Peter Watts, John Updike and District 9

I don't actually have much to say about Peter Watts. He's a great writer, his plots are very interesting and I hate almost every character in his books. These are people who need nanobots in their bloodstream in order to keep them from torturing people and behaving decently-and none of them behave well. The only good thing I can say about Maelstrom (the sequel to Starfish) is that through reading it, I finally understood why the damaged people were sent to live miles beneath the sea-because they were so caught in in their own pain, that they didn't notice or care about anybody else's pain. But did they actually have to implant false memories to create Leni's not-real abusive childhood? They couldn't find someone who actually had been abused who fit the ticket? Maybe in the third one we find out-but I'm not reading it unless someone lends it to me.

As for John Updike, blah blah blah. Yes, he's a great writer and all-but if I want to feel suburban angst and pain, I'll go visit my parents. I grew up in that world and I have no desire to relive it, which I do every time I read him (excluding visits from the Devil, unfortunately).

District 9 is a great movie. It's has aliens, alien hybrids, people behaving REALLY badly and sacrifice to help for no other reason than it's the right thing to do.

I spent some time during and after the movie thinking about whether this movie could have been made anyplace other than South Africa-and I don't it could have been made in the US or Europe. Not that they would behave any better than the South Africans, but they don't have the recent history that SA does with treating people of color badly. If the Europeans put anyone, including aliens, into anything that looked like a concentration camp, there would be such an outcry-it wouldn't work. I take it back though, maybe it could be made in the US-we'd just have the aliens in a concentration camp not on US soil. Anyway, it was great-the lead was especially good, I was very impressed from how he went from dork to casual killer to bio-torture victim to escapee to someone who, in the end, did the right thing to help a creature when two days earlier he was killing their babies. Good job, Sharlto Copley.