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The Double Agent by Peter O'Donnell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is Volume 19 of the Titan reprints of the Modesty Blaise newspaper strip, featuring the last three story arcs drawn by Nevile Colvin in the mid-80s before he stepped down. By this time, Modesty and trusted lieutenant Willie Garvin are not accepting assignments from Sir Gerald Tarrant so much as being trouble magnets, having to deal with things like the head of French intelligence being kidnapped, a Thuggee cult revival in India, and that old standby, a doppelganger story (the title track here) in which a Commie gangster tries to frame Modesty for the assassination of Sir Gerald. As usual, it’s straight-up fast-paced spy-adventure from beginning to end, and while the core ideas aren’t all that original (it’s probably not a coincidence “Kali’s Disciples” appeared a year after Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom), it’s in how you tell them, and Peter O’Donnell generally told his stories well, and made even old ideas work in the Blaise universe. And of course he has a great set of core characters to work with. It may not be as fresh as the earlier strips, but it ain't boring.
A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Incredible True Story of North Korea and the Most Audacious Kidnapping in History by Paul Fischer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The strange but true story of South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee and her husband, film director Shin Sang-ok, who were abducted by North Korea in 1978 under the orders of Kim Jong-Il, who at the time wasn’t yet officially in line to succeed his father Kim Il-sung as Supreme Leader, but was the head of the Propaganga & Agitation Dept – which included North Korea’s film industry. Kim was a huge film fan and – seeing cinema as the ultimate propaganda tool, as well as a way to make money – decided he needed the talents of Choi and Shin to make better quality films. So he kidnapped them. And after five years of re-education and (in Shin’s case) prison, they went on to make several films, from the award-winning Salt to the MST3K-worthy Godzilla rip-off Pulgasari.
It sounds like a comedy, but it’s actually pretty grim – North Korea is as nightmarish and extreme a dictatorship as you can imagine, and for all his quirks, Kim was a sociopathic man-child criminal. It’s a fascinating story that Paul Fischer tells well, though it takes awhile for him to get to it – the first third of the book is a primer on the lives of Choi, Shin and Kim, the history of the splitting of Korea, how the North Korean cult-of-personality regime was established, and a summary of the film industries of both countries. But all of that provides the necessary context for the feature presentation, and also plays into Fischer’s view that North Korea itself is in many ways another Kim Jong-Il production. The book also works because Fischer invested a lot of effort to making Choi and Shin come alive on the page – especially Choi, who he interviewed personally for the book, and who sadly passed away just as I was finishing the last few chapters. Recommended for film fans as well as anyone interested in North Korea.
The Giver by Lois Lowry
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Background: This has been sitting on the bride’s bookshelf for awhile now, and neither of us is sure exactly how it got there – it may be the consequence of going to lots of used-book clearance sales where they sometimes throw in some free books. Anyway, I never bothered to check it out at home, but I just happened to see a new copy in a bookstore, picked it up and saw that it was award-winning dystopian YA fiction. So, since I already had a copy for mysterious reasons, I decided to give it a try.
The premise: 11-year-old Jonas lives in a closed utopian community where there’s no war, violence, pain or sadness. When you turn 12, you’re assigned your life vocation, and that’s what you do for the rest of your life. When Jonas turns 12, he is given the most prestigious job: the Receiver of Memory, whose job is to remember the past for everyone – which also means remembering the truth about the community, which turns out to be horrible. Well … awards or no awards, I didn’t get much out of it. Lowry is a decent writer who keeps the pages turning, and I appreciate the themes she’s exploring here. The main problem is that it stretches my suspension of disbelief too far, particularly in terms of how memory transfer works, and how you would go about creating and maintaining a community like that. Also the “shocking truth” twist is not only predictable, but also one of the great clichés of dystopian fiction. Even as a “what if” thought experiment, it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny if you look closely. It’s not a bad book if you can accept it at face value – and I don’t think it’s necessary for speculative fiction to overexplain how everything works – but I feel the book underexplains its own basic premise to the point of distraction. So overall it just didn’t work for me.
Profiles of the Future by Arthur C. Clarke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In which Arthur C Clarke predicts the future 50 years ago! Or, more accurately, Clarke looks at many of the various tropes of science-fiction and assesses how many could come true or are at least scientifically possible. Because this was published in 1963 – and contains some articles that were written as far back as 1958 – reading it is as much an exercise in assessing Clarke’s accuracy as it is appreciating his vision. (In fact, Clarke himself would do this in later editions of this book – the copy I have is from 1964, so I get to apply 55+ years of hindsight to everything here.)
Obviously – and like lots of futurists – Clarke gets a lot wrong, mainly in terms of timescale, technological details, commercial feasibility and/or optimism, but he also gets a lot right, and some of his “forecasts” hinged on future breakthroughs that haven't happened yet but still could one day. Cleverly, Clarke hedges his bets straight off with a couple of chapters reminding us of how the prediction business is a tricky one, and how so many self-styled prophets and even scientists get it wrong, either by failure of nerve or imagination. If nothing else, it’s interesting (at least to me) to see what people 50 years ago thought the future would look like based on what they knew at the time.
