Disappointysium -- a guest review by Tim Akers

It was so much fun doing an exchange of movie reviews with Bryce Moore last month for Pacific Rim that I thought it would be fun to do another one with my client Tim Akers for Elysium.  Tim has just started selling an e-collection Bones of Veridon which collects some of the short fiction that first attracted me to Tim's work,  and you can also enjoy two Veridon novels, Dead of Veridon and Heart of Veridon.  Also highly recommended -- Horns of Ruin, the first fully realized blend of steampunk and sword & sorcery.
The JABberwocky page for Tim Akers
Tim's Blog, main link
My review, on Tim's blog.

Disappointysium

I want to start by saying that I kind of liked this movie, in the sense that I didn't walk out and I didn't feel like I had wasted my money and I only got blood-humming angry a couple times. But really, it was a movie of great potential that made dozens of small mistakes and one major mistake that killed it for me. I wanted to like it more, but didn't. Here's why.

Elysium felt strangely like a science fiction movie written by someone with no experience in science fiction. That's odd, because Blomkamp delivered the excellent District 9 (enjoyed it, will never see it again) and is supposed to be something of a ninja among science fiction directors. But from the very beginning there were a number of gaffes that felt like they were being made by someone who heard about this science fiction thing, and thought maybe he'd try his hand at it. Let me tell you, it's not for everyone.

Let's start with the science stuff. I'm not the kind of guy who freaks out about impractical science in my fiction, especially movies. I have a friend who hates Firefly because of the kitchen table in the space ship. It's too big, he says. You'd never waste that kind of space in a real space ship, and certainly not with a wooden table. I'm not that guy. But from the very start of the movie there were just. So. Many. Things. There's an early scene where a bunch of 'unfortunates' tries to sneak into Elysium with some stolen shuttle IDs. Three shuttles go up, two get destroyed en route by a (wait for it) shoulder launched missile system, and the third crashes into someone's lawn. Everyone is rapidly rounded up by adorable droids, except for a mother and her daughter. These two break into someone's house and, using the forged DNA-ID on the kid, use the rich people's health care to cure the girl of something debilitating.

Begin the questioning, sir.

Why are they shooting at this shuttle from earth, rather from the station itself? Wait, how are they going to land when there must be some kind of shield keeping the atmosphere in the... huh. Ok, how are they keeping the atmosphere in the... wait, they caught *everyone* in a matter of minutes? Well what's the point of trying to get up here if literally everyone gets caught? Oh, so this scene is some combination of the voter ID laws, universal health care and white privilege, I guess? Ok... but...

And that's all the stuff that came to me in one scene, and there's one thing I'm leaving out that's *huge* to the plot that, I guess, never occurred to the director. But I'll get to that later, when I'm yelling about the ending. Spoiler: fuck the ending.

This kind of bizarre, poorly thought out inconsistency in the mechanics of the world, both societal and technological, never ends. I kind of hoped it was just some convenient hand waving at the start of the movie to demonstrate the shape of the world and to foreshadow the rest of the plot, but no. No luck. I can't go through every little thing that happened because it's a lot of things, but suffice to say that there's not a scene in the movie where I wasn't questioning some bit of the technology. That bothered me mostly because I'm really, really not that guy. I'm *so* good at suspending disbelief. But for most of the movie, I just couldn't do it.

Ok, so that's the technology/science stuff. Next up, characters. Max is that type of main character who makes mistakes to move the plot forward. I don't like that kind of character. He basically keeps falling forward until everything works out (for everyone except him). Sure, the system he's stuck in is horrible, and he's just trying to make the best of a bad situation, but there simply wasn't a lot of appeal. I won't go into his girlfriend, because she was just a foil for her child. I won't talk about her child because honestly nearly every line they gave that child made me sick to the stomach.

Also, and this is important, the second you meet the kid she tells you she's sick. It's literally the first thing that she says. And you immediately flash back to that early scene I was bitching about, with the mother and the kid and they steal their way to Elysium so the kid can be cured. And now you know what's going to happen for the rest of the movie. The only person who doesn't know that this is the shape of the rest of the movie? The protagonist. And what active role does he take in this forward movement of the plot? None, at least not until the very end. The kid and her mom get up there on the same ship as our hero, but not because of anything specific that he's done. No, they're just along for the ride, and so the antagonist and his pals can constantly threaten to rape the mother. Got it.

