Edge of Tomorrow and the Fifty Shades of Time

Anyone writing science fiction has likely already run into two vexing problems: gravity aboard interstellar ships (because there is none according to our current science); and theories of how to go back in time -- troublesome at best, even if theoretically possible according to the great physicist Albert Einstein.

Photo courtesy NASA image archives

So the latter came to mind as I watched Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt in the latest box-office film Edge of Tomorrow.  After the credits started their lazy scroll, I found myself thinking about the ramifications of what the film's central conceit was suggesting.  Now, if you haven't seen the movie yet, here is where you need to disembark, because I am venturing deep into spoiler territory now.  Okay?  We're all good?  All right.  You have been warned.

The movie has Cruise's character, Major Bill Cage, repeating the final hours (why only hours, though?) of his death before he is killed by alien invaders and ends up covered in weird blue alien blood that mixes with his human blood.  See, the alien blood contains some time-traveling properties that allow Cage to relive the past, over and over, Groundhog Day-style, and thus empowers him, and anyone he can convince to join him in his efforts, to tweak future conditions so that the outcome is different in each newly relived reality.

This is the grand attraction of the plot: imagine being able to shuttle back and forth in time to a particular moment, just to see how a specific scenario will play out.  Great special effects take a front seat in this movie, but unfortunately the initial characterizations limit the experience and the film comes off as a series of been-there, seen-that setpiece props: the nervous, untested combat virgin; the seasoned, tough-as-nails veteran; the jaded and unwelcoming infantry squad.  We've seen those story elements before, and to quote the eminent editor and writer Gardner Dozois, that's usually the problem with a majority of science fiction fare.

Now, there's a functional limit to Cage's time-travel ability -- first he has to die, and then he returns to the moments roughly 12 hours prior to his very first combat mission.  The alien hive mind, meanwhile, has the ability to detect Cage's time-tripping jaunts and will eventually zero in on his ass and smoke him before he can do any lasting damage.  Cage is summarily told by Blunt's character, Sergeant Vrataski, that when he stops seeing "visions" of the alien hive, he then loses the ability to reset his personal time-loop, and his next dance with death will be his last.  This portion of the story holds more originality, but it is never fully explained and becomes the pea under the mattress that threatens to unhinge the whole experience.

I'm leaving out a lot of plot details but you get the essential drift of the story: Cage can reset time when he dies and alter future conditions to bring about a different outcome, one that prolongs or even avoids his death.  So many questions flew out of my brain when I pondered the idea.  The main problem, however, is the central-timeline theory, that there is a single, universal time-flow and in changing it, everyone in our known plane of reality is affected.  This is different from what I see as more popular versions of time; namely, that each timeline can have its own universe based on the outcomes.  It certainly makes for more entertaining fiction, anyway.

Which outcomes, though?  And if we have only one outcome, for an alien species to be able to use time travel against us, wouldn't they have the ability to see far into the future and prevent Cage's meddling in the first place?  Would time even be so delicately arranged in this way, subject to the most minor tamperings?  I mean, seriously, one dude on one planet in one solar system can cause this kind of havoc to the universal time-stream?  Physicists can probably assert with authority that the universe's timeline behaves according to rigid rules; otherwise, what a pushover time would turn out to be.

But back to the movie.  Cage is not alone in his efforts to stop the time-hopping aliens with some time-hopping of his own.  Soon after getting zapped back in time, he again sees the Angel of Verdun still alive, getting PR'd to death as the Full Metal Bitch (a nod to Stanley Kubrick's classic war movie Full Metal Jacket).  Blunt's character, Sergeant Rita Vrataski, typifies the popular subgenre of the physically fit female ass-kicker, and Blunt's later scenes serve to breathe some three-dimensional life into what starts off as a character archetype.  Blunt's facial expressions and poise make her character believable, however, which is honestly an amazing transformation considering her prior work as the snooty personal assistant of her breakout role in The Devil Wears Prada.  In this movie, she essentially occupies the role of Cage's mentor and combat instructor, and the scenes where she repeatedly executes Cage to reset the time and get him into shape for the mission of their lives are among the most entertaining of the entire film.

