Paul Levinson's Blog: Levinson at Large, page 158

The Old Man and the Gun: Don't Retire

So, right in the middle of a fabulous little squall on Cape Cod last night, which knocked over chairs and an umbrella stand on our deck, my wife and I watched The Old Man and the Gun on HBO.  The squall was more exciting, but The Old Man starring Robert Redford had it beat hands down in sheer charm and style, and was much more enjoyable in its understated beauty.

The signature of Forrest Tucker, the real life bank robber and escape artist portrayed in this movie, was his smile -- at least in this movie.  And who else on this planet to better play a charming, smiling bank robber than Redford?  He announced after completion of the movie in August of last year that he was retiring from acting.  Here's a strong hope that he shouldn't.

Sissy Spacek, who isn't retiring, was a great recipient of Tucker/Redford's charm.   In fact, the two make one of the best couples I've seen in a while in a movie.  And, refreshingly, she's not like Bonnie with Clyde.  Instead, she provides a sensible, caring restraint on Tucker, who, however, can't resist his larcenous influences for too long.

Good supporting acting from Casey Affleck, Danny Glover, and Tom Waits, along with a comfortable early 1980s ambience, make all of this a pleasure to see.   Tucker wasn't quite Robin Hood - he generally kept his ill-gotten gains to himself - but I've always had a soft spot for a thief with a heart, and Redford with his winning smile brings him home to us just perfectly.

 
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my Readercon 30 schedule Quincy, MA, July 11–14, 2019

July 12, 5:00 PM Salon 4 • Fascism as a Genre • Gillian Daniels, Ruthanna Emrys, Paul Levinson (moderator), Howard WaldropMany thinkers have approached fascism as storytelling. In 1936, Walter Benjamin wrote, “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.” Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism” considered this approach. And in 2018, Nick Harkaway tweeted, “Part of the danger of Fascism is that it’s less an agenda and more a style.” How can the lens of genre help us understand and combat fascism in the present era? What would anti-fascist aesthetics look like, and how can we write them into speculative fiction?

10:30 PM Salon 3 • Meet the Pros(e)Each writer at this party has selected a short, pithy quotation from their own work and is armed with a sheet of 30 printed labels, the quote replicated on each. As attendees mingle, the request “May I have a sticker?” provides a convenient icebreaker for tongue-tied fans approaching the pros whose work they love. Rearrange stickers to make a poem or statement, wear them as decoration, or simply enjoy the opportunity to meet and chat with your favorite writers.

July 13, 12:00 PM (Noon) Salon 3 • The Implications of SFWA’s Rate Increase • Scott H. Andrews, Pablo Defendini, Michael J. DeLuca (moderator), Paul Levinson, Romie StottSFWA will be be raising their designated qualifying rate for fiction from 6 to 8 cents per word in September. It might seem a small change, but it has the potential to alter the field significantly for a lot of writers, readers, editors, and publishers. This panel, led by Michael J. DeLuca, will discuss what the change means for specific markets, who’ll be able to meet the new rate, who benefits and who doesn’t, and how this relates to the broader economic and political climate. This session has CART real-time captioning.

July 14, 11:30 AM Salon C • Reading: Paul Levinson

12:00 PM (Noon) Autograph Table • Autographs: Paul Levinson, Dianna Sanchez

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City on a Hill: Possibilities

I saw the first episode of City on a Hill on Showtime.  I'll probably keep watching - mainly because its story and characters are nothing we haven't seen before, in movies and on TV, but very well paced and acted.

Kevin Bacon is back playing another FBI man, this time a seasoned and cynical agent in Boston in the 1990s.   He forms an unlikely alliance with a gung-ho DA in Boston by way of Brooklyn, played by Aldis Hodge, last seen by me in Turn.   (The two B's always did have a lot in common, though less so since the Brooklyn Dodgers decamped to LA in the late 1950s.)  As I said, the narrative is well acted.  Another Kevin - Chapman - who has played a cop or detective well in countless television shows, is back doing the same again.

