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Sci-Fi Showdown: Avatar vs. District 9

Jan 15

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Movies, Reviews | 2 Comments

It’s pretty clear that Avatar and District 9 are the best science fiction movies of the year.  Star Trek was very good as well, but in terms of visionary content and originality it can’t really keep up with the other two, which are both truly high-water marks in science fiction filmmaking and effects technology.

I gave both movies 5/5 — which is the best of the two?

I’m going to give the nod to District 9, mostly on the basis of its plot and premise, which in my opinion is just more thought-provoking and emotionally impacting than the somewhat more formulaic but more visually impressive Avatar.

How did I arrive at that conclusion?  Let’s compare the movies and see what they have in common.  It’s more than you might think.  Both films include (mild spoilers):

  • The fundamental theme of how humanity reacts to the Other.
  • Corporations with quasi-governmental, quasi-military powers dealing with a “problem” that other governments and corporations refuse to deal with.
  • A secondary theme of transformation into the Other.
  • A secondary theme of self-loathing.
  • A secondary theme of colonialism/race relations.
  • As an antagonist, a badass tough-guy ex-military leader whose reaction is always to shoot first and ask questions later.

Of these, I think it’s very interesting to note the Reese’s peanut butter cup antagonistic power structure that exists in both films.  “You got your corporation in my military!  No, you got your military on my corporation!”  They could have just come straight out and called both organizations Blackwater or Halliburton and their point would have been crystal clear.  On the surface it seems like a garden-variety left-wing commentary on Big Business and the dangers of militarization, but I think in both cases it’s more properly seen as an anti-libertarian message.  In both films, the situation seems to be that the government has abdicated its responsibility for its particular problem with tacit public consent, much like Pontius Pilate washing his hands of responsibility for the fate of Jesus, and turned power and responsibility over to a private, profit-driven organization which is not accountable directly to the public, and which is therefore willing to do those unpleasant (and inhumane) things which must be done to control and exploit the situation.

Also interesting is the common theme of self-loathing.  Jake Sully in Avatar starts out desperately wanting to regain the function in his legs, and this speeds his alienation from humanity and his identification with the Na’vi — through the Avatar program, he regains the use of his legs in his alien body, and so naturally wants to spend all his time in it.  By contrast, Wikus in District 9 is quite happy with his life until his accidental exposure to the prawn biotech fluid.  When he begins to physically transform, he desperately wants nothing more than to reverse it, to the point of trying to cut his own extremities off.  His increasing identification with the prawn is entirely physical, and even at the end he’s still resisting, still holding out hope that he can reverse the transformation.  In Avatar, I got the sense that Jake Sully would be quite happy to never see a human being again.

It’s almost more interesting, I think, to compare how the films differ:

  • Avatar has beautiful aliens that appeal to our romanticized ideals of pre-technological life.  District 9 has aesthetically repellent aliens who wallow in filth and who live in a manner revolting to humans.
  • Avatar‘s protagonists are motivated by a desire to emulate and eventually actually become Na’vi.  The main character of District 9 is willing to go to extreme lengths to avoid his own transformation, as mentioned above.
  • Avatar‘s aliens behave in a comprehensible fashion — a human can readily learn their language and customs.  The aliens of District 9 are almost completely incomprehensible in language and behavior, although a few have learned English.  More to the point, the prawn of District 9 appear to have an intraspecies diversity greater than humans; there are a great many “low-caste” aliens that are either completely ignorant or utterly stupid, and a few that are extremely intelligent and competent that apparently drive their high-tech society.  The tribes of Na’vi in Avatar are egalitarian, organized on tribal lines familiar to any human anthropologist.
  • District 9, interestingly, has an alien “cute kid” that features prominently in terms of screen time and plot importance, whereas there are few if any children on-screen in Avatar.
  • District 9‘s prawns are dependent on humanity for survival (for unspecified reasons) while the Na’vi of Avatar neither want nor need anything from humanity, and would be just as happy to see them all disappear.

