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Worlds Without End Blog

Looper Posted at 7:03 PM by Jonathan McDonald

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It’s hard to know what to say about Looper without sounding like a sycophant. I hate time travel stories, have with a passion for years, and probably will continue doing so for the most part—just ask Dave—but I can’t bring myself to even dislike Looper a little, despite it being supersaturated with the worst time travel tropes and inconsistencies. Why is it so good? It’s almost good in spite of Bruce Willis, who has a habit of ruining movies in his old age by sleepwalking through his acting responsibilities, but who is here somehow inspired to pull out his A-game. I think we can thank director Rian Johnson for that.

Johnson was not particularly well known before Looper, but his earlier films Brick and The Brothers Bloom were somewhat more than mere cult classics. Brick (2005) featured a younger Joseph Gordon-Levitt—who is cast as the Young Joe to Willis’s Old Joe in Looper—as a highschooler who plays noir detective in his free time. The Brothers Bloom (2008) told the story of a pair of fraternal confidence men. Both films are filled to the brim with, well, life, for lack of a better term. At times during Bloom you feel like the modern world has been taken over by the spirit of Homeric Greece, all sun and exuberance and love for every single character in the story, even the despicable ones.

The basic story of Looper is set up sufficiently well in the trailer, and I feel no need to repeat it here. The story does not quite unfold in usual three-act or “dramatic arc” structure, but neither does it make a (heh) loop. It’s more of a spiral, or a peeling onion with a fascinating revelation in every layer, some of which may, yes, make you cry. But not if you’re manly. Just saying.

Gordon-Levitt’s makeup job and method imitation of Willis is uncanny, even if the fact that it is makeup is too often apparent. Willis has a lot to play with, and makes some interesting choices regarding how the same person may change over the course of thirty years. Emily Blunt as the sort of love interest Sara probably has more acting chops than many of the other actors, and isn’t afraid to use them. Garret Dillahunt is cast in a role that, for so many reasons, hearkens back to his stint on The Sarah Connor Chronicles as a Terminator. Jeff Daniels shows up to collect his paycheck on schedule. The very young Pierce Gagnon has a surprisingly meaty part for such a young boy, and I suppose it’s a testament to Johnson’s directing abilities that he can do so much with him.

Did it bother me to see more confusing time travel logic than Timecop? Certainly. Was I bemused that Kansas will be growing a major metroplex within thirty years? Absolutely. But do you know why I didn’t care? Because Rian Johnson knows that if you cast Bruce Willis in a movie, there has to be at least one scene where he goes batshit crazy and singlehandedly shoots every last bad guy with a small armament of guns.

Go see this movie.

GMRC Review: Approaching Oblivion by Harlan Ellison Posted at 7:46 PM by Jonathan McDonald

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Harlan Ellison is one of those writers I not only love to hate but hate to love, one of those irascible writers who will permit no criticism of his work to sink in to any depth of his soul. He is also one of those wildly creative writers who is inexplicably able to form fictional worlds entirely different from one another both in setting (hard enough) and tone (nearly impossible). His progressivist politics and often blasphemous hatred of religion infuriates me, but in a seven page tour of a dying earth he can reduce me nearly to tears. Ellison has developed a powerful level of artistic talent, and he is not someone to be taken lightly. Many of the videos of the man one finds online too often depict him simplistically as an old crank—which, to be sure, he is—but this can scarcely explain the stories that could only come from a soul which feels deeply.

Too often Ellison’s wrath gets the better of him. “Knox,” the first story in this collection, depicts a liberal’s wet dream of a conservative racist party turning violent and creating a police state. Does Charlie Knox hate every person who is not wholly like himself, or is it truly himself that he hates?, Ellison asks, rather uninterestingly. The way in which Knox memorizes and recites his list of racial slurs might be revelatory in subtler hands, but with Ellison it comes off as a paranoid delusion. The great irony, though, is that Knox is revealed in the end to be telepathically manipulated by alien invaders who wish to destroy our civilization. And the worst irony is that Ellison probably didn’t understand the irony at all.

Other times Ellison’s penchant for wallowing in the bizarre and perverse gets the better of him, as in “Catman.” This is a story—if an incoherent narrative set in a incohesive future world can be called a story—which would be better left on the cutting floor, but which (I must suspect) Ellison furiously refused to trash simply because a friend recommended that course of action. Alternatively, one wonders if he wrote this story about freakishly Oedipal, immortal, machine-humping characters on a dare. There are discrete elements of creativity within the story which would be the envy of science fiction masters, but which are smashed together with such violence as to nullify any spark of humanity. The less said about it the better.

