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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Review of the novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling

Deathly_Hollows.jpg
Harry Potter
and the
Deathly Hallows

The Harry Potter series wraps up at long last: After publishing the first three books in 3 years, it took another 8 years for J.K. Rowling to write the last four. Of course, each of the four is twice as long as any of the three, so there you go.

If you’ve surfed in here and haven’t yet read the book, be advised that there are spoilers after the Read More link below, although I’ve tried to keep the first half of the review free of them.

Deathly Hallows starts, as the other books do, at the end of the summer between school years, but this time the book promptly heads off into new territory: As Harry is enemy number one where the resurrected Lord Voldemort is concerned, and since his mystical protection will evaporate as soon as he turns 17 (which is the age of maturity for wizards), the Order of the Phoenix plans to hide Harry for his protection. Not everything goes as planned, but Harry finally ends up in a safe house.

While preparing for the marriage of Ron’s brother Bill to Fleur Delacoeur, our trio of heroes (Harry, Ron and Hermione) start planning how they can go about finding the remaining Horcruxes containing fragments of Voldemort’s soul, since if they can destroy them all, then they can bring about the dark wizard’s downfall. Unfortunately, the downfall of some powerful forces on the side of good in the wizarding world leave the three on the run from the ascendant dark lord’s forces, with precious little idea of how to proceed other than trying to stay one step ahead of their pursuers.

Their adventures on the road involve personal conflicts, a variety of traps, and learning some surprising facts about Harry’s family and Dumbledore’s history. They also learn of the existence of the Deathly Hallows, some powerful magical artifacts which could turn the tide against Voldemort, but which – like the Horcruxes – are well-hidden, if they even exist at all.

I freely admit that the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, sapped my enthusiasm for the Harry Potter series. It became clear to me that J.K. Rowling was no longer being edited, and she really needed a strong editor, because she too easily fell in love with her own typing. Phoenix badly needed to be cut at least in half, and Half-Blood Prince, though better, was also too long and had long stretches of boring in it. So I didn’t approach Deathly Hallows in a very forgiving frame of mind, since it was another giant tome.

That said, Hallows has some things to recommend it. It’s a very different book from its predecessors, having very little of the “kid’s stuff” feel of those books: It’s all deadly serious, and Harry and friends are mostly left to their own devices, as Rowling puts them in the role of the “last, best hope” for the good guys. The story has finality written all over it: The stakes have never been higher, and the story revolves around Harry’s and Dumbledore’s backgrounds (much as Prince revolved around Voldemort’s), bringing a strong feeling of coming full circle.

But, dammit, the book is still too darned long. It takes nearly a quarter of the book to finally get Harry and company on the road looking for Horcruxes; the pages before are a very, very gradual build-up of elements of the story, and once again I wished Rowling would just get on with it. Heck, the whole first chapter is completely superfluous and should have been cut. I’m still of the mind that Rowling simply fell in love with the sound of her typing, and had enough clout to keep her words from being edited, even though she really, really badly needed some serious editing.

The book takes some strange turns once Harry is on the road, and some of them don’t ring true. And then it still takes quite a while before the shape of the story becomes known. Eventually, the conflict becomes not just the one between the forces of good and evil, but the temptation of the Deathly Hallows for Harry: To follow the course Dumbledore set for him to destroy the horcruxes, or to go for the seemingly-certain victory by seeking the Hallows. This is actually a surprisingly sophisticated conflict for what is otherwise not a very subtle series, and I wish more time had been spent on it, rather than the noodling around which occupies the first half of the book. (The insight into Dumbledore is not uninteresting, but it’s not essential either. A lot of it is spun out of whole cloth just to increase the suspense in this volume, with little connection to earlier volumes.)

Deathly Hallows feels so divorced from the rest of the series that it makes several of the early books feel even less relevant: Goblet of Fire can be boiled down to Voldemort returning from the dead, Order is little more than giving Harry a reason to hate Voldemort because of what he does to Sirius Black, and Prince is partly Voldemort’s backstory and partly the set-up for this book. It feels like you could read the first three books, and then just skim the next three to get to the “good stuff” that’s in here.

And as usual I think the cover of the U.K. edition (pictured above) is much better than that of the U.S. edition. Mary GrandPré’s art is not at all to my taste, so I’m glad to have the British editions instead.

