The title of Altered Carbon refers to flesh, human flesh in particular. Richard Morgan describes a world in which people record their experiences while they live, then get transferred to other bodies when their own die or if they need to go to another planet or if they are rich enough to want a different experience or alternate bodies just for the sake of it. The alteration of the normal relationship between consciousness and physical existence is the backdrop of the book.

The good part about this cyberpunkish story is that it is personal enough and simple enough to read in one gulp. I did that, always wondering what was going to happen next and excited enough to not get distracted by something else. The bad part is that most of the props are used only to further the story and are never explored in depth. The way people are always so easily "re-sleeved" into another body and yet almost never walk with different bodies at the same time, the way "Meths" - rich people that are practically immortal, having cloned bodies waiting in case anything happens - have all this influence, but in the end fear laws and have a conscience and human failings, just as if they didn't live for centuries, and so on. I could have gotten over that more easily if all these rules would not have been waived aside whenever the main character needed them waived.

The plot is that of a detective story set in the future. A former Envoy - soldiers trained to easily switch bodies and move from planet to planet to preserve The Protectorate - is sleeved back on Earth to investigate the suspicious body-death of a rich and influential man - a Meth. During this mission, he lives dangerously, gets people to try to kill or manipulate him, women to fall for him - quite a lot actually - and in the end solves it all. So in a way, it's an interstellar James Bond.

Some of the elements in the story are haphazardly thrown around and never explained or having any connection to the main plot, like an apparent discovery of Martians, also an interstellar civilization, long gone for reasons unknown and remembered through racial memory only by whales. It was a silly proposition and pointlessly left in the book, but for me it served to show that the writer is not perfect and, even if his first book is not perfect either, it still was a nice enough read for me to do it in one swoop. Morgan has written another two books with the same character, Takeshi Kovacs, and in the other two the Martian motif is truly explored. I may end up reading them.

In conclusion, Altered Carbon is more pulp fiction than cyberpunk, with a strong backbone of detective story with a moral and a thin body of future world, disruptive technology and exploratory writing. Even if it felt naive at times, it was a pleasant read and I don't regret wasting a Saturday finishing it.

The Windup Girl, acclaimed by many as a very good book, shows a Thailand that Paolo Bacigalupi declares as "a future version", but given scientific realities I would call it an alternate world Thailand. Wikipedia calls the book "biopunk", although I wouldn't quite call it that way, either, as the bio bits in the book didn't feel absolutely necessary to the story; more of an eco-thriller, perhaps. The book takes place in a nation that is fighting the encroaching ocean, in a time where global warming is rampant and sea levels have risen. Also, there is no more oil, no real use of electricity or combustion and everything revolves around genetics. Large elephant derivations are used to generate power; "kink-springs", a sort of mechanical energy battery, are powering just about everything; cats have been engineered to color shift to blend into their environment; human derivatives have been created, sterile, but beautiful and always healthy, slaves for things varying from military use to sex toys. But the most important element of this strange world is the overwhelming power of genetic companies. The same ones who created successful and copyrighted versions of food crops, they also released horrible diseases onto the world, making their products the only viable alternative and creating a depopulation incident.

In the book, Thailand is one of the last countries to resist the "calorie companies" through a combination of cultural and religious fanaticism, but also with the help of a hidden seed bank and a defecting company geneticist. The country is rife with political and economical tension and the main characters of the book are all caught up in this large game. You have the artificially created girl who was left behind by the Japanese and now is a sex toy to be abused every day for the pleasure of others, the AgriGen company man, his only purpose to get his hands on the seed bank, the Chinese refugee from Malaysia, where the brown skinned Muslims took over the country by ethnically cleansing anybody else, the different Thai factions and their agents, all playing the field amongst the "innocent" population of Bangkok.

The thing is that the book is not really about the "windup" genetically engineered girl, but about this world that Bacigalupi is describing. The girl herself has a pivotal role in all of this, but she is merely a secondary actor. I feel like the author wanted to give this impression of all the characters of the book, that they are transient, unimportant, even the human race as a whole, even when they are the driving force of the events around them. A very Asian perspective from a European, I guess. The writing style is good and fluent and I rarely got bored, even when the events described were not terribly exciting. The plot focuses almost exclusively on people, with the technical or logistical aspects thrown in there as afterthought. I think this is what makes the book a good one, because any inconsistency with our own world can be easily dismissed, at least for lack of evidence.

