Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez

Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kill Decision is a near-future techno-thriller based on the disturbing concept of financial interests using technology to further their profit goals without morals or accountability. That's not a new idea, of course, there's been plenty of other books (and movies/TV/etc) based on the same idea of some shadowy conspiracy manipulating events with no regard for consequences to the world. I think Suarez does a fine job of implementing the concept using modern society and technology, so it didn't bother me that there wasn't much in the way of new ground covered.

The novel revolves around advances in autonomous drone technology, most notably vision processing and swarming behavior. I'm no expert in those fields, but I consider myself an informed layman, and it certainly doesn't feel like Suarez is reaching all that far past what's possible right now. What the novel proposes in these fields is advanced refinements of capabilities that we're already seeing in labs today - years away, not decades, if someone really wanted to do it and dedicated the resources.

It's not all techno-games, of course; there's plenty of interesting characters with personality in Kill Decision. The main character is Linda McKinney, a scientist who studies ants. Her work is co-opted by the bad guys, and she's saved from elimination by a team of black-ops soldiers. They proceed to spend the rest of the novel roaming around the world to stop the conspiratorial disaster. My favorite character was the heavy-metal-loving commando Foxy, right-hand man to team leader and hero Odin. All of it is well-written and engaging, if not particularly unique.

Kill Decision is a enjoyable read, fast-paced and interesting. The reader can just enjoy the action, or think a little deeper about some of the moral questions. (What kind of danger are we in from certain kinds of technological advances? Do we have any real control over bad actors using such technology?) Either way, I recommend it.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Less by Andrew Sean Greer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Less won lots of prizes and is clearly a work that many people appreciate. It's a good case in point of the fact that I am not one of those people, because I thought it was largely boring, and the main character uninteresting.

Less follows middle-aged author Arthur Less as he jets around the world avoiding reminders of twin impending disasters: his ex-partner's marriage and turning 50. He spends a lot of time feeling out of place, unsure of himself, nostalgic for a simpler past, and unable to write. Eventually he sorts out his feelings (somewhat) and manages to write again (but not finish his novel) and finds resolution for his romantic woes (but not on purpose). This is not a book with an exciting, gripping plot.

Arthur is gay. There were maybe one or two places where this actually mattered, as far as I can tell, most notably one bit where one of his books is rejected because it deals only with a white gay man instead of something more exotic. Other than that, you could swap the gender of a few characters and maybe a few locations to make this a straight novel and it would read very much the same. Arthur has no struggles over being gay, there's no discrimination, practically everyone he meets is either also gay or could care less. Which is fine, something of an ideal world in fact, but it begs the question of why write a novel about it? Ideal isn't interesting.

Romantic relationships seem to define Arthur's self-image. He's with an older partner in a long-term but still somewhat casual relationship; that ends and he finds a younger partner to do basically the same thing in mirror image; then that ends and he's alone and pathetic. Completely alien to my mindset, putting this kind of weight on romance and yet not actually pursuing a solid lasting relationship. To me, it makes Arthur simply look like someone unable to decide what he really wants out of life...not uncommon, but not interesting enough to base a novel on. This being a romantic novel, there is an eventual resolution to Arthur's love woes...but it fell flat with me, as it basically falls into his lap, through no fault of his own.

The writing style of Greer reminds me of when I was reading classics in school. Some genuinely funny or moving prose, surrounded by a whole lot of flowery language meant to convey characters' mindsets that goes off in all directions and is either uninteresting or confusing. So I can see why the literary critics loved it, but it is definitely not to my taste.

There are obviously lots of people who enjoyed Less, most notably a Pulitzer committee. However, I am not one of them.

Good Omens (Amazon 2019)

The Good Omens miniseries from Amazon navigates the tricky waters of book-to-video adaptation in a largely successful fashion.

I first read Good Omens 20+ years ago, and several times since. Considering the authors, it's unsurprising that I liked it so much. Both Pratchett and Gaiman have written plenty of good stuff, most of which I've read. Their collaboration is as good as one might expect, and from all accounts they enjoyed writing it as much as we've enjoyed reading it.

