Okja. Meh.

I watched the much-promoted Okja last night, the new Netflix movie by Bong Joon-ho. It’s mostly harmless, but not very good. It has problems.

  • The story goes nowhere. Girl raises super-pig on her farm in South Korea for Evil Agri-Corp, Evil Agri-Corp takes it away, girl goes on quest to recover her super-pig. I won’t say how it ends, but let’s just say there are no surprises.

  • The super-pig, Okja, is a CGI pig/hippo hybrid carefully designed for maximum cuteness. It does not make any sense ecologically or physiologically. It’s a huge herbivore, but it only rarely eats. It’s touted as ecologicaly super-efficient, but how that would work isn’t explained.

  • The Animal Liberation Front are the good guys. No. ALF may have admirable goals, but their tactics are dishonest and destructive. They are terrorists and vandals. They are portrayed here as gentle people dedicated to not harming people or animals.

  • The message is incoherent. Don’t kill super-pigs, they’re adorable and intelligent! GMOs are bad! But Okja is a GMO, even though Evil Agri-Corp is trying hard to hide that fact, and the South Korean family has no problem eating fish and chicken. They show how horrible it is to slaughter super-pigs, but hey, that’s not a chicken — it’s a bowl of chicken stew.

  • There are a few scenes in a super-pig slaughterhouse. It is the cleanest, most humane slaughterhouse I’ve ever seen; almost no blood, and the super-pigs just roll over dead when hit with a bolt-gun. It’s so antiseptic and swift, and the animals are sliced apart into bits so neatly, it had me thinking butchery was far tidier than I expected. I don’t think that’s the intended message. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle this ain’t.
    Maybe the slaughter of CGI animals is just nicer.

  • Tilda Swinton, as the CEO of Evil Agri-Corp, was too ridiculously over-the-top. I think it’s a good idea to restrain and regulate agri-business’s excesses, but it doesn’t help to portray them as cartoons. Although, if the NRA is any example, maybe they are all villainous psychopaths.

  • The economics make no sense. Evil Agri-Corp has engineered these meat animals to save their business, and first is going to put everything on hiatus for ten years while 26 super-piglets are individually raised on small farms scattered around the world. Why? This is PR? And then that PR collapses abruptly (thanks to ALF), but there are hundreds and hundreds of super-pigs at a slaughterhouse in New Jersey. I really don’t get it.

  • There are several chase scenes. Apparently, little girls and 6-ton animals can barrel through city streets, subways, and crowded stores and no one gets hurt. It’s always a kind of fortuitous chaos where girl and beast conveniently find each other in New York and Seoul, and then harmlessly charge through pedestrians and cars.

  • At the end, I’m just left with questions. Are GMOs bad, or do they create cute animals? Is eating animals bad, or only the ones that are cute? Agri-business is bad, or just the ones run by ineffectual psychotic twins? I think I wasn’t supposed to think, but instead to just enjoy adorable friendly CGI hippo-pig frolicking with tween girl.

Maybe you’ll enjoy it if you like sanitized videos of fake animals. I think it dodged all the issues.

Make your monsters unique: Lizzie Borden vs. Lovecraftian horrors

I watched the season finale of American Gods, and they did something brave: they portrayed Jesus as just another member of the motley horde of gods. Usually the Christian faith is excluded from these kinds of god-stories — you can’t reduce the One True God to another myth, like Anansi or Czernobog! — but the show did just that. Furthermore, they featured dozens of Jesii, because there so many different versions of him, all different and often incompatible with one another. They chickened out a little bit, though; there was a throw-away line about Jesus being the nicest of the gods, and they failed to include one prominent American god, Supply-Side Jesus of the Prosperity Gospel, armed with an AK-47 while crushing the necks of the undeserving poor under his sandals.

