Fuck. And. Yes
Aug. 11th, 2010 07:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
volterator"I've never met [JJ Abrams]. I am not a member of his fan club or anti-fan club. I disliked Cloverfield a very great deal. I disliked Star Trek intensely. I thought it was terrible. And I think part of my problem is that I feel like the relationship between JJ Abrams' projects and geek culture is one of relatively unloving repackaging - sort of cynical. I taste contempt in the air. Now I'm not a child - I know that all big scifi projects are suffused with the contempt of big money for its own target audience. But there's something about [JJ's projects] that makes me particularly uncomfortable. As compared to somebody like Joss Whedon, who - even when there are misfires - I feel likes me and loves me and is on some cultural level my brother and comrade. And I don't feel that way about JJ Abrams."
-- China Miéville.
My own opinion is that Whedon is merely an incompetent SF writer; doesn't know a tap about science and his work often lacks rigour, but is at least thematically pleasing, well characterised and fun, most of the time. Abrams is scornful about SF, scornful of Star Trek, which I understand, but took it on anyway, and keeps inserting fate and the mystical into secular material. He completely assassinated Captain Kirk for a start, in a way that Brannon Braga never managed when he dropped a bridge on him. His compatriots, Orci and Kurtzmen are strongly implicated in some of the worst genre writing in the world today. Allow our chum Simon Pegg, playing Benji, to explain the central trope of their dire, doleful, wan fucking work, the ill-defined McGuffin: personified here with the one-two punch of populist technofear in the risible MI:3, starring walking ceramic tile-showroomface Tom Cruise; the trope of grey-goo as wrath of god.
"
Benji Dunn: According to one of these e-mails, your Mr.Davian is going to attend a function in tomorrow afternoon at one Vatican City.
Luther: What the hell's Davian doing in Vatican?
Benji: Well, it's all got to do with "the Rabbit's foot".
Ethan: What is that?
Benji: I'm assuming it is a kind of code-word for a deadly weapon, something Davian is going to sell to his unspecified buyer for 850 millions, by the way. Or maybe it's not a code-name, maybe it is just a really, really expensive bunny appendage.
Ethan: Do you have any ideas what it is?
Benji: It's interesting - I used to have this professor at Oxford, okay? Doctor Wickham, his name was and he was, like, this massive fat guy, you know? Huge, big guy. We used to call him - you know, well, I won't tell you what we used to call him, but he taught biomolecular kinetics and cellular dynamics. And he used to sort of scare the underclassmen with this story about how the world would eventually be eviscerated by technology. You see, it was inevitable that a compound would be created which he referred to as the 'Anti-God'. It was like an accelerated mutator or sort of, you know, like a, an unstoppable force of destructive power, that would just lay waste to everything - to buildings and parks and streets and children and ice cream parlors, you know? So whenever I see, like, a rogue organization willing to spend this amount of money on a mystery tech, I always assume...it's the Anti-God. End-of-the-world kinda stuff, you know... But no, I don't have any idea what it is. I was just speculating."
Fuck that guy, and especially fuck Orci and Kurtzmen and their shitty, shitty shows, Alias, LOST and Fringe.
And yeah, Kraken grew on me eventually, even if it is at least 100 pages too long.
-- China Miéville.
My own opinion is that Whedon is merely an incompetent SF writer; doesn't know a tap about science and his work often lacks rigour, but is at least thematically pleasing, well characterised and fun, most of the time. Abrams is scornful about SF, scornful of Star Trek, which I understand, but took it on anyway, and keeps inserting fate and the mystical into secular material. He completely assassinated Captain Kirk for a start, in a way that Brannon Braga never managed when he dropped a bridge on him. His compatriots, Orci and Kurtzmen are strongly implicated in some of the worst genre writing in the world today. Allow our chum Simon Pegg, playing Benji, to explain the central trope of their dire, doleful, wan fucking work, the ill-defined McGuffin: personified here with the one-two punch of populist technofear in the risible MI:3, starring walking ceramic tile-showroomface Tom Cruise; the trope of grey-goo as wrath of god.
"
Benji Dunn: According to one of these e-mails, your Mr.Davian is going to attend a function in tomorrow afternoon at one Vatican City.
Luther: What the hell's Davian doing in Vatican?
Benji: Well, it's all got to do with "the Rabbit's foot".
Ethan: What is that?
Benji: I'm assuming it is a kind of code-word for a deadly weapon, something Davian is going to sell to his unspecified buyer for 850 millions, by the way. Or maybe it's not a code-name, maybe it is just a really, really expensive bunny appendage.
Ethan: Do you have any ideas what it is?
Benji: It's interesting - I used to have this professor at Oxford, okay? Doctor Wickham, his name was and he was, like, this massive fat guy, you know? Huge, big guy. We used to call him - you know, well, I won't tell you what we used to call him, but he taught biomolecular kinetics and cellular dynamics. And he used to sort of scare the underclassmen with this story about how the world would eventually be eviscerated by technology. You see, it was inevitable that a compound would be created which he referred to as the 'Anti-God'. It was like an accelerated mutator or sort of, you know, like a, an unstoppable force of destructive power, that would just lay waste to everything - to buildings and parks and streets and children and ice cream parlors, you know? So whenever I see, like, a rogue organization willing to spend this amount of money on a mystery tech, I always assume...it's the Anti-God. End-of-the-world kinda stuff, you know... But no, I don't have any idea what it is. I was just speculating."
Fuck that guy, and especially fuck Orci and Kurtzmen and their shitty, shitty shows, Alias, LOST and Fringe.
And yeah, Kraken grew on me eventually, even if it is at least 100 pages too long.