I have no complaints with the production quality or the casting of the video series. The visuals are beautiful, and the costumes and special effects bring some of the more exotic descriptions in the book to life. Both Michael Sheen and David Tennant are excellent as the two leads, and I thought the kids playing the Them did a great job also. (OK, maybe one minor complaint, I wasn't terribly impressed with the special effects of the Bentley-on-fire-across-M25 scene. So much more potential there.)

Film adaptation has to strike a balance between getting the details right for fans of the original book, and keeping things simple enough for those unfamiliar with it to understand. Good Omens is somewhat heavy on the side of the details, in my opinion. I think it's difficult to get the very understated humor of the book to come across on screen or in narration without leaving unfamiliar viewers feeling confused or even bored. Plus it would simply take up a whole lot of screen time to fully explain everything so a viewer can reach the same level of understanding that one gets from the book. So the creators of the series decided to stay largely faithful to the book, even if it meant that those who hadn't read the book would be a bit lost at time.

That's not to say that everything is exactly like the book, of course. There are quite a few minor characters and plot points left out. Slightly disappointing to some of us who read the book, but not surprising and not a major problem. I would have loved to see the Other Four Horsemen, for instance, but I can certainly understand why that bit was left out. Not essential to the storyline and would have taken a good amount of screen time.

All told, I loved the Good Omens series as a long-time fan of the book. I'd recommend reading the book first for anyone planning to watch the series, or at least give it a second watch after you've had a chance to get through the book. You'll likely pick up on quite a few things that weren't completely clear to a non-reader viewer.

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When an author's first novel is as good as The Hate U Give , it begs the question: was that success just a flash in the pan, a case of catching lightning in a bottle? For Angie Thomas, the answer is an emphatic No. On The Come Up is every bit as good as its predecessor.

On The Come Up follows Bri, a teenage girl in the poor and largely black Garden Heights neighborhood of Baltimore, as she tries to start off a rap career. She's got a whole lot of obstacles in her way, from her family's dire financial straits to racial tensions to breaking into a male-dominated rap culture. And she doesn't help her own case when she plays right into many of the stereotypes, both in her lyrics and her actions, while trying to point out the inherent biases.

If that sounds awfully familiar to The Hate U Give, that's because at the level of themes and social commentary, it is. The two books are set in the same world, share much of the same Garden Heights territory, and On The Come Up even references a few of the events in the first book. But the characters are very different, with their own problems, strengths, weaknesses, and motivations. The setting and themes may be similar, but this book tells its own story.

I hope Angie Thomas is planning to write a whole lot more. That's a bit selfish, of course, because I've enjoyed her first two books so much. But more importantly, I think her writing is providing a perspective that isn't shared nearly enough in popular writing. The wider she can share that perspective, the better.

The Americans (FX)

I'd considered starting The Americans a few different times over the last few years, but there was always something else available to watch. Figured I might as well just wait until the show finished its run, which happened earlier this year.

The Americans is a Cold War era spy thriller, set in the 1980s. A pair of Soviet agents comes to America under assumed identities in the 1960s and sets about living normal lives. By the 1980s when the first season starts, Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings have two kids and are basically indistinguishable from your average suburban couple. Using their travel agency jobs as cover, they perform various espionage missions right under the noses of American counterintelligence.

In addition to the deep-cover family, other characters in the espionage game fill out the cast. An FBI agent lives next door, there are various sources and informants, and several of the Soviet embassy staff become important figures. I enjoyed seeing focus on characters from both sides of the undercover conflict. As you'd expect, there's a high turnover rate...not a safe profession, the spy game.

Spy shenanigans take up about half the plot, and I found most of it to be well written. Sure, you have to suspend your disbelief about the premise of the super-deep-cover setup, and the main characters miraculously survive all kinds of danger on a weekly basis. But that's par for the course on almost any television series. A lot of the spy action is centered around development of personal relationships with individual sources, but there's also plenty of sneaking around and even a few gun battles and car chases.