Bottom line, The Windup Girl is a very nice book, well written by Paolo Bacigalupi to describe an alternate future version of Thailand. The fantastical elements of the book are there mostly for support of the story, which in its essence is not really science fiction. One could easily imagine the same plot in a real world country, maybe modern Thailand itself. But, if you are going to write a philosophical commentary about human society and our place in the world, why not place it in an imaginary universe, as well?

I met a few friends for a drink and they recommended to me (or rather seemed amazed that I had not heard of it) Dragonlance. I looked it up and, to my chagrin, found that it is a huge series with over 20 books and a lot of short stories - actually, in 2008 there where over 190 novels in the same universe. Resigned myself to read them all, I googled for the right order in which to read the saga and came up with Chronicles, which is a trilogy of books, as the correct starting point.

As in the story, there is balance between the good and the bad in my assessment of the books. For one, I will not read the rest of the books and waste a lot of my time, but for the other, I already start regretting reading the first three. You see, the entire plot seems to have the only purpose of supporting a canon of the classic fantasy genre that the writers have thought up.

Probably emerging from games of Dungeons and Dragons, like many fantasy universes, the world of Krynn has nothing remotely original. There are elves, humans, dwarves, goblins, dragons, pegasi, unicorns, centaurs, and other races like that. From the very first pages, you meet the heroes that form the quest party and they seem to have gathered all the possible cliches in the genre in their travels: the dwarf is old and grumpy and complains a lot, the half-elf is tortured by his double ancestry, the knight is rigid and honorable, the mage is tiny and frail and frustrated about it, his big (twin) brother is huge and completely non-magical, etc. In fact, the mage character is the only one which seems remotely interesting, all the other being busy posturing most of the time, like real size commercials for their D&D class and specialization.

But what I thought was the most offensive of all was the premise of the trilogy. Beware, here be dragons... and spoilers. Do not read further if you think you might want to read the books.

You see, the world has been reeling after a huge Cataclysm, a fiery mountain hitting the planet and causing havoc. At the end of the book we learn that the gods, in their infinite wisdom, did that because the world was too unbalanced towards good! And we learn this from the good god, who for the entire duration of the story just nudged our heroes in one direction or the other while the evil god was amassing armies and killing everybody. How is that for balance?

Even so, you can hardly complain about a book being cliché if you don't read more of the genre and, to be honest, except for a few books, I didn't really read much fantasy. So I had an opportunity to enjoy this, even if the writing was simplistic, the characterization almost non existent and the story bland. But there was something in the books that kept me at arms length from enjoying it. It finally dawned on me in the middle of the second book, when, after reading about the emotional turmoil of everybody, having the men pair with the women - unless they were there for comic relief, like the dwarf and the kender (which one could consider a pair, if I think about it) - and making chaste promises to one another (like not having sex until they can focus on the relationship and stuff like that)... after all that, I realized that Dragonlance was written by two women. (Even later I realized that one of the women was actually a man. Shame on me! The rest of the review stands)

I don't want to sound misogynistic here, I really wanted to read something cool written by women, but for a series entitled after a weapon - albeit something long and thin, with a thick bulbous appendage at the tip - the story was surprisingly devoid of any detailed battles, tactics, strategy or even decent brawls. The heroes are always running around, talking about their feelings or thinking about them and, in case there is a huge battle between the forces of good and evil, quickly skips forward to the conflict between the two women that love the same man.

Also, as if it all wasn't formulaic enough, no one really dies from the group, unless it is something that fulfills their purpose in life, while the support cast keeps perishing without anyone actually giving a damn. Check out the bit where an entire ship crew - including the woman captain and the minotaur second that I had read a lot about in previous pages - just die without the characters even remembering it. Or the battle of the knights with the dragon armies, where one phrase describes how the knights held, but half of them died. Just like that. I may have written more about that bit than there was written in the book.

To end this terrible rant, if you thought Wheel of Time was childish, as I did, this is worse. T'is true, the fair maiden that hath captured my heart and recommended the books hath read said scrolls of wisdom when she was 16, so that might explain her fond memories and my tortured journey towards the end of the story. I also really really wanted to believe that by writing more, the authors would become more skilled at it. It didn't seem to be the case. I refuse to read another dozen books just to keep the faith.

In conclusion, I cannot in good conscience recommend this to anyone, including children or young adults - to which I think the story would be tantamount to poison, teaching all the wrong lessons in the worst possible way. These books sucked lance!