In terms of filmmaking itself, District 9 goes for a documentary-style immediacy, while Avatar goes for big-budget blockbuster perfection.  Both have phenomenal visual effects, although I give the nod to Avatar here for the sheer scope of its worldbuilding and the deft, groundbreaking use of 3D technology.  I felt the acting was equivalent in both movies — Giovanni Ribisi and Stephen Lang were standouts in Avatar, but the other roles I thought were just good, not great.  Sharlto Copley in District 9, however, I felt did a fantastic job of portraying the difficult character of Wikus Van De Merwe, and turned in what I felt was the best, most believable and authentic performance of both movies.

When I went over these lists of similarities and differences, the main thing that crystallized for me was that the prawn of District 9 actually came across as believable aliens, for the most part, while the Na’vi ultimately didn’t, at least not the same degree.  And although I could understand the reactions, motivations, and behavior of both Wikus in District 9, and Jake Sully in Avatar, I was much more profoundly moved by Wikus’s plight.  District 9 was simply more real to me, in terms of its story.

I think others felt the same way, and a good illustration of this is seen in how the audience reacted at the end of each movie.  I saw both District 9 and Avatar in packed theaters.  At the end of Avatar, everyone in the theater was excited, animatedly getting up to discuss the movie and talk about their favorite parts.  We couldn’t wait to leave the theater and talk about all the cool stuff we’d seen.  When District 9 was over, the entire theater sat still, shocked into inanition for a minute or so, and then got up and filed out in total silence.  I’ve never experienced that before.  District 9 was that powerful, that moving, and in the end, that much better of a film.

Movie Review: Avatar

Jan 11

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Movies, Reviews | No Comments

Avatar — James Cameron

Rating:  5/5

I’m not sure which of three Avatar movies I should review:

  1. The heroic tale of the disabled Marine corporal who is sent to spy on and betray the native Na’vi aliens on the distant world of Pandora in the service of a rapacious, soulless corporation.  He eventually learns to understand and love the alien people, finally becoming both their liberator and truly one of them at the same time.
  2. The horribly tragic story of the death of humanity, desperately seeking vital resources at exorbitant cost from an unimaginably distant, completely hostile world, only to be betrayed by one of their own after diplomacy, nonlethal combat and psychological warfare have all failed to appeal to the alien savages.  In the final scene, the heroic and loyal colonel confronts the traitor, after the humans, who could obviously easily destroy all the Na’vi if they truly wanted to, are being soundly defeated as a result of their restrained, humane warfare.  He asks the traitor the cutting question “how does it feel to betray your race?”  But the traitor is too far gone to even speak at this point, and just hisses like an animal as he continues his work of selling out his species and destroying humanity’s last hope for survival, condemning billions to freeze in the dark back on the mother planet.
  3. The epic saga of a round of Starcraft 2 gone bad, as the Terrans squander a huge early tech and resource lead by trying to overexpand and create a secondary base, allowing the other side to tech to air and eventually zerg them down via an ambush in an unexplored area of the map.  If you’ve ever wondered how massed Mutalisks can take down a Yamato, this is the how-to video.  Message to Terran player:  Grow a pair.  And build more Ghosts.

I’m pretty sure James Cameron intended movie #1, which is kind of a shame, as the others would have been a bit more fresh from the perspective of plot originality (and let’s face it, this was a better Starcraft movie than any conceivable Starcraft movie could ever be).  Fortunately, the somewhat formulaic plot of movie #1 was still executed quite well, with decent acting and truly amazing cinematography and visual effects.  I saw it in IMAX 3D, which I highly recommend to anyone else who sees the movie.  The 3D is unobtrusive for the most part, but really adds to the immediacy.

Avatar is also hard science fiction, which is very unusual and very impressive for science fiction movies these days.  By “hard” science fiction I mean science fiction that sticks very closely to known physical laws as far as possible.  The space travel is sublight, with cryogenic stasis used for the passengers due to mass and life support issues.  Although “unobtainium”, the room-temperature superconductor that is the main reason for the human presence on Pandora, may not truly exist, it probably could, and its presence could explain the “floating  mountains” on Pandora that otherwise seem wildly farfetched.  Really the only piece of technology that has no reasonably extrapolated physical basis is the projection unit that projects human consciousness into an Avatar body.  It looks like an MRI machine, but apparently operates on some sort of psychic basis.

