#william barton

[retroscifiart]

Final & prelim art by Dean Ellis for A Plague of All Cowards by William Barton (Ace, 1976)

[thoughtfulfilm]

River (2021) dir. Jennifer Peedom & Joseph Nizeti

River isn’t really a documentary, it’s more of an artistic collaboration of musicians, cinematographers, writers, and an actor.

What results is somewhere between Baraka, a David Attenborough doco, and the video accompaniment to a poetic call-to-arms. This film is evidently intended as a visual and aural hymn to the sanctity of our waterways.

The voice-over narration features the earthy tones of actor Willem Dafoe (a perfect choice) reading words by the popular British nature writer Robert Macfarlane. But the soundscape of the film is mostly filled with lush and almost unceasing music (both classic and contemporary compositions) from the Australian Chamber Orchestra and longtime collaborator William Barton.

Despite the soundtrack, I found River an overwhelmingly visual experience. The gorgeous cinematography makes skilled use of aerial and drone shots as well as archival footage. There is a beautiful sequence in the first part of the film in which a drone shot weaves over the crevasses of a glacier then turns and follows the tumbling meltwater bubbling and surging over the sheer mountainside. It’s impossible not to feel a sense of joy and wonder as the cascading music of Vivaldi accompanies the descent; the soaring movements of both water and sound.

Nevertheless at times I felt myself wanting more periods of silence and raw natural soundscape to contemplate the images and words. The addition of the music felt overwrought at times in its incessancy.

There were moments of beautiful poeticism, poignance, and brilliance in the words of the narration, however there were also times when I found Macfarlane’s words repetitive. What I really wanted was a little more practicality, microdetail, or focus, rather than the generalism which risked descent into platitudes at times. It was interesting to read in the end credits that the film drew inspiration from Scottish writer Nan Shepherd, because I feel that the film could have learned more from the work of both Nan Shepherd and poets like Mary Oliver who are marked as great for their ability to link the small, individual, quotidian experience of nature to the grand and universal. This film attempts the latter while forgetting the former.

Although there is footage of many interesting locations a keen eye may be familiar with, none of the footage is referenced explicitly in the voiceover. This is frustrating at times, because sometimes it appears to relate to the narrative, and other times the footage is unrelated - and this is at worst misleading. An example is beautiful footage of the ruined pagodas of Bagan, on the banks of the Irrawaddy (Ayerwaddy) River in Myanmar, as well as clips of Burmese Buddhist monks crossing what may be either the river or another waterway such as Inle Lake. This footage is accompanied by narration which refers to how people in ancient cities used to worship rivers. Although many Burmese have long held animist beliefs, it is quite harmful to mislead viewers to conflate these with Buddhist practice and architecture. So you see, the film’s editing (both sound and video) didn’t quite pass the critic’s eye!

What is impressive is how the film made an effort to centre indigenous perspectives and disrupt prevailing anthropocene attitudes of domination and control. Writer Melissa Lucashenko is credited as indigenous consultant, and the narration beautifully frames human responsibility for rivers as seeing ourselves as upstream ancestors in the river of time who need to be mindful of our downstream legacy for our descendants.

An alluvial paean magnificat, despite some follies, worth watching - and definitely catch it at the cinema if you can to do justice to the visuals!

[the25centpaperback]

A Plague of All Cowards by William Barton, cover by Dean Ellis (1976)

[salonduthe]

William Barton and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra play Men At Work’s Down Under at Bob Hawke’s Memorial at the Sydney Opera House, Friday 14 June 2019.

A beautiful, rousing rendition of an Aussie classic to celebrate and farewell a great Prime Minister.