The bottom line in my opinion is that this book is more suspenseful than the two before it, and feels more necessary to the overall story, but Rowling still needed to be seriously edited to cut down the volume of extraneous material and make the story more streamlined and enjoyable. She could still surprise and delight, but not like she could in the first three, shorter books. My final feeling is that I’m glad the series is over because I don’t think I could have pushed through much more of her verbiage, and that’s not a good epitaph for any series. The core magic of Harry Potter was the feeling that Harry was a normal boy who found that he was really extraordinary, but that magic is far in the past. Deathly Hallows is just a straightforward adventure story.

Beyond this point are spoilers for the book, so don’t continue if you don’t want to be spoiled!

Continue reading “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”

Stardust

Review of the film Stardust.

I remember when Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess‘ book Stardust was published in the 1990s: It first came out as a series of 4 squarebound comic books, and I looked forward to it eagerly, having greatly enjoyed the couple of issues of The Sandman they’d done together. But I was bitterly disappointed in the series.

First, rather than being a graphic novel, it was instead a prose novel with illustrations by Vess. Moreover, it felt like a step backwards for both creators in its quality. Thumbing through it today, Vess’ illustrations often are of very simple design and execution, and don’t illustrate the moments that I’d most have liked to see illustrated. Gaiman’s text seems extremely weak: The characters have none of the strength or humor he employed in Sandman as a counterpoint to the (intentionally) dreary title figure, and the narrative style is plodding. Gaiman seems to have a tendency to start by writing a “travelogue”, taking the reader on a tour of the ideas in his head, but without much actually happening. Stardust has this problem in spades, and with a decidedly anticlimactic ending. It’s my least favorite of Gaiman’s novels.

So I wasn’t enthusiastic about a film adaptation of the book – until I saw the previews for it. A good cast, and the scenes looked more dramatic than I’d recalled from the book. So I decided I was interested in going to see it, and I’m glad I did, because Stardust the film is much better than the book.

The story takes place in the 19th century: Tristan Thorn (Charlie Cox) is in love with Victoria (Sienna Miller), but she doesn’t love him. One night, they spy a falling star, and Tristan promises to find that star and bring it back to her. But it falls beyond the wall for which is town is named, and the guard won’t let him through. Tristan learns from his father that he was born beyond the wall, and a gift from his mother allows him to head beyond the wall to the magical world of Stormhold on his quest.

The star turns out to be a young woman, Yvaine (Claire Danes), who had been pulled to earth as part of a test by the dying King of Stormhold to choose his successor. Yvaine carries a jewel which will allow the successor to ascend the throne, and the jewel is pursued by the King’s sons Primus (Jason Flemyng) and Septimus (Mark Strong). Yvaine herself is sought for nefarious purposes by a trio of aged witches, in particular the evil Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer). Tristan finds her first, and they set off on paths to adventures as they make their way back to Wall, complicated by Yvaine’s dislike of Tristan as well as their pursuers.

Director Matthew Vaughn (who, like Charlie Cox, is entirely unknown to me) has assembled a terrific cast in support of a fine script which tightens up the novel and jettisons a lot of the boring stuff, while punching up the dialogue. Cox has an amiable-yet-bewildered nature which reminds me a bit of Matthew Broderick. Pfeiffer – as usual – is a thoroughly loathesome villain; a few more years of this and she’ll join Glenn Close among actresses I think are perfectly fine actresses, but they play so many roles of hateful characters that it’s hard to get behind her in any other role. Danes does a good job being by turns grumpy, resentful, insightful, lovestruck, and crushed, and she and Cox not only seem to have a good rapport, but they appear to build that rapport as their characters get to know each other.

Stealing the show is Robert De Niro as Captain Shakespeare, tyrannical commander of a lightning airship who isn’t all that he seems. He looks like he’s having the most fun he’s had in years, chewing scenery and acting like – well, you’ve gotta see it, it’s worth the price of admission all by itself.

I’ve never warmed to traditional views of Faerie; I find them depressing and capricious – maybe depressing because they’re capricious. So I was pleased that the film takes all of those elements out of Gaiman’s Faerie, as well as making several other changes, such as adding a climactic confrontation among the interested parties, something which was sorely lacking in the book. All the plot elements get neatly tied up in a much more satisfying manner than the book, especially in the epilogue.

