Champions' League 2013, Round of 16

As usual, I'd like to post my predictions for the Champions' League somewhere public. This keeps me honest if I'm wrong, and allows me to gloat if I'm right. The round of 16 draw has been made, and it has set up some really interesting matches. Here's what I think about them.

Real Madrid vs Manchester United: This really could be the biggest and most exciting match-up this round. Not only are these two of the best teams in the world, but there are also so many interesting story lines to follow; how will Ronaldo play against his former team?; Is Mourinho going to replace Sir Alex after his eventual retirement?; What happens to Mourinho's job if he fails to beat United? Leaving the speculation aside, I think that this will turn out to be another classic tactical battle between Fergie and The Special One. While RVP seems to be the man in form at the moment, I think that United run the risk of being too dependent on him to rack up the goals. If Jose can find a way to neutralize him, and I bet he will, United may not have enough depth in the front line to make a difference. I'm going to call this one for Madrid. Prediction: Real Madrid

AC Milan vs Barcelona: Milan-Barca games are always great to watch, and I don't think this one will disappoint. The only difference between this year and previous matches is that Milan won't be able to compete. Their form in Serie A is poor, their players are all either too old or too young, and they can't seem to find their trademark balance of youth and experience this season. Barca, on the other hand, boasts Lionel Messi in the middle of the best season of his life. Not only is he the best active player in the world, he's quite close to becoming the best player of all time. Nobody can seem to mark him this season, and I think that he'll be too much for the Milan defense. This one's going to Barca. Prediction: Barcelona

Shaktar Donetsk vs Borussia Dortmund: This is going to be an incredible match-up of two teams at the top of their game. Shaktar is Eastern Europe's best chance at European success, and I was totally predicting them to upset some of the bigger teams. Unfortunately, Dortmund is coming off of one of the best seasons in German history, and I can't really see Shaktar standing in their way. Sorry Ukraine, but you're not getting any further. Prediction: Borussia Dortmund

Arsenal vs Bayern Munich: This is another easy one. Arsenal has been struggling of late, and I really can't see them being able to compete for at least another few years. Bayern, on the other hand, are looking to erase the memory of their penalty-shootout loss in the finals last season, and beating the snot out of another London team may just be the way to do it. Prediction: Bayern Munich

Valencia vs Paris Saint-Germain: I'm pretty surprised Valencia managed to make it this far after their incredible meltdown a few seasons ago. I'm also happily surprised that PSG is back in the running, after so many years of Lyon being the only French team to really compete in Europe. Valencia still has a ways to go, however, and PSG can count on a solid squad that plays incredibly well together. Also, they have Ibra. That man must be magic. Prediction: PSG

Galatasaray vs Schalke: It's great to see a Turkish team get out of the group stage, and there's no denying that Galatasaray has being playing great football as of late. But...the German teams are just too strong this year. The Bundesliga is quickly becoming Europe's best league, and Schalke shouldn't have too much trouble here. Prediction: Schalke

Malaga vs Porto: I have no idea how to call this one. Malaga were a bit of a surprise, and Porto does have a real habit of dropping the ball at this stage in the tournament. I think I'm just going to go with my heart and say that the Portuguese will beat the Spanish. That sounds good. Prediction: Porto

Celtic vs Juventus: Right off the bat I'm going to declare my bias. I'm a Juve fan, and always will be. No matter what our form is like, I'm going to call it for us. Luckily, we're in great form this year. Sure, we've lost two games, which is a disappointment after going all of last season undefeated, but we've still got way too much for Celtic. In fact, we're going to win it all this year. Sorry Celtic. Prediction: Juventus (obviously)

Ok, so I think the next round will look very German and Spanish, with a hint of Italian and French. Let's hope I'm right. Forza Juventus per sempre!

The Name

It shouldn't come as any surprise that Alien is one of my favourite movies of all time. I mean, look at the banner picture up there. And my profile pic. Oh, and my screen name on just about everything is Xenomorphs, named after Giger's terrifyingly beautiful nightmare monsters. The title of this blog is also named after Alien, and that is what I wanted to talk about today.

Films and books have to stand on their own merits, but their titles can have more far-reaching effects on our perception of these merits than we realize. I know it's a cliché to say that you can't judge a book by its cover, but in some ways you can judge it by its name. Or, at the very least, I think it's fair to say that your perceptions of a piece of fiction (either written or on film) are affected in some way by its title.

