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A neat new sculpture has appeared on a Christchurch street recently: “Cosm” by Dan Rutherford. Or, conceivably, “Dan Rutherford” by Cosm. I think it’s fantastic. It looks to me like primeval Earth, or maybe Alderan a few moments after Tarkin said, “You may fire when ready.”

A friend of mine is moving to Riverton near Invercargil, and so I was checking the place out on Google Earth. I found something strange. If you turn the road overlay on, you can see a network of roads that don’t seem to exist, as one street and parts of others seem to be out in the estuary. (Click to see more clearly.)

With Google Earth the match-up between the road overlay and the actual roads is frequently pretty approximate, and so at first I just assumed the registration was wrong, and that the in-estuary road was actually running along the edge of the estuary. But the registration on the other roads is quite good, and when you turn the road overlay off, there’s no sign of the roads:

A quick look at Wises confirms that these roads don’t actually exist:

So, what’s going on here? Is it possible that Riverton was a planned town, and these phantom roads were never built, and then the estuary encroached on where they were supposed to have been? Or does this represent a set of planned roads, complete with estuary reclamation project? Or is something else going on? In any instance, why does Google’s database have these phantom roads, rather than just the actual roads?

Well, the New Zealand Film Festival is over for another year. I got to see six of the movies. Usually I find that one or two movies are a complete waste of time, even if others are brilliant. This year, one movie was a little disappointing (Be Kind Rewind), but the other five ranged from great to utterly brilliant.

The movies I saw were:

No End In Sight: A depressing doco about the mess in Iraq. It didn’t deal with the decision to invade, but rather with the series of monumentally stupid decisions that got made in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. The two worst of these decisions were:

1. The decision to “De-Bathify” society. This meant that everyone who was a member of the Bath party got fired from their posts. Since under the Hussein regime anyone who wanted any high position had to belong to the Bath party, this decision meant that, at a stroke, everyone who knew anything about anything got fired.
2. The decision to disband the army. This meant that, suddenly, 100,000 men with guns were deprived of their incomes.

So, who made these decisions? Depressingly, but perhaps predictably, it was a small group of stupid white men in the Pentagon, none of whom had combat experience, none of whom had experience in running an occupied country, none of whom spoke Arabic, and none of whom had even been to Iraq.

Man on Wire: Wow! What an amazing doco about an amazing story. How come I’d never heard of this event before? The doco concerns the antics of a French high-wire walker, Philippe Petit, in particular his walk across a rope rigged between the Twin Towers of New York in 1974. While the ‘heist’ itself is dramatized, clearly someone in the team was a keen amateur cameraman, and so much of the preparation has been caught on film. (Once slight criticism of the film I have is that it was sometimes not easy to tell which bits where period film and which bits dramatized.)

After much sneaking about to get the wire strung, Petit finally makes his walk. Only he doesn’t do it just once – he spends 45 minutes on the wire, walking back and forth eight times! There are some amazing still images, including one of the guy sitting on the wire, the balancing pole in his lap, looking down with apparent unconcern at the crowd far, far beneath him.

Amazing stuff.

Be Kind Rewind: I was expecting to really enjoy this movie, but for me it fell flat. It concerns a bunch of misfits who set out to re-shoot some of the great movies of the recent past, when they accidentally erase a whole shop’s worth of VCR tapes. It was a pleasant enough way to pass the time, but I was expecting to be wowed and I totally wasn’t. I’m not sure why – all the pieces seemed to be there. Maybe I was just wearing my grumpy trousers that night.

Up the Yangtze: This is a harrowing doco which follows the tribulations of a very, very poor Chinese family. At the start of the doco they are living in a crude shack by the edge of the Yangtze River. The shack has a dirt floor, and seems to be built by leaning sheets of wood and iron against each other. Sheets on the roof are held down with an assortment of bricks and stones. Animals wander about beneath the feet of the humans. Neither father nor mother are literate, and it’s not clear whether they have any paid employment at all. They grow their own food on the riverbank.

Their eldest daughter (they have three children – so much for the one-child policy) wants to go to high school, but of course there’s no money for that, so she is sent to work as a kitchen hand on one of the luxury cruise ships that sail up and down the Yangtze. This of course sets up the contrast between rich and poor.

All this is happening against the backdrop of the rising river levels caused by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. By the end of the doco the shack is completely submerged, and the family has moved to live in a very basic concrete-block ‘shack’. They seem to be worse off after this move: “Before we had water and grew our own food, now we have to buy these things.”

It’s the sort of doco that makes you swear never to complain about anything in your life ever again.

The Wave: In the 1960s a school teacher in California allegedly (there’s some dispute over whether it ever really happened) conducted an experiment on his students by deliberately inducing fascist behavour in them. In 1981 a made-for-TV dramatization of the experiment was made. I can remember seeing it as a kid, and being profoundly affected by it. To this day I can very clearly remember many scenes.