The movie isn’t perfect: It still drags in places, especially in the first half. Yvaine’s behavior when they reach Wall lacks motivation (Debbi pointed this one out to me), and seems intended simply for cheap drama, which is too bad since plenty of expensive drama occurs immediately afterwards. But it gets a lot more right than it gets wrong, and all-in-all it’s a fun, exciting, and romantic film which is very well executed. I’m glad I saw it.

The Bourne Ultimatum

Review of the film The Bourne Ultimatum.

Yesterday morning we went to see The Bourne Ultimatum, the third film in the series based on Robert Ludlum’s novels. All three movies are a lot of fun, although I think they go steadily downhill from the first one, The Bourne Identity.

This one starts near the end of the second film, The Bourne Supremacy, with Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) leaving Moscow and returning to western Europe. On the way he learns about a reporter, Simon Ross (Paddy Considine), who’s been collecting information about him. Ross has also learned about a project called Operation: Blackbriar, which has set the US government on his trail, headed by Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) and Pamela Landy (Joan Allen, back from the second film). Bourne contacts Ross, leading to confusion on all sides, as Vosen thinks Bourne was Ross’ contact, while Bourne isn’t sure what Ross had. The information he gets from Ross leads Bourne to Spain, Morocco, and then New York as he untangles the story of his origins as a government assassin.

The films are all marked by decent acting, a decent plot, excellent action sequences, and not much characterization. The visual look of the films are distinctive, with washed-out color palettes and special effects which don’t look like they rely much on CGI (I have no idea whether they do), which makes the films feel like a throwback to good old action-adventure films that aren’t trying to wow you with their technical prowess.

The thing I liked least about the direction was the tendency to cut rapidly between various angles during the action sequences. I think this technique worked especially poorly in this film, because the longer shots were so effective: Panoramic views of a whole scene, or a lingering shot of someone’s face, or a careful framing of part of a fight sequence. Considering many camera shots were done with “shaky-cams” (the notional opposite of a Steadicam), there’s already plenty of movement for dramatic tension, and the rapid cuts just make the action harder to follow, which doesn’t help anyone.

The most fun element of the films are Bourne staying one step ahead of his adversaries – who inevitably have far more resources than he does – simply by being alert and playing the game better. The scene in Waterloo Station here is just brilliant. Unfortunately the story is marred somewhat by some characters behaving rather stupidly. While the characters are only human, it just feels shoddy when characters seem to be acting like idiots for no good reason, while other characters seem uncannily smart.

Overall a good film, but not as good as the first two.

A few further comments – of a spoilery nature – behind the cut.

Continue reading “The Bourne Ultimatum”

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Review of the film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

This afternoon we went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I was not enthusiastic about seeing this entry in the film series because I hated the book. Fortunately, the film is quite a bit better than the book. Unfortunately, the story still isn’t very good, and the movie is, like the book, the weakest of the series.

Director David Yates thrws down the gauntlet at the beginning of the film that he’s a director, dammit with a fade-in to Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) marking time in London and being tormented by Dudley Dursley (Harry Melling) and his cronies: The playground Harry’s in is bleak, Harry’s sitting on a swing, and there are various dramatic camera angles and pans during the opening sequence, when Harry and Dudley are attacked by Dementors. On the one hand it all seems a little too ostentatious, but on the other hand given how easy it would be to do a rote adaptation of Order, I appreciated anything Yates did to liven things up.

And actually Order is the most visually appealing entry in the series after Prisoner of Azkaban: Hogwarts and its environs look beautifully rural, in a dangerous-looking, untamed way. The Order’s safe house is crammed with decor and stuff. The Ministry of Magic is large and imposing and by turns claustrophoic and paranoiac. The thing is really very pretty to look at, and the camerawork fits in pretty nicely.

The film jettisons a lot of the chaff of the book – as it has to, in order to finish in under 12 hours – and at its core are two truths: That the story works best when focusing on Harry’s relationships with his friends and allies, and that the plot feels basically entirely superfluous to the overall arc of the series.

The plot of the story, basically, is this: In Goblet of Fire Harry saw Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes without a nose) come back from the dead. While Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) and his allies believe him, Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy) and the Ministry of Magic do not, and they believe the Harry’s pronouncement is both a public nusiance, and that it’s part of a power play Dumbledore is making towards the Ministry. Consequently Fudge installed Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) at Hogwarts to push Dumbledore out and squash Harry’s spirit.

In other words, the larger plot boils down to Harry trying to convince those in charge that what really happened, happened!

