The other day I found myself watching a soccer game. The players were not very good: defenders were constantly out of position, midfielders of the same team were bunching together and stealing the ball from each other, few passes were completed, and those that were often gave the impression of being accidental. Once, the goalie was even caught standing inside the goal when one team took a shot. Fortunately for them, the shot went well wide of the mark, despite the fact that it was taken a mere ten feet from the mouth of the goal.

Notwithstanding the poor level of play, I was enraptured. I cheered, I groaned, I shouted encouragement. I never missed a second of the action. What is more, I had just as eagerly watched the 30-minute practice that had preceded the game. The reason for my enthusiasm was that one of the players was my four-year-old son. There is a lesson there for storytellers of all stripes.

Oblivion is the second opus of director Joseph Kosinski, who also gave us Tron. It is a perfectly average movie on net, with some attributes rising a little above and others sinking a bit below. Of all the changes one might suggest to improve the film, the single most important one would be to populate it with characters we care about. The same thing that turned an hour and fifteen minutes of abject boredom into an engaging experience on a small soccer field in central Ohio would have dramatically improved every single scene of Kosinski’s work.

Tom Cruise plays Jack, a repairman, pilot, warrior, guardian, and whatever else the situation requires. One of the very last humans left on Earth, he is tasked with repairing the drones that guard the power plants providing energy for the human race, which has moved to Titan after a long war with an alien species called The Scavs. The Scavs, we are told, attacked us, trying to take the planet. Humans eventually won the war, but Earth was devastated.

Jack goes out every day to repair drones and occasionally fight aliens, while Victoria, his coworker and lover, stays at home in the operations room. She relays communications, assists him, and monitors their area, from which they may not stray due to the high levels of radiation outside it. Their memories have been erased to make them, they are told, a more effective team. They are nearing the end of their tour of duty. Victoria is especially keen to go and does not want anything to get in the way of her rejoining the human race on Titan.

The setup is interesting enough, and there are some nice vistas to take in while Jack is flying all over, but there is nothing about this film to put it in an elite category. A number of plot twists have the potential to be interesting, but they raise logical problems that weaken the story. When one starts to find out the truth, the entire enterprise becomes increasingly absurd. The illusion under which Jack and Victoria are operating requires the cooperation of certain actors who should be little disposed to cooperate. It also requires that the Law of Large Numbers be suspended, so that a certain chance encounter, which could have happened at any time in the last few years, does not occur until the story is ready for it. Indeed, unless one were somehow given assurance that two specific characters were not ever going to come within sight of one another, it would be foolhardy in the extreme to create and depend on the illusion in the first place.

All of this would be forgivable, scarcely noticeable even, if there were characters to care about. Replace Jack and Victoria with Han Solo and Princess Leia, and suddenly the story becomes far more interesting. The ones we have, however, don’t excite much.

Part of the problem is that they don’t feel human. Everything about the home in which they live, perched high above the surface of the planet, is clean and sterile, almost like a CGI rendering. Like the people living in it, there are no physical imperfections. It never feels real — nothing ever needs to be cleaned, nothing is worn down from use, nothing scratched. A man can become attached to his faded, worn, torn, stained blue jeans. The brand spanking new pair recently arrived from the store have no history, no character yet. The abode of Jack and Victoria feels less like the home of two lovers who have each other and no one else, and more like the model home at the front of a sub development. Nothing is suggested or implied by its appearance, except perhaps that it is a movie set and no one lives there.

The human dwellers are similarly airbrushed of any mark of humanity. There is no bed head when they first get up in the morning, no bad breath, no blood shot eyes from a night of drinking. There are some bare indications of character, like Victoria’s strict adherence to the rulebook and Jack’s natural curiosity, but the director spends little time developing these points. When Luke Skywalker took a few moments to watch the binary sunset, it was a compelling, touching moment of character-building that did far more than give the audience a chance to breathe between action scenes. Oblivion has nothing like it.

Everyone is attractive here, but in a very distancing sort of way. Jack is Tom Cruise, and Victoria is a pretty redhead. A third character is brought into their home who has even less personality than the owners. After advancing the plot with her initial appearance, her only job after that is to be beautiful. They have no flaws, no bad habits, no irritating behaviors, no infectious laugh or goofy grin, very little in the way of humanizing attributes. Jack has a hidden collection of vinyl records in a shack he has built on the surface (A shack that contrasts nicely with the high-tech, antiseptic atmosphere where Victoria waits for him. It is too bad the director does not take much advantage of it.), but that is about it. These people wind up more like wax sculptures of people than actual people.

When Jack brings a beautiful woman home with him, does Victoria get jealous, and how does her jealousy affect the way she treats Victoria? Do Victoria and Jack ever get tired of being with each other, with no relief ever? Do they ever get on each other’s nerves? Do they ever get lonely to see someone else? How do they combat this loneliness?

Probing the answers to any one of these questions would bring some needed depth to the film, but I suppose that would require effort in an area that was of little interest to the modern moviemaker. There are no scenes designed to delve into a role, all merely skim over the surface. To the extent that a person will shape his environment after his character, and can in turn be shaped by that same environment, we miss out on other opportunities. The sets are, though out of the ordinary, ultimately bland and featureless, and the director is little disposed to exploring them anyway.

When the big reveal finally happens, there is a lot left unexplained. I cannot claim I truly had a handle on what was really happening on anything more than a basic level. Some of the gaps we can fill in ourselves, but some of them are perplexing and needed some kind of explanation. Much of what I did deduce made the entire undertaking seem implausible.

Oblivion is nothing more than a way to pass a few hours, not a movie worth owning and watching again and again. The story is competently structured, with a rehash of old science fiction tropes to keep it running. The performances are perfunctory but acceptable. The soundtrack is loud and a bit hard on the ears, but the scenery is easy on the eyes. And there is some action, shooting, and explosions. Like most movies, it falls right in the middle of the Bell Curve, far from either extreme.

The Android’s Dream, a novel by John Scalzi, is a science fiction tale that takes place in the not too proximate future. This was my first experience with Mr. Scalzi, and I came away impressed enough to want to read other titles by him that have garnered more acclaim. There are a variety of different tones and elements in the present novel, in use of which Scalzi demonstrates talent. He can be funny, clever, action-oriented, and even, on occasion and to a small degree, poignant. I was not always convinced by the way he mixed these different tones together, but overall the novel was a fun read. Scalzi exhibits the flair of a true storyteller with his well-refined and polished plot and cast of diverse characters.

The title refers to a line of specially bred sheep, named in honor of Philip K. Dick one supposes, which become the object of a hunt to prevent an intergalactic war. When a group of men of varying interests conspire to insult an alien diplomat during trade negotiations, the blowback leaves Earth on the brink of war. As things get increasingly out of hand — to the point where even the original conspirators begin to doubt the course they have plotted — an agent of the American government must find an Android’s Dream sheep to offer to the aliens, as appeasement, so they can sacrifice it in an important ceremony.

I do not know whether or not Scalzi has written sequels or other novels in this world, or if he plans to, but he has a knack for world creation that would seem to leave a lot of room for future work in this universe. There are different alien species with odd customs and cultures, eccentric politics, a variety of characters, and a number of odd social developments (including a religion devoted to Evolved Sheep whose adherents belong to one of two categories: true believers, and those with a sense of humor who want to make the Church’s prophesies come true for the fun of it). The message is not profound and the characters are not explored in the kind of depth that makes them stick with you long after you have closed the book for the last time, but the story is coherent, moves well, and provides a few interesting twists that give it a little kick at the right time.

The opening chapter is reminiscent of Douglas Adams in its silliness, though here it is more subdued than the concentrated absurdity characteristic of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. A meeting of delegates of Earth and an alien species, the Nidu, is sabotaged by flatulence. The Nidu possess an olfactory acuity beyond anything that has evolved on our planet. It is so strong, and so sensitive to nuance, that the Nidu can actually communicate through smells.

One of the saboteurs has a device surgically implanted into his colon that allows him to alter the aroma of his intestinal gasses to send any message he wants to any Nidu nose within reach. He prepares with a meal sure to get the gas flowing, and during the meeting spends an hour or so insulting the mother and questioning the sexual prowess of a particularly excitable diplomat who holds his post not from having earned it, but from having been born into the right family.

The Nidu diplomat dies after being worked into a rage. The Earthling saboteur also dies, as his laughter at the sight of the fallen Nidu diplomat is too much for his clogged arteries to handle (the arteries are clogged because he, the son of a butcher, has spent his entire life eating meat almost exclusively. This departure from reality is, of course, the current orthodox viewpoint and can be forgiven on those grounds).

It is funny stuff, but the tone it establishes promises future sketches like one might expect from Monty Python. Instead, the story becomes more about the thrill of the chase and a race against time. All of it is competently handled, but, notwithstanding certain moments of levity, the rest of the book feels different from the first chapter. It is almost as if Scalzi had an idea of a humorous way to open a story, but ran short of funny and had to turn to something else to finish the book.

On the plus side, there is a fullness to the story and interactions that leaves one feeling satisfied, like one has read a complete tale and not just a teaser. There are some stories, on paper as well as celluloid, that feel unfinished. A viewing or reading of these leaves the spectator feeling shorted a confrontation or two between personalities, or as if there should have been one more obstacle to overcome. However good The Android’s Dream is, it achieved, I believe, its pinnacle.

The above tonal shift and a number of typographical errors are the only sins of commission, and these are minor. The only real sin of omission is a lack of engagement with the characters, who all have idiosyncrasies and are distinct, but who largely do not become real, profound people in our minds and hearts. It is for this reason, then, that after the book is done we feel the downslope of a mild exhilaration, but no great yearning or nostalgia for people we must say goodbye to and never again meet for the first time.

It seems that every classic is to have an entourage. The loneliness of such films as Alien, Star Wars, and King Kong is too much to bear for the hearts of movie execs, so companions are made for them. Sequels, prequels, remakes, and spinoffs are what Hollywood does most, though not necessarily best. At times, this proclivity has born sweet fruit. Though sequels are rarely as good as the original, if the original was any good at all, there have been some smashing successes. Even remakes have some achievements to be noted. I am, however, unaware of a prequel or a spinoff whose makers could hold their heads high and proud once their creation hit the silver screen. Oz the Great and Powerful, a prequel to the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz, is unable to break out of this trend and be the first.

Set some years before the events of Victor Fleming’s work, it tells the tale of the wizard himself, a travelling magician from Kansas making a meager, day-to-day living. A magician is a trickster, of sorts, and Oscar Diggs (James Franco) has a character well suited to it. Though one gets the sense that at his core he is not entirely amoral, he lies to friend and stranger alike. He lusts after money and women, whom he tricks for his own benefit.

It is this very duplicity in his nature that gets him running from trouble and sets him on course for Oz. After flirting with the wife of a circus strongman, he escapes the enraged husband in a hot air balloon just as a tornado begins to ravage the landscape. As happened in the original film to Dorothy, the tornado transports him to the magical Land of Oz. There, he meets Theodora, a witch played by Mila Kunis.

It is not long before he is mistaken for a wizard of whom a prophecy spoke, a mistake which he declines to correct because of the potential remuneration. Being a wizard of prophecy is not easy for one whose magic consists entirely of sleight of hand, but tempted by a treasure room full of gold, Oscar agrees to do what the prophecy says he must: rid the Land of Oz of the evil witch.

The movie boasts two strong points to keep it afloat: The design of the world and complexity of character. The latter of the two comes as something of a surprise because the script is hardly a masterwork. Indeed, I figured the deftness of character creation was due to the original source material, only to find out that this is not based on any of the other Oz books, merely the world itself. What it is doing there is an enigma, then, but whatever causal agent is responsible, it elevates the movie above the muck of worthlessness into which its other attributes, had they been left on their own, would have stuck it.

Oscar Diggs is a man with good and bad traits, with the flaws predominating. Yet he must reach within himself to accomplish a task that becomes more and more altruistic as the movie progresses, and all of this without a sudden, drastic conversion. Oscar Diggs never loses or changes who he is, but he does find good in himself that was always there, hinted at before but never shining clearly through. All of this, it should be added, is accomplished without making a caricature of any particular attribute.

The scenery, as I mentioned, is often a pleasure. Though it is CGI and CGI cannot, as of yet, equal the reality and immediacy of a movie set — even if that movie set has matte paintings — there is much in Oz that attracts, that is fun to look at.

The rest of the movie is ordinary, even poorly wrought. The worst part is James Franco, who simply cannot act. Go to a local theater performance of A Christmas Carol and you’ll find a handful of actors who do as well as or better than Mr. Franco. What he is doing in a movie originally budgeted around $200 million dollars is yet another mystery. I am sad to report that Mila Kunis, who in some indescribable way forgot to look beautiful, does only a little better than her costar. Those scenes where Oscar and Theodora are stuck throwing lines back and forth at each other, pleading for another actor to come on set and save them, are nearly lifeless.

Lazy screenwriting also holds the movie down. From watching Oz, one gets the sense that the filmmakers were in a rush to reveal things to us, to get those moments out of the way so they could get on with something else that truly interested them. The problem here is that a storyteller can exploit the gap between what he knows and what the audience knows, or the gap between a character’s greater knowledge and the audience’s lesser knowledge, or the audience’s greater knowledge and the comparative ignorance of a character. A screenwriter must tease, bring things along bit by bit, not merely dump them out so he can put a check next to that item of the list.

When it came time to reveal that there was a prophecy of a wizard, Theodora simply blurts it out, having deduced very quickly and from very little evidence and yet with absolute certainty that Oscar was the one. Could she not have started out with nothing more than a suspicion that grew into certainty over time? Did she have to give full vent to her hypothesis with a total stranger a handful of seconds after meeting him? Could she not have made hints, instead of absolutes? In short, could the theme of the prophecy not have been developed over the scene, or even multiple scenes, instead of being brought up and dispatched with tension-killing efficiency?

Imagine the soul-numbing awfulness of it: James Franco with a Mila Kunis lowering her game to the level of her colleague in a scene already reverberating with lackluster acting that is then amplified by a script bent on skipping over dramatic tension as rapidly as possible.

But for all that, I cannot report that the film was terrible. Mediocre on net, but not terrible. There are enough good aspects mingling with the bad ones. The aforementioned complexity of Franco’s character, even if the poor fellow cannot portray it properly. Theodora goes through a conversion that elicits our pity, even if the depth of her emotional pain seems greater than warranted by the brevity of her acquaintance with Oscar. The scene where we meet the mystery witch manages to conjure some suspense, even if it is a touch implausible and the witch apparently had no motivation to be where she was other than to show up in the movie.

There is one part of the film that runs the risk of being mistaken for libertarianism, and this error ought to be corrected before it festers. After twists and turns to the plot, which I decline to give away, Oscar finds himself at the head of an army about to be attacked by another, evil army. The problem for him is that his army will not fight, will not commit acts of violence, and yet must defend themselves against the bad guys. This is an interesting predicament and is good for the movie, but I have read whispers on the Internet about this being a libertarian theme. ‘Tis no such matter.

Pacifism is fine for anyone who wants to practice it, and it does not conflict with libertarianism, but the unwillingness to be violent on the part of Oscar’s army does not make a libertarian theme. It delineates in no uncertain terms whom the storytellers consider to be the good guys and whom the bad, nothing more. A libertarian, when under attack, is permitted to respond with violence. A people under attack may, with absolute justice, load, lock and pull the trigger. My concern here is that their pacifism could be seen as the quality that makes them libertarian, when in reality they satisfied that condition by not initiating the coercion. By eschewing violence entirely, they do not become more libertarian, they simply cross a line into pacifism.

It is no surprise that a movie prequel fell short of the original, though this one did better than some others whose names I shall not utter here. I expect that, like the other handful of Oz-related movies, it will be forgotten soon enough. In the meantime, while it is having its run, it is no better or worse than most of the other stuff out there.

Joe Haldeman began a series with the book Marsbound. Like his other books that I have read, it starts quickly, wastes little time with descriptions, treats people mechanistically, with little emotion or soul, but tells an interesting tale. Marsbound is less entertaining than The Forever War and Forever Peace, but it is still a decent read.

The story begins on Earth, where a university student named Carmen Dula and her family are waiting for a taxi. They are on their way to Earth’s space elevator, which over the course of several days will take them up to a spaceship, which in turn will take them to Mars where they will be staying for the next five years. That is, unless something unexpected pops up.

Carmen gets on the wrong side of the bureaucratic leader of the Mars colony before she even arrives. One night, stinging from a punishment meted out to her and feeling rebellious, she goes for an unapproved walk in her Mars suit. While out, she injures herself and cannot get back. On the verge of death, she is visited by a strange creature who saves her…

What is revealed after, over the second half of the book, is a unique take on the first contact scenario. There have been so many, and yet interesting versions keep springing from the fingertips of authors the world over. I have yet to read a science fiction book whose future, once we overtake it in real life, proved to be a completely accurate depiction of how things actually turned out. I have to believe that first contact novels will prove just as inaccurate. Many of them will get broad aspects right while missing on narrower details. Marsbound is one that is almost certainly well wide of the mark, but one does not get the sense that prediction was the target Haldeman was aiming at.

As with Forever Peace, not enough care goes into the inner life of a character. There are times when someone will unleash an abrupt, emotional eruption that I never saw coming. This is because instead of describing the pounding heart, the flushed face, or the clenched jaw of a person overcome by a powerful passion, we get only those movements associated with gross motor skills. Early on, Carmen gets up and races from her dinner table, crying over a conversation that I did not even realize had perturbed her until her outburst. This seems to be a hallmark of Haldeman’s writing. It would have been more engaging to be kept abreast of her emotional development over the course of the conversation, which would have made me feel closer to the character.

Another hallmark of Haldeman is the horny, promiscuous female. I do not deny the existence of such wonderful beings, but every time I open a Haldeman novel there await inside a host of women hungry for man-flesh and with no qualms about going out and getting some. This would seem to be wish-fulfillment on the part of the author. A single such character is absolutely permissible; when every main female character has this trait it starts to feel unrealistic. Haldeman’s novels do not take place in Heaven, after all.

If Marsbound suffers from the typical Haldeman infirmities, it also benefits from his usual strong points. The writing is lean and smooth with believable dialogue. There are no throwaway scenes, no padding. In this respect, Haldeman ranks up there with Heinlein.

I thought the novel’s story was a little on the simple side. There is not a whole lot of drama nor obstacles nor upping the ante. It is a short book that might have benefited from a little more length and extension of the plot. A book so brief should, in my opinion, tackle a smaller story and delve into it. For a first contact piece, I would like to see a lot more setup and payoff, a lot more character interaction and development, before we reach the end.

Marsbound is nearly the equal of Forever Peace, but falls short on the overall course of the plot. I did not leave Forever Peace wishing it had been more, but that was exactly the feeling I got from Marsbound. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book, although each new Haldeman opus I read is a lesser work than the previous one, a trend I hope comes to a definitive end with Starbound, the sequel.

In 2010, John Ringo published the first book of the Troy Rising trilogy. Titled Live Free or Die, it is a story on a grand scale, a great symphony of a book but by an author who probably should stick to bagatelles. Though it started well and had my interest, it was a chore to get through most of it. There was enough creativity and verve for a short story, but by the end these had faded and I was glad to be finished.

It is the kind of story I imagine Ted Nugent would enjoy reading. Filled with gun-toting, rugged individuals who thrive on infuriating the Thought Police and composing odes to capitalism, the book might almost seem libertarian until one realizes just how besotted with militarism and American exceptionalism the author is. I have no problem with a man a bit rough around the edges, a touch short on couth and decorum, but Ringo at times goes beyond that into deliberate callousness, especially as regards sex and race.

There are many sensitive liberals who both need and deserve a little rattling from time to time, if only for our amusement, but there are just as many conservatives who could use a dose of circumspection, introspection, and nuance. I am tempted to suggest we lock Ringo in a room with his diametric opposites, to see if there might be a mutually beneficial rubbing off, but I am afraid someone would end up dying.

Live Free or Die begins with an alien race that establishes a portal in our solar system. They have no goals except to neutrally manage the portal, but the next race that appears is bent on imperial control of Earth. They begin by destroying some major cities and then demanding tribute. Though this species, the Horvath, is technologically backwards in comparison to other civilizations in the galaxy, they are yet far ahead of humans.

Enter Tyler Vernon, whose appellation had me thinking of Fight Club throughout. Tyler discovers that maple syrup is, for certain aliens, highly pleasurable and perhaps even more addictive. He wheels and he deals and, before word gets out, has nearly cornered the market on the sweet stuff. He goes on to make what is probably the greatest fortune ever to be compiled in a single human’s coffers. Then he turns to vengeance.

The idea is full of potential. I feel like I have typed that sentence on many occasions. The execution leaves something to be desired. I feel like I have typed that sentence just as many times.

The first act is far and away the best part of the book. It is the part where we are introduced to Tyler, and the part where he most feels like a person. We see him in negotiations with aliens, an enterprise that he carries out with flair and wit. The different parties are so adept at bullshitting and playacting while maintaining such an impeccable demeanor of politeness that one cannot help but be amused by the whole affair.

When Tyler discovers the effect of maple syrup on the extraterrestrials, we feel that tingle of anticipation for what is to come. However, what is to come of the maple syrup industry is dispatched in the first act of the book. Though he never relinquishes his interests in that market, Tyler moves on to other things, and this is where the book becomes dull.

Reading Live Free or Die is almost like reading a series of newspaper clippings about big events of the day. By this I mean that we run through a lot without getting into the details of a participant’s perspective. Ringo has little interest in appealing to our senses; instead, we see meeting after meeting full of one-dimensional characters who bring the reader up to date with their conversations. Dialogue is principally how the plot advances in the second and third acts of the book.

In Ridley Scott’s Alien, we are treated to one of the greatest shots in movie history. It is an extreme close up of Ellen Ripley’s grimy, mud-caked fingernails as her hand reaches up to grab the top of a ladder she is climbing. Her head pops up behind the hand a moment later. That shot encapsulates a lot of what the director was trying to do with the film. It brought all the gritty realism of the sets and stuck it right in the viewer’s face. There is virtually nothing of this in Live Free or Die.

While some interesting things happen, we jump from big event to big event with the ease of turning the pages of a newspaper. And in between these big events are meetings where plans are hatched and scientific details hammered out. The author gives the impression of someone who did a fair amount of research for his book, because there is a lot of science in it but nothing particularly interesting.

