mariness

Ok, first up, another Edith Nesbit post up at Tor.com, this one about The House of Arden. NOT a favorite of mine, but Gore Vidal liked it. Which, er. Yes. Onwards!

Meanwhile, just to confirm that every once in awhile I do poke my little head out to read something other than speculative fiction, children's fiction, and gossipy biographies about long dead people, a couple of recent non-genre reads I can strongly recommend:

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean, by journalist Susan Casey, is mostly the story of various extreme surfers who hop all over the world to chase down and ride giant waves all around the world, and by giant, I mean 70 feet/21 meters to 30 meters. These are the sorts of waves that destroy tanker ships.

Not surprisingly, surfing on these sorts of waves, even with highly specialized surfboards and people riding around on jet skies to pull surfers out of the water while helicopters hover above is, how shall we say this, risky. Even the author, no surfer, gets badly tossed around just trying to document this kind of thing from a boat. It's riveting stuff.

Slightly less riveting are the chapters that punctuate the surfing bit, where Casey, no scientist, follows wave scientists around and tries to understand both waves and global warming. This is not entirely successful, mostly because – as I learned to my great distress in a graduate-level physical oceanography class, waves caused by wind are COMPLICATED, and by complicated, I mean, they will drive you to literal tears when you are trying desperately to understand what your professor is talking about and how any of these damn equations work and why all of them seem to involve calculus and worse having to program calculus into a computer. Er. I digress. The second problem is that despite several PhDs patiently trying to tell her otherwise, Casey remains unable to understand that tsunami waves (caused by earthquakes) and other waves (caused by, in my opinion, far too many damn things) are not the same thing. (I actually got all of the questions about tsunami waves correct.) Which in turn means that although global warming is expected to impact the way wind wave works, and may, or may not, impact the damage caused by tsunami waves (this is debatable) and may possibly increase the number of undersea earthquakes causing tsunamis (this is VERY debatable and only in the "worth investigating" stage) it will not affect the way tsunami waves work.

This may not seem that important, but when a good half of your book is about the growing potential for wave damage from global warming, it's important to make sure that you have a clear understanding of the differences between tsunami waves, wave waves, and storm surge waves. Casey doesn't, and she also isn't good at translating scientific terminology to layman's chatter, which means that her chapters about global warming, waves and scientists are decidedly the weaker part of the book.

Which in the end is ok; I guarantee everyone will really be reading this for the extreme surfer stories, and if readers get a bit of "wow, waves are complicated" lessons from this, it's all good.

The other strongly recommended book is The Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears. Set in the reign of Charles II, this is a book about the murder of one Dr. Grove and the woman suspected of committing the crime, told from four different viewpoints – that of a charming Italian traveller, a young man obsessed with restoring his father's name and honor, a mathematical genius, and another young man who just loves books.

Naturally, all four of these narrators have something to hide – in some cases, quite a bit to hide – and their perspectives are quite, quite different.

Pears ladles his book with discussions of blood transfusions (this is pretty fascinating); a horrified and unintentionally hilarious description of a performance of King Lear (part of the fun is trying to figure out which Shakespearean play that particular narrator is reacting to); and appearances by most of the great academics and thinkers of the period: John Locke, the great Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, and so on, all happily discussing philosophy and blood transfusions in between murder investigations. This is all pretty great, but what makes the book is the way Pears handles the four competing viewpoints of the murder and its events – and the way all four men, and it's very important that these are men, justify their various actions, which include unauthorized and questionable medical experiments and autopsies, attempts to purchase corpses, rapes, spying, betrayals, purchases of books and musical instruments that come close to bankrupting them, homosexual desires, and so on. (The rape section of the novel, while not graphic, may be triggery for some readers given that narrator's ability to justify the rape to himself – while making it perfectly clear to readers that this is rape, it is unacceptable, and that it most definitely harmed the woman involved.)

That most of the characters and two of the narrators are historical figures adds to the intrigue and the mystery (without being too spoilery I was fairly sure that John Locke wouldn't end up as the murderer, but then again, his role in the narration ended up surprising me).