This leads to some character bits that are both good and bad: Harry spends the early part of the film brooding and feeling alone, which is pretty annoying and just rings false for the character. On the other hand, he ends up in the middle of the resistance against both Umbridge and Voldemort, putting him in a position of authority and trust, where he’s an admirable figure. Radcliffe is much better at playing the hero than the petulant young man, so the latter scenes are a lot more fun. (Radcliffe, by the way, is filling out and looks quite buff – rather different from the stringbean that Harry is.)

The film also points out that the Potterverse is getting weighed down with an awful lot of characters, many of whom no longer get much screen time: Ron (Rupert Grint) has hardly anything to do in the film, Snape (Alan Rickman) has only a small role, Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) appears for just two scenes, Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) is also only in a few. Evanna Lynch is quite good as Luna Lovegood, but the character feels irrelevant. Staunton is appropriately nauseating and loathesome as Umbridge, but she never really gets her comeuppance on-screen, so all the build-up doesn’t have an appropriate catharsis. Even the film’s best moment – the Weasley twins’ kissing off to Umbridge, to a fantastic bit of music by composer Nicholas Hooper – feels like it was tacked on awkwardly.

All things considered: Order does its best to make order out of Order, it’s pretty to look at and has its moments, but it’s still pretty much a mess, mainly because of the source material. It should delight plenty of Harry fans, but I think Azkaban is going to end up being the apex of the movie series.

My Reviews of Earlier Harry Potter Films:

  1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
  2. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
  3. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
  4. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Kelly Link: Magic For Beginners

A short review of the collection Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link.

This collection of stories was our book for this month’s Kepler’s speculative fiction book group. I enjoyed the first story in the book, “The Faerie Handbag”, and figured it would be a charming collection of little modern fantasy vignettes. Unfortunately, I didn’t like any of the stories in the rest of the book!

By and large, these are plotless stories with obscure endings (and sometimes no endings at all): A family in an increasingly-haunted house (or are they just descending into madness?); an all-night convenience store frequented by zombies; a nested collection of semi-horror stories. None of them really go anywhere. The characters are occasionally just-barely-interesting, but are often flat and dull. The stories take odd turns for no reason and have no resolution or explanation. Many of them feel like set-ups for novels by Tim Powers – but only the set-ups. (Powers, of course, would carefully tie up all the details by the end of the story, which is exactly the opposite of Link’s tales.)

Other than “Handbag”, the title story comes the closest to being a satisifying story: A boy and his friends are fans of a bizarre fantasy television show, “The Library”. When he and his mother inherit property in Nevada from a late relative, a protracted goodbye leads to them heading out to Nevada. The story has a variety of interesting bits, and a build-up of “What the heck is going on here?”, but the story abruptly ends with no sense of a conclusion, leaving the reader entirely befuddled and frustrated. (Why the story is titled “Magic For Beginners” also seemed entirely obscure to me.)

Link does have a playful way with words, and many of the stories contain numerous humorous lines worth quoting to your friends. But beyond that element, I didn’t enjoy them, and I struggled to finish reading the book.

A pity, since I’d heard such good things about Link’s writing, but it’s clearly just not for me.

Karl Schroeder: Queen of Candesce

Review of the novel Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder.

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Queen of Candesce

The sequel to Sun of Suns – which just wrapped up being serialized in Analog – takes us back to the unusual environment of Virga, a giant balloon environment surrounding an artificial sun, Candesce, in which people live in rotating cylindrical “worlds” which drift through the space. While Sun was a nonstop tour of the space in Virga, Queen of Candesce takes place almost entirely on Spyre, one of the oldest worlds in Virga.

The novel opens with Venera Fanning drifting into its space after her escape from the circimstances at the end of Sun. She’s rescued by Garth Diamandis, an aging rake who ekes out a living in the no-man’s-land space of the main cylinder of Spyre. Venera doesn’t know whether her husband, Chaison, accomplished his mission to save their home of Slipstream, and she doesn’t know what else has happened since leaving Candesce with its key in her pocket. Garth robs her of some of her valuables as “payment” for saving her, but not trusting him to do more, she escapes and tries to jump off the edge of the world, but is instead captured and becomes a citizen of the nation of Liris.