Though the idea is big enough to spawn a 5,000 page series of books, this one did not hook me. I do not plan on completing the trilogy. With so many other books to read, the opportunity cost is too high. The reader may enjoy how it begins, but that only heightens the disappointment later on.

Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, Side Effects, uses the modern themes of high finance and psychiatry to fashion a plot that grows increasingly riveting as the story unfolds. The script features some very classic elements of tale-spinning executed with adroitness, while the director’s realistic, subtle style makes a great complement. What is more, there are all kinds of themes and subtext of interest to the libertarian, who will nod knowingly throughout the film, even if the filmmakers take a neutral position and give no indication whether they are too.

There are a number of plot points that pull the rug out from underneath the viewer, turning points that completely alter what the movie appears to be about. By the time we find out the true nature of the story, a few of these twists have already occurred. This makes it difficult to know how to summarize the film.

The movie is a suspense thriller of sorts, but distinct from most thrillers in the way it is executed. Soderbergh does not use slow-motion, close-up cuts or insistent music to belabor points and hit the audience over the head. He films and edits in a simple, subtle style. This is not to say that the movie is hard to follow, but Soderbergh does treat us like adults. When a character is dissimulating, for instance, this fact will not be spoonfed to the viewer. There will be no close-up of the actor’s face as he makes the kind of expression that has come to be a clue that he is tricking someone, the kind of expression that, if a person made it in real life, would instantly give him away.

MILD SPOILERS MILD SPOILERS MILD SPOILERS

It begins with a young woman, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), and her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) trying to get their lives going again after Martin’s stint in prison for the “crime” of insider trading. Emily suffers from depression and sees a psychiatrist (Jude Law as Jonathan Banks). When she tries a new drug called Ablixa, her symptoms seem to be cured, but are replaced by episodes of sleep walking. During one of these episodes, she murders her husband. Dr. Banks is called to testify on her behalf during the trial, but there are more surprises in store, and behind it all are indications of a conspiracy.

END OF SPOILERS

The acting, as one would expect, is the cinematic version of realistic. That is to say, you would never mistake it for a recording of real-life, extemporaneous interactions, but it is not overly dramatic and has just enough polish to make it run smoothly, not so much that the life is taken out of it. All the actors feel like real people and either make us care about them, hate them, or alternate between the two.

The best part is the construction of the plot, which melds two different realms together, Wall Street and pharmacology/psychiatry, to make something that will keep you fully invested and guessing throughout. One plot twist is followed by another, but all of them logical, and there is no shortage of twists. There came a point where I was afraid they would try to shake us up one more time even though the constraints in place by that point would not have permitted yet another twist that could be called plausible. Fortunately, there were no more to come. The filmmakers hit the optimal number and left it there. They show excellent restraint all around, from the judicious use of surprises to the way each scene is filmed.

As mentioned above, the story tellers take the neutral position of merely relating the tale. Their position is so neutral, in fact, that the story was well into the second act before I could be sure who the sympathetic protagonist was supposed to be. The portrayal and recording of each character give nothing away, with the possible exception of Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), whose depiction on screen might be construed as giving the faintest of hints. At any rate, after seeing her a couple times an embryonic bias grew in my mind.

However neutrally the tale is related, the libertarian is going to have some strong opinions about things that transpire. Above all, he will note that however reprehensible the behavior of certain characters, their actions were triggered by a situation the government created. Other acts are made possible by government force, whose application in this circumstance is not entirely unjust but whose potential for abuse is obvious. It would give away too much to relate all the details, but I will say that the non-crime of insider trading figures prominently, as does the impermissible power of a psychiatrist to lock a person away whether they have committed a crime or not.

There are only two things I would point out as flaws in the film, and one of them is not truly a flaw so much as a missed opportunity. The scenes are brief flashes of plot points without much development in themselves. The overarching story is developed nicely, but the scenes do nothing other than serve this purpose. This is in stark contrast to a film like Inglourious Basterds, whose scenes are miniature virtuoso stories in themselves while also contributing to the larger story that makes up the movie. Side Effects has simple scenes without much set up and without much complexity of composition or of interaction. The greatest movies, in my opinion, are works of art at every level, and Side Effects falls short on that count.

There is also a question of believability in one aspect. There is an element of central importance in the plans of some of the characters that is largely out of their hands. They must trust fate to come through for them, or all will be for naught. Fate comes through, although this is not discovered until later, and I suppose this can be forgiven since the movie would not be itself without it. Nevertheless, a little more attention to this aspect might have yielded an improved product, although it is not a glaring problem.

Last year’s winter season gave us The Grey, which turned out to be, for my money, the best movie of the year. Side Effects is this winter season’s early surprise, and a pleasant one like its predecessor. There is nothing about it that demands a large screen viewing, but if a person enjoys the theater experience for itself, Side Effects is a good choice to make for that night out.

Cloud Atlas, a movie based on the novel of the same name, is a bundle of stories with interconnecting threads meant to form a greater pattern, a message to the viewer. We are all in this together, we conclude by the movie’s end. Sometimes we are nice to each other, and sometimes we are not, but either way our actions resonate into the future, even as they were partly shaped by actions from the past that resonated into the present. The filmmakers are successful in creating this pattern, but as a piece of entertainment and a storytelling vehicle, the movie itself achieves only limited success.

Each story of the larger tale is engaging by itself. That is, the scenario created is interesting enough and worthy of its own movie. The scenes are shot well, and thoughtfully, and the worlds, ranging from far in the past to far in the future, are imaginative conceptions where many other stories might take place. Given this format, it is difficult to summarize the film, which is just as well because watching it becomes more of an exercise in identifying themes and spotting parallels than in following a plot.

The cutting between stories is done in such a way as to prevent momentum from accruing. While I have read many good books that switched between multiple characters to good effect, these books had the characters as part of the same story, so that an advance in the plot of one character’s story had immediate and important ramifications for the other characters, wherever they were in their story arcs. Each chapter usually had a beginning, middle, and end, as if it were its own short story, and finished with some sort of hook to make you regret leaving that character.

In Cloud Atlas, a character in one tale might compose music that another character hears decades later, but the connection is only important for the theme; it has no bearing on the obstacles to be overcome in the endeavor to reach a goal. With only a handful of exceptions, the characters in later times are not even aware of the ones who anteceded them. Imagine taking scenes from Amistad, Blade Runner, Star Wars, Miller’s Crossing, and Three Days of the Condor and mixing them together into one film. As far as the plot goes, this is almost exactly how isolated each story is from the others, how little they have to do with one another.

This problem is exacerbated by the differences in tone of the different pieces. One of the strands of story is comical, almost farcical. Another is dark with hints of terror, while a third is a suspenseful mystery. It is jarring enough to cut between them while disregarding plot rhythm, but we must endure radical and abrupt tonal shifts as well.

Thematically, it is a different story, and the themes and parallels are what drive the editing. Two characters are shown to be in a similar position, and the editor cuts back and forth between them as they navigate their circumstances, separated by time but connected by their humanity. The parallel is what they want us to see, and if they leave for a third perspective at a propitious time for the plot, it is merely by happenstance. They are as likely to cut away at an awkward moment pacing-wise, and one senses that this does not concern them.

It is a unique but not altogether satisfactory reversal. A movie is usually about the plot and characters; everything else must be adjusted to accommodate them. Cloud Atlas is about the theme and the story is cut up to accommodate that concern. While I was not unmoved by the skill with which they developed their themes, I was never fully convinced by that approach, for the same reason I might admire a chef’s sauce but wonder why he filled a bowl with it and sprinkled some meat on top.

The theme itself I find partially unconvincing. We are indeed connected in a way, and our actions, good and bad, have repercussions so let’s all be nice to each other. However, from the observable facts that we can exert influence on each other, even across time, and are all part of the same human story, the filmmakers draw the conclusion that we are one. A virtuoso composer, astonished at the musical ideas that his apprentice has turned into a sextet, The Cloud Atlas Sextet, claims that the apprentice must have absorbed the ideas from him, the composer. A sextet like that, he claims, could never be the result of a man, but can be claimed by all of us. The apprentice agrees with him.

This is nothing but nonsense. Cloud Atlas seeks to discredit the idea of a separate identity. It does not follow from the composer’s influence on the apprentice that he can claim partial authorship of a work he was not even aware was in existence as it was being composed. Unless the work is truly copied, it is the work of the apprentice and merely influenced by the composer. It is telling, I think, that writers and directors are able to show our influences on each other without having to state them, but when it comes time to argue that we are not merely influential to each other, but are actually part of the same whole, they must resort to making the argument explicit. They cannot show it, because it simply is not true.

There is nothing wrong with a character explicitly stating something in a work, but only as a sort of summary of the things the work itself has been demonstrating all along. At no point is anything like a great human oneness established, so when the composer makes the claim, or a slave girl makes a plea over the radio to all human kind along the same lines, it seems almost to come out of nowhere.

Though there are many roles in the film, there are comparatively few actors because each actor performs in various roles throughout. This is a wise move in that it supports the notions the filmmakers are trying to get across, even if some of the notions are silly, but it has gotten them into a bit of trouble with the PC crowd. Some characters, you see, are made up to be of a different race, and this simply must be racist.

This is about as absurd as the notion of the great human oneness. Each and every human being, no matter the race, gender, or sexual orientation, is treated with dignity as a member of the species. This is not to say that all the characters are sympathetic, but they are not mistreated by the director, nor made to conform to offensive stereotypes, nor given less attention in their realization because they are of an unimportant class or ethnicity.

There is nothing of racism here, even if white actors made up as other races has been done in a racist way in the past or done for racist reasons. The important thing is how it is handled, and here it is not in denigration of anyone, so it is not racist. Just because I stab a Congressman with a steak knife does not mean you cannot use a steak knife for something innocuous. The mere act is neutral. I found some of the makeup to look ridiculous, and it took me out of the movie, but that was my only complaint with it.

All in all, the movie is a visual feast, full of nuance and careful craftsmanship, but frustrating and ultimately unfulfilling. Its principal problem is that it is a story with themes, and yet it is fashioned as if it were a theme with some stories. That, at any rate, is my opinion, which I alone am responsible for.

There are many elements of science fiction that find their way into stories that are not science fiction. Many times, enthusiasts of the genre will try to claim these works as part of the family. Atlas Shrugged and 1984 are examples. The same thing happens, only more frequently, with noir. Sometimes, the mere presence of a morally ambiguous protagonist is enough for a piece to be so labeled.

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, however, is a rare work — quite possibly unique — that may fit both bills. While perhaps not classically noir, there is no denying a strong noir presence, and its science fiction credentials are beyond question, what with the flying cars and androids, called replicants, and off-world colonies. As a devotee of both genres, I quite naturally am a fan of the director’s third film, but watching it is an experience both frustrating and pleasant. It is a good movie, but not the great one it could have been.

Alien, Scott’s second feature, is a masterpiece whose best form made it to the silver screen. One simply cannot imagine a better version. Blade Runner, however, is a movie whose perfect version was never realized, whose potential was never reached. That mirage of the ideal Blade Runner intrudes on my thoughts every so often, and I find myself reaching for the DVD, thinking that perhaps this will be the viewing where I get it, where I notice that missing part or make that important connection.

It never works out that way. As usually happens in life, experience trumps hope. The movie simply is not as good as it ought to have been, and the reason is the plot. This is all the more tragic given that Philip K. Dick, in the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, had already provided a first-rate plot that was later diluted over multiple drafts of the screeenplay.

Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, a blade runner, a police detective who hunts down and kills replicants. When a group of four replicants go on a killing spree and escape to Earth, he is tasked with finding and killing them. Along the way, he meets a woman who turns out to be a replicant, and develops feelings for her.

The premise is simple, and the plot adds only a little complexity on top of it. Not that a plot needs complexity to be good, but it does need peaks and valleys, obstacles and more obstacles, twists and turns, dramatic interactions. It would be unfair to say that the movie has none, but when it is over one has that feeling of an itch not fully scratched. Blade Runner is like a one-course meal whose lone dish is superb, but lacks the variety and quantity needed to fully satiate one’s palate.

As with the book, there is never any attempt to explain why the replicants must be taken out. While the particular replicants involved in the movie have committed capital crimes, there is no question of rights, habeas corpus, and a trial by jury; for them there is only assassination. This is the fate that awaited them as soon as they escaped; the murders were committed essentially penalty-free. Other replicants are treated the same, whether or not they have committed crimes.

It is accepted as a fact of life, questioned neither by human nor replicant. The pseudo-humans are none too happy about it, but they do not bother to write a declaration of the rights of replicants, nor mount a simple verbal defense of themselves, nor even complain much about their lot in life. Their main gripe seems to be their short programmed lifespans, not the fact that the police are bent on making them even shorter. I do not find it strange that such a society should evolve, but that it never occurs to any storyteller involved with the world to question this feature or entertain the possibility of rights for sentient life other than homo sapiens I find curious, a missed opportunity.

Where Scott misses no opportunities is with the craftsmanship of the work. The shots are exquisite and pieced together at a deliberate pace. The music adds a noir feel to go with the mood lighting. Many of the prominent features of the book’s world remain in the movie, though less conspicuously, creating a rich tapestry of details for the story’s background. The sets are evocative. Though the acting is not as uniformly spot-on as in Alien, Harrison can pull it off all by himself, and he gets help from a few strong supporting roles.

In most categories, Blade Runner meets or exceeds what one expects from a classic, an elite work. The only thing holding it back is that there is not enough in the plot to give that full sense of satisfaction one gets from a good, well-rounded story. Perhaps Ridley thought the book was too much, that it needed to be trimmed down for cinema.

Considering what the movie could have been is an exercise in frustration, but even so it is as good as or better than any science fiction film of the last 12 years. It rewards multiple viewings; I just wish the reward were even greater.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is probably Philip K. Dick’s most famous work, given that it was turned into one of the most respected science fiction films of all time. I do not hold to the absolutist opinion that the book is always better than the movie, but after one read of the book and many viewings of the movie, I am inclined to say that, in this instance, the book is at least as good and in some respects is better.

Rick Deckard, along with numerous other unfortunate souls, has been left behind on Earth, an unhealthy wasteland from which anyone of means has migrated. He is the number two man assigned to retire rogue androids who try to pass themselves off as human. The androids, however, prefer to remain alive.

Deckard makes a modest living, but when the number one guy is nearly killed by an android, he assumes the responsibility to retire a group of six of them, seeing in the job an opportunity to make some much-needed cash. Insert canned line about things not going as planned. Insert second canned line about the job being more than he bargained for.

As I expected, the clownish dialogue and behavior, unnecessarily detailed descriptions and lengthy back stories injected into scenes immediately after a character’s introduction — the slipshod method by which so many authors introduce and develop their characters — is absent. Instead, we meet people who feel and act real, and we come to know them as we would anyone else: by how they act, what they say, and what is said about them. They move about in an exotic land but act in accordance with their human goals and abilities.

What I found surprising was how good the plot was. There is a satisfying quantity and variety of dramatic interactions, various obstacles to overcome, a sufficiently grand and tense third act… everything an eager reader could hope for. I did not expect a poorly wrought narrative, but given some of the difficulties I found in The Man in the High Castle, I thought that maybe character and setting were Dick’s strengths, not plot. The movie, as good as it is, strikes one as underplotted, and I assumed this was due to a deficiency on the book’s part.

The truth is, Ridley Scott had a perfectly good script already made for him when he set out to make Blade Runner. Why it was so altered — perhaps watered down is more accurate — I cannot fathom, but the movie wound up with an inferior story. There are all sorts of scenes and story-paths in the book that would have been as easy to film as anything else and that would have improved the movie.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

Early in the investigation, Deckard is told by his chief that a man is coming to observe his work. This man turns out to be an android who tries to kill Deckard.

Deckard tries to test what he believes to be an android, but the test does not go well. Is she deliberately and cleverly sabotaging his efforts, or are her actions and excuses valid?

Deckard is arrested by a cop. When he tells the cop where he works, at the police precinct, the cop does not believe him, tells him there is no police precinct there. Instead, the cop takes him to an alternate precinct, one that Deckard has never heard of. Deckard begins to believe he is surrounded by androids.

Deckard joins forces with another cop who starts to suspect himself of being an android. He is, however, dedicated to eradicating androids and suffers a crisis.

Deckard has a very compelling rendezvous with an android who tries to inhibit his will to retire androids.

END OF SPOILERS

Each one of these scenes, and a few more besides, is an excellent scenario and might have been used to good effect by Mr. Scott. I can only wonder that he left them out of the story.

There is a lot for libertarians to ponder, though there is no indication in the novel that this angle ever occurred to Dick. The androids are incapable of sympathy, but they still seem to experience emotion and have a desire for self-preservation as well as cognitive abilities roughly equal to that of humans. What, then, of the rights of androids?

Murray Rothbard talked about rights for nonhuman beings only a little, but what he did say leads me to conclude that he would have advocated for android rights, so long as they respected them in others. And the truth is, throughout the novel the androids do bad things usually in response to something done to them, or because of the desperate situation they are in through, it seems to me, no fault of their own.

It is never clear why androids must be retired if they escape their slavery. Deckard himself never questions it, and neither do the androids. It is a fact of life that both sides must cope with, and cope they do, without introspection. Were Dick a bit more libertarian, this might have been a fruitful avenue of pursuit.

There is one aspect of the book that was, sagely, left out of the movie. There is a new religion that has come to predominate in the society, much of it having to do with obsession with animals, which have become rare in the wasteland that Earth has become. While some aspects of it fit in well with the story — giving us the title, for example — others are more distracting. Why were these distracting elements in the story, doing so little yet being constantly referred to? There is an allusion to it near the end of the book, a connection between Deckard and a religious figure, but I cannot help but feel that I missed something. It has all the hallmarks of an important point, since Dick went out of his way to create a scene to show it to us, but whatever it was eludes me.

Scott omitted these things from the movie, and they might have been left out of the book without harming it. Nevertheless, their presence is only a small puzzle, a mild annoyance, in what is otherwise a fine tale of science fiction. Though the movie has an atmosphere that has rarely been matched, the book has the better plot and I might have to incline towards it for that reason.

A director returns, after several years and more than one lackluster attempt with other kinds of movies, to a genre he redefined. He had some little known but modestly successful works before his big breakthrough, but since then he just has not been the same man who gave us such an epic, fantastic spectacle full of industry-defining special effects, wonderful music, thrilling action, and, above all, a new world to explore with characters we wanted to accompany. Special effects have come a ways since his magnum opus was crafted, and if used correctly they have the potential to enhance the visual experience even more than before. What could possibly go wrong?

Peter Jackson’s latest project is out in theaters. I wish I could say it was called The Hobbit, but honesty compels me to report that the name is actually The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. The reason for the alteration is that The Hobbit will be brought to us not as a short adventure thrill ride, in keeping with the pace and feel of the source material, but rather will be extended into a movie trilogy that, when finished, will outlast a typical BBC miniseries. The motive behind this sort of reverse editing, whereby Tolkien’s notes were raided for things to stuff into the story and plump it up, is Mr. Jackson’s belief that we are stupid enough to triple his box office take if he triples the number of movies to be made from the story. He is probably right. I know I bought my ticket.

Even with his triumphs Jackson had a tendency to let a project get bloated. The best example, I believe, is the sudden barrage of scenes that hit us in The Two Towers right as we should be, could be, would be cruising toward the third act if a drawn-out and apocryphal love story were not fed to us by way of flashbacks, many in a languid, dreamy style that makes one wonder if one has just witnessed something shot wholly in slow motion. When Jackson had over 1,000 pages of material to convert to nine hours of footage this was an annoyance. With The Hobbit, he has fewer than 300 pages to make into nine hours and the filler has now surpassed the beef in the hotdog.

It is blatantly obvious, too, when we are watching scenes newly minted for the movie and when we are watching something adapted from what Tolkien first created. Given that the first movie only gets us to chapter seven of the book, there are precious few scenes from the source material, but the ones that are there work. The angle they take is unique: Bilbo challenges Gollum to a high-stakes game of riddles, or he tries to distract some trolls so the sun will catch them unawares with its morning rays.

For me, these are superior to giants throwing boulders and a scrotum hanging off the chin of a goblin king. Although he debauches the old scenes, a thing he usually managed to avoid in The Lord of the Rings, they yet crackle with the vitality of creativity, not to mention the kinetic energy of plot momentum. The added scenes in An Unexpected Journey usually just add action, special effects, and some bland dialogue. Not a one of them would harm the movie with its absence. Contrast that with the troll scene, without which Sting does not get found. Contrast that with the riddle scene, without which Bilbo never finds The Ring. It is almost as if Tolkien planned out his story pretty well and already included every scene he needed to make it work.

A prequel like An Unexpected Journey presents some dangerous temptations to a director. Lucas fell for them all when he made a prequel trilogy; Jackson’s record is mixed. He does nothing so grotesque as making R2-D2 fly through the air, but he does include a lot of characters from the first trilogy who have no business in this one, and they enervate the proceedings. The story is fine without them, yet they are given screen time anyway and lines of dialogue that we must get through so the story can get going again. Saruman’s role in LOTR was both crucial and engrossing; here it is just a mundane visit from an old friend.

It cheapens Saruman, I think, and even worse it subordinates the newer film to the older ones. The older ones had no characters to borrow from other films, and so had to develop their own and make us care. Of course, An Unexpected Journey has new characters, but it leans for support on a few roles from another tale, and in so doing it becomes a me-too, a tag-along. The moment Jackson decided to stretch the work to over 500 minutes, he was committed to trying to repeat LOTR, trying to equal or even best it. The Hobbit is a fine and entertaining tale, a true delight, but it simply is not suited to take on LOTR in epic territory. Jackson should never have tried, but by borrowing on the credit of that trilogy’s characters, he made a difficult job nearly impossible. He was at once trying to match LOTR with The Hobbit and subordinating The Hobbit to LOTR. It is as if Jackson were stepping on the accelerator and the brake simultaneously.

Another manner in which Jackson makes LOTR the dog and The Hobbit the tail is his reuse of magical moments from the trilogy. The Ring first finds its way onto Bilbo’s finger in exactly the same fashion as it will do to Frodo at the inn in Bree. In The Fellowship of the Ring, this moment, a small but positive deviation from the book, was an indication that The Ring was indeed an acting entity and wanted to return to its master. Now it is unavoidably diminished, like a joke that was funny in the moment the night before. Gandalf the Grey also uses his moth trick again, the one that summons giant eagles to carry him away to safety. It does not matter that it technically, in the world of the story, happened first in The Hobbit. It happened second in the real world, and that is the one I live in. To say nothing of the fact that it was simply done better in Fellowship, it stands out as an obvious homage to the older film.

