Good Morning Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton

[King Bob]

I read this thinking it was going to be a post-apocalyptic story, but it is only slightly. There is some sort of worldwide catastrophe (never specified) and there's an old astronomer and a young girl at an observatory in the Arctic. There's also a spacecraft returning from a mission to the moons of Jupiter. A lot of it is the astronomer thinking about his past, and an astronaut thinking about hers. The writing is good, but there's a twist near the end that I think goes against the grain of the narrative up to that point. Oh well, it was a first novel so maybe I'm too picky. Curious to see what she does next. I'd say not really a DOOM book.

A film is in the works, directed by and starring George Clooney as the astronomer, with Felicity Jones as the astronaut. I'm not sure how well it will work since so much of the book is interior monologue.

[cranefly]

Interesting.  Not so long ago (actually, when I was a lot younger), Science fiction was considered the ghetto, and writers fought to keep SF off the spine of their books, and SF movies were few and far between and avoided by legit actors.  These days things are a whole lot different.  It seems Clooney has a fondness for the genre.  There's 2015’s Tomorrowland, 2013’s Gravity and 2002’s Solaris.  For Good Morning Midnight it looks like he'll also be directing.

2002's Solaris was very interior monologish, so maybe he has a good idea how to present it, or maybe he just has a weakness for those types of stories that don't translate well to film.  Wishing him the best with it.

[Drunk Monk]

I'm flashing back to Solaris (1972).  I remember that was a tiresome affair of a film, but there was one random scene where a dwarf came in randomly and then left.  The dwarf never came back and that was never explained.  That has always bothered me but not enough to watch it again.  Maybe I feel asleep during it.  Maybe I dreamed it.  But that's all I remember of that film, except for that I'm pretty sure I saw it in Palo Alto in that old rep house I used to frequent, the one that became a Borders or something...shoot I'm blocking on the name now.  Man, I think I just come here to post my failing memories nowadays.  That and cool gifs.  

[thatguy]

never explained...

--tg

[King Bob]

DM, you are thinking of the Russian version, which I think I read somewhere is very long. But the book was kind of like that too; at the end I kind of went "Huh?" Soderbergh's film shapes the story better, and I think it's one of Clooney's best performances. (To place it in Soderbergh's work, it's kind of like The Limey - more images than dialogue (as I recall).

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

The book was by Stanislaw Lem, whose satire I enjoy, but the book Solaris...let’s just say that I know now that I am missing too many cultural and literary references. Back then it was just “whuh?’

[Drunk Monk]

Yes indeed, it was the Russian version.  Lem's The Cyberiad was one of my favs, and seeing that version of Solaris was during my phase when I was going to see anything that played at the art house theaters.  Now that I reflect upon it, it was quite traumatic and put me of Russian film overall.  

Dwarves are more mind-fukkin than watermelons but good one, tg.  I forgot about that scene.  I should really revisit that film.

[King Bob]

I found Lem disappointing as a novelist and think his short stories are better. Some of the Pirx the Pilot and Ijon Tichy stories are great.

[Drunk Monk]

Cyberiad was more of a collection of related short stories than a novel, if memory serves.

[King Bob]

Yes it was stories, about the two constructor robots, and I can only remember one name - Klaupacius (sp?)

[Drunk Monk]

That's better than me.  I could wiki the names but I'm just happy I can remember it was about robots making robots.  

And that damn dwarf.  I remember him.  

At least he wasn't a Sinful Dwarf.

[cranefly]

Lem was one of my favorite SF writers.  The Cyberiad was my introduction to him.  I was bored through the early going, what with all these simple little disconnected stories involving the two constructors.  It really takes a hundred pages for it to start working.  Then the stories start intersecting, and things get very loopy and complicated.  I recall that topology is dredged up as the hardest field of mathematics, and at the time I was good friends with a mathematician who gave up on the field after hitting a wall with topology.

Anyway, Lem was never much for characters and emotion, but he impressed the hell out of me with his creativity, his idea generation, building ever more complex storylines.

I very much liked The Futurological Congress and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, though it always took a long while for his novels to get moving.

Lem was a severe critic of American SF.  He felt that science fiction stories should need to be science fiction, whereas most American SF have storylines that could just as well have been told mainstream.  Solaris is a shining example of what Lem aspired to write.  You just can't mainstream that idea.  I didn't much care for Solaris the novel, by the way.  It seemed very dry, with too much repetitive description of nebulous formations in the world ocean.  But that novel wasn't translated by Michael Kandel, who did brilliant translations of most of his other major work (how did Kandel manage to get all that wordplay to work in English? [And what more was there that was left out?]).

But as I got deeper into Lem, I found that he committed the same sins that he criticized others for.  It's really really hard to come up with stories that have to be SF.

My last exposure to him was Fiasco, which was solid, but disappointed me towards the end.  I can't remember why, except that I felt it was mostly a mainstream story despite its space-faring setting.

Oh, and I've watched both versions of Solaris.  The Clooney one sort of made a different story of it, though I felt it held up pretty well in its own right.  As for the Russian version, my goodness that was slow, and pedestrian, with most of it occurring on Earth in the aftermath, just recalling the adventure -- if I'm remembering correctly.  But it did have a couple of powerful scenes.

Oddly, though, I'm not recalling a dwarf in either of them.  That memory lapse seems almost ... sinful.

[Drunk Monk]

Oddly, though, I'm not recalling a dwarf in either of them.  That memory lapse seems almost ... sinful.

Maybe there was no dwarf.  Maybe I fell asleep in the movie and dreamed up the dwarf, just so I'd have something to remember about it.  

But I'm not going to watch that film again to find out.  Sinful or not.