There's other character stuff. The antagonist is just a monster. Jodie Foster's character... I don't know how best to say this. She's portrayed as one of these people who will do anything, commit any atrocity, push any boundary to accomplish her goals. She authorizes lethal force against those shuttles at the beginning. When those assets are taken away from her (without being replaced by more humane or politically acceptable systems. I really don't understand why they aren't replaced, or why there's NO APPRECIABLE DATA SECURITY anywhere in this world that apparently runs on data and algorithms) she conspires to overthrow the government by way of a system reboot (as a former helpdesk nerd, I couldn't help but say "Society not working? Have you tried turning it off and then back on?") because the programs that run Elysium apparently function in such a mechanical way that if you reboot the central computer and put your name in the data field labeled "President" you're suddenly the president. And when the homicidal rapist murderer who just got his face shot off and rebuilt does something stupid, she goes down there without any security and berates him. Because who would *dare* try to stop her? But when that same homicidal rapist murderer puts a piece of glass in her throat and throws her into a room with a nurse, and that nurse tries to bandage the wound so that they can get this woman to one of the billions of miracle-laser medbays that are just outside the door, what does this unstoppable force of nature do?

She gives up. She lets herself die. Because...?

Again, these are the most obvious things. There are more things, but I don't want to get into all of them. Suffice it to say that I doubted a lot of the character choices. But whatever.

I'm going to talk about the ending now, because up until the end I was still enjoying the movie. I know it sounds like I wasn't, but there was enough fun stuff going on that I was able to push most of this behind me. And then we got to the ending, and I was all 'Screw it!' and then there were some credits.

Here are the relevant details. Jodie Foster is going to overthrow the database. I mean government. She's going to overthrow the government with a database. To do this, she employs the assistance of Jerk #1, CEO of the company that builds all of these lovely droids that are everywhere. Jerk #1 does something in a unix shell that, when uploaded to the central computer in Elysium, will reboot the system and make Jodie Foster president.

Let's pause, because while that's ridiculous at nearly every level, I'm going to let it slide. It's the kind of big idea that science fiction sometimes depends on, and since the movie is nothing more than a clumsy metaphor for disenfranchisement, we're going to let it go. After all, in my first book there was a church that was based on strange pieces of machinery that floated down a river, and they built a god by fitting the pieces together even though they had idea which parts went where. So metaphor is a thing I enjoy. The problem, though, is one of plotting. Jodie Foster explains her plan to Jerk #1 while they're on Elysium. He then goes back to earth (with nearly no security) writes the program to carry out this mischief, encrypts it with a 'fatal' algorithm (more on that later) and then travels back to Elysium. Except, of course, he doesn't make it back. He gets hijacked by our hero, who downloads the contents of Jerk #1's brain into his own brain, to steal bank accounts or passwords or something. And instead of bank accounts, he ends up with this program to overthrow Elysium. Then Jerk #1 dies.

Let's talk about that encryption program for just a second. How is it supposed to work? I'm not going to dwell on how encryption actually works, because that's irrelevant in this world, it's just shorthand for 'protected'. So if it's supposed to protect this data with a 'fatal' algorithm, how should that work, if you really want to protect that data? Shouldn't it kill anyone who tries to download it without permission? That's how it would work if it were my head being hijacked. But no, that's not how it works. It kills the person carrying the data, but only after it's been download. Why? Because otherwise the plot wouldn't work, that's why. So Matt Damon is able to download this protected data, and then other people are able to view it, and finally he's able to run the program on Elysium (more on that later) and then tragically die. Very tidy. Almost as if someone wrote it that way.

Anyway!

At the end of the movie, Matt Damon runs this program on Elysium, only instead of making Jodie Foster the president (she's dead, anyway) they make all the people of earth citizens of Elysium. So now the droids can't arrest them, the medbays will heal them, and they all get matching polo shirts with the swell Elysium logo.

Actually, I want a polo shirt with the Elysium logo. I think that would be cool.

So all that happens and Matt Damon dies and the day is saved. All the world's problems have now been solved by universal health care.

Except obviously they haven't. Things are the way they are on earth because of overpopulation, environmental disasters, poor resource management and a general societal collapse. There are no jobs! Resources are scarce! Are you going to solve those things with the fifty or so medbays you just shipped down to earth? No. No you are not. You are going to cause riots, all while disabling the primary security system you've put in place (the droids, who can apparently no longer arrest people because they're citizens of Elysium) oh and now all of those people are probably going to try to fly up to the space station and live there because why not? What's to stop them?

