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(01.20 PM, 07 Aug 2008, Derren Brown is a Liar) Daniel Hemmens says...

Actually IIRC there were a few articles after the Russian Roulette trick loudly proclaiming "Russian Roulette Trick a Hoax!"

With the Cat thing, though, people were mostly complaining because they assumed it was real.

(08.05 PM, 05 Aug 2008, Derren Brown is a Liar) Arthur B says...

I was thinking when I posted, that a participant unwilling to stay quiet might just refuse to sign a non-disclosure agreement. But I suppose then Derren could then pull the trick from the show entirely, which would leave the participant without much to blab about. We do also know that Derren can be very persuasive. Given the setup, they might even have got them to sign even before taking part, if it could be made to appear a formality.

Surely, in fact, the normal procedure with these things is to expect people to sign non-disclosure agreements before they take part in the thing you do not wish them to disclose details about?

Also, as Dan points out "Magician does not actually use magic" is about as newsworthy as "dog bites man", and as such it would be very hard for most news outlets to actually make a scandal out of that. In fact, most of the Derren Brown scandals I recall seem to involve newspapers acting as if he's actually playing Russian Roulette live on television for real (for example), which would seem to bolster his act more than it undermines it.

(03.59 PM, 04 Aug 2008, Derren Brown is a Liar) Surreal says...

Hello. I'm a friend of Rami by the way.

I was thinking when I posted, that a participant unwilling to stay quiet might just refuse to sign a non-disclosure agreement. But I suppose then Derren could then pull the trick from the show entirely, which would leave the participant without much to blab about. We do also know that Derren can be very persuasive. Given the setup, they might even have got them to sign even before taking part, if it could be made to appear a formality.

The analogy of the people in the vanishing cabinet seems fair. I suppose it is unlikely that they experienced being "disappeared" as a trip to pixie land, so magicians must often have relied on some complicity from their participants. I suppose it is cynicism to think that with such a high-profile magician not everyone would be unwilling to be a spoilsport.

I agree that if your explanation is correct, it would not make Derren a fraud. I was thinking how the story could be spun for maximum scandal by a news outlet.

(10.07 AM, 04 Aug 2008, Derren Brown is a Liar) Daniel Hemmens says...

Hi, nice to see a new poster around here.

I don't think she'd blab for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that she had to sign some kind of non-disclosure agreement. Secondly, most people recognize that it's really bad form to give away a magician's secrets (I felt a little bit guilty about writing this article to be honest, but I figured that since it was all guesswork it was kosher). When a magician puts a member of the general public in a vanishing cabinet, they don't go around telling everybody about the secret door in the back.

Besides, as I hope I've made fairly clear in the article, if Derren Brown *did* do the Kitten Effect the way I think he did that doesn't make him a fraud, just a master illusionist. Remember that magic is 99% misdirection, and one of the most important aspects of misdirection is making sure your audience doesn't know where to look for the trick.

(11.58 PM, 03 Aug 2008, Derren Brown is a Liar) Surreal says...

Nice article. I will treat Derren's explanations of his act with more scepticism in future.

Your suggestions about how the kitten execution worked are clever, but left me with a question. If she is not a plant, why did the girl not go to the press if her experience was not as it appeared on TV? She could have had to have been paid off after the trick was completed. But I also imagine that the draw of publishing a "Derren Brown a Fraud" story would be fairly strong and so the corresponding pay off (fame or monetary) for snitches would be too. If Derren's act required him to regularly trust participants not to blab, I would have expected one of them to have come forward by now. Maybe this has happened and I have not heard.

(02.30 PM, 23 Jul 2008, Whistle Down the Wind) Rami Chowdhury says...

I'm glad you liked it! Kvothe's total awesomeness made even me, gushy and enthusiastic as I tend to be, think twice -- but I really can't wait for the next one... in a few months' time, anyway...

(12.50 PM, 17 Jul 2008, The Reading Canary: Vlad Taltos Falls Over) Arthur B says...

What Rami said. As I point out in the review, the good thing about Dragon is that it seems to be an entirely optional episode in the series. I'm still, after all, going to read the ninth book when I can pick it up, simply because the first seven books were so good I'm holding out hope that Dragon was merely a mid-series hiccup instead of an actual sign of the way things are going.

