Usurper of the Sun

Perhaps my favorite sub-genre of Sci-fi is contact stories. Tragically, these stories inevitably fail to deliver satisfying resolutions.  The art is always in the build-up - the suspense surrounding an unknown alien intelligence.  Anticipation ever heightening towards the unveiling of something universally epic and transformational.  It's the narrative equivalent of painting yourself into a corner.  Once you've hooked an audience with the promise of revealing the 'great mysterious other' - no description, no matter how artful - can possibly manage to fulfill expectations.  It's failure by design.    

It's no wonder there are relatively few great contact stories.  Carl Sagan did the seminal Contact,  Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous with Rama (which was actually earlier.)  Both and had the good sense to make their aliens  disappear, at least partially managing to maintain some of the mystery (and in Clarke's case, prompting sequels.)  Yet even these award-winning novels conclude with the inescapable aftertaste of disappointment.  We always want more.

I appreciate these flawed constructs.  Most Sci-fi simply invents its artificial elements and tosses them in.  Introduced as exposition, we readily accept them and move on.  It's so much more powerful when a writer confronts the magnitude (and impossibility) of describing the truly alien.  Willing to - fearlessly or foolishly - push the narrative forward, all the while inwardly aware that what lies beyond the great wall of the unknown can never be adequately described, they try anyways.

So it's with a special reverence when I announce Usurper of the Sun, by Housuke Nojiri, is a great contact novel.  Its premise: an alien intelligence (or unknown force of nature) is building a ring around the sun, indiscriminately threatening Earth.  It presents an alien intelligence so different that any communication with it (or understanding of it) is very likely impossible.  Set in the very near future, told from the point of view of a Japanese scientist over a lifetime, it at times carries the weight and feel of an important historical autobiography, the chronicle of an obsessive quest to communicate with something  incommunicable.  In the end, the novel does make the fatal mistake of showing us the builders - effectively destroying any sense of plausible realism and landing us squarely within the realm of lighthearted Sci-fi.  *Sigh*  But such is the fate of contact stories.  And Usurper of the Sun remains among my favorites.

Housuke Nojiri is the author of several Sci-fi novels.  Usurper of the Sun won the Seiun Award for best Japanese Sci-fi novel of 2002.  Nojiri possibly deserves to rank among the pantheon of great Sci-fi writers, but most distressingly only Usurper has been translated into English.  Another of his older novels, Rocket Girls, is slated to be published in English soon.  I'm already in line.

The Child Thief

I was familiar with the artwork of Brom long before I realized he was writing books.  I recently picked up a hardcover copy of The Child Thief on a whim, unsure of how well an established artist might fare in the tangential medium of writing.  His artwork is great, but I was skeptical that anyone who publishes his works under a monosyllabic moniker could possibly offer more substance than ego.  At least the book has numerous stunning illustrations - that was what tipped my curiosity over the edge.

Suffice to say I am very glad I did purchase the book. Its wonderful prose immediately drew me in.  Brom paints as effectively with words on a page as he does with oils on a canvas.  Either way his true talent is revealed in his imagery.

The story itself is a dark retelling of Peter Pan - the devilish imp who kidnaps children and manipulates them into waging an insane and bloody war against his enemies.  Not at all the playful tale of prolonged childhood desires, no Tinkerbell, no fairy-dust, The Child Thief is more in the vein of Lord of the Flies than any Disnified image you might hold of Peter Pan and his 'lost boys.'  Brom admits when he read the original J.M. Barrie story he was struck by the savage side of Peter (only occasionally hinted at), and sought to explore what such a powerful, feral child might really be like.

The Good:  Drawing heavily from Welsh mythology, Brom creates a memorable world populated by strange and authentic characters.  I especially loved the bad guys.  The Captain was both a horror - and thoroughly human.  His actions completely reasonable according to his circumstances.  The war and bloodshed between his crew and Peter's made especially tragic because of its inevitability and its pointlessness.  Much of the conflict was framed as antipathy between the Holy Church and the older Pagan traditions, allowing Brom to highlight the hypocrisy and senseless evil of unyielding dogmatic beliefs  - on both sides.

The Bad:  Although it was an enjoyable read, I was sorely disappointed by Brom's inconsistent utilization of myth and magic.  At first it seemed 'magic' held significant symbolic meanings, perhaps even offering the reader a glimpse at some deeper human truth (as is often the case in great myths.)  From chapter to chapter however, the power and use of certain magics would inexplicably change.  The end result was to strip these events of any deeper significance, 'magic' becoming no more than a bluntly wielded plot device.  Any hint at underlying significance apparently little more than the vestigial traces of the original myths Brom cribbed from - misunderstood, unappreciated, and ignored.  I have no problem whatsoever with taking directly from (and even changing) existing myths, but it seemed the real tragedy was to write so well, draw in all the right elements, and yet remain blind to the story's full potential.

