Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

THE EXPANSE, Season 6

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I’m a huge fan of THE EXPANSE and looked forward to Season 6 with great excitement. Aside from the relatively rough Season 4, which was okay but not mind-blowing in my opinion, every season was incredibly strong, drawing on terrific source material while beautifully adapting it as a screen series. Season 6 was okay but overall disappointing for me, not quite Season 8 GAME OF THRONES but with some familiar feelings.

In this season, James Holden and his crew are exhausted after months fighting Marcos Inaros and his Free Navy, which seeks to control the Rings and therefore all the resources of the worlds beyond. If they can stop asteroids from being hurled at Earth, the UN and Mars can go on the offensive. When they do, it leads to a climactic battle that may forever redefine the final relations between Earth, Mars, and the Belt. While all this is happening, each episode starts with a scene on a planet on the other side of the Ring, where colonists are conducting some type of research and a young girl makes a startling discovery about its indigenous life.

The season has its strengths and powerful moments, but overall it feels rushed and clumsy, and while it catches up to the books and offers nothing more to happen–the show has been canceled, and the next book in the series from what I hear is set 30 years later, requiring a reboot–it leaves a lot on the table. Notably, the subplot on the planet that for me didn’t really go anywhere and wasn’t needed. Besides that, the characters don’t feel like themselves. Gone is the cracking dialogue, the human moments that made the sci-fi come alive and feel lived in. Everybody feels like they’re economically checking scenes so they can get it over with in a short season of six episodes, while oddly some subplots, such as the relationship between Inaros and his son Philip, have falling out and reconciliations that repeat again and again. A power play at the very end, which apparently wasn’t in the book, is a TV trope we didn’t need to see again.

Overall, it didn’t crash and burn and tick me off the way GAME OF THRONES did, but I was hardly wowed. In all, THE EXPANSE was one of the best things in my opinion to happen to sci-fi on TV, brilliant and exciting and filled with strong characters. I wish it had ended on a stronger note, but I’m grateful for what I was able to get, and I’ll continue reading the books to flesh out my fix.

DUNE (2021)

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By Denis Villeneuve, one of my favorite directors, DUNE (2021) delivers a visually stunning adaptation of the Frank Herbert classic, though it struggles with its massive source material.

Confession: I liked the David Lynch adaptation a lot, at least until the last act turned into a rushed, jumbled, sometimes laugh out loud mess. I tried to watch the TV series adaptation but couldn’t sit through it. When I heard Villeneuve was bringing it to the big screen, my first thought was, does the world need this? Then I caught the trailer and thought, it just might. The new DUNE is like a love letter to science fiction film making as much as it a compelling and artistically made film, and it captures its own identity even as it feels familiar.

If you’re not familiar with the story, it follows Paul Atreides, a young man born into a powerful noble house that rules a planet in a galactic empire that is not unlike the Holy Roman Empire or maybe Westeros from GAME OF THRONES. When his house is called by the Emperor to rule Arrakis, a desert planet where spice is mined that is used by navigators for interstellar travel, it feels like a trap they have no choice but to enter. As things go bad, Paul, the product of centuries of specially woven bloodlines, is thrust toward a destiny he does not yet fully understand.

Visually, the film is stunning. It’s brooding, beautiful, and strange; I wish I’d seen it in a theater. The world these character inhabit is high-tech in some things but not in others, giving it an exotic mix of archaic and future that is compelling and doesn’t allow an easy technological fix to problems. Compared to the Lynch version, the story is far less psychedelic and appears stripped down to a level where it all feels Shakespearean. The characters are terrifically rendered, in no small part due to the incredible cast. Timothée Chalamet is like a male Kristen Stewart in that he’s rarely cast in roles demanding a lot of range, but he’s so awesome to watch brood in this that he pulls it off the way he did in THE KING. I liked how the Emperor doesn’t appear on screen, creating a sense of mystery; a lot of the film is like that, allowing my imagination to fill in missing details. The Harkonens aren’t clownish in this version but extremely menacing and brutal, making them perfect villains.

It wasn’t perfect for me, however. Some of the dialogue feels like a placeholder. I actually think Lynch handled the big attack in a more exciting and compelling way. After Villeneuve got past the attack, he ran into the same struggle Lynch did with connecting Paul with the local people. In the new DUNE, the last act sags and struggles and appears more focused on setting up the next film. Some old-fashioned tropes, such as the boy prophesied to the be “the one,” the natives leaning toward noble savage stereotypes, and so on haven’t particularly aged well.

But okay, that aside, I absolutely loved it, and I’m looking forward to the next film. More, please.

RICK AND MORTY

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While bedridden with COVID, one of the things that made the hours pass with the medicine of laughter was a binge through all five seasons of RICK AND MORTY. This cartoon series is packed with interesting ideas, though its later seasons packed a far weaker punch for me.