But it’s still an interesting point. If you’re going to personify deities, which rendition are you going to use? There are at least hundreds of gods in the Bible alone, although the devout seem to think giving one name to all of those entities, malignant and benign, is enough to unify them. Likewise that got me thinking of other mythical beings. Is there one true vampire nature, for instance? The media versions are all over the map. There’s the Stoker version, which wed Victorian disgust for sex with disgust for contagion. There’s the Ann Rice version, all sex and Catholic guilt. There’s the del Toro/Hogan version, which got rid of the sex and wallowed in repulsive infection stories. Or the Stephen King version, which is a little less gorey but is still all about dread of infection and decay and death. I shall not dwell on the sparkley angsty emo vampires, but they’re also part of the range.

One of the problems with the proliferation of supernatural variants, though, is that interest attenuates. Which Jesus are we talking about? Which vampire? I’d also add, which zombie? Pretty soon these kinds of stock genre boogey men degenerate into an unimaginative gluing together of standard tropes and the mechanics begin to show. Oh, this is a standard Stoker vampire plus tolerance for sunlight plus a functioning penis. Oh, this is a God-is-Love Jesus plus non-white xenophobia minus pacifism. It’s paint-by-numbers supernaturalism. Genre fiction (note: I include Christianity in the genre fiction category) tends to get overwhelmed with this kind of rote assembly line crap. A few original and creative stories launch an idea into popularity, and then the hacks take over. The zombie genre is in the terminal stages of the process right now. Seriously, authors, don’t bother doing zombie anything anymore, unless it’s genuinely original, and no, “fast zombies whose weak spot is the heart rather than the brain” are not original.

I love the creepy-crawly kind of horror story, the ones that make you go “eww, ick” now and then and wonder which character is going to die horribly next. But I’m tired of vampires and zombies and Christian evangelists — those monsters have been sucked dry and reduced to gristle and slime and all the thrill is gone. I am overjoyed when I stumble across a story that is new and different.

Which brings me to the point of this overlong introduction. My airplane reading this past weekend! I found something cool and fun and creepy!

I’m a fan of Lovecraftian atmosphere — but not so much of most of the stories themselves. Usually there is just some detached narrator recounting the mounting horror growing in the breasts of the victims, who will meet their demise in some climax of hyperbolic madness. There are lots of Lovecraftian pastiches out there that are little more than collections of increasingly florid adjectives and adverbs. But have you noticed that most Lovecraftian heroes are dull men with little imagination who are usually shattered by some unearthly revelation? Fine, once or twice. Boring when every Lovecraft imitator does exactly the same thing.

But Cherie Priest doesn’t. Her novel, Maplecroft: The Borden Dispatches, first focuses on the characters, but it’s still Lovecraftian. It’s set in Massachusetts in the 1890s; Miskatonic University has a featured role; there are horrors that emerge from the sea. The story revolves around the Borden sisters — that’s right, Lizzie Borden, after her acquittal from a famous pair of axe murders, and yes, her axe, and her skill with it, is very important in the story. We learn the true secret reason why her parents were killed. There is a blend of science — Lizzie has a basement lab where she tries to understand what is happening, and one aspect of the nightmare overtaking them is an unusual specimen of Physalus — and mysticism. There is a supernatural aspect to the weird absorption of the townspeople in a voice from the sea, and the fate of the individuals who touch the thing from the ocean. There’s definitely horror here: the monsters are vivid and disgusting, and portrayed with the Lovecraft Adjective Generator turned down enough to endow them with a revolting degree of plausibility. Lizzie has her axe, and also a convenient installation in her basement called “the cooker” which allows her to render monstrosities down to digested slime. It’s all very well thought out and grisly.

Most importantly, though, you know enough about the characters that you actually care about them as they are driven towards terror and the inevitable descent into madness.

Recommended, if you’re a fan of horror and Lovecraft and good writing. I’ve also read her book Boneshaker, which has got zombies in it, which are usually a turn-off for me, but it hasn’t got very many zombies in it, and they’re kind of a generic mass threat on the side, so you can mostly ignore them and read it for the story and characters.

If only we could all find the doorway in our hearts

I’m about to depart for the airport to pick up my best beloved and bring her back home after a week long absence, which means I’m going to be tied up with driving for the next six hours (it’s OK, it’s worth it). I’m going to recommend some reading for you while I’m occupied.