Overall I would recommend the book to anyone interested.  It was always intriguing, at times unexpected, but never quite fulfilling. I myself enjoy an entertaining distraction - and The Child Thief is - but if you're not already impressed with the premise and cover art (or are squeamish about explicit violence), you could probably pass it by.  It delivers in full on it's promise, but only just.  What you see is what you get.

Mass Effect 2

I finally completed Mass Effect 2.  It really is a great game, but for a game series whose primary strength throughout has been it's storytelling - I'm more than a little disappointed in the ending.

Every once in a while I'll get excited about the prospect of an upcoming game.  Very rarely will a game live up it its own hype.  Mass Effect 2 is such a disappointment to me not so much because it failed to achieve its promise, but in that it ended up being such a near miss. They almost nailed it.  Instead they dropped the ball in the final scenes.  It appears to be a classic case of rushed production.  Somebody decided it was more important to ship the game than finish it.  I'm surprised more reviewers aren't calling BioWare out on this one.  

Mass Effect 2 is an extraordinary game.  It's an improvement over the original Mass Effect, which itself won dozens of awards - including the New York Time's 2007 Game of the Year.  Just like everyone says, most anything that you might have taken issue with in the original  - most notably inventory management - has been fixed.  Personally, I didn't get into the new system for resource collection, i.e. orbital scans, but it was still an improvement over the tedium of terrain navigation in the Mako.  

But still, all this is nitpicking.  Mass Effect was great because of its storyline and character development.  The story and character development in Mass Effect 2 is truly awesome.  It's darker too, with seemingly more complex moral choices to make and more shades of grey to choose from.  Character interaction in Mass Effect 2 was enormously fun, and I loved a lot of the dialogue and dialogue options.

Yet after a while a sort of cookie-cutter approach to character development becomes apparent.  First you recruit a team-member by completing a mission. Second you perform a side-mission to further gain the loyalty of the team-member.  But choosing to do the side missions was never difficult - more missions simply means more experience and more stuff.  And who want's to leave an area of the game unplayed?  On these side-missions you're forced to make moral choices, but surprisingly these choices have no effect whatsoever on the team-member.  On more than one mission I betrayed the interests of the team-member and was immediately forgiven.  And the intra-team hostilities hinted at never develop into difficult to resolve confrontations.  

In Mass Effect you were forced to make a difficult decision - ultimately deciding who lives and who gets left to die.  In Mass Effect 2, despite the darker themes and purported moral dilemmas, you never need make any tough choices - at least not any ones that have an impact on gameplay.  I'd be shocked at anyone who didn't complete the final 'suicide-mission' without every team-member surviving.  Apparently the only way to fail to do so is to intentionally rush to the ending without playing the available side-missions (no matter the decisions you make along the way.)

Although transferring a character over from Mass Effect means you get lots of feedback on the outcomes of little decisions you made in the first game, again this seems to be of no real importance.  And there are plenty of glaring omissions in Mass Effect 2 - most notably any possible interaction whatsoever with the consort Sha'ira, or the Shadow Broker.

Worst of all the game makes an abrupt shift in the final scenes of the game.  Simply put, the storytelling ends before the game does.  It's an awkward switch from being part of a story to suddenly playing an arcade game. It happens just before embarking on the final mission, when the entire command staff suddenly leaves the ship, yet no compelling explanation for this - or even where you all went - is given.  It feels forced.  And the ending itself?  It was just plain stupid. 

Strangely enough, you can continue playing even after completing the final mission.  Apparently BioWare intends to make further content available online and doesn't want you to have to start over to play it.  This feature was probably behind the decision to release the game in it's current state, but it's doubtful additional missions can revive the game from total narrative collapse.  I returned to the Citadel after defeating my enemies and rescuing humanity yet again - only to receive no acknowledgment that anything had happened at all. Finishing the game still leaves everything completely unresolved.  Even the biggest theme woven into the intro and throughout the game remains strangely unresolved: Alliance, Cerberus, or Independent - Where do your ultimate loyalties lie?

In truth, Mass Effect 2 was the most fun I've had playing a game since I was a kid.  It's sublimely enjoyable because the immersion and story are so good it's obvious that BioWare has delivered the goods - right up until it doesn't.  It's an implied promise not kept.  An impressive magic trick gone horribly wrong.

I've always loved games as a medium for storytelling.  I still believe that one day games will exist on par with books and movies as a widely accepted forum for narrative expression.  Unfortunately, I don't expect that to happen anytime too soon.

For BioWare, our core vision is one where we strive to deliver the best story-driven games in the world, with memorable stories and characters driving the flow of our games . . .

~Ray Muzyka CEO BioWare

. . . into nonsensical cliché endings.  I haven't been this disappointed in an ending since I stopped reading David Brin.

Blue Déjà Vu

Is there some unconscious reason why we might empathize more with an alien who was blue?

