2005 第7屆 台北電影節
首頁
movie lists
閉幕片－決戰夜 Night Watch
http://www.tiff.org.tw/Programs/Opening.aspx
兩廳院售票網
星期三, 6月 01, 2005
星期四, 5月 12, 2005
Brave or Reckless?
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星期二, 5月 10, 2005
Dr.コトー診療所
"僕は、死亡診断書を書くために、この島に来たわけじゃありません。"
－五島健助－
日 本，志木那島，一座風光明媚的離島，只不過有一間沒有任何醫生想要去的診療所，醫療水準低落到只要有急重症患者出現，除了後送到本島之外，就只能等死。島 上的居民，由於之前的駐島醫生不是敷衍了事，就是水準低落，因而不再信任任何醫生。某天，鄉公所課長從東京大學外科部請來了五島健助醫生駐島看診。驚訝於 本島與離島兩者之間醫療水準的落差之外，五島醫生還必須面對島民的不信任與敵視。五島醫生能夠扮演好志木那島診療所醫生的角色嗎？
一年前，電視看一次，VCD看一次，很感動。
一年之後，終於買到DVD，再看一次，還是很感動。
感動的是，五島醫生以醫生的身分對於患者的堅持。
感動的是，五島醫生以朋友的身分對於島民的付出。
感動的是，志木那島島民對於五島醫生的體諒與關懷。
可以讓我看這麼多次也感動這麼多次的日劇，除了Long Vacation和Love Generation之外，就是這個了。
我想在這部戲中不單單是五島醫生以醫生的身分拯救了許多志木那島島民。更重要的是，在志木那島上的經驗與島民的幫忙，反而回過頭來把五島醫生從他黑暗的過去中拯救出來。
唔，台灣的外島是不是也會有著一樣感人的故事呢？ Pondering...
"僕は、死亡診断書を書くために、この島に来たわけじゃありません。"
－五島健助－
日 本，志木那島，一座風光明媚的離島，只不過有一間沒有任何醫生想要去的診療所，醫療水準低落到只要有急重症患者出現，除了後送到本島之外，就只能等死。島 上的居民，由於之前的駐島醫生不是敷衍了事，就是水準低落，因而不再信任任何醫生。某天，鄉公所課長從東京大學外科部請來了五島健助醫生駐島看診。驚訝於 本島與離島兩者之間醫療水準的落差之外，五島醫生還必須面對島民的不信任與敵視。五島醫生能夠扮演好志木那島診療所醫生的角色嗎？
一年前，電視看一次，VCD看一次，很感動。
一年之後，終於買到DVD，再看一次，還是很感動。
感動的是，五島醫生以醫生的身分對於患者的堅持。
感動的是，五島醫生以朋友的身分對於島民的付出。
感動的是，志木那島島民對於五島醫生的體諒與關懷。
可以讓我看這麼多次也感動這麼多次的日劇，除了Long Vacation和Love Generation之外，就是這個了。
我想在這部戲中不單單是五島醫生以醫生的身分拯救了許多志木那島島民。更重要的是，在志木那島上的經驗與島民的幫忙，反而回過頭來把五島醫生從他黑暗的過去中拯救出來。
唔，台灣的外島是不是也會有著一樣感人的故事呢？ Pondering...
星期五, 4月 29, 2005
All About "Hana & Alice"...
我都不知道岩井俊二在花與愛麗絲裡面埋了這麼多小東西,
嗚...真懷疑當初在看的時候是不是睡著了. >_<
當初看到那句"我愛你"和蒼井優最後一幕的芭蕾舞，還感動的亂七八糟...
找時間再去看一次好了 :P
[2004金馬]朦朧、雙生花、青春殘像 - 花與愛麗絲(Hana & Alice)
[感想] 續‧花與愛麗絲的二三事
作者首頁：新‧龍貓森林
我都不知道岩井俊二在花與愛麗絲裡面埋了這麼多小東西,
嗚...真懷疑當初在看的時候是不是睡著了. >_<
當初看到那句"我愛你"和蒼井優最後一幕的芭蕾舞，還感動的亂七八糟...