In Avatar, Jake Sully, a Marine corporal whose legs were paralyzed in combat, replaces his dead brother on a mission to Pandora.  The brother was a science PhD who had trained for years to be one of the Avatars — teleoperators of hybrid human/Na’vi bodies who were supposed to study, communicate with and build ties with the Na’vi population of Pandora, a near-human-habitable moon of a gas giant in the Alpha Centauri system.

In his Avatar body, Jake has the use of his legs again, but on his first trip out into the wilds he gets separated from his group by the attack of a wild animal and is lost in the bush.  He is rescued by Neytiri, a young Na’vi girl and the daughter of the clan leader.  She wants to kill him but decides to take him back to their home, where — although he is distrusted — the leaders are intrigued enough by his “warrior” background to try to educate him in their ways, under Neytiri’s tutelage.

Jake then learns the Na’vi way of life, one of oneness with nature, as he learns to use the biological apparatus all Pandoran life possesses to commune with horse-analogues and pterodactyl-like flying mounts the humans nickname “Banshees”.  At the same time, the corporation in charge of resource extraction on Pandora is using the information Jake is learning to plan a relocation of the Na’vi away from their home, which happens to sit on a gigantic unobtainium deposit.

When push comes to shove, the Avatar crew, including Jake, switch sides, helping the Na’vi fight the human encroachment and protect the unique planetary network that all Pandoran life partakes in.

The worldbuilding here is fantastic.  The alien landsape, flora, fauna, and natives all look and seem completely real, and the artistic vision represented in the portrayal of Pandora is nothing short of staggering.  Details of alien physiology are consistent in many cases, and you can make interesting speculations based on the species observed as to what evolutionary paths the Na’vi took compared with other species in their world.

The human technology, also, is extremely well-realized and very believable.  Computer technology is ubiquitous and used casually in very sophisticated ways, military hardware looks advanced but operates on believable principles — even the mining hardware and the starship that starts the movie off were obviously thought through in painstaking detail.

Although the movie is over two and a half hours long, it doesn’t feel like it.  It’s well-paced and well-acted, and there is always something compelling happening on screen.  If you don’t have some sort of racial or political axe to grind, and you like science fiction at all, it’s one of the most enjoyable experiences you’re likely to have at the theater for quite some time.

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Avatar

Jan 8

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Movies, Reviews | No Comments

I saw Avatar in IMAX 3D, and I’ll be writing a full review of it for next Monday.  But what I can tell you now is that it hits a new high-water mark for digital effects, in my opinion.  Cameron has succeeded in creating a believable alien world that seems real in all particulars and is fully immersive.  Opinions differ among my friends, but I found that the effects pushed past the “uncanny valley” — the point at which something is humanlike enough to not be cute but not humanlike enough to look real.  The Na’vi seemed just as real as the humans to me, and with the addition of subtle and effective 3D, I think the sky’s the limit as to what filmmakers are going to be able to do with digital effects in the coming years.

Go see it if you haven’t yet!

GemCraft Is Evil

Dec 30

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Games, Reviews, Websites | 2 Comments

All “tower defense” games are evil, compulsive time-suckers, but some are more evil than others.  My entire extended family has become addicted to PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies, which is quite possibly the most perfectly-refined TD game in existence.

I’ve had brief relationships with several other TDs in the past, from Desktop Tower Defense to several space-themed variants.  The latest one I stumbled across is the nefarious GemCraft Chapter 0.  (I provide these links solely for educational value, of course).  I don’t know if its mechanics are a touch too subtle for me, or if its upper levels are fiendishly calculated to lie right on the razor’s edge of possible solvability, but I have very seldom been so frustrated by a computer game.  I can get through 18 or 19 of 20 levels, only to fail on the last one.  Replay after replay gets me a bit closer, Zeno’s Paradox style, but I’m walking away now.  It’s not worth the frustration, or the waste of precious free time.

Be warned.

