As has become usual, there were a number of studies of the works of individual authors, including: the inevitable study of Philip K. Dick, I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (Metropolitan Books), by Emmanuel Carrere; Solar Labyrinth: Exploring Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun (iUniverse), by Robert Borski; Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (Kent State University Press), by Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce; There and Back Again: In the Footsteps of J. R. R. Tolkien (Cadogan Publishing), by Mathew Lyons; The Cherryh Odyssey (Borgo/Wildside), edited by Edward Carmien; A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference (Wesleyan University Press), by Jeffrey A. Tucker; and The Road to the Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King’s Magnum Opus (NAL), by Bev Vincent. There were also volumes of essays by writers as opposed to about them, including The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (Shambhala), by Ursula K. Le Guin; Dancing Naked: The Unexpurgated William Tenn (NESFA Press), by William Tenn, which also doubles as a short-story collection; The Crazy Years: Reflections of a Science Fiction Original (BenBella Books), by Spider Robinson; Why Should I Cut Your Throat?: Excursions into the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (MonkeyBrain Books), by Jeff VanderMeer; The Grand Conversation (Aqueduct Press); and Kicking the Sacred Cow (Baen), by James P. Hogan. There were also books of interviews with SF and fantasy writers, including Speaking of the Fantastic II (Wildside), by Darrell Schweitzer; and Hanging Out with the Dream King: Conversations with Neil Gaiman and his Collaborators (Fantagraphics), by Joe McCade. Probably more entertaining and more accessible for most readers were Projections: Science Fiction in Literature and Film (MonkeyBrain Books), edited by Lou Anders, a collection of essays, some original, mostly reprint, discussing either print SF or its adaptation to film (being who I am, I found the essays dealing with print SF more interesting—although Lucius Shepard’s film reviews are enjoyably vitrolic—particularly the two essays by Michael Swanwick, John Cult, Mike Resnick, Sean McMullen, Michael Moorcock, and others; there’s some “SF-is-dying” stuff, particularly by Robert J. Sawyer, but it’s balanced by more optimistic views by other commentators) and a reissue of Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy (MonkeyBrain Books), by Michael Moorcock (Moorcock clearly knows his subject, and provides some fascinating insights into it, although the relentless Tolkien-bashing gets tiresome after a while).
Media fans will probably like Five Seasons of Angel: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Vampire (BenBella Books), edited by Glenn Yeffeth.
In the art book field, your best bets were probably the latest edition in a Best of the Year – like retrospective of the year in fantastic art, Spectrum 11: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner; and a retrospective of fantastic art of years gone by provided by Worlds of Tomorrow: The Amazing Universe of Science Fiction Art (Collectors Press), by Forrest J. Ackerman (although it would have been nice if he’d provided artist credits). There were also a number of strong retrospective overviews of the work of individual artists, including Futures: 50 Years in Space: The Challenge of the Stars (Harper Design International), by David A. Hardy and Patrick Moore, which doubles as a nonfiction text about space exploration; Kingsgate: The Art of Keith Parkinson (SQP/Fanfare), by Keith Parkinson; The Paint in my Blood (IFD Publishing), by Alan M. Clarke; The Deceiving Eye: The Art of Richard Hescox (Paper Tiger), by Richard Hescox; Paintings, Drawings, Perceptions (Underwood Books), by Ilene Meyer; and The Art of Discworld (Gollancz) by Paul Kidby and Terry Pratchett. Cartoon fans will want to have The Best of Gahan Wilson (Underwood Books), one of the best of all the cartoonists of the fantastic.
