TEAM-UP! Microsoft+B&N = NOOK Viability

Own a Nook? Like the Nook platform? Don't really care, just don't like the idea of Apple and/or Amazon dominating the ebook market? If your answer to any of these questions was "yes," then you're in luck:

Books and bits united Monday as Microsoft provided an infusion of money to help Barnes & Noble compete with top electronic bookseller Amazon. In exchange, Microsoft gets a long-desired foothold in the business of e-books and college textbooks.

With Microsoft Corp.'s $300 million investment, the two companies are teaming up to create a subsidiary for Barnes & Noble's e-book and college textbook businesses. Microsoft is taking a 17.6 percent stake in the venture.

The agreement underscores the importance of electronic bookstores as traditional booksellers and technology companies jockey for position in the increasingly competitive market. While no definitive numbers exist, e-books are believed to account for some 20 percent of book sales in the U.S.

So this is mostly of interest to college students, some of whom may be nerds, but who are rarely asked to read the right kind of nerdy books for their courses.

Comp-lit students demo B&N's new, funnel-shaped e-reader

However...

Micro Review [Film]: Freaked

The Meat

The early 90s had a very unique and peculiar trash aesthetic that occasionally washed up on the shore of pop culture. If you're able, remember back to Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted animation festivals, Ren & Stimpy, GWAR, and Green Jello's Cereal Killer Soundtrack, which all shared a Rat Fink-meets-Evil-Dead-II, eye-bulging, vein-popping style. Alex Winter (Bill S. Preston, Esq. of Bill and Ted fame) and his NYU film school friend Tom Stern embraced this aesthetic whole-hog, and were asked by MTV to produce a sketch comedy show called The Idiot Box. When that show was done, someone at 20th Century Fox inexplicably gave them $10,000,000 to make what become 1993's Freaked.

In Freaked, Bill (I'm just going to call him "Bill") plays a moronic TV celebrity who accepts a dump truck full of money from an evil corporation to go to South America and talk up a controversial liquid fertilizer, but falls afoul of a crazy freakshow operator who turns him into the hideous "Beest Boy," and throws him in with the rest of his mutated menagerie, all created using the liquid fertilizer in question and, apparently, a Nintendo system. The result is -- starting with the opening credits -- a brutal, stomach-churningly disgusting, insane, partially claymated gumbo that I expect you're either really going to love, or man, you're just not going to want to watch a single frame of. This film effectively derailed Bill's career. After its release (into only 2 theaters, Wikipedia tells me), Bill went from the co-star of a successful comedy franchise to a guy who didn't work again for four years, only to return with roles such as "TV Gangster" and "Subway Passenger."

For my part, I loved the Bill and Ted movies, and was partial to Bill above Ted, so I root for Bill, and he seems to have a pretty successful career now, especially as a director. And I expect Alex Winter must be pretty smart, and a hell of a nice guy, because here are some of the people who agreed to appear in Freaked, which was clearly never, ever, ever going to be a successful mainstream film: Brooke Shields, Keanu Reeves, Randy Quaid (not widely known to be crazy at the time), William Sadler (the wonderful character actor who next appeared on film in The Shawshank Redemption), Bobcat Goldthwait, Michael Stoyanov (at the time on the highly successful TV show Blossom), and Mr. T (who plays a bearded lady). I remember seeing a tidbit about this movie on Entertainment Tonight when I was maybe 15 years old, and being really excited that Bill was going to be in a new movie, but that was the last I'd heard of it until Turner Classic Movies scheduled it as part of their TCM Underground series this past weekend. So as much as I wanted to like the movie, and was excited to finally see it, I can't get behind it. I love cult movies that happen by accident -- amateur filmmakers who stumble across something evocative, Hollywood outsiders who build truly inept films around interesting ideas, or people who manage stunning feats of filmmaking with almost no resources. But Freaked seems to be one of those films that aspired to be a cult movie, and that, to me, is a fool's errand. Sorry, Bill.

The Math

Objective Quality: 2/10

Bonuses: +1 for the intriguing supporting cast; +1 for the makeup and effects which are grotesque but quite accomplished

Penalties: -1 for a pervasive we-know-how-clever-this-is attitude while not actually being very clever.

Cult Value Coefficient: 3/10

[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]

Micro Review [film]: Green Lantern

The Meat 

DC Comics' most science fiction-y of superheroes has always been dear to my heart. Sure Hal Jordan can be really annoying (as can Kyle Rayner and Guy Gardner), but I love the whole Guardians/Oa thing, and I really dug Geoff Johns' series reboot. So when I heard Warner Bros. was making a feature film, I thought: "Wow, if this could be as good as The Dark Knight, or even X2, I'll be really happy."