Also, there's a big reveal at the end of book seven, so if you read the first seven books (the ones that got put out in the nice compilations) and then stop it's as reasonable an end point as any.

(10.07 AM, 17 Jul 2008, The Reading Canary: Vlad Taltos Falls Over) Rami Chowdhury says...

Just because a series starts getting wobbly around the 8th book doesn't mean you can't enjoy the first seven, surely? I think the Vlad Taltos books are well worth reading even if you have advance warning from the Canary about when they're going to sink into mediocrity.

(09.56 AM, 17 Jul 2008, On 'Last Argument of Kings') Joe W says...

I minded what happened to Jezel a lot less than you. Yes he got shit all over by Bayaz, but that scene for me was less 'Jezel can suck it' and more 'what would happen if Gandalf was a total prick'.

I don't mind that Jezel is a coward (understandably so in the face of a magical compulsion, and someone who can turn him into bloody chunks with a thought). It was enough for me that he had become someone who wanted to be a good man even if he lacked the courage to follow through; it would have been out of tone with the rest of the series for him to be heroic. Besides that I quite liked the idea of him and Glokta, quietly scheming behind Bayaz's back to do good deeds. A conspiracy of fluffiness.

(09.44 AM, 17 Jul 2008, The Reading Canary: Vlad Taltos Falls Over) Kyra Smith says...

I mourn. This is really sad, especially since your positive reviews meant that I was, at some point in the future, going to start reading these. I was quite interested in how Brust's 'hard-boiled fantasy' would compare to Scott Lynch who is currently making the fantasy heist genre his bitch. What are your thoughts - if you have any. I guess from your reviews it just struck me - perhaps entirely unjustifiably - that were doing something, on some levels, quite similar.

By the way, this made me laugh: rendering me a small child sat in the back of the Brustmobile kicking the back of Steve's seat and whining "Are we nearly there yet?".

(09.40 AM, 17 Jul 2008, Ne waes thaet wyrd) Kyra Smith says...

Oh. Ouch.

Actually I kind of love anglo-saxon fatalism. I mean, possibly it's something we've invented because there's so little writing still extant - I mean, here we are fretting over The Wanderer and The Seafarer and The Wife's Lament (in which an anglo-saxon mourns their crappy lot and points that all lots are crappy, actually, beacuse we're, like, all gonna die and where the fuck has the horse gone?) but perhaps the bulk of their poetry was about really parties and balloons and cute fluffy rabbits.

To be fair, I think there are some riddles still about. You know, that "cunning" litle poem that recurrs in all historical periods in which you THINK the poet is describing a penis but ACTUALLY he's describing a key. D'ya see.

(12.08 AM, 17 Jul 2008, Ne waes thaet wyrd) Arthur B says...

The Anglo Saxons, by contrast, were a thoroughly miserable lot. Life was short, fate was cruel and arbitrary, and nothing you did mattered because everybody and everything dies and turns to dust.

sir are you sure you have your germanic tribes straight because it sounds like you are talking about the GOTHS!!!!!

ba-dum-TISH

(11.47 PM, 16 Jul 2008, On 'Last Argument of Kings') Kyra Smith says...

Yes, I think you're absolutely right, it's possible to take a sort of detached intellectual satisfaction in the conclusion but it doesn't exactly feel like you've had a pleasurable experience. I think for this very reason I'd feel hesitant about recommending; Dan, I'm sure, would lose all patience with it.

Just out of curiosity, what did you think of Jezel?

(03.49 PM, 16 Jul 2008, On 'Last Argument of Kings') Joe W says...

I'd agree that the book's conclusion doesn't really satisfy and I at least partially share your ambivalence. I sought of feel that I am a reluctant participant in Abercrombie's experiment in writing- one can sse what he's done, and why he's done it, but one's method of appreciating of the piece becomes that of detached analysis rather than aesthetic enjoyment. One closes the book and thinks 'Hmmm...interesting choice.' rather than just basking in the contented glow of a story completed.
Or maybe that's just me.

In any case I think I'd still recommend the series myself; it was an enjoyable read and the characterisation is different enough from generic fantasy fare to feel fresh, particularly if one blitzes through the series in one go.