Spyre has been divided up into thousands of small nations, most of them with a few valuable assets which they trade with other worlds, and many of them being extremely small: Liris is just a few dozen people in a single building. Liris is currently ruled by Margit, who is in fact a representative of the much larger nation of Sacrus, which is engaged in a lengthy struggle for dominance of Spyre. Not to give too much away, but this little claustrophobic nation makes for an exciting episode of the story all by itself, at the end of which Venera finds herself reunited with Garth. While Venera at first wants to leave the world, Garth presents another option: Posing as the last heir of an ancient, powerful, and defunct family and accumulating her own power base on Spyre, with which she could return to Slipstream to seek vengeance for her husband.

This takes Venera to the realm of Lesser Spyre, buildings and structures high above the main ring in which the powerful and privileged live and trade with the outside. This also brings her firmly into conflict with Sacrus, as Venera’s presence upsets the balance of power which Sacrus has been gradually upending over centuries. Venera encounters friends, enemies, rebels, tyrants, and madmen during her time on Spyre, in an adventure which is transformative for both herself and the world.

Sun of Suns was a lot of fun, and Queen of Candesce is even better. For one thing, rather than skipping among several different points of view, Queen almost entirely focuses on Venera (with time out taken for Garth a couple of times). Venera was the stand-out character of the first book, so getting inside her head for the second book is an excellent choice.

Spyre is an even more claustrophobic environment than those in Sun; despite being a huge habitat, the place feels constrained, because of the stratified social and economic environment, and the fact that Venera’s first ally – Garth – is an outcast from the social structure, living on the edge of even the society of outcasts. Therefore watching Venera – who is a dramatic and active heroine, despite her calculating nature – try to thread her way through the nations of Spyre makes for a lively plot.

The plot turns entirely on Venera’s disruption of the status quo on Spyre, and her opposition to Sacrus’ plans, as well as her delivering the Key to Candesce into this charged environment. It’s a lively story, and there’s little reason for me to spoil any of it for you, save to say that although there will clearly be more books about Virga, Queen still has a satisfying ending, and even stands on its own perfectly well. (There are a few loose plot threads, but by design: Queen is about Venera’s odyssey through Spyre, and not the larger drama throughout Virga.) Okay, the story does seem a bit roundabout when Venera stages her grand pose, but it’s all so much fun to read that I didn’t care a bit.

It’s Venera’s character arc which is worth deeper consideration: She arrives as the consummate manipulator, but deflated due to being separated from everything she knows, and with an understanding that her husband is dead. A couple of flashbacks provide insight into how she became the woman she is, but the events of Queen give her a deeper appreciation for loyalty and doing right by others who deserve it, making her an respectable figure with a sense of responsibility beyond simply that having married an admiral. Schroeder’s handling of characters has been rather bland in his novels to this point, so I’m hopeful that Queen indicates a breakthrough in his skills in this area.

Regardless, I’m eagerly looking forward to what comes next.

Karl Schroeder: Sun of Suns

Review of the novel Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder.

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Sun of Suns

I read Sun of Suns over a year ago when it was serialized in Analog and neglected to review it. Which ain’t right, since I think it’s Schroeder’s best novel to date. It the first of a series, and with the second, Queen of Candesce, having just wrapped up its own Analog serialization, I decided to revisit this one.

Sun of Suns takes place in the system of Virga, which is an unusual system indeed: It’s a giant balloon, several thousand miles wide, with a small artificial sun (Candesce) at its core. Virga is mostly pressurized, so people can travel throughough the balloon at will, although at some risk, as the air quality is not consistent. Candesce lights and heats the center of Virga, but the outer reaches are too far away. Humans live in rotating cylinders which are slowly drifting throughout the system. The small “worlds” at the outer reaches light their own small suns to make them habitable. Tech level is middling: Peculiar warships and small jet-cycles propel people throughout the system.

Hayden Griffin grew up on Aerie, a world attempted to build and light its own sun when its larger neighbor Rush, capital of the nation of Slipstream, attacked it and prevented the project from being finished. Griffin’s parents died in the attack, so he focused his young life on infiltrating the house of Admiral Chaison Fanning of Rush, intending to kill him. Griffin rises to the level of a jet cycle pilot for Fanning’s wife, Venera.

Slipstream is at its own crossroads, as Admiral Fanning has learned that two of its neighbors plan to attack it, and that Slipstream’s leader, the Pilot, is heading into their trap. The Admiral assembles an expedition of a few ships to head towards Virga looking for a lost treasure with which he hopes to be able to defeat their enemies.