There are certain directorial touches that mark the film as Jackson’s. He continues his fascination with sloppy eating, for instance. It is not enough to eat a tomato, but its juices must squirt forth and dribble down the chin. It is not enough to tip back a mug and drink ale, but the ale must spill over the sides and wet the drinker’s whiskers. To this day I cannot decide if this helps paint his picture or if it is merely distracting. I think I would appreciate it more if it were a bit less flagrant, but the attention given to characterization, both of person and location, is welcome.

Also present is the juxtaposition in the battles of gritty, gory wounds with cartoonish physics. This was something that always bothered me about LOTR, whether it was Legolas breezily climbing an Oliphaunt to kill it or horses at Helm’s Deep marching through goblins and knocking them aside as if the horses could act on the goblins without the goblins acting on them. No matter how far-fetched the fantasy, Newton should not be cast aside lightly. After one viewing, it seems to me the problem is worse now.

Not all his usual touches are accounted for, however. Gone are the abundant, stylized, close-up, slow-motion reaction shots that permeate the films from a decade ago. Like the sloppy eating shots, they would be more effective if they were toned down. In the present film they have been toned down to the point of disappearing, or so I remember it.

The shortest summary is to say that The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is an overly long work that should have clung to the cannon, the presence of which in the movie constitutes its best features. However, its best features are good features, and there is much of the new stuff that feels like setup. While I doubt I shall ever be convinced that Jackson has navigated his course wisely, the movie does leave the story in a position to do more in the sequels. If the movie got sidetracked now and then, these diversions have built something of a foundation for the future. It is almost enough to give one hope.

Until one remembers that there are only 12 chapters to go, and it is going to take us six hours to get through them.

It has been a long trip. Twenty-two weeks, sixty chapters plus a prologue and an epilogue. With this week’s installment, John Hunt’s Higher Cause finally comes to an end.

We had a lot of adventure, saw a lot of character and relationship arcs, experienced some mystery and intrigue, and all the while saw a libertarian society in operation. It struggled to survive in the midst of statism, full of dedicated men who not only believed in a libertarian philosophy but were willing to live it and work hard to achieve it. It would be nice to see more works of this sort.

The books virtues, as I have mentioned before, are the imagination that went into the concept and the overall grasp of a story arc. The writing is generally solid and Hunt manages to competently weave together a rather complex tale.

It is my opinion that the dialogue could be improved and that certain sections of the prose could be deleted to good effect. At times, there was a tendency to over-explain things.

In addition to the above, and with the story now behind us, there are other aspects I would like to point out as needing strengthening. For starters, the separate story strands could have been synchronized a little better. For most of the novel, they complimented each other and crisscrossed back and forth quite nicely, but things came loose a touch at the end.

There are four chapters and an epilogue after the main climax. Most of the sundry plots eventually came together in the attempted takeover and defense of The Island, and when this wraps up it must be viewed as the final climax to the story. However, it drags on a little further with a separate story that, as it turns out, never really had much effect on the story as a whole.

There was a lot of time spent developing this side story, and yet we can see now that its removal would change little but the word count. Though its final resolution is unique and definitely interesting, it feels like it should be part of a different book. A stronger ending would have tied it in to the main story a little better, maybe even made it a crucial part of the resolution, which could then be followed by a single chapter to tie up loose ends.

There were story elements that waned in importance, and one wonders if they should have been included at all. If so, they should be seen through to a better finish. There were other elements that strained credulity a bit, such as Petur’s constant runins with Elisa. But despite these flaws, the work was imaginative and entertaining, with some genuinely fun sections.

I would recommend a revision to get the most out of the work; there is definitely a good story there, something worth seeing to. Perhaps, and I shall end on this point, the revision could have more of the libertarian legal system at play. It is not enough to point out a court room and simply say that it rarely gets used. Statists everywhere need to see libertarian law in action, see it work and see it justified.

I hope to see more from Hunt. He has the imagination and competence with writing to be a good author. I think Higher Cause was generally engaging and would like to see another draft to bring it along a little further. There are few enough truly libertarian works of literature; this one is to be encouraged. Don’t forget the ebook is out and Christmas is around the corner. It might make a nice gift for that special statist in your life.

It is my opinion that John Hunt’s greatest strength as a novelist is in his overall design of the story. This is particularly true when it comes to setting things up in one chapter to get a payoff in another. The last dozen or so chapters have been all about payoff, realizing returns on investments made in earlier chapters. In this the penultimate installment, we see as good a display of his careful planning as we have yet seen. A seed planted way back in the beginning of the book finally bears fruit as a twist to end the installment.

To begin the installment, we saw the conclusion of the cliff hanger from last week. I truly had no idea where he was going to go with it, but his resolution was clever and made sense. Things have, in the main plot line, pretty much come to a close, barring some unforeseen surprise in the next chapter.

One supposes that the last segment will be an epilogue that brings to a close the other plot line, the one about The Bounty, which never quite merged with the central story about The Island and its enemies. This is going to be a bit of a problem for the book. There is nothing about The Bounty story that needs connecting to The Island’s libertarian story. This is not necessarily bad, by any means, but it seems that the two are not going to ever truly be connected, except geographically. It is an odd choice, but The Bounty was never as fully developed and intricate as the rest of the plot. Leaving it to the side, as has been done, makes it feel unnecessary, like a story line that did not need to be there. Judgment must be reserved until the end, but right now it feels like The Bounty story could have been a separate book, maybe a sequel. The present one might have been better without it. We shall see.

As I said, the main story seems to have pretty much concluded. There are some final character moments we are going to need, especially involving Elisa and Petur. And something will have to be done to justify the inclusion of The Bounty in the story. And, of course, we must see how the British decide to handle things if they are to be the mafia institution that oversees The Island. Just one more week, and all will be answered.

Higher Cause is a bit of a mixed bag this week. The final showdown continues, but there is an aspect to it that fails to convince. The action and the tension remain, but some of the maneuvering with respect to international law does not strike this reader as very plausible. However, there are two very good moments, one of them being what is probably the novel’s greatest cliffhanger.

The standoff with Mexico reaches what seems like a climax, only to redouble in suspense just a short while later. All in all, this final showdown has been an up-and-down affair. Just when the reader thinks one faction has an advantage, the tables get turned. I expect they will turn again, though how this is going to happen after the aforementioned cliffhanger is beyond me.

There have been a number of things I have criticized in these reviews, all having to do with how information is conveyed to the reader. There has been tell when there should be show. There have been moments when something already understood is explained at length. Sometimes, things that we do not need to know yet, or even really should not know yet, are told to us. All three kinds of these “information problems” are on display in this installment.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

Let us consider the following paragraph.

They had the man on the defensive now. Less than an hour ago, Marcos was informing Petur that he was being indicted — threatening him with prison and death and takeover of the islands. Now he had lost his ship, and along with it his biggest threat. He had learned that his operation had been infiltrated by a spy from the Island — a woman of whom he had been particularly fond. And he had discovered that his effort to expel the islanders might not be supported by the law. Furthermore, he had seen that the Island Project had a new, incredibly powerful weapon. Indeed, the man was on edge.

The very first sentence tells us something when a more compelling choice would have been to show us. This could be done by describing his body language, or facial expression, or simply by giving him dialogue appropriate to his mental state. It is not a mortal sin for a novelist to commit, but it is a lost opportunity.

What follows that sentence, however, is entirely redundant and really ought to be omitted. We have already spent time reading these things; a summary is simply wasting time.

END OF SPOILER

Finally, we are given extra information that often comes from a writer with an itchy trigger finger. For instance, if something happens, say, to a ship in the distance, the present characters will only be able to tell so much about what happened to the ship, what condition it is in now and what exactly was the final result of the occurrence, what it may be. This is a good thing. It leaves the reader in the same sort of doubt in which the characters find themselves, and ignorance, if well chosen, can enhance a reading experience.

Too often in Higher Cause we read, after some momentous act has occurred, sentences that begin, “It would later turn out that…” or something like that. It is my opinion that this information, if it is important, can be learned later, when the characters learn it. Knowing too much can spoil a mood. An author ought to leave a few loose ends that he can tie up later. Giving us that omniscient information seems impatient, like the author wants the readers to know something and wants to get that information conveyed now, so he can cross the item off his agenda.

The penultimate installment comes in a few days. After such a cliffhanger as we just experienced, there will no doubt be some eager readers. I wonder if yet another cliffhanger awaits us before the wrap up.

Higher Cause #19 continues the entwining of separate story lines that began in earnest in the previous installment. There are three more chapters, with all the action being on or around The Island. The situation is at its most dire as we enter, but the good guys get a lucky break and suddenly their opponents’ hand is not as strong as it was. At the very least, they have been given a chance.

One of the key elements Hunt has used throughout the novel is the planting of mystery. Many seeds have been sown along the way, some of which sprouted and were further tended to. Now, as we near the end, we are starting to get a lot of payoff from the harvest. As far as timing goes, I think it was handled well.

One of the reveals, however, may be problematic for other reasons. The entire backstory has not yet come out, so final judgment must be withheld, but one of the enigmas we have encountered in the book is beginning to strain my credulity. At this point, it seems like some license was taken with plausibility in order to set up the mystery, but perhaps a future installment will set me straight on that.

Act Three is well under way and must resolve itself in the next ten chapters or so, unless a cliffhanger and a sequel are in store for us. It has been a pulse-pounding finale so far with more to come. And we know that perhaps the greatest mystery of all, the one that was prepared for us as early as the prologue of the book and has been developed repeatedly since, has yet to play a role. The author has done a good job of masking his intentions with it, because though some possibilities as to how all this will play out occur to me, there is no obvious or unavoidable scenario to make the book too predictable.

We shall have to wait to see.

After a long break, we return to the Higher Cause reviews.

In part 18, there are many pieces in play as we near the end of the novel. Different story lines, separate for so long, are now starting to entwine themselves together in the narrative thread. What looked like nothing more than a mid-story action sequence a few weeks ago has turned into a protracted battle that reignites every time we think it might be slowing down. It is becoming apparent that, however it evolves over the next few installments, it is going to be the final showdown.

The terrorists are still playing cat and mouse games with The Island’s defenses. The Island has been evacuated as the Mexican government forces land on The Island. Petur and his team prepare to defend themselves, though in what manner we still do not know.

Chapters 45 through 48 exhibit the attributes we have come to recognize in the novel. There are many perspectives that enhance our experience of the action. Hunt likes to drop bombs to end his chapters — to good effect. There is a bit too much over-explaining. The dialogue could be cleaned up a little to sound more normal.

With only a handful of weeks to go, the end can be made out in the distance, though the features are still a blur. A few mysteries await elucidation, too. This marks several installments in a row that have kept us hooked and ready to read on, despite some areas in want of polishing. It is much to be hoped that the end will satisfy the built-up tension and expectation.

Alongside Night by J. Neil Schulman, so far as I am aware, is still the agorist novel par excellence. More than three decades have passed since its publication — not that you would know it without looking at the copyright date — yet in that time no other novel has so successfully mixed the principles of agorism with such a keen perspective on the future. There are not many novels that can top it for entertainment value either.

The story takes place in what was then the future, but which now seems a very prescient present. Not only is the story filled with theretofore unrealized gadgets and technology that differ from what we actually possess sometimes by no more than an appellation, or occasionally a small feature or manner of use, but the economic conditions described in the tale read like a seer’s forecast.

Schulman’s knowledge of economics allowed him to make a forecast every bit as accurate as the one for which Ayn Rand, in her novel Atlas Shrugged, has been lauded of late. In fact, this very knowledge of economics is probably what helped the author predict all those gadgets, for it is well established that science-fiction authors, a group not known for their economic acumen, tend to think on a grand scale when most of the advances, in a consumer-driven society, are modest devices of everyday convenience and entertainment.

It is a dystopian world we are plunged into in Alongside Night, where central control of the economy and erosion of civil liberties proceed, as they must, hand in hand. When the government abducts the protagonist’s father, a noted free-market libertarian economist somewhere between Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises in his radicalness, the high school student Elliot Vreeland embarks on a quest to free him. This quest takes him into the world of the agorists, free-market rebels and masters of counter-economics.

The story idea is a perfectly good one, and there is a strong flavor of Heinlein in the way that it is told: smoothly and economically. Even better, Schulman spends more time with some brief yet poetic descriptions that I find attractive. Particularly good for me was the description, near the beginning of the novel, of Elliott walking down a cold New York sidewalk at night. There is not an abundance of such passages, though, merely some choice bits here and there. The author wastes no time in getting the story started, and does not pause in unrolling it before us.

Most satisfying of all was the experience of a truly libertarian book, with no apologies and no compromises. More adept with characters than Rand, Schulman peoples his world with many shades of gray, but never is there any doubt that the story is a vehicle to show people cooperating without monopolies, without coercion being initiated. The novel exceeds The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in its libertarianism; indeed, I cannot recall a well-known work that can rival Schulman’s opera prima in that category.

The much shorter Alongside Night cannot compete, in certain respects, with the massive, intricate, epic wonder that Atlas Shrugged is, but there are many areas in which it surpasses Rand’s magnum opus. The handling of characters and the tone of narration come to mind (Atlas Shrugged could tend toward the overdramatic at times). The dialogue is also a bit more realistic.

I could have wished for an ending with a little more pop perhaps. Something to match the way the beginning got the heart pumping. I might have liked another hundred pages or so as well. Despite this, there is little enough to complain about. I very much enjoyed the novel and recommend it for all libertarians, be they radical or mild. I recommend it even more for statists.

The action that began in last week’s offering is, for better or worse, brought to a conclusion this week. First, though, we get a scene with Onbacher in his search for the Bounty. It acts as a sort of interlude between the action of last week and the conclusion of that action this week. It is a good way to start off the installment, because we know what must surely be coming, but the gratification is delayed and therefore heightened.

Onbacher goes on a trek over land as the first chapter begins. There is nothing especially arresting about the segment, which is usually when Hunt chooses to hit us with something, and this time is no exception. Onbacher meets a man at the end and, through the clever use of a prop, the author relays to the reader everything they need to know. Another cliff hanger, and a great method of conveying much by showing just a little.

After that, we return to the threat to The Island from a few different perspectives. It is a nice piece, but last week I mentioned that more obstacles, more tease and denial, might have been used. Not doing so reduced the intensity of the conclusion. With more involvement, more perspectives might have been added, and there might have been more cutting back and forth from one to another, giving the whole sequence a more frenetic pace and taking us to a higher summit before finding a resolution. Again, it is still a nice bit of action and thrills, but I think more could have been done.

This week paved the way for a lead up to, one imagines, a final action sequence with everything on the line. Onbacher is going to get into something, and if the story is successful it will tie in to the Mexican threat to The Island as well as the Arab threat. If handled right, it will be a great way to finish off the story. We’ll see over the next few weeks how it goes.

Spoilers

There are action and thrills in the offing this week. The sequence we follow sees some separate strands of story come together and follows them through four chapters, the largest offering to date. It finishes in what may be termed the eye of the storm. A crisis is averted, but a larger one looms in the near future.

Hunt has developed a number of characters and spent time positioning them and this week takes advantage of this preparatory work. What we read has enough to be the ultimate climax of a book like this, but we know there is much more to come. It is quite a thrill ride, but I do have a couple of criticisms to make.

The first criticism is that I thought there needed to be more obstacles to heighten the suspense. The setup is excellent, but midway through this latest attack on The Island, some of the danger has been resolved too easily. Don’t just have a man crash his bike and break his arm. Have him fall in a mud pit, too. Then have it start raining, threatening to drown him in the mud pit. Give him a ray of hope in the form of a root that he can grab and climb to safety, but then make the root actually be a snake, which bites him.

A sequence like that should be drawn out as far as tolerable by having the hero’s plight worsen and worsen with each new setback. Every hope or near-resolution must be yanked from his grasp at the worst moment, only to be replaced by another difficulty. This sort of thing might well double the length of the four chapters, but it would probably quadruple the entertainment value. As it is, the sequence is good, but it is not the kind of nearly unbearably good that it could be.

The second aspect I would criticize is that there are a number of instances where the wrong emotional note is sounded. There are several instances where characters say, do, and feel things not consonant with their circumstances.

Sophia wistfully notes that she has not walked on the beach with her boyfriend for a long time… right in the middle of being kidnapped. She wonders why letting a little air out of one’s lungs, when one is holding one’s breath, relieves the pain in one’s chest… as she is under water, does not know where the surface is, and is in danger of drowning. Jeff opens a door and gives Sophia the kind of broad, happy smile she loves from him… as she is manacled in a cell and he is trying to rescue her.

Even the part when Jeff explains to Sophia how to escape out of the torpedo tube is done in too cavalier a fashion. Sophia is not a trained agent used to making daring escapes, and yet Jeff sees her off as if he has few worries about ever seeing her again, and does not agonize over her when he must leave her and return to his role as a double agent.

A more careful approach to the characters would improve the selection, as would a rethinking of the plot points to add more drama and tension. There is a lot of potential that has built up over time; the eventual discharge should, and could, awe the reader.

With an official release date of October 30, 2012, just in time for Halloween, author Tarrin Lupo presents us with a new sort of vampire tale that is certain to make any libertarian’s skin crawl. While not intended to be a traditional horror novel, One Nation Under Blood is nonetheless a frightening tale of what can happen when government regulation and patriotism go too far.

In Lupo’s dystopian novel, it is discovered that blood transfusions can offer more than the gift of life to a needy recipient. Performed correctly, they serve as a fountain of youth, transferring rejuvenating properties from the blood of a child into the veins of an adult. Older generations are thrilled at the chance to become healed of their ailments and erase years from their appearance, leading to a huge demand for young blood that creates an unparalleled shift in the balance of wealth from the old to the young.

When blood transfusions become a target for politicians eager to profit from the new technology, the demand overwhelms the willing donor population and a new source of young blood must be found. By the power of legislation and with the help of a successful propaganda campaign, orphans and the children of immigrants are soon forced into concentration camps where they are made to give up their blood as a patriotic service to their country.

By telling the story through the eyes of those being taken advantage of, the author allows us to put ourselves in the place of those who face similar discrimination today. Although the novel is fiction, readers will find many similarities between the story world and our own. Perhaps the scariest notion is that we can easily imagine our society being swayed into nearly identical unspeakable actions under the pretense of protecting the children.

The author does a good job of demonstrating how interference in a market leads to increasing problems in supply and demand. Before the government interferes, the blood market is relatively stable. Children have become independently wealthy, and have developed a social network to coordinate transfusions at price rates that reflect age and purity. When a group of senators decide to regulate the blood market in the name of protecting the children, we are able to see how these changes do more harm than good.

We are also shown several examples of how politicians can manipulate a population by using regulation to create problems that then have to be “solved,” usually by the passage of new legislation that would have otherwise been unpopular. The book describes a slippery slope wherein these methods are used to gain profit at the expense of the young. To meet the public demand of young blood, a number of new laws are passed. One particularly horrific example is that citizens are paid bribes to turn in any neighbor who is neglecting their child; this of course leads to all sorts of false accusations and many innocent families are torn apart in the process. Lupo thus shows how the least popular members of a community can easily become victims of those in power, through the use of nationalist propaganda that leads to the rationalization of that victimization by those who previously would have spoken up on their behalf.

The author’s political beliefs are a major influence in his writing, and while he doesn’t go into great detail about the science involved in the blood transfusion technology developed in the novel, Lupo devotes a lot of time here to the ideas of freedom and self-ownership that libertarian science fiction fans relish. You’ll find many enemies of liberty within the novel, from security checkpoints and immigration raids to crooked politicians and abusive government agents.

While there are a few details I didn’t like about the story, such as the main characters’ father showing overwhelming naiveté throughout the story, and the sometimes lack of a prominent inner dialogue (for which I have a personal preference), I enjoyed reading One Nation Under Blood and was delighted to find that both the writing and the plot seemed to get better as the story progressed.

There are a lot of plot lines this week. Just about all the major players, in fact, make an appearance.

We visit the Marcos family, where things in Mexico have nearly reached a climax point, and so has the family dynamic.

Elisa, still arousing my suspicions, briefs Petur and paints a picture of dark clouds on the horizon.

Onbacher makes some headway, perhaps, in his search for the Bounty.

The council of oligarchs comes on stage for a short while.

Finally, we see where Jeff Baddori has ended up. There is the potential problem of logic in this part, because it raises some questions that will need some plausible answers. For now, though, it certainly intensifies things.

The three chapters this week bring us perspectives from all the important storylines. Each either establishes something important or moves the plot forward. Most leave the story dangling tantalizingly in the air, waiting for another chapter so we can see what comes next. It is this aspect of the book, the chapter endings, that stand out most. It is what the author has developed the most in his writing technique.

What needs the most work is the continued over-explaining, the telling instead of showing. This week we read lines like, “His father was like that — always taking the opportunity to belittle and berate his son,” and, “Petur used his Hash name,” after a line of dialogue in which we just read what he used. The absence of things like this would improve the work, a simple judicious use of the delete key.

That aside, and the dialogue that could use a little cleaning, it has been a while since I have read something that I thought was out of place, or truly needed work. Once the story is up and running, it moves forward well and usually has something of interest.

This week is more about setting things up than reaping payoffs. Onbacher proceeds with his plan to find the Bounty, but that is the only significant plot point in the three chapters. This is not to say that the chapters are skippable, because we catch glimpses of plots and machinations whose culminations will no doubt explode in future chapters, but we do get a little time to catch our breath. There have been some rather kinetic chapters of late, so like a symphony whose music is a contrast of louds and softs, and fasts and slows, and sharps and smooths, we catch our breath and proceed pianissimo, with perhaps one sequence as exception.

There are dark characters lurking on The Island. Hunt once again introduces things slowly, like a tease, as he should. The possibilities are numerous but over the course of the next few chapters we will no doubt start to narrow them down until we find out just what these people are up to.

It bears noting that there has been a lot of reliance on chance partial sightings, conversations improbably overheard, and the like. This technique can quicken the pulse and is often used to get a plot started, or to introduce a twist, but overuse wears out anything. I would hope not to see it used too much more.

We also revisit the Marcos family for another interaction between father and son, one that leaves us more engrossed than it found us. I will say that the removal of one character from the family scenario was a lost opportunity, but there is a hint that she may return. I really want to see more from them.

There are a few examples I would cite of awkward prose, or prose that needs a little verve injection. These are things I have mentioned before, but I think it is worthwhile to bring them up as long as they keep popping up.

