F&SF July/August 2011

by Fantasy; Science Fiction

  Schmalzer then made his fatal mistake.

  Perhaps emulating the bad-boy behavior of Charlie Sheen, he began to grab handfuls of candy from the Lindor Truffles display by the cash register and stuff them into his mouth, unpaid-for and even partially unwrapped. A choking fit abetted by a Tasering precipitated a massive heart attack, Schmalzer went down, and CPR failed to revive him.

  A man was dead over a DVD purchase.

  The incident might have become no more than fodder for a News of the Weird column were it not for a Twitter user at the scene who employed the handle "@nerdtaku." This person uploaded cellphone photos of the dead Schmalzer accompanied by a tweet that read, "dude died for sucky tv show who nxt?" The tweet went viral.

  The subsequent ramping up of the ETEWAF Revolution can be laid decisively at the door of its first major theoretician, the blogger named John Scalzi. Scalzi wrote a long passionate post decrying fanatical fannishness, consumer preoccupation with factitious media properties, authorial laziness and greed, readerly impatience and avidity, corporate crassness and short-sightedness, postmodern ennui, retailer incompetence, shortcomings of the educational system, and a host of other malaises of twenty-first-century capitalism as it involved entertainment and intellectual properties. This post too went viral, racing around the globe and acquiring commentary and amplification.

  What happened next in the U.S.A. was replicated subsequently around the world.

  Within twenty-four hours of Schmalzer's death, every Borders Books location found itself under siege and put to the torch by angry mobs of consumers. Numerous arrests and pleas by officials, as well as mobilization of the National Guard, only stoked the fury. The attacks quickly spread to Barnes & Noble stores, then to independent bookstores. Other retailers, such as Walmart, Best Buy, and Target, who also sold books, CDs, videogames, and DVDs came under assault as well.

  When interviewed, the protesters offered a variety of reasons for their actions, ranging from incoherent angry gibberish to cleverly formulated manifestos. Some seemed to feel that books, music, and movies represented a diseased and decadent culture. Others maintained that they merely wanted to purge the dross so that the gold could stand out. Some lambasted high prices. Others spoke out against unequal marketplace access for all creators. Some trotted out the old rubric, "Information wants to be free." But all were possessed by a violent disgust and repugnance at the marketplace of ideas, and at themselves.

  Perhaps the most succinct, intuitive, and accurate assessment of what the revolt was all about came from comedian Patton Oswalt. In an essay that had preceded the rebellion by a few months, Oswalt had coined the acronym ETEWAF: Ever wondered what acor Jeopardy! orything That Ever Was—Available Forever. His thesis that instantaneous, cheap, and perpetual availability of the world's entire artistic heritage would paradoxically result in a devaluation and trivialization of culture was now being borne out.

  "People," Oswalt remarked now, as he stood being interviewed in the smoking embers of a Costco, "have invested so much in their obsessions that they have come to hate and despise everything they ever loved."

  Of course, not only brick-and-mortar stores suffered. Cyberattacks against iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Vimeo, and a myriad of other content-provider sites roiled the internet. The anarchists of 4chan and Anonymous unleashed their supreme efforts.

  The next developments were, in retrospect, easily foreseeable, but nonetheless took everyone by surprise.

  A vast majority of the planet's authors, dancers, actors, reviewers, critics, musicians, film directors. and other artists joined the global crusade, going on strike and repudiating all their past endeavors. PEN, SAG, the Académie Française, SFWA, the Writer's Guild, the MWA, RWA, and HWA all formally disbanded. The few scabs such as writers of fanfic or home videographers who attempted to continue business as usual were tarred and feathered.

  Museums came under attack, with the complete destruction of many, including the Metropolitan, the Louvre, the Smithsonian, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Neither were libraries, playhouses, nor theaters spared.

  A kind of Dadaist fervor now gripped creators, readers, viewers, and listeners. Only the cynical middlemen seemed immune. Publishers and editors and Hollywood producers tried to maintain the old regime, but failed. Sonny Mehta had to be choppered out of the burning Knopf headquarters, as did Markus Dohle, CEO of Random House, and Doug Morris, head of Sony Music. Likewise with Ariana Huffington, Tina Brown, Tom Doherty, Rupert Murdoch and their peers. Others perished in the chaos. The Burning of Los Angeles and the Black Hole of Bollywood took the lives of many intransigent studio heads.

