Editorial note: I need a better writing team. This is just taking too long…
Some people just have all the luck. Unfortunately, sometimes that luck is quite profoundly bad. Take, for example, the protagonist of Stephenie Meyer’s “Three Down One To Go!” novel Eclipse. Third in the Twilight Saga, it almost serves as a perfect example [...]
For more shameless reposting of io9’s content, here’s a tasty tidbit about what Stephenie Meyer’s doing instead of working on more Twilight books:
Author Stephenie Meyer Blows Off ‘Twilight’ Sequel to Make a Music Video
In the next-generation world of “I, Robot”, brought to life by filmmaker Alex Proya, the existence of fully-functioning robotic assistants with human intelligence and post-human strength ultimately forces the entirety of the human race to challenge the definitions of “alive” and “human”. These questions are raised through the actions and reactions of the protagonist of [...]
While I would love to do my own reviews about David Louis Edelman’s first two installments of the Jump 225 Trilogy (Infoquake and MultiReal), Charlie Jane Anders at the io9 Blog (a blog to which I owe a huge inspirational debt), has created what is porbably a far better one than I could write. Read it here, then read the books. You’ll be glad you did.
[New Moon] What is this, Philip, the vampire lover’s anonymous blog?
No, but I feel I need to finish the review of this series. Relax, more good stuff is coming. Besides, I like this stuff.
While some people find the idea of being a vampire attractive because of the whole immotral power badassery, its unique to find someone who would be better off as a vampire because her life is too dangerous as it is.
Consider Bella Swan, protagonist in this the second of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga and nearly direct sequel to Twilight. Coming out of a summer spent with the love of her life, Edward Cullen, while recovering from her ordeal with some not-so-nice vampires at the end of the previous book, Bella is looking forward to an entire schoolyear with her true love. Despite the fact that Bella is petulantly against birthdays as rememberances of her aging against Edward’s immortality, the Cullen family throws her a birthday party at their estate just outside the small Washington town of Forks. Due to Bella’s inborn clumsiness and because the plot needs something interesting with which to drive conflict, Bella slips, cuts herself, and falls into a glass bowl, resulting in furhter lacerations. This sets up a lot, so let me repeat that: Bella (human) starts bleeding profusley in front of a family of vampires. For those of us who kept waiting for this shoe to drop, we got to have a little “I-told-you-so” moment with ourselves. One of Edward’s “borthers” and the youngest of the vampire bunch, goes blood-crazy and almost attacks Bella, while most of the rest of the family scurries off to avoid temptation. Edward and co. deflect the attack, and the good Dr. Cullen (Edward’s “father”) patches up Bella and sends her on her way.
Edward, who from roughly halfway through book one up until the end of book four (spoiler!) is deeply worried about Bella getting injured or killed just by hanging around him, and the entire family decides it would be better to just leave, despite the fact that Edward and Bella are only a minor sugery away from being attached at the hip. Bella is instantly heartbroken, in manner designed to tug at the strings of all tenn females everywhere, but which managed to warm the cold bitter heart of this college male (me). One of the only nice things about Edward and Bella’s breakup is it allows for a rather brilliantly styled time change. There are those who would say that Meyer’s use of four separate pages, each with a month name in light grey font (”October, November, December, January), is tacky and occasionally overdone. I disagree.
Edward’s (and by extension the Cullen Family’s) decision to leave Forks and Bella forever creates a moment of catharsis, of supreme emotional anguish, with no immedaite foil or relief in sight. It occurs in the first quarter of the book, and the feeling is that the book can only go downhill from here, emotionally speaking. The four-page time lapse is poetry deisguised as prose, using the minimum amount of speech to convey the most emotion. We can only take so many pages of psychological torment, especially since we’re seeing everything from Bells’ point of view. Those four pages allow our imaginations to fill in the blanks of what our protagonist must be going through, rather than just feeding us in explanation. In other words, it allows us to think as well as move the plot forward. (If anyone thinks I’m off the mark here, I would love to discuss it further, but I must go on.)
The stroy continues. Charlie, Bella’s policeman father, confronts Bella with sending her back to her mother in Florida, because he sees her so miserable in Forks. This prompts Bella to force herself back into the land of the socially active again, just so her father will let her stay close to the place where her true love once lived. Bella starts spending more time with Jacob Black, an old friend from Bella’s custody summers in Forks, and has a good time with him, but discovers another mark of her insanity – Oops, I mean, deep and abiding love for Edward. Every time she does something nail-bitingly, mind-bogglingly stupid, she hears Edward’s voice in her head telling her not to do it. Bella is by this time so desperate for any sign of Edward that she keeps doing amazingly stupid things. Like riding motorcycles, despite the fact that she has no natural balance. As well as taking her and her defenseless friend to the shadiest part of the nearest big city, in effect just asking for this book to reclassify its age level. Edward’s voice guides her through these situations, but sounds angry with her. Go figure.
I do have to say, from a reader’s perspective, and given the random vampire lore I’ve picked up over the years, I’m almost convinced by the end of the book that one of Edward’s supernatural powers (besides the mind-reading thing I keep forgetting to mention) is the ability to his voice into Bella Swan’s head.