[edithshead]

Regret, they say, is the most expensive thing in the world, but it’s a lie. Regret is free; you get to have as much regret as you want.

from Down in the Dark by William Barton

(Asimov's Science Fiction, December 1998; reprinted in The Year's Best Science Fiction, volume 16)

[amethyst-bohemian-moonchild]

Listen

, so many emotions

[tomoleary]

Harry Borgman “Hunting on Kunderer” by William Barton (1973) Source

[jrderego]

The Three Body Problem and When Heaven Fell: A Comparisson of Invasion Stories

I recently completed reading Cixin Liu’s book The Three Body Problem, like, literally closed it fve minutes ago before starting this article. For those who don’t or aren’t keeping up with what’s in original Science Fiction literature these days, The Three Body Problem is a 2015 TOR release translated into English by Ken Liu. Originally published in Mandarin by Chongquing publishing in 2006. Translations take time, no doubt and considering the depth of differences in language structure, not to mention storytelling form and linguistic idiom, the fact that it was even translated at all is a feat. If you don’t get why this is a big deal check out a couple of the free translations of the Strugatsky Brothers original Russian novel Roadside Picnic, there are a lot of them and a lot of them suck. Literature isn’t something you can whip through Google Translate and have anything worthwhile. So props to Ken Liu for putting so much work into bringing The Three Body Problem over to the Engish speaking audience. It seems to have been a worthwhile endeavor too considering the list of awards it earned in 2015 and 2016. The Three Body Problem either won or was nominated for every single major science fiction award offered on Earth. This is great and shows that Science Fiction, especially hard science fiction, not tied to an existing property can still draw huge accolades.

Also, because of course, The Three Body Problem has been adapted for televison and will arrive on Netflix soon. I am not sure if it was adapted for Chinese TV and that’s what being sent to Netflix or if it’s a Netflix sponsored development. I watched the trailer, which captures some imagery from the first few chapters of the novel well enough that readers of the book will instantly recognize them. I am not sure what my response to the series will be or if I will even watch it.

Adaptations

I was thinking about, not this book, but how I approach adaptations in general while I was walking around a book/record/DVD store. I’d stumbled upon a BluRay of Kick Ass 2 which is a perfectly servicable action movie satire based on the short comic series of the same name by Mark Millar. I saw it in the cinema and didn’t enjoy it not because it isn’t a good movie, it’s because my approach to the experience was to see how faithful to the source material the film was and what changes the director would have to make to accomodate Chloe Grace Moretz as Hit Girl, who in the books is 12 yet who in real life has aged into the late teens by the time the film started production. What I’m getting at is that I’m trying to be less of a shithead about that kind of stuff and try to take things on their own by their own merits. If the sole reason I am going to watch a film adapation is to critique how well the writer/director of the film stayed faithful to the source material I might as well not bother. It’s always going to be different, A Clockwork Orange is different - I love both, Watchmen is different, I really like both (even the non-directors cut), The Shining is different, I love the film and am bored to death by the book, The Sand Pebbles, I love both. But for some reason I don’t extend the same deference to films by authors I already like or have a history with, such as Robert Heinlein - no good adapations of his work have been made, William Gibson too, Frank Herbert, Gregory Macdonald, Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, all of them have adapations and all of those adaptations fail to stand enough alone to be good without the source, and don’t use enough of the source to be good adapatations. As such they force a drawn comparison. It’s a vicious circle, admittedly, and one that I’ve only recently recognized in myself and have tried out of which to break.

Anyway, back to The Three Body Problem and why I’ll probably skip the adaptation airing on Netflix…

I didn’t like the book.

I realize that calling out all of the accolades that this book has received, describing the jump off point for original Chinese hard science fiction television, and all of that before even mentioning that I finished the book not exactly out of spite, but close. I don’t like to give up on books, there is always the chance that a writer can surprise me even in the last 500 words of a story that offsets any ill-will they may have engendered in the previous word count. This doesn’t happen often but it does happen. This caveat applies only to science fiction books. Fantasy stories generally never get beyond chapter 1 with me before I donate them. I hate fantasy stories. Hate them with the fury usually reserved for war criminals and crooked politicians.

The Three Body Problem should be something right in my wheelhouse. It’s science fiction based in real science, it isn’t based on existing IP, it’s from a writer who is new to the scene (at least in the USA). All of these characteristics usually get my brain already willing suspending disbelief before I even crack the spine.

But The Three Body Problem doesn’t work for me for one big reason and a lot of little ones.

