Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose!

Friday Night Lights has been on my radar for a while, recommended to me by very good friends. Sometimes it takes a while for the time to be right to embark on immersing yourself into a fictional world, and with FNL I’ve been waiting for that prefect moment.

Trusting your unconscious to signal when that right time be has worked pretty well for me in the past. I believe its the intuitive part of the story-telling hindbrain that pops up and says, time to view.

Anyway, this is a long way around saying that I’m glad I waited. Why? I had a sporting related trip to the US in May this year and met a bunch of basketball coaches, went to a heap of colleges, and experienced first-hand the awe of the 80K football stadiums. Coming to this series after those experiences, makes my viewing of this series much more enriched. I totally get it, in a way I just wouldn’t have before. Australia is reknown for being a sport-obsessed nation, but there is a magnitude of belief and culture around sports in the US that doesn’t compare, even to here.

I’ve only watched the best part of two series but I’ve been impressed on SO many levels; the acting, the script, the story arcs, the delicate balance between heartbreak and joy. I believe some of the power in the story comes from the way it’s delivered. The show’s wiki states that the whole thing was filmed without blocking and rehearsal, so there’s a lot of hand-held follow around filiming and raw ad-libbing. The actors were encouraged to use their initiative. The EP’s quoted as saying, “no rehearsal, no blocking, just three cameras and we shoot.”

Deep into series two now, I’m finding only a few tiny instances of straying into melodrama, but many more of intelligent, soulful story-telling and social commentary. I feel terribly connected to all the characters – even Buddy Garrity! If I had to single a couple out, Taylor Kitsch is pretty much to-die-for in the role of bad boy, Tim Riggins, and Kyle Chandler as Coach Eric Taylor is quite superb. Of the female cast, the characters Lyla Garrity, Tyra Collette, Corinna Williams and Tami Taylor worked best for me ( and LOVE LOVE LOVE Lorraine “Grandma” Saracen).

The anatomy of Eric and Tami’s marriage with the arrival of a new baby and their separation due to work commitments is beautifully portrayed, as is the Jason (6) Street’s journey from athlete to quadraplegic, Smash, Saracen and Riggin’s different struggles into manhood and Tyra’s desperate attempt to break the family mold. So much is going on in this show and its organic feel contributes to creating the illusion that you’re listening and watching and being a part of your own friends and family’s lives.

Not sure if it was my own personal experiences with sport, but the game scenes NEVER failed to give me goose pimples. What makes me sad is that it didn’t reach a wider audience – as it seems viewers were put off by a notion that this was a story about football, when in fact it’s a complex narrative about how our choices define us.

Love it and trying not to watch it too fast!

Reviewed by Jamie Marriage

If given the opportunity to avoid extinction would you take it? Even if it meant abandoning or even destroying everything you know?

This is the major question that David Brin’s novel Existence doesn’t so much try to answer as investigate from every angle.

During a routine space-junk collection mission astronaut Gerald Livingstone goes against protocol and lassos a crystalline object that has been drifting in Earth’s orbit for longer than anyone imagined. And when the crystal egg begins to speak with the voices of alien entities, welcoming humans to join them, the already precarious balance of Earth society is thrown into chaos.

Existence is a complex entity built primarily CyberPunk and Hard Sci-Fi components, but they aren’t the only elements that have been crafted together to tell this tale, and with stunning cohesion.

Hamish Brookeman, acclaimed novelist and director, is tasked with unravelling a plot that risks the plans of his secret society. And in turn exposes far more than he expects.

Hacker, an eccentric playboy, ends up in an extreme sporting accident that results in falling into a world of strangeness and grants him a new sense of purpose.

And Tor Pavlov, pop-culture reporter extraordinaire, prevents a terrorist bombing and becomes immersed in an online culture of unimaginable proportions.

But these are only a few of the many varied characters intertwined within Existence; each of whom have a vital part to play in the overall scheme of things. The tangle weave of betrayal, suspicion and subterfuge is constantly tinged with the hint of hope and progress. Especially when a second egg is discovered that refutes the grim tale of the first.

The writing of Existence is amazing, the characters flawless in their scope and the setting a fascinatingly erratic ride through worlds often difficult to comprehend, but never hard to picture with this level of storytelling. But be warned, this is a dense parable; filled from end to end with twisting points of views and narrators-a-plenty.

It isn’t a fast book, but it is a great book. And one worth taking the time to enjoy.

Good reviews are like pasta for a writer. We get enormous energy and sustenance from them. For me, I try and use the good ones as a motivation to keep going, and with the horrible ones, I tell myself everyone is entitled to their opinion – that’s what makes the human race so interesting.

It may be a self deception, but honestly, it’s the only way to survive and be productive. Intense criticism can be paralysing, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let it (criticism) stop me doing what I love. My dear ex-editor once told (soon after my second novel was published) to don my steel cap boots and armour and keep marching because that’s what a writer needs to protect themselves.

Not that all criticism is a negative experience. I have defintiely learned from my some of reviewers, and truly appreciated their perspective and feedback. But life can be measured by its extremes and there are those critics who are all about being destructive.

Anyway, this is a rather long preamble to me admitting to be particularly excited when my SENTIENTS OF ORION series gets good reviews. It was a tough, demanding, mind-stretching project and I’m proud of it. It is not, however, a series that everyone understood. A space opera with difficult, complex characters and a female protagonist who gves birth during the story (no this nothing like Aeryn Sun giving brith in the middle of a firefight in Peacekeeper Wars!), did not fit into the usual space opera mold.

Over at the Deadline Zombie, this lovely, thoughful review appeared this week, and puts it up with my other favourite review by Alex Pierce. Here’s a snippet for you to check out …

‘This is the first of the four book series Sentients of Orion, in which author de Pierres throws a cast of humans into a whirling maelstrom of alien cultures, inscrutable godlike beings and galaxy-wide war. The book deals not only with their struggle to survive, but their growing awareness that they aren’t fully in control of their own destinies. .. de Pierres has written a beautiful, touching story.’

So there … sustenance for another few months!