Here's the final kicker? Remember that first scene I was bitching about, where the shuttle crash lands and the people go running out and then get apprehended and deported? Each one of those people had been given a valid Elysium ID, burned into their skin. The medbays scanned them as valid citizens. Theoretically, since it's all one big database, the droids would have too. Oh, and the droids were able to arrest those citizens, because...?

So when they reboot the system on Elysium and make everyone a citizen, those droids are not able to arrest the new citizens even though they were able to earlier. And there's no system in place for reversion of citizenship, or amending the terms of citizenship, or any kind of backdoor anything to undo this act. Because...?

Look. I actually liked the movie, kind of. But it failed on so many levels, in so many little ways. It was lazy in its metaphor, inconsistent in its application of technology, poorly paced (I didn't even get into the movie's structure. Gods, the pacing!), and the characters frustrated me. But that ending! What. The. Hell.

Seriously.

by Tim Akers

BEA Day 1

So here are some of the things seen at Day #1 of Book Expo America, the biggest trade show for e book publishing industry in the United States...

The Rebellion/Solaris booth gave first look at a finished book copy of Dead of Veridon by Tim Akers, which goes on sale next week. Sometimes a book cover looks different on an actual book than in the steps along the way. This one looks nicer than I might have expected.

The Macmillan Audio catalog has a special "Just Announced" insert page for Mistborn: The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson. Because they hadn't planned to offer a retail consumer product, but I persuaded them to give it a think and they decided that they in fact should. Me happy. Next, trying to persuade them to provide physical consumer product for the original Mistborn trilogy. If you would like to see that, let me know.

Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner doing a joint book signing at the MWA booth. Hard to believe, but this is Charlaine's first ever trip to BEA, and tomorrow she is featured at one of the major breakfast events. This is one of those things as an agent that you dream of having clients important enough to be doing.

Roaming about the digital section, with an amazing assortment of eReaders that you haven't heard of, many of which are different than the two years ago eReaders you've never heard of, one of which has an office just a mile or so away from JABberwocky in Astoria/LIC that we've never heard of. Kobo, which is unveiling a new device, is the most prominent in attendance. No Nook or Kindle at BEA, neither is counting on mom and pop outreach or libraries for selling devices. Amazon has a stand for their publishing operations.

The show floor is mixed up from years past. Recorded Books is in the digital section and Tantor is only in the Rigths Center so audio row isn't this year. Major publishers have booths in strange locations. Due to renovations there is a blocked off section in the middle of the show floor which breaks up the expanse.

Who says you don't get free books any more? I picked up around 20 without even trying that hard. My parents and siblings will be getting some care packages!!

On the way over to Javits, seeing the mass market of Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings in the bestseller facing at Hudson News, which tells me Tor has put some money into getting good display for us on this book.

So just a few quick idle notes...

This past weekend was the Nebua Awards weekend event in DC. IT was a good and well run event, but I find it sad that only around 200 people show up for the awarding of one if the top prizes in SF. No representation that I saw for Orbit or Harper Voyager, as an example. Still I think it was a good networking opportunity for Myke Cole. I got to catch up with David Louis Edelman over good west African cuisine. I wad happy to see an Analog story by Eric James Stone win in one of the short fiction categories because Analog is very important to me, Stan Schmidt is important to me, and Eric James Stone is an author I like. Met a few agent- hunting young writers, so fingers crossed for when their partials arrive.

I could say more about both BEA and Nebulas, but will settle on this for right now.

2010!

Well, on balance, 2010 was a pretty danged amazing year for Brillig, and the Business of Being Brillig.