找時間再去看一次好了 :P
[2004金馬]朦朧、雙生花、青春殘像 - 花與愛麗絲(Hana & Alice)
[感想] 續‧花與愛麗絲的二三事
作者首頁：新‧龍貓森林
星期二, 4月 26, 2005
星期三, 3月 16, 2005
星期一, 3月 14, 2005
CUBITAL TUNNEL SYNDROME (ULNAR NERVE AT ELBOW: A SENSORYAND MOTOR SYNDROME)
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL MEDICINE 37:75-93 (2000)
While focal entrapment of the ulnar nerve is an increasingly recognized cause of work-associated morbidity, the literature on these disorders in the occupational setting is sparse. Cubital tunnel syndrome is ulnar nerve entrapment at the medial aspect of the elbow. It is the second most common entrapment neuropathy of the upper extremity after carpal tunnel syndrome [AAEM, 1999; Idler, 1996].
Epidemiology
Two recent comprehensive reviews of the epidemiology of WMSDs [Hagberg et al., 1995; Bernard, 1997] did not assess studies of nerve entrapments in the upper extremity aside from carpal tunnel syndrome. While Hagberg and Silverstein [1995] stated that ulnar nerve entrapment in the elbow region (cubital tunnel syndrome) was the second most frequent upper extremity entrapment neuropathy, they did not review this disorder, stating that studies providing evidence of its work-relatedness are currently lacking. However, earlier and subsequent articles and texts provide some evidence of the work-relatedness. Specifc work related risk factors common to the cubital tunnel syndrome appear to be aggravating motions consisting of repetitive and sudden elbow flexion, and repeated trauma or pressure to the elbow at the ulnar groove [Feldman et al., 1983; Herrington and Morse, 1995; Gordon, 1995]. Job tasks associated with cubital tunnel syndrome include shoveling, hammering, lifting, manipulating handles of boring and punching machines, leaning on the elbow at a desk or work bench, working in tight places, digging, and use of hand saws or large power machinery [Feldman et al., 1983; Gordon, 1995; Blair, 1995].
Anatomy and Pathology
The ulnar nerve originates from the inferior roots of the brachial plexus (C8-T1). Compressions of the nerve at given points along its course through the upper extremity give rise to the various nerve entrapment syndromes. While cubital tunnel is a general term used to describe localized entrapment of the ulnar nerve at the elbow, the site of entrapment of the ulnar nerve in the region of the elbow can occur in several locations including proximal to the elbow by the medial head of the triceps' "arcade of Struther's,'' at the elbow by the arcuate ligament, or in the mid-forearm by the flexor carpi ulnaris muscle. Precise localization of
entrapment is important if surgery is being contemplated [Hilburn, 1996].
Clinical Presentation
Depending upon the severity of the entrapment, typical symptoms of cubital tunnel syndrome include: (1) activityrelated numbness or paresthesias involving the 4th and 5th fingers; (2) pain in the medial aspect of the elbow and proximal forearm; (3) progressive inability to separate fingers, pick up small objects between the thumb and index finger; (4) loss of power grip and dexterity and, in severe cases, claw position of the ring and little fingers, hand fatigue and atrophy of the hypothenar and interosseous muscles [Idler, 1996; Feldman et al., 1983; Herrington and Morse, 1995; Blair, 1995]. As with carpal tunnel syndrome, symptoms of cubital tunnel syndrome are often associated with nocturnal awakening.
A variety of provocative tests have been suggested for use in diagnosing cubital tunnel syndrome. These include Tinel's sign (paresthesias in the fifth digit and medial half of the fourth digit when tapping over the ulnar nerve at the elbow), the elbow flexion test in which symptoms in digits 4 and/or 5 (paresthesias and/or numbness) develop following maximum flexion of the elbow with the forearm in supination and the wrist in neutral, and the pressure provocative test, in which pressure is applied proximal to the cubital tunnel with the elbow in 20 flexion and the forearm in supination [Novak et al., 1994].