First off, a title can act as a signifier of the kind of film or book you're looking at. If, let's say, it's got a serious sounding title like Doomsday Book, or The Left Hand of Darkness, you know right away that you've got something with a certain amount of dramatic gravitas. On the other hand, you know that Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is going to be more irreverent and comedic. Additionally, titles can help you avoid reading or watching something that you know you're not going to like, usually by situating the movie or book within a series or genre that you can't stand. When I see a movie called Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, or a book called Boomerang Bride, I immediately know to steer clear of them and find something else.

Titles also impart some thematic, poetic, or atmospheric qualities to their respective films or books. Dune conjures up images of sandy wastelands and searing emptiness, while Forbidden Planet just oozes mystery and potential danger. It is in this regard that Alien is such wonderful example of how important a title can be.

Dan O'Bannon, Alien's writer and creator, had originally called his screenplay Star Beast. That's alright, if you're making a cheesy B movie with ridiculous fake costumes and a thin, yet fun, storyline. For a film as dark and tense as Alien, though, Star Beast is way to campy. Can you picture the glistening, smooth-lined, bio-mechanical Xenomorph being referred to by moviegoers as the Star Beast? Something about that just doesn't sit right with me, probably because I think the name sounds somewhat silly and childish, not fitting for a parasitic death-machine. Alien, on the other hand, is minimalistic perfection.

Much of the terror inherent in Alien comes from not seeing the Xenomorph. Neither the characters nor the viewers know what it is, or where it is, until it's too late. With the alien constantly out of sight, viewers are forced to fill in the blanks with their own fears, a process that is always far more terrifying than just being shown a monster. Alien's title works in exactly the same way. It reveals nothing about the Xenomorph or the plot, allowing viewers to fill in the details. What it does do is equally as important. Simply using the word alien, and nothing else, allowed Ridley Scott to reveal nothing about the plot or characters to viewers, except for the fact that some kind of alien was involved. The word also suggests the idea of something foreign and dangerous that absolutely does not belong. The change in title from campy Star Beast to minimalistic Alien helps project the sense of unease and vaguely directionless fear that the characters feel for the first half of the film. It also amplifies the horror of the Xenomorph's presence in the second half of the film. In all, I think it's genius. However, the film does have another title, and I think it's even better.

Many of the non-English versions of Alien are actually titled The Eighth Passenger (in reference to the fact that there are seven crewmembers on the Nostromo until the Xenomorph hitches a ride inside one of them). Hopefully you recognize that name by now (where have we seen it?!). For me, this title does even more to reflect the film's atmosphere of uncertainty and claustrophobia than does Alien. Not only does The Eighth Passenger leave much unsaid about who or what the passenger is (allowing you to fill it in with something frightening), it also points out that there is no escape for the other seven people. A ship, or a plane, or whatever you're a passenger on, is a closed environment, somewhere with no escape. This title thus emphasizes the fact that the rest of the crew is trapped with this undescribed but obviously dangerous eighth passenger, and that is exactly how much of the film's horror is generated. This title, then, helps to both create and add to the film's overall theme and tone. Rather than being just a silly tag that distinguishes this movie from others, it actually plays an integral part in generating some of the fear that viewers are meant to feel. Pretty good for something as trivial as a title, eh?

 
Ok, this was far less intellectual than previous posts, but it was what I was thinking about today. I hope you come back again soon. Maybe I'll be more interesting. Or maybe not.

The World of Tomorrow

William Gibson is undoubtedly one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time. His bibliography is impressive both for its quality and for its profound effect on the genre as a whole. While Neuromancer may not have actually created cyberpunk, it certainly remains the sub-genre's most recognizable and enduring exemplar. Hell, I can't even look at neon lights and urban sprawl without having flashbacks of blind ninjas, shady tech dealers, rogue AIs, and the Rastafarian navy. If you don't get the references then just read the book already.

Aside from its role in transforming an entire genre by raising its literary and narrative standards, Neuromancer has also been praised for its semi-prescient depiction of the near future; at least, what the near future looked like in the early 1980s. The internet was new and exciting, computers were becoming affordable for regular people, cultures were beginning to mix in novel ways, hybrid musical genres full of synthesizers and sampled tracks were taking over the mainstream, and the late-Cold War political landscape was shifting too fast for most people to follow. Gibson, in classic sci-fi fashion, extrapolated these trends to envision a world of endless urban sprawl, hybridized humans and technology, and a sort of ultra capitalistic free-for-all global economy. Some of his predictions were so prescient as to feel commonplace (the erosion of national identities in the face of a global economy, the incredible availability of cheap technology, internet scammers), while others look decidedly quaint or naive in hindsight (physically connecting yourself to the internet, extensive habitation of outer space, computers that can pass Turing tests). Rather than truly predicting the future, Neuromancer gives us a startling glimpse of what I like to call a "past future"; a future as envisioned by people in the past.