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Game Review: Jade Empire

Dec 16

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Games, Reviews | 3 Comments

Jade Empire, Bioware

4.5/5 stars

aa1_jade_empire[1]

Before Jonathan, before IFComp 2009 (how many years ago was that, anyway?), I was playing Jade Empire.  I’d gotten about halfway through it by the time I got sidetracked with interactive fiction development, and then really sidetracked by Jonathan.  Even after recovering a bit from that, I was reluctant to pick Jade Empire back up, as I’d forgotten some of the combat mechanics and didn’t really relish trying to come back up to speed and figure out where exactly I’d left off.

Finally, though, I did.  A half-hour here, an hour there, and I finally completed it last night.  It’s definitely in the top echelon of Bioware games, which are all consistently excellent.  I thought the writing was quite good, the plot was interesting, and the combat mechanics integrated very well with the mood of the game and the more conversational aspects of gameplay.

Like many Bioware games, Jade Empire gives you a choice of morality.  Unlike most Bioware games, however, the choice in Jade Empire is not along stark good/evil lines.  Instead you gravitate between the Way of the Open Palm — an altruistic, communalistic, almost paternalistic ethic — and the Way of the Closed Fist, which is a more individualist, borderline-Nietzschean philosophy (“solve your problems yourself, or you don’t deserve to live”).  This gives the moral choices a bit more subtlety and interest than the usual “give money to the poor child or cut her throat” options that are found in some of Bioware’s other titles.

Combat uses three resources — health, chi, and focus, and all of these are emphasized in different ways depending on what style of combat you favor.  If you use standard martial arts, you are limited in range, but don’t inherently deplete chi or focus to fight.  If you use weapons, your focus drains as you fight, and if you use magic or transformation styles, your chi depletes.  On top of these basic mechanics, you have several different types of martial arts, different weapon styles, and different schools of magic and transformations, and you can choose to amp up your damage by spending extra chi, or slow down your opponents by spending focus.  The end result is a very option-rich combat model that is very adaptable to the way you want to play.

The plot follows a Hero’s Journey-type structure.  You’ve been trained in combat at the beginning of the game, and then discover that you have a Mysterious Past™ that gives you a Great Destiny™.  You are forced out of the nest, meet companions, learn more about yourself as you gain strength, and then learn the full extent of what’s been going on for the last twenty years.

The way these revelations are handled in the context of the player’s progression, however, is what makes this game such a high quality experience.  You’re given enough information to make successively wrong conclusions at several points throughout the game, and the twist at the end is pretty unexpected.  Also, by the time you’ve figured everything out, the game linearizes a bit.  I think this was a great choice; you already know what to do, and at that point it’s just a question of doing it.  Putting in a big exploration section near the end would have compromised the flow of the game — and taken me extra weeks to finish it.

Also, your companions are pretty fully-realized, with distinctive personalities and goals of their own, which helps immersion.  There are romance plots available, and while some of the dialogue seems a bit forced, they’re doing romance better at Bioware these days than they did back in the era of Baldur’s Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights.

One great aspect to the game is the inclusion of several homages to the great Barry Hughart, author of the Master Li and Number Ten Ox series of novels.  I greatly enjoy these books, and was very excited every time a reference (and there were many) came up.  If you enjoy the game, you’ll definitely enjoy the books — they’re some of the best fantasy writing I’ve ever encountered.

All in all, Jade Empire is definitely in my top 5 Bioware and Bioware-derived games.  It doesn’t quite equal the Planescape: Torment or Baldur’s Gate 2 experiences, but it’s right at the level of other top titles like Knights of the Old Republic (the first one) and Mass Effect.  I recommend it to all who enjoy Bioware titles or fantasy with an oriental flavor.  You won’t be disappointed.

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New IF Links

Nov 23

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Reviews, Websites | No Comments

infocom[1]I’m adding several of the better IF sites to my blogroll.  These are good places to get IF interpreters, IF games, information and reviews about games in the genre, and, in some cases, lively discussions about the current state of IF and directions it can be taken.  Check them out, and let me know if I missed any good ones!