Harlan EllisonEven so, there are stories here which are worth tracking down at any cost. “Paulie Charmed the Sleeping Woman” is astoundingly different from Ellison’s usual approach, being the story of a saxophone player grieving for a dead lover, and his attempt to reach her from beyond the grave. “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty” is a nostalgic look back at the influences that make us what we are as adults, and is haunting enough that I can forgive the time-travel conceit (well, mostly). “Hindsight: 480 Seconds” is a wistful look back at the Earth humanity is leaving behind, wondering what we could have done better, and what we still might. These are the stories which make one suspect Ellison of a hidden lycanthropic condition: the moon is new, and darkness consumes his soul; it is full, and he beholds the beauty of the night; it wanes, and he sleeps.

I don’t know what to make of this collection. It is distinctively bi-polar, and one must use discretion in approaching its individual parts. I suppose I must recommend it, but with all the cautions listed above intact. Ellison is a wild beast, but now and then you may find him in a sanguine, or at least tolerable, mood.

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack Posted at 7:33 PM by Jonathan McDonald

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The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack[There are spoilers throughout. This novel is difficult to review without referencing certain events in the story. In my defense, many of the later twists are strongly foreshadowed early on. Also, a special thanks to Pyr Books for providing WWEnd with a review copy of this book.]

Mark Hodder’s inaugural novel neatly rides the popular wave of pseudo-Victorian Steampunk while mixing in well-worn science fiction tropes like time travel and genetic engineering. It’s obvious Hodder has done his homework, as his depiction of the Victorian era is very detailed, both in its representation of the society as it actually was and in the minor and major changes that have taken place as a result of a time travel incident. It’s like reading a Dickens novel with ray guns.

The novel’s protagonist is Richard Burton, who in real history was something of a failed explorer (he made an early attempt to find the source of the Nile), a maligned statesman (tossed about from one consulship to another in later life) and a bit of a pervert (the least offensive thing he did was to be the first to translate the Kama Sutra into English). The main crux of the novel hinges on the fact that Burton’s career makes a major turn to the better when he is hired to investigate the mysterious Spring Heeled Jack by special assignment of the Prime Minister. In this new timeline Burton feels that he barely escaped a horrible fate, validated during a collision with the aforementioned Jack, who tells Burton that nothing is as it ought to be.

Burton’s partner, the story’s secondary protagonist, is the minor poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. He’s quite the opposite of Burton in many ways—short, thin, unathletic, somewhat effeminate—but he seeks the sort of life-threatening adventure that he feels is necessary to make his poetry great. That and the fact that he can easily disguise himself as a young chimney sweep gradually makes him an indispensable partner to Burton’s investigation.

These two adventurers live in a world where Queen Victoria was assassinated on the same day Spring Heeled Jack was first spotted; a world in which the eugenics movement has progressed so far that super-intelligent dogs and birds act as message carriers; a world in which geothermal energy is tapped as a sustainable manner; a world in which cats act as living vacuum cleaners; a world where human brains can be transplanted into animal bodies and even into other human bodies to make double-brained beings; a world in which helicopter-like machines are common and genetic werewolves haunt the lower-class neighborhoods. This is the novel’s biggest draw but also, I would argue, its major weakness, for it all hinges on the changes caused by one time traveler from the twenty-second century who effects all these changes simply by feverishly talking about the scientific wonders of the future to one man who happens to be well-connected. None of his own technology is reverse-engineered; apparently all that was needed to make all these changes happen in a few decades was to plant the ideas in a few minds. (The time travel logic itself is also very convoluted and self-contradictory. Badly written time travel always throws me out of the story while simultaneously giving me a headache.)

The plot revolves around a group of scientists attempting to perfect their social and genetic engineering plans. They want to create a perfect world, and they aren’t afraid of murdering and causing widespread grief to bring this world about. This isn’t the strongest aspect of the novel, which excels in describing its imaginative alternate England and the antics of its protagonists, but the worst that can be said of the plot is that it’s just there to give our heroes something to do. One hopes that, now that the origin story is out of the way, the Burton and Swinburne team can proceed with their adventures without going through the motions of explaining why their world is the way it is. Honestly, the less time spent on that explanation the better, because it simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Burton’s major decision at the very end is amazingly cold-blooded and clearly defines his character as an anti-hero of ambiguous moral status. Even his fiancée Isabel is a clearly drawn character who could probably support a novel of her own. Swinburne is somewhat less defined since the novel follows Burton’s point of view almost exclusively, but one hopes that future installments will spend more time with Swinburne and his poetic response to the strange world in which they live. Hodder’s sequel The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man is due out this March, and this reader is definitely looking forward to seeing where he goes with the series.