Joseph Onbacher had been on the phone all afternoon. It was Saturday, but that would not stop this motivated man.

The combination of overstating the case (a Saturday is no great obstacle to work) with the unnecessary adjective wants improvement. “Onbacher had been on the phone all Saturday afternoon” gets to the point, as well as shows us that he is motivated rather than tells us.

“No, sir. I could not disagree more.” Stouffer’s statement was not the least bit obsequious. It was just a point of fact. The reality was that everyone who worked for Joseph held him in the greatest esteem. He was that kind of man.

More telling when we have been shown much of this already.

That damage was irreparable and gave him an impressive propensity for evil.

The last example of telling refers to Enrico Marcos. Again, rather than be told that Enrico is abused by his father and, in his anger, deals out abuse to those under him, we should be shown. The chapter does two things: it brings us up to date on the revolution in Mexico and shows us a clash between father and son, wherein the son tells his father that he is being used and the father violently beats his son. It is effective, but how much more effective would it be to see Enrico rise after recovering from his beating, find a servant who has committed some petty offense, and deliver the same beating to the servant that his father just gave to him? Better yet, the servant need commit no offense at all. That would be gripping; that would show us Enrico’s character; that would be a great way to end the chapter. And we could omit the awkwardness of the “impressive propensity for evil.”

We cruise into chapters 30 and 31 with the most recent offering from Higher Cause. Both chapters take place on The Island. They deal with a couple of different strands of plot. A growing suspicion comes closer to being confirmed.

Enough time has passed to allow Petur and Jeff to fully recuperate from their injuries during the attack on the OTEC. Jeff makes a brief appearance before leaving for other areas of the globe as part of his investigations. Elisa, meanwhile, returns to The Island and Petur grows more and more smitten with her.

Elisa continues to dress as unattractively as she can manage, though Petur can see through it and is pretty sure she could be a knockout if she tried. On a couple of different occasions she is caught by surprise by Petur and quickly adjusts her appearance to minimize her appeal. The reasons for this are still unclear, but Petur has begun to wonder about it. This, coupled with another occurrence, makes me suspicious about her motives, although she has been nothing but helpful to Petur and The Island to date.

The alluring brunette whose pheromones have sunk hooks into Petur is seen again, and by now the faithful reader will probably have a good idea as to who she is. If my hypothesis is right, it only heightens my suspicions. It is a plot thread with a lot of promise.

All in all, another successful bit of work. There is, however, one thing that I have been waiting for and have seen little of so far. The Island seems to be functioning smoothly, with a freed economy that is beginning to heat up. However, there is little mention of how they handle the services that government keeps for itself. How are disputes resolved? How is punishment meted out? How are claims adjudicated? The question of security is not so pressing, because the world already has more private security than government cops, but the question of arbitration and enforcement is altogether different.

This is also the point where a lot of doubters part ways with libertarianism, many of whom call themselves libertarians. It seems to me that the story would benefit from a look into private law. Is crime and disagreement simply not a problem on The Island? I feel like this could be possible, given the circumstances and the population’s size and makeup, but even so, something needs to be in place to handle possible problems. An exploration of this would fit well with such a libertarian novel, and its absence, at least for this anarchist, is starting to be felt.

The story continues to benefit from the prep work done earlier, and it continues to move, also an important point. I hope to see some sort of dispute-resolution/crime-and-punishment system discussed. After all, what would they have done with/to the saboteurs had they captured them?

“What ifs” are the bread and butter of science fiction. What if organized crime overthrew the United States government and took over? What would life be like under the mafia? Would the people of North America be better off? These are the questions C.M. Kornbluth sought to answer in his science-fiction novel The Syndic (1953).

The Syndic is of interest to libertarians, not least because it was honored with the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1986 by the Libertarian Futurist Society. This edition of the novel includes a forward and an afterward by Jeff Riggenbach that set the historical context for Kornbluth’s work and life and their relevance to libertarians. The Syndic is a fast-paced, entertaining tale replete with insights into the nature of the state and of war. Indeed, it could arguably be deemed an antiwar novel; but the insights do not end there.

As The Syndic opens, the continent of North America has long been divvied up between the Syndic and the Mob. The former United States government continues to exist in exile in Iceland and Ireland as the North American Government (NAG; an apt acronym). After an odd prologue composed of historical documents that set the stage for us, we’re introduced to our main viewpoint character, Charles Orsino, a low-ranking young bagman for the Syndic, who spends his days politely shaking down small businesses in the 101st New York Police Precinct for protection money and playing a brutal version of polo with jeeps and firearms instead of horses and mallets.

Charles happens to be the target of an assassination attempt during one night out on the town, and this lands him the rare opportunity to be invited to a meeting of the leaders of the Syndic. The North American Government is suspected of being behind the attempt as well as others, and Charles volunteers for an undercover mission to infiltrate NAG territory and assess the threat. From here on out an action-packed adventure with a touch of romance ensues that allows Kornbluth to contrast life in the Syndic with that under the NAG and the Mob.

The people of the Syndic territory have it pretty good. They enjoy a great deal more freedom and prosperity than people did under the old United States government or do under the NAG and the Mob. So long as they pay their protection money, they seem to be able to do most anything they please that’s peaceful. They don’t need permits to travel. There’s no bureaucratic welfare state, no war, no militarized police barging into their homes, no close regulation of business. Women enjoy equal legal status. The young are allowed to experiment, and yet society does not degenerate — on the contrary, most seem to settle down into normal lives by middle age.

Charles has frequent occasion to be horrified during his adventure outside of the Syndic — he likens the NAG military to particularly unscrupulous pirates — to the point that he’s ready to push for his leaders to raise an army and navy to wage an aggressive war against the NAG and the Mob to destroy their governments and civilize their people before they have a chance to invade, as they inevitably will. His uncle Frank, a respected member of the Syndic leadership, will have none of it, however. It is through Frank that we, and Charles, receive much of the aforementioned libertarian wisdom.

Uncle Frank understands the state and has a keen sense of history. He understands, as few today do, that laissez-faire works — until governments start to tinker with it. Regulations and other government interventions are not the products of wise, benevolent politicians and bureaucrats. Big, established corporations call for regulation of their own industry — under the guise of consumer protection, of course, but with the actual aim, or at least effect, of maintaining the status quo and hindering competition. Government intervention snowballs. A fiat paper currency fuels public debt,  mounting inflation, and inequality. History has taught him it’s best not to meddle.

Frank frequently protests that the Syndic is not a government, but one gets the impression he does not mean this literally — at one point Charles admits that the Syndic is a government too — but rather as a warning to his fellow Syndic leaders not to behave like the Syndic is an abstract, permanent institution through which they have a right to rule for the good of the people. As Charles is wont to echo Frank, the Syndic is nothing more than “some people and their morale and credit.”

Frank understands that war is the health of the state. A standing military and a war will be a drain on their wealth. There will be much death and destruction, curtailed freedom at home, altered sensibilities, erosion of their carefree culture. The Syndic government itself would be forever changed if it embarked on the path of traditional government, centralizing and expanding its power, losing its meritocratic family- and business-like character. War would mean an end to their way of life — in the name of preserving it. The Syndic would become the very thing they meant to defend it against.

As Frank retorts to Charles: “Nothing can be a matter of life or death to the Syndic. When anything becomes a matter of life or death to the Syndic, the Syndic is already dead, its morale is already disintegrated, its credit already gone. What is left is not the Syndic but the Syndic’s dead shell.”

Despite its age, The Syndic is not a dead shell. It is a science-fiction classic that should be on every libertarian fiction-lover’s to-read list. It’s a short and quick, entertaining read — about half as long as the typical science fiction novel today, a quarter the length of the average epic fantasy novel. While characterization receives short shrift by contemporary standards, and events might feel a bit rushed to modern sensibilities, The Syndic’s strengths lie in its plotting and timeless ideas. The modern reader should be forewarned that attitudes toward women expressed within are rather old-fashioned, but the story is not without a strong female protagonist. Kornbluth’s prose is good and occasionally brilliant. I leave you with this little gem that culminates a bless-curse sequence:

“Bless the founding fathers for the exquisitely Newtonian eighteenth-century machinery of the Constitution, and curse them for visiting it in all its unworkable beauty on the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.”

We start out the second half of the book with two more chapters. Hunt is starting to benefit from the seeds planted in earlier chapters. There is a lot going on, a lot of side plots and characters to worry about, and as each advances, they give us that mild euphoria that comes from a new development or a new clue revealed. With so much to work with, these developments and clues come tumbling out of the prose at us.

The first chapter begins with some medical care for Jeff Baddori. It catches us up to date with Dr. Thomas Standall, whom we met earlier. The research done into the wounds that Jeff and Petur received adds a lot to the narrative. It also allows for some pro-market explanations. I would have omitted the first three paragraphs and had the information therein come out as dialogue though.

The second part of the first chapter is a bracing search for the bad guys. This time, something is found. It’s a stimulating little stretch of prose and leaves us with the certainty of trouble ahead.

The second chapter deals with Onbacher’s theories about the Bounty. He has made some progress in his own search, which he confesses was, initially, his principle interest in The Island. The novel has a lot of appealing aspects, and this is one of the main ones. It takes a historical fact, fills in a lot of gaps with some real imagination and then connects it all to the present narrative, which does not have to have anything to do with it. It could survive quite well on its own, but the addition of the historical fiction enriches the tale.

Right now, we can see only possibilities, but there are many and they are all exciting. How is the past going to affect the present as the story progresses? Like real life, there is a lot going on; there are many characters on the stage; and things are simply too difficult to predict.

My only criticism of the last chapter is to note that there is one paragraph too many. Erase the last one, and consider how the penultimate paragraph leaves things a little less explained but still well understood. The effect, in my opinion, would be better.

Logic is never kind to a story about time travel. It seems that no matter what idea or aspect of so-called fourth dimensional travel a storyteller wishes to pursue, something does not work right — contradictions abound. The biggest plot holes in the history of fiction are to be found therein. For my money, this is the first and best reason to suppose that time travel is not possible. Reality is nothing if not possible and plausible — at least from the perspective of one in possession of the relevant facts — and if a story cannot be made to work right when time travel is involved, reality probably cannot either.

There is, however, a lot of potential in such tales. If a viewer will but suspend his disbelief and allow an author or filmmaker to explore one possibility while forgetting its necessary and contradictory corollaries, then some interesting possibilities may be realized. Rian Johnson has done a first-rate job of spinning a time-traveling yarn with the new movie Looper, if the audience will afford it such consideration.

The year is 2044, and time travel, as we are told by the narrator and protagonist (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is not yet invented. Thirty years in the future, it is/will be (it occurs to me that we need another tense or two in the English language when we discuss these things). It is illegal, though, and only mobsters make use of it, to send back their targets to be eliminated and their bodies disposed of. The men who do the eliminating and disposing are called loopers, and they earn that appellation when they close their own loop by, at the end of their contract, killing their 30-years-older selves.

Our protagonist, called simply Joe, is a drug abusing, well-dressed looper with a manner perhaps a bit too refined, and a face perhaps too smooth and handsome, for someone in his station. Leonardo DiCaprio, in The Departed, managed to overcome his golden beauty and give a convincing portrayal of a hoodlum. I would have preferred something rougher like that in Looper. Gordon-Levitt has all the makings of a leading man, but I thought the role he portrayed in this film was not quite the right one.

Nevertheless, Johnson and Gordon-Levitt manage to fashion a three-dimensional character out of Joe, and he is not the only one. It is impressive how many roles in this movie are handled with enough care to make them feel like real people, even a few with minimal screen time. For that alone the movie rises above the mediocre majority.

One day, inevitably, Joe comes face to face with his future self, sent back in time. There is something different, though. Future Joe is not bound at the wrists with his head in a white sack as all the others are, and in surprise Present Joe hesitates, allowing Future Joe to escape. Failure to dispose of a mark is not looked upon kindly in the underworld of this never-named Midwestern city, so Present Joe tries to hunt down his future self to save his present self. Meanwhile, his future self is on a mission to kill a child before he can turn into a man and do terrible things decades hence, but he does not know which of three children he must kill.

The story comprises a lot more than what is detailed here, but the above suffices to give a basic idea. To tell any more would spoil the surprise. I will just say that it all leads to a very satisfying conclusion, one you can see coming if you are paying attention and thinking about the possibilities, but the foresight does not make it a disappointment. Instead, the suspicion of what is coming and the step-by-step approach to getting there heighten the anticipation.

Along with The Gray, I found Looper to be the best movie I have seen this year, and there are a number of things I could point to. The characterizations and the inspired idea I have already mentioned; there are more noteworthy features.

The world is well-crafted, mixing the old and familiar with the new and improved. The same process of new technology overlapping but not immediately replacing older versions is a constant, and there is no reason to think that 2044 will be any different. The sets capture this perfectly. I particularly liked the juxtaposition of the mundane with the fictional and fantastic. Sometimes we cut from a run-down apartment to a futuristic skyline at night; other times we see an advanced city in the background while corn stalks sway in the breeze in the foreground. A new contraption that dusts crops comes out of a dilapidated old barn that is probably old right now in 2012. While it hovers over the corn, a farmer cuts into a tree stump with her ax and rubs her skin raw.

With characters so well-drawn and a world so well-envisioned, even a middling plot would satisfy, but Looper is a cut above the average, storywise. It is a tale that takes us through many interactions and many phases, covers much territory with a host of emotional highs and lows. While never forgetting its original conceit, it ventures far into new territory, finally becoming a tale about many things, but all in the right balance. The director takes advantage of the unique situation of having different temporal versions of the same man interacting with each other. What happens to the younger version must affect the older version, and a couple inspired scenes play with this idea.

There are a lot of details in the movie that at first seem to serve no purpose, but in the end they all come into play. There is a metaphor about small and large spiders, which gives a clue about events yet to transpire. An offhand comment from a prostitute gives us information that will later be important. A mutant psychic power, for the longest time, seems like a whimsical addition to the world, but proves to be vital to the resolution. Everything is there for a reason, even if it does not come out right away.

Finally, I would note the camerawork. Director Rian Johnson makes use of what is off camera as much as what is on camera, and he always seems to nail it. Some shots are effective because they are simple, like the opening shot, while others achieve a harmonious complexity that delights the eyes.

There is very little to quibble about. The protagonist might not be the most believable in his situation, and Emily Blunt’s Sara is also not quite right for a former street walker turned mother and farmer. Even forgetting the illogic involved with time travel, we have to wonder why targets in the future are not killed in the future and merely disposed of in the past. For a profession like loopers with a demonstrated high time preference, one wonders how Joe, a drug addict, resists the temptation to spend and winds up saving so much money. The imperfections in this gem are few and small.

The trend continues with movies. We must wait for the latter part of a year to get most of our good ones. This makes for a depressing drought for a few months, but the end of the year always holds promise. Looper, let us hope, is just the vanguard.

The Hollywood Movie Factory has turned out another flick, helping to satiate the demand for competent but uninspired action vehicles conveniently forgettable enough not to take up valuable cerebral RAM for the long-term. This one is called Dredd 3D and is based on the same source material that spawned the Stallone production some years ago. I hardly remember the previous version, and I fully expect to have difficulties recalling the present one when, in a decade or two, they remake it. More interesting than the movie, however, are all the libertarian points it makes without any indication that it means to.

In the future, the United States has become an irradiated wasteland, save for a megacity that stretches from old Boston to old DC. A place of squalor and, one suspects based on general living conditions, a robust welfare state, 800 million inhabitants huddle together inside its protective walls, trying to eke out an existence while spawning the occasional mutant.

There are gigantic living centers hundreds of stories high where like classes of people are housed. These massive structures have all the hallmarks of government housing, from a disinterested janitorial staff to poorly maintained and infrequently cleaned premises to homeless squatters claiming filthy nooks and crannies. As one would expect, drug lords dominate in these neglected mini-cities.

Judge Dredd, a member of the police/military class, has the legal privilege to apprehend, try, and punish on his own authority. He takes a student out with him for a day, a young woman who cannot manage a passing grade at the academy but whose mutant psychic powers make her highly desirable for the force. In answering a police call, they enter Peach Trees, the name of one of the gigantic living complexes, and arrest a prominent member of a powerful drug gang. The local drug lord, fearing what information her subordinate will give away when he is interrogated, locks down the building and tries to eliminate the judges.

Though the movie evinces no libertarian intentions, it gets a lot of things right about which a libertarian can make a number of points. Consider the Drug War. There is a new drug called Slo-Mo, which slows down perception of reality for the user, making seconds seem like minutes. A drop of rain, from the perspective of someone on a Slo-Mo high, appears to hang in the air and hardly move. To society’s detriment, this seemingly innocuous drug is prohibited, and all the attendant black market decay, violence, and corruption are everywhere to be seen.

The movie does not get into it, but it is an interesting exercise to imagine the fictional history of the drug. Like marijuana, it is harmless, making it a prime target for prohibitionists, but harmlessness is never enough. For a drug to be outlawed, it must also be stained by association with a people considered inferior or at least lower class.

A drug with the effects of Slo-Mo would be a positive boon for, say, a particle physicist. How better to catch a glimpse of some exotic and elusive speck of quark than to slow it down by a factor of who knows how many orders of magnitude? In such a case, the drug would be hailed as a modern miracle, and some lucky pharmaceutical company would be taking out patents right and left while collecting money hand over fist. We must suppose, then, for the sake of plausibility, that unemployed welfare recipients got to it first and used it to prolong their orgasms, or something similarly unseemly.

In this world there would, of course, be a corollary to the medical marijuana movement, maybe called the scientific Slo-Mo coalition, who would endlessly argue the benefits of decriminalization to a public that was largely not paying attention, but this is not shown in the movie.

What is shown, however, are the results of government provision of police services. The figure is given that there are 17,000 reported crimes each day in the megacity, and Judge Dredd explains to his rookie that they cannot possibly handle all of them. They must choose which crimes to ignore and which to investigate.

Government provision of anything leads to shortages, as we all know. This is why our courts are backed up; this is why we are chastised for using water and are subject to blackouts. It would make more sense to allow each living structure to form its own police force, made up of gun-carrying citizens, but government prefers to have that power to itself. Even the streamlined “due process,” which consists of a Judge deciding your fate on the spot, is analogous to the plea bargaining system we have now, where hardly any case ever goes to trial. Instead, a district attorney uses the possibility of ridiculous sentences and dozens of charges all stemming from what is essentially one crime (which often is not even a real crime) to induce the suspect to plead guilty for a lesser charge.

When government feels the squeeze, it responds by relaxing standards. Can anyone imagine Ford Motor Company not moving Heaven and Earth to keep up with a surge in demand for automobiles while maintaining quality?

The movie does not deal with the problem of mistakes in sentencing, a problem made worse by the frequent use of the death penalty. Nor does it show us the tyrants that policemen given such powers must become. The Judges are depicted as hard but fair, for the most part, bent on cleaning up the city and unconcerned by personal gain. Though a handful of Judges do succumb to the bribery of the wealthy drug lords, at no time do we see a Judge who abuses his power on his own, just for the sheer joy of exercising power or possibly to set up his own little fiefdom within the greater empire.

Nevertheless, this mediocre offering does a good job of showing us the real effects of drug prohibition and police power, even if we must fill in the causes and interrelationship on our own. It is a pity that the movie itself was not more engrossing.

We have finished the first half of Higher Cause with this, the 11th installment. We get three chapters this time, each dealing with different places and different characters. The action is well under way, so any break we get from here on out will be, one suspects, something of a cliff hanger.

The first chapter picks up where we left off last time, with Jeff and Petur dealing with the attack on the OTEC. As Jeff feared, there was more to come. Indeed, what transpires is perhaps the most harrowing part of the entire ordeal with the saboteurs and assassins. By the time it is over, it seems like a draw between the two sides, and we know that they will butt heads again, most likely multiple times, after they have licked their respective wounds.

The second chapter is perhaps the best thing John Hunt has yet given us. We return to Mexico, to the former drug family now involved in political revolution. We might discuss its placement in the book, because it is largely an establishing chapter and this is the very middle of the novel, but what it gives us is engrossing.

We have a father and a son. The other son is now deceased, as we saw earlier, and the living son has schemes. The dynamic between the two is good, and then we are treated to a scene of the son pursuing a lust-interest who works in the father’s home but who resists the son’s advances. This also adds flavor to the mix, tells us a little more about the son as we discover his motives and his attitude about the whole thing. As if this were not enough, a final twist is added at the end, and that is the best part of all.

I have to say, I am as excited to read more developments in this thread as I am to read anything else in the book.

Finally, we end with a chapter detailing the patrolling of the OTEC and the pursuit of the saboteurs. Whether or not this needed its own chapter is something that might be better determined later, but it strikes me as something that might be cut down to its essentials, which does not seem to be too much. At the very least, it should follow the first chapter, or possibly just be the end of it.

As before, there are a few things that could be done to enliven the prose. Adverbs abound, many of which could be jettisoned, along with their verb, in favor of a stronger, more colorful bit of vocabulary. Others, like “now,” are not necessary and used too frequently, but there are no egregious problems with the writing. Just what I would term clean-up work.

I shall eagerly await next Wednesday, and especially hope that we get another taste of Mexico, as well as some build up for another clash between Jeff and Petur, and the assassins.

As we near the midway point of the 22 installments of Higher Cause, we get the first major action set piece. The long-awaited OTEC arrives at The Island, and once again a deadly sabotage is attempted. By the end of the second of two chapters, it is clear that there is more soon to come. We are left with perhaps the biggest cliffhanger yet.

This was an excellent time to pull a scene like this. A lot of different pieces have been put into place and the main storyline is underway. It raises the stakes and gives us a long chapter from multiple viewpoints. If it were a movie, this section would probably feature in the trailer. The key, of course, will be to get a couple more such chapters in and increase the thrills and tension each time.

The pacing was spot on this week. We can feel a lit fuse burning to its end; a sense of foreboding laces the early segments. The picture of what is going to happen comes into sharper and sharper focus, and then the thrills start. It is a strong addition to the story so far.

There continue to be opportunities for improvement. One would be to do a little less explaining. There are times when a line of dialogue is explained when the thrust is obvious from the context and the wording. Other times a character’s actions or reactions are explained when it is not necessary; the reader understands what is going on and why.

There are opportunities to cut sentences, some of them of the oddly worded variety. Take the following paragraph:

It takes thirty minutes for the receptors of light in the human retina to fully acclimate to low light conditions. As Petur stood there, his retinas continued in their efforts. Ever so gradually, he could make out more and more shapes.