The Big Reason

The Three Body Problem is a setup novel at 390 pages that is barely the first act of a short story. There are two other books in this series and I was aware of that at the time of purchase but even a series of interconnected novels should at least tell a complete story. The Three Body Problem doesn’t do that. It exists to set up the next book – that I am not going to read because I am sure the second book exists to set up the third book. It’s not that I don’t like to read, I love reading, but if you’re going to drag me through 1000 pages of your story over three books the story better be really goddamned compelling and The Three Body Problem just isn’t. The core of the story is sort of a detective story where a nanotechnologist is recruited by a global war council to infiltrate a mysterious group of scientists who seem to keep committing suicide or being murdered. That is an intriguing premise. The plot jumps around in the timeline for most of the 390 pages between the current story of Wang Miao the nanotechnologist, and the man who becomes his partner, Da Shi. Wang infiltrates the group of scientists who have become a weird cult that many prominent physicists and astronomers have begun to follow. The other story is that of Ye Winjei, a physicist who is sentenced to spend her lifed at a radio observatory called Red Coast that the Chinese government has built ostensibly to track western satellites.

A large underpinning of Ye Winjei concerns the life she leads at the radio telescope and how she ascends to the leadership of the cult decades after she is freed and hired to work as a physics teacher at a technical college.

Ye Winjein’s time at Red Coast produced a daughter, Yang Dong also a physicist and married to Ding Yi, himself a theoretical physicist.

Everyone except a few government/military officials are scientists, which, to be honest, was incredibly refreshing. None of the characters are the sort of innocents that provide the common way into science fiction at least since Neuromancer. Where Yi Winjein’s story gives us a sympathetic (at first) heroine who is adapting to the crushing power of the revolutionary government, Yang Miao’s innosence is focued on the cult and machinations of the members, not the science. He understands the science and everyone who speaks with him about science speaks with him as if he understands because he does. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the gritty, downtrodden every-men (people) of cyberpunk and a lot of what science fiction has taken on as main characters in the last couple of decades but for all the shit I talk about disliking this book, I liked the characters. Cixin Liu did these people well, and props to Ken Liu as well for keeping their distinctiveness intact in the translation. That can’t have been easy.

I am not going to do a whole breakdown of the plot, you can go read the story yourself or watch the Netflix show on your own.

Like I said, there are a lot of little things that got under my skin with this book that punched it repeatedly off of the recommended list for me and onto the “I am recycling this book when I am done” list.

The Little Things (that suck)

The Three Body Problem reads like young adult fiction. The sentence structure is simple. The details are limited. The use of pronouns is distracting. The writing is artless and boring. Those are just the smallest complaints. I realize that this is a translation so I let a ton of this slide, but if 390 pages is boring and utilitarian I have a hard time staying interested. It isn’t that the plot doesn’t move along, it does, but very slowly with a lot of meetings and long passages of expository dialogue. Bradbury would have hit the meat of this plot in like 200 words. Cixin Liu doesn’t even get out of the first act until page 380.

I’ve watched a handful of reviews of this book on youtube and I am convinced that ALL of the reviewers who have heaped praise on The Three Body Problem have listened to The Three Body Problem as an audiobook and not actually read it.

Same story, different medium.

The experience of reading a book and listening to a book are very different. Listening, at least for me, loses a lot of the artfulness of the prose if there is any. I read and later listened to Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and the experiences were vastly different. When I read it the poetry of his language and the structure of his sentences and paragraphs eclisped the story, in the audio version the story overshadowed the prose.

If you are interested in Blood Meridian, I had a really good experience reading first and listening second. Your mileage may vary.

The Three Body Problem may be more exciting as a listen on Audible or something but I didn’t listen, I read through all 390 pages. The sentence and paragraph structure reads like something targetted to readers of The Hunger Games or Harry Potter and the Something of Something. They are shortish, simple, pronoun heavy, and slow with state of being verbs. All of these are characteristics of writing for less experienced readers. It shouldn’t be the case in books ostensibly written for adult humans who can understand the concepts being discussed.