So I was very interested to hear that a new version had been made. It was very good indeed. It followed the structure of the original quite closely, although it was updated for the modern world (once the Wave gets organized about the first thing they do is make a Facebook page). The fact that it was set in a German high school and was in German added a whole new level of relevance.

The quality of the acting among the cast of unknowns was brilliant throughout, especially on the part of the man who played the teacher.

The ending was substantially different. I can see why they made the changes they did, but I’m not sure which version of the ending I prefer.

The Hollow Men: This was a doco which recounted the goings-on in the National Party in the run-up to the 2005 election (the dumping of Bill English, the ascendancy of Don Brash, the centering of National policy, the whole Bretheren debacle). There was pretty much nothing new, nothing that I didn’t remember from the time, but it was still good to see it all laid out as an evolving story, and the doco was well made and used lots of interesting archival footage. One of the lessons of the doco was that National still has many New Right advocates in its ranks, and that New Right policies aren’t official National policy only because they know they don’t stand a chance arguing for the return of Rogernomics.

But my reaction to the movie was: so what? Sure National might have a hidden New Right agenda – but what else is new? Sure they’ve softened their policies and moved them towards the center in order to get more support, and that their official policy is motivated by a desire to get into power rather than by what they really think is best for the country, but again: so what? That’s just the way the game is played.

I was therefore puzzled by the reaction of some in the audience. The director was present, and he held a Q&A session afterwards. One person said that she was “chilled” by the “revelations” of the movie. Say what? It struck me that such a person would have to be very politically naive to be worried by this doco.

Incidentally, the director claimed that his intention wasn’t to lambast the National party, and I believed him. He said that he felt that people should know how the world works, and it is indeed a good demonstration for those that need it.

Every now-and-then I take a trawl through the Amazon listing for the top 100 sellers in SF&F. In my most recent pass through, I was somewhat startled to find Dark Mission (Richard Hoagland’s latest embarrassing emanation), at #80. I’m not sure whether to be horrified that it’s selling so well, or delighted that it’s been listed as Science Fiction.

If you look at the listing for the book itself, you’ll see it listed in the following categories:

Books > Science > Astronomy > UFOs

Books > Religion & Spirituality > Occult > UFOs

Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Historical

Who dreams up these whacky categories? “UFOs” as a sub-category of “Astronomy”?? And while Dark Mission is a load of rubbish, you can’t really call it an historical fantasy, in the conventional sense. It isn’t directly about UFOs either.

Today I went to see Richard Stallman’s talk at the university. You can read my report on events here.

At university today I had half an hour to kill before going to a talk by Richard Stallman (of which more later). I went into the UBS, not planning to buy anything. A book called “Lost Languages – The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts” by one Andrew Robinson caught my eye, as I love that stuff greatly. I was umming and ahhing over whether to buy it, when the following hilarious endorsement on the back decided the matter for me:

“Robinson’s enthusiasm for the subject is so infectious that you might find yourself trying to crack Etruscan in your spare time.”

I am reading “Star Maker” by Olaf Stapledon at the moment. The reason for this is that I read an article which basically claimed that there was nothing in modern SF that wasn’t invented by Stapledon 60 years ago. So I decided to read one of his books, partly to look at the origins of SF, but mostly in the hope that this claim was complete bollox – the idea that SF is hidebound by convention and hasn’t had a good idea in 60 years appalls me, as it should be the most progressive of genres.

Anyhow, the book is – at least at first – a very difficult read. It starts with a man sitting on a hill contemplating his lot in life. We get copious drivel like this (talking about his relationship with his
wife):

“Yet this life of ours was not all sheer and barren fantasy. Was it not spun from the actual fibres of reality, which we gathered in with all the comings and goings through our door, all our traffic with the suburb and the city and the remoter cities, and with the ends of the earth? And were we not spinning together an authentic expression of our own nature? Did not our life issue daily as more or less firm threads of active living, and mesh itself into the growing web, the intricate, ever-proliferating pattern of mankind?”

Good grief. The book does become readable a bit later on, but I only got through the first few pages of the above tosh through pig-headedness. I wonder if he felt obliged to go on like this in an effort to seem all literary?

A couple of other things that interest me about the book, so far:

The hero takes off from his hill-top and goes on a sort of astral tour of the galaxy. At first he tries to find other planets around the nearby stars, but he has no luck:

“I found no planets. I knew that the birth of planets was due to the close approach of two or more stars, and that such accidents must be very uncommon.”

Ha! Shows you the disadvantages of limiting yourself to current scientific opinion!

The introduction, written in 1937, is fascinating. He can clearly feel the war approaching, and talks of the rise of fascism as the great evil of the age. And he feels obliged to defend himself against the charge of writing escapist fiction during such dark times:

“At a moment when Europe is in danger of a catastrophe worse than that of 1914 a book like this may be condemned as a distraction from the desperately urgent defence of civilization against modern barbarism.”

I couldn’t actually follow his argument as such, but I found it fascinating that he found it necessary to mount such a defence.