The second sentence is awkward, describing a process that produces no visible manifestation in a scene. Retinas, mitochondria, and other miniscule body parts can be assumed to be doing their job without reminder. Even the first sentence might be cut, because we all understand the process of growing accustomed to the dark, even if we might not be able to cite the 30-minute figure.

A thorough editing of the paragraph might leave us with something like “As Petur stood in the dark, his vision acquired greater sensitivity and he began to see the details of his surroundings.” Done often enough, this scrubbing of the manuscript would aid its momentum.

Finally, there are times when things are told when they could be shown. Consider the following:

Above, Jeff began to recover from the disabling blow he had received a moment earlier.

What exactly does this recovery entail? Rather than be told that Jeff recovered, we would be more engrossed in a section that made the recovery feel real to us. We need an appeal to the senses. Did his head throb? Did his ears ring? Did he taste blood in his mouth? Was he dizzy? What symptoms receded as he recovered, and how did that affect his actions? With the use of vivid language and imagery, a bit of show here would bring the narrative to life. Here I argue for adding sentences, rather than subtracting them.

As noted before, we end on a cliffhanger, and a good one. I can imagine some desperate scenario awaiting us next week. We shall have to wait to see what happens.

This week’s installment has good movement to it. We get three chapters, all of which follow a thread of plot, but from three different perspectives. There are a couple of moments that tantalize us, and we are left with the promise of trouble to come. A good continuation to the story, leaving the reader eager for next Wednesday.

The first chapter is told from Jeff’s perspective. He gets the news that he is cleared to work for The Island, and for Petur specifically. Given Jeff’s background and the forces arrayed against this tropical Galt’s Gulch, there is all kinds of potential there.

Sophia finally lets Jeff in on the details of her work, which is interesting, but best of all, Jeff catches a glimpse of someone we have probably seen before. Someone Petur has seen before, but who has never been identified. A woman of mystery. Further developments await in the following chapters.

Sophia is the point-of-view chapter in the second chapter, and she meets an attractive woman who, we suppose, is the one who has turned up, briefly, before. At this point it is difficult to say whether she is trustworthy or not. She wants to work on The Island, but does not want to get her job the easy way, which would be a guarantee for her. Her approach is curious, her reasons unclear, and it is far from certain whether she is trustworthy or not. My caution alarm is still going off.

Petur is our guide through the last chapter. He meets with this new character, Elisa. Once again, Elisa sets off alarms with her approach to the meeting. She does nothing blatantly malignant, but her behavior continues to be odd. It is clear she is plotting something, but we cannot tell what.

She delivers some important information to Petur about the host nation of their island, Mexico. Trouble is looming. As readers we already know who is behind it, but now The Island could be in jeopardy.

There were only two problems I could discover, one of them quite minor. The first is the regrettable use of feminine pronouns as neutral pronouns, and the second is a bit of odd phrasing: “Almost every country on the globe had, within the first six months of operation, sent at least one of its citizens to vacation there.” A libertarian especially could find a better, more precise way of phrasing that!

We shall have to wait another week to see where we go from here. This week was successful, and one hopes the momentum is maintained.

The eighth part of Higher Cause is out. Three chapters this time, and a real sense that the main plot is truly underway. I have some suggestions for streamlining, slicing off what does not aid the book and leaving some succulent, lean meat behind.

The first chapter takes us to more new characters, two of them. This is starting to happen with some frequency in the novel, and I am growing a little impatient with it. There is quite an investment of words given to these two men, which comes at the expense of making us wait on the storylines we are invested in. In truth, the chapter does not feel like it ought to have been a chapter all by itself. I would counsel shortening it and tacking it on to the end of another chapter, giving us just the bare essentials. Give us the important points and move the plot.

The last part saw a character introduced and developed at some length only to have him perish before the chapter ended. If these two men are going to figure large in the book, perhaps a little time spent here is OK, but if they are never going to be more than secondary characters — and after such late introductions, one wonders how primary they could possibly be — I think much of this should be edited. Whether it turns out to be worth it will depend on what happens next.

We follow them around in some detail as they perform their task, but one wonders if all these details are necessary. Again, another character’s bio sheet was told to us, rather than giving us an opportunity to get to know him by his words and actions. Did we enter the scene as late as possible and leave it as soon as we could? I do not think so, and the surplus detail exacerbates the problem.

This last point is something to ponder about the work as a whole. Now that it is coming into focus, it is worth thinking about which parts of the story need to be told and which do not. Star Wars, for instance, might have shown us Princess Leia’s squad when they first stole the plans for the Death Star. It might have shown us Luke’s Aunt and Uncle first purchasing their home and farmland. It could have shown us Han Solo and Chewbacca landing on Tatooine and looking for lodging for the night, before meeting with Obi Wan and Luke the next day. Instead, it showed us only the most pertinent parts, the parts directly tied to the story and character development.

It seems to me that there are some parts of Higher Cause that we might take for granted. The story could start with Jeff already having met Sophia, for instance. There is nothing terribly important about when and how he meets her that I can see. A bit of streamlining might have us follow Jeff on one mission and then come home to Sophia, whereupon she tells him she is leaving for The Island. A bit of pruning would bring the story more into focus, and put emphasis on the arresting parts of the plot.

Before proceeding to the next chapter, I wish to point out an awkward sentence, the likes of which have cropped up from time to time in the story. It is a simple matter of lack of clarity and vigor. At the beginning of a paragraph that would go on to describe a building exploding, we read, “The building they were gazing at changed drastically.” The story would profit from taking some of these odd sentences and giving them some energy and some precision, or possibly omitting them altogether.

In the second chapter, I see a good opportunity for a bridge between Petur’s recruiting of the investors — during which time information was doled out sparingly — and the present, a bridge that could span a few of the other discussions about the place. Petur lays out his plans to Jeff, plans which, if memory serves, partially duplicate some other monologues in the piece. A little more pruning might take us from Petur’s recruiting trips, give us an introduction to The Island — including the assassination attempt, of course — and then leave us with Jeff’s arrival, where the full battle plan can be finally laid out.

The third chapter in this installment, one feels, is when the novel really gets started, and I think we could get to this point a little more succinctly. Everything up to now has been set up and preamble, some of which is necessary but much of which could be snipped out. From this point on, the story starts, and with some judicious editing we could arrive at this point more smoothly, and with more momentum.

In part 7, author John Hunt gives us two chapters. The first takes us to a ship on the sea, bound for The Island. The second chapter, through one of the investors, relates some of the tale of Captain Cook in Tahiti. We finally find out something of the nature of the mystery in the Pacific, and there are all sorts of possibilities to be taken advantage of. We shall see how it plays out.

There are some strong story lines going on in the book, but we’ve hit a couple chapters recently where we are left idling a little bit. After introductions are out of the way and the plot comes into focus, I feel like, especially in a book of this nature, we should be building up some speed. Unfortunately, the first chapter in this week’s offering slows down the story. This is extra confounding because there are aspects of the book that interest me that I want to get back to. A bit of separating the wheat from the chaff might be in order.

The first chapter gave me a similar feeling to the chapter with the cross-island race in the previous installment. There was a lot of set up and description and exposition for one important plot point at the end. It was a lot of time to spend on something that could have been mentioned in the next chapter as having happened, or perhaps be related briefly in a paragraph or two.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

Unlike the previous chapter with the race, we are introduced to a new character in this one. We spend a little time getting to know him, in the middle of a story that has not been at all about him up to this point, and then watch him die. It could be that something important was planted that will emerge later, but even so I think the segment should be streamlined. As it is, we witness a death that is not all that moving since we only just met the character. The point of the chapter — its service to the plot — is to show a sabotage of something important for The Island. I would counsel getting to the heart of the matter and eschewing excess verbiage.

END OF SPOILER

The tale told in the second chapter is riveting and important to the story. It does not move the plot forward, which is not a problem in itself though its proximity to a couple of slower chapters is problematic, but it is a key part of the book and entertaining in its own right. It also further obviates the need for a prologue.

Apart from the above, there is a brief scene — brief as the first chapter should have been — where we learn that Jeff is coming with Sophia to The Island. Two important characters are going to meet up and we look forward to the meeting and the possibilities to unfold, especially with a man of Jeff’s talents. Once again, Hunt shows he has a handle on leaving minicliffhangers throughout the narrative.

What is good about the work is definitely engaging, and I think this could be reworked to better effect with some editing. The prologue should be removed, and a couple of involved chapters might be reduced to their essentials and leave the story more streamlined. Even so, the story is still a good one and has me looking forward to Jeff’s arrival.

The sixth week of Higher Cause starts and ends the way the fifth week did: with the Jeff Baddori story line. However, this week there is a return to Petur on the island in between. Both story lines leave us with a tease, a twist of mystery.

The Jeff Baddori story line is going full steam. We left him in dire straits last week, and we begin with his recovery this week. The opening segment takes us through his mostly unconscious state before he fully wakes, and I thought it was well done. When he finally gets back home to the United States, he reunites with Sophia, his love interest, but when he talks to her about his experiences he learns from her that something about his trip to Russia was not as he had thought it was.

It is the last thing we learn before the chapter ends, and it is a great way to leave the reader on the edge of the proverbial cliff. Publishing the novel in serial form makes this sort of thing especially beneficial, even necessary, and Hunt has pulled it off a couple times now to nice effect.

The middle chapter was more problematic. Though at the end there is a discovery that pertains to the story, the prologue of the book above all, it takes a while to get there. The rest of the chapter deals with the “Hash,” a sort of cross-island marathon with odd rules that is more for fun than competition. It is drawn out in great detail and while it is pleasant to see a culture develop on the island, it is not what the story is about. I feel the Hash should have been related to us in briefer form.

After the last Petur chapter, where we saw him under attack, I would have expected his next chapter to deal with some sort of investigation. The novel breezes past this and takes us off on a tangent instead. The story, in other words, sits in neutral for a bit before that discovery at the very end.

Apart from one error at the outset, there was little trouble with grammar. There is the occasional bit of dialogue that I think could be polished, but all in all it was another successful portion. Readers who have come along for the ride so far are unlikely to get off before next week’s delivery, given the nature of the revelation in Jeff’s second chapter.

Terry Pratchett, the author of Snuff, our July Lightmonthly Read, has been diagnosed with an early form of Alzheimer’s. No longer able to type, he now reportedly dictates to a software program. This was the first time I had read a Pratchett novel, and in researching the author and his book, I came across a couple of interesting things. First, the novel was scoring significantly lower on sites like Amazon than other Pratchett novels, and second, many of the book’s detractors were bewildered by what they had read, some of them seriously proposing that someone other than Pratchett had written the work. I can have no opinion on that, but learning that his earlier works were of a markedly different style does make me more inclined to give them a try.

Snuff is a Discworld novel, the most recent in a long line of stories from that fictional world. It tells the story of Sam Vimes, a “copper” in the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork who has married into aristocracy. An incorrigible workaholic, he is practically forced into a vacation outside the city, at the manor that he has inherited. While there, he discovers a murder and, relieved to have something to do that is work-related, investigates.

There was more libertarianism in this work than in the other finalists for the Prometheus Award, save for one, and I appreciated that. The main thrust is an exploration of goblins as sentient beings and Vimes’s chafing at the society that so badly esteems them and so poorly treats them. While much of it is a mere libertarian-friendly argument against bigotry, the novel increasingly turns towards the question of law and rights. Though it never delves as rigorously into the question as one would expect from, say, Hans Hermann Hoppe, there are a number of comments and even a discussion or two that dance around the theme of natural law versus man’s execution of his laws.

The novel started well, I thought. It was a bit short on atmosphere, but long on cleverness both in the dialogue and the narrations. It took its time to introduce us to the new society in which Vimes would be operating, and I generally appreciate patience in the early going.

There were only two things that put me off during the first third or so. One was the stereotypical relationship between Vimes and his wife Sybil. I do not know if the name chosen for his wife is significant, but it is the same as Basil Fawlty’s wife in Fawlty Towers, and the relationship between man and wife in Snuff, though overall far more positive, at least shares some aspects with that in the BBC series. Sybil, in both, is a bit of a scold and a killjoy, but whereas Basil Fawlty is a thoroughly detestable character and therefore we cheer when Sybil scolds, nags, and sometimes downright dominates him, Vimes is forthright, hard-working, a good father, and enlightened on questions of prejudice and intolerance. It irritated me when his wife did not permit him much bacon in his beloved bacon sandwiches, and it irritated me that he put up with it.

My second problem was the unimaginative way in which the principal conflict is introduced. Vimes, through his “copper sense,” suspects that something is not quite right and starts poking around the town to find out what it might be. That and nothing else alerts him to trouble. We are meant to believe that a man, in a place in which he has never been, in a rural setting when he lives and works in an urban one, can simply sniff out a crime because something is off. We are not even given a hint as to what it was that was off, whether the guilty mien of the townsfolk or their carefully averted eyes when he looks their way or anything else. He simply declares himself suspicious of something and begins to demand answers.

After the introductory third of the book, it goes downhill. The time spent meeting the various personalities of the manor and countryside is largely wasted because most of them are not woven into the fabric of the main story. One has to wonder what the point of their scenes was.

A handful of things were set up without further development and little to no payoff. For instance, Sybil takes Vimes to an afternoon tea with a friend of hers who has a number of daughters looking to find a husband and live a life of leisure. Vimes bears it silently for as long as he can but finally winds up delivering an increasingly unsubtle lecture to the ladies about perhaps rolling up their sleeves and doing something useful. This is a lecture that leaves the young ladies stupefied, but pleases the mother. Afterward, Sybil gives him a kiss and thanks him for being so dependable. It is a good scene, but then the daughters disappear until near the end of the book, where it is mentioned in passing that they seem to have obtained employment.

I feel like a more smartly wrought plot would have developed many of these other characters, if indeed they were to be introduced at such length, and incorporated them into the central story, conferring upon them an importance more in line with the time spent on them early on.

Later in the book, we are given a number of scenes back in Ankh-Morpork with the City Watch. These are characters who have figured prominently in previous Discworld novels, but their importance to the present one is a complete mystery. While early on one could easily see how this side story might eventually connect to the larger one, it never does. In fact, the entire thing could be omitted and almost nothing of the rest would have to be altered to accommodate it. It was an absolute waste of time.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

The climax occurs with a large chunk of the book still to go. The main story wraps up, and what is left is a lot of protracted tidying up plus a new storyline involving the villain, an unimpressive one and only newly introduced, in his attempts to escape justice and have revenge on a family whom we never really feel is truly in danger. The number of new chapters one must go through after the story is essentially over is staggering, and I actually started to grow angry.

END OF SPOILER

The final serious flaws in the book are the dialogues, which at the beginning seemed clever but quickly start to test one’s patience. It seems that every character in this world is prone to delivering the same, rambling, page and a half of tangents, asides, and extra verbiage at precisely a time when a real person would utter a single, simple sentence. They are never interrupted, no matter how colossally they fail to keep it concise, and the same generic British flavor permeates every one. Any randomly chosen monologue in the book could have been uttered by any character, save for perhaps Sam’s six year old son and the goblins, whose dialect marks them as distinct (although there is no variation within that population either).

It is as difficult to say why the book went wrong as it is easy to say how. After having written so many books, Mr. Pratchett can be forgiven for pumping out one or two more after the well went dry, and nearly every well does to the artist who lives long enough. Alternatively, it could be the fault of his condition. Given the problems in structure and conception, and given the alleged radical change in writing style — especially with character speech — one can see how a man who can no longer write or type might have difficulty adjusting his writing process.

Whatever the reason, Terry Pratchett has a legion of fans who laud his books. Though many still seem to have enjoyed Snuff, I did not. However, I will not let that deter me from giving him another chance with one of his books that is almost universally adored.

In week five, we return to the story line of Jeff Baddori, the DEA agent we first met in Mexico. The first of two chapters deals with Jeff’s work in Mexico, now a year in the past. We are privy to a meeting of important figures in that country, one of whom has a grand plan the specifics of which are kept from us. One of the men is a drug dealer whom Jeff had fooled into shutting down his operation. The man, Juan Marcos, is still convinced of Jeff’s loyalty, but another has information for him that may change his mind.

In the next chapter, we join Jeff, who is back to work, this time in Moscow. He is on his way to a meeting with some Mafia members, but his instincts tell him something is wrong. It is, and we wind up with some action to end the scene. As a final bit, we get yet another scene with the mysterious seven, who increasingly strike one as fulfilling some sort of Illuminati function. Their conversation hints at the previous chapter, leaving us with possibilities and wondering whether this is a red herring or not.

The first few chapters of the book seem to have been an extended prologue, of sorts, a way to set us in the time and place and give us some background. After the last installment, with our leap forward, it appears we are into the heart of the story. Already some connections between the story lines have been hinted at, and surely they will grow and evolve in future chapters.

The author continues to do a good job with his description and atmosphere. Without spending too much time, he gives us details for multiple senses, and that I appreciate. I think a thing like that makes the world real, brings a reader more into the story.

There is some work to be done as far as editing goes. I would suggest another once-over before a final publication. There are some misplaced commas and words in the recent selection, minor grammatical bits. There were also a handful of strange ways of phrasing something. For instance, “The unfortunate emptying the entire magazine into _______ had contributed to Jeff’s mission” seems like a bland and oddly vague way of conveying the message.

Also, it might profit the story to cut back on some of the adjectives. At one point Jeff is accosted by an “irritating little man”, yet he plays so small a roll one wonders why we needed to know he was annoying and small. If indeed he was irritating, this could be shown, rather than told, in his interaction with Jeff. Most likely, it could be left out altogether. There are a few instances where adjectives do more to clog up the narrative than enliven it.

As a final point, I think that proper names are overused and could be replaced with pronouns in many instances where it is obvious whom we are referring to.

But these are not critical issues. The story continues to entertain, as we keep ascending that narrative hill and mysteries become deeper and more numerous. I wonder what the answers will be.

The next installment takes us into a new phase of the book, about a year forward in time. The project is coming together, with The Island being developed at a break-neck pace. Trouble looms, however, as the project’s enemies have not given up.

The first chapter gets us up to speed on the various aspects of the project. More investors have been found, the right island chosen, and many of the financiers have their own sub-projects under way. The chapter ends with an ominous conversation from a group we have seen before.

Right before we are privy to this meeting, there is a nice passage when Petur takes a moment to relax, stares into the night sky and ponders the heavens. It is a nice moment of thoughtfulness, and a view into an aspect of the character, between episodes in the plot. I quite liked it.

The next chapter gives us a tour of the island. It is shaping up to be a marvelous setting, perfect for a science fiction/epic adventure story. And the end shows us one of the the machinations of the enemy.

It is interesting to note the trend among anarcho-capitalists to look for little micro-worlds in which to escape the state. Higher Cause fits well in this trend. There seems to be a school of thought that the state is such a monstrous beast that liberty lovers need to escape it to thrive, instead of trying to overthrow it from within. Patri Friedman, to that end, is working on a gigantic floating city where a few can live outside the state’s reach. My own work of fiction features something similar to Higher Cause: an island, sheltered from tyrants, where liberty can sprout roots and take hold.

The Shield that Fell From Heaven (read my review) by William Kerr has a character who states that freedom is always to be found on the frontier. If a people want to stay free, they need to keep moving, always on the edge of civilization, just out of the state’s reach. What happens, though, when there is no true frontier any more? It would seem that the drive for the frontier turns into a quest for bubbles of freedom, like the Seasteading Institute. Until space travel and colonization becomes obtainable and cost effective, or until we convince a critical mass of the population of the superiority of the nonaggression principle, these little bubbles, either in real life or in fiction, might be our best bet.

Another movie joins the list of remakes that have, of late, come pouring out of Hollywood. Total Recall has been reimagined for the CGI era, much changed now but sharing just enough plot and details to justify the shared appellation. As I recall, the first Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, was an entertaining bit of science fiction with some action and a satisfying twist or two thrown in. The recent version does not reach the same level, falling short mainly because it invests less in the human element, although it does surpass its predecessor in some areas.

The main characters return with the same names. Colin Farrell plays Douglas Quaid, a blue-collar worker with an itch he does not know how to scratch, a vague sense that something is not right with his life. His wife Lori is played this time by Kate Beckinsale, while the rebel Melina is Jessica Biel. When Quaid goes to Rekall, a company that can insert memories of better times into a client’s brain, they discover that the fake memories of espionage and danger that he is asking for are already in his brain, except that they are real.

Quaid has just a few seconds to process this shock before police burst into the facility and try to arrest him. To his own surprise, instincts and muscle memory kick in and he takes out the squad of cops. The chase is on. When he rushes home and tells his wife, she springs a bombshell on him that catapults the plot forward.

There were a few choices made for the film that I found surprising, occasionally to the movie’s detriment. Mars plays no role in the film, for instance, and the rebels are not mutants. For a movie that put a lot of effort into CGI sets and scenery, a trip to the red planet sounds like an excellent opportunity. Instead, we stay on Earth, the surface of which is mostly uninhabitable due to chemical warfare and pollution.

The loss of Mars is a neutral change, I would say, but the loss of the mutants is regrettable. It was their special abilities that necessitated the convoluted scheme whose revelation was such an inspired twist in the original movie (to say nothing of the lost opportunity for costume designers!). Though this same twist is in the new one, one has to wonder why. Whereas in the first movie the twist was part of a brilliant and devious scheme, in the second movie it is just an unnecessary complication to what should have been an old-fashioned double agent espionage mission. The elements of the 1990 version worked together, but the removal of one element in the new one gutted the logical necessity and therefore the impact of another.

The setting and atmosphere, however, are superior in this new version. Technology is used to good effect to create a futuristic, gritty, crowded slum reminiscent of Blade Runner. The movie even takes a little time at the beginning to set things up, time enough to enjoy the look and feel of the world where humans jostle each other in narrow alleys that fantastic buildings crouch over. It is a shame that with one small exception, the entirety of what follows is a breathless chase. We see this world go by in a blur, rather than have an opportunity to delve into it and explore.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

A pause now and then to catch our breath might have been beneficial in the development of some ideas relating to the world. For instance, the rebels have taken to hiding in the wastelands where nothing can breathe. However, other than a mention in an expository script in the opening, this is forgotten until Quaid is eventually taken to them. This aspect of the world should have loomed large over the movie, should have been incorporated more into the plot. Instead, it is a non-factor until the end, and never achieves more importance than to be the location of the rebel hideout. Its unique features, such as the deadly atmosphere, are not taken advantage of in any way and have no more effect on the action than to force the characters to wear gas masks until they get inside a hermetically sealed building.