Admittedly there is a reason to simplify the language when dissecting the physics in this book, but well over ninety percent of this book reads more like a mystery. An example where the tendency to gild the lily all the way through and thus make a book unnecessarily difficult to read with miniscule payoff for the effort is The Vorrh by Brian Caitling. Never have so many wonderful sentences been put into service of such a disjointed and overly complicated story.

The Ready Player One Problem

There are giant segments of Wang Miao playing the “Three Body Problem” video game. I absolutely HATED these insufferable segments of the book. Not only did I not care what the outcome was of Wang’s “game” the game mechanics themselves made absolutely no sense at all. I understand game theory. I understand zero-sum and non-zero-sum games, but the idea that players would invest in a haptic suit and a ton of expensive gear to go and talk to representations of past Chinese leaders or Western scientific pioneers to argue the solution to the three body problem in physics is exceptionally difficult for me to accept both as a reader and writer, let alone a gamer!.

I accept that no one really knows what to do with VR yet. The killer ap isn’t yet a thing, though it will most likely be some immersive game - I know my kids love Beat Saber and some weird gladiatorial fighting game that made me almost run into a wall when they let me play it. But in science fiction VR tends to have one of two futures - Everyone is in VR all the time and not only for entertainment, but commerce and work and education and everything else associated with life not tied directly to physical needs (food, sleep, pee/poo, shelter) is provided in VR. This paradigm goes back, literally, to William Gibson’s short stories in Burning Chrome and the novel Neuromancer. The ideas he seeded there have been built on and expanded by other authors like W.T. Quick, Bruce Sterling, Neil Stephenson, etc… but the differences between how Gibson envisioned VR and how they envisioned VR are so minescule that it might as well now be considered a mechanic of science fiction as a whole.

That said, the real change in how VR is portrayed in science fiction is that it has moved from the cyberpunk subgenre into more mainstream mass market science fiction. Mass market science fiction like the excerable Ready Player One by current best selling author and future name on an award similar to the Bulwer Lytton prize, but for hellishly piss-poor prose, Ernest Cline.

I hate Ready Player One, HATE IT.

The second way that VR gets used in fiction is as a game that ties together real world events, soldiers, for example, fighting a distant war through VR suits linked to robots or space ships. Or characters who have to use VR for some dangerous aspect of their job, exploring a poisonous planetary atmosphere or the deep sea, for example, but those experiences are tangential to the plot of the story. The Three Body Problems falls into this category. The Three Body Problem Game is meant to do two things: one allow people to work out a solution to this vexing physics problem, and two, to test whether or not the player is worthy of being approached by the cult.

If you start to recognize a couple of other sub applications of VR or computer gaming here, that too is a now a science fiction trope where the protagonists are presented with a complicated challenge that ultimately tests their worthyness/skills to be allowed into whatever this other world is, and oops, the simulation was real! See also: Ender’s Game, Armada (also by Ernest Cline), The Last Starfighter (the movie Ernest Cline ripped off for Armada), A Babylon 5 episode where the command staff had to figure out how to disarm an alien bomb, at least a few episodes of Star Trek varients. There are others, there are always others. But these are the ones I can yank out of my brain without too much thinking.

The Three Body Problem game works like this - You appear on a plain with some large structure in the distance. As you approach the condition of the world may be in variations of one of two states. One, the stable era where the climate is “earthlike” and comfortable and conducive to life, or two, the chaotic era where the world may be frozen or charred. The stable and chaotic eras determine the state of the inhabitants of this world as well. During chaotic eras the inhabitants of this world are placed into a sort of dessicated stasis, sort of like tardigrades, and rolled up and stored in bunkers. During stable eras everyone is rehydrated and allowed to do normal things alive people do. The gist of the game is to find a way to predict the appearance and langth of a stable and a chaotic era so that society can thrive in one and weather the other before the world is destroyed by one of the three suns.

The game mechanics of the Three Body Problem are simple. It’s a platform for expository dialogue between the player and a Non Player Character representing the leader of this world. For the most part the game presens a leader from China’s history because that’s how the Chinese characters would measure the passage of time and the technology that accompanies it when watching a society grow and change depending on the era. There’s one segment where Wang Miao meets with some Renaissance inventors instead of Chinese heads of state and generals. The outcome is the same.