On the dollar-and-cents scorecard, I've told people I think 2010 was the best year I had, and ever will have, and then I have to listen to all of these people saying "oh, you can't know that." Maybe I am selling myself short, but... 2010 was the year we were getting royalties for the second half of 2009, which was when there were 9 Sookie Stackhouse books on the NY Times list at once (8 on paperback list linked, 9th on hardcover), a feat for an author that is unprecedented in the annals of publishing. I'd prefer to be pleasantly surprised if that can ever be equalled or surpassed by some other event or combination of events. Charlaine returned to Earth in the US in 2010, she was "just" an incredibly successful author, and the hardcover sales first week for DEAD IN THE FAMILY were "only" twice the first week sales of DEAD AND GONE the year before. Even if CBS picks up a series based on Charlaine's Harper Connellly books, that series has only four books in it and won't duplicate the 9-on-a-list Sookies. Even if Paul W.S. Anderson starts filming his Painted Man movie tomorrow, that series has only two books so far. Now, there are multiple foreign markets where we haven't yet seen the Charlaine Harris business peak. She's hit the French bestseller lists, True Blood goes on a better German network in 2011, lots of things are happening. But I like to be on the conservative side of realistic in my planning, and if you're the next person I'm telling that 2010 is the year of peak oil, JABberwocky style, humor me on that.

JABberwocky is not a one-legged stool.

The Sookie Stackhouse books were bestsellers even before True Blood. In 2010, Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy was selling well beyond what the first three Sookie books ever came close to doing even as that series was climbing the charts pre-True Blood. Well beyond. The Stormlight Archive is, with The Way of Kings, off to an amazing start. The success is deserved. The Mistborn trilogy is one of the towering achievements in the fantasy genre in the past five years, and The Stormlight Archive will be all that and more in the next ten years.

As successful as Charlaine and Brandon are, Peter V. Brett has accomplished things with just two books under his belt that go well beyond either at equivalent points in their career. #35 NY Times, #16 Der Spiegel, #9 Sunday Times of London with THE DESERT SPEAR.

I don't want to turn this post into a Christmas letter where I mention every single client, but I could. Elizabeth Moon's OATH OF FEALTY is making many best of year lists, Tim Akers is doing so for a 2nd year running, Jack Campbell's "Lost Fleet" books got to #10 on the NY Times paperback list and are moving into hardcover, Simon R. Green turned in his 40th novel in 2010, Eddie's author Jon Sprunk has had the kind of early foreign success Peter V. Brett and Brandon Sanderson enjoyed.

It was a really good year.

One shadow was having Kat Richardson depart our company, probably the most important client to part ways with JABberwocky. Maybe it was inevitable. Kat had been discovered by my first full-time employee Steve Mancino in our slush pile during his very first week on the job, and Steve took very good care of Kat's. I don't know if I ever saw him happier during his time at JABberwocky than when he did a great deal with Roc for her 4th thru 6th Greywalker novels. His decision to head back to his family in Philadelphia and later to depart the agency was a blow, and I wasn't able, as the writing of those three books played out, to match that kind of first author/agent special thing that the two of them had.

But we also had our best year ever in 2010 for placing first novels.

Eddie did a great job getting multiple editors excited about Janci Patterson's SKIPPED, and then of doing the heavy lifting for an eight-month process of negotiating new boilerplate with the publisher that ended up buying. I was able to sell Myke Cole's LATENT after many years and many drafts. Interestingly, I first had extensive face-time with Myke at the same Philcon in 2003 where I first had extensive face-time with Peter V. Brett, so that was definitely a good weekend to be at the Philadelphia Marriott. We didn't entirely sell Bryce Moore's VODNIK to the new Tu Books imprint, but we were thrilled when he came to us with the offer. I first met Bryce at the World Fantasy Convention in Madison in 2005, had read and given notes on an earlier draft of the book along with some others along the way, and feel we did something more than pick up the phone when it rang. And interestingly enough, I also first met Tim Akers at that same World Fantasy, so that was definitely a good weekend to be hanging out in Wisconsin. The person who introduced me to Brandon Sanderson at the 2000 Nebula Awards in NYC recently tweeted that he had finished a novel and was starting in to revise, who knows maybe we can make a two-fer on that convention, too! And at the very end of the year, Eddie got an offer for FAIR COIN by Eugene Myers, more details to come.

We launched our e-book program. I did hope it would be a little further along by the end of 2010. We ended up taking more months than weeks to ponder exactly how big a program we wanted to have and what overall approach we wanted to take, which I think is time well spent. We also ended up underestimating all the little things that would come up to be sure we were setting up our vendor relationships the right way, which is just annoying time to have to spend that I'd like to make go away. But we do have six Simon Green titles up for Kindle, sales are in line with expectations, Kobo should follow very soon, and a lot of horror anthologies not long after, some possibly on Kobo before they show up elsewhere.