 I think by now we're all pretty comfortable with the idea of past futures. Anyone familiar with post-war North American culture has seen countless depictions of "The World of Tomorrow, Today" that became one of the defining images of early Cold War World Fairs, American theme parks, and even Saturday morning cartoons (leaving The Jetsons aside, it's a particularly common theme on The Simpsons, for example). The innocent belief that modern technology would solve all our problems within a few decades became so common between the mid-1950s and the early-1970s that we have yet to fully expunge it from our collective cultural consciousness. The difference between then and now is that we have become disillusioned enough with our parents` and grandparents` hopeful vision for a perfect future that we can half-joke about being promised hovercrafts and robot butlers that have yet to materialize. The technology-worshiping optimism of past generations has given way to a realization that perfection is for Hollywood, and that technology creates just as many social problems as it solves. While Gibson`s characters are not so starry-eyed as to believe they can achieve some kind of technological paradise, they retain a basic optimism about the potentially limitless freedom for creation and reinvention that technology could possibly provide. So, while it`s not a blindly optimistic depiction of the `wonders of technology`, Neuromancer still appears overly positive and confident to our cynical, post-millennium sensibilities.

What strikes me most about the hopefulness of Gibson's past future is that he intended it to be far more gritty and realistic than earlier futures that science fiction authors had imagined. In a collection of short stories entitled Burning Chrome, Gibson turned his critical eye towards the romantically optimistic past future predicted by many of his predecessors. "The Gernsback Continuum", first published in 1981, follows a photojournalist as he attempts to capture images of self-consciously "futuristic" buildings from the 1930s and 40s. The nostalgia for a simpler, more hopeful, era is suffocating as he photographs run-down monuments to an imagined future, many of which "featured superfluous central towers ringed with those strange radiator flanges that were a signature motif of the style, and made them look as though they might generate potent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm (p. 28)." The protagonist spends so much time trying to capture the forgotten beauty of these buildings that he starts physically slipping in and out of the future envisioned by earlier generations of sci-fi authors. He sees perfect people in white togas driving silver bullet cars, cities built of gold, crystal roads, all the gleaming perfection of a fantasy world made of marble and mercury. His visions, though they lose some substance, never fully disappear, but neither do they supplant the real world of the modern "human near-dystopia" of early 1980s Los Angeles (p. 36). Instead, the narrator is left with the ability to catch glimpses of a past future full of promise and hope, always hiding just behind a thin veil of smog and flaking paint.

"The Gernsback Continuum" is Gibson at his least subtle, but his narrative never loses his trademark complexity and contradictory emotions. He lampoons earlier sci-fi writers for their naivety in predicting a future populated with blonde demi-gods and burnished ziggurats, while simultaneously yearning for the kind of world in which these fantasies are believable. Reality has fallen short of this dream, but Gibson tells us that having dreams is still a crucial part of being human. However, he also feels that our cynicism is justified, maybe even inevitable, in a world where "the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming." The promise of accessible high-technology has created a place where "everyone had a car - no wings for it- and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal (p. 28)." Rather than usher in an era of peace and prosperity, the fruits of the 20th-century obsession with technological progress have become the very agents of our misery. It's no wonder, then, that Gibson is critical of a past future that looked so much brighter than our own.

Despite his rejection of the Gernsback past future, Gibson still retains an incredible amount of faith in the power of technology to transform our lives for the better. Neuromancer is never either wholly positive or negative in its depiction of a new future. Instead, it depicts a future in which freedom is near complete, and creativity unchecked, allowing people to be or do just about anything, for good or ill.

I, for one, can't help but feel a crushing nostalgia for the cultural milieu that led to the creation of Neuromancer, much as Gibson must have felt for his own favourite past futures. It feels fresh in its grittiness, comforting in its new-found infatuation with computers, and beautiful in its palette of gray and neon. I just wonder what future generations will think our imagined futures. Will they see us as hopelessly deluded dreamers, or as overly pessimistic worriers? Whichever it is, I hope they treat us with the same dignity that Gibson affords his literary predecessors.

I Got Trolled by Jack McDevitt

Ok, now that I've explored a little bit about the depiction of aliens in sci-fi, I can talk about what got me ranting in the first place. For a little while now I've been a sporadic fan of Jack Mcdevitt's Alex Benedict series. They're not the best books I've ever read, but they're fun and easy to read, so I got through a few of them very quickly and actually enjoyed them despite the formulaic plots and underdeveloped characters. What I liked most was McDevitt's incredibly nuanced and refreshingly novel treatment of aliens. That is, until I read Echo.