Turning to general genre-related nonfiction books of interest, the ones that’ll probably be of the most interest to SF readers this year were Chased by Sea Monsters: Prehistoric Predators of the Deep (Dorling Kindersley), by Nigel Marven and Jasper James, the companion volume to the television show that pretended to take scientists back in time to explore ancient oceans, and a fascinating work of what might be called “speculative biology,” The Future Is Wild (Firefly Books Ltd.), by Dougal Dixon and John Adams, an ingenious and gorgeously illustrated look at the strange creatures that might evolve to replace the familiar creatures of today millions of years from now (this actually came out a couple of years back, but I missed it; a mention of the new trade paperback edition is justified, though, I think), and Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time (Tor/Forge), by Stephen Baxter. It’s much harder to come up with a genre connection to justify mentioning Conquest: Hernando de Soto and the Indians: 1539-1543 (Wildside), but I’m going to give it a try anyway. For one thing, it’s by William Sanders (yes, that William Sanders), the SF writer, and as such at the very least deserves a mention as an associational item: for another thing, it deals with such a little-known period in history that many readers may also find that it delivers much of the same kind of kick that they get out of Alternate History. (How’s that?) Sanders makes no attempt to disguise his dislike of de Soto and his conquistadors from the beginning, but they’re a bunch that it’s hard to find any good reason to like, even for somebody who was bending over backward to be “fair” and “unbiased”; basically all they did on their “expedition” was blunder around the South searching futilely for gold, taking slaves by the hundreds and working them to death, slaughtering Indians (including every man, woman, and child in at least one village), stealing everything they could find (including the food that kept them alive), and burning towns and villages to the ground. (De Soto also managed to get most of his own men killed in the process as well.) This, alas, is what First Contact with a technologically superior race could really be like, rather than the more benign scenarios we sometimes see in science fiction. Despite Conquest’s horrific content, it’s an enjoyable read; Sanders’ style is clear and colloquial, always entertaining, sometimes wryly funny, and he’s marshaled an enormous amount of facts about a little-known period in history (the expedition journals are the only descriptions we have of some of the Indian civilizations that existed on this continent before the fateful coming of the Europeans), one as different from the present-day world as many another author’s alien planet. Nor is there much genre-related justification for mentioning Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives (BBC Books), by Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, other than the fact that it might be worthwhile for fantasy fans to see just how complex, contradictory, and multifaceted medieval times actually were, as opposed to the watered-down, simplified, and bland version of them you get in all-too-many generic genre-fantasy novels.
The Hollywood machine continued to flail and judder and fart, emitting a loud, discordant grinding noise and puffs of black smoke, in its attempt to churn out successful genre movies, but many of them didn’t go over even at the box office, let alone with the critics. Critically, the best-received movies of the year, especially in science fiction, were mostly products from smaller studios and production companies—not surprisingly, I suppose.
The best science fiction movie of the year, and one of the best in a number of years, was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; it was not without flaws (it’s slow in places, and rumor has it that the somewhat out-of-left-field happy ending was tagged on at the studio’s insistence), but the performances were all excellent (Jim Carrey proving once again that he can act without mugging if the director sits on him), and it’s refreshing to see an intelligent SF movie being aimed at an audience of intelligent adults who are expected to actually think about the ideas being presented, instead of a vehicle jammed with the standard action movie tropes and big special effects as a substitute for idea content. The best fantasy movie of the year was undoubtedly Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, by far the best directed to date of all the Harry Potter movies, and the only one, in my opinion, that the adults are likely to enjoy as much as the kids. Another of the year’s best movies, although it’s hard to know where to categorize it (it’s no
t exactly a comic-book movie, since it wasn’t based on a existent comic book, but is more of an ironic postmodern comment on comic-book heroes in general), was The Incredibles, which received almost unbelievably respectful reviews for an animated film about superheroes, even from intellectual critics, and which many people felt should have been on the Oscar shortlist for year’s best movie, period, instead of being relegated to the Best Animated Feature category. It’s perhaps a stretch to categorize Finding Neverland, a partial biopic of Peter Pan creator J. M. Barrie, as a genre movie, although many critics seem to be doing so (perhaps because of the internal fantasy/dream sequences), but although it’s nowhere near as historically accurate as it pretends to be, it deserves its slot on the Oscar ballot, and a mention here, if only for Johnny Depp’s wonderfully nuanced performance—and because the Peter Pan connection does make it of at least marginal genre interest.