  Within a month of the death of Stephen Schmalzer, nearly all artistic production and distribution had ceased across the developed world, leaving only a few pitiful straggling mimes and oral storytellers at work. Debord's Society of the Spectacle had finally self-destructed.

  The subsequent ten years have been something of a mental holiday for the human race, although not one without its rigors and losses. With an end to commodified art, people were free to produce their own—or live entirely without such vicarious indulgences and simulacra. An upsurge in the sales figures for condoms, bicycles, camping equipment, and gardening gear represented merely the tip of the transformational iceberg.

  What the timidly resurgent professionally produced music, film, and literature of the rest of the century will look like is anybody's guess. But chances are, no one will ever be willing to die for a TV show again.

  FREE WILL HUNTING

  By Lucius Shepard | 2001 words

  RELIGION class was not my favorite course of study when I attended Catholic school, primarily because our teacher, a priest who had served for years as a navy chaplain, had precious little scholarly knowledge of the subject. His lectures consisted of dull summations of the textbook with no intellectual heft, no spark whatsoever, and caused me to seek stimulation by gazing out the window, watching sparrows decorate a statue of the Virgin Mary with birdlime. If you've had a similar experience or if you've been trapped in a dorm room while a freshman from Hucklebuck, NC, who, until the week before when he discovered the wisdom of Jean-Paul Sartre, was a zealous Christian and now stoned on homegrown is holding forth on his new religi for hundreds of years. c ( a landscaping company oce and on... if you've been there, then George Nolfi's directorial debut, The Adjustment Bureau, may rouse in you a certain dread nostalgia.

  The Adjustment Bureau began life in 1954 as a short story entitled "Adjustment Team" by Philip K. Dick, a narrative concerning an insurance salesman who inadvertently gets a glimpse behind the scenes of how reality is manipulated. Mr. Nolfi has opted to chuck most of Dick's plot, not to mention all of his irony and menace, transforming the story into a romantic comedy featuring America's aging fratboy, Matt Damon, as a youngish, tightly buttoned politician, David Norris, and Emily Blunt as an irreverent party girl/aspiring ballerina named Elise who, oddly enough, given her thoroughly modern, irrepressible nature, seems content to let David make all her crucial decisions. They meet-cute in a hotel men's room where David is rehearsing his concession speech—he's lost the 2006 senatorial election, thanks to the New York Post publishing photos of him mooning his college buds—and Elise is hiding from hotel security. Within minutes they're lip-locked and thereafter David is so inspired by their make-out session, he tosses his notes and gives an off-the-cuff speech that rekindles his fizzling political star.

  Some time later a man named Mitchell (Anthony Mackie), an agent of a clandestine organization, falls asleep on a park bench, thereby failing to prevent David from taking the bus to work—as a result he meets Elise again and she gives him her phone number. He arrives at work early and finds that his colleagues have been frozen in time and are having curious things done to them by a group of enigmatic men wearing fedoras (magic fedoras, it turns out). He flees, but is swiftly captured by virtue of wormholes disguised as doorways that allow the men to travel about instantaneously from place to place—he is thence removed to a wa
rehouse where a man named Richardson (John Slattery of Mad Men ) subjects him to the first of several quasi-metaphysical expository lectures like those referenced in the opening paragraph of this review. The agent explains that the men in hats are part of the Adjustment Bureau, a covert team of angels (a piss-take, really, on the angels in Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire ) who manipulate human lives to accord with "the Plan," a grand design that they access via a technology that resembles iPads with actual pages and is conceived of and written by a shadowy omnipotent force known as the Director (hopefully someone a tad more perspicacious than Mr. Nolfi). Should David interfere with their plan for his life, he's told, if he ever sees Elise again, he'll be lobotomized or brainwiped or something. Richardson then burns Elise's phone number. You'd think David might recall the area code, maybe even the prefix, and considering his connections, what he now knows about her, police sketch artists, etc., he should be able to track her down without much trouble.