The antagonists are a family of bank robbers (actually, armored car, to be more precise), who, like most of these Boston capers, aren't exactly Brinks robbery calibre.  But it's good to see a Boston crime family again, in full Boston accents, replete with leaders, dummies, and traitors.

The 1990s setting is the most original element in the series, and good to see.   But I thought the commentary was a bit too obvious.  I don't recall anyone especially talking about JFK in the 1990s, even in Boston.   On the other hand, yeah, it is Boston, so if he was talked about anywhere in the 1990s, that would be where it was.   And he did give the famous "City on a Hill" speech there as President-elect in 1961.

There's a great twist at the end of the episode, which of course I'm not going to tell you about.   But it was enough to get me off the fence and decide to watch at least the next episode.  Hey, I'm on Cape Cod right now, in almost shouting distance from Boston, and that's the least I can do.

 
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Luther 5.3: Bitter Fruit

Alice's killing of George's son bore bitter fruit in Luther 5.3, as George goes after Alice and Luther to exact his revenge.  Of course, that's just what Alice intended - to draw George out into an all-out war against Luther, on the bet, probably safe, that Luther would prevail in the end and rid Alice and everyone else of George.

Did she worry about collateral damage?  Probably not.   Poor Benny went that way.  Alice herself is now at the other end of a gun.  But I can't see her succumbing after all this good effort to bring her back.

Meanwhile, the Lake story has come to an end of sorts, at least for Vivienne.  Her attempts to restrain her psycho husband fail.  After imploring him not to endanger her with his nefarious deeds, Jeremy drugs her, undresses her, tucks her in bed, in the hopes that she won't find out about his latest victim, at this point a kidnap.  But of course she does, and before the evening is over she's arrested by Luther, on the verge of dismembering the poor young woman to cover up her husband's evil work.

He manages to escape, so here's where we are on the edge of the season finale next week:  Jeremy's at large, desperate to escape and do who knows what.   George's hit men have Alice and Mark in their possession, with a tough road for Luther to free them, unscathed, and unhurt himself.   Actually, unscathed is no doubt impossible at this point.  The best we can hope for is unkilled.

And even though I can't see Alice dying - which would be a double death for Ruth Wilson in tempestuous characters in love affairs these past few years - I'd say the only survival we can be sure of Luther's.

See also Luther 5.1: Back in Fine, Depraved Form ... Luther 5.2: "A Chocolate Digestive"

And see also Luther: Between the Wire and the Shield ... Luther 3.1: Into the Blender ... Luther 3.2: Success ... Luther 3.3: The Perils of Being an Enemy ... Luther 3.4: Go Ask Alice

 


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Big Little Lies 2.2: Perry's Progeny

The most significant discovery in Big Little Lies 2.2 is that the late Perry's twins - Max and Josh - know that Ziggy is also his son.  All of which is capped off by the three children meeting, at the end, in the way that Big Little Lies always does things.

Also apt for the way Big Little Lies tells its stories is how the twins found about this.  That would be via Madeline's younger daughter, Chloe, who heard her mother talking about this on the phone.  It was a big night for Madeline's daughters letting out secrets.  Her older daughter Abigail blurts out that Madeline slept with the theater director, thinking her adoptive father and Madeline's husband Ed wasn't home.  The ramifications of that second sharing are Ed says he's "done" with Madeline.

That might well be the less toxic of the ramifications of what Madeline's daughters said.  There's no telling what the psycho Max will do to Ziggy, knowing that Jane's son is his likely-unwanted half brother.  Big Little Lies has always been and continues to be an ensemble narrative with an abundance of grievance and a vengeance.

Meanwhile, we're beginning to learn a little more about Bonnie.  Her mother practices some kind of voodoo.  We already knew that Bonnie was afflicted with some kind of demons - why else would she push Perry down the stairs - but now we know that these must be longstanding, inhabiting Bonnie long enough that her mother would know.   Her mother, by the way, seems pretty formidable, and a potentially good match for Perry's mother and her single-minded vision to find out what happened to her beloved son.

Last but not least we have Renata's husband arrested tonight.  There's not connection yet to the rest of the story, but let's just wait and see.  And the arrest brought out some primo acting by Laura Dern.