Below this point, though, things go downhill fast.
Nobody will ever know for sure, unless we consult the lady from the new TV show Medium, but I suspect that Isaac Asimov would have hated the big-budget movie “version” of his famous short-story collection I, Robot (I hesitate to call it a version, as it really has little to do with the book other than a shared title and a few character names). Isaac was a pacifist, after all, and (rightly or wrongly) felt that violence never really settled anything and was the last resort of the incompetent—so I doubt that he would have been happy with his robot stories being turned into a standard Will Smith adventure, with all the gun battles, explosions, car chases, and physically impossible action scenes that seem to be required by law to be put into a movie these days once the budget climbs past a certain point, especially if it’s a sci-fi movie. For all the thud and blunder, I, Robot only performed lukewarmly at the box office, although it wasn’t a complete dog. Another case of more being less was The Chronicles of Riddick, the sequel to an actually pretty good small movie called Pitch Black, which was good because it was small, and cleverly exploited the virtues of being so. Given a lot more money to work with, though, due to the success of Pitch Black, the producers threw out of the window everything that had made the earlier movie worthwhile, and produced a bloated and overblown standard action movie that threw everything it could into the mix, including the kitchen sink, and which sank out of sight at the box office. The Day After Tomorrow was another big specialeffects movie, but it did extremely good business, one of the few such movies that did this year; I must admit that the special effects were extremely well done, especially the gigantic storm surge that drowns Manhattan, but the movie had little else to recommend it, being silly in the extreme. Van Helsing was almost as bad as last year’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which puts it in the running for the exclusive title “worst movie ever made,” and was a box-office bomb, as was Alien vs. Predator, although I suspect that the later movie (and perhaps even Van Helsing, alas) will make it up later in video rentals. The Village featured a “surprise” ending that most experienced genre fans had figured out within the first ten minutes of the movie, and struck most as a long way to go for very little result; movie after movie, director M. Night Shyamalan has been steadily losing (with me, anyway) all the credit he’d earned with The Sixth Sense, until now I’m at the point where I’m reluctant to watch his movies at all. Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (with Jim Carrey back in his mugging mode) did well enough, although I get the feeling that it didn’t perform quite up to expectations.
Comic-book movies had an uneven year as well. Spider-Man 2 was pretty successful, both critically and commercially, as was, to a lesser degree, Hellboy, but in spite of featuring Halle Berry in a skintight leather cat suit (which you would have thought would have been enough to insure a lot of ticket sales right there), Catwoman was one of the biggest bombs (notice the restraint I demonstrate by refusing to say that Catwoman “dogged-out”) of the year, and perhaps the most critically savaged movie of the year as well. Segueing into animated movies, Shrek 2, the year’s other big sequel, seemed to do pretty well (although the critics didn’t handle it as respectfully as they had Shrek) and is enjoyable enough, but it’s nowhere near as good as the first movie had been. Shark Tale also made money, but it wasn’t as good as its obvious model, last year’s Finding Nemo, or Shrek 2, let alone The Incredibles. The Sponge-Bob SquarePants Movie did okay. Team America: World Police and Thunderbirds , two movies using a deliberately retro and campy style of puppet animation, did less well.
Two movies this year stretched the limits of moviemaking technology, with mixed results. Everything in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was computer-generated except the actors—sets, backgrounds, props, everything—with the actors performing before blue screens on bare stages (which was all too evident in a couple of places, especially when they were looking the wrong way). It looked great, kind of a big-screen version of an old Fleischer Superman cartoon with live actors plunked into it, and if they had just managed to add a script that made sense and generated some suspense, and found an actor a bit more capable of charismatic swashbuckling than the cold and affectless Jude Law, it might have been a success. As it was, though, it tanked big-time, probably especially painful considering how much it cost to make in the first place. The Polar Express was an all-computer-animated movie, even the actors, using the motion-capture technology that had been developed for Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies; at first, it looked like it was going to tank, too, but it eventually recovered and did pretty well. One widespread criticism, though, was that the computer animation made the characters look “creepy” or “scary,” probably not the effect they were aiming for in a warmhearted children’s movie, but which means that this technology might have a lot of future applications for horror movies.
