The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (9 page)

Not technically genre-oriented, but a book that will interest many genre readers, and one that is sorely needed in these credulous times when more Americans believe in angels than in evolution, and many don’t even believe that the moon shines by reflected light from the sun, is
Denying Science: Conspiracy Theories, Media Distortions, and the War Against Reality
(Prometheus Books), by SF writer John Grant.

2011 was another weak year in the art-book market, even weaker than the year before. As usual, your best bet was probably the latest in a long-running Best of the Year series for fantastic art,
Spectrum 18: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art
(Underwood Books), edited by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner. Also quite good were
Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art
(Rockport Publishers, Inc.), assembled by Karen Haber;
Exposé 9: Finest Digital Art in the Known Universe
(Ballistic Publishing), by Daniel P. Wade;
A Tolkien Tapestry: Pictures to Accompany The Lord of the Rings
(HarperCollins); and
Fantasy + 3: Best Hand-Painted Illustrations
(CYPI/Gingko Press), edited by Vincent Zhao.

There were a few excellent books collecting the works of single artists, the best of which was probably
Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss
(Titan), by Chris Foss, although
Jeffrey Jones: A Life in Art
(IDW Publishing), by Jeffrey Jones, was also very good, and
Mark Schultz: Various Drawings, Volume 5
(Flesk), by Mark Schultz, was worthwhile as well.
Girl Genius Book Ten: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse
is the latest in the Hugo-winning series by Phil Foglio and Kaja Foglio, and
Lost & Found: Three by Shaun Tan
(Arthur A. Levine Books) is a collection of picture books by the creator of last year’s Oscar-nominated short film,
The Lost Thing,
which is included.

An odd item, straddling the line between non-fiction and art, is
Out of This World: Science Fiction but Not as You Know It
(British Library), by Mike Ashley, a catalogue of this year’s British Library SF exhibition, a mixture of text and art that covers six centuries of speculative art from 1482 to the present.

According to the Box Office Mojo website (
www.boxofficemojo.com
), seven out of ten of the year’s top-earning movies were genre films of one sort or another, if you accept animated films and superhero movies as being “genre films.” (Somewhat unusually these days, there were two non-genre movies in the top ten:
The Hangover Part II
and
Fast Five
.) Four out of five of the year’s top five box-office champs were genre movies by the above somewhat loose definition, as were twelve out of the top twenty earners, twenty-seven of the top fifty, and roughly forty out of the top one hundred, more or less (I might have missed one here or there, and there are some fuzzy calls in classification). Three of the top five were fantasy movies,
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1,
and
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,
and one was a science fiction movie (albeit a rather silly one),
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
. (
The Hangover Part II
was the only non-genre movie to break the top five, coming in fourth.) The following five were made up of an animated movie (
Cars 2
), a superhero movie (
Thor),
and a science fiction movie (
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
), with the non-genre
Fast Five
and
Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol
cutting in at sixth place and seventh place overall out of ten. Further down the list were superhero movie
Captain America: The First Avenger
at twelth place, the steampunkish
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
(technically not a genre movie, although the physical action was unlikely enough that you could make a not unreasonable case for considering it a fantasy, and Holmes has always been associated with the genre) at ninth, animated film
Kung Fu Panda 2
at fifteenth place, animated film
Puss in Boots
at sixteenth, superhero movie
X-Men: First Class
at seventeenth, semi-animated (it also featured human actors, interacting with the CGI characters) film
The Smurfs
at nineteenth, and Spielberg/monster-movie homage
Super 8
at twenty-first.

This shouldn’t surprise anybody – genre films of one sort or another have dominated the box office top ten for more than a decade now. You have to go all the way back to 1998 to find a year when the year’s top earner was a non-genre film,
Saving Private Ryan.

The year’s number one box office champ was
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,
which so far has earned a staggering $1,328,111,219 worldwide.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
also earned more than a billion dollars worldwide, as did
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,
with a steep drop-off thereafter to
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1,
which earned “only” $702,316,133.

In spite of these immense sums, it wasn’t a particularly good year at the box office overall for the movie industry. Overall profits were down 3.8 percent to 10.17 billion from 2010, and ticket sales fell 4.7 percent to 1.28 billion, the worst since 1995. I suspect that, in the grip of a worsening recession, it’s getting to be just too expensive to go to the movies for an average family, especially when most movies will be available on DVD or on the Internet in only a matter of months. The ability of 3-D to make moviegoers pay more per ticket, something that’s been propping up profits, seems to be wearing thin as well, probably because there are so few films that 3-D actually adds anything to; often, in fact, it makes the moviegoing experience worse, muddying the colors and darkening the palette. It should also perhaps make the movie industry uneasy that the highest-grossing non-sequel of the year was
Thor
; all the rest of the top ten movies were sequels. Which makes you wonder how many times you can go to the same well before it runs dry.

