't be weaponized is to ignore every bit of history since simians decided to leave the trees.
Tue, Dec. 23rd, 2008, 12:18 am
The Ruins of Babylon
Fri, Jun. 8th, 2007, 05:50 pm
Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town
Cory Doctorow's tour de force is, at it's core, a very simple story. It's the tribulations of the eldest child of a dysfunctional family (the strange offspring of a distant miner and an exhausted housewife), looking after his relatives and helping to building an anarchist wireless mesh network for a city. But that's like describing an apple as "long, thin, and white, with a stem at one end and seeds in the middle". The core is almost unimportant, except as a framework which holds the juicy bits in place so you can bite them.
What I expected to be a fairly dry and cheeky piece of enjoyable agit-prop is instead a mystical realism masterpiece. My chief objection to most such stories is their lack of verisimilitude. It's something almost inherent to the style; it takes immense art to mix modern "rational" society and the mythical causation of faerie tales, without making one or the other seem forced.
Such breaks ultimately pull me out of the story; Sandman and the like are entertaining, but not terribly engaging. I tend to deconstruct the allegory in parallel as I read; once I realize the general style, my brain shifts unconsciously into doing so. The world Cory describes, however, kept pulling me back in; it wasn't until just prior to the climax that I managed to bite close enough to the core to see it well. The transitions between the mundane and the mythic are seamless, and often frighteningly familiar1 . . .
Reading Sandman is somewhat like looking at a Da Vinci painting. Reading Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town is like watching one being painted in front of you.2 And like everything else Cory writes, it's free unless you want to pay money for it.
What I expected to be a fairly dry and cheeky piece of enjoyable agit-prop is instead a mystical realism masterpiece. My chief objection to most such stories is their lack of verisimilitude. It's something almost inherent to the style; it takes immense art to mix modern "rational" society and the mythical causation of faerie tales, without making one or the other seem forced.
Such breaks ultimately pull me out of the story; Sandman and the like are entertaining, but not terribly engaging. I tend to deconstruct the allegory in parallel as I read; once I realize the general style, my brain shifts unconsciously into doing so. The world Cory describes, however, kept pulling me back in; it wasn't until just prior to the climax that I managed to bite close enough to the core to see it well. The transitions between the mundane and the mythic are seamless, and often frighteningly familiar1 . . .
Reading Sandman is somewhat like looking at a Da Vinci painting. Reading Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town is like watching one being painted in front of you.2 And like everything else Cory writes, it's free unless you want to pay money for it.
- It's probably a bad sign that stories about mad scientists and other dangerous weirdos always strike such deep chords with me. I take comfort in the evidence I'm not even close to alone in this.
- Now, to ask him if he'd let me try making it into a movie. Cory's one of the few authors cool enough that cold calling him with such a crazy idea might be worth it. He blogs from hot air balloon, for chrissake . . .