That’s pretty much it. They are expected as players to come with theories as to how the calculations could be determined using the technology available at the time whichever leader is in charge. Success is measured in whatever year the society lasts until before being destroyed by an unexpected chaotic era.

We learn through the two competing timelines that an invasion of Earth is pending from a world only 4 light years away that suffers from the Three Body Problem. They are known as the “Trisolarians” and know where Earth is because of Ye Winjei who first notices their broadcast at the Red Coast base and figures out how to use the sun as a giant amplifier to send a message back.

With the technology that the Trisolarians have at their disposal it will require about 400 years of travel for their fleet to reach Earth. The Trisolarians, for what we learn of them in this book, have found a way to retard the scientific development of humanty by messing with the results of their particle physics results generared in the CERN accelerator and other accelerators on Earth. There is also some discussion of quantum computing and quantum states of existence that are interesting in that you can create a quantum entangled proton that gives you faster than light communication by shooting one proton to the destination and keeping the other quantum entangled proton local. This sort of makes for a weird remote controled proton computer thing that can both mess up CERN results and deliver messages to scientists by imprinting text on their corneas.

The cult that Wang investigates is made up almost solely of scientists who know what is coming because of Ye’s actions. She leads the cult, her hatred of humankind springs from the way her father was murdered in the early pages of the book during the Cultural Revolution. The cult is also seeing information sent from the Trisolarian fleet meant to freak them out and turn them away from science. This is because the Trisolarians can use two protons unfolded and imprinted with circuitry, then refolded and used as a quantum computer to send messages through the corneas of the scientists that they target. I don’t pretend to understand how this works but I am allowing the willing suspension of disbelief to let me accept it.

The one issue I have with the Trisolarian’s plan is the reliance on flumoxing partlcle physics as the key to stopping all scientific development on Earth. I am not sure how this is the lynchpin other than for things like, I guess, propulsion systems? Quantum computing maybe? Biology and other disciplines of physics wouldn’t or shouldn’t be immediately affected by inconsistent results from CERN or other particle accelerators. But I tried hard to just take that for what it was and figure that someone would spell it out for me, but I guess that is in a book that isn’t this one.

When we finally get to spend time with actual Trisolarians they aren’t presented in any way that gives us a glimpse into their appearance, culture, traditions, etc… They are presented as sort of disembodied conversations captured and sent to one of the factions within the cult that restate the need for them to leave Trisolaris and spell out their plan, supervillain style, as they create unfolded, 4th dimensional, single-proton, quantum computers. The Trisolarans we meet seem to now a whole lot about what Earth is like both in culture, climate, wildlife, etc… even though it seems that only two messages have gone back from Earth to Trisolaris and that the Trisolarans state that they aren’t really sure where Earth actually is but they have a good idea. So there are some baffling inconsistencies, or, in the case of The Three Body Problem - plot foles filled in during the plots of subsequent books.

Cest la vie!

Inside the cult two factions have developed, one who sees the Trisolarians as gods who will improve life on Earth by erradicating humans and this making it a better place for all of the other life forms (based on a Billionaire American character who meets and befriends Ye). This group views the Trisolarians as “Lord” and have a religious fervor for a future that they will never see. The second group sees the Trisolarians as more advanced stewards who will raise the better traits of humanity and the rest of the world and improve things all the way around.

The Trisolarians view Earth and humanity as a threat and realize that we if we are smart and powerful enough to read and respond to their message it is only a matter of time before they come to Trisolaris to conquer it.

There, that’s the end of book one. The only one I will read in this series.

The central idea is that we have inadvertendly invited an alien race to conquer us. What we do with that knowledge is how the story develops. I like that the book is structured with two competing timelines of information and I like that the characters are interesting in both. There’s the end of my praise and criticism of the book as it stands.