Of course, that whole Kobo thing... In the US, Kobo is pretty well tied to Borders, who knows where Borders will be in a couple of months but it looks grim, and then what is the Kobo store in the US? However, Kobo is very well established in Canada and Australia, to name a few other markets, and probably will be a player in the e-book space at some level no matter what befalls its major US partner. Well, with the e-book revolution happening by the day and the Borders scenario to play out, 2011 will be interesting for the business. Enough publishers had bad experiences in Borders in 2008 especially that I think most will manage to muddle through even if Borders does go into bankruptcy, but it wouldn't be entirely surprising to see some smller publishers go into bankruptcy if Borders does.

After years of pretty much sleeping in the office, I finally gained some distance between work and play in 2010. I hate to commute to work after all these years, but I like not sleeping in the office. But the last stage of decorating new apartment to allow old apartment with home office to be spruced up a bit (bedroom there hasn't been painted in over 19 years!) is becoming one of those typically long-winded fix-up stories.

I saw just under 80 movies, which is pretty typical for recent years. I used to see more like 120 movies, however, and there are always a half dozen or so of the missed movies that I wish I'd seen.

I was shocked to see just how little theatre I'd done in NYC in 2010, but am trying to catch some things before they close. I reviewed two of those shows here and here. I think I'm going to try harder to make time for going to shows during 2011. Why live in NYC otherwise, and if Myke Cole follows through on plans to move to New York, I can't drag him with me to see things sometimes when I do "missed it in NYC, last chance DC" theatre trips.

The iPad is amazing. I think the best technological device that I've ever had, and it pretty much goes everywhere with me. I read on it, I tweet, I surf, I correspond, I find efficient walking routes on Google Maps, and imagine if I started to really load it with apps.

The one thing I don't have now that I had a year ago is Len Horowitz. Len was a man, around 70, who was a regular at my Scrabble club. And however these things happen because I can't really explain why it did, we became good friends. We'd walk up 7th Ave and talk after Scrabble, the summer holidays when we had a bbq at someone's house we'd play an extra game or two at a local pizza dive after or head to where we could watch the fireworks on the 4th. Len kept a lot to himself, we didn't talk much if at all about his family as an example, but we could talk about movies at length even if we often didn't agree, and he was genuinely interested in what I was doing and happy for the success I was having in recent years. At the start of 2010, Len stopped showing up at Scrabble without any word, and I ended up stopping by his apartment building in March to see what was up. He'd been diagnosed with a brain tumor, he was in rehab, didn't really want visitors. In retrospect you could look at some of the little things, the eye problems he'd been having or the way the Boggle words were getting more fanciful (Len always thought it was better to create words when you couldn't find many real ones), but only in retrospect. I sent a healthy number of greeting cards, got one e-mail from him that didn't sound very good because he said he was dealing now with pneumonia on top of everything else, and we all know that's not a good thing in situations like these, not a good thing at all. He ended up passing away while I was away at London Book Fair. No funeral, I was told. Maybe there'd be a memorial service. There really wasn't any family to speak of to bother sending a card to, a cousin or nephew or something helping to sort through his affairs. I was really looking forward to having him over to play Scrabble in my new apartment, he'd have actually ventured forth from Manhattan for that. When those of us in the Scrabble club play Boggle, we'll always know what it means when we say somebody's written down a "Len word." It's fifteen years now that my Uncle Matthew passed away, and I still feel that on occasion. In fifteen years, when I'm starting at an awful Boggle board with one vowel and no words and putting things down just because that I'll still see Len there, guiding my hand as I write down my very own Len words.

He was in his early 70s. How do people live to be 50? Let alone into their 80s and 56+ years together like my parents. There are days when my hair is looking its most grey, my knees feeling their creakiest, this week when I've been sitting around with an icky cold, when I wonder just what the pleasures of a ripe old age are supposed to be. But you know, we sold four first novels this year, and I'm quite eager to see what people think of them. Sookie has a choice to make between Eric and Bill. I'm not yet entirely sure if The Warded Man or Jardir is the Deliverer, if the bad Verrakai can be defeated once and for all, whether the Knights Radiant can be re-formed, if Black Jack can discover what makes those mysterious aliens tick. The Gale family has yet to bake me a pie on my birthday, maybe John Taylor can find my Latent magic, and the Mets and Blue Jays will finally meet in the World Series. All of these are things worth waiting for.

the retail scene

Family business often brings me to the Hartford area, where the bookstores are longtime friends of a sort. 

