Review: Slumdog Millionaire vs Q&A

Review: Q&A (novel, Vikas Swarup) vs Slumdog Millionaire (film)

It is inevitable, perhaps, that in adapting a novel to the screen, the complexities of the original must be somewhat reduced. In the case of Q&A's transition to Slumdog Millionaire, this is certainly the case.
To be sure, both have the same "hook" - poor, uneducated lad from the slums wins the top prize on Indian gameshow, and is then arrested because, after all, he must have been cheating - how would a lad like him possibly know the answers to the questions?
And, in both, the actual plot unfolds mainly in the protagonist's recounting of significant events in his life, each linked to his surprising knowledge of an answer he gave.

However, to a significant extent, this is really where the similarities end. Indeed, the fundamental differences between Q&A and Slumdog Millionaire are even evident in the name of the protagonist. Q&A's Ram Mohammad Thomas has a name intimately connected to one of his first anecdotes, a nominative determinant, perhaps, of the varied life he will lead (being, as we are told, one name for each of the three powerful religions in India - Hinduism, Islam and Christianity). The protagonist of Slumdog Millionaire is merely named "Jamal", a simple name for a boy with less outlandish origins, to go with the simpler plot.
If Ram loves, or thinks he does, and loses, perhaps, kills (or perhaps not), cheats and is cheated, then Jamal has a more straightforward life - yes, he loves, but the same girl throughout his life; but he never kills, or thinks he does, or really desires to. Indeed, the darkness that Ram experiences in his life is thrust onto the persona of his friend/brother, Salim, in the film (and the film punishes its new surrogate for dark choices, now unprotected by the protagonist's mantle).
The mark of corporate patronage is also evident upon the film adaptation. Q&A's quiz show is entirely fictitious, a new show created by an unscrupulous company in deliberate imitation of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. Its prize is huge, 1 billion rupees (or about 12 million pounds). Its host, and its backers are untrustworthy, and their reasons for having Ram arrested are not pure.
Slumdog Millionaire is a product of Celador Films, stablemates to the producers of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire itself. It is no surprise, then, that this is also the quiz that Jamal finds himself on, that the producers and host of the show are generally morally upright, and that their suspicions of Jamal's dishonesty are precisely that.
(There is also the Hollywoodisation of the quiz show format involved here to some extent - unlike in the novel (and real life), the film version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is apparently shown live, purely to allow a moment of dramatic plotting to occur. Some may wince at this, depending on their devotion to reality over romanticism.)
All this is not to say, of course, that Slumdog Millionaire is a bad film, or even a bad work of fiction. It is simply a more direct, more "HBollywood polished" affair than the novel, and its narrative universe must be treated from that perspective. One suspects that the creators are aware of this, and that the Bollywood dance sequence over the end credits is as much a nod and a wink to viewers as it is an expression of the protagonist's final joyous success.
Q&A, on the other hand, is a more gloriously cynical affair, a view of the true struggle of existence at the bottom of the heap, and a recipe for overcoming (and enduring) them.
Just don't read it before you see the film, for risk of blunting the latter's purer simplicity with your moral complexities.

Book Reviews

Review: The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)