I remember the first time it happened. We were just beginning to watch your struggle, the rise of such wonderful life, then the strike. It had happened before, but we weren't really paying attention. This time it was incredible drama. Galaxies cried out in anguish and desperation, but it wasn't the end. No, you survived, rebuilt, went on.

It's funny, the first time apes started acting smart there was a lot of disappointment. Ugly, cumbersome, a bit mad, everybody thought. But we continued to watch, mesmerized, as you got through so much that almost destroyed you. You changed, you evolved.

Then you bloomed. Started talking, singing, thinking and painting. Further on you started writing. What a wonderful flower you were. Worlds would die and form on the sounds of your wails or yells of joy. We loved it all, the wars, the art, the science, the suffering. We gulped it up, knowing that it was not going to last. They never do, we thought.

We cheered for you when you were dying in the great pandemics, we cried for you when you killed each other, you had our full attention when you almost destroyed everything with nuclear devices. Some of us rooted for that ending. They love violent, brusque ends, some of us do. But it didn't happen.

Oh how you danced, how you sang, the beautiful things you thought and put in writing, in films, did with your computers. We knew you were close to the end and we knew that it was all good stuff, because we didn't want it to end, but they all end, don't they?

We marvelled at your ships, at your resilience in hoping to contact others... us... and we cried. The space battles were magnificent. You took inspiration from your history and created fiction, then you used fiction to create your future. You bypassed your present altogether. A whole universe laughed and cheered. Those were good times.

Your enormous space habitats, floating around your sun, always changing, always growing, they gave us hope. Hope that some of you might make it, leave your system. Sometimes it happens. We love splinters, that we do, but it didn't happen. You stayed put.

And then your flower wilted away. You had altered yourselves, you had become faster, smarter, you had already merged with the machines you had built and defeated most of your biological problems. You were invincible and beautiful, immortal. But then you found it; after all, they all do, the universal link, the thing that finally allowed you to fulfil your dreams. You found us.

And now you listen to our songs, watch our histories, run our software, use our technology. But we remember you, how beautiful you were when you were young. We all loved you, humans. Now that you are old, like us, you have control. You are us. Join in watching this wonderful new life that emerges from the chaos. It's a great show. And maybe some will make it, some will manage to be different, somehow, sometime.

As always, this post will reflect my personal opinion. I know that The Listeners is a classic book, one that has been cited by SETI as a major factor in the project becoming known and supported by others. I know that at that time, doing a reasonable sci-fi book was a feat. I know that the writer was a believer in the contact with aliens and human nature and so on, and thus he must have been a nice guy, with similar desires to mine and other space-looking people. However the book annoyed me to no end.

The first and biggest of all problems is the insistence of the writer to add to the book all kinds of quotes from various works, many of them in a foreign language - that is, other than English. It was the reason why originally publishers refused his manuscript. Now, even if I understand the language, I don't know the quote. There is an annex at the end of the book that translates everything, but really, when a character randomly interrupts a perfectly good conversation to spout something unintelligible in another language, that guy is an asshole!

Then there was the construction of the book, the Project being presented like something that held sway over the human heart. All you had to do to convince anyone of anything was turn on the speakers so that they hear static, while the main character would do PR work, knowing exactly what to say to manipulate the other person. I would not have a problem with that, if the manipulation would not be completely obvious and most of the time completely ridiculous. It felt like a Naruto episode where the other ninja, filled with power, suddenly decides to switch sides because Naruto is such a nice guy. I know I don't inspire confidence when I compare a classic sci-fi book with a Japanese manga, but for me it was the same quality of work, which may be entertaining, but not great.

All the people and events changed in order to conveniently support the plot. It felt fake and it is a lousy writing technique, more suited to pulp. I did not enjoy that.

As for the plot itself, it is about this Project, which is pretty much SETI, that suddenly receives an alien signal piggybacked on 90 years old radio transmissions. What people do and say is so underwhelming that it felt like I was wasting my time while reading the book. That is why it took so long to finish it. My conclusion: while a classic for the science fiction genre, I did not enjoy the book or empathise with its characters. The plot is difficult to swallow and the story is very dated. I would not recommend it.