Novak and colleagues [1994] evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of Tinel's sign over the cubital tunnel, the "pressure provocative test,'' and the elbow flexion test. The sensitivity and specificity of the Tinel's sign were 0.70 and 0.98, respectively. The sensitivity of the flexion test at 60 seconds was 0.75 and the specificity 0.99. The 60 second ressure test's sensitivity was 0.89, with a specificity of 0.98. A maneuver combining the elbow flexion test with maintaining local pressure over the cubital canal for 30 seconds, resulted in sensitivity=0.91, specificity=0.97, and ppv=0.93.
Tests of function in muscles innervated by the ulnar nerve may not always be impaired because of cross supply to these muscles by the median nerve. Clinical methods described to test the ulnar innervated intrinsic muscles of the hand include: abduction of the digits (with the IP joints in extension) against resistance; flexion of the fifth digit DIP joint against resistance; difficulty in adducting the fifth digit while it is in extension (Wartenberg's sign); inability to properly cross the index and middle fingers (Scott Earle test); and inability to pinch index and thumb tips together firmly without sharp flexion of the DIP joint (positive Froment's sign) [Idler, 1996]. The "late'' signs include wasting of the intrinsic muscle mass of the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscle, one of the intrinsic muscles best viewed in the space between the thumb and the second metacarpal bone.
Sensory testing over the ulnar nerve distribution should include the palmar and dorsal aspects of the fourth and fifth digit, comparing the affected and non-affected sides. Such testing can be accomplished using standardized (Semmes-Weinstein) monofilaments or vibratory testing, since light touch and vibration sense are the first affected in early stages of nerve entrapment [Idler, 1996].
A classification of causes of cubital tunnel syndrome is described by Tetro and Pichora [1996]. Of the classification systems devised for describing the severity of cubital tunnel syndrome, that of Dellon [1989] is the most comprehensive, incorporating progression of symptoms and clinical tests of motor and sensory ulnar nerve function.
Electrodiagnostic Testing
Electrodiagnostic testing including nerve conduction velocity and electromyography should be performed whenever an entrapment neuropathy is suspected, but the severity of the clinical findings may not always correlate with the results of such testing. In addition, the proper technique and interpretation by the specialists performing these tests is of paramount importance for the evaluating physician who must decide when to refer a patient for surgery. Blair [1995] writes "the definition of cubital syndrome on the basis of absolute electrophysiologic values is of limited merit, as normal and abnormal values are technique and laboratory dependent".
The reader is referred to a recent comprehensive review, the American Association of Electrodiagnostic Medicine's "Practice Parameter for Electrodiagnostic Studies in Ulnar Neuropathy at the Elbow" [AAEM, 1999]. This document attempts to standardize the methodology and technique for performing electrodiagnostic testing of the ulnar nerve at the elbow. Its four-page summary is a useful guide in assessing the quality of electrodiagnostic testing for the clinician who refers a patient. Two of the three AAEM practice standards listed are: limb temperatures should be maintained and noted within a reference range (34 C is most commonly used), and, elbow position should be the same during electrodiagnostic stimulation and measurement of the nerve and also when comparing the patient's results with the normal values adopted by the testing laboratory. The AAEM suggests moderate elbow flexion of 70-90 from horizontal but recognizes that studies have used different elbow flexion/extension angles [AAEM, 1999]. The information provided by electrodiagnostic testing
of the ulnar nerve can help:
1. confirm injury to the nerve;
2. gauge the severity of nerve injury;
3. locate the site(s) of injury along the course of the nerve.