Possibly the simultaneously most dumb and most predictable thing Bella does that qualifies as somewhat insane is start hanging out with werewolves. Yup, Jacob Black comes from a long and distinguished line of werewolves,as do most of Jacob’s friends. It comes as no surprise to the reader, given that Bella had no trouble with vampires, that she will have no trouble with werewolves. Most normal humans would be freaked out, however.
On top of all that, Bella has a vampire after her, hell-bent on revenge. That’s right, the mat of the the vampire Edward killed protecting Bella is back with a vengeance trying to kill Bella in revenge on Edward. Of course, while Bella’s furry new buddies are off trying to catch the rogue vamp, Bella decides to hear Edward in her head again by taking a little swim off a giant cliff. At which point, Edward’s fortune-telling “sister” sees what looks like Bella’s death, and Edward runs to the vampire law enforcement, the Volturi, to do something tupid enough to kill him, so that he can join Bella in death. Maybe its just my description, but this does sound a hair like a supernatural soap opera.
Bella rushes to Italy with Edward’s “sister” Alice to try and stop him, and manages to do so before they are all brought before the Volturi, who decree that Bella “knows too much” in the manner of secret societies everywhere. They make Edward promise to turn Bella into a vampire post-haste, and Edward agrees, because agreeing is so easy in the face of death. Everybody, Bella and all the Cullens, return to Forks, where Bella gets just a little more petualnt about how soon Edward will turn her, and the book ends with Jacob reminding Edward (and Bella) that the treaty between the Cullens and Jacob’s pack requires no biting, not just no killing. So, if Edward turns Bella they face a vampire-werewolf war. Skippy.
Alright, review time. As balse as I sounded about this Twilight installment, I’m still deeply fond of the series for its continued deciation to making the supernatural human, and its light supermatural appreciation of the human. There are no emotional experiences that feel contrite, and the pain that is in abundant supply in this novel feels real enough to make the reader pause and take a breat before continuing. Bella turning to another supernatural being after one breaks up with her feels, hindsight being 20/20, rather predictable, but that’s actually not a detractor here. The main detractor, for my money, is the strained love triangle that is on the rise once Edward comes back, since Jacob seems in no hurry to relinquish his feelings towards Bella. Seeing how this plays will be an interesting topic for the next review.
All in all, its a good read, obviously enough or I wouldn’t have read it. Since I haven’t mentioned it before let me ackowledge that Meyer’s writing style, while no Tolkien, really does try to bring the reader into the moment and often greatly succeeds in doing so. The series has enough momentum from this book and its predecessor that I’m hungry for more, but that will be in my review of Eclipse, so keep a weather eye.
ts actually refreshing when an undercurrent idea hits the main stream. Stephenie Meyer’s first book in the Twilight Saga quatrology takes an idea that has been stewing in the underbelly of fantasy thought, namely the idea that vampires can be rather excellent chaps when they’ve forced themselves to stop drinking human blood, and brings that idea into the shining, prismatic light of the bestseller list.
Now I know there are those who would say that the idea of “good” vampires has been around for at least a few decades, but the blood-sucking (yes, the vampires in Twilight suck blood, but the ones we like don’t suck human blood at all) members on the side of the protagonist take this farther. They try to be good and peaceful. None of them draws a modified robotic katana and slays other vampires while taking hits of a human-blood drug replacement. Yes, I’m looking at you Wesley Snipes.
So, as I launch into the bloody meat of this review (yes, I know I’m not that witty), let me start by saying that the humanity expressed in this book is more real than in a lot of other Fantasy novels with only human casts. Part of that realism comes from the fact that the “good” vampires in Twilight do not serve as a foil to the humanity of the non-vamps, but express incredible depths of humanity themselves.
In a unique moment for Vin Diesel, he has found a movie with an engaging plot. Now, that’s not to say the plot is perfect, and I could spend this entire review picking at the semi-truck sized holes in the plot, but that would be entirely critique, and no review.
So, what did Bablyon AD do [...]
Well, since I have now been off of the Vikadin long enough to get a clear head, its time to start writing again. Its funny how enforced absences can change one’s perspective. Since I really didn’t have anything better to do but lounge around and recover, I started thinking about the blog, where I was going with it and the direction I had started heading.
ts hard to imagine someone with such enormous bad luck that being a vampire would make their life easier by comparison. While many of us might have harbored fantasies of joining the ranks of the undead, normally its just for the Gothic coolness that is sometimes attributed to vampires in popular culture. It says something of the character of Bella, in Stephenie Meyer’s continuation of the Twilight Saga, that her life would seem to be easier if she were a member of the brotherhood of bloodsuckers.For one thing, she wouldn’t have to suffer the massive heartbreak dealt early Meyer’s “New Moon”, second in the as of now Twilight quatrology.
XKCD shows one of the classic SciFi actors in some of his lesser moments: Harrison Ford
The next step in the car of the future: Plug-in Prius
Lastly, because I am a major Linux geek, here’s a list of really handy apps that are new to me but extremely useful.
More tomorrow, but possibly of a slightly drugged [...]