(01.56 PM, 16 Jul 2008, On 'Last Argument of Kings') Kyra Smith says...

Hmmm...the problem is I'm genuinely not sure whether I'm being unfair to it. I mean it all comes together in quite a satisfying way and the fact that everything gets re-established pretty much the way it was before does make sense in the context of the book, and it has a suitably cynical conclusion to a cynical trilogy. But ... feh ... it just doesn't *feel* massively satisfying.

Thank you for reading epic post of epic :) I'm grateful!

(11.03 AM, 13 Jul 2008, What I Did on My Holidays... in Space! With Jesus!) Arthur B says...

Just to clarify, I don't know whether Lewis was the first SF writer to suggest negative consequences of human expansion into the universe at large, but he was certainly amongst the first to do so at a time when the majority opinion was overwhelmingly positive.

(07.37 AM, 13 Jul 2008, What I Did on My Holidays... in Space! With Jesus!) Guy says...

Thanks! I agree that the disturbing stuff in Perelandra is considerably less awful than the stuff in Hideous Strength... but I will still quite troubled by the description of what's-his-name being beaten and then chased and then begging for mercy and then being killed (by Ransom with his bare hands) and then killed again... I think that these scenes give the novel some power and the villain (whatever his name was) certainly deserved some of it... but it still felt pretty icky to me. Maybe it's just the brutality of the... physical stuff that's involved in actually killing someone with your hands that got to me.

I didn't know anything about the place of the Space trilogy in the history of SF when I read it, but I'm impressed that Lewis was the first to consider the possibility that there was a downside to conquering the universe... he's certainly more serious in the way he thinks about the philosophical consequences of humanity expanding out over everything in sight than just about any other sf author I've read. But I'm not an sf expert, by any means. :)

...speaking of which, no, I haven't read "A Voyage to Arcturus". It sounds like the kind of thing I would enjoy... I'll keep an eye out for it.

(02.21 PM, 12 Jul 2008, On 'Last Argument of Kings') Arthur B says...

I have to say that I don't much like cyclical stories either - or rather, I don't like it when they are a perfect circle rather than a spiral, if you see what I mean: I can accept "things are much the same, only a little better" or "things are much the same, only a little worse", but if you tell me "things are basically exactly the same and matters haven't really progressed or regressed at all" you've wasted my damn time.

The worst example I can think of this in SF/fantasy is Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney, which granted inspired Bowie's Diamond Dogs but is in itself an entirely pointless novel. It's set in this post-apocalyptic city where people live shallow, pointless lives because there's nothing left to do or achieve, and it does a remarkable job of evoking the crushing boredom of such a society. Which, of course, makes it a complete chore to read.

(04.57 PM, 08 Jul 2008, What I Did on My Holidays... in Space! With Jesus!) Arthur B says...

Good review; several points:

- I think Tolkien probably was highly embarrassed by the Ransom-as-Christ syndrome you get by the end of the third book, and I suspect was also pretty mortified by the sort of things that Lewis had Ransom saying by that point. It sort-of-kind-of makes sense that Lewis would do that, since it was Tolkien who converted Lewis to Christianity; as such, it's understandable that Lewis would be massively grateful to him and consider him at least partially responsible for his salvation. I believe there's letters where JRR says to CS "dude, chill out, you're taking this whole Christ thing a bit far".

- I personally really disliked That Hideous Strength, mainly because of the misogyny but also because the plot is just plain weaker. I also get what you mean about the vindictiveness; I honestly don't think it's a problem in Perelandra, where it's focused more-or-less exclusively on a single villain, and also (I seem to remember) comes across more as the natural consequences of the man's shittiness finally catching up with him. It is a problem for me in That Hideous Strength, for all the reasons you describe.

- I think the second book is far and away the best, mainly for the horror sequences, which are fabulous (not many people can make me afraid of a goat in a railway cart, but Lewis can) and because if you can see past the preaching (which really isn't too bad in this series until you get to That Hideous Strength) poses a question which s actually a legitimate poser for secular and religious authorities alike: what if human expansion and colonisation of space is a fundamentally bad thing, akin to European colonisation wrecking societies across the globe back in the day? I think part of the reason the Space Trilogy is considered so important is that up until that point next-to-all SF had an overwhelmingly optimistic view of space colonisation, so Lewis presented an interesting discordant voice at the time.