Let me back up and summarize the series briefly. Humanity has been in space for thousands of years and has settled numerous planets. Civilizations have risen and fallen all over the place, leaving behind tons of artifacts, from abandoned colonies and space stations to personal diaries and commemorative plates (LOTS of commemorative plates; I wonder how infomercials work in the future). Alex Benedict is a wealthy antiquities dealer/amateur archeologist who, along with his beautiful assistant and pilot Chase Kolpath, travels around the galaxy hunting down rare artifacts whenever the mood takes him. In each novel, which read like a television detective program, Alex and Chase become embroiled in a mystery surrounding some artifact or another. Inevitably, somebody wants to keep something a secret, and attempts are made on their lives (usually someone sabotages their flying car), but in the end their perseverance pays off and they learn or find something really interesting. McDevitt reuses this formula each time, with slight variations, like changing the narrator after the first novel (A Talent for War), or doing the big reveal halfway through so that he can make the book about a disaster evacuation (The Devil's Eye), but overall the structure of each book is pretty much the same. Hell, even certain plot elements, like the sabotaged car, get reused too often. This predictability was getting to me by the time I started reading Echo, the fifth novel, but I still found the series worthwhile if only for McDevitt's fascinating depiction of the Mutes.

For this series, McDevitt has postulated that intelligence is incredibly rare in our galaxy. The Ashiyyur, or Mutes, as humans have nicknamed them, are the only other living alien race that humanity has encountered in their millennia amongst the stars. They are large, grey-skinned, fanged, evil looking monsters, most closely resembling gargoyles or demons. Their very presence makes peoples' skin crawl. Interestingly, they feel the same way about the tiny, hairy, unpredictable dwarf-monsters called humans. Humans refer to the Ashiyyur as Mutes because they don't speak, and actually communicate telepathically with one another. McDevitt spends some time working out how a society would develop if its member were unable to hide thoughts and feeling from one another, and he depicts the Mutes as thoughtful, disciplined, and sensitive with a predilection for philosophy and poetry.

The relationship between humans and Mutes is incredibly nuanced and, to me, realistic. Humans and Mutes are simultaneously friends, enemies, rivals, and allies. No single type of interaction can fully characterize their relations, and factions exist within each species that either loves or hates the other. Maybe we can describe the relationship is one of polite yet strained indifference, sort of like the relationship you may have with your neighbour who is a decent person but whose personal or cultural habits make you uncomfortable. With a bit of effort, humans and Mutes can understand and get along with one another, but that's not exactly a priority for either species. In short, McDevitt's depiction of human-Mute relations is both interestingly complex and realistically mundane; a combination that makes it refreshingly unique. With all this going for him, McDevitt still managed to squander all my good will with his cheap and overly simplistic treatment of a new alien species that Alex and Chase discover in the last half of Echo.

Rather than rehash the plot, I'm going to be really cheap and lazy and let the reviewers from amazon.com do it for me. You can find all the review I will be quoting here and here.

bmills writes "I can't recall reading another book that was as poorly thought out as McDevitt's Echo, and when the resolution is the big part of a story's problems, I think it's fair to include spoilers, so here goes.

The setting: The story is set at least 9,000 years in the future, but except for artificial intelligences and space travel, the characters live pretty much like 21st century people. Neither technology nor society seems to have progressed much in all that time. The characters have a shuttle that can routinely take them from a planet's surface to orbit, but this shuttle doesn't have enough thrust to cope with flying through the storm they encounter (so how does it make it to orbit?), and is shot down by regular old bullets, leaving it to look rather feeble for something that should be built to withstand the rigors of space travel. The entire society in which these characters live is convinced that there can be no such thing as intelligent aliens, even though there already is an intelligent alien race that they encountered many years before the setting of Echo and are still in contact with.