END OF SPOILER

Of all the problems the movie has, the greatest is the mechanical indifference with which it treats its characters, which is bound to evoke a similar feeling in the audience. Absent is Quaid’s struggle with the realization of who he was and the decision of who he wants to be. His dissatisfaction with life at the beginning is the only hint of an attempt to create a person, and this is left behind soon enough, to be replaced with fight scenes (if anyone doubts that a movie with fight scenes is perfectly capable of developing characters and relationships, I invite them to watch The Matrix). No one else is the least bit memorable, and few are anything more than scenery. The artistry that went into the creation of the slum where Quaid lives is not supplemented by any attempt to fill it with people. Only extras live there.

In truth, most of what is wrong with the movie has to do with a failure to capitalize on possibilities and develop details. Perhaps the script was written at the same breakneck pace at which the characters fly across the screen. The core of a good movie is there, but a further draft or five of the script would have improved things, one suspects.

There is, though, one decision made that is a pleasant surprise. The heart of this pre-9/11 story still concerns a tyrannical government against a group of downtrodden, separatist rebels bent on their own self-determination. In today’s environment, it is nice to see in a mainstream movie. One could never have an American soldier come to his senses and side with, say, the occupied people of Afghanistan, but the wonder of science fiction is that it can replace the familiar with a more neutral setting, so that ideas can be examined without the stain of prejudice and bias. If Total Recall gets people thinking a little about this topic, it has done enough, even if it was only half as entertaining as it might have been.

Before the third of the Batman trilogy hit theaters, I had heard that The Dark Knight Rises was a film without hope, with a long and dreary narrative that never loosens its grip. It leaves the viewer without a sense of answers.

I saw it and left confused. It saw it again, and left confused again. All the while, I kept wondering if this interpretive effort would pay off. Maybe it’s just another movie and lacks the ideological significance of the previous two.

I too had read several reviews that had condemned the film from a left-wing point view, arguing that it took a cheap shot at the Occupy Wall Street movement, suggesting that it consists mainly of brainless menaces who are easily manipulated by a strongman leader. The filmmakers deny this.

Regardless, this was probably the best political feature of the film.

However, the merit of its warning about left-wing populism was seriously compromised by the portrayal of the Gotham cops as saintly guardians of the social order. Neoconservatives loved this part of the film, made all the better to them because the prisons are full and Gotham is ruled by a civilian-led authoritarian regime of tight law and surveillance — the neocon dream come true.

What’s going on here? Why is the movie so full of mixed messages and, in the end, so unsatisfying?

Finally, it hit me. And this will be perfectly obvious once you hear it.

The problem is that the film gives Gotham (and us) a choice between two forms of despotism, one “left wing” and one “right wing,” and asks us to choose the lesser of two evils. We can have one of two systems: bureaucratic/authoritarian or revolutionary/dictatorial. The idea of a self-managing society is just out of the question. The film biases that choice by showing one as offered by the evil villain and the other by a corrupt, yet stable status quo.

Do you see now? The Dark Knight Rises replicates the choice that the present political system presents to us. We look at the choices and throw up our hands, knowing full well that neither really offers answers to the problem. Watching this film is like watching the Sunday talk shows that feature two flavors of the same poison. It’s the State of the Union address and the response to the State of the Union address, neither of which tells what’s true or gives us a way out.

It’s the two sides of the street fights between the Occupy protesters and the cops. It’s the left versus the right. It’s Republicans versus Democrats. It’s “law and order” versus revolutionary dictatorship. It’s Italian fascism versus Soviet communism. It’s the two sides of the Spanish Civil War. It is also the choice faced by old Rome in its late stage: rule by a corrupt oligarchy of the Senate or a cruel imperial dictatorship of Caesar.

It is the choice given to every nation in its late stages. No truly informed citizen believes that this is all that should be on the menu. But The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t show us another way. It never shows us the option of a self-managing society where people are permitted to shape their own destinies apart from the will of two gangs of political elites. Whoever wins the great struggle over Gotham’s future, the results will be imposed from the top down.

The result is that viewers are left with a sense of hopelessness in the same way that the current political climate denies people authentic hope. Whatever happens will come from the center and top, leaving the rest of us unfree to manage our own lives, keep and use our own property, mind our own business, and cobble together our own human associations. In The Dark Knight Rises, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not even distant memories.

The film opens with Bruce Wayne/Batman in a long period of retirement, living alone in his mansion during eight years of stability in Gotham. But what is this stability, really? It’s not prosperity, because the homes for orphans are full and they can’t get jobs once they are too old to live there. The prisons are jammed with supposedly violent thugs and the leaders of organized crime, swept off the streets thanks to a new draconian law that unleashed government power.

The new law is named after martyred district attorney Harvey Dent. In the first scenes of Gotham, the city is celebrating Harvey Dent Day. The police are in firm control of the city, as led by the police commissioner and the political powers of the city. From the perspective of the elites, nothing is wrong. Life is blessedly boring. Crime has fallen so low that police joke about soon having to chase down people with overdue library books.

Is there corruption? Of course. This is Gotham. In fact, the corruption is so deep and pervasive that the saintly district attorney after whom the present order is named is a lie. He is actually the villain named Two-Face — a perfect metaphor for every member of the political class. In his tenure, he said one thing and did another. People thought he was doing good, but he was secretly doing evil. Even the best men of the current regime in Gotham are willing to spread the lie of the greatness of Dent, solely for the purpose of maintaining government power and immunizing the power structure from criticism.

The strongman dictator Bane sees the vulnerability of this seemingly stable system. He perceives that people are seeking something, some form of liberation, and that he can use this political impulse to solidify his control over Gotham on his way to plotting its final destruction. He recruits the unemployed to work under the city in the sewers to plot his takeover.

Bane has plenty of people willing to risk death to work for him, both because they are desperate and because Bane offers a radical alternative to the present order. Meanwhile, the city elites go on about their daily tasks, completely oblivious to what is happening beneath the surface.

At the appointed hour, Bane initiates shock and awe in the form of massive explosions throughout the city. At the football game where a large portion of Gotham’s citizens are gathered, Bane blows up the field, and announces to everyone that he is the new leader of the city. Their elites have failed and now a people’s revolution is taking place.

“Gotham, take control,” Bane says, “take control of your city. Behold, the instrument of your liberation! Identify yourself to the world!”

The rich are looted. The prisoners are set free to become armed gangs in the Bane regime. Show trials are established on the model of the late stages of the French Revolution. Guilt is presumed and everyone is sent to die, to the cheers of the workers and peasants. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie cower in their homes in fear.

This is when the Dark Knight rises to set the world right again. His most-loyal allies in this army are the massive number of police who had been recruited during the years of seemingly crimeless stability.

As audience members, we are being asked to cheer for Batman because he opposes the bloody and ruthless Bane, who is a Stalin-like figure. But the best possible result that Gotham can get out of this is a restoration and intensification of the previous fascist system of police, prisons, rule by corrupt elites, and mandatory obedience to Gotham’s version of the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security.

As a result, it is hard to cheer. The choice is left or right dictatorship. It is Occupy versus the cops. It is Stalin versus Mussolini all over again. It is Hoover versus FDR. It is the Democrat despot or the Republican despot.

This is the dreadful choice that political systems all over the world have set up. You have to decide, based on your cultural identity and ideological preferences, what form of top-down rule you desire. There’s Plan A or Plan B, but no Plan C. There are two types of prison cells, but there is no way out of the prison itself. Our choices are not really authentic choices. All of us are inchoately aware that whatever the results are, we will not be freer than we were before.

One of the most-compelling images of the film is a prison that is considered the worst prison in the world. It is buried deep in a hole. You can look up 200 feet in the air and see the light, but there is no way that ordinary people can climb out. This is a chilling image of where most people in the developed world are today. We look up and we see a far-distant light, and that light is called liberty. But we don’t see a way to get there.

This much we can see. There is no Dark Knight who will save us. We must save ourselves.

[LFB]

The latest installment consists of three chapters. The story continues to introduce some new characters, but now, separated characters are slowly being brought together.

In the first chapter, we revisit Jeff, one of the characters introduced earlier, as he meets someone whose patronymic suggests a familial connection with another character. There is also an important bit of information at the end of the chapter, something that a reader will probably be expecting. It gives a little jolt of electricity to the story and hints at suspense to come.

The next chapter is the first one that I would offer serious criticism to. It begins by introducing a new character, and I would say that there are too many unimportant details, or details that can come out in another way. This in itself is not a big issue, but midway through the chapter this new character, a recently laid-off or perhaps fired professor comes home to find someone waiting for him there. Suddenly, the narrative jumps out of the head of the professor and into the head of the newcomer, and then we are treated to a few paragraphs explaining who this person is and what he is like. The chapter is near to 2,500 words, and most of it is exposition with a jolting point-of-view change in the middle. It does serve a plot point, but I would have preferred to see it achieve this with more economy.

The following chapter, the last of the recent installment, gets back on track. The possibility that arose two chapters previous is confirmed, and the stakes of the game are expounded on in more detail. In addition, a sound explanation of sound money is delivered with an Austrian flourish.

After three weeks and several chapters, Hunt has a pretty good story going. There are lots of intriguing and epic possibilities lurking ahead, one suspects. I think that things could be trimmed in places, but I have definitely been entertained so far. In another week, we shall see how it proceeds.

“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” is a delightful fable, not only on account of the political themes it explores but also some very fine writing. The short story was first published in Clarkesworld Magazine (Issue 55, April 2011) and then republished by Escape Pod (Episode 343, March 2012). If you’re partial to audio fiction, you can spend a pleasant half hour listening to the story being narrated by Kate Baker (Clarkesworld) or Mur Lafferty (Escape Pod). Yu’s tale has been nominated for a 2011 Nebula Award and a 2012 Hugo and is a finalist for a Locus Award and the Million Writers Award, and it is deserving of all of these honors. Yu, a student at Princeton, is a new author to watch.

Yu’s tale warns of the transitive and cyclical nature of violence — from thoughtless destruction to calculated imperialism. It begins with a boy attacking a wasp nest and ending the uneasy truce between the wasps and his village. The villagers make an amazing discovery: the wasps had inked beautiful maps of the land (China) into the walls of their nest. Soon the wasps were hunted to near extinction and a group of survivors manages to escape.

The leader of the surviving wasps has learned well the hard lessons of realpolitick. Once the new nest has been established, she orders her wasps to expand aggressively. A nearby bee hive is enslaved and forced to pay tribute. The victim of violence has resolved to avoid being the victim ever again by becoming the oppressor.

But the subjugation of the bees has unintended consequences. Some of the bees are educated and trained in philosophy, science, and cartography. One day a bee with an inclination to anarchism is born and so educated and trained, and she produces a brood of anarchist sons…

And, well, just go on and read or listen (or both) to the story. It’s free. You won’t be disappointed. Then return to read the spoilery sections below wherein I get a bit analytical.

MILD SPOILER WARNING

Naturally my favorite lines in the story are the ones about anarchism:

To her sons in their capped silk cradles — and they were all sons — she whispered the precepts she had developed while calculating flight paths and azimuths, that there should be no queen and no state, and that, as in the wasp nest, the males should labor and profit equally with the females.

[…]

“Govern us,” they said to the two wasp-taught anarchists, but they refused.

“A perfect society needs no rulers,” they said. “Knowledge and authority ought to be held in common. In order to imagine a new existence, we must free ourselves from the structures of both our failed government and the unjustifiable hegemony of the wasp nests. Hear what you can hear and learn what you can learn while we remain among them. But be ready.”

The “authority … in common” bit might be given a left-anarchist spin, but I think is too ambiguous to really say. It could just mean we should all be equals in political authority à la the Lockean state of nature, not that we must make all decisions collectively. The “knowledge … in common” bit is suggestive of an anti–intellectual property stance — expressing the belief that ideas cannot be owned, with “in common” being analogous to the public domain.

MAJOR SPOILER WARNING

The ending of the story is somewhat ambiguous and has left people speculating. The old bee colony awakens from winter and happens upon the remains of the anarchist bee colony.

Bees lay dead and brittle around it, no identifiable queen among them. Not a trace of honey remained in the storehouse; the dark wax of its walls had been gnawed to rags. Even the brood cells had been scraped clean.

Some have thought that this means the anarchists all died for want of planning, because, you know, it’s just obvious that there can be no economic plans without a central monopolistic authority to hand them down from on high. Is Yu’s point that an anarchist society is not viable? I do not think so. In fact, she tells us that anarchism is a viable hereditary trait in bees and depicts them implementing plans for the fast-arriving winter. Perhaps they simply did not have enough time from the beginning of their exodus to the onset of winter to prepare enough food and shelter to survive. Perhaps they all starved to death through no fault of their political ideals. Or perhaps they were attacked by a bear.

In any case, the story nevertheless ends on a positive note with the remaining few sentences.

But in the last intact hexagons they found, curled and capped in wax, scrawled on page after page, words of revolution. They read in silence.

Then—

“Write,” one said to the other, and she did.

The idea of anarchy will live on to inspire others.

The next installment of John Hunt’s serialized novel, Higher Cause, is out and ready for reading. Last time we met a couple characters and got a glimpse of a plot. This time we follow one of the two characters, Petur Bjarnasson, as he continues to recruit. We also find out more details of his plan, while the shadow of the villain is cast in Amsterdam.

Mr. Hunt is assembling the pieces of a real thriller — so far. While Petur is recruiting, he runs into his first obstacle, which tells him and us that someone is on to him and does not want him to succeed. He also has an unlikely encounter with someone he had glimpsed in another city. Petur invents an excuse for it, but as readers we suspect something else is up. The locations are also interesting, and it looks like we will be hopping all over the world over the course of the story.

Chapter three is a repetition of chapter one, with a different location and a new target. This time, Petur is recruiting a man named Thomas Standall to invest in his vision. The danger here is for the story to lag as we go over ground we have already gone over. Hunt does a good job of feeding us more information about the plan this time, which does go some way to keeping our interest, but I still got a bit of a restless feeling at the inevitable repetition. If I were to give advice on the structure of the opening, I would suggest omitting the prologue and, in chapter one, showing us only the very end of the sales pitch, where Onbacher agrees to invest $400 million. With this little bit of information and next to nothing else, curiosity would be piqued. Then, in chapter three, we can see the recruitment process rather than have to see a lot of it twice in a short time.

There were a few minor things that could be smoothed out with more editing. Often there are adjectives that should be taken out or that perhaps do not convey exactly what the author intended. Petur, at one point, ascends a “rather innocuous cement entrance stairs.” Innocuous as opposed to what? More so than the average cement entrance stairs? Petur sees “two men, both with dark hair and inadequately shaved faces.” Did they miss a spot, or did they have a couple days of stubble? There is the occasional sentence that could be phrased more elegantly, such as “The fact that drug use was legal allowed for there to be little concern for illicit importation.”

These are not large issues, however, and are easily addressed. The important points are the setting, the characters, and the story. So far, they are promising, and the comments on the two post are in agreement. The book has the added bonus of being unabashedly libertarian, and I do not mean gay-marriage/balanced-budget/medical-marijuana libertarian. This is the real vintage, the radical stuff. Much of chapter three is a history lesson on governments debasing their currency and the dangers this represents to any society.

That’s all for part two. Tune in next week when the next three chapters are published.

Laissez Faire Books is serializing a novel by John Hunt, a libertarian and student of Austrian Economics. Titled Higher Cause, it promises to be an epic adventure story. The first installment (of 22) consists of a prologue and the first two chapters. The remaining installments will be published every Wednesday, followed by my reviews every Friday.

I am generally in favor of eschewing prologues, and though the present one was not uninteresting, at this point I feel it was unnecessary. It seemed to set up a mystery, but then the mystery was solved at the end of the first chapter. Also, all the major points of the prologue were covered in chapter one, in brief. I would say it was better to just get to the first chapter.

However, the author does a good job of enticing us with vague but interesting possibilities. In chapter one we meet Petur, who comes to a rich investor with a proposal in a manner reminiscent of Atlas Shrugged. The details are withheld from the reader, but some great error that threatens humanity has been discovered, and Petur is attempting to set things right, before it is too late, with a market-oriented plan of attack.

In the second chapter we meet Jeff, an undercover agent trying to throw a monkey wrench in the gears of a Mexican drug lord’s machine. He runs into a little trouble and a small twist at the end.

The opening did most of what I want a story’s beginning to do: it laid out the beginnings of a plot and got me intrigued. I might have wished for a stronger sense of character or personality from the two protagonists, but all in all it seems like a decent beginning.

There were a few times when something pulled me out of the story. These culprits ranged from a strange and unnecessary metaphor, to a sudden switch to present tense for one paragraph describing the city of Tijuana to this odd bit, given to us after an extensive physical description of Jeff has already been read: “Jeff, tall and handsome, opened his eyes to see the smaller and plainer man in front of him beaming gleefully.”

I also think the momentum could be better preserved by avoiding jumps back in time. Both the prologue and the first chapter introduce us to a character in a setting, only to jump back in time to tell something else. Both of these instances were avoidable, I believe.

In chapter two we do less jumping back but there is a lot of tell when a bit of show would have been more compelling. Jeff’s character and history are extensively described, soon after we are introduced to the setting and therefore delaying the action. I do not think it necessary to tell us that much about him before the story gets started. It might have been better to give us just a small bit of his character, but shown through his interactions in the scene, not told in exposition.

I do like the way the author describes a scene. Atmosphere is important to a story, in my opinion, and descriptive writing can really bring a piece alive. Hunt focuses on details here and there to bring the smell, look, sound, and feel of a place to the mind’s eye.

All in all, a pretty decent start, and there is no mistaking the libertarian bent. Let us see where it goes from here…

Mild Spoilers

Hans Zimmer has composed an unrelenting score that is being blasted in movie theaters across the world right now. It is not bad music by any means, but why it is launched like an assault at the eardrums I cannot fathom. Underneath this score, if one listens carefully, one can hear a movie playing, accompanied by corresponding images on a screen. The movie is called The Dark Knight Rises, and it is considered a part of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy on the grounds that Batman makes a couple brief appearances in it.

It takes place eight years after the previous installment. Batman, erroneously believed to be the murderer of Harvey Dent, has disappeared, and his alter ego, billionaire Bruce Wayne, now lives as a recluse. A new super villain, Bane (Tom Hardy), has emerged to wreak havoc in Gotham City. Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) is also on the prowl, though whether she is a villain or heroine is less certain until the end of the film.

Bruce Wayne is moved to return the Caped Crusader to the streets of Gotham City as the Bane menace grows. He is pushed to this decision by a police officer with amazing faith in his pure hunch that Bruce Wayne is somehow connected to Batman, as well as the theft of his belongings and personal information by Catwoman, who was working for him as a maid in order to position herself for the strike, and who was helped along by an assistant we never really get to know, but both of them are radical egalitarians with some connection to Bane, who it turns out was behind the guy who hired Catwoman to burgle Bruce Wayne because he wants the information to set Wayne up so that he can financially ruin Wayne so that his people can take over Wayne Enterprises in the ensuing bankruptcy so that he, because he knows who Batman is, can get access to Batman’s arsenal so he can use it to further his plans to…

You know, it’s actually a little complicated. Much like its predecessor. Indeed, the movie shares all of its predecessor’s flaws but got shortchanged on the strengths.

The complex plotline, which does not have to be a problem, is made more difficult to follow by the editing (the problems with Nolan’s shots and editing have been detailed before… pay particular attention in part two where film critic Jim Emerson recuts a sequence himself and makes it work a lot better). Early on, when we need to orient ourselves in the film, scenes and sequences are smashed into each other, things that need to be established are not — or not to the right rhythm — and the result is a semi-incoherent jumble that a viewer must really concentrate on to follow.

An excellent example occurs early on, when Catwoman has been sent, by Alfred (Michael Caine), to deliver Bruce Wayne’s dinner to him. She has never done this before, and with some trepidation she ventures into an unfamiliar part of the mansion. Rather than stay with her on what should prove to be an interesting little trip, we cut abruptly to another scene of Alfred telling Miranda (Marion Cotillard), to whom we have not yet been introduced, that she may not see Bruce Wayne. The sound and pace of this intercut sequence clashes with what it was cut into, and it feels just as odd a moment later when we — again, abruptly — rejoin Catwoman.

This seems to be taking the old advice — to get into a scene as late as possible and out at the first opportunity — to an extreme, leaving the sequence without the full development of a beginning, middle, and end. However, even though we are used to introductions and therefore it feels awkward to suddenly be watching Miranda as if we should already know her, one can follow the action. Obviously, she has requested to see Bruce Wayne. Obviously, Alfred left the kitchen where he gave Catwoman her marching orders and met Miranda along the way, but it is jarring to view these things in the manner in which they have been presented.

There is also a real problem with character action, motivation, and plausibility. I was never satisfied with the conclusion of the previous film. It felt to me that they had an interesting situation they wanted to arrive at, but had to force the story to get there, and it wound up being implausible. I also found the extreme importance to the general morale of protecting Harvey Dent’s reputation to be silly. This aspect rears its implausible head in the present movie in the form of The Dent Act, a law passed at some level in our ostensibly federal system which has virtually wiped out organized crime (no, it is not drug legalization: that would actually make sense). There were a handful of other things in The Dark Knight Rises that struck me as odd, things characters did that did not appear to be the best way to get where they wanted to go, but of course these things served to move the story where the storytellers wanted it.

Implausibility is a tricky thing for a storyteller. In some settings, a viewer will accept what he would not countenance in another. Christopher Nolan has chosen a very realistic approach to his movie, but that brings out the various slips in logic like a blacklight brings out stains. The very attempt to meld a superhero with a strictly realistic approach to moviemaking is an odd mesh in itself. Truth be told, I think Burton was better served by his fantastical approach to Batman.

Where The Dark Knight Rises differs from its predecessor is in the villain, Bane, who is not as interesting as The Joker. Played by Heath Ledger in one of the best performances I have ever seen, The Joker was a psychopathic menace, bent on destruction for its own sake. His goals were clear and he acted to achieve them. His flippant tales of life as a child with his father, each one contradicting the next, was a perfectly chilling way to get across his cavalier attitude toward evil, his mocking of any attempt to understand him.