- Lastly: have you read A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay? (You can still find the Fantasy Masterworks reprint if you hunt about.) It's the book Lewis read which inspired the Space Trilogy, mainly because he found it so disturbing that he felt he had to write a response to it: it's a decidedly non-Christian allegory, lacks the preachiness that Lewis can't quite suppress, and is a million times trippier than the most out-there segments of the trilogy. I think it blows Out of the Silent Planet and sequels out of the water.

(04.05 PM, 07 Jul 2008, Random Review Part II) Rami Chowdhury says...

Java Chip Frappucino
I've become quite a fan of their new Dark Mocha ones -- don't know what they're like with cream, but they're utterly sinful otherwise. Mmmm.

Amaranth
Yay, Nightwish! Amaranth is certainly the most mainstream and pop-y track from Dark Passion Play but you're right, it's got all the hallmarks -- nonsense lyrics, bizarre video, and symphonic backing :-)

(10.14 AM, 03 Jul 2008, Fists of Beauty) Kyra Smith says...

Dude ... just .... dude ...

My gast is flabbered.

(06.49 PM, 27 Jun 2008, The Random Review I) Jamie Johnston says...

Nifty! I may well be too lazy and disorganized to play, but I look forward to reading future installments.

(04.43 PM, 24 Jun 2008, The Random Review I) Kyra Smith says...

I'll play - I'll review the next cultural artefact in my vicinity when my phone makes a noise.

(03.02 PM, 19 Jun 2008, Review: Before They Are Hanged) Kyra Smith says...

I do actually have The Last Argument of Kings - I was so passionately in love with TBI that I rushed out and bought both sequels. I'm giving myself a break to try and get over the fact that they're not what I thought they were and enjoy them for what they actually are - but I'll certainly be embarking it upon it in the next couple of weeks. But thank you kindly for the offer.

I know what you mean about Ladisla; everything about the character, and the way he's dealt with, annoys me. Being idiotic is, as you say, a traditional perk of being royalty BUT it's like he's deliberately set up so that you want somebody (probably West) to just freak out and kill the guy. I remember thinking to myself as I was reading the bit where West literally begs him not to throw away probably the war and all of those lives, "kill him, West, just kill him now." And, of course, he doesn't. He just grits his teeth and respects the institution of the monarch as, living in a heredity monarchy, you probably would. So that's why the rape-triggered freak out irritates me particularly. But, yes, you're right - it's also just depressing to have a cardboard cutout in a world otherwise by populated by quite interestingly flawed people. Even Arch Lector Sult - who is basically hand-rubbingly evil from toes to nose - is *interesting*.

About Logen ... mmm...I'm not sure. Perhaps you're right that it's just a psychological trick he's developed to protect himself from the truth of what he really is but it seems to me that the narrative seems to hinting otherwise. I mean, there's that scene where they're all sitting round the campfire confessing their mistakes (Bayaz talks about his love his master's daughter and all that stuff) and Logen talks about the time he killed his best friend and didn't remember doing it, and gives a long list of similar incidents. Also when the narrative describes Logen in extreme beserker mode it does differentiate between Logen and this other force, The Bloody Nine. Maybe you're right and it's just a rhetorical trick and you probably know since you've read the last book but even if it is just a metaphor it nevertheless isolates Logen's violent identity as something other to who he really is...

(01.52 PM, 19 Jun 2008, Review: Before They Are Hanged) Daniel Hemmens says...

What I didn't like was how much of a caricature Ladisla was- I could have lived with him as simply being utterly crap, but the rape attempt took him straight from crap into wilfully evil.

That's usually my problem with the Obligatory Fantasy Rape Scenes. It's so often used as evidence that a particular character is zomg teh evil. See my recent article on /Age of the Five/.

As for the Bloody-Nine, I've only read the first book, and I was certainly *concerned* that there was going to be a "big reveal" to the effect that Logan was effectively controlled by an external spirit. If it remains ambiguous throughout all three books, then that's a lot better than I was expecting.

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