The book is primarily an account of their voyage, as well as an exploration of the unique environment of Virga: Small worlds, weightlessness, empty space between the worlds, yet still crossable in fairly creaky vessels. Hayden befriends Aubri Mahallan, a woman from outside Virga, who briefly describes the post-singularity universe from which they are insulated. Just as the travellers are getting adjusted to one another, they suffer a difficult encounter with pirates, and later on they search for clues to the treasure they seek in another world elsewhere in the habitat. These elements display both the relationships among the characters, and the political machinations of the story, as everyone wants something, and some people are more manipulative than others in trying to get it.

The book is filled with adventure and swashbuckling, thus making it very unlike Schroeder’s earlier novels, which are generally far more cerebral. It’s very much to the good of the story, as Schroder’s stories often seem to get overwhelmed by their ideas content, and here the balance is much closer. The combat with the pirates is vividly depicted, as is the climactic battle in the floating ships, while ample attention is also paid to hand-to-hand combat in zero gravity. The book weaves its way between high-tech and steampunk, but it stays relatively grounded, which is crucial in bringing such an exotic locale to life.

Although Hayden is the nominal hero, Venera Fanning is the most interesting character: Having been shot by a long-travelling bullet when she was younger, she hopes someday to find who fired that bullet. She also loves her husband, but is as machiavellian as he is, sometimes to his frustration. She’s the character which drives the book’s events more than Hayden is, and she certainly grabs the reader’s attention more readily.

Characters besides Venera are a mixed bag: Both Hayden and the Admiral feel somewhat generic. Of course, Hayden’s been pursuing a destructive obsession for several years, so that’s not a big surprise. Aubri is a bit of a cipher, on purpose, but she gains Hayden’s romantic affections, which only sort of works in the story: The gulf between their backgrounds is a nifty idea, but I didn’t think it played out well on paper. Then again, Aubri is one of the keys to the story’s resolution, so she’s certainly worth paying attention to.

I enjoyed Sun of Suns best of Schroeder’s books to date. It’s more accessible than his earlier novels, while still being chock-full of interesting stuff. My recommendation comes with the reservation that the ideas content might still feel overwhelming to some readers, but if you felt like Schroeder’s earlier novels weren’t quite what they should have been, I think you’ll be pleased with Sun of Suns.

John Scalzi: The Android’s Dream

Review of the novel The Android’s Dream, by John Scalzi.

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The Android’s Dream

After finishing John Scalzi’s The Last Colony, I was excited to launch right into this one, which is unrelated to the Old Man’s War trilogy. Unfortunately, The Android’s Dream really wasn’t my cup of tea: It’s a very light action-adventure story with heavy dollops of farce

In the near future, mankind has joined a community of worlds, and one of its closest allies among the many alien races is the caste-bound Nidu, who communicate in part by sense of smell. One human diplomat harbors a long-standing grudge against the Nidu and sparks a diplomatic incident in a first chapter which is basically a long fart joke (with an equally-unfunny aside about meat consumption). Besides just not enjoying the chapter, it made it hard for me to take the rest of the book seriously.

Following that, Secretary of State Jim Heffer and his aide Ben Javna try to find a resolution to the dispute – the Nidu having Earth over a barrel due to the circumstances – and negotiate a deal to try to find a special breed of sheep needed for the upcoming Nidu coronation ceremony. Failure could lead to a breaking of the alliance, a result which some factions on Earth think would be a perfectly fine thing. Javna farms out the sheep-finding job to his friend Harry Creek, a low-level functionary in the government who’s actually a tremendously capable ex-soldier, and who is the book’s protagonist. Creek has the help of a cutting-edge computing resource, and in his search he meets Robin Baker, owner of a pet store with an unexpected relationship to Creek’s search. Creek and Robin are pursued by hired guns whose employers have different designs on the coronation, and there are a couple of other interested parties as well. The problems are solved with a little deus-ex-machina mixed with a little Gordian-knot-slicing.

Some of what I enjoyed about Scalzi’s other books is present here: Creek and Robin facing their pursuers in the middle of a mall is smartly written and inventively engaging. Creek’s background in the army is well-thought-out. The dialogue is sharp.

But the book is weighed down by its many frivolous and farcical elements. The Android’s Dream is filled with the sorts of ridiculous touches which turned me off of books such as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash or Max Barry’s Jennifer Government: The extreme conclusion of mixing our meat-consuming culture with our conservationist attitudes; a church created as a scam and self-consciously maintained in that spirit (sort of the anti-Scientologists); the endless parade of rather silly aliens. It all feels more dreary than funny.