The show started with a short film by Justin Roiland that parodied BACK TO THE FUTURE and became a show for Adult Swim with partner Dan Harmon. It follows Rick Sanchez, the smartest man in the universe who has invented interdimensional travel, who lives his estranged daughter Beth and her husband Jerry and teen kids Morty and Summer. For various reasons, Rick needs Morty to help him on his adventures across planets and dimensions, and drags him, sometimes unwillingly, into situations that are usually comedic and sometimes, for Morty, dangerous and horrifying.

The show’s creators called it an extended fart joke wrapped in a study of nihilism, and that is certainly a good summation, though the humor deserves credit as often being far more sophisticated than Roiland and Harmon claim. As far as the nihilism goes, however, their claim is pretty spot on, making the whole morally ambiguous at best, unpredictable to an extent, and tinged with a little sadness. Rick is aware of death’s permanence and that existence is therefore essentially meaningless; the typical human answer is either nihilism or humanism. Unfortunately for Rick, because there are an infinite number of dimensions where things turn out differently, he can simply hop to another if things get too dicey, a wonderful thing though it robs him of having to deal with consequences or enjoying the value of real human relationships that might save him from nihilism. Morty suffers along, becoming more self-sufficient as he learns Rick is right about existence, while also occasionally teaching Rick about the saving value of love.

These themes come to life in the early seasons through conflict between Rick being a mad scientist and espousing a nihilistic point of view, and the family obsessing on something important to them but ultimately shown to be unimportant. In each episode, Rick and Morty find themselves in a wacky, life-threatening situation Morty confronts with angst and trying to do the moral thing and Rick confronts with alcohol and a callous disregard for everything aside from his own immediate interest. This is where the show really shines, this conflict but mostly through the crazy adventures and ideas where anything can happen because nothing matters. Examples include a planet where men and women formed separate societies, a galactic spa where the toxic aspects of your personality are extracted to form a separate purged entity, a microverse built to serve as a spaceship’s battery, parasites that take the form of lovable cartoon characters, and so on, usually packaged as a spoof of popular movies such as INCEPTION, etc. Celebrity guests playing the part of an episode’s characters and a post-credit scene add to the fun.

The first three seasons shine with pretty much every episode being a standout for its humor and ideas. By seasons 4 and 5, however, things get a little soft as the family stops caring about its old values and simply go along with Rick’s worldview, the writers get meta about the toxic core of the show’s fan base and seemingly their own struggle with the show’s identity as either fun and light episodes versus an overall arc, and none of the characters seemingly have anywhere healthy to grow to offer a counterpoint to Rick’s cynicism. The last episode of season 5 was pretty smart and seemed to offer a hard reset, and I’m curious about what they’ll do next with subsequent seasons.

Overall, I really enjoyed the ride and recommend it. It’s smart, funny, rewatchable, and filled with interesting ideas.

VIVARIUM (2019)

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VIVARIUM (2019) is a well-executed science fiction film with a simple premise. Starring Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg, it’s stylish and poignant with metaphor, but the simple premise becomes realized too early, testing the viewer’s commitment and interest. Let me explain.

Gemma (Poots) and Tom (Eisenberg) are a young couple interested in buying a house together. Visiting the office showcasing a new development, they meet a strange real estate agent who takes them for a tour only to leave them there. Soon, they realize they’re trapped in a seemingly endless suburb of green houses. Boxes appear on the road, delivering the facsimile of food. Then another shows up, holding a baby and a note saying: “Raise the child, and you’ll be released.” Only the child may not be human…

As a science fiction story, VIVARIUM is intriguing and well done. The only trick is it’s fairly easy to figure out what is happening to them early on, and the plot develops to its conclusion for another hour without much in the way of surprises or character change. Instead, the story appears to rely on its conceit that this is pretty much the life Gemma and Tom would have had anyway, enslaved to children in a cookie cutter suburban home while questioning the meaning of it all.

The storytelling approach–more “short story” than “novel”–may not be enough for some viewers expecting a more traditional story with a stronger plot development and character arcs. The metaphor/theme may also be unsatisfying in that it too manifests very early in the viewer’s mind, basically serving up an allegory, and offers little in the way of solution.

But you know what, despite all that, I liked this one. While not a big winner for me, I found it very watchable, and once I aligned my expectations with what I was getting, I enjoyed it. The stylish but gratingly uniform sets, the weird kid, the acting, little moments where the metaphor resonated, all come together for me nicely. In the end, I wish there was more to it, but I guess that’s part of the metaphor too.

THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM By Cixin Liu

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Chinese author Cixin Liu’s Hugo Award-winning THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM is certainly an intriguing piece of science fiction, rich in ideas if thin in plot and characterization. A mixed bag, though on the whole I quite enjoyed it as something bold and original.

The plot description is pretty simple. During China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project ends up communicating with an alien civilization on the brink of destruction. Forced to emigrate, this civilization decides to travel to Earth. During the long wait, factions form on Earth, some planning to welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as irredeemably corrupt, and others planning to resist.