Rather like Pratchett, Gaiman seems to be spending increasing amounts of his time on writing books marketed for children, rather than adults. The Graveyard Book is his most recent foray into children's fiction, and, as the title implies, it owes a conscious debt to Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book in its form.
The protagonist is orphaned by a killer in black - the man, Jack - in the opening sequence, escaping death himself by choosing to toddle off and explore outside. Reaching the graveyard at the top of the hill, he is adopted by the ghostly denizens, and the solitary, corporeal (but dislikes the sun, has hypnotic powers, needs his native earth nearby to sleep) Silas. Named "Nobody" (there's a good reason, thematically, why "John Doe" wouldn't have been appropriate), by his adoptive family, each chapter (separated by two years each time) concerns one or more important events in 'Bod's life. The astute reader will have already suspected that each event is pivotal in the climactic confrontation with the agent of his family's death.
If you've read any other Gaiman, the setting will be unsurprising - a general inversion of the horror-tropes of the past (there are night-gaunts, but they're surprisingly helpful, as are the werewolves, vampires and witches we encounter), with even the dangerous things being temptingly drawn (the ghouls, despite their horrific aims, are at least entertainingly spoken). There is nothing evil that shows itself such by horrific appearance, and some things of horrific appearance are actually fairly friendly.
In this, in fact, the Graveyard Book is somewhat more progressive than The Jungle Book was towards animals. The villains of Kipling's work are precisely those animals which one might imagine to be dangerous or "evil" (apart from humanity itself). The villains of Gaiman's book... less so (although the man, Jack's "employers" might be said to stand in for a certain aspect of humanity themselves).
Many people seem to have decided that The Graveyard Book is Gaiman's "best book yet". I'm not sure that it is quite that good, but then I still don't think he's quite surpassed the better parts of Sandman...

Review: Let the Right One In (Movie vs Book, John Ajvide Lindqvist )

The novel of Let The Right One In is both more fantastical and more mundane than the acclaimed film.
In both, the core plot is the growing, uncertain, and complex friendship between the boy, Oskar, and the child, Eli, recently moved into Oskar's area. In both, the man, Håkan, who appears to live with Eli, is killing young people and taking their blood, and has an ambiguous relationship with Eli. In both, Oskar's connection with Eli helps him, ultimately, to fight off his bullies at school, with escalating consequences.
However, the film is a considerable streamlining and simplification of the book. Indeed, at least some of the simplification appears to be an attempt to bowdlerise the original work so that it can be filmed. The film doesn't really make Håkan's relationship with Eli clear - he could be a Renfield, he might be what Oskar would become grown old, he might be a pederast who picked the wrong child to molest. In the book, it is clear that the latter is truly the case, as Håkan is one of our viewpoint characters from the start, consumed with sleazy desires that he'd rather not have, but is too weak to resist. Indeed, part of the book's thesis is the weakness of humans themselves - subplots that are barely touched on in the film fleshs this out, with their litany of flawed, struggling men and women who are let down by their fears or their flaws.
If the film avoids telling us what kind of person Håkan really is, though, it also avoids punishing him in the way the book does - he gets a relatively clean death, in the end, almost romanticised in its replaying of horror tropes. In the book... in the book, he's reduced to, symbolically, merely a shell around the desires he's always hated in himself, and it is possible that his final punishment is neverending "life" in broken body that cannot move or think.
Which brings us to the other major simplification the film makes over the book - the nature of Eli. Oh, Eli is a vampire in both works, although denying the actual term (for good reason, in the novel). What we speak of is Eli's gender. When Eli says to Oskar, in the film, "Would you still like me if I wasn't a girl?", we can interpret this as a warning of hur supernatural nature. The novel isn't so straightforward, making Eli's nature a more problematic, and trauma-laden, question.
Indeed, whilst the film can be read as a sort of ersatz love story between Oskar and Eli, the novel is harder to pin down. That Oskar and Eli escape at the end is perhaps less important than that Oskar learns to strive, and grasp his striving with both hands. Indeed, with the counterpointing of all the other characters, each with their crippling flaw (and the mirroring subplot of the drunkard Lacke's signal failure to do what Oskar succeeds in), the key point of the novel is almost certainly that to live successfully, one must strike out and take the risk of failure, despite everything.