Unfortunately, it wasn't to be. The problems begin with casting. Hal Jordan is supposed to be cocky but likable, headstrong but street smart; Ryan Reynolds plays him flat and emotionless. Then there's the inexplicable decision to cast hot-but-nothing-like-the-character Blake Lively (with unnatural looking died brown hair) as Carol Ferris. Of course, I might have been wrong about all this--had I been able to actually hear what they were saying while they were mumbling their lines. Hard to tell who to blame for this one: actors, director or production team.

The second fatal error was to try to incorporate 3 iconic GL villains into one film: Sinestro, Hector Hammond and Parallax. Sure Sinestro is there to basically set up the sequel (if they actually make one), but it's just too much. I know this was a decision made "for the fans," but I'm sure the fans would have preferred a better, more cohesive plot.

The bottom line is, Green Lantern is a very bad film adaptation of a beloved comic book franchise. But hey...there are some cool special effects.

The Math 

Objective Quality: 3/10

Bonuses: +1 for stuff on Oa actually looking like it's supposed to

Penalties: -1 for terrible casting; -1 for not just adapting Rebirth.

Cult Film Coefficient: 2/10

World SF/F

There's a big ol' world out there, with more than 6.8 billion inhabitants. Around 370m of those, or roughly 5.4%, live in the US and UK. But writers from the US and UK account for, I'd have to guess, at least 80% of the SF/F that reaches bookshops/major online retailers (and that's a conservative estimate). There's a number of reasons for this: the US and UK have highly developed publishing industries; they have the SF/F tradition; the most developed markets; their writers write in English; etc. But in today's world, where global communications networks grow denser by the minute, where more and more people are being raised functionally bilingual, and where rapid changes to economic, social and political systems raise big questions about the pace of technology and our relationship to it, the science fiction world is both expanding globally and coming to the realization that it already is a global phenomenon.

About a month ago, LA Times had an interesting article on the re-emergence of SF/F in China:

Next month, Chinese writers will be under the spotlight as 2012's Market Focus country for the London Book Fair. It is a prime opportunity for China to push its cultural clout abroad (a top priority for the Communist Party), with dozens of authors traveling to the U.K. But political science fiction — long suppressed during the Cultural Revolution and afterward — is unlikely to be at the top of the agenda. Relations with the state remain fraught. (Last March, China all but banned popular "time travel" television dramas for promoting "feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation.") 

Despite this, science fiction is having a comeback in the country. Thriving online fan sites host legions of amateur sci-fi writers. China's leading sci-fi magazine, Science Fiction World, boasts a circulation figure of 100,000. (American writers such as George R.R. Martin are also in demand in translation.) Above all, insecurity over China's meteoric economic growth coupled with an authoritarian leadership has produced ripe pickings for the genre's top writers.

Damien Walter over at Guardian Books argues that SF/F is emerging as a literary lingua franca:

It's as a response to that cultural void that science fiction becomes genuinely interesting. In the midst of an ever accelerating technological revolution, science fiction has emerged as the literature best able to articulate the relentless pace of social change. And as that technological revolution has spread outward from the western world, so the symbols and archetypes of science fiction have become a shared language for understanding the new world we are entering.

Then there's a nice plug for World SF, a blog that works hard to bring SF/F writers from outside the Anglophone world to the attention of readers within it. It's a great site, and one of the highlights for readers is their Tuesday Fiction series, where they post short stories from global writers for free. This week's story is "Flight of the Ibis" by Malaysian author Fadzlishah Johanabas. Ever thought of Malaysia as a place to discover SF/F? Me neither, but that's the point: good authors are everywhere. Bravo to World SF for helping us find them. More for short fiction lovers...

Micro Review [Film]: This Island Earth

The Meat

In This Island Earth, a scientist/jet pilot named Cal Meacham (the impossibly deep-voiced Rex Reason, which was his real name, apparently) orders some science parts out of a mysterious catalog, and follows the instructions -- which clearly did NOT come from Ikea -- to build a super-advanced wireless video telecom device that converses with an alien named Exeter. That Exeter is clearly an alien is utterly lost on Meacham and his assistant. So Exeter sends a magical, self-piloting plane to pick up Meacham and whisk him away to a secret science facility in Georgia that looks like an equestrian center/country club. Meacham falls in with Dr. Ruth Adams ("Dr. Ruth," hee-hee), an old girlfriend who pretends not to know him, and another scientist, Steve Carlson (Russell "The Professor from Gilligan's Island" Johnson). They finally figure out Exeter "ain't from these parts," and after The Professor makes one of the most odd and ill-fated filmic attempts to escape from an alien death-ray, Meacham and Dr. Ruth accompany Exeter to Metaluna. Exeter's home planet, Metaluna is constantly under attack by Zagons, who keep shooting radioactive meteors at the planet, threatening its existence.