At first, I thought this was an alien contact story set during the Cold War, with a Maoist China making first contact, but the Cultural Revolution only serves as the backdrop for the genesis story. The story soon jumps ahead in time to the present day to a new protagonist, a scientist struggling with a string of connected mysteries that lead him to the truth about the aliens.

Reading reviews, I noticed that some readers criticized the mostly tell and not show plot, wooden dialogue, and thin characterization, and I can’t argue with any of that. For example, the protagonist has a wife and son we meet near the beginning but pretty much never hear of again. Where the novel excels is in its ideas, sense of a scientific mystery, and beginnings in the what can only be called insanely turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution. These elements really grabbed me, and while I didn’t particularly care about the characters aside from perhaps the clever but obnoxious cop, I stayed glued to the page to see where all these crazy ideas were going to take me.

So overall, I’d call THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM a highly enjoyable and original piece of science fiction, particularly enjoyable for its density of intriguing, interconnected ideas.

THE NEXT CIVIL WAR by Stephen Marche

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In THE NEXT CIVIL WAR: DISPATCHES FROM THE AMERICAN FUTURE, Canadian novelist and essayist Stephen Marche examines America’s crumbling political foundations and imagines a series of scenarios that could spark a civil war. As with DON’T LOOK UP, many reviewers tut-tutted about its tone and nitpicked its plausibility. Personally, I thought it was frank, honest, and accurate in its analysis of why America appears caught in a fantasy and unable to solve its problems. It did miss one important element, however, in my view, which I’ll explain in a bit.

First, let me describe the book. Marche evaluates several fictional near-future scenarios that could start a civil war. He regards a civil war as likely occurring everywhere, a war largely fought between rural and urban, which I totally agree with and used in my novel OUR WAR. In THE NEXT CIVIL WAR, we have a standoff between the Army and a coalition of hard-right militias at a bridge, the assassination of an unpopular president, climate change producing mass migrations from coastal regions, a dirty bomb blowing up in Washington, DC, and outright secession and breakup of the union. Each scenario is loaded with background information for context.

This background info is the real education in the book, information I’d consider essential reading for Americans wondering why the country seemed stuck in a hostile malaise even before the pandemic made everything ten times worse. How elimination of earmarks (pork spending) eliminated the only basis of compromise in the two-party system, resulting in hyper partisanship. How the electoral college, the Senate, and gerrymandering warps democracy such that it can scarcely be called democracy (62% of senators represent 1/4 of the population, while 6 senators represent another 1/4, Democratic presidential candidates regularly win the popular vote but lose elections, etc.). How gridlock means America is becoming incapable of enacting major policies and confronting the greatest threats to its existence, which are income inequality and climate change, and how this fuels the rise of the imperial presidency, as the executive branch claims more and more powers simply to get something done. How Congress can’t even properly investigate an assault on itself by violent protesters seeking to overturn a democratic election result, with one of its major parties (the GOP, obviously) essentially having a political and a militant wing that are starting to work together. How social media manufactures and refines rage, helping to fuel a right wing terrorist movement. How hyper partisanship means everything becomes politicized along tribal lines, from Trump’s big lie about the election being stolen to whether people should take the basic self-preservation steps of wearing masks and getting vaccinated during a pandemic. The story of the woman literally drowning in her own COVID snot and fighting nurses trying to intubate her in the belief COVID is a government hoax, based on “doing her own research” on YouTube, is pretty much a defining image of these strange times we live in.

As for the scenarios that Marche presents as trigger points, they seem fair enough as major stresses on the system. What I think the book is missing is a major Constitutional issue that literally breaks the country. Marche logically concludes a match and kindling are what makes fire, but bringing the US to a literal state of civil war would require a healthy dose of gasoline, to extend the metaphor. Secession would do it, or an attempted or successful hard coup. In my novel OUR WAR, the civil war starts almost by accident, as far-right groups take over government buildings across the country as an armed protest over an impeached president that snowballs into something much bigger. Far more likely as a result of the depicted scenarios in Marche’s book would be civil strife, terrorism, government impotence and de-legitimization, and continuing decline. Civil war is very unlikely when it’s so much easier to simply take over the government through elections and rewriting election laws, and then stack the courts with friendly partisan hacks as we’re seeing with today’s Supreme Court.

In its conclusion, Marche nails the idea that America is itself an idea, a dream that creates a nation from what is really just another of history’s multi-ethnic empires. Political tribalism has destroyed this idea, or rather created parallel ideas, parallel Americas with different interpretations of government, history, and even basic reality. He wonders if the only solution is a divorce, where different regions of the country can be freed of each other to pursue their own dreams.

Overall, THE NEXT CIVIL WAR is a powerful if unhappy read. Even if you don’t agree the country is headed to civil war, the way Marche depicts the fault lines in American stability is compelling, provocative, and eye-opening.