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Game Review — Batman: Arkham Asylum

Nov 20

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Games, Reviews | No Comments

batman_begins[1]Batman:  Arkham Asylum — Rocksteady Games

Rating:  4.5/5

I’ve played a lot of FPS-type games (including tight over-the-shoulder 3rd person games) over the years, starting with the original Doom.  It’s not my favorite genre — I tend more towards role-playing games, interactive fiction, and turn-based strategy.  It takes quite a bit for an FPS to impress me these days, but Batman:  Arkham Asylum has what it takes.

The premise is fairly simple.  You’ve just captured the Joker and are carting him into Arkham Asylum for the usual ineffective treatment.  Unbeknownst to you, however, the Joker has already salted Arkham with inmates that are actually his goons from a nearby prison, and has a plan in motion to bust out and take over the island.

You, as Batman, must stop him.

The game gives you a very impressive range of gadgets with which to play.  From the Batarang and Batgrapple to the late-game Batline and Batclaw, you always have tools to support what you want to accomplish.  These gadgets support not only different movement options, but also give you great tactical flexibility in combat.  Explosive gel can be used to set traps for enemies or blow open thin walls.  A cryptographic analyzer can short out security nodes and allow access to otherwise-inaccessible areas.  The Batclaw can disarm enemies and pull them toward you, and the Batarang can knock them out.  You can fly with the Batcape, as well as stun enemies with it.  And, of course, you can beat the crud out of enemies with the good old Batfist.

Speaking of combat, the game does an excellent job of hybridizing the “shooter” and “sneaker” genres.  Batman can simply wade in, fists flying, and take out almost unlimited numbers of unarmed goons.  However, armed enemies give Batman more trouble, and for these he is often better off swinging between gargoyles up in the rafters, maneuvering behind the guards in order to take them down silently, in gameplay that’s like an amped-up version of Thief.

Another facet of gameplay leverages Batman’s legendary detective skills.  You can enter “detective mode” at any point, which highlights objects you can interact with, lets you see through walls, and distinguishes between armed and unarmed enemies.  In detective mode you can also use environmental analysis, which allows you to detect, say, a trail of Harley Quinn’s fingerprints or trace levels of alcohol breathed into the air by a treacherous guard.  My only real complaint about detective mode is that it was so useful that I spent the whole game using it, which means that I didn’t see enough of the beautiful environs of Arkham.  If they do a sequel, I’d suggest integrating detective mode more with the natural view of the environment.

Of course, no Batman game would be complete without a selection of big-name enemies for Batman to fight.  This game’s big baddie is the Joker, supported by a host of classic Batman villains including Bane, Szasz, Killer Croc, Harley Quinn, the Sandman, and Poison Ivy.  The Riddler also makes a cameo, having littered the grounds of Arkham with secrets for Batman to find.

These supercriminals usually fall into one of two categories — big bruisers that Batman has to defeat using superior agility and tactics, or more traditional “bosses” that must be defeated in a particular, scripted scenario.  Both these types of fight are done well, although the “Batarang-and-dodge-the-charging-brute” tactic tends to get old by the end of the game.

The environments are very well-rendered, and most areas are visited more than once, since the additional mobility options you get later in the game serve to open up areas you couldn’t get to on the first run-through.  The result is a game that feels open while it subtly guides you, and where you get to learn the lay of the land early on so you can use it to your advantage in the endgame.

I was a bit let down by the final battle, particularly after the high bar set by the rest of the game.  But really, this is a very good title if you are a fan of Batman or like tactical or sneaky combat games.  I’d have no qualms recommending it.

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Book Review: The State of Jones

Nov 18

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | No Comments

e3d7591a-a5f3-489b-88bb-d872f2b52269img100[1]The State of Jones — Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer

Rating:  4/5

The State of Jones is a Civil War history, but one from a fairly unique perspective.  The main focus of the book is Newton Knight, a barely-better-than-subsistence farmer in Jones County, Mississippi.  Mr. Knight’s grandfather was a slaveholding planter with a moderate-sized plantation, but his father was opposed to slavery and struck out on his own.  Newton grew up in a Primitive Baptist milieu, with a doctrinal emphasis on the equality of man and a distrust for the hierarchy of politicians, planters, and preachers that helped stabilize the institution of slavery in the Southern states.

