Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

SLEEPING GIANTS by Sylvain Neuvel

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sleeping giantsIn Sylvain Neuvel’s terrific sci-fi novel SLEEPING GIANTS (Del Rey), a young girl named Rose is riding her bike when she falls through the earth into the palm of a giant metal hand that had been buried there for millennia. Years later, the hand is in government storage, and Rose is now an adult scientist studying the hand. When she concludes the hand is of alien origin and must be part of a larger structure, perhaps a robot, a shadowy government operator begins pulling strings to find the missing pieces and find out exactly what it’s for. A weapon, or something else?

The novel is presented as a series of documents, most of them interviews between the government agent (who goes unnamed, and wonderfully emerges as a very tricky operator with brutal social skills) and the project team participants. At first the convention of using documents threw me, as we have people in formal interviews going into exposition about their childhood and whatnot–great for establishing character in fiction, but pushing suspension of disbelief. As the novel finds its depth and the mystery builds, however, Neuvel hits his stride, and the result is a very intelligent and engaging story, sort of like ARRIVAL but with far more action and character development.

The novel was turned into a trilogy, and I’ll be reading the second one shortly. I love the robot, the characters are interesting, the government agent is terrific, and I’ll be happy to see what happens next in this realistic, intelligent story.

THE CIRCLE (2017)

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the circle

THE CIRCLE (2017), based on the bestselling novel by Dave Eggers, is a delightful surprise for low expectations. The film received a lot of negative reviews but I enjoyed its execution, and best of all, its ideas made me think.

Mae (the lovely Emma Watson, showing off her acting chops) works a dead-end customer service job, struggling to pay the bills and support her parents, particularly her father (the great Bill Paxton) who is struggling with MS. Her friend lands her a job at the Circle, a vast high-tech company that is changing the world by leveraging social interaction and connectivity. At first, she’s overwhelmed by the cult-like society in the company led by its founders, including Bailey (played with perfect charm and menace by Tom Hanks, who is aging super well), but an incident convinces her to join the club. She agrees to wear a camera on her at all times and put them in every room in her house, embracing full “transparency.” This platform gives her importance in the company and gains her a vast following. When she sees the negative consequences of this, she seeks justice the only way she can.

As a story, it’s engaging, particularly through good directing, a competent script, and excellent acting performances by everybody in the film. The ending is a bit oversimplified, but it works despite its moral ambiguity about what comes next. What’s most engaging about the film is its core ideas. In a series of TED-style talks, Bailey tells his employees about all the positive and compelling personal and societal benefits of new technologies, though he’s obviously less into changing the world and more into making money through social control. This part of the movie has a strong BLACK MIRROR vibe. We see the negative side through surveillance and snap judgment by our peers, the loss of being genuine and human, manipulation through social pressure, and aggression via unchecked mob mentality. In this film, mit isn’t the government we should be afraid of, it’s corporations with too much power and most of all, each other.

I went into it expecting typical Hollywood but enjoyed it far more than I thought I would, and I loved its ideas.

UNTIL THE LAST DOG DIES by Robert Guffey

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until the last dog diesRobert Guffey’s UNTIL THE LAST DOG dies presents a novel type of apocalypse: What if a disease made the world lose its sense of humor?

When comedian Elliott Greeley gets a tepid response to a performance at a comedy club, he wonders if he’s losing his edge but then learns the CDC is warning the public about a virus that makes people lose their sense of humor. As audiences shrink, one by one his colleagues contract the disease and quit the business, while the world stops being fun.

The wonderful idea and its huge potential grabbed me right away, but for me, the novel didn’t quite deliver. The story has little to do with the plague until the end, which in my view is the best part and makes the most interesting points. Until then, it diffuses into numerous subplots, most of it staged farce and a bit self-indulgent for the narrator. Comedy threads most of the narrative, though most of it is absurdist shock stuff, which unlike some people I usually don’t find shocking or very funny (I’m a terrible Cards Against Humanity Player).

I’ll just say I was the wrong reader for this book. There’s a proverb in the lighting industry, which I cover as a journalist for my day job: “There are no bad lighting products, only bad applications.” For me, it’s the same with books. When I was younger, I appreciated this type of story–young introverted male nobody understands is surrounded by the absurd, which he takes in stride, and everybody takes his absurd response seriously. Our introverted male even participates in a long subplot involving him being a shoulder to cry on for the beautiful crazy chick who has a jerk boyfriend, and whom he’d love to rescue by trying to get her into bed. Maybe it’s because I’m older or something, but I just don’t dig this type of story anymore.