When Heaven Fell

Since this is an invasion story, even if the invasion is still centuries away, I am reminded of one of the other invasions stories that I read and adored and reread and re-adored called When Heaven Fell by William Barton. There is a plot similarity in these two stories in that the world has an interval from when they learn an invasion is coming to when the invasion happens for humanity to prepare. For the cast of The Three Body Problem that is all handled, as I understand it, in the next book. In Barton’s book the first contact event happened before the main character was born and the war happened when he was a teenager. The difference is that Barton is able to tell what is ultimately the same basic tale of The Three Body Problem in like two paragraphs instead of 390 pages. That frees up a whole lot of writing space to tell a more interesting story, which he does, of a great protagonist named Athol Morrison.

The aliens in When Heaven Fell are a race of black cubes known as “The Master Race” who were developed billions of years ago by a once intelligent species as servants/protectors. That species, now known as Poppets, are little hamster sized fluff balls who do not appear to have any organized civilization at all. The Master Race, acting on some long forgotten set of instructions, has spread out and enslaved the galaxy one race at a time, incorporating them and their knowledge and people before stretching their hands out again for more conquest. In When Heaven Fell the Master Race arrived on Earth and announced themselves, they were beaten back when the captain of the Earth’s first faster than light spaceship rammed the Master Race’s vessel, destroying it. This kicked off a 50 year countdown before the invasion fleet of the Master Race would arrive at Earth. In that time humans created a one world military industrial powerhouse to create the weaponry necessary to defend themselves from the mercenary force that the Master Race keeps as its invasion arm. The war between humans and the Master Race lasted six weeks and killed 90% of the human race.

The war earned the humans a spot in the Spahi Mercenary Corps, the military wing of the Master Race’s empire.

When Heaven Fell is not an uplifting novel, it’s bleak and sad and at times hopeless. Athol Morrison is sent home on leave after subduing a planet in the Master Race’s sights and massacring every living thing in their capital city. Home is a shantytown in what used to be a city in North Carolina, the few people who remain eek out a living digging for resources that the Master Race takes away. A few maintain basic services. Others try to stage a resistance. All in all everything is fruitless and life on Earth is one of endless sorrow and early death. The only way to escape is to win a spot in the Spahi and become ruthless.

Barton presents us with a wonderful lose-lose ethical choice. Athol Morrison chooses one way his former girlfriend who does not get selected for the Spahi, chooses another. Everyone does what they must to survive even at the expense of other people they should, in any other story, have loyalty towards.

When Heaven Fell was maligned when it was released. I learned of the book from a scathing review by Dr. David Brin in either Asimov’s or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction that decried the bleakness, the reliance on Athol spending much of his down time having sex with his former girlfriend or prostitues or people assigned to him as doxies by the Master Race, and the hopeless view of the future. But, when the world has been devolved to this point what currency is left? I bought the book the same weekend that I read the review and have read it a few times since, each read brings me more insight into the ideas of invasion and what it means.

Humanity may have lasted longer had some of the armor they developed not failed. This sounds mundane, I admit, but Barton adds a sizzler line that I have never forgotten. When one of Athol’s childhood friends plans to stage a rebellion and enlists Athol’s help in getting his people prepared for combat. They have secured at least one suit of unused armor from the war. Athol shows them how to wear it and tuck their arms just right because the original contractor skimped on materials to increase profit and created a weak point where the wrists and elbows met and there wasn’t time for a second run of manufacture.

Genius.

What an incredible idea, what a detail to just throw in? The implications of that are something that’s kept me thinking and writing and thinking in the years since I first read it.

Comparing When Heaven Fell to The Three Body Problem isn’t my agenda here. And, while my taste differs from many of those who festoon the opening pages of The Three Body Problem with accolades, I can see the attraction that this might have to Netflix. If the subsequent books all fall into the 400 page range as the first one does then they have ample material for several seasons of programming.

What I’d like is for someone (me…) to adapt When Heaven Fell for Netflix or one of the other streaming services. It’s such a great story and one that could definitely reset expectations for what both exciting and interesting and thought provoking science fiction could be. Plus, there aren’t enough military science fiction shows that aren’t clumsy clones of the Verhoven version of Starship Troopers.

Read that instead of all 1200 pages of Cixin Liu’s books. My two cents.