It comes as no surprise that when the war came, Newton was opposed to it, but the groundswell of support for secession ensured it would take place regardless.  Newton was conscripted and served in the Confederate Army through several harrowing battles, until finally, after the particularly insane slaughter at Vicksburg, he deserted and returned home to Jones County.  He hid out in the swamps along with other deserters and runaway slaves, avoiding dogs and patrols sent to root them out and return them to service, eventually forming a band of deserters into a pro-Union militia and effectively driving the Confederates out of Jones County for a period of time.

After the war Newton Knight’s star rose high for a while.  Reconstruction-era elections ensured that the Republican party was in power, and officials sympathetic to what he had done in the war were able to reward him in certain ways.  As the North withdrew and suppression of the black vote started to turn the political tide, however, Newton Knight was increasingly put on the defensive, and eventually he stayed on watch at his family farm, presiding over two families — a white one with his wife, and a black one with Rachel, a former slave who had helped him in his swamp-running days.

The book does a great job of characterizing Newton Knight, thanks to some oral interviews he gave near the end of his life.  It also does a nice job of providing historical context for the events of the book — we know that the “Twenty Negro Law”, which effectively exempted rich planters from military service, correlated closely with an increase in desertion from the Confederate Army, as soldiers realized that the law made official what was widely known already:  that the conflict was, in the words of one soldier, “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.”

The book also goes into fairly extensive detail about the devastation inflicted on the South during the war, both by the direct assault of the Union armies and through confiscatory policies imposed by the Confederates themselves.  The effects of both of these were brutal to the farmers (mostly women) left behind to survive and try to raise families with their men off serving in uniform.  The fact that so much of this oppression was self-inflicted is particularly tragic, and the authors pull few punches in describing it.

The last section of the book, however, is the most fascinating, describing Newton Knight’s dual family and what happened to his descendants in post-Reconstruction Mississippi.  This section of the book contains much that probably seems absurd to 21st-century Americans, but should serve as a powerful reminder of the oddities and cruelties of race relations in the recent past.  One of the scenes examined is the miscegenation trial of one of Newton Knight’s descendants, which hinged on an exhaustive legal examination of how much African ancestry Rachel actually had, with witnesses asked probing questions about, among other things, how kinky her hair was.  Perhaps the most powerful image of the book is the final one:  Newton Knight, over 80 years old, still camped on his porch every night, a rifle on his lap, on a silent vigil to protect his large family from the unpredictable threat of racial violence.

This is Civil War history at the scale of individual humans, and also the story of a fascinating, obscure personality.  I think it succeeds on both levels, and I have no qualms about recommending it.

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Erfworld Relaunch

Oct 28

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Humor, Reviews, Websites | No Comments

BLOWUP_nomnomnom_640[1]I follow a few webcomics.  They make great bite-size reads when I’m waiting for a compile at work, or while eating an in-cube breakfast.  One of my favorites is one called Erfworld, created by Rob Balder and Jamie Noguchi.  Erfworld follows the adventures of a gaming nerd who is summoned to a fantasy world as the “perfect warlord” that a hard-pressed, losing faction desperately needs.  The fantasy world follows all the conventions of a turn-based wargame, including movement points, levels, attack bonuses, and so forth, and Parson Gotti (the protagonist) has to learn all the details as he goes.  Unfortunately for him, his boss is both crazy and dim, his forces are vastly outnumbered, and no one trusts him.

The writing and art were both excellent, and as a gamer myself I was constantly laughing at the dense layer of in-jokes and game references almost every update.  Unfortunately, after completing the first installment of the comic, artist Jamie Noguchi got overcommitted and eventually decided to step down from illustrating Erfworld.  Rob Balder kept up with text-only updates, but they were sort of just marking time.

It looked like Erfworld was heading for a slow suffocation, but recently Rob announced that they will be relaunching today, October 28, with a new artist.  They’ve already revealed some of her art and it’s excellent!  I can’t wait to start the new installment of the comic; it looks like Rob is pushing the writing to deal more with the social ramifications of living in a world patterned after a fantasy-themed board wargame, which are pretty bizarre.  In turn, the concepts of free will and human rights Parson is importing seem just as alien to the Erfworlders.  Add in a major war to test Parson’s strategic chops, and this second book looks like it could be pretty awesome!