Warning: this is a heavy book, and it's meant for rereading. Some of you will find the rape section and the sections narrated by the mathematician John Wallis (a historical figure) to be difficult going. But this was most definitely my kind of book.

So, as I mentioned, yesterday my parents and I headed off to see Oceans, a French film brought to the U.S. by Disney with revised narration by Pierce Brosnan. I have no idea if the English narration is the same as the French.

First, let me mention the good parts: the photography is stunning, with particularly vivid pictures of crab armies (the highlight of the film), a blanket octopus, a ribbon eel, a blue whale, and some cute little baby turtles getting eaten by hungry birds (this film is probably not suitable for very small children, whatever the G rating.) It looks glorious. I wanted to take several of the images and turn them into screensavers. And I adored all of the bits about the sea lions. (I love sea lions, and these were particularly adorable sea lions.)

But it is not without its problems, some from the editing, some from the narration, and some stemming from the sad truth that I have spent way, way too much time in my life staring at dolphin noses.

1. Presumably to emphasize its overall "all of the oceans are connected" viewpoint, the movie jumps around and around and around the oceans, and I do mean all of the oceans, with little to no identification; if you didn't know better, you could easily believe that the cute little sea otters just off of Monterey Bay are in fact swimming over the coral reef that the film showed just moments earlier.

This continues to happen through the film, giving little to no context for most of what is going on. We have a shot of what was probably an Atlantic barrier reef almost immediately followed by kelp forests presumably in the Pacific (difficult to tell) switching to Japanese waters and so on.

2. Speaking of editing issues...those dolphins.

The film has quite a few scenes of jumping and swimming dolphins. In all of these scenes, we are meant to think that the film crew just happened to manage to get images of the same dolphins, first under the water and then over the water and then in the afternoon and then in the sunset. Except for one major problem: the shots are of different dolphin species. (If you see the film, watch the noses.) In the most egregious example, the underwater and initial swimming shots are of either Pacific or Atlantic white-sided dolphins, which then through the magic of movie editing become spinner dolphins.

I get that this is going to be lost on the vast majority of viewers. I also get that different dolphin species, less interested than we are in these sorts of distinctions, often swim together, and if I'm not mistaken there was also a shot of some spotted dolphins swimming along with bottlenose dolphins, demonstrating just that point. But combined with the constant shifting from ocean to ocean made me not want to trust the film.

3. If I see an ocean area solely filled with medusae (jellyfish/jellies, whichever term you prefer) and absolutely no other fish, my first thought, Disney, is not, ooooooh, what an exquisite pristine ocean environment, but rather, holy )(*)(, what an overfished area.

The numbers of ctenophores and jellyfish do appear to be increasing in ocean waters. This is not necessarily something to celebrate, since their numbers appear to be increasing just as fisheries are collapsing. It is probable, if not proven, that they are taking advantage of the reduced competition for food.

I suspect magnifelyn had other concerns.

But these quibbles aside, I did find myself loving the film – largely because so much of it really looked cool. Oh, and the sea lions. And the otters. And the blue whales.

*******

We also took a moment to watch – not go up in – Disney's Big Balloon Thing at Downtown Disney, which is a big balloon featuring Mary Poppins which goes up a few hundred feet, hovers there for a bit, and then comes down – all for the low, low price of...$18?

As far as we could tell, the entire Balloon Thing lasts for about five to ten minutes, which, well, great, but given that in the same location you can take in a movie for $7.50 to $10.50 (depending when you get there) or spend several hours at the considerably more exciting Disney Quest at $35 to $41, or (in the evenings/weekends) listen to free sidewalk entertainment, I have to wonder just how well the Balloon is doing. It certainly wasn't attracting many people when we were there, although, granted, we were there during a largely unbusy weekday afternoon.

Also, my mother figured out how to work her moving sand picture thing, which had failed in its potential awesomeness by not actually, as it happened, moving. As it turns out, like so many artistic things, the sand pictures are…dare I say it? A bit temperamental, requiring just the touch of fiddling and kindly if slightly irritated tapping to get moving. I can sympathize.