Nothing is that clear about Bane. His motivations do become evident, but only in a murky way. By degrees we piece together his intentions, a project made more difficult by the fact that his early endeavors are only supporting his main goal. By this I do not mean to suggest that his entire master plan should have been revealed to us from the outset, but it would have been nice to understand what passions motivated him. We are also left with the impression that his actions are not really the best way to achieve his goals, in the final analysis, but they are a great way to achieve a bombastic ending to a movie.

Bane has a breathing apparatus that affects his speech, but whereas this sort of thing enhanced Darth Vader’s character, it detracts from Bane’s because we cannot understand him. He has some sort of accent, I think, which is garbled a bit by the hardware in his mouth. Remember that Christian Bale plays his Batman with a deep, throaty growl, so that when the protagonist and antagonist start yelling at each other, it sounds like a spat between a gas-powered weed whacker and a man struggling to scream under water.

There are reasons to commend as well as criticize the movie. The acting is good, the production values are spectacular, and the action is occasionally thrilling. I would be more inclined to dwell on the positive aspects were it not for the fact that the movie is, to this libertarian soul, positively hateful. I remarked to my friend, as we watched it, that it seemed that Karl Marx had a hand in writing the script.

Egalitarianism of the most extreme variety is the order of the day, and class warfare is brewing, a sentiment that Catwoman makes the cornerstone of her existence. Theft from the rich, some insist, is perfectly alright. They did not deserve their wealth and possessions in the first place.

It would be unduly optimistic to think that the rich in America have uniformly gotten their riches through the honest discipline of the market. I do not pretend to know what percentage of wealth is earned and what stolen, through various artifices, nor do I conceive of the issue in the simplistic terms of thief/non-thief. There are, after all, some rich people who have benefited without having lobbied for the benefits, sometimes without even realizing that the field has been tilted. Others with more principle grow rich while opposing parts of the system in which they accumulated their fortune. What I can say with certainty is that any blanket aspersion cast on the entirety of the rich, however we define them, is as stupid and bigoted as all such denigration always is, whether the object of our scorn be men, blacks, Muslims, gays, the rich, or any other group.

For all its purported philosophical sophistication, there is no effort in the movie to draw distinctions between the deserving rich and affluent thieves. I do not even expect an understanding that, in a voluntary trade, both parties usually come out the better for it. I set the bar far lower: merely demanding consideration for each individual on his own actions rather than as a member of a group. You know, the sort of thing progressives insist on for their favored groups, but even with the bar lowered the filmmakers trip over it.

Lest anyone point out that the egalitarian arguments are made by the bad guys, I will remind them that at no time do the good guys even attempt to refute the madness of these little Robin Hoods. The egalitarianism comes across as an attempt to humanize the bad guys, rather than a way to characterize them as evil. Batman seems to oppose their plans more out of habit than any real commitment to property rights.

The movie is neither a poor nor a good one, on the balance. It is a shame that, for those of us committed to the code of property rights and freedom, whose desultory pursuit has allowed some societies to stagger out of the misery of poverty, this movie turned out to be so odious.

Ernest Cline is a science fiction fan and video game enthusiast who, as a former tech support employee, has spent most of his working hours surfing ’80s pop culture on the internet. As an author, he has successfully drawn from these interests to write an engaging story that weaves new technology with low-tech nostalgia. Although he has previously written about the gaming world (his screenplay Thundercade follows a video gamer’s quest to restore his championship gaming title), Cline takes the concept to an exciting new level in his science fiction novel Ready Player One, Prometheus Award finalist and our June Lightmonthly Read, which offers the reader a full immersion into the world of virtual reality gaming.

Ready Player One begins in the year 2044, and protagonist Wade Watts doesn’t have much going for him in the desolate Portland Avenue Stacks. He’s an overweight, unpopular orphan living with his aunt in a crowded RV park, where the RVs are stacked up to 20 units high in an effort to accommodate everyone in an overpopulated city fraught with power outages and gunfire. Wade finds solace by playing video games and watching reruns of family sitcoms from the ’80s, trying to lose himself in a decade when the world was a simpler and friendlier place. He also spends much of his free time logged into the OASIS, a massively multiplayer online game that has evolved into a virtual reality-based global network.

The online world of OASIS is not without conflict, however. The creator of OASIS, James Halliday, died five years before without naming an heir. At his behest, a contest is being held to determine who will control the OASIS. In his video will, Halliday explains that he has hidden three keys (Copper, Jade, and Crystal) to three gates in the simulated world of the OASIS. The first person to pass through all three gates will become heir to Halliday’s multi-billion dollar estate and gain full control of the OASIS.

Desperate to find a way out of the Stacks, Wade becomes a gunter (short for “egg hunter,” a reference the Easter egg hidden in the video game Adventure). Because Halliday had an infatuation with ’80s pop culture, his death sparks a global obsessive interest; spiked hair and acid-washed jeans come back into style, and gunters attentively study the decade’s fads and trends in hopes of discovering a clue to the keys’ locations.

Wade hopes his own vast knowledge of the decade will give him an edge in the competition, but the odds are against him. He must race to find the keys before they are found by another gunter — or worse, by the Sixers, employees of the dangerous Nolan Sorrento and Innovative Online Industries, a corporation set on gaining control of OASIS at any cost.

While the plot is engaging, the most captivating aspect of the book by far is the world of the OASIS. Through the eyes of Wade’s avatar, Parzival, the reader is invited to explore the virtual world in great detail, and we are able to experience the action firsthand as Parzival travels through the OASIS in his search for the elusive keys. Many of the OASIS zones are modeled after classic video game environments, and some of the more interesting action in Ready Player One takes place in virtual reality arcades, with the characters acting out dialogue from cult classics such as the movie WarGames and trying to beating high scores on the arcade games Joust and Pac Man.  The world of the OASIS is described in great detail; however, little attention is given to the relationships between the characters, and as a result they seem slightly less important than the setting itself.

While Ready Player One has many great elements, there are a few other minor problems with the story that should be pointed out. The book starts with an exciting prologue, but the first few chapters were very slow paced.  Too much time passes without action, with the author writing lengthy descriptions of themes that later prove unimportant to the plot and introducing others that remain undeveloped.

A related problem is that details of the OASIS itself and various pop culture elements seem excessive at times. When considering Cline’s target audience, one wonders why explanations of avatars and chat rooms are necessary. Cline’s readers are most likely already familiar with these concepts, so this only serves to stand in the way of the enjoyment of the story.

In contrast, there were also times when the author intentionally kept information hidden, and dramatic conflicts were resolved by divulging that actions had been taken in the past that allowed the character to easily sidestep the problem. This made the resolution a bit unbelievable, almost as if a bit of cheating had taken place on the author’s end.

Because the villains in the story represent an evil corporation and there is mention of an ongoing global energy crisis and catastrophic climate change, the story seems to have a slightly leftist slant. There is a refreshing passage that states the characters’ preference for private education in the OASIS, which is funded entirely by private charity, because the public school system is “underfunded” and overcrowded.

To my dismay, however, there was nothing overtly libertarian to be found elsewhere in the story. There is virtually no government presence beyond a few minor regulations — such as those pertaining to the purchase of weapons and body armor from vending machines — but it is unclear whether the author views having so little government as a sign of progress or is using the absence of regulation to explain why there is a three-decade Great Recession taking place.

Living Proof is the opera prima of Kira Peikoff, the daughter of Ayn Rand’s intellectual heir, Leonard Peikoff. In it, Peikoff uses a near-future setting to explore the logical conclusion of certain prolife arguments with which she disagrees. The plot of this thriller is well-structured and the writing, notwithstanding the occasional imperfection, is decent. However, in the end it gave me the same feeling I get from a dish made from good ingredients that nevertheless wants salt. Or pepper. Or oregano. Or something.

Arianna — a protagonist in the Randian tradition — is a brave, rational, free-thinking and beautiful doctor working at a fertility clinic in New York City in the year 2028. Embryos have been given the same legal status as human beings, and the Department of Embryo Protection is tasked with making sure that embryos not used in implantation are frozen and taken care of instead of being disposed of. The DEP chief becomes suspicious of Arianna when her clinic experiences a sudden and inexplicable surge in popularity. He sends Trent Rowe undercover to earn Arianna’s trust so he can find out what she is up to and if she is “murdering” embryos. What Trent discovers will challenge his beliefs, and he must make a choice between what he was raised to believe, and what Arianna has taught him.

Peikoff’s prose is decent, although she occasionally misuses words, which sound like notes of a melody played flat. On page 58, for instance, she uses “pretext” when she means “pretense.” On page 55 she uses “oblivion” when she cannot possibly have meant it.

She also has an affinity for metaphors, some of which go off well and help elucidate an idea. For instance, on page 261 she writes, “But recently the cells had been tantalizingly close to the goal, developing as astrocytes or microglia instead of oligodendrocytes, like Cokes instead of Diet Cokes.” However, there are just as many times when no metaphor is needed, or the one she chooses takes the reader out of the story. A good example is on page 163, where a character is said to be “trapped in an ethical straitjacket, laced tight with emotional strings.” It is not that the metaphor cannot convey the idea, but the particular one used seems a little silly and distracting, like a knowledgeable professor whose belly spills over the waistline of the pants he bought when he was 40 pounds lighter.

Quibbles aside, the novel generally reads smoothly and the story it tells has a solid structure. We are hooked into the plot, and know the stakes, when Trent is given the task of infiltration. Moral dilemmas develop, a few obstacles are put in his way and a sense of urgency is introduced as time begins to run out on both sides, for different reasons. Finally, everything leads to a climax with a short resolution afterwards.

The author undeniably has a grasp on this aspect of storytelling, but the story lacked the impact it might have had. The characters tend to be bland, often representing aggregates of young urban professionals rather than being unique individuals. When the characters are not bland, they lean towards the implausible, such as the head of the DEP who turns out to be a devoutly religious crusader who is enraged at the idea of the disposal of embryos. A little cartoonish, he would probably better represent the activists who lobbied to protect embryos rather than the police and bureaucrats who enforce the laws. There was only one character whom I truly found interesting, and this lack of engagement robs the story of appeal.

There were also a lot of insipid throwaway scenes, usually taking the form of a brief visit to a character to remind us that he is still in the story. During these scenes, the character does little or nothing, but we visit his thoughts to review how he feels about the situation. The story might be scrubbed clean of these bits and come out better for it.

One final thing that distanced me from the story were a few unlikely actions taken by the characters. For instance, to aid Trent in his infiltration, his family and the family of his boss are brought in to stage a dinner for Arianna. The problem is, many of them have to pose as people they are not to maintain Trent’s deceptions, but these are normal people, untrained and unused to this sort of counter-intelligence game. I find it difficult to believe that real investigators would even think to use a tactic like this.

There is a Randian flare for the dramatic that pops up now and then, such as when Arianna begins to take piano lessons and the notes she plays, even from simple scales, are described in effusive terms, leaping from her delicate and deft fingers. Her very soul can be felt even in these simple warm ups, something that I have never experienced in real life but have run into many times in Ayn Rand’s stories. Whether or not this is a flaw I suppose is up to the reader, but I rolled my eyes at it. The ghost of Rand definitely informs much of the work, whether it be the Romantic departures from realism, the praise of reason, the denigration of religion, or the theme of the oppressive state hampering people of quality from making the world a better place. Absent is the virtue of selfishness, which is fine by me.

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One last mention might be made of that spice that seemed to be missing. The story went through the proper motions of buildup and climax, but there was nothing truly arresting. When Trent finds himself unsure of which side he is on and starts lying to both sides, more might have been made of his predicament. There were a few obstacles and character responses to them, but not as much as I felt the story needed. There were no unforeseen twists and no momentum changes. Once the stakes are known, the reader already has a good idea of how things will play out.

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I enjoyed the book, though I was not captivated by it. Being a first work, it leaves some room for improvement but also demonstrates definite skill. A reader could do far worse than invest some time in Living Proof, and might do well to keep an eye on Kira Peikoff. If her sophomore effort improves on some of the weak points mentioned here, it could be a very fine work.

One cannot help but notice that, cinematically speaking, director Ridley Scott’s best days seem to be behind him. They were glorious days, though short lived; nothing after Blade Runner could compare to his second and third films. One might also note that he left his best days behind at precisely the time when he left behind science fiction. It is understandable, then, if one supposes that a return to the genre that made him might also be a return to form. Alas, it is not so. Scott’s latest feature, Prometheus, is a disappointment even for one whose expectations were not that lofty.

Prometheus returns us to the universe of Alien, that sublime work of sci-fi horror that remade an entire genre. This time, it is the late twenty-first century, a few decades before Ripley, Dallas, Parker, and the rest will land on LV426. Cave paintings all over the world, and from many different millennia, have been found to depict a giant gesturing to the stars as smaller, human forms worship him. Through means not satisfactorily explained, two scientists, Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) and Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), determine that this is an invitation from a race that created our kind. Not only that, but they are able to pinpoint the star system to which we have been beckoned. The infamous Weyland-Yutani corporation bankrolls a scientific expedition to the system and danger ensues.

A strange approach to the movie is taken, one which is a peculiar fit for a prequel to Alien. Whereas the original started when the story started, introduced us to believable characters whom we slowly came to know only by how they acted and interacted, and got down to the business of slowly creeping us out before scaring us senseless, Prometheus attempts a good deal more. It begins with an ill-advised prologue in which we see one of the mysterious beings, instead of discovering them for the first time with the crew later in the movie. After the prologue we see the prelude to the expedition, the scientists discovering one of the cave paintings, something rendered entirely unnecessary when they explain it all to the crew anyway after coming out of hypersleep. They even spend some time with character back story.

One of the keys to horror is how much is shown to the audience. It is often scarier to see less; perhaps I should say usually scarier. Alien achieved a consonance with this idea in its streamlined script. We might have been shown a prologue of the original Space Jockey crashing into the planet, followed by a title saying 2000 YEARS LATER, as we faded to the Nostromo crew finishing up final preparations for the trip back to Earth. We might have been given all sorts of backstory for the characters, but we were not. We saw only enough to orient ourselves and connect with the seven men and women on board, and the movie opens as late into the story as it can. This informational parsimony is a key to Alien’s enduring success; it sets the right tone, keeps us in the right frame of mind for a horror flick. Prometheus, I am sad to report, overindulges.

If that were its only sin, it would be forgivable and the movie still a success. Unfortunately, the script is so poorly written that I am tempted to declare that the reason for Lost’s decline has been discovered. All sorts of mistakes are committed, mistakes one would not expect to see from a mildly talented amateur.

First of all, there is no attempt to show us competent science in progress, and this happens more than once. When the cave painting is discovered, Holloway asks Shaw if she has dated it yet. This despite that fact that she only found it a few minutes earlier before calling for him to come see. Yet she gives him an answer accurate to within a millennium. I have never worked with cave paintings, but I just feel like this is implausible.

Later on, when the ship arrives at its star system and the crew awake, they eat one meal, have a pep talk, and directly land on their target moon without pause, preparation, or deliberation of any sort. I have never flown a starship, but I just feel like this is implausible. They rather quickly find a likely spot for alien activity and land next to some ancient structure. Without pause, preparation, or deliberation, they exit the ship and go exploring, showing less prudence and circumspection than one would expect from a Kindergarten class’s field trip (they rush inside, start pressing and prodding things and even take their helmets off when they learn the air is breathable). I have never excavated and explored alien structures, but I just feel like this is implausible.

Characters behave in strange ways just so something plotful can happen. When they first enter the structure, they come across an alien cadaver. The geologist becomes angry that they are spending their time studying it because it has nothing to do with his line of work. Instead of being fascinated by the discovery of an intelligent extraterrestrial species, or just getting down to doing his work with his own equipment, he yells at Shaw and declares that since there is nothing there for him, he is going back to the ship. While completely without logic of any sort, it does get him separated from the group so that scary things can happen. In another instance, one character deliberately infects another, and the motive is never revealed. But it does allow for an awesome fight scene later on.

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Even the laws of science itself are cast aside and shattered. A procedure is performed on a cadaver so old that it should have been dust, but they are able to jam something into its skull and use electricity to spark some life into it, despite knowing little about its anatomy. The Space Jockey’s DNA is revealed to be an exact match to ours. Even setting aside the Darwinian problems with this, no human who ever lived has come out looking like what these things look like; they simply cannot be an exact match to our DNA (so the previous point still stands).

Also, the head of a nasty little creature is cut off and it regrows in less time than it takes to read this sentence. I realize that the one implausible point of Alien was that the chestburster somehow grew to enormous size in such a short time without, apparently, eating much. But at least one character expressed surprise at this, a surprise we all shared, and the discovery of the skin it was shedding, like a snake, made for a nice step in the development of that thread.

Prometheus’ deviations from reality are many and entirely without rhythm or development. They just throw one thing after another at the viewer. Worst of all, perhaps, are the physical feats performed by a character mere seconds after getting a C-section.

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Finally, the cheap and lazy approach to the script leaves certain threads undeveloped or unfinished. They are merely forgotten. To cite one example, there is a big fight scene with multiple fatalities that occurs in the hangar/garage of the human spaceship. It happens and then is forgotten. Did anybody ever clean up the mess? Did anybody ever miss anyone who died there, or bury the bodies? Did it damage anything vital to their mission?

As far as I recall, the fight scene had no effect on the rest of the movie, and yet the human response to something like that is a good engine to drive the plot. In the original Alien, the death of Kane led to an effective scene where his body was shot out into space. Even if the fight scene had been the most wonderful thing ever filmed, it still hurts the integrity of the larger project because it has no effect on the movie, like a rock thrown in a lake that makes no splash or ripples. One gets the sense that it is there merely to be an action scene, and once the action is over, the writers did not want to be bothered with it anymore.

Despite some gorgeous photography and philosophical pretensions, Prometheus mainly deals in the sort of experiences one can get from a roller coaster. To do more, it would have to honor logic and character actions, make sure that the scenes were not only impeccable, but that they came together to form a coherent whole. These elements of logic of character and plot are what can pull an audience into the story and make it special. These are the elements that make it a story in the first place, and not merely an action demo reel.

Prometheus, however, is a cheap story, and it cheapens the Alien universe. I long ago wrote off Alien Resurrection as a movie that never happened, but that film did not try to ruin previous films. Prometheus might be harder to erase. It took the tantalizing enigma of the Space Jockey and killed its wonder by solving the mystery. Perhaps if the solution had been captivating it would have done no damage, but it turns out the Space Jockey race was engaged in acts fully as illogical as the actions of some of the characters in the movie. Maybe the project was simply doomed from the start as soon as it set its sights on that cryptic, fossilized pilot from another planet, the one who fascinated generations of fans. After all, who would remember a serial killer of prostitutes in London in 1889 if his identity had been discovered?

Science fiction prequels are going to get a bad name. George Lucas and Ridley Scott have taken the best franchises the genre has to offer and given us lame precursor stories, though Scott’s is nowhere near as bad as Lucas’s. Even if there is nothing in the present film to appall the libertarian — the theme of the evil corporation is hardly even detectable — there is plenty to displease cinemagoers of all political persuasions. And now I see that Ridley Scott is going to work on a Blade Runner project?

Someone stop him before it is too late.

In the Shadow of Ares is a tale with a marvelous setting and a great central idea that, as it unfolds, wraps the reader up and will not let go. It is also a minarchist libertarian tale, in that the dangerous, punitive, and stupid aspects of government are laid bare while the readers are urged to hold government in check to allow the market to better flourish. There is a lot here to like, but there are also a number of defects that mar the work, though nothing to such a degree and of such a nature as to make one pessimistic about better future prospects for the first-time authors. They have shown that they can design and fashion a stirring tale; let us hope that they polish the next one.

Amber Jacobsen is the First Kid on Mars, the first child born there to parents who were among the earliest colonists. It is thought that Mars is too dangerous for children, and Amber’s parents have been chided for deciding to remain and have a child there. Even in her teenage years, she remains the only child ever to be born on Mars.

Having homesteaded some land where they live in an airtight “hab,” sheltered from the lethal conditions on the Martian surface, Amber’s parents, Aaron and Lindsey, have earned the ire of the Mars Development Authority, a quasi-governmental organization that no one will stand up to and that wishes to extend its power and control over every colonist on the red planet. In addition to the effrontery of daring to live free, Aaron Jacobsen has also made enemies with one of the officials at the MDA. When the MDA secretly sabotage the Jacobsen residence, they are forced to find another place to live.

They make their way to The Green, a relatively large settlement that figures to be of central importance in the new Martian society as soon as their land claim vests. This the MDA does not want to see happen, because it means they will lose all authority over them, both the authority spelled out in The Charter — analogous to the US Constitution — and any authority that the MDA has helped itself to.

Amber finds herself unwanted because of her age, though she yearns to be taken seriously. While trying to prove herself to the people of The Green, she also becomes deeply invested in the mystery of the Ares III mission, which disappeared a couple decades before under perplexing circumstances. She starts to suspect that someone who knows more than she is trying to prevent her from making any headway in her search and is willing to take criminal measures if necessary.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment in the story, for me, is that it creeps up on the edge of a real radical libertarianism, but then shies away (the second disappointment would be an implied support of intellectual property, which simply has no place in a libertarian order). There is no better example of this than the endless bickering with the MDA over The Charter. They argue about whether it is a living document or meant to be taken at its word, but never do they question the legitimacy of the document itself, nor the reason the MDA should be telling them what they can do on Mars as if it owned every stretch of the planet’s surface. This is not a criticism of the merits of the novel, merely a wish to see more Rothbardianism in my literature, especially in a work that comes so close.

There are other problems too, though they cannot hide the talent that is definitely there. The villains are caricatures, for example, and never quite elicit the response in the reader that the authors are going for, because they cannot be taken seriously. Not only that, but there is an implausibility to the interactions of characters, particularly enemies, that is difficult to get past at times. When the authors want to demonstrate something between characters, they lay it on good and thick. Even the familial interactions of the Jacobsens, which do not suffer the kind of overplayed antagonism of so many other relationships, never rise above the formulaic kind one can find by the dozen on any number of television stations when sitcoms are running.

More problematic still is the structure of the book, the layout of the plot. It takes a long time to discover what it is really about. This is strange given the intricacy of the central plot and how many setups for it were introduced early on, seeds that will bear fruit later. The authors, then, either knew what the book was about when they wrote the first act and simply did not want to get into it yet, or went back later, with things clearer in their minds, and added in needed details but without streamlining the story.