A few days after Xmas I had the opportunity to check out James Cameron's newest flick Avatar at the local cinema. The film was so shamelessly over-hyped I'd grown skeptical about it being any good. But I'm not one to pass over many sci-fi films.

Overall, I enjoyed the film. The storyline was entertaining and obviously catered towards mainstream audiences. It touched on quite a few contemporary sci-fi concepts without delving too deeply and without managing to get overly technical, philosophical or preachy. I've heard a few critics deride it for being somewhat shallow. While I can't completely disagree, I also can't believe that Cameron missed the mark he was aiming for. Avatar is the new Star Wars, not the new 2001. Personally I felt the visual effects worked well with the straightforward storyline, the pacing was good, and as stated before - I enjoyed the movie.

While watching the movie however, I was struck by a sense of déjà vu. I knew I'd already read a similar story set in the same universe. I just couldn't remember exactly what. After I got home I searched through my bookshelves for collections of sci-fi short stories. I found it - a short story entitled In His Sights, by Jeffrey Thomas. It's in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, published in 2007. I quickly reread the story, expecting to discover some sort of tie-in between the movie and the short story. Instead my sense of déjà vu dissolved into a strange sort of narrative confusion.

Firstly, I was wrong. Thomas's story - a satisfying sci-fi narrative in its own right - is not set on the world of Pandora (the setting for Avatar). Yet despite my faulty memory, my association between the two stories was no accident. Numerous similarities exist:

• both stories were told from the point-of-view of a disabled veteran (Jake Sully is a paraplegic in Avatar; while Jeremy Stake suffers from metamorphic paralysis in In His Sights)
• both protagonists travel to a jungle-like world populated by blue-skinned humanoids with almond shaped eyes (the Na'vi of Pandora; the Ha Jiin of the unnamed blue world)
• the blue-skins world is invaded by humanity solely for the acquisition of a rare and exotic subterranean resource (Pandora's ridiculously named mineral: Unobtainum; the Ha Jiin's strange subterranean gasses)
• on both worlds the mining of resources involves violating sites considered sacred by the blue-skins (Pandora's sacred trees containing the souls of their ancestors; the Ha Jiin's sacred burial catacombs)
  
• both protagonists were selected because their unique genome allowed them to assume the form of a blue-skin, infiltrate and gain access to said exotic resource (Jake Sully - his genetically engineered Avatar; Jeremy Stake - a mutant human with mild metamorphic abilities)

Yet despite all of these similarities I'm left with the impression these are two very different stories. Given the timeline, it seems unlikely either author could have directly influenced the other. Thomas's story was published in 2007, by which time production for Avatar would have already been underway - yet far from released. It’s also worth noting that while their stories share multiple details, they ultimately differ in form and intent. Perhaps I'm being naïve, but I'm not convinced that Cameron was influenced by Thomas' story (or vice-versa) - which makes the similarities all the more bizarre.

The scope and nature of the similarities is baffling. While the major thematic elements are hardly unique: conquest of an another culture for resources, assimilation into an indigenous culture, etc. (Frank Herbert's Dune is the first sci-fi staple that comes to mind, but really almost any war of conquest - real or fictional - could be cited as inspirational basis.) The plot specific similarities are more intriguing. Particularly the protagonist's special ability to take the form of a native. Even so, if only these similarities existed, it'd be easy enough to chalk it all up to pure coincidence. It's the little details that are the most perplexing: the physical description of the natives, the hostile jungle world they inhabit, the protagonists even have similar names!

Yet clearly both narratives are not versions of the same story. Despite the eerie similarities these are unique narratives - each set with a different focus and ultimately going different directions. Cameron spends a lot of time creating allegories about living in balance with nature - a sub-theme absent in Thomas's short story. Thomas’ sub-themes focus instead on the horrors of war, and the increased diversity of human and alien cultures in the future. In fact Thomas’s narrative primarily takes place on a cosmopolitan human world (the protagonist experiences flashbacks taking us to the hostile blue world). Other differences of note:

• the Na’vi are ten feet tall; the Ha Jiin are not
  
• the Na’vi are untechnological and tribal; the Ha Jinn utilize technology
  
• Pandora is accessed by spaceship; the Ha Jiin world is reached via trans-dimensional pods
• Sully utilizes a genetically engineered Avatar, effectively becoming a flesh and blood Na'vi; Stake is a human mutant capable of mimicking only the appearance of a Ha Jiin
• Sully ultimately becomes a Na'vi; for Stake the transformation is disguise only
• Pandora is more colorful; on the Ha Jiin world almost everything appears bluish to humans
  

In the end, the differences seem more significant than the similarities. Perhaps Cameron and Thomas drew inspiration from a common source. Perhaps not. Strange as it is, I can’t help but think about Jungian archetypes and wonder if somehow they each independently drew from the same unconscious wellspring when trying to create a captivating alien world. The stories are different, but the shared elements serve to create the almost familiar perspective – the feel – of a hauntingly strange world and its people. Maybe it had to be blue.