The plot: The protagonists are intrigued to hear about a stone with writing that may have come from an alien civilization after all, but the antagonists strenuously work to keep the heroes from examining this stone. However, when all is revealed at the end of the book, it turns out that the stone and its writing contained no clues whatsoever to the origin of the stone. In other words, there was no reason at all for the antagonists to try to keep this unhelpful thing away from the heroes. In fact, if the antagonists had not stolen the stone out from under the heroes in the first place, the protagonists might never have figured out who the villains of the story were, nor bothered to dig into the mystery at all, leaving the villains of Echo to look like utter idiots who brought their own downfall upon themselves. Along the way, following clues leads the protagonists to an uninhabited planet where they are lured into an ambush by a hostile agent. But the planet is, as I said, uninhabited. Where did the hostile agent come from? Has he been living alone on this planet for who knows how long, just hoping someone will try to investigate the mystery he's been hired to hide? Or are we to assume that he figured out where the heroes were going, somehow got there first, and set up the ambush? That's possible, but McDevitt simply never addresses the question. The protagonists eventually find the planet where the stone originated, but it turns out it's inhabited not by aliens, but is merely a lost human colony. But then in the epilogue, bizarrely enough, the narrator explains that subsequent examination revealed that the natives of this planet really were aliens after all, leaving the reader to conclude that it's mere coincidence that these people look exactly like humans from earth. So the protagonists find an alien intelligence (besides that one they've ALREADY known about for centuries) after all, but despite the fact that seeking aliens was the whole quest the heroes set out upon in the first place, the fact that these other people actually are aliens is tossed off as an afterthought. Not even the protagonists themselves seem impressed that they found the aliens they were hoping for in the first place.

Echo's fictional world is unimaginative, the mystery hinges on a clue that isn't a clue, the characters behave stupidly, and what should be the emotional climax of the story is buried in the epilogue. This book was so bad that I was angry I'd wasted my time reading it."

That pretty much sums it up for me. Whoever bmills is, I owe him or her a beer.

Now, my biggest problem is with the treatment of this new alien species. Let me summarize it for you. 1-Alex and Chase land on a planet with an old but unknown human colony. It's been there so long that the people actually claim to have been created there in prehistoric times. Unfortunately, their civilization was largely destroyed by an asteroid, and the last few survivors are just living out the end of days in a monastery-type place in the wilderness. 2-Chase and Alex live with these people for quite a while, and at no point do they ever even remotely suspect that they're not human. 3-In the epilogue McDevitt reveals that they actually are aliens, so...yay? The exact line from the novel is "The inhabitants, it turns out, were not human after all. They only have forty-two chromosomes." Yeah...that's it. Can you see my problem?

Now, my first reaction to this twist was that it must be a joke, but there is nothing in the book that would substantiate this idea. My conclusion, then, is that I've been trolled by an author. Does he really expect me to believe that these beings are so identical to humans that his main characters were fooled after living in very close quarters with them for days (or weeks, I don't remember)? Does he really expect me to believe that he forgot how to write about aliens? Look at how great the Mutes are. What the hell happened? Furthermore, is he trying to say that people with more or less chromosomes than "normal" aren't human anymore? Or is his biology just so woefully bad that he assumes he's being clever? To be honest, I'm so disappointed that I'm having trouble putting into words just how angry I am over this ending. Again, I'm going to let some other people say it for me.

jiminnyc writes, "My mother use to make meatloaf a lot when we were kids. We didn't have a lot of money so the meatloaf was usually more bread than meat. This book is a lot like that meatloaf. But unlike this book, my mother's meatloaf, God rest her soul, was good. Jack McDevitt's Echo, not so much. There is not enough real material in this book to make a short novella. Shame on you Ace Books for publishing this. There are lots of young, gifted writers out there that are so much more deserving to be published but are never seen because a publishers like Ace will go with a known author, even if his work is horrible, than someone who is truly deserving."

thepinkone writes, "The ending is so pathetic. NOTHING new happens. Recycled trash. If Jack McDevitt actually wrote this himself, he should be ashamed. I wonder if he even READ it. I seriously want my money back."

D. C Smith writes, "You make us read almost the whole book for nothing. It's like expecting a good dessert at the end of your fancy, high-priced meal, and instead getting a lump of sour yogurt. Oh well, at least I didn't pay for this book."

Finally, Avid Reader writes, "In this case, the alien idea was utterly absurd - nearly identical "humans" developed on another world but for some reason they had 42 chromosomes - lol."

All of these people had the same reaction that I did. Disappointment, maybe even anger, and shock at being treated like fools by an author that we had all sort of liked. It's really disconcerting, and I'm reacting by never buying or recommending another one of McDevitt's novels. As I mentioned above, he has squandered all the good will I had towards him, and he can never get it back.

So where does this long, negative rant leave us? Frankly, I don't know. I started out wanting to say something about narrative consistency or maybe about treating your readers as if they're intelligent enough to see through your hand-waving, but I don't really think that I can say anything halfway interesting anymore. I guess I'm just venting on the interwebs.

Thanks for reading, maybe, and come back soon when I've decided to write about a book I like. Until then, don't read Echo. Go watch Columbo instead.