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Economic Astrology (aka Book Review: The Great Depression Ahead)

Sep 25

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | No Comments

2950849303_b39feef51e[1]The Great Depression Ahead — Harry S. Dent, Jr.

Rating: 1.5/5

I can’t really claim this is a full and complete review of The Great Depression Ahead, because I didn’t finish it. I borrowed it from a friend at work, and although I made an attempt to read it and got through the first three or four chapters, there was way too much pseudoscience in here to motivate me to complete it.

Dent’s central thesis is that the economy operates according to cycles, and that these cycles are relatively regular both in amplitude and frequency. He posits the existence of multiple overlapping cycles, ranging from an every-decade stock market cycle and cycles based on our presidential election years, all the way up to a 500-year “mega innovation cycle” (his term) and even a 5000-year “civilizational advancement cycle”.

I don’t have a problem, really, with most of the short-term cyclic approach, particularly that based on demographic analysis.  I can easily see that demographic spending trends will change as large generational cohorts enter and leave the workforce, and as their aggregate family conditions change.  So far, so good.  And I’m willing to go with the empirical evidence of some of his odder cycles — given enough points that plot with regularity, you can infer the presence of at least a temporary cycle with reasonable confidence.

But these longer cycles that he anchors with one or two conveniently-chosen points are just bunk.  For example, he chooses the invention of the printing press and the rise of computers as anchor points for his 500-year innovation cycle.  But what about the steam engine?  The assembly line?  The railroad?  The telegraph?  The cotton-pickin’ cotton gin?  You could make a reasonable case for each of these as being society-transforming innovations, but since they don’t fit his 500-year model, they’re conveniently left out.

But when prediction fails, hindsight comes to the rescue!  The 60-year Kondratiev Wave cycle theory went off the rails in the 1990s, trashing some of his earlier predictions.  So, to cover himself, he posits a new, 80-year cycle.  But a one-time change in cycle length doesn’t fit his “everything can be explained by cycles” model — if cycles can arbitrarily change in length, then they weren’t really truly cyclic to begin with, and the whole premise of his analysis goes straight into the wastebasket.  So he concocts the explanation that the 60-year cycle shifts back and forth to an 80-year cycle on a schedule governed by a 250-year Revolutionary Cycle.  Fiction masquerading as truth is truly stranger than honest fiction!

So what is the predictive value of his theory?  He claims successful prediction of the Japanese slump in the 1990s.  Fine.  Let’s take that at face value.  He’s also the guy that wrote Dow 30,000.  Oops.  His most successful “predictions” appear to be immediate reads of the existing situation, more akin to psychic cold reading than any long-term prediction of market trends.  He touts the recommendations he made that paid off, and conveniently fails to mention the ones that didn’t — a classic use of confirmation bias.  The terrorist attacks of 2001 and their effects on the market took him by surprise, so now he has incorporated a nine-year “terrorism cycle” into the mix — retroactively, of course.  By this model, we’ll be “due” for a major terrorist attack in 2010, and apparently can breathe easy until then.

Folks, you can’t make this stuff up.  Economics is supposed to be a science, but for Harry Dent it’s more like astrology.  Or, if you want to be generous, it’s more along the lines of astronomy: Ptolemaic astronomy, with scads of epicycles to attempt to shoehorn ever-more-complex observed behavior into the straightjacket of a single, incorrect unifying assumption.

The irony in astronomy was that the truth, given the illumination of proper mathematics, is much simpler and more elegant than the Ptolemaic model could ever have been, and I suspect (with no proof, I admit) that the same is probably true of macroeconomics.  Possibly the greatest irony in this book, though, is on the back cover of the hardback, where (at least in my edition) he proudly features a glowing testimonial from none other than recently disgraced South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.  It’s tempting to thus just refer to Dent’s cyclic theories as the “Argentinian School” of economics, and to put it quietly back on the shelf where it belongs.

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