  But no.

  This is, after all, a Senatorial candidate we're talking about, not a New York cabbie or anyone with the common sense God gave a Cheeto, so our boy is reduced to riding that same bus for three years hoping to meet her before they connect again.

  If you've seen a couple or three Hollywood pictures, you'll realize by now that this pattern will be repeated as the film proceeds—there will be more separations, more impediments put in the path of true love by the Bureau, more product placement, ever more hair-raising chases through the recognizable portions of touristy Manhattan, so that half the movie seems a reprise of the New York Is For Lovers campaign, and for certain there'll be more tedious, half-baked discussions on the topic of free will versus predestination, something that's bound to crease the foreheads of those folks who thought Inception was a real brain-twister.

  Eventually Terence Stamp, an elite operative of the Bureau, steps in to advise David that unless he ceases his pursuit of Elise he will not become Presiden shouldt inventory —t, world peace will not be achieved, her brilliant dance career will never happen, and their life as a couple will prove painfully ordinary. Stunned by his own self-importance, David accedes to his wishes... but by this time it should be clear to everyone that things are going to work out just fine for David and Elise.

  Philip K. Dick's canon has already been so degraded by Hollywood, it's hard to whip up any real outrage about The Adjustment Bureau, though I'd expect Dick is spinning a bit faster in his grave today. As a romantic comedy it's okay, Damon and Blunt have decent chemistry, but essentially it's a lace panty of a film leavened with a dose of pop-Christianity that soon will waft away on the breeze generated by the louder and more bombastic summer movies. As a science fiction film, lacking any real menace to lend it gravitas, it come across as retro whimsy, the sort of tired, plothole-riddled God comedy the studios have been churning out since the 1930s. Nolfi might have been better served if he had jettisoned the sci-fi element altogether, for buried in all the technological and philosophical mumbo jumbo, the love story seems devalued and the love-conquers-all theme he intended comes across as more an illustration of evolutionary biology embedded in a story about a controlling psychopath (albeit nominally a good guy, a role the Matt Damon of another era, Jimmy Stewart, specialized in) who is willing to sacrifice everything—the future, the fate of the world, whatever—in order to get laid. As is, it simply doesn't work on any level.

  Paul, the latest pairing of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the British comedy team who gave us Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, should have been much funnier than it was, but this alien road movie is weighted down by too many lame gay and redneck jokes to rise to the standard of their previous films.

  The idea is that Paul (affably voiced by Seth Rogen) is the dwarfish, big-eyed alien who crashed his spaceship at Roswell sixty-some years ago. Having milked him of all his knowledge, the powers-that-be intend now to dissect him, so he escapes in a stolen car and nearly crashes into the RV rented by Graeme (Pegg) and Clive (Frost), two Brit comic and scifi geeks who are spending their vacation traveling from ComicCon to tour various famous UFO sites in the U.S.A. As they strive to enable Paul to reach a rendezvous point where he will meet a rescue ship, they are pursued by bungling agents of the Big Guy (Sigourney Weaver, here for a couple of minutes screentime) and inadvertently kidnap a young religious fanatic, Ruth Buggs ( SNL 's Kristen Wiig) whom Paul, driven to distraction by her creationist blithering, hilariously cures of Christianity by means of a mind meld and later introduces her to military-grade marijuana, the film's most memorable YouTube moment. Wiig and Rogen carry most of the humor of the movie, whereas Graeme and Clive are relegated to the roles of earnest bumblers. Rogen actually seems to inhabit the special effect that is his character, imbuing the bird-devouring, junk food-loving alien with a gentle, amiable raunchiness. Director Greg Mottola has done better work ( Adventureland, Superbad ), but he keeps things bumping along at a reasonable pace.

  Though you will have certainly seen the trailer (and as with many films, this basically means that you have seen the best parts of the picture), there are enough funny in-jokes and happy surprises to keep your interest for a hundred plus minutes... and so if you have nothing better to do, you might as well do it with Paul.

