Z/Web

I’m not a huge fan of the Twilight series and expected this one to be terrible, but it surprised me. It’s actually pretty good and my favorite of the bunch.

The story is very simple, which I liked. Basically someone (the bad vampire girl from a previous film) is out to kill Bella with an army of fresh vampires, so both the vampire and werewolf clans have to cooperate to protect her. This sets up Bella right in the middle of the conflict between the two who love her, giving her an agonizing decision. She wants to marry Edward and become a vampire, but she loves the wolf boy, too, and doesn’t want to hurt him.

Most of the time when I see such “I’m in love with two men” dilemmas they come across as phony and forced, with one man clearly the obvious choice. But here the dilemma is real. With Edward she can have immortality at the cost of living, but with the wolf she would stay human. This choice is combined with her pending high school graduation, which is perfect as everyone is thinking about their wide-open futures and if she becomes a vampire it is permanent, freezing her in time at that age and ending any chance of a normal life.

The solution to this dilemma is also excellent and I really liked the way it was handled. It revealed that Bella is actually growing up and is intelligent, something I hadn’t seen much of before.

Of course the film still has many flaws, including lame special effects and action, overdone vampire drama, lots of “mystery” mood that isn’t very mysterious, and distracting irrelevant plot stuff that should have been cut. The worst was the nitpicking and irritating fighting between the two male leads. Yeah, we get that vampires and wolves don’t like each other. But they are so annoying we don’t want to be in the same room as their bickering!

But despite some problems, the core of the film is quite good and I actually liked it.

Author: Isaac Azimov

This is a classic bit of science fiction that I’d somehow managed to avoid reading until now. A while back I read part of this book but never finished it. This time I bought the audio version and finished it. It’s very good and holds up surprisingly well even after 60 years.

Its major flaw is also its key gimmick, which is that the book takes place over hundreds of years and covers a lot of fictional history quickly. The premise is that a radical scientist has predicted the fall of the galactic empire thousands of years into the future and set plans in motion to prevent catastrophe. He can’t prevent the fall itself — that is inevitable — but he can minimize the darkness that follows, reducing the chaos to a thousand years instead of 30,000. His predictions are eerily accurate, as he re-appears from the dead in video form right on schedule during crises, having recorded speeches prior to his death.

While this is fascinating, the nature of such a spread-out novel can be tedious. We are offered deeper glimpses into various points of history, but this makes the book feel more like a collection of related stories instead of a novel. We don’t get the richness of characterization and plot of novel: everyone feels like mere sketches. Unfortunately, that is simply a drawback of this particular kind of story. To tell the entire galatic history in full novel form would be an encyclopedic venture and would take a lifetime to read!

So I basically get out of this what I can: I enjoy the little stories of conflict and resolution, and I marvel that Hari Seldon’s science can predict human behavior so many centuries in advance.