2001-07-07 - 23:55
I'm glad Brian Aldiss isn't dead
But that's a point to deal with later, if there is a later, as these two hog-wallow eyes pupilling you all over from spitting distance tend to dispute. Let it not be by jaws alone, O monster, but also by huge hooves and, if convenient to yourself, by mountainous rollings upon me! Let death be a saga, sagacious, Beowulfate.
from "Poor Little Warrior!"
So, I just watched A.I., and I can only say that I recommend it with strong reservations. A lot worth watching in there, but it's tempered by missed opportunities, excessive HaleyTorture, and an ending that left me, my friends, and every reviewer going, "What the fuck?"[1] and not in a good way, either. I'm not going to go into it further, because complete spoilers would be necessary for any meaningful discussion of what's wrong with this movie.
Before watching the movie, I read Brian Aldiss's very short story, "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long," which was the inspiration for the film. I was impressed enough to check out Man in His Time, an anthology of his short sci-fi stories, from the library. I read about 80 pages of it at work today.
Man, how come nobody told me about Brian Aldiss? This anthology spans three decades, from the '50s to the '80s--this guy's been writing circles around most of his contemporaries since my dad was a spotty teenager reading magazines with names like Amazing Stories. My dad, in fact, remembered reading my favorite story in the anthology so far--"Poor Little Warrior!", about a brontosaurus hunter--when it first came out.
Since I really knew nothing about Aldiss, I didn't know whether he was still alive, and my dad hadn't read his stuff for decades, so he didn't know either. (I saw that he was born in 1925, which made him a perfectly reasonable age for a crotchety old science fiction writer to attain [see also Clarke, Arthur C.].) I was hooked, though, so, hoping he wouldn't turn out to be dead, I did a search on his name and turned up his official website, which is maintained by his extremely-not-dead cooperation, and contains several pieces of his fiction and nonfiction writing. Included, as an almost offhand comment in this article, is a pretty good assessment of how A.I. fails.
So I just wanted to bring that to people's attention. Gotta do something for an update.
[1] Confidential to, like, three people: "Steve Buscemi!"
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