Review: The Prince of Nothing Trilogy (R. Scott Bakker)

In the acknowledgements page at the front of The Darkness That Comes Before, the first book in this trilogy, R. Scott Bakker mentions his debt to both J R R Tolkien (author of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion) and Frank Herbert (author of Dune). It is, therefore, no surprise that this trilogy (the first, itself, of a trilogy of trilogies currently barely half complete) reads very much like a merging of the two settings, thematically and character-wise.
From Tolkien, we have the sweeping worldbuilding, the past apocalypse returning, the meat and grounding of the setting , from Herbert, the political machination, the concern with the dangerous effect of a messiah-figure on a populace, and, most of all, the influences that form the insular warrior monks called "Dunyain". The Dunyain (and, I assume that the name is deliberately reminiscent of both "Dunedain" and "Dune") have devoted the last two thousand years to perfecting their mental and physical acuity, breeding and training themselves towards the (perhaps unattainable) goal of the "Self-moving soul" - a state of being in which their thoughts are purely their own, with no unconscious influences from outside. In so doing, they have become something like Mentat-Bene Gesserit, combining awesomely honed bodily awareness and perception with acute mental ability and recall. And no-one else in the world remembers that they exist.
Perhaps 20 years before the start of the first novel proper, they sent out one of their number into the world. Being tainted by the outside, he was not allowed to return to spread his taint to the others... but now, somehow, members of the Dunyain are experiencing dreams of him, dreams that their purely mechanistic view of the world cannot explain. So, they send his son, Kellhus, out into the world to deal with this problem (and kill the rest of the dreamers to retain isolation).
The rest of the books follows what happens when a Dunyain enters the world of Earwe, and warps it around himself in order to accomplish his goal. For normal men, not Conditioned by Dunyain training, are in thrall to their emotions, to subconscious reactions to a thousand external influences, to their unexamined beliefs and cultural mores. For a Conditioned Dunyain, they are easy to read, and just as easy to manipulate.
Which leads us to the "problem" which seems to have excited the most debate amongst fans of the books: Is Kellhus a sympathetic character? He is, by breeding and training, something of a cold fish. He never reveals his true thoughts externally, and sees nothing wrong with manipulating everyone around him to do his bidding (as, from his perspective, they were hardly in control of their own actions even without his influence). Some readers see him as an irredeemable sociopath, others as a means whose end (hinted to be pivotal in the larger conflict against the Lurking Nihilist Evil) does precisely that, I suspect that some even see him as a hero - the One Sane Man. Certainly, the comparisons to Paul Atreides are apt, although perhaps Leto II would be a better match (if Kellhus' father, Moengus, is Paul), with the revelations of the later books in mind. (Not that Kellhus has become a giant sandworm, yet.)
Regardless, Kellhus is a problematic protagonist. Presumably, this is why we are treated to at least three other potential protagonists throughout the trilogy - the "barbarian" Cnaiur, who has deep-seated reasons to hate Dunyain after his encounter with Kellhus' father twenty years previously (and yet ends up uneasily reliant on Kellhus, too); the sorcerer and spy Achamian, whose self-doubt belies his actual mettle; and the novel-described 'harlot' Esmenet, whose problem is simply that her culture gives very few options to a woman once she's been rendered 'impure'. (The latter also has the disturbing problem that, as this setting is one in which mass belief is ontologically significant, it is possible that women really are worth less, because enough people hold it to be true.)
Of these, Achamian is the easiest to empathise with, although none of the protagonists (except Kellhus) really reveal their inner motivations to the reader (or to themselves) at first. Achamian's conflicts, however, stem from either external sources - the apocalyptic dreams that all sorcerers of his order suffer - or from his self-doubt, re-enforced by the perceived unholy nature of his profession. This makes him, in many ways, a more human protagonist than the others, and the only one who it is not a spoiler to confirm his survival unto the end (excepts from a history of the period attributed to him garnish the start of many chapters).
These are a complex work - as complex as either of their antecedents, at the least - and knowing in their examination of the myriad consequences of their setting. In this, they already surpass the vast majority of modern fantasy works, and thus despite, and because, of the uncomfortable moments and the "problems", I cannot recommend them to any potential reader more.