Scalzi also employs the time-worn technique of giving many of the major characters – as well as the Church of the Evolved Lamb – a lengthy expository aside in which their backstory and motivations are explained, often for humorous effect. For some reason, this technique never works for me: The backstory, even if relevant, feels extraneous, and also falls into the trap of being a big “tell-don’t-show” exercise.

And, I was disappointed that, well, there isn’t anything in the book about androids dreaming; the title refers to the breed of sheep that everyone’s trying to find. (The cover features sheep, although it also features an android. It really has almost nothing to do with the story, and thus seems a little misleading.) Of course, the title plays off the title of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and some have said that the book has some stylistic similarities to Dick. I’ve only read a little of Dick’s writing (The Man in the High Castle and A Scanner Darkly), neither of which I enjoyed, so that’s not a selling point for me.

The book moves along fairly well after getting through the first several chapters, which set up the scenario and introduce Creek and his world, but the story just didn’t work for me. I really wanted to like this book, having enjoyed the Old Man’s War series as much as I have. But those books feature a light, bantering narrative set against a serious background with serious themes, while this book was a veneer of serious story set against a mostly-silly background with few serious themes. Not my thing.

Get Fuzzy: Scrum Bums

Darby Conley’s strip Get Fuzzy is fun for reasons other than that its fictional head-of-household Rob Wilco is a fanatic Red Sox fan, though that helps. Rob is an advertising geek with two anthropomorphic pets: Satchel Pooch is a kindly and responsible dog, but his memory isn’t so good and he frequently misunderstands what others are saying. Bucky Katt is a nasty-tempered siamese cat with a long, deadly fang. He’d greedy and self-centered, and often tries to run scams past Rob and Satchel, but he’s pretty naive about how the world really works.

This, as they say, is their story.

The episodes mostly revolve around Rob and Satchel trying to deal with Bucky’s shenanigans: Trying to con or extort money out of Satchel (or, less often, Rob), his ongoing feud with the ferret next door, or just being generally offended at things around him. Better yet, it often comes with clever wordplay, sometimes feeling like some twisted version of a Marx Brothers film. For instance:

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(Click to view the strip)

The latest collection (which came out at the beginning of the year) is Get Fuzzy: Scrum Bums. Though the strip doesn’t change a whole lot over time (Rob stopped wearing glasses a while ago, and the Red Sox haven’t won the World Series for a few years now), it’s still quite funny. I think I enjoy when Rob gives Bucky his comeuppance the most, especially when Bucky doesn’t quite realize that he just pulled a fast one on himself.

Despite his clean linework, Conley’s art reminds me more of some of the odd styles from the early days of MAD Magazine: His characters are distinctive and usually kind of funny-looking, with a wide variety of facial expressions. He also makes extensive use of forced perspective, which puts the animals on equal footing – at first glance, anyway – with Rob. Conley’s style is not the sort that I’m usually into, but he’s certainly capable enough, and his writing and characters more than make up for the strip’s sometimes-repetitive panel style. And his art style is certainly distinctive on today’s comics page.

He manages to mix moments of pathos in with the silliness, too. For instance, Satchel learns that he’s actually Canadian, and Rob takes the pair on a trip to meet Satchel’s parents and see where he came from. The trio shares a quiet moment once they’re there:

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That’s about as quiet as Bucky gets. Really.

Get Fuzzy has accreted a huge supporting cast over time, many of whom are hilarious. A recent strip sequence featured many of them gradually moving in with Rob and company, until Rob finally put his foot down. Since many of the animals tend to be on the dim side, they all had bizarrely ineffective ways of dealing with each other. My favorite relatively-recent addition is Mac Manc McManx and his impenetrable British accent; although I wonder whether he might offend the occasional British reader, he also demonstrates how the spirit of Chico Marx continues to influence our culture. (Kidding! I’m kidding! Sorta.) I think he embodies the strip’s fundamental zaniness and tendency for its stories to veer out of control in bizarre ways.

Overall, Get Fuzzy keeps me coming back to see what ridiculous plan Bucky’s cooked up this week, and how it goes wrong and throws everyone out-of-sorts until things settle back to normal. Silliness unleashed is how I like my comic strips, and hardly anyone wears a leash in Get Fuzzy.

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