See also Big Lies 2.1: Grandma On a Mission

And see also Big Little Lies: Big Good, Truly ... Big Little Lies 1.5: Multivalent Whodunnit ... Big Little Lies: Elvis and Answers

 
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Review of Tobias Cabral's Night Music: A Dose of Hard SF, and Wash It Down with Rock 'n' Roll

Well, it's not quite rock 'n' roll, but there's definitely crucial music in Tobias Cabral's short 2009 novel (136 pages) Night Music, which is all about what happens at Zubrin Base on Mars.

And there's lots of science.  Although the genre is called science fiction, there's usually precious little hard science in the fiction we read under that moniker.  I've often said that Asimov's Foundation trilogy, for example, which I consider the greatest science fiction ever written, is really more philosophy-of-science fiction than science fiction.  Hal Clement's work, to stay with the golden age, is a rarity in that hard science actually plays a pivotal role in the stories he tells.

Cabral does this as well in Night Music.  It's not that hard science is a determining factor in this narrative.  It's that what happens on Zubrin Base, and the expedition to go out there to investigate, is told by science at every step, and accompanied by scientific details and explanations at every turn.

I don't want to say too much about the determinative role of the music, lest I give away the plot.  But I will say that, back here on Earth, I've been captivated by the hypothesis that we humans could sing before we could speak.  That's why, for example, I had my Neanderthals communicating via music in The Silk Code.   In Night Music, the acoustic is more akin to the music of the spheres.  But the novel is also about beginnings, the commencement of human interaction with another intelligent life-form.

It's praise, in my book, to say that Night Music could have been written, in terms of its style and structure, in the 1950s, even though its content is much more current.  If you have a taste for this kind of story-telling, pick up a little Night Music, an at-once profound and refreshing treat.

 

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Luther 5.2: "A Chocolate Digestive"

That's what begins Luther and Alice's renewed relationship when she shows up at his doorstep at the end of 5.1 and the start of 5.2.  She tells Luther she wants "a chocolate digestive" before she passes out, and Luther carries her inside his apartment - she's already inside his head - to tend to her wound.

That wound is physical, but the real wound of significance with Alice is the gaping wound her soul, which manifests itself in all kinds of ways, including killing people and loving Luther.  And the strange thing about this, the compelling glue of Luther, is that Luther, or at least a significant part of him, reciprocates in this powerful inchoate attraction.  Therein resides the true glue of this series, and especially this season, as of the end of the second episode.

The two are not quite unofficial partner detectives as yet, but they're verging on it.   Will Luther accede to George's demand for Alice as the price to stop George's beating of Benny Silver?  Luther says yes, but you know he'll never give up Alice - certainly not to George.   Which will leave Alice free to continue doing what she does, including slaying in ways that exceed what we see in Killing Eve, a lot of which is indebted to Luther for the master female assassin that is Alice.

But what makes this season of Luther so good is Alice's logical depravities, and her relationship with Luther, get a run for their money with Vivien and her psycho surgeon husband.   It was Freud who said the surgeon is a sublimated sadist, whose libido is stoked by the lifesaving good that is done in surgery.   The scene with Jeremy doing surgery is an instant classic of Freud writ too large.  His kidnapping of the next victim, though a real not imagined crime, is actually less shocking than Jeremy in the operating room.

Still an open question at the end of this second episode is what exactly is Jeremy's wife, psychologist Vivienne, up to?  We've yet to see a meshing of the Alice/George and Jeremy/Vivienne stories, which will be fun to see.

See also Luther 5.1: Back in Fine, Depraved Form

And see also Luther: Between the Wire and the Shield ... Luther 3.1: Into the Blender ... Luther 3.2: Success ... Luther 3.3: The Perils of Being an Enemy ... Luther 3.4: Go Ask Alice

 
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Review of David Walton's Three Laws Lethal: A Few Minutes and Decades Into the Future

David Walton's newest novel, Three Laws Lethal - title inspired by Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics - begins with what certainly is an ethical quandary that typifies our increasingly AI-driven age, in this case, driven literally.  A mother with her children are passengers in an AI-driven automobile.  She can turn around and tell them to stop arguing, without risking an accident.  She marvels at being in the driver's seat with her hands off the wheel.  And then ...  A big tree falls in front of them.  To plow into the tree would risk the death of both mother and children.  The AI computes the deadly odds, and acts upon it, instantly swerving the car to the right to avoid the tree.  Unfortunately, there's a biker in that lane, and he's killed by the swerving car.