I didn't get to read the book, which was written by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and which was the source for the film.  I would like to imagine that there are some more complex ideas in the book that didn't translate to the big screen for the usual reasons of running time and the producers' or director's preferences for final cut.  However, Sakurazaka's novel was written for the Japanese young adult market in what Japanese publishing calls a wasei-eigo, or "light novel" in Western parlance, and in that market it is pretty much the decedent of pulp fiction in the 40,000- to 50,000-word range.  So maybe the whole time thing wasn't intended to be a fully developed concept in the first place.  If accurate, that is a shame.

And that is what hamstrings the film.  One comes away with the sense that director Doug Liman intended to elevate this movie with deeper meaning which in the end just wasn't there.  Why did the aliens choose to attack Europe first?  Why do they want Earth in the first place?  Are the attacking aliens merely an invading infantry force with a hierarchy of higher-level aliens directing them from elsewhere, or are they just a massive enclave of extraterrestrial Huns?  So what happens when an alien dies?  Whose time loop are we resetting there, and wouldn't that alone suggest a multiverse rather than a universe for the purposes of time?  And seriously, what kind of military service are the major characters in that allows them to wear their hair past regulation length, despite the haircuts of their surrounding cast?  (OK, that last one is a pet peeve).

The idea as presented in Edge of Tomorrow serves as a decent plot device, but without answers to some pretty basic "wait a minute" questions, it sort of bangs its head on the ceiling of the above musings and limits its storytelling power.  Science fiction is about blowing your mind away with new ideas that make you look at the world with a different perspective.  The first science fiction stories were mechanisms that transported us to a different time and place in order to look back at the present and effectively criticize the social and political strictures of the day.  Sometimes asking a question is enough, but when it sprouts more questions that only exist to confound rather that coax a happy contemplation, the story loses some steam.  In the case of this movie, I was certainly entertained but not exactly blown away by it.

There is a suggestion in the movie that the size of the alien creatures with this time-travel blood have an effect on the temporal distance that this time-loop reset can achieve, but it is only a hint.  When Cage finally manages to kill the hive-brain (think of it as an alien regional headquarters), he gets his reset moment pushed all the way back to two days before his combat drop, and well ahead of his meeting with General Brigham, which is where his predicament started in the first place.  It's not really a criticism, since I enjoyed the movie, but it raises larger questions that don't get answers.  I just wished there had been more meat in the whole time-travel sandwich than this film offered.  Liman already knows how to choreograph his set-pieces to build suspense and drive the story forward, and these traits are on full display in this movie, with action creating the momentum that story logic tends to drag down if you think about it too much.

But for us creative types, a final question: how much time (no pun intended) should a writer invest in working out his/her own theory of time, in those stories where time travel is used?  Want to know how bad it gets?  Google up theories of time and get into the whole A-theory and B-theory shit, and it will make your head spin.  Maybe, like Cage in the movie, this is all we can afford to know right now.  Whatever "now" is, of course.

It's All Good: Writing and Designing

Ten years ago, the world was different.  E-book publishing hadn't made that peculiar splash yet, Amazon hadn't produced the Kindle, and the New York publishing giants were still driving the market and pushing their stable of favorites.  The new breed of up-and-comers wasn't here yet, the J.A. Konraths and whoever else that found the keys to the e-publishing kingdoms (there are many kingdoms now, not just one -- another big secret).

Today there is literally nothing stopping you, or anyone, from putting out a book on Amazon or Smashwords or through any book packaging service.  Those poems you used to write to your dog and kept hidden in a drawer all these years?  Get them out there if you like.  Those scribblings on white construction paper that your daughter thought would make a great illustrated children's book?  Go for it.  Gone are the gatekeepers, that elite priesthood of publishers and agents who demanded and paid for the next big hit, and when that big hit came they paid and demanded more of the same.  Vampires are big?  Give us more of those dashing, fanged bloodsuckers.  Books about witches are delivering audiences to advertisers?  Put a broomstick on that cover, quick.  Dan Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code and today, years later, at the bookstore I found at least ten books that seem to cover the same story elements (secret societies, shady history, globe-trotting adventurers).