Well, sometimes an admin will try to make the system secure by annoying the people who have to use it. Yeah, that always works. My situation is that I have to login every day into a virtual machine that is on a "secure network". So after using a very restrictive password policy that forces everybody to be creative in the way they write "password" and "123456", he also disallowed the saving credentials in Remote Desktop Connection. So every day I have to enter the damn complicated password. I couldn't have that. Here is a .js script that you execute with WScript and it logs you in automatically:

var shell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
shell.Run("mstsc /v:[remote server] /console");
while (!shell.AppActivate("Windows Security")) {
    WScript.Sleep(100);
}
WScript.Sleep(100);
shell.SendKeys("[password]{enter}");

Save this into a Javascript file and replace [remove server] and [password] with your settings and either double click the .js file or create a batch file like this:
@echo off
start "Auto log on!" wscript c:\Batches\autologin.js

Of course, this means your secure password will be stored in a stupid text file somewhere, so be warned.

I was just thinking about Coma a few days ago. I don't know why. I thought I miss one of their beautiful songs. And here I see on YouTube they released a new video just when I was thinking of them. This one is a very nice combination of Catalin's lyrics, melodic and hard sounds and a cool interweave of the voices of Catalin and Dan - it's not the usual contrast between singing and shouting, but rather a vocal collaboration which works surprisingly well. Without further ado, here it is.
Chip, by Coma:
\

Also, if you want to see a live version:

I have at work a very annoying HTTP proxy that requires a basic authentication. This translates in very inconsistent behaviour between applications and the annoying necessity of entering the username and password whenever the system wants it. So I've decided to add another local proxy to the chain that handles the authentication for me forever.

This isn't as easy as it sounds. Sure, proxies are a dime a dozen, but for some reason most of them seem to be coming from the Linux world. That is really bad user interaction, vague documentation and unhelpful forums where any request for help ends up in some version of "read the fucking manual". Hence I've decided to help out by creating this lovely post that explains how you can achieve the purpose described above with very little headache. These are the very easy steps that you have to undertake:

1. Download and install Privoxy
2. Go to the Program Files folder and look for Privoxy. You will need to edit two files: config.txt and user.action
3. Optional: change the listen-address port, otherwise the proxy will function on port 8118
4. Enter your proxy authentication username and password in the fields below and press Help me configure Privoxy - this is strictly a client base Javascript so don't worry that I am going to steal your proxy credentials...
5. Edit user.action and add the bit of text that appeared as destined for that file.
6. Edit config.txt, look for examples of forward and add to it the bit that belongs to config.txt and replace proxy:port and the domains and IP masks with the correct values for you
7. Restart Privoxy
8. Configure your internet settings to use a proxy on 127.0.0.1 and the port you configured in step 2 (or the default 8118)

This should be it. Enjoy!

Username:
Password:

I've reached the last of the animes in the Studio Ghibli series that I wanted to watch (again) and it was nice that this one got to be the final one. You see, before that I had watched The Cat Returns and I rated it mediocre, so unlike the beautiful movies from the same collection. Whisper of the Heart seems to be the film designed to redeem it.

The story is that of a young girl who likes to read a lot of books. She notices that most of the books that she borrowed from the library had the same name on their library cards, a boy that she didn't know. Coincidentally she follows a fat cat, apparently named Muta, to the shop of an old man who has a beautiful doll of a cat in a suit: the Baron of Gikkingen. You guessed it, two characters from The Cat Returns. And behold, the old man is the grandfather of the boy that kept borrowing the same books.

Whisper of the Heart seems to just take beautiful elements from other Ghibli animes and bring them all together in a wonderful union. The windy hills of Tokyo, which still has beauty despite the expansion of the city. The young girl who is not only smart and sensible, but also ambitious and kind. The family who is sometimes annoying and overbearing, but that in the end is the source of support for the development of the child it nurtures. The indolent fat cat :)

And then the love story, something that springs from common interests and a karmic connection between two people who seem to have been meant for each other. But there is more. They don't just click and that's it; they get motivated and energized to be the best of what they can be in order to honor the relationship in which they enter. In a way, it is a continuation of the warm and supporting family model from which both protagonists come.

One of the scenes in the anime was so funny to my wife that she spoke the Japanese words from it for a week. What a wonderful thing to have a film that not only makes me want to be a better man, but that already does make me be so by connecting me stronger to the one I love. And I watched it on Valentine's day, too! How can I rate it any less than with a perfect 10?

Returning to The Cat Returns, it somehow felt to me that the story linked to it also from the perspective of the ever aspiring artist; the rough and unpolished plot there sounds a lot like the story Shizuku writes, her first but one in many, the stone that will allow her to get to the skill and experience to do this story, which is so much better and complete. It does seem that way to me, since I watched The Cat Returns first, but chronologically Whisper of the Heart was made seven years earlier.