View all my reviews
Here’s yr future,
This is dF
The Double Agent by Peter O'DonnellMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is Volume 19 of the Titan reprints of the Modesty Blaise newspaper strip, featuring the last three story arcs drawn by Nevile Colvin in the mid-80s before he stepped down. By this time, Modesty and trusted lieutenant Willie Garvin are not accepting assignments from Sir Gerald Tarrant so much as being trouble magnets, having to deal with things like the head of French intelligence being kidnapped, a Thuggee cult revival in India, and that old standby, a doppelganger story (the title track here) in which a Commie gangster tries to frame Modesty for the assassination of Sir Gerald. As usual, it’s straight-up fast-paced spy-adventure from beginning to end, and while the core ideas aren’t all that original (it’s probably not a coincidence “Kali’s Disciples” appeared a year after Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom), it’s in how you tell them, and Peter O’Donnell generally told his stories well, and made even old ideas work in the Blaise universe. And of course he has a great set of core characters to work with. It may not be as fresh as the earlier strips, but it ain't boring.
A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Incredible True Story of North Korea and the Most Audacious Kidnapping in History by Paul FischerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
The strange but true story of South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee and her husband, film director Shin Sang-ok, who were abducted by North Korea in 1978 under the orders of Kim Jong-Il, who at the time wasn’t yet officially in line to succeed his father Kim Il-sung as Supreme Leader, but was the head of the Propaganga & Agitation Dept – which included North Korea’s film industry. Kim was a huge film fan and – seeing cinema as the ultimate propaganda tool, as well as a way to make money – decided he needed the talents of Choi and Shin to make better quality films. So he kidnapped them. And after five years of re-education and (in Shin’s case) prison, they went on to make several films, from the award-winning Salt to the MST3K-worthy Godzilla rip-off Pulgasari.
It sounds like a comedy, but it’s actually pretty grim – North Korea is as nightmarish and extreme a dictatorship as you can imagine, and for all his quirks, Kim was a sociopathic man-child criminal. It’s a fascinating story that Paul Fischer tells well, though it takes awhile for him to get to it – the first third of the book is a primer on the lives of Choi, Shin and Kim, the history of the splitting of Korea, how the North Korean cult-of-personality regime was established, and a summary of the film industries of both countries. But all of that provides the necessary context for the feature presentation, and also plays into Fischer’s view that North Korea itself is in many ways another Kim Jong-Il production. The book also works because Fischer invested a lot of effort to making Choi and Shin come alive on the page – especially Choi, who he interviewed personally for the book, and who sadly passed away just as I was finishing the last few chapters. Recommended for film fans as well as anyone interested in North Korea.
The Giver by Lois LowryMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Background: This has been sitting on the bride’s bookshelf for awhile now, and neither of us is sure exactly how it got there – it may be the consequence of going to lots of used-book clearance sales where they sometimes throw in some free books. Anyway, I never bothered to check it out at home, but I just happened to see a new copy in a bookstore, picked it up and saw that it was award-winning dystopian YA fiction. So, since I already had a copy for mysterious reasons, I decided to give it a try.
The premise: 11-year-old Jonas lives in a closed utopian community where there’s no war, violence, pain or sadness. When you turn 12, you’re assigned your life vocation, and that’s what you do for the rest of your life. When Jonas turns 12, he is given the most prestigious job: the Receiver of Memory, whose job is to remember the past for everyone – which also means remembering the truth about the community, which turns out to be horrible. Well … awards or no awards, I didn’t get much out of it. Lowry is a decent writer who keeps the pages turning, and I appreciate the themes she’s exploring here. The main problem is that it stretches my suspension of disbelief too far, particularly in terms of how memory transfer works, and how you would go about creating and maintaining a community like that. Also the “shocking truth” twist is not only predictable, but also one of the great clichés of dystopian fiction. Even as a “what if” thought experiment, it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny if you look closely. It’s not a bad book if you can accept it at face value – and I don’t think it’s necessary for speculative fiction to overexplain how everything works – but I feel the book underexplains its own basic premise to the point of distraction. So overall it just didn’t work for me.
Profiles of the Future by Arthur C. ClarkeMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
In which Arthur C Clarke predicts the future 50 years ago! Or, more accurately, Clarke looks at many of the various tropes of science-fiction and assesses how many could come true or are at least scientifically possible. Because this was published in 1963 – and contains some articles that were written as far back as 1958 – reading it is as much an exercise in assessing Clarke’s accuracy as it is appreciating his vision. (In fact, Clarke himself would do this in later editions of this book – the copy I have is from 1964, so I get to apply 55+ years of hindsight to everything here.)
Obviously – and like lots of futurists – Clarke gets a lot wrong, mainly in terms of timescale, technological details, commercial feasibility and/or optimism, but he also gets a lot right, and some of his “forecasts” hinged on future breakthroughs that haven't happened yet but still could one day. Cleverly, Clarke hedges his bets straight off with a couple of chapters reminding us of how the prediction business is a tricky one, and how so many self-styled prophets and even scientists get it wrong, either by failure of nerve or imagination. If nothing else, it’s interesting (at least to me) to see what people 50 years ago thought the future would look like based on what they knew at the time.
View all my reviews
Here’s yr future,
This is dF