Review: The City and The City (China Mieville)

Every review I've seen of China Mieville's current novel describes it as Kafkaesque. Considering that the inside dustjacket mentions "shades of Kafka and Philip K Dick", one might be forgiven for suggesting that this doesn't necessarily reveal a terrifying erudition in the reviewer. Similarly, when I mention the (stronger, for me) resonances of 1984, you will be unsurprised to see this also referenced on that same dustjacket...
The difference between the Kafkaesque interpretation and the Orwellian is one of ontology. To read the separation of the twin cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma as in some sense physical, despite the obvious cues in the earliest descriptions, is to apply the more extreme aspects of Kafka's surrealism where it is not needed. And yet, some, many, reviews seem to take this course.
So, the plot: Inspector Tyador Borlu of the apparently Eastern European city-state of Beszel has a murder case on his hands. The problem, it emerges, is that the murder took place not in Beszel, but in the sister-city of Ul Qoma, interpenetrating and interwoven with Beszel itself, and separated only by the assiduous conditioning of their citizens to ignore the other. And, worse, as he continues to investigate, it appears that the murder is just the tip of some kind of conspiracy, perhaps one that strikes at the heart of the separation itself.
Of course, the central conceit - of a parallel setting that people simply edit from their perception - appears in many works of fiction, notably Gaiman's Neverwhere, where, as here, it is a metaphor for all those aspects of society that we all blank from our perceptions as we wander the world. Or, rather, the city; one cannot imagine the same metaphor working in the country, where the opposite applies - the half-glimpsed vision of a world one never noticed is the metaphor there, not the consciously suppressed awareness of those you'd rather not be forced to share proximity with.
Unlike other novels making use of this conceit, though, The City & The City actually investigates it, makes the conceit the star, and the villain, perhaps, of the piece. In Neverwhere, the mystical equivalent of "unseeing" people is just... there. In The City & The City, it is an almost active force, an enforced taboo with terrible consequences.
But, as with any cultural absurdity, it is simultaneously meaningless.

And that, perhaps, is where the story begins.

...the recursive madness continues.

The second artifact created by my dwarves:

Sîboshkekath, "The Deteriorated Tundra", a green glass toy hammer

This is a green glass toy hammer. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality. It is encircled with bands of green glass. This object menaces with spikes of Melanite. On the item is an image of a green glass toy hammer in green glass.

This is starting to get a little odd...

...recursive artifact tunics in Dwarf Fortress

Not quite what I wanted my first legendary artifact to be:

Nônubothôs ïteb Asob: "Punchwilt the Post of Boards", a Rope reed tunic.

This is a Rope reed tunic. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality. It is made from Rope reed cloth. On the item is an image of a Rope reed tunic in Rope reed. On the item is an image of a Rope reed tunic in Rope reed.

Woohoo?

Hostile Waters: A Confession

I've stopped playing Hostile Waters.

Part of me wants to keep playing it, to get to the later missions, to experience the unfolding plotlines.
However, part of me doesn't care anymore. Because I spoiled myself.

That is:
Mission 9 (I think it's 9) requires you to deliver some explosives to an enemy underground silo, via a trainline. Obviously, the enemy will attack the explosives enroute, so you have to do some destruction of the existing enemy defences first. There is no explicit requirement for you to wipe out all of the enemy forces.

Now, this map contains three enemy bases. The central one is clearly intended by the designers to be attacked - it is right next to the train line, the explosives, and the control station you need to send the train in the right direction. One of the two sets of derricks feeding energy to it (and thus enabling it to produce new forces) is handily pointed out to you in the briefing.
The north-western one is hidden right up in the corner of the map, and exists purely to generate aircraft to harass your carrier once you start progressing in the main objective. It isn't actually hard to destroy, but I suspect that you're not supposed to bother, as it's so out of the way.
The third base, however, is directly to the east. It's slightly out of the way, but it has no less than three sets of derricks, heavy protection from both land and air attacks, and sometimes generates land forces to sweep across the island to harass your attacks. I suspect that the developers never intended anyone to actually focus on wiping it off the map - it is supposed, I guess, to ensure that there is always a looming enemy presence to potentially assault your train once you set it off across the island.
I became somewhat... fixated... on destroying Base 3.
Now, this isn't the developers' fault. When playing Strategy games, my main flaw is my tendency to be overcautious and overcompletist in completing objectives - so, if the mission is an escort, I wipe out all the enemy forces first. Even if they're hugely defended bases with three sources of energy, and even if I have an (apparently deliberate) lack of starting energy to build my own forces.
I also became a little fixated, due to the aforementioned caution, with the Shiny New Weapon you get given in this mission. "Warhammer" is a long-ranged indirect fire weapon - a mortar that is supposed to be used to wipe out enemy forces from afar with the aid of a spotter. However, Base 3 is arranged nestled in the midst of mountains that block most of the potential indirect firing solutions from positions of safety... and when you do start attacking, it sends out fast moving air units to drive you off.
So, my assaults on Base 3 moved from long-duration "guerilla artillery" tactics, to doomed fast-assaults with defensive units around the artillery... and nothing worked.