First and foremost is the Borders in Farmington, store #55. Got to see it from when it was a construction site, when it was exciting to have a Borders move in during the dawn of the superstore era. It was the first of it's kind in the area, and it still does a decent business. And had a very decent selection of close to 90 non-Charlaine JABberwocky titles on the shelf. Like many Borders, not the business it did ten years ago. And like the Westwood store, which is of similar vintage, the box is too big. Back where the music used to be in the car rear corner, they have couches and chairs set up. But the space overhang isn't as bad as Westwood, the rent no doubt cheaper. I still like this store very much since it is big, full of endcaps and displays, lots and lots of books.  First in the wild sighting of Horns of Ruin by Tim Akers. 

Across the street, literally across the street, is a Barnes and Noble. It always seems dead. No customers. It had just over half the titles of the Borders, and some of those because they haven't sold in years but they're selling down to zero instead of returning to zero, so they just sit and sit and sit.  I cannot understand how this store stays in business. 

Just down the street is the Westfarms mall. In the days when malls had bookstores this had at least two, I a B Dalton and a Waldenbooks.  And the Corbins Corner strip mall across the street also had a Waldenbooks  And then several years ago and even a few years after the Corbins Corner store closed, Borders put a Walden/Borders Express back into the mall. It never seems to have any customers in it but must make some money because it still exists when 80-90% of the mall stores known to exist in the US have closed. Earlier in the year Borders put the mall stores on the same inventory system as the superstores, so now the books have inventory stickers which I can read. But how does the store make money?  Really cheap rent?? The landlord supports as a public service because rich people in West Hartford want a bookstore in their mall?

Once upon a time the Bishops Corner area of West Hartford on the other side of town had one of the earliest Barnes and Noble superstores, but that was one of the mistake stores from when they didn't know superstores had to be larger and more atmospheric than being larger versions of small bookstores. It closed years ago. And then BN decided to put a store in a new downtown shopping destination called Blue Back Square.  This is like many bookstores in rich suburban areas and doesn't sell much sf/ fantasy and also had around 50 non-Charlaine JABberwocky titles.  First in the wild sighting of Alcatraz vs the Shattered Lens by Brandon Sanderson.  Downtown West Hartford has a small indie I don't even bother visiting since it has a very small sf/fantasy section that isn't well curated.

On the other side of Hartford in Manchester the Buckland Hills mall approach has a Borders, #60, from about the same era as Farmington. Both part of the KMart triplets era, Farmington still with a Sports Authority in same shopping center, Manchester with an Office Max next door that is now an Office Depot and a Sports Authority around the bend.  Atop the hill in the mall proper there used to be a Waldenbooks that doldrums lots of books from a very small space, until the mall gave a secondary anchor spot to Barnes and Noble.

That B&N is now one of five test stores for an educational games section that has taken over the music and movies area. All the Lego you could want, lots and lots of Lego.  It looks nice, I would even go to B&N over a Toys R Us to buy Duplos. It can't do worse than the shrinking music and movies section. Since these items are bigger than shiny disks the section doesn't need a separate security system and register and dedicated employee to keep shrink to a reasonable level, which could save upwards of $3M in personnel costs over the course of a year. It is more open to the rest of the store. Would maybe like e section even more if I were part of the target audience for educational games.  

The Borders always seemed dimly lit to me, and over the years started to look dingy. It was very late to being renovated three or four years ago, maybe they had a fifteen year lease from 1992 or 1993 and held off pending a renewal?  Add to that the overall woes at Borders and it is no surprise that business has slowed. It has gone from being a quietly respectably strong store to being more 40th percentile, if I had to guess. But to judge from the amount of the science fiction section in upstock (I climbed the ladder hoping nobody would notice to bring down 2 Trading in Danger, 3 Way of Kings, a Warded Man, a Poltergeist and a Moon Flights), this is one of the stronger sections for the store. Also, the store was always smaller and has a mid-range music and movies selection, so it doesn't have the empty space issues of Westwood or Farmington and other larger Borders boxes of this era.  Bottom line is that the Borders still has a larger selection of JABberwocky titles, around 80 vs 70, but the BN is new and shiny. But at least the Borders seems to have settled into a stable if smaller business, even if not the business of 10 years ago.  

