| Wrryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy |
[Aug. 31st, 2005|11:58 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | books, random, sf | ] |
| [ | the knight's heart |
| | hHAgagharrr | ] |
| [ | the knight hears |
| | Sound Alive, A.S.H-- Blue Water, Blue Sky | ] |
Why, oh, why did I stay up until 5 AM browsing for porn, whyyyyyyyyyy
Recently, and alongside Grave of the Fireflies, I managed to borrow and watch Katsuhiro Otomo's small animation anthology called Memories. The animation is superb, as always, so I won't even go to that, but I do take issue with some of Otomo's 'visions' as it were. Stink Bomb and Cannon Fodder, the two latter pieces in the collection of three science fiction shorts in the DVD, were largely corny and pointless, in that particular order.
Stink Bomb was a modern day tragicomedy with a predictable copout ending despite the initial hilarity of its premise of a man suddenly turning into a living biological weapon that spreads destruction through the sheer power of raw stink. The guy remains implausibly oblivious throughout the whole thing, and Otomo really shows us nothing new except that he has an erstwhile hidden side that enjoys a rather sophisticated brand of toilet humour.
Cannon Fodder was an intresting, if somewhat bleak look at the life of ordinary people in an alternate universe setting where a city can dedicate its entire existence to firing larger-than-life cannons at an unknown enemy. One would think that I, of all people, would genuinely appreciate a story about an entire city made of nothing but guns, but while the craftsmanship of the short is visible, it retains a seedy, experimental air, and sports an unappealing art style that chafes against my personal aesthete. In the end, it tells us little new, and comes off as an unforgivably weak cap to Katsuhiro Otomo DVD.
The DVD's namesake short animated feature though, Memories, was, while not a stirring piece of genius or novelty, a good piece of writing that took me back to my days of reading hard SF-- science fiction-- short stories and books. Memories is set in 2092, when man has successfully achieved a space-age, and is about a planetfaring garbage schooner that enters a starship graveyard in response to the summons of an SOS signal. The two men who explore a gigantic, abandoned spacestation soon discover that there's more to the wreck than meets the eye, and they fall prey to the wiles of a strange woman from the past...
I never exactly stopped reading hard SF, not with a conscious decision or anything, but it's just that I started to drift in other directions, particularly ones with more boobies. In retrospect, some of the best things I've ever consumed in the way of literary goodness have come from hard SF novels and shorts, and I am perplexed at myself now for having almost literally abandoned the genre. It's never too late though-- I've been thus far a little leery of reading the Best of SF short story collections that I run across every now and then at our local Borders, but I've just discerned that I have absolutely no reason why, and that they would be the perfect thing for me to jump back in the loop. I'm a little tired of full-sized novels right now, have less and less time for the compact storytelling of movies, and very much miss the artform of the short story. So a whole bunch of 'em picked out from the 'best' of them in SF in a given year should hold lots of promise for me. Granted, I'm a little wary of all the new names, writing styles, settings-- all the newness-- I'll be encountering among the authors, but hey, expanding horizons, challenging the old viewpoints, fresh material, experience points, level up, all that jazz. At the very least, I can most always be assured that writers of hard SF are highly intelligent. :)
And just to find out who I can go 'ooooooh, yeah, that was awesome!' with, off the top of my head, here's a list of my absolute favourite hard SF short stories over the years!
Nightfall (Isaac Asimov) - a story about the first dusk and night of a world constantly bathed in sunlight by its binary star solar system. A great story with an intriguing premise and a quite literally mind-blowing conclusion. Asimov may have been a somewhat perverted, opinionated old man with a rather high view of himself, but God knows he can write good SF-- there's hope for me yet!! :D
Legwork (a short Google trawl initially reveals that it's by Eric Frank Russell) - a charming short piece about how a shape-changing alien entity bent on offering the Earth up to his civilization is foiled through simple hard work and perseverance. One of my fondest favourites, I am grievously sorry that I lost the book that had it-- lent it to a con man, in fact.
Time Travel(?) (???) - I forget what the true title was, and I even forget who wrote the piece, so this is a query as much as anything else-- do any of you know this story? It's about a man who encounters a very strange robot telling his fortune in a carnival tent. This somehow leads to his being pursued by a Turkish android, discovering the cure to the common cold, and then living happily ever after. It's perfectly alright that I tell you the ending, because that's how the story is structured; it starts blithely with the the statement: 'This is the ending of the story.' The sheer cheek and uncomformity of the writing style embodies a large part of the tale's appeal.
The Last Question (Isaac Asimov) - yet another Asimov piece, a story about humanity's most advanced thinking computer, about how happenstance has it begin pondering a deceptively simple query that turns out to span aeons unanswered. 'How do you reverse entropy?' The ending is staggering, and will leave you breathless.
That's really all I can think of right now, but that should be enough. Those of you who've encountered all three should be then able to derive what my general taste in short stories run like; they ought to have at least a marginally interesting basic premise, it doesn't matter what time they've been set in, and it earns many, many bonus points for having what may be my single favourite writing device ever invented-- the twist/surprise ending.
Anyhoo, I'll be picking up those SF anthologies sometime tomorrow or on the weekend, I think, and then reading them in places where I can't play Advance Wars: Dual Strike. Yet another thing to do to add in my list of things I absolutely cannot do because I have no time? Well, if I can't do any of them, it doesn't matter how many things I put on that list, does it? AHAHAHAHAAAAA
Godspeed~
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