At this point, a sensible person would have said "Oh, well, clearly I'm not supposed to destroy them, I'll just concentrated on Base 1 like I'm supposed to".

I didn't.

I'm not about to let Base 3 stand like that, posing a permanent threat. So I cheated.

There are only really two important cheats for Hostile Waters. One of them gives you effectively unlimited energy to build units. The other gives you access to the entire selection of units in the game, even ones that aren't unlocked yet. I used both of them.

I assaulted Base 3 with units that I shouldn't have had until Mission 20, in numbers I shouldn't have been capable of fielding without copious resource gathering. It gave way, eventually, doomed by technologies beyond its position in the narrative of its world.
And it didn't feel good.

So, after wiping out all the enemy on the entire map, I saved the game. And quit.
And I haven't played since. The joy has gone from it - I don't care anymore what plot elements give me the cool units in future missions, since I've already crushed Base 3 with them, anachronistically. And every time I see a challenge in the game, I know I'll be tempted to cheat again.

But at least I destroyed Base 3, eh, readers?


(Edit: There's probably another article in the fact that I actually cared here, about cheating, where cheating in something like Quake 10: Another Shooter doesn't matter to me at all.)

Cell-based games and graphs. (i)

I promised myself that I'd not write about this until it was in a useful state, but there are several issues connected to it that I actually want to talk about so...

A couple of weeks ago, I started playing with the roguelike game engine that I've been meaning to write for some time. (Partly as something to do with Xcode, and partly because I realised that I could leverage existing Python libraries to handle some of the boring stuff.)

The key to this game engine being different to other Roguelike engines is in how it treats the discrete array of cells that is the gameworld. Most roguelikes use a square grid where either nsew motion, or 8-way motion is possible, purely because this is the obvious approach to the limitation imposed by a terminal style display. (Indeed, presumably this is essentially why Rogue did so, as much as the reference to RPG graph-paper maps.) However, squares are not the only regular shapes that can tile a plane, and hence hexagon-based roguelikes are possible (only two examples exist that I am aware of, one of which is a simple translation of Rogue itself), along with triangle-based games (of which I am aware of none).
More than this, however, one realises that the roguelike map is just a particularly simple lattice, and that we can thus consider other extensions of the representation than those implied by regular tilings.
For example, inspired by the fact that the hex and tri tilings are dual to each other (replace the mutual corners in each with a tile, and you get the other), we might note that "nsew" square lattices are selfdual (but contain two interleaved square lattices if we rotate our directions of movement by 45 degrees), but the 8-way lattice (which is really an "octagonal lattice", implying a hyperbolic space) is dual to a curious lattice best represented by an array of right-triangles grouped four-to-a-square, and which has even less "connectivity" than the tri lattice dual to hexagons (we will call this lattice "dual octagonal").