Borders has been trying very hard to have a good holiday season. In stock guarantee, price guarantee, returns thru January 30. Lots of couponing including a Black Friday insert in 28 markets. Years past they had lists of books, DVDs and CDs at huge discount prices, this year you could an item of your choice at 50% off. Which is crazy, selling an item below cost, but at the same time less crazy than allowing people to buy 8 items at below cost and nonetheless more alluring because you get to choose. 

The list of Borders stores closing in coming days also includes downtown Portland OR (#65), Farmington Hills MI (#77) and Chestnut Hill MA (#17).

Portland was a major flagship downtown location which always struck me even several years ago as having not quite flagship sales, and I am sure was at the end of its lease and not worth renewing.  There is a wonderful Borders in Gresham in the Portland suburbs that did more business with I am sure less rent.  The flagship Powells is .6 miles from the Borders. Should downtown Portland have only one bookstore or is there an opportunity for Powells to open a satellite in another part of downtown or for another bookstore with a lower rent to make a go of it?

Chestnut Hill was one of the oldest Borders stores, maybe at one time a books only location that expanded into a neighboring space to add a music section. Like West Hartford in a rich suburban area that was absolutely a dead zone for sf/fantasy, an absolute absolute dead zone, and I am not sure how well it did in other areas. It is in a very tony mall. I have a feeling it had a decent rent from when it was first leased in the early 1990s and maybe not so decent a rent to renew in this upscale rich suburban mall.  So it will close. I kind of liked it once upon a time because Borders #17 did have a certain character to it, but over the years Borders spent lots of money to remodel the character out, Cheesecake Factory opened in downtown Boston, and not worth the schlep to travel out to a store that didn't sell any sf/fantasy. There is a BN down the street that also doesn't do much business in sf/f, so the people of Chestnut Hill will not starve for books.              

blatant linkage

My client Tim Akers took some time away from his work on Dead of Veridon to give us his thoughts on the Nook he got for Christmas. Click here and enjoy. And then you should enjoy Akers' debut novel The Heart of Veridon, which Library Journal has rightly hailed as a key title in the modern steampunk movement, and then reserve his forthcoming The Horns of Ruin. We've heard of sword and sorcery, or s&s, and now we add the third s of steampunk to create a fully-realized s&s&s fantasy which people are giong to be talking about come November.

He mentions an article in the NY Times today by Randall Stross, an author on hi tech topics. I, like Stross, don't see the dedicated ebook reader as a lasting technology, that being said a lot of people are betting a lot of money that Randall and I are wrong. And Randall gives a lot of attention in his article to Amazon's notorious tendency to say lots without saying anything. The only problem here is that Amazon has actually sold a shitload of Kindles and I do see them all over the place. So Amazon might be coy on giving hard sales #s as a matter of policy or of habit, the iPad may be selling on a much quicker pace than the Kindle when it launched at the end of 2007, but they've still sold a lot of these suckers, they've sold a ton of books for people to read on these suckers, and Randall and I might be entirely correct that this isn't what people will be reading on in 20 years but certainly near term the Kindle is an important part of our lives. I'd have come across this article when I read the hard copy of the Sunday times, but I first saw courtesy of a tweet from Tobias Buckell, who is settling back from Gencon.

Pop Culture

First, I am so happy to hear that Breaking Dawn will be split into two movies, like the last Harry Potter movie. I was so worried that I would be able to skip only three Twilight movies, and now I know I can skip a fourth. Phew! Let me suggest The Dawner Party and Dawn & Dawner as two possible titles for the added movie in the series.

I watched some TV on the plane rides to/from LA for the Season 3 premiere of True Blood on Tuesday night.

I'd watched one episode of The Middle in November, and two more including the pilot/first episode on the aeroplano. This is a really good show, and it's all there pretty much from minute one of the pilot. The closest in ancestry might be Malcolm in the Middle, and it will be interesting to see if The Middle can hold up a little longer than Malcolm did. I think it has a couple advantages. The family in Malcolm in the Middle wasn't a real family. It was very close to one, but the exaggeration was just a little too much. The family in The Middle is exaggerated but I think is an exaggerated version of reality instead of going beyond it. The writing is sharp and snark without looking down on its characters. By keeping the focus more on the mother than on the children it may better be able to survive the inevitable aging of the cast which began to really hurt Malcolm because things that were fun when the kids were younger seemed not so fun at all when the kids were bigger. This is a show that deserves its success.