It's not that the AI didn't see the biker - the problem is that it did, and decided the mother and children's lives were more worth saving than the biker's.  Now, people driving in our reality make split-second decisions like this all the time.  They're maybe not quite decisions but instant gut reactions.  Would anyone for a moment think of charging a mother with vehicular homicide if she did what the AI did in the car?  Of course not.   But there's something deeply disturbing about an AI making this decision, any decision, that results in the loss of innocent human life.

This is the problem that opens David Walton's novel, just published by Pyr today.  It's a narrative that is as philosophically profound as it is breathtaking.   Asimov imagined/foresaw that all robots could and would be programmed with three laws:  1. A robot can never do harm, or allow harm to be done, to a human being.  2. A robot must follow all orders given to it by a human, except when following such an order would contradict the first law, i.e., harm or allow harm to be befall a human.  3. A robot must always act to protect itself, except when that would contradict the first or second law.  Asimov wrote great novels and stories that explored what could happen when these laws were bent or broken.  In that sense Three Laws Lethal is an extrapolation of Asimov, a meditation on how an AI programmed to protect human lives can end up taking a life - a life that threatens no one, but whose existence nonetheless must be ended to protect the people the AI serves.  The novel is also Asimovian in the sense that it is an un-put-downable read.

Exploration of driverless cars makes Three Laws Lethal not a story happening the day after tomorrow, as they used to say back in the 1950s, but maybe more like a few minutes from now.  An Uber driverless car already killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona in 2018.  This apparently was more a malfunction than a deliberate decision of the car to kill the woman (a pedestrian walking her bicycle in the street), so it didn't raise the kind of wrenching ethical dilemmas posed by Walton.   But Walton also explores, with the same panache and savvy, the corporate competition and intrigue that has characterized the digital revolution since it began in the 1980s.  In this case, we go from intrigue to outright assassinations, and self-driving cars to fleets that can work as an attack force.  Malignant AIs reminiscent of HAL (an Arthur C. Clarke not Asimov creation) also figure in this story, pitching it at least a few years and maybe decades into the future. 

All of this is played out by a memorable cast of characters all along the continuum of fundamental human decency, which at the bad end includes a willingness to do the aforementioned  murders to get desired results.   In as much Asimov's robot stories were also detective stories, this makes Three Laws Lethal an Asimovian story in yet a third, appealing sense.

Although Asimov defined the genre of sentient robots and therefore AIs, the other two titans of the golden age of science made important contributions to this crucial sub-genre.  In addition to Clarke's homicidal HAL, Robert Heinlein's self-sacrificing Mike has a permanent place in the AI pantheon.  No one can duplicate those achievements, but it's good to see that David Walton is carrying forward that tradition so well as we move to ever more AI in our cars and lives in the 21st century.
 

 
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Big Little Lies 2.1: Grandma on a Mission

Big Little Lies was back on HBO last night, with Meryl Streep as Perry's mother Mary, staying with Celeste and the twins, and understandably determined to find out what happened to her son.  You couldn't ask for a better actress than Meryl Streep to convey the suspicion that Mary has that Perry's death was not as everyone is telling her, and it will fun to see those suspicions develop to the point of certainty, which will no doubt lead to Mary plotting some kind of retribution.

Now, in case you didn't see the first season and its stunning ending, we know what happened to Perry.  Bonnie accidentally killed him, deliberately pushing him down the stairs, as she sees Madeline, Jane, and Renata unable to pull him off Celeste.   Every one of those women are justifiably glad to see him dead.  The last thing they'll do is even tell police that Bonnie didn't intend to kill him.  So this sets up the new season with five powerful women lying to the police, and resisting Mary's attempt to learn the truth.