This Island Earth is one of those movies held up as an exemplar of great 50s sci-fi, and it appears that it earned much of this reputation upon initial release back in 1955. The warm critical reception that welcomed it seems to owe a lot to the fact that it was 1) in color, and 2) had some special photographic effects. Both of these things were new at the time, and probably wowed the heck out of people seeing this stuff in a movie for only the first or second time. The movie made a big impression on kids like Steven Spielberg and other young sci-fi fans who would go on to reference This Island Earth in other films, documentaries, and books when they grew up.

The problem is, color and special effects aren't new anymore. And maybe you've had the experience of flat loving a film as a kid, only to revisit it later and think "You know, this actually kinda sucks." You'd rather have left alone the really good movie you remembered in your head, instead of burdening it with the actual, sorta crappy movie that exists out in the world where the rest of us live. I think we can pretty safely put This Island Earth in that bucket. The gaping, jaw-droppingly "wha?" plot turns and broken science may have paled in comparison to the awesomeness of the special effects in 1955, but not so much any more.

The Math

Objective Quality: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for having one of the more iconic 50s sci-fi monsters; +1, the customary bump for an early appearance by Russell "The Professor from Gilligan's Island" Johnson.

Penalties: -1 for woefully under-utilizing that cool sci-fi monster; -1 for moving the characters around like cardboard cutouts, rather than even attempting to give them sensible motivations for their actions; -1 for making an utter mockery of science. I mean, by 1955 we must have known that shooting a planet with some meteors wouldn't turn it into a star, right? I mean, we must've know that.

Cult Value Coefficient: 5/10

[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]

Also of note, this interesting essay by Errol Morris about a strange echo from This Island Earth in Douglas Sirk's 1959 racial drama Imitation of Life with Lana Turner.

Blog Roundup: What the Neighbors Are Saying

We here at nerds of a feather recognize that this is just a small corner of an ecosystem of blogs and websites dedicated to nerdery. So periodically we'd like to recognize all the good stuff our friends and neighbors are producing.

Ebooks, DRM and the Brave New World of Publishing

Ebooks and the changes they entail to the publishing industry are hot topics at the moment in the nerdosphere. Just the other day, major SF/F publisher Tor (a subsidiary of Macmillan) announced it would forgo DRM, to the delight of bloggers everywhere.  Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi all offer sophisticated arguments as to why this is win/win for everyone involved. The best: 1) that DRM leaves readers in the lurch if their chosen ebook format disappears; and 2) that they don't really do much to stop piracy anyways.  It may herald a broader trend, where publishers one-by-one abandon DRM.

For the record, I tried to find an opposing view--someone who could eloquently defend the use of DRM for ebooks on moral, ethical or strategic grounds. I failed, because DRM is just terrible. I did, however, read this article from Guardian Books (which isn't a blog, per se, but is very bloggy in its approach). The author, novelist and blogger Barry Eisler, makes an incendiary rebuttal to the conventional wisdom with regards the DOJ suit against Apple and 3 publishers, summarized here. The most important bit:

If you ask legacy publishing's defenders, "Which is the monopoly: the entity that charges high prices and pays low royalties, or the entity that charges low prices and pays high royalties?", you'll be told by those defenders (tortured logic to follow) that of course it's the latter. If you're a customer of Amazon, novelist Charlie Stross wants you to believe that in fact Amazon has you in a "death-grip". If you love books and like buying them from Amazon, Authors Guild president Scott Turow argues that in doing so you and Amazon are "destroy[ing] book selling". Enjoy your Kindle? More legacy insiders than I can count will accuse you of participating in the degradation of "literary culture", an Orwellian euphemism for "current literary establishment of which I am a member and with which I identify". 

Now, will Amazon break up the current publishing cartel only to become a monopoly itself? I doubt it. The company's DNA is all about serving customers, for one thing; for another, unlike in the analogue world, on the internet the competitor who wants to eat your lunch is always just a mouse click away, and with competitors like Apple and Google, I expect Amazon will be forced to stay true to its customer-centric roots rather than attempting to rely on the kind of monopoly rents that have poisoned legacy publishing's willingness and ability to compete. In the meantime, the publishing establishment wants you to believe that in order to prevent Amazon from possibly one day charging higher book prices, the establishment has to charge you higher prices today. Or, to put it another way, "Hey, you might get robbed if you carry all that cash around, so I'll just save you the trouble by taking your wallet right here." This isn't an argument; it's a con job. Consumers ought to recognise it as such.

Nick Harkaway (John Le Carre's son) rebuts the rebuttal here...

Exhibit: 'The History of Space Photography'

Readers who live in the LA area, as well as those passing through sometime between now and May 6, might want to head to Pasadena, and specifically to the Art Center for Design for an exhibit on 'The History of Space Photography.'  The LA Times has a nice review of the exhibit.

If you go, you can see stuff like this 1882 photo of a comet:

Or this 2008 photo of a black hole:

More photos here.  Details on the exhibit here.