30 Rock, two episodes, has gotten a lot better than its earliest episodes from Season 1. I may give more time to The Middle next year now that I don't have 24 to watch and can look for another hour or so of network TV to amuse me. But I'm still not sure I like 30 Rock so much that I want to start making it appointment viewing. But it's decent.

The Big Bang Theory. Huh? From sampling that, I'm a little puzzled the show's taken off so much. It's not bad. I've watched bad sitcoms, this isn't one of them. One of the problems may actually be the show's laugh track. The show's funny, but it's not always THAT funny, and the disconnect between the uproariousness of the laughter on the laugh track and the actual quality of the jokes was incredibly distracting to me. The cast isn't bad, but they also seem visibly to be working while the best acting is the kind you don't notice. It reminds me somewhat of It's Like, You Know, a sitcom from ten years back with similar-ish characters similarly sitting around doing sitcom banter, but I kind of liked that the older show was a little dryer.

Friday Night Lights isn't airplane viewing, that's appointment viewing every week for me, and season 4 is no exception. Last week's episode had four different commercial breaks with lead out scenes powerful enough that it took me ten or fifteen seconds to decompress from the show before I could turn to my newspaper reading during the commercials. At the end of the prior episode we found out that the father of one of the main characters, the now-graduated QB of the Dillon Panthers, had been KIA in Afghanistan, this week we're dealing with his deeply conflicted feelings. There's a great scene when the QB visits his coach's family for dinner, and in the writing and the acting it's what the characters aren't saying that's as important as what they are. You're looking at the faces in the background. The QB storms out and nobody knows what to do and the coach says "I'll go talk to him," but what we see is that he doesn't really talk. He goes out, says "I'll walk you home," and maybe they'll talk or maybe they won't, but it's just being there for the person. The one thing I didn't like was the actual funeral scene. Season One of True Blood, one of the points that won me over as the show found its groove over the course of season #1 was when they had a funeral scene where not everyone in the show was wearing a black funeral suit. I was told by Tim Akers that it wasn't uncommon in his upbringing to have one of those hanging around, but I still think there are people in the world who don't have and don't buy and don't wear black. Well, not in last week's Friday Night Lights, where everyone is indeed dressed in black. No, no, no, no, no a thousand times no.

And speaking of True Blood -- well, yes, I'm biased, but I do think the show is hitting a home run in its third season. There's a strong consensus that the first season really started to get good around the 4th episode, that the second season was stronger than the first, and season 3 is at least the equal of the previous. Season 3 motors out of the starting gate picking up its characters right where the previous season left them, and moves forward with great energy. The actors and the writers are all finding their characters. Hence, in Season #1 there were occasional forced message moments with obvious metaphor and real life parallel. Those moments aren't gone in Season #3, but now they're totally in character. When Sookie's giving a message to someone, it's Sookie giving the message. There are an abundance of nice little touches throughout. I was especially fond of the menu for the meal between Bill and the vampire king of Mississippi played by Denis O'Hare. The meal starts out with blood taken from willing donors fed a tangerine diet for the past two weeks. If you're the kind of person who really digs the cage-free hens and the free-range chickens, you'll be able to laugh at yourself while taking the moment very seriously. And if you're the kind of person who thinks that whole cage-free hen stuff is exceedingly silly, you'll be able to take the moment the exact opposite way. It's written and played so dead-on straight that you can't tell which way anyone on the show is going with it, so the moment becomes your own. And let me assure you the second episode is worth watching entirely for the meal. Haven't enjoyed a movie meal moment so much in years, up there with Louis Jordan serving his speciality to James Bond in Octopussy.

If you haven't watched the first two seasons of True Blood, I'm not sure how much the recap at the start of episode #1 will help. Happily, enough people have been watching that it probably won't make a difference.

When they say "it's not TV, it's HBO..." Well, TV doesn't have the budget. The cast of True Blood keeps growing and growing and growing. This Variety review says they're now up to 29 regular characters and I wouldn't argue. In the real world of TV, you can't do that. Maybe once in a while you can have an episode where you drag in everyone for some event, and then the bean-counters will say you can't have any guest stars next week and must use only the regulars.