Did Mary know her son was a rapist?  Probably not.  Did she know that he was physically abusive to women, including his wife.  Probably.  Will Mary learning the truth about her son's treatment of women affect her determination to find out what happened to him?  Probably not.  And that has the makings of a pretty good story.

Of the two, I'd give Mary has better odds of finding out the truth than the police.   But Detective Quinlan, also a woman, is no slouch.   Chances are Mary and Quinlan, working for the same thing - to find out what happened to Perry - won't get too much in each other's way.  But once Mary begins planning her retribution, well ... all bets are off.

Big Little Lies in its first season was a unique detective story.  It promises to be the same in its second season, with a much different story featuring almost the very same people.

See also Big Little Lies: Big Good, Truly ... Big Little Lies 1.5: Multivalent Whudunnit ... Big Little Lies: Elvis and Answers

 
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Review of J. Neil Schulman's The Fractal Man: Alternate Reality Autobiographies

Alternate realities have become something of a vogue in science fiction, especially on television with Fringe and Counterpart.  I've even tried my hand at it in a few short stories such as The Other Car.  But J. Neil Schulman has outdone all of this with his novel The Fractal Man, which for most of its 160 some odd pages - meant literally as well as a figure of speech here - is not only a masterpiece of alternate reality, but one of the best science fiction novels I've ever read, literally.

It's also a tour de force of meta-fiction and autobiography.  What do I mean by that?  Well, the main character - the narrator - is David Albaugh, a character in Schulman's 1979 novel Alongside Night, played by Schulman in the 2014 movie that Schulman wrote and directed.  In The Fractal Man, we meet Schulman - one of Albaugh's fractals, i.e., existences in an alternate reality - to the point of the character Schulman warning Albaugh about a danger that lies ahead, because, after all, Schulman wrote Albaugh's account of Albaugh's  alternate reality adventures which is the novel The Fractal Man.   I'd say I'm a sucker for that kind of science fiction, but if a I'm a sucker for delighting in that, then anyone with any appreciation for the finer tropes of science fiction, carried to their logical extents and well beyond, should be a sucker, too.

And the novel is chocked full of tidbits to delight the science fiction devotee and anyone with a taste for new ways of thinking about old things.   Distant galaxies that we see in our reality may be alternate timelines.   Arguments that a couple may have over whether an event unfolded this way or that way may reflect an alternate reality that one of the couple for some reason came from or has access to.   Everything from timeless music to time travel is woven into the undulating fabric.  It's all served up so well that I don't even mind that Schulman and most of his alternates are thorough-going libertarians, in contrast to me (I'm an absolutist only about the government keeping its hands off of all media and communication, i.e., the First Amendment). 

Schulman sprinkles in some of his real libertarian friends as greater and lesser characters in this novel.   We know each other and have worked together, but I can't hold it too much against him that I didn't make the grade, because I'm not a close friend of his, and, as I said, I'm not an across-the-board libertarian.   And he makes up for this with some derring-do espionage escapades across realities, and a galactic scope that reminds of both Asimov and Heinlein, which is no mean feat  (Schulman, at least in this reality, did an important interview with Heinlein in 1973).

What I do hold against the novel is a long play within the novel, near the end, that has lots of relevance to the novel's philosophy and was excellent in and of itself, but comes out of left field, so much so that the reader is offered the option of skipping ahead.  This doesn't exonerate the play's inclusion.

But, hey, the rest of the novel is so bright and wonderful - such an intellectually exciting and satisfying ride - that I put it up there with David S. Michaels and Daniel Brenton's Red Moon and David Walton's Three Laws Lethal (to be published in two days, look for my review) as one of the best standalone science fiction novels I've ever had the pleasure of reading.   Is it a contradiction to describe The Fractal Man and its immersion in alternate realities as a standalone novel?  There's a sequel afoot - "The Metronome Misnomer - the title comes from a fractal version of the author in The Fractal Man, who wrote a book of that title in an alternate timeline" (this quote from Schulman's biography at the end of The Fractal Man) - so you may not need to answer that.



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