City Lights Books in San Francisco
Photo credit: LandsEnd

The problem when you self-publish is that your marketing team is gone.  Your promotion guys moved to Madison Avenue, your ad department was fired, and that nice lady who arranged your book tours has been downsized and she had to take a job in the suburbs working for a mid-sized accounting firm or an insurance company.  Hell, maybe she finally got her real estate license and now she's showing houses.  The point is you are on your own.

The new writer fresh on the scene may bemoan this.  After all, our writing forebears had but to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair, as Ernest Hemingway once passed on as advice.  We had our Underwoods and Remingtons and IBM Selectric IIIs with ball elements (mine was a nice Brother AX-15 from Montgomery Ward with a daisy wheel cartridge ((Thanks Mom and Dad!)).  Beyond the basic equipment, there was the craft itself to learn.  Most of us early writers simply learned by reading.  I didn't pick up books on techniques until I was about fourteen or fifteen years old, and it took me even longer to turn sound advice into solid practice.

But in the maddening new digitalsphere we occupy, the modern (self-published) writer must contend with (1) learning the craft, (2) writing the book/short story/poetry, (3) acquiring a design for the cover, (4) acquiring rights to any and all images, photos or illustrations used in the work, (5) formatting the work for the e-book markets, and last but assuredly not least, (6) marketing the product.  It was hard enough in the old days to churn out narrative on a consistent basis.  The new digitalsphere demands much more of individual writers than just a good yarn.

It's all good, though, because ultimately it means that, save for the first public postings about "Hast Thou Seen Thy Queen's Pig?" rolled off the Gutenberg presses, writers are in complete control of their product more than at any other time in history.  Don't like the cover?  Make a new one (or pay for another one).  Want to put a circus strongman milking a goat into the middle of a bank robbery scene?  Your call.

You can even swap out content or add new material after your work has sallied forth and hiked up its digital skirt, a practice reminiscent of the halcyon days of science fiction magazines like Astounding, where short stories which first appeared there later made the transition to novel length with some tweaking.  Damon Knight criticized A. E. Van Vogt for doing so with his story The World of null-A, although to be honest, Knight didn't like Van Vogt as a writer all that much to begin with.  But the practice of modifying already published works exists even today.  Lawrence Block wrote in his fiction column for Writer's Digest many years ago about his short story in Playboy titled "When the Sacred Ginmill Closes," and how he ultimately turned it into a longer novel version of the same name (a great story too, by the way).  You are free to try this yourself these days.  You are the only editor now, the final approval department, the ultimate critic.  The final judgements will come from your readership.

All this control goes out the window the moment you sign with an established publisher, of course.  But by then you've hit the big time, you can afford to take a little break and concentrate on the craft of writing and let someone else worry about the promotional push.  You may retain the habit of being hands-on and you may or may not get it at that point.  You may ask for and not get book jacket approval written into your publishing contract, but the contract in itself is the brass ring.  You'll be a made author then.  And you'll have an entirely new caste of authors to contend with for sales and shelf space in brick-and-mortar bookstores (themselves a vanishing species).

But for now, you're not.  You toil away at it all: story elements, narrative content, book presentation, scouring for public-domain images for your book cover, or for a book cover designer who won't break your bank, esoteric treatises on HTML, cascading style sheets, wondering if you should get Adobe InDesign, the works.  You open up tabs for the Smashwords website and forget to close them.  You send emails to bloggers asking for reviews, you get a Facebook author page, you get Twitter even though you have no clue how to even start a Twitter promo.

You do it all because you will be in complete control.  Enjoy it now, because as soon as you start making some real money off your work, you will see that control start to fade.