There were a lot of ill-advised “remakes” of old movies, most of which failed at the box office, including The Stepford Wives, The Manchurian Candidate, Around the World in 80 Days, and The Flight of the Phoenix. Hollywood has been trying to duplicate the success of Gladiator for some time now, but it was a disastrous year for big-budget “historical” epics, what used to be called “Sword and Sandal” movies, with Alexander the Great (featuring a ludicrously miscast Colin Farrell), Troy, and Arthur all performing well “under expectations,” to put it politely.
Coming up next year: the new Star Wars movie (some devoted fan is already camping out—literally—in line to wait for tickets, in spite of the movie’s release date being months away, but let’s just say that I won’t be camping out next to him), a new Harry Potter movie (unfortunately not with the same director as the last one), a Tim Burton remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, supposedly taking it back closer to the original Dahl book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, lots more comic-book movies, and no doubt other unexpected delights (I suppose I really should add a glyph of irony here, shouldn’t I?). Also coming up is a new animated movie by Hayao Miyazaki, who did Spirited Away, something I actually am looking forward to. (The film version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy looks promising, too.)
With the disappearance of many of the most popular SF-and-fantasy television shows in recent years—Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Babylon 5, Farscape—and with other shows like Enterprise and Smallville visibly tottering on the brink throughout the year, there seems to be a feeling in some circles that the golden age of genre TV is behind us and receding fast. On the other hand, new shows such as Lost and Stargate Atlantis are pulling in big new audiences, even as older shows falter and die.
As Kathy Huddleston and other commentators have pointed out (including me in this space last year), genre shows on television have clearly been hurt by the current rage for “reality TV.” Most of the older, now vanished genre shows, especially the SF shows, were special-effects-heavy, which made them expensive to produce; why pay huge amounts of money producing a genre show that will draw only a relatively small audience, when you can pay comparatively next to nothing to produce a reality show that will draw imm
ense audiences, many times higher than the genre shows ever drew on their best days? This was probably a factor in the death of Angel, Farscape, and a number of other shows. On the other hand, there are new effects-heavy shows, such as Stargate Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica—none on network television, though, you’ll notice. The tendency on network seems to be to run genre shows that have only minimal or tangential fantastic elements, such as Joan of Arcadia or Desperate Housewives, which don’t demand big-effects budgets to do.
The big news in genre TV this year, announced just at press time, was the cancellation of the last surviving original-run Star Trek series, Enterprise, something that came as a surprise to few, since it has been obviously struggling and sinking in the ratings for the last couple of seasons. With the cancellation of Enterprise, and persistent rumors that there’s not going to be another Star Trek theatrical movie, this may be the end of the once-mighty Star Trek franchise—as far as movies and TV are concerned, anyway; oddly, Star Trek novelizations and computer games, which are doing fine, may continue marching on long after there’s no longer a first-run Star Trek series to be found on the air (old Star Trek shows will still be available in reruns for years—if not decades—to come, of course; your grandchildren may still be watching them). Another genre show that was once a heavy-hitter in the ratings, Smallville, is also making distressed wobbling noises, as if its wheels are about to come off, and probably will be cancelled soon. Charmed, once also a ratings powerhouse, is also suspected to be almost at the end of its rope, and will probably be cancelled either this season, or, at best, the season after that. Already dead are last year’s “lawyers in the future” show, Century City, plus Father of the Pride, Futurama, Wonderwalls, and Tru Calling, which seemed set to make it into its sophomore season before suddenly having the plug pulled on it. (Reputedly killed by the success of a similar “I see dead people” show, Medium, introduced early this year; I guess the suits figured, why have two of them?)
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