Now I don't know exactly in which proportion is Hayao Miyazaki responsible for the great quality of this film and story and how much Hiiragi Aoi, the writer of the original manga, but I heartily recommend the end result. I may be exaggerating, but this could be the best anime Studio Ghibli ever did, and that is saying much.

I can't say that Neko no ongaeshi had a great effect on me. The animation was OK, the story was like a fairy tale, but it lacked something, a special feeling that I was expecting to have.

The plot is that a young girl saves a cat from death and finds herself uncomfortably rewarded by the entire hidden nation of cats with a trip to their kingdom, a marriage to their prince and a free transformation into a feline. She doesn't want this, but helped by new friends, she manages to escape. I am not really spoiling anything here. It wasn't like at any moment I felt that she might be in real danger, which I think was the biggest flaw of the story. Another anime from Studio Ghibli, Spirited Away, features a much more beautiful and scary foray in a magical world and one of the novels of Clive Barker, The Thief of Always, brings the required tension and fear that is missing in this film.

Another issue I had with this is that, other than eat mice and fish, the cats behaved exactly like humans, missing entire opportunities to delight the viewer with so many catty things. They don't use their claws, they don't do acrobatics, they live in a feudal community and are loyal to each other. The whole concept of a feline kingdom passed right by the creators of the anime.

My conclusion is that this is a film for very little children or a lazily made one. It's not that I didn't enjoy watching it, but was completely bland, devoid of any inspiration that would make it rise above average.

I always liked animes from Studio Ghibli., but until now I didn't quite get why. It is because they have calm. Everything today has to be over the top, flashy, fast. Ghibli stories take their time, they feature normal people with normal desires and rhythms. behaving normally.

The Ocean Waves is about a cute girl moving from Tokyo to a provincial highschool in Kochi. Everybody is curious about her, but she is a loner and quite rude. Two friends are both interacting with her, but it's never clear what's in their hearts. Slowly, but surely, we start to understand each of the actors and the story comes full circle after graduation, at the first highschool reunion.

I've learned so much about Japanese culture from animes, but the ones from Ghibli make me understand the people. The stories often have what is missing in not only animation, but real actor movies as well: people that you can empathise with, because they are like you (or rather, like you would like to be, but not in infantile fantasies, but in your hopeful dreams).

Really nice movie, it certainly worth seeing.

When I first started watching the movie and I saw the way it was drawn - colored pencil style, I thought it is some sort of children thing and I would not like it. But the minimalistic animation works very well for this film, which shows the everyday life of a Japanese family. They are not very smart, good looking or have anything special. They are forgetful, self centered and lazy. But they have each other and they are happy. That's a beautiful message in a world dominated by heroes, celebrity and egotism.

One might not like one thing, that the story is merely descriptive. There is no "end" to it, just a funny enumeration of family moments. I enjoyed it, though. The speech at the beginning, from the woman advising the newly weds what life is and how they should spend it together is both funny, mostly true and descriptive of the rest of the film. The part with "life is hard when you are alone, but even two losers can go through life if they are together" cracked me up, as well as the part with "have children, it will help you appreciate your parents; they will come and take care of them for you from time to time".

The bottom line is that this is a movie that families should watch together. It would relieve the pressure of never appearing to make mistakes, trying to be a perfect whatever and missing the joy of life. Now, it's too late for my family, but this film may be a way to screw up your children less.

So, while this would not be for everyone, The Yamadas is one of those Studio Ghibli. animes that makes you have warm feelings.

A lot of people nowadays are born in the city or a large town somewhere; nature and animal life is something you see on TV. Few older people, though, may remember what life used to be mere decades ago, when wild nature was what awaited you when you got out of your yard and people were three times fewer.

Pom Poko is a movie about the changes urban development brings to the land, as seen from the perspective of a playful and intelligent race of racoons, magically endowed with the ability to shapeshift into anything they choose. Worried, scared and finally enraged by the destruction of their home forests by the expansion of Tokyo, they decide to fight back. Alas, their efforts are in vain, there is no stopping the humans.

A beautiful anime, nicely drawn, very imaginative, it is almost impossible to dislike. The only problem I see is the rapid shift from the playfulness of the raccoons to their grief and despair and then back again. Sometimes I didn't know if to feel sad or to laugh; sometimes I could not stop myself doing both at the same time. And that is saying much: I am city born and bred and can't stand nature much, so it was an inspiring movie.

Watch this, it is another animation gem from Studio Ghibli.