Writing and Perseverance: Martin Cruz Smith

I've been a fan of Martin Cruz Smith's novels for a long time.  Nightwing, Wolves Eat Dogs, Stalin's Ghost, Three Stations.  He just gets better and better with each novel, and his stories are compelling and powerful.  And I'd go so far as to say that as a writer, Smith has achieved that elusive zenith -- the ability to write what he wants, how he wants, whenever he wants.

Of course, not every practitioner of the trade will consider that to be the watermark for success.  As writers, that definition is wholly self-styled anyway, and what the writer determines of it depends on a conglomeration of factors, attitudes, life-learning conclusions, etc.  But when I read Polar Star, Smith's follow-up to Gorky Park, I was spellbound by his eye for selective detail and the claustrophobic sense of place.  It was a locked-room mystery on a Russian factory ship, and at the time that it was written, I could think of few real-world scenarios so daunting as that one.  Smith pulled it off in spades.

To read Smith's books, especially his historical thrillers, is to step into the living past, to revel in the little details, and to meet characters with depth and clarity.  It's watching a master blacksmith toiling at his trade with obvious artistry.  Some of that talent must have to do with the fact that Smith used to sketch scenes, to look at a place that he was researching with a painter's eye.

Martin Cruz Smith at 2011 Left Coast Crime convention
Photo credit: Martin Cruz Smith/Mark Coggins

Here I have to pause:  When I was writing this the first time, the sentence that started this paragraph was: "I don't mean to suggest that writing comes easily to Smith, although by now he probably feels a natural fluidity to his narrative drive."  In November 2013, however, Smith revealed that he had been adapting to writing with Parkinson's disease, with which he had been diagnosed over ten years ago.  It's incredible to consider that despite such challenges, Smith presses on with dedication and guts.  According to various articles, he also receives incredible support from his wife, both professional and personal.  My admiration for these people is huge.

In a series of three early interviews, which for some inexplicable reason I was able to find and download as MP3s, Smith revealed that he spent many years honing his craft under various pen names for different publishers.  By the time his breakout novel, Nightwing, came around, he was already a veteran storyteller.  And those novels were before his debut story featuring the Moscow investigator Arkady Renko in the unique international thriller, Gorky Park.  Seeing him develop his writing skill to such fine quality over the years has been a real pleasure for his legion of readers, myself included.

His latest novel, Tatiana, does not disappoint.  The titular character is a journalist enmeshed in political intrigue which culminates in her murder, one that the government would rather not investigate with great thoroughness.  In this volume are characters who have grown with the fans of Arkady Renko's exploits: his blunt, boorish partner, Victor Orlov; his apathetic boss, and his estranged adopted son, Zhenya.  All of these recurring characters occupy an orbit that gives Arkady his momentum to see a case to its conclusion, though often these characters don't necessarily appreciate the role they play in each other's lives and motivations.

To any fan, by now these characters are like an extended family of Arkady's.  The character is not romantic, trapped instead in a job that no one wants him to do, viewing his existence through a haze of melancholy cynicism, and witnessing events bleak enough that occasionally he considers suicide (in the book Havana Bay, he actually tried it).  He is not quite an anti-hero so much as a non-hero, an everyman who searches his sense of common decency and stays alive by wits and guile rather than by gun and strong-arm.

Which isn't to say Arkady Renko is a weakling.  The collective fight scenes across various novels have depicted him using his police training to subdue the ordinary foe, although it's the extraordinary ones who manage to kick his ass every once in a while.  He struggles, he pushes back, he falls down and gets back up.  Dogged resilience is the expression that comes to mind when thinking about the character of Arkady Renko.  And that stubbornness just draws us deeper into that character's circle.

Perhaps it's a resilience shared by character and creator alike.  And maybe it's a resilience that we can all try to emulate when we stare at the blank page and think that writing the next word is the hardest thing to do.  There are harder things out there still, and Smith has learned to overcome even those.