I was blown away by Every Heart A Doorway, by Seanan McGuire. It’s a genuinely original fantasy story that steals from a lot of familiar fantasy tropes. You know there are all these stories about kids who are magically transported to a strange and unfamiliar world, like Narnia or Oz or Wonderland? What if this was a relatively common occurrence, with many strange worlds that are much weirder or scarier than the familiar fantasy lands? And most importantly, what happens to the children who have been shaped in their formative years by alien places with inhuman residents?

That’s the focus of the story: these children would be really different, with a different sense of self and different yearnings and different behaviors, and they’ve returned to our culture, which can’t even deal with something as mundane and normal as gay kids. What you find is that most of the parents of these children can’t cope and want to somehow reshape and indoctrinate the children to be more ‘conventional’, causing all sorts of misery for everyone involved. The lucky ones find themselves at a school in this story, run by a woman who had stumbled through a portal to a fantasy land and returned, who now runs her home as a refuge for these strange children.

So the main character, Nancy, is ace, and this is a minor metaphor for her true strangeness, which is that she lived in a world of ghosts who disliked the business of the living, so she has learned to retreat into statue-like stillness. The character I identified with most was Jack, who was trained on a world of mad scientists and horrible experimentation. Jack, by the way, is a girl — try not to impose your gender expectations on any of the people in the book, because you’ll probably get them wrong, or at best will be focusing on irrelevancies.

Also don’t think that a school that favors tolerance and openness will be free of tension and conflict. The whole story is about the way all these different people, different to a degree much greater than anything we experience in everyday life, have to struggle to resolve those differences, and how unhappiness can find a home anywhere you let it.

It’s fabulously well-written and thoughtful — it’s not really escapist fare. It’s also the first in a series which I’m looking forward to. Also, this is not your usual fantasy story that inevitably gets drawn out into an overlong trilogy of ten books or whatever. The main characters in this one achieve resolution of their various conflicts, for good or ill (no spoilers, but for some there are no happy endings, and for others, what they consider a happy ending might not make you happy at all), and I think the next book will focus on different kids or different sides of the story. I don’t know! Isn’t that wonderful when you find a book that doesn’t always trundle down familiar tracks?

The Nebulas have been announced, and I haven’t read a single one

I am a terrible person, but in my defense, this has been a rough and stressful academic year, and I haven’t been keeping up. That’ll change this summer, though, so give me a chance. I’m putting all of these on my Amazon wishlist.

  • Best Novel: All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders. I’ve heard many raves about this one.

  • Best Novella: Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire. Just bought it. Figured this ought to be high on my list, since McGuire will be at Convergence in July, and there’s a tiny chance I might have to stammer out a few words in a conversation with her. Also, I’ve read most everything she’s written, so why stop now?

  • Best Novelette: The Long Fall Up, by William Ledbetter. Who? I don’t know this person at all, so I guess I get to discover a new author. And hey, that issue of F&SF is free on Kindle Unlimited!

  • Best Short Story: “Seasons of Glass and Iron” in , The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, by Amal El-Mohtar. Oh, I did meet her, very briefly, at NerdCon. She was nice, and her stories are lovely. I’ll have to read this one, too.

  • The Bradbury award went to Arrival. I’ve seen that!

  • The Norton Award for Young Adult fiction went toArabella of Mars by David Levine, another one I don’t know…but YA stuff is remarkably fresh and good and often more challenging than the “adult” stuff. What’s categorized as adult is too often the conventional crap with military hardware and sexy times and surprisingly frequent violence.

So that’s my next week of light reading sorted.

One question: why novel, novella, and novelette? Isn’t it rather arbitrary to set up categories defined by the length of the work? We don’t have categories for Best Picture Over 3 Hours Long vs. Best Picture Less Than 2 Hours Long, or Best Actor Over or Under 6 Feet Tall. Is this a vestige of a genre that was accustomed to its authors getting paid by word count?