So I think this is a great book for a certain crowd who will appreciate it as a comical romp along with the well-intended message that humor is as a necessary thing, but for this middle-aged guy, it just didn’t connect.

DARK

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dark

A German original Netflix series, DARK portrays how several families are affected by the eerie mounting disappearances of several town children, evoking a response from some of the adults that “it’s happening again.” This is a crazy, dense, complex, dark, intellectually challenging (and exhausting) show. I really, really liked it, though I didn’t connect with any of the characters–all of them deeply flawed–enough to love it.

The show has been compared to STRANGER THINGS (though nobody teams up in DARK, and it’s much, well, darker) and TWIN PEAKS (overall weirdness and tone). To which I’d add IT (strange events happened 33 and 66 years ago that are happening today, and the villain, who seems to understand what’s going on more than anybody and obeys its rules, is awesome) and LOST (new mysteries are introduced as old ones are resolved). There’s a great cosmic aspect centered on travel. We’re shown the lives of a large cast both in the present, past, and distant past, along with numerous theories of time travel and time travel paradoxes.

The craziest paradox is how the future can influence the past, a problem I also had with the film ARRIVAL. It works like this: I’m drowning and will definitely die without help, but I find a life preserver and survive, because my future self came back and threw it in the water for me to find. The same paradox occurs in DARK at least twice. Several other strange things made me wonder, such how a kid (and the dog) get through the portal, somebody coming out in the present though the police tape is missing, etc., which seem to be creative license shortcuts and continuity errors.

Yes, I’m nitpicking, but it’s that kind of show. You have to pay attention to every single detail (and numerous characters at different ages on the three-point timeline) to follow what’s happening. Despite the amount of information, the show has a fairly solid pace. For about 4, maybe 5 episodes, it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, but then the show starts introducing reveals that sew up the dozens of loose ends one by one until the striking last episode’s conclusion. I was able to figure out two big reveals before they happened (through intuition and luck), but otherwise it’s a show that leaves you guessing until it’s ready to slap the next puzzle piece on the table. In more than one way, I was satisfied when it ended, as I found it kind of exhausting albeit oddly penetrating. I don’t know if DARK will get a second season; I’d be happy either way. The show wraps things up nicely, with just enough loose threads to make you wonder and perhaps long for them to be sewn up as well in a season 2.

DARK is yet another example of why TV is in a golden age, while film kind of sucks despite the odd gem. It’s TV that challenges you, that makes you think and feel something different. I really liked this one and hope for more of the same.

THE POWER by Naomi Alderman

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the power by naomi aldermanNaomi Alderman’s THE POWER is a novel about the final battle of the sexes that results from women undergoing an evolutionary change in which they gain the power to wield electrical current with their hands. Suddenly, men become the “weaker sex.” Women push back until a complete societal reversal occurs, as they gain not just the power to hurt men at will, but all of the other power that comes with it. I found this story, a big ideas novel written in the tradition of THE HANDMAID’S TALE (and as powerful), a work of genius that got me thinking on several levels. The novel came out in 2016 and won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2017.

The story starts off clunky. A man named Neil, a member of a men’s writing association, is writing to Naomi Alderman, a popular author, in the hopes she will beta read his work of historical fiction. What follows is his novel, told mainly from the perspective of four people: an abused girl who becomes a powerful leader after founding a religion based on a feminist reinterpretation of the Bible; a girl destined to play a minor role in a London crime family, who rises up to become a mafia don in her own right; a female mayor who rises to become one of the most powerful people in America; and a male journalist who travels the world documenting it all. Alderman’s decision to use Neil (and herself) as a device for introducing the novel is a bit off-putting due to the style change and the wait to get down to it, but in the denouement it ties together and really works.