The dual octagonal lattice appears to be as "unconnected"^* as we can easily produce for a dual tiling within the constraints of a flat representational medium; we can't represent a tiling with more than 8 neighbours in a square-tiled array, and hence we can't produce a more connected tiling than the octagonal one to be made dual to.
However, considering the representation as a lattice, which is just a special case of an undirected graph, there is one other thing we can do; we can make the graph directed. This leads us to a "loop" lattice, where each node has two "outgoing" and two "inward" edges, arranged so that adjacent nodes alternate two of their edge directions relative to the origin node. The only consistent way of arranging this produces "cycles" of four nodes, in which a path exist starting at any element of such a cycle, passing through each of the other nodes before arriving at the origin again. It can be noted that considering such "cycles" as "units", each unit is connected to four adjacent units by both "in" and "out" connections, and so the units form a lattice equivalent to the starting square lattice.
The internal loop then looks a lot like a compactified "third dimension" embedded in the 2d lattice structure. There are amusing comparisons to string theory possible here.

More problematic is the consideration of what the appropriate dual to this "loop lattice" is. Considering the "dual nodes", we swap a notion of oriented edges with a notion of "oriented nodes" themselves - the boundaries of the dual nodes are either the "loops" we previously noticed, or the "non-loops" formed by the connections between those loops.
If we examine the loop structure more carefully, we see that the chirality of the loops alternates in a checkerboard fashion - alternating clockwise and anticlockwise across the lattice.
This gives rise to the idea that the chirality of the nodes perhaps encodes a different kind of separation - is this a different encoding of some kind of three-dimensional structure, with clockwise = +1, counterclockwise = -1, and the other nodes in between?



^*Or, equivalently, "positively curved" - the "circumference" of a "circle", defined in terms of the distance from a central point within the lattice constraints, is smaller for a dual octagonal lattice (being roughly 2.5*r) than it is for the tri lattice (at 3r). What I mean by connectivity is implied to be proportional to this, as the number of paths out from a given point is proportional to the length of the edge (or the area of the surface in 3d).

Review: Twelve by Jasper Kent

It is 1812, Napoleon is advancing imperturbably toward Moscow in his Russian campaign, and four Russian officers have made a deal with Wallachian mercenaries with a brutal reputation to disrupt his supplies. Only one of the officers knows the true source of the mercenaries' abilities - although even the most marginally intelligent reader will have already picked up on the mention of Wallachia (and the master of the mercenaries' choice of name - Zmyeevich (translated for us by the narrator as "son of the serpent, or dragon")) and added all the other clues together to make V. V for Vampire, or (in Russian) Voordalak.
But our knowledge of what these brutal killers - nicknamed the Oprichniki by their employers, after the more human, but equally brutal historical bodyguards of Ivan the Terrible - really are isn't the point. What we are really exploring is the state of the narrator, Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, in his connections with his three comrades, with his lover (and his physically distant wife), and with Russia and humanity itself.
Afterall, the main difference between the undead and the living (for the most part) is that the undead are entirely lacking in empathy, even with one another. They are not even animal - for pack and herd animals care for their group members - in some sense, they are the antithesis of this.
And so, Aleksei learns about what it is to have trust, and faith, in his fellow humans - to accept that is the most important thing about being human, in fact - and incidentally kills off 12 brutal predators out of myth, although not without the usual and expected assaults on both his spiritual and physical state (and a good couple of twists, most of which it is possible to spot before the narrator does, I believe intentionally).
Wisely, Kent keeps Dracula out of it, only allowing him onto the stage as the pseudonymous master of the Oprichniki before he departs homeward (only to reappear safely in a single flashback later in the book). I almost wish that he'd not even allowed that much of the Count to appear - so much of the mythos of the modern Vampire story is built around the adaptations and extensions of Stoker's novel (and the Hammer Horror films) that even a brief appearance risks overshadowing the rest of the characters. Luckily, his appearance is, indeed, brief, and his apparent protege (himself delighting in the pseudonym of Iuda - Slavic "Judas") manages to amply animate the final third of the story at least.
It also helps, of course, that the Russian campaign itself presents a solid historical backdrop - the occupation of Moscow, especially, also admitting of various metaphorical comparisons with the state of undeath - pulling "Twelve" safely away from being Just Another Vampire Story.
All in all, "Twelve" is more than a cut above the majority of "supernatural" fiction, and definitely deserves a look.