Electrodiagnostic studies are useful in documenting mild to marked entrapment of the ulnar nerve in the cubital tunnel. However, the values of electrodiagnostic tests must be interpreted in the clinical context, for 65% of the population may have 10±20 m/second slowing across the elbow [Blair, 1995]. Very mild cubital tunnel syndrome is a clinical diagnosis based on practitioner experience [Blair, 1995]. Comparison of the affected and unaffected limbs (if the condition is not bilateral) could also prove useful for reaching an accurate diagnosis. A review paper by Hilburn [1996] provides an excellent overview of the use of electrodiagnostic studies in the diagnosis of cubital tunnel syndrome as does a textbook by Preston and Shapiro [1998]. Once it is clear that the ulnar nerve is probably involved in the injury process, referral to an experienced specialist in electrophysiologic testing is warranted for the reasons listed above. In addition, the specialist can select, from among the various nerve conduction testing parameters available, those appropriate for the patient.
Treatment
The treatment of cubital tunnel syndrome is generally based on assessment of (1) the severity of symptoms and sensory or motor impairment upon presentation of the patient and (2) the duration of symptoms and nerve function impairment. In mild or moderate cubital tunnel syndrome a minimum of six months of non-surgical, conservative (medical) management is suggested before considering surgery [Idler, 1996]. Surgical intervention is generally recommended for severe sensory or motor impairment [Idler, 1996; Tetro and Pichora, 1996]. However, there is less agreement in the literature on the best method of initial treatment for moderate cubital tunnel syndrome, based on less successful outcomes compared to mild neuropathy. Medical monitoring of patients at 1±3 month intervals is warranted, which should include assessment of symptoms, signs of nerve impairment and compliance with treatment recommendations. If no improvement is seen or the clinical condition deteriorates, electrodiagnostic retesting is recommended by most authors and operative intervention should be considered [Tetro and Pichora, 1996].
Non-surgical management of the cubital tunnel syndrome should include modification of inciting exposures and activities at work and at home. Extreme elbow flexion should be avoided at home and at work. Patients frequently benefit from use of an elbow splint. The elbow should be splinted in elbow extension which limits flexion to no greater than 45 but does not apply direct pressure to the nerve [Sailer, 1996]. Splints should be used at night even in the absence of nighttime paresthesias noted upon awakening. During the day, elbow pads may be used to protect the ulnar nerve within the ulnar groove from direct pressure or trauma. Use of elbow padding and night splinting is suggested for a trial of at least three months. In severe cases, daytime splinting may be tried [Idler, 1996]. Additionally, for more chronic and severe cases of cubital tunnel syndrome, physical or occupational hand therapy should be performed.
Authors differ over the time from the onset of symptoms for which adequate conservative measures are to be tried before surgery should be considered in patients who present with mild or moderate cubital tunnel syndrome, but it ranges from six months [Idler, 1996] to one year [Tetro and Pichora, 1996]. Dellon et al. [1993] have found that a high percentage (89%) of patients with "mild, intermittent disease were successfully treated nonoperatively, whereas only 38% of those with moderate disease(persistent paresthesias, muscle weakness, abnormal two-point discrimination [less than 10 mm] were successfully managed conservatively." Urbaniak [1991] recommends a trial of conservative measures in patients with the following findings: "(1) early symptoms, intermittent episodes; (2) mild paresthesias without significant pain; (3) minimal physical findings (slight numbness), with normal motor examination.'' He suggests operative exploration without a trial of conservative treatment in those with "severe findings of weakness, decreased two-point discrimination, and electromyographic evidence of denervation potentials..."[Tetro and Pichora, 1996].
The medical literature varies on the most appropriate operative procedure for the different subtypes of cubital tunnel syndrome. Basically, releasing constrictions at all affected sites along the nerve in the elbow region is one surgical option (simple decompression), and changing the position of the nerve to the front of the elbow (anterior transposition) is the second major category of operation, with variations used within each category. Needless to say, there is debate over the best operative procedure to be used, and the reader can refer to the reference article by Tetro and Pichora for a discussion of the different operative procedures.