When the novel does find itself, there follow about twenty to twenty-five chapters that had me constantly reaching for my wife’s Kindle during every spare moment so that I could read a little further. Though character interactions were mediocre, the inner life of the main character as revealed to us makes us care about her. The actual investigation into the Ares III mission, especially as it gets going, is truly a wonder of well-placed details, plausible dead ends, and red herrings that fit together without, as far as I can tell, a single slip in logic. Bravo. Hollywood could use a couple writers who can make a mystery like that.

The villain is finally revealed and we get some gripping life-or-death action scenes, which are well set up and even turn out plausibly enough to keep my interest. When the laws of physics are broken too badly too often, I grow bored. I most definitely was not during In the Shadow of Ares’ climactic scenes.

I did grow bored in the score of chapters that followed the climax. The main point of the story has been resolved, for good or ill, the villain revealed, the chase and fight scenes enacted, and the winner declared. However, lots of unsynchronized story arcs have to be wrapped up, but the momentum has been lost. No one wants to munch on crackers and brie after the chocolate cake has been devoured. These items need to be rebalanced within the story, so that they can come to their conclusion during or before the climax, with one last chapter to show the result of The Green’s struggle with the MDA. A denouement cannot be a full quarter of the book.

The first Lightmonthly Read gave us a book that was at times tedious, but often a true thrill. To give a net grade would miss these details, but all in all I would say I had some fun reading it. I also think there is real talent in this writing duo, considering their obvious technical knowledge and their ability to forge a top notch mystery. One is left hoping that their sophomore effort will come with an increased mastery of the other aspects of storytelling.

Having never read a Ken MacLeod novel before, I found my introduction to him to be a bit rocky. The opening chapters of The Restoration Game were replete with irritants. After that it settled down and started to tell an interesting story, but never quite managed to completely convince. It had the right ingredients for a better tale, but it could not get the doses right and wound up feeling, for all its positive points, out of balance.

The story’s protagonist, Lucy Stone, spent most of her childhood in the fictional Soviet Republic of Krassnia, but now works for a computer game company in Edinburgh. Her company is hired to make a Krassnian version of a popular medieval computer game, and her heritage and lingual abilities, rare to be found in the West, are the reason her company was chosen. There is more to this request for a Krassnian video game than is initially apparent, however. Lucy’s mother is a former CIA operative, and another man who might be her father is mired in the same kind of political intrigue. Through them Lucy gets entangled in an international plot the details of which are murky but the danger in which becomes increasingly apparent. Finally, she finds herself on a mission with consequences so far reaching that “epic” does not seem to do them justice.

The novel opens with a prologue written in second person, which constitutes the first irritant. I do not see the point of second person, unless it is to make the author seem a little overbearing, informing a reader what he is doing instead of telling him about a story. To me, it seems like a cheap way to “be different.” It is fortunate that there are only three second person chapters in the book, all with a commonality that one supposes the shared difference in perspective is meant to highlight.

It is unfortunate that the second chapter is a flash forward to near the end of the book. In it, the narrator is clearly on the verge of a very traumatic experience, but its effect is attenuated by the fact that we do not know what the problem is, or The Other Thing that she refers to, and we cannot much care about her since we have not gotten to know her yet. Any effect of the mysteriousness of this Other Thing evaporates when we realize it is a flash forward, and must make another jarring jump before the story can get started.

Finally, three chapters in, we are introduced to a protagonist at the beginning of a story and start to get to know her. Her narration style reminds one of a fourteen-year-old girl on the phone with a fellow teenybopper. Soon after, she jumps into backstory. So the initial chapters of the book consist of odd bits of second person narrative, an annoying narrator with a less than propitious voice for this sort of story, and leaps from one time frame to another that are apt to give the reader whiplash. We get a perspective of someone, us apparently, outside our universe, then a future time frame, then a present time frame, then a past time frame.

This is the sort of thing that makes me regret opening a book in the first place, but there were two redeeming qualities about the beginning, qualities that gave me hope that the book would get better (the narrator’s voice also got less irritating, or perhaps I just accustomed myself to it). The first was a bit of cleverness after the prologue, the kind you do not get from writers of no talent.

I stopped dead. My rolling case, in accordance with Newton’s first law of motion, kept rolling and collided painfully with my calf muscles. It then rebounded (third law), toppled over (second law), and made me stumble (Murphy’s law).

The second was a small section in the prologue that hints at a profound and very arresting idea:

“… you have brought those poor creatures to the brink of disaster. Nuclear war, ecological catastrophe, and what else? Oh yes — cultural calamity, as they discover they are in a simulation. How long will it take for that to dawn on them?”

“Blame the SPs for that,” says Andrea Memmius. “They used an off-the-shelf navigational package as the basis for their extrasolar astronomy simulation. Naturally it is Ptolemaic. They were not to know—”

“That their virtual creations would one day send probes to the edge of the solar system? That they might just notice that the galaxies are spinning too fast? That the underlying physics of their world are inconsistent?”

“So far,” says Caro Odom, “the sim-people have shown remarkable creativity in rationalizing these… dark matters!”

We are given to understand, then, that our universe is a simulation. It is also what I interpret as a dig at modern conventional physics, and one that maybe they have coming (for those interested in these sorts of things, there is, on page 233, a clear reference to MOND). However, it comes as a disappointment to discover, by degrees, that the story is too small for a concept like that. It has too little time to apportion to it, given the other tasks it sets for itself.

MAJOR SPOILER MAJOR SPOILER

This conceit of a simulated universe is forgotten until the end of the novel. When Lucy finally, at the end of her mission, finds evidence of it, it feels tacked on, a foreign element in a story that is not intrinsically about it. The idea is not, insofar as I can tell, hinted at, talked about, or developed in any way after its introduction in the prologue. Then it resurfaces in the final act.

Perhaps The Restoration Game could be improved by omitting the prologue, by introducing a mystery whose elements baffle investigators through the course of the book until the final answer is hinted at in the end, when Lucy discovers a great secret. That way, it would have been a part of the story the whole time, but subtle enough not to give the game away, rather than an addition on the front and back of a story otherwise unconcerned about the topic. And better yet, it might have been left tantalizingly inconclusive rather than definite.

END OF SPOILER END OF SPOILER

Lucy’s family history is delved into several times, either by her telling us what she knows, or reading an old diary and relating it to us, or hearing stories from others who were there. The backstory itself is intriguing, but the time devoted to it is out of proportion to the other elements of the novel. By the time it is finally told, with the exception of an important reveal at the end, we are over halfway through the book. Meanwhile, very little is advanced or developed in the current timeline. Lucy meets a guy, they fall in love, she works on her video game project.

The current timeline is mostly to put her in situations so that the reader can read more of the backstory. Then, with the majority of the book’s pages used up, the current timeline suddenly kicks into gear and Lucy goes on a very rushed mission that runs her smack dab into, as I have said, a gigantic idea that towers over the small novel like a colossus.

Complaints aside, I did enjoy the book. The backstory is too much, but it is interesting. Several generations of Lucy’s family are explored and they have some remarkable history. I also felt the author did a crafty job of mixing the events of his story with the turmoil in Ossetia and Georgia that happened in real life. Apparently, these unforeseen events, occurring while he was writing the book, forced him to make some last minute changes. This he pulls off marvelously.

The one thing I cannot figure — not about the book per se, but rather about reaction to it — is why this would get a Prometheus Award nomination. I do not see anything particularly libertarian about it. It explores some of the nastier aspects of communism, but even socialists are given to do that once in a while. Indeed, in seeing the sensitivity to nuance with which the author paints the different brands of communists, one might suspect him of being, if not in the fold, some sort of ideological cousin. Certainly he has gotten to know the movement.

It also does not paint the CIA in a wonderful light, but a book cannot be called libertarian simply because it opposes some of the same things a libertarian does. There are no libertarian characters; the sympathetic ones are just about uniformly social democrats. This might be realistic for a novel principally set, in one timeline at least, in modern-day Edinburgh, but it is hardly libertarian. Nor is there any attempt, so far as I can discern, to make an understated libertarian point about the things going on in the book.

I suppose that is not my concern. The Prometheus Awards may nominate whom they wish, and one imagines there is a paucity of truly libertarian material out there. What does concern me is whether or not I like the book, and I did. Sort of.

After a series of movies about individual superheroes, movies that gave us their origin stories, we have finally been treated to the culmination of the last few years and so many millions of man-hours: The Avengers. The films leading up to it were generally fair to middling, I thought, with the first Iron Man rising maybe half a skosh above that level. The latest comes heralded by uniformly positive reviews. It is, we are told, much better than one would expect. According to most reviews, there is a greater focus on character than one usually gets in an action movie, but there is no skimping on set pieces. The reality, for me, was more of the same: half a skosh above decent.

Loki, Thor’s brother and fellow god, wants to rule the Earth. He makes a deal with some aliens who agree to conquer the Earth for him in exchange for the Tessaract, an artifact of immense power, which will also play a role in transporting the invading army to New York to begin the takeover. Loki steals the Tessaract from Nick Fury, who then assembles the Avengers to find him, find it, find out what the plan is, and do anything else that needs a little superpower elbow grease. A lot of bickering between incompatible personalities and a whole lot of violence and destruction ensue.

The plot is unremarkable but perfectly adequate, and that is a good description for the movie as a whole. There are no scenes whose impact lingers in your memory after the credits have rolled, no wonderful development of character, no stunning visuals, no lines of great insight, no “aha!” moments. What it does have, to go with its serviceable story, is competent direction, a few genuinely amusing visual jokes, a bevy of one-liners that play well to an opening-weekend audience, and the action set pieces that many movie goers — mostly male — crave sometimes to the exclusion of all else.

There have always been movies like this, movies that never rise above ordinary. What concerns me is that there used to be summer blockbusters that left mediocrity far behind and below. They were full of adrenaline rushes, but they were also works of art. They never won many Academy Awards, but they were every bit as good, or better, than the ones that did. Has CGI banished the last of our restrictions and taken with it our restraint, or are we just making movies for audiences who want nothing more than a rollercoaster ride?

A movie is capable of so much more than a ride at an amusement park, but The Avengers, just like nearly every other action movie that comes out nowadays, avails itself of few of these possibilities. One of its two main problems is that everything is a huge explosion or a death defying stunt, always in fantastic locations on a grand scale. There is no foil to set any of this off. You step into smash bash crash, exaggerated with CGI, and that is about all you ever get. Once upon a time, without CGI, Lois Lane’s helicopter crashed and she hung from it, suspended over the streets of New York, to be saved by Superman. Those few minutes of her ordeal are more gripping than the entirety of The Avengers and all of its setup movies put together, and there is no hyperbole in that statement.

The second main problem, related to the first, is that no one in the movie feels like a human being. Precious little effort is spent showing us anything like a personal life. There are no small, quiet moments. Michael Keaton’s Batman, far and away the best of the caped crusaders for my money, was a fully fleshed out human being, and not just because he had a tragic backstory. He felt human, despite his wealth, because we saw him in his daily life, interacting with the people he knew. The script was good enough that the plot never stalled while we saw these things, and the result was that we actually gave a damn about him as Batman because we knew him as Wayne. The Avengers has no time for this, because it has too many skyscrapers to pulverize.

There are other little quibbles, such as a few curious moments when one is inclined to ask questions that start like, “Wouldn’t it make more sense to…” or “How could he have known…” or “Shouldn’t he really have…” But these are small lapses of logic. We also get too little mystery because we are shown too many things from too many perspectives, but this too is no great sin. The main issue is that there is no restraint and no human being in the movie, just costumes and destruction.

When a fine movie like Ang Lee’s The Hulk is panned by critics and audiences, I must recognize that I am far from the mainstream. I am not what moviemakers have in mind when they think of their audience. But I cannot help thinking that these visceral delights that CGI brings us will quickly fade, and future film buffs will look back at our period and wonder why so few good action movies were made, why CGI was not used to enhance good movies, rather than be made to form the core of mediocre ones.

The Cabin in the Woods is a supernatural genre-bender penned by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard. It is a bizarre story that grows odder as it goes, but there is a focus on character, a decent atmosphere, success in keeping a young and handsome cast from becoming mere plastic eye candy, some intelligent dialogue and a few inspired approaches to scenes. There was enough skill involved in its creation to make a fine work. It had me at the opening; it kept me as events unfolded; it lost me at the end.

To summarize the plot past a certain point is to risk ruining a first viewing. At the beginning, five college students go to a cabin in a woods to spend a weekend drinking, playing games, and committing acts that many religions proscribe outside of matrimony. It is safe to share that the students are being monitored and manipulated, because this aspect is revealed from the outset. From the conversations of the monitors we piece together that the students are going to be put through some sort of gruesome trial, and that these students will, unwittingly, determine the nature of that trial. Beyond that I prefer to say only that beneath this bizarre surface is a whole lot more story to be uncovered.

There are a number of things the movie gets right. Despite the fact that the nature of the cabin is explained early on, there is still a mood of enigma about everything. The monitors become the mystery, rather than the cabin. The dialogue, despite Whedon’s continuing penchant for corny one-liners at the wrong moment, is streamlined, full of character, and delivers just enough information without talking directly to the audience. Tantalizing phrases suggest a deeper plot, hints of which are continuously doled out to us. Even one aspect that seemed initially disappointing, regarding the trite order in which characters must die in a horror movie, is given a surprising yet sufficient explanation later on.

The script demonstrates thoughtfulness in the way it approaches things. There is a basement that figures large in the story, but the way Whedon and Goddard get the kids in the basement is imaginative. They are playing a game of truth or dare, and when it is the turn of the less sexually adventurous of the two girls, another character ventures her answer for her: truth. She gets irritated when he explains that whenever she chooses dare she always goes back and says she would rather do truth. To show him up, she reluctantly picks dare, but the game is interrupted by the discovery of the basement. After staring into the dark depths for a while, the other players decide that the girl’s dare will be to explore the basement.

I had a handful of minor issues, many of which might be cleared up on a later viewing. However, at this point they seem illogical and contrived. By way of example, there is a one-way window between two bedrooms. On one side, it is a mirror, on the other side translucent glass, but it is covered by a painting. One of the boys removes the painting due to its macabre subject matter and gets a view into the room of one of the girls. She starts to undress and after a quick debate, he tells her to stop and shows her the mirror.

As far as I can tell, there is no logical reason for the one-way mirror to be there. Because the nature of the trial awaiting the lodgers is to be determined, one might argue that the mirror is there in case a particular trial is chosen, but I feel like that gives a free excuse card to the screenwriters for any implausibility they stick in the movie. Either the students should have encountered something in the cabin that would have to do with the particular trial they end up with, or they should have discovered all sorts of architectural and decorative oddities that would at first baffle the characters but whose use the audience could guess at (they do find in the basement many items, each relating to a different scenario, but this is not what I am referring to). As it is, the mirror, chilling though it is when first discovered, ultimately feels like a convenience to help show the chivalrousness of one of the male roles, who will soon become an amorous interest of the girl on the other side of the mirror.

Notwithstanding the few minor issues, I was sold from the beginning until near the end, whose nature I prefer not to describe here. Suffice it to say that it goes from bizarre to outlandish, and does it in a very short period of time. Where before mystery had been heightened and questions answered at a judicious pace, now everything started spilling out all at once, while I felt there was still more mystery and revelation to tease us with and plenty of time to do it. Restraint is cast aside in favor of slapping the viewer over and over with excess, and the final effect is a silliness that does not sit well with the established tone.

A moviemaker should, to my way of thinking, treat the viewer like a woman. He must court her, slowly, never pushing too far but neither missing an opportunity to advance his cause. Whether the courting takes place over a month or single evening, there is a pace she will accept and a pace that will lose her favor. It is different with every woman, but there are certain approaches that work with none of them. If you find the pace and approach that makes her eager, she very well may, to borrow a phrase from Dangerous Liaisons, perform quite eagerly acts that one would hesitate to ask from a professional. But you cannot whip out your manhood in the restaurant over dessert. That would be revealing too much too soon, and that is precisely how the last act of the movie felt.

The Cabin in the Woods is worth seeing for its uniqueness, and it certainly is not a bad movie. I was considering adding it to my collection until the last part made my decision easier. A $10 movie ticket might be too much for some, but a Netflix rental does not seem like a bad idea, especially for one who likes supernatural horror and a little genre-bending.

The latest craze to seize the literary world has been transformed, according to the law of Hollywood, into cinema. The Hunger Games, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins, is helmed by Gary Ross and co-written by the author herself. Targeting a younger crowd, the movie yet boasts enough maturity and craftsmanship to appeal to other demographics. I continue to await the next science fiction masterpiece, but if the interlude between masterpieces had more movies of this caliber, I would gripe a good deal less.

In the world of the story, an Empire has put down a rebellion by thirteen districts. The thirteenth district was destroyed and the other twelve must, each year, supply a male and female between the ages of 12 and 18 to participate in the Hunger Games. The 24 participants train for a few weeks before competing in a winner-take-all gladiatorial contest that leaves only one alive. Interspersed in their training are interviews with the media, banquets, and chances to impress viewers and thereby win sponsors who can assist the contenders during the competition.

Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is a young girl in district twelve. She hunts for food in forbidden territory but is permitted to do so because she sells much of her catch to the guards (the first in a series of welcome demonstrations of governmental corruption). When her younger sister’s name is pulled as the female representative for the Games, Katniss demands to go as a volunteer in her stead.

She and the male representative, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), are whisked away in an opulent high-speed train. They meet Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson), a former district 12 representative who won the contest years ago. He is to act as their advisor during the training, an endeavor that begins badly before they get past Abernathy’s cocksure flippancy to find a decent person underneath.

In the capital, they encounter a decadent culture full of soft and foppish dandies, the culmination of metrosexual evolution, perhaps. This pampered and preened upper caste is a stark contrast to the gritty miners Katniss and Peeta are used to. Katniss at first struggles to adjust to her new environment, while Peeta makes the transition more smoothly.

I regret to report that the first half of the movie is the one that comes off better. Though the latter half is never bad, some problems do start to accumulate and these prevent it from pulling the viewer to the edge of his seat, as is the intention. The first half, though not without flaws, is a more adroit creation.

I did have some minor complaints with the first hour and a quarter, the shaky camera foremost among them. I will record my complaint once again for posterity: if the camera is jittery, there ought to be a reason. If we are filming a sedate character eating meager scraps of food in his poverty, there is no reason I can think of why bouncing his image around the silver screen, such that we can barely tell what is going on, contributes anything important to the story, conveys anything of the mood and character or does much of anything else except irritate.

There was a moment in the capital, when the contestants are first introduced to the masses, that I found a little silly. Much is made of the importance of a first impression, so some time is spent designing the right costumes for the chosen. Katniss and Peeta, coming from a coal mining district, are given an ensemble to represent their background and, presumably, impress the audience and win them supporters. This would not be a problem in itself, as their outfits turn out to be a perfect tacky fit to the gaudy crowd that has come to watch them, but the movie does not deride the moment. It treats it is a minor triumph. There is a sudden upswell of music, and then the camera cuts to the two conscripts and pulls back to show black with a few paltry flames trailing behind as they ride through an arena on their chariot. In a world of technology far more advanced than ours, it is difficult to see how this could be as impressive as it was portrayed to be. If I felt like the storyteller were sharing my embarrassment for anyone who saw grandeur in the moment, I would have not been inclined to groan, but such was not the case.

Despite these complaints, I felt that the first half was a bit of solid filmmaking. The camera captures mood and character well, the story develops naturally and smoothly and the adult actors and maybe one or two of the kids make their roles convincing. It is unfortunate that it turned out to be superior to what followed. The second half is the event itself, and the screen time is turned over almost exclusively to the teenyboppers, who simply do not sell their rolls like the older actors. Jennifer Lawrence is acceptable, but the others come off as plastic models and 90210 types rather than real people from districts stricken with want and neglect (or gladiatorial trainees who have spent their young lives preparing to participate in the games, as some of them are).

Apart from poor casting and makeup choices, I felt there was a lack of interaction between the various characters, something that might have raised the stakes on an emotional level. I also felt like there was no recognition of what they were facing. Katniss and Peeta are presumably going to have to kill each other at some point, if someone else does not do it first, yet there is little to no reflection on this. Even Haymitch, who must have done some killing himself, has nothing to offer on the terrible act of killing an innocent human being. A lot of emotional depth could have been added to the story with some development of these ideas.

Implausibilities are numerous once the battle begins. Katniss makes a stupid mistake, for no apparent reason, that one thinks Haymitch would have warned her not to make. A rebellion starts in one district, sparked by something that I can only think is seen every single year during the Hunger Games, yet this time we are meant to accept that it gets people riled up. This rebellion leads the director of the Games to make a decision that makes very little sense in the story, but is full of contrived implication for Katniss and her romantic interest. Near the end Katniss’ previously established tree-climbing aptitude is forgotten so that the climax can be more exciting. Even one of the flaws shared by both halves is revealed as a disappointment only in the second half. This has to do with the introduction of a character, Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth), whose chiseled jaw, baritone voice, and on-camera swagger simply scream protagonist — again, in a 90210 as opposed to a mining district sort of way — and yet we come to realize that he ultimately means nothing to the movie, repeated cuts to his perspective during the competition notwithstanding (I presume he plays a greater role in the sequels).

The greatest disappointment, though, has more to do with what was not done than with what was done. The climax is simply not thrilling enough. Its outset is a bit jarring, because though we have been kept up to speed on the body count and know it cannot be far away, the emotional buildup and final hook are too diminutive or little developed to make us ready for the last chapter. It bears repeating that the movie is not bad, nor is its climax, but the aforementioned problem keeps it far away from being great.

As an example to follow, I would suggest the climax to Predator, a good movie with a great final act. There comes a moment when character arcs are finished, interactions between hero and villain have been sufficient, and a last obstacle and chance for the hero to save himself suddenly present themselves, so that we know the last confrontation is at hand. We are made to endure tantalizing minutes watching the preparation, which is full of hints of things to come, and finally get what we have been waiting for. Something like that, so similar to the Hunger Games’ scenario, would have suited the film nicely. There are many other ways it could be handled, but whatever the ending, it needed more of an emotional crescendo, more of a mix of tenseness and giddy excitement. What we actually got, though not devoid of satisfaction, was more subdued, not as completely fulfilling as it might have been.

All things considered, it was a decent film. It would be easy to exaggerate the libertarian element, but it is an allegory for our times, when powerful interests suppress a people, some of whom yearn to be free. It is not precisely clear that a libertarian solution is one the author has in mind — many a leftwing statist has made similar complaints, after all — but it is nice to see powerful authority depicted as it deserves to be. The Hunger Games is a pleasant time at the theater if you are already on your way, and, even if you are not, you might consider making the trip.