The time period in the 1980s makes it easier to accept all the disguises and sneaking, although I suppose modern spy thrillers manage the same even in today's cameras-everywhere society. Each season has some kind of big theme for the spying, from stealth aircraft to improved food crops, drawn from the big stories of the time. It was fun to see how the writers worked with the time period, from those significant plot points down to minor references like classic video games.

The other half of the plot comes from all the emotional angst that you'd expect in this kind of situation. Who is sleeping with whom, what lies are being told, the stress of hiding activities from your family and friends, and so on. I found it all interesting at first, though eventually it starts to wear thin. I thought the writers did a pretty good job of showing how the stress of the spy lifestyle wears people down over time, but in so doing there's a ton of repetition.

After about three seasons, I was more than ready for the Jennings family to finally move on from spies to whatever was next, good or bad. I'd kind of hoped that would happen in the fourth or fifth season, but instead it just dragged on in more or less the same vein. Some significant changes did finally happen throughout the final sixth season, which was the best since the first in my opinion. The last episode leaves a lot of loose ends, but there was enough resolved to make it a good series finale.

I'm glad to have watched The Americans, though I think they let it go on too long. If they'd wrapped it up around 4 seasons, that would have been about perfect.

Fiction and Suspension of Disbelief

I read books, watch videos, and play games in all sorts of fictional settings. Science fiction, fantasy, thrillers, mysteries, alternate history...they all have something in common. The easier they make it for me to suspend my disbelief, the better they are.

The phrase "suspension of disbelief" was first used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge back in 1817. The basic idea is simple - fiction relies on the observer willingly accepting something false. It's a pretty rare work of fiction that expects people to believe that it's actually true. For the vast majority of fiction, the consumer knows going in that they're seeing something unreal.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This is easier in some genres than others. It's fairly straightforward to settle into a mystery set in the present day, with people you can easily believe might walk by on the street and technology that you recognize. A far-future world with aliens and fantastic machines, on the other hand, requires the observer to accept things that would never be encountered in daily life.

I find that I rarely have trouble with the sheer amount of things that a work of fiction expects me to accept. Magic, aliens, super-spies, warp speed, etc, etc...it's all good. Suspending my disbelief rarely runs into a volume limit. Give me a basic explanation of what your particular work of fiction expects me to accept, and I'm pretty likely to do so.

What I do have trouble with, however, is inconsistency. Tell me that there's a guy who can move faster than the eye can see, and has some funky ability so he doesn't burn up in the process...no problem. But then turn around and put him in a showdown with a single opponent who relies on a gun, which speedy should be able to take away before it can be fired - now we have a problem. This exact scenario has happened on CW's The Flash, which is a show I actually like quite a bit, but I had some trouble accepting that particular scene. The bigger the distance of the initial premise from reality, the more often you get this sort of inconsistency.

A well-crafted story can make things easier on the audience, by including believable reasons behind these kinds of scenarios. For instance, in that Flash-and-gun scenario, have the villain rig up the gun to explode or shoot randomly as soon as anyone else touches it. (Which is in fact what they did in a later episode.) While you probably couldn't do that in reality any more than a guy can run at light speed, having that added detail gives the viewer an excuse to believe in the scenario.

Most of the best fiction I've encountered requires suspension of disbelief just once, setting the initial scenario, and then everything follows logically from there. Harry Turtledove's various alternate history novels are a great example of this. The Guns of the South is perhaps the most famous; an alternate Civil War in which the Confederacy was given 20th century firearms. Once you get past the initial hurdle of accepting that premise, the rest of the story makes sense without forcing yourself to ignore logical holes.

By definition, fiction is going to contain something untrue, and much of the time it's something fantastic. The consumer is going to have to suspend their disbelief along the way. Really good fiction defines and explains those differences from reality in a way that the observer can understand and easily accept.