There were a few actual SF movies by my definition (as opposed to junk popcorn bad-science SF extravaganzas like
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
), and a few of them were even pretty good, but few of them were wild successes at the box office. Of the movies that got some kind of critical respect, the one that did the best was
Super 8,
which finished at twenty-first. It was
half
of a good movie, with the early Spielberg homage stuff, following kids who are trying to make an amateur monster movie, brilliant and effective; when the
real
monster starts showing up, things go downhill, and I couldn’t help but feel that it would have been a better movie without the monster altogether. Similarly,
Cowboys and Aliens,
which only made it to thirtieth on the list, was also half of a good movie, with the cowboy setup interesting, but suffered increasingly from bad writing and the ridiculous motivations for the actions of the aliens (which really made no sense) as it went along; they might have been better off making it as a straight cowboy movie if they couldn’t do a better job with the “aliens” part.
Real Steel,
perhaps the film that came closest this year to being a core SF movie, based on a Richard Matheson story about boxing robots, widely described as “Rocky with robots,” only finished thirty-fifth on the list.
Contagion
was a somber and realistic look at the spread of a worldwide pandemic, without extraneous car chases and gun battles thrown in – which is perhaps why it only made it to forty-fifth on the list.
The Adjustment Bureau
only made it to fifty-sixth place, perhaps indicating that people are getting tired of Philip K. Dick movies. The two best-reviewed genre movies of the year, Woody Allen’s time-travel love letter to 1920s Paris,
Midnight in Paris,
and Martin Scorsese’s steampunkish homage to Georges Melies (perhaps the closest anyone has yet come to putting a Howard Waldrop story on film),
Hugo,
finished fifty-ninth and fifty-second respectively.
Paul,
a mixture of slob comedy with Area 51/alien stuff in the form of a road picture, came in eighty-first.

The two worst-reviewed, most critically savaged, genre movies of the year were probably
Green Lantern
(twenty-fourth) and
The Green Hornet
(thirty-second) – although it is perhaps a bit too much to hope that this indicates that superhero movies are wearing thin too. (You’ll be seeing a lot more of them next year.)

Most of the buzz about movies coming up in 2012 so far seems to be going to
The Hobbit,
the Peter Jackson – directed prequel to the
Lord of the Rings
movies, to
Prometheus,
the prequel to
Alien,
to the
Avengers
movie, to the new
Star Trek
movie (although that probably will be in 2013 rather than in 2012), and to
The Dark Knight Rises,
the last of the Christopher Nolan–directed
Batman
movies.
John Carter,
a film version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s
A Princess of Mars,
is a movie I would have been absolutely wild to see when I was thirteen. There’s a film version of the bestselling YA series,
The Hunger Games,
and a reboot of the pioneering TV vampire soap opera
Dark Shadows
as a movie, starring Johnny Depp. People seem to be divided between anticipation and dread for the reboot of the
Spider-Man
franchise,
The Amazing Spider-Man.
Nobody seems to be looking forward to another
Men in Black
sequel, but that won’t stop them from making it anyway. There’s also going to be the second half of the last
Twilight
movie, which, although it totally
un
excites me, will no doubt be among the box office champs of 2012.

The big story of 2011, as far as SF and fantasy shows on television are concerned, was the huge success of HBO’s
A Game of Thrones,
based on the bestselling
Song of Ice and Fire
series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin. Response to
A Game of Thrones
was immense, generating buzz far beyond the usual boundaries of the genre, sparking commentary in places like
The New York Times,
and inspiring references in comic strips, game shows,
The Big Bang Theory,
and even drawing a satire from
The Onion
– and making George R. R. Martin, who was already famous within the SF/fantasy genre, a widely recognizable figure outside it as well. HBO’s other genre show, the campy vampire show
True Blood,
had a disappointing fourth season that turned off many of its core viewing demographic; let’s hope they can do better with the upcoming fifth season (what they primarily need is to increase the quality of the writing, which sagged this season, and bring it back up to its former high standard; the actors are mostly pretty good, but they can only work with what they’re given).

The two biggest debuts of SF shows in 2011 were probably
Terra Nova,
in which scientists escape through time from a doomed and ruined Earth to attempt to restart the human race in a prehistoric era, and
Falling Skies,
in which embattled guerilla militiamen battle alien invasion forces who have destroyed much of the Earth and killed most of the people, both expensive shows for television, and both produced by movie director Steven Spielberg, in his first foray into television.
Falling Skies,
which is perfectly valid as a genuine bit of military SF, although offering nothing that print SF fans haven’t seen dozens of times before, seems to have established itself, but
Terra Nova,
the more expensive of the two to produce, because of all those CGI dinosaurs, is wobbling badly in the ratings, and may not make it. Another Spielberg-produced show,
The River,
which looks like a
Lost-
flavored horror series, is coming up.

Cult favorite SF show
Fringe,
another expensive show to produce, is also wobbling in the ratings, and may not make it. If
Fringe
and
Terra Nova
do die, they’ll be following many another expensive special-effects-heavy show such as
Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, Firefly,
and
Stargate
and its sequels into oblivion – the clear lesson being that supernatural shows, which are far less expensive to produce than SF shows (all you really need is some creature makeup), are more likely to survive on television than SF shows, particularly ones that take place in outer space.
Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries, The Walking Dead, Teen Wolf,
and
American Horror Story
are all coming back, to be joined by new supernatural shows, such as
The Secret Circle,
about witches,
The Fades, House of Anubis,
and the dueling fairy-tale series,
Grimm
and
Once Upon a Time.

No Ordinary Family
and
The Cape
died, and the long-running
Smallville
finished its final season, leaving the airways momentarily cleared of superheroes, although that probably won’t last long.
V
died. Spy spoof
Chuck
will finish its fifth and final half season in 2012.
A Gifted Man,
a rather peculiar attempt to cross the doctor show and the ghost show, featuring a doctor who is haunted by the nagging ghost of his wife, is sinking, and may already be gone by the time you read this. A new show,
Touch,
which, as far as I can tell from the coming attractions is about an autistic boy with preternatural powers of some sort, started early in the year; too early to tell how it’s going to be received.