Written in 1951 by George R. Stewart, Earth Abides describes the end of civilisation by way of a deadly pandemic. The main character is an intellectual, used to observe rather than do, therefore he gains comfort in the idea of observing the end of the world. He is immune to the disease, as are few others, and so he becomes not only the observer, but the patriarch of a whole new tribe of people.

The pace of the storytelling is rather slow and the story itself spans several decades, until Ish dies of old age. The book is clearly well written, and I would say well thought, as well, but I take issue with Ish's character. He is proud of being an intellectual, of reading books, he worries all the time about the fate of civilisation, but he really does nothing to share his knowledge or do something of what he is thinking of. I know that's a trait I share, unfortunately, but his level of passivity is insane.

If at the beginning of the book I was relishing the description of the single guy finding ways to survive, both physically and mentally, then liking the way the little group of people was growing into a tribe, then I kept waiting for something else to happen. Instead, they all become complacent, living in houses they didn't know how to maintain, using products from abandoned shops they did not care to learn how to make, forgetting how to read, and so on. The biggest calling of an intellectual is to continually learn and teach. Instead, in what I see as great hypocrisy, Ish is merely content to be slightly more learned than the people around him, thinking to himself like he was reading from the Bible, even if he considered himself as an atheist rationalist, then having hopes that his child will grow to be an intellectual and spread it around, as he was doing none of that. He just complained endlessly about how stuff should be! That was infuriating.

Perhaps that is why it took so long to finish the book, as the ending felt horrifying and even insulting to me: people living like the old American indigens and caring not one bit of the immense body of knowledge that came before them. Perhaps what was worse is that this scenario seems very plausible, too.

What was refreshing (if you can use this word for a book that is 60 years old) is that there were no depictions of warrior groups roaming the land, looking for slaves or whatever, or any other type of antagonistic situations that required heroic violent response. It seems to me that this is almost a requirement in modern apocalyptic sci-fi, if not in most of it.

The style of the writing and the thoughts of its main character are a bit dated, but not terribly so. Electricity is not really useful for much other than lightning and maybe listening to radio, so they don't feel they need to maintain it one bit. Women are not as learned or smart as are the men, but that's OK, because they are women. It is normal for some people to not know how to read. A man can decide for another what is best, just because he thinks he is smarter, and it is only civilised to let them choose for themselves and completely optional. Buildings are mostly wood, so a big fire would burn a town to nothing. And so on and so on.

I can't put my finger on it, but there is something 50ish about the mindset of the lead character that definitely feels alien to me now. Perhaps the idea that, even if he were to make the effort to teach the children to read, the only books that would be of use would be technical or science. That's an incredibly weird point of view to find in a fantasy literature book.

Anyway, as one D.D.Shade lamented in a 1998 review of this book: When you're talking to someone you just met and you discover they 'love' science fiction, and you ask with great anticipation if they have read Earth Abides, the answer is "No, should I?". I agree with the man. The book should be read and should be known, as a classic of the genre and a reminder of how "the first Americans" thought about these things. Don't expect to go all "Wow!" while reading it, but as it stands, there are few books that are as thorough about the end of civilisation as this one.

I've read Legends of Earthsea and so I knew a little bit who the characters were and what the story was supposed to be. And still I got confused on what exactly had Tales from Earthsea in common with the books I remember. First of all it is a loose adaptation of the third book, so if you don't know who Sparrowhawk or Tenar are, you are out of luck. Also the Nipponification of the characters makes things a bit lame; for example Tenar is a kind and spirited woman, but completely helpless and always in need of a male to come rescue her. Even Sparrowhawk, the greatest mage in existence, is easily captured or fooled. Then there is the repetition of the same bullshit that without death there can be no life, the reason that Cob needs to be defeated. It's such a Japanese way of accepting fate that has nothing to do with the Le Guin books.

Basically Goro Miyazaki turned this beautiful fantasy into a moralizing piece of crap, where the biggest sin is that one wants to avoid death. The anime is missing the point of the books, it's completely unintelligible without reading those books, and finally does nothing for the viewer. Just read the books and enjoy the story. Or at least see the mini series ecranization of the first three books, with Shawn Ashmore as Sparrowhawk and the beautiful Kristin Kreuk as Tenar. This anime, unfortunately, had nothing working for it except the excellent animation.

Just to understand how bad this film is, I went to Imdb to rate it and I noticed that I had already rated it before. So I have seen it already, but forgotten about it. That's how unmemorable it is.