The story of women around the world suddenly gaining power over men initially leads to what one would expect (and hope) to happen. Repressive societies like Saudi Arabia undergo revolutions, men catcalling and sexually harassing women comes to a dead stop, sex slaves liberate themselves, and other events occur that are, well, satisfying to read for anybody who hates these things. All good, right? As the gender reversal accelerates, however, Alderman takes a gutsy path with the novel: Women start to act like the worst of male behavior. Rape, humiliation, stereotyping, subjugation, rewriting history and religion to promote a single gender, stealing creative work, this is what some women do after they get all the power (pursuing a similar premise as portrayed in the film WHITE MAN’S BURDEN). While reading THE POWER, you’re going, hey, payback’s a bitch, then, wow, maybe women really would become the worst of the “patriarchy” if they ran the world (an assertion that power universally corrupts), and then, jeezus, in the real world, women have to put up with a lot of crap. The ending is conclusive but open, and while acknowledging the truth is unknowable, the denouement suggests what happened, or at least confirms what the world is like in the present, in a final clever note among many.

Overall, I loved it for what it was–a gutsy big ideas novel about gender and power spiced with terrific action set pieces. Recommended if you like speculative fiction that tugs your brain strings. If you read it, like it, and want more, TV rights were acquired by Jane Featherstone (Sister Pictures) in an 11-way auction and will be turned into a TV series with global distribution.

SAVING CAPITALISM (2017)

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saving-capitalismIn SAVING CAPITALISM (2017), a documentary on Netflix, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich highlights the major points in his book with the same title while having conversations with ordinary Americans about how changes in the economy are affecting them. This spot-on analysis of how American democracy has become corrupted by corporate influence, and what this means for the economy and average Americans, is essential viewing for people of all political stripes.

Reich is a Democrat who was Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, but his analysis speaks to anger that crosses the cultural divide in America and speaks to almost everybody in a nonpartisan way. The documentary shows him talking to conservatives and libertarians who humorously agree with him but then fall back on stereotypes about liberals to insist there shouldn’t be agreement. Reich’s central thesis is that a free market doesn’t exist in America, there is simply government making rules that define the game. Deregulation is more about changing the rules to suit big business than it is eliminating regulation. He charts how the rich and big business accumulate wealth, which they use to accumulate power, which they use to change the rules to benefit them, and how this hurts democracy and workers. The result is a country that is a de facto oligarchy designed to serve the few instead of everybody. The horrifying Republican tax bill–which gives massive tax breaks to corporations and the rich, which will come at the expense of Social Security and Medicare–is a perfect example of this. Reich predicted anger and resentment about income inequality in the 90s, when he found himself increasingly marginalized in the Clinton Administration, and it explains why many of the same people supported both Sanders and Trump. Both candidates spoke to income inequality, though arguably only one actually meant it. It’s a stark raving fact that the middle class has been steadily shrinking for decades and all economic gains are going to the top 1%.

The people in SAVING CAPITALISM recognize the same problem but have different solutions. The leftist may come away from SAVING CAPITALISM saying, maybe capitalism shouldn’t be saved. In fact, Reich’s analysis is so frank and bleak it makes you wonder what can be done. While socialism and capitalism can work well together, pure socialism, even democratic socialism, may not be the answer and in any case couldn’t be achieved with anything short of violent revolution. The conservative or libertarian will come away saying, if crony capitalism (the government rigging the game on behalf of a small group of corporations) is inevitable, we should keep capitalism but take away government’s ability to make the rules. But that would eliminate what little economic security Americans have left, and stick them with the bill for all, instead of most, of capitalism’s externalities (costs that businesses impose on society, such as pollution, poor safety, etc.). Instead of ensuring fairness, capitalism would run amok. The bottom line is both sides want Americans to have more economic security, believe government is focused on catering to the rich and big business, and that if the system doesn’t change, America will decline. The key is to ensure government sets the rules of the same with the interests of Americans, and to do that they need to take power back from corporations and the rich, which would mean getting money out of politics. On that, at least, I think most Americans can agree.

Reich has the facts but no easy answers. But maybe that’s enough for one documentary–to at least get everybody to recognize we see the same problem (crony capitalism and government slanted to the rich, creating a two-tiered society) and want the same thing (democracy responsive to average people and more economic security), and can therefore debate solutions from a common understanding of what the problem is.

Regardless of what your politics are, or whether you even care about politics at all, you owe it to yourself to watch this documentary right now. It’s a crash course on what’s wrong with our political/economic system that will make you think and piss you off.