  Imagine you're a kid, the sort of nasty wee skuzz who likes to play pranks on grownups whom he feels have wronged him, and so he fills a paper sack with dog poop, places it on the grownup's porch, lights it on fire, and then bangs on the door, yells and runs away to hide in the bushes, peeking out and giggling as the grownup flings open the door, spots the burning mess on his pristine, freshly painted porch, and in a pI pick up the corner of the net... I pick up the corner of the netacor vampireoranic tries to stomp out the fire.

  Now imagine you're that same grownup. You stand on the porch, your brand new kicks smeared with smoldering dog poop, and you feel shock, dismay, then anger as it dawns on you that you've been pranked by that creepy little snotrag down the block who may one day (if you don't get your hands on him first) grow up to become a serial killer or a corporate executive or even the president of our once-great nation.

  Betwixt those poles of experience lies the spectrum of emotions and reactions elicited by a viewing of Battle: Los Angeles and, to a considerable degree, therein also lies the essence of the movie itself.

  B:LA is yet another alien invasion film and this time the baddies are mistaken for meteors à la Skyline (seen courtesy of grainy CNN footage) and turn out to be a host of mushroom-headed bio-mech monsters intent upon obliterating humanity and destroying our cities in order to steal our planet's water—I guess stomping the bejesus out of us was too much of a temptation to resist or else they might have gotten all the water they could use by mining a few comets on their way across the galaxy.

  This is a film that could be reviewed in a few well-chosen words, or in a few thousand if one takes the tack of Soldier of Fortune, a magazine aimed at chubby wannabe mercs who wear camo T-shirts with bad-ass slogans. SOF ran my favorite movie review of all time, an incredibly lengthy, painstaking assessment of John Milius's Red Dawn that focused a critical eye on the authenticity of the Russian helicopters (Sikorskys in drag) in which Cuban troops invaded the USA. That is probably how this movie should be reviewed, if one is feeling kind, but I'm not feeling particularly kind, having just sat through it, and I'm not enough of a gearhead to attempt to analyze whether the movie's technology obeys any reasonable logic, though I doubt it—so I'll settle for the few-words method.

  The plot? Yes, there is one. Just barely. If a mash-up of Skyline and War of the Worlds (that's a spoiler, guys) passes muster as a plot. There are also actors, but no acting to speak of. Aaron Eckhart and company can't do a whole lot with lines like "Run!", "Get down!", "That was some John Wayne shit, man!" and, to a kid whose parent has just been killed by aliens, "I need you to be my little marine." There are further stabs at mawkish sentimentality and at least one instance of attempted humor. When Michelle Rodriguez (playing the basic Michelle Rodriguez role) gets her
face splattered by alien goo, one of her confreres makes a tasteless and decidedly unfunny sexual comment, hyuck, hyuck. It's not the sort of thing I'd say to a pissed-off woman with muscles and a big gun in the midst of a firefight, but I guess an early casualty in any alien invasion is a sense of tact.

  There's one well-choreographed action scene on a highway overpass, but the remainder of the movie is straight out of shaky cam hell, cinematography that makes you dizzy and hurts your eyeballs replete with clichéd characters, an implausible ending, and the suggestion of a sequel, a horrid fate from which we can only hope that an organization such as the Adjustment Bureau will jump in and save us.

  SCIENCE

  By Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty | 2884 words

  PATTERN RECOGNITION, RANDOMNESS, AND ROSHAMBO

  Pat is sixty rounds into a contest with a computer. Right now, Pat has 20 wins, the computer has 20 wins, and the two have tied 20 times. If there were a watching crowd, they'd be on the edge of their seats.

  The game is roshambo, also known as rock-paper-scissors. Yes, this is the classic schoolyard hand game: you hold out rock (a fist) or paper (an open hand) or scissors (index and middle for hundreds of years. c ( a landscaping company re original finger extended). Rock breaks scissors; scissors cut paper; paper wraps rock.

  Pat's competition in roshambo, following in the wake of the recent Jeopardy! win by a computer named Watson, has us thinking about that staple of science fiction: the sentient computer. More specifically, we've been thinking about computers, language, pattern recognition, and randomness.