It is important to modify ergonomic risk factors associated with ulnar nerve entrapment flexion (greater than 45), repetitive elbow flexion, and forceful exertions of the wrist, forearm or elbow.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL MEDICINE 37:75-93 (2000)
While focal entrapment of the ulnar nerve is an increasingly recognized cause of work-associated morbidity, the literature on these disorders in the occupational setting is sparse. Cubital tunnel syndrome is ulnar nerve entrapment at the medial aspect of the elbow. It is the second most common entrapment neuropathy of the upper extremity after carpal tunnel syndrome [AAEM, 1999; Idler, 1996].
Epidemiology
Two recent comprehensive reviews of the epidemiology of WMSDs [Hagberg et al., 1995; Bernard, 1997] did not assess studies of nerve entrapments in the upper extremity aside from carpal tunnel syndrome. While Hagberg and Silverstein [1995] stated that ulnar nerve entrapment in the elbow region (cubital tunnel syndrome) was the second most frequent upper extremity entrapment neuropathy, they did not review this disorder, stating that studies providing evidence of its work-relatedness are currently lacking. However, earlier and subsequent articles and texts provide some evidence of the work-relatedness. Specifc work related risk factors common to the cubital tunnel syndrome appear to be aggravating motions consisting of repetitive and sudden elbow flexion, and repeated trauma or pressure to the elbow at the ulnar groove [Feldman et al., 1983; Herrington and Morse, 1995; Gordon, 1995]. Job tasks associated with cubital tunnel syndrome include shoveling, hammering, lifting, manipulating handles of boring and punching machines, leaning on the elbow at a desk or work bench, working in tight places, digging, and use of hand saws or large power machinery [Feldman et al., 1983; Gordon, 1995; Blair, 1995].
Anatomy and Pathology
The ulnar nerve originates from the inferior roots of the brachial plexus (C8-T1). Compressions of the nerve at given points along its course through the upper extremity give rise to the various nerve entrapment syndromes. While cubital tunnel is a general term used to describe localized entrapment of the ulnar nerve at the elbow, the site of entrapment of the ulnar nerve in the region of the elbow can occur in several locations including proximal to the elbow by the medial head of the triceps' "arcade of Struther's,'' at the elbow by the arcuate ligament, or in the mid-forearm by the flexor carpi ulnaris muscle. Precise localization of
entrapment is important if surgery is being contemplated [Hilburn, 1996].
Clinical Presentation
Depending upon the severity of the entrapment, typical symptoms of cubital tunnel syndrome include: (1) activityrelated numbness or paresthesias involving the 4th and 5th fingers; (2) pain in the medial aspect of the elbow and proximal forearm; (3) progressive inability to separate fingers, pick up small objects between the thumb and index finger; (4) loss of power grip and dexterity and, in severe cases, claw position of the ring and little fingers, hand fatigue and atrophy of the hypothenar and interosseous muscles [Idler, 1996; Feldman et al., 1983; Herrington and Morse, 1995; Blair, 1995]. As with carpal tunnel syndrome, symptoms of cubital tunnel syndrome are often associated with nocturnal awakening.
A variety of provocative tests have been suggested for use in diagnosing cubital tunnel syndrome. These include Tinel's sign (paresthesias in the fifth digit and medial half of the fourth digit when tapping over the ulnar nerve at the elbow), the elbow flexion test in which symptoms in digits 4 and/or 5 (paresthesias and/or numbness) develop following maximum flexion of the elbow with the forearm in supination and the wrist in neutral, and the pressure provocative test, in which pressure is applied proximal to the cubital tunnel with the elbow in 20 flexion and the forearm in supination [Novak et al., 1994].
Novak and colleagues [1994] evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of Tinel's sign over the cubital tunnel, the "pressure provocative test,'' and the elbow flexion test. The sensitivity and specificity of the Tinel's sign were 0.70 and 0.98, respectively. The sensitivity of the flexion test at 60 seconds was 0.75 and the specificity 0.99. The 60 second ressure test's sensitivity was 0.89, with a specificity of 0.98. A maneuver combining the elbow flexion test with maintaining local pressure over the cubital canal for 30 seconds, resulted in sensitivity=0.91, specificity=0.97, and ppv=0.93.
