Terra Nova (TV Review)

I've just watched almost two hours of nonsense masquerading as science fiction. Incompetent and wooden acting coupled with much wincing from the audience. Found myself rooting for dinosaurs against whiny teenagers, and authoritarians against unlikeable rebels. Great pain. Will not go there again.

This is my review. It was painful writing it too.

Sailing To Byzantium

Events of the last few weeks have further hardened my convictions that the 'Blue Ocean Strategy' is indeed total rubbish. Handpicked studies etc — the so-called research is equivalent to saying that 'what works, works' or that 'what is new, is new'. ANY successful technology is successful because others did not achieve that particular success. The best part is the hypocrisy of it all; the 'Blue Ocean Strategy' is marketed by 'Red Ocean' means. That's because you need the entire Red Sea to sustain a blue pond, if you're being honest with yourself.

But away from this evil and ugly rubbish; let's look at a considerably more beautiful picture of a dying and decadent society upheld by freakish hierophants in nominal service to a besotted emperor. Let me present to you a vision from Yeats:

Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
— Those dying generations — at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

It was a long time ago, when I was a wee bairn, that I first copied out the words of this poem. I have never forgotten it, through the days of my life and the dark nights of the soul. It goes together with the dozen or so others which have enriched the barren wastelands of a long journeying.

Low Firepower

I haven't had the time to update my book blog with the last six months of reading, but I have to write this down. It concerns the single worst waste of my book funds this whole year.

Katherine Neville's latest book, The Fire, is the worst and most plotless piece of iridescent claptrap I've read. It has almost no character development (apart from unintended caricature), purports to be based in a chess framework where the opening move Nd4 can be made by white, and contains the most absurd mystical calabash (haha, O gourd!) that I've read for years including Dan Brown's stuff.

I have no idea why some reviewers said nice things about it. It's probably because they hadn't really read it but were enthused by the theme and the concept of the story, like I was. But what a cheat! The 'secret history' in this book lacks all conviction and ability to convince, except perhaps where it borrows from the usual conspiracy theories about how Washington DC was constructed and why Iraq was invaded.

It's total rubbish and it isn't even funny rubbish. It took me four nights to digest, when I can normally do a book in half the time. It is that boring. Actually, the one bit of amusement I got out of it was that some of the characters in it remind me of people I used to work with.

Stay away from The Fire. It would be like setting your money aflame.