Tests of function in muscles innervated by the ulnar nerve may not always be impaired because of cross supply to these muscles by the median nerve. Clinical methods described to test the ulnar innervated intrinsic muscles of the hand include: abduction of the digits (with the IP joints in extension) against resistance; flexion of the fifth digit DIP joint against resistance; difficulty in adducting the fifth digit while it is in extension (Wartenberg's sign); inability to properly cross the index and middle fingers (Scott Earle test); and inability to pinch index and thumb tips together firmly without sharp flexion of the DIP joint (positive Froment's sign) [Idler, 1996]. The "late'' signs include wasting of the intrinsic muscle mass of the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscle, one of the intrinsic muscles best viewed in the space between the thumb and the second metacarpal bone.
Sensory testing over the ulnar nerve distribution should include the palmar and dorsal aspects of the fourth and fifth digit, comparing the affected and non-affected sides. Such testing can be accomplished using standardized (Semmes-Weinstein) monofilaments or vibratory testing, since light touch and vibration sense are the first affected in early stages of nerve entrapment [Idler, 1996].
A classification of causes of cubital tunnel syndrome is described by Tetro and Pichora [1996]. Of the classification systems devised for describing the severity of cubital tunnel syndrome, that of Dellon [1989] is the most comprehensive, incorporating progression of symptoms and clinical tests of motor and sensory ulnar nerve function.
Electrodiagnostic Testing
Electrodiagnostic testing including nerve conduction velocity and electromyography should be performed whenever an entrapment neuropathy is suspected, but the severity of the clinical findings may not always correlate with the results of such testing. In addition, the proper technique and interpretation by the specialists performing these tests is of paramount importance for the evaluating physician who must decide when to refer a patient for surgery. Blair [1995] writes "the definition of cubital syndrome on the basis of absolute electrophysiologic values is of limited merit, as normal and abnormal values are technique and laboratory dependent".
The reader is referred to a recent comprehensive review, the American Association of Electrodiagnostic Medicine's "Practice Parameter for Electrodiagnostic Studies in Ulnar Neuropathy at the Elbow" [AAEM, 1999]. This document attempts to standardize the methodology and technique for performing electrodiagnostic testing of the ulnar nerve at the elbow. Its four-page summary is a useful guide in assessing the quality of electrodiagnostic testing for the clinician who refers a patient. Two of the three AAEM practice standards listed are: limb temperatures should be maintained and noted within a reference range (34 C is most commonly used), and, elbow position should be the same during electrodiagnostic stimulation and measurement of the nerve and also when comparing the patient's results with the normal values adopted by the testing laboratory. The AAEM suggests moderate elbow flexion of 70-90 from horizontal but recognizes that studies have used different elbow flexion/extension angles [AAEM, 1999]. The information provided by electrodiagnostic testing
of the ulnar nerve can help:
1. confirm injury to the nerve;
2. gauge the severity of nerve injury;
3. locate the site(s) of injury along the course of the nerve.
Electrodiagnostic studies are useful in documenting mild to marked entrapment of the ulnar nerve in the cubital tunnel. However, the values of electrodiagnostic tests must be interpreted in the clinical context, for 65% of the population may have 10±20 m/second slowing across the elbow [Blair, 1995]. Very mild cubital tunnel syndrome is a clinical diagnosis based on practitioner experience [Blair, 1995]. Comparison of the affected and unaffected limbs (if the condition is not bilateral) could also prove useful for reaching an accurate diagnosis. A review paper by Hilburn [1996] provides an excellent overview of the use of electrodiagnostic studies in the diagnosis of cubital tunnel syndrome as does a textbook by Preston and Shapiro [1998]. Once it is clear that the ulnar nerve is probably involved in the injury process, referral to an experienced specialist in electrophysiologic testing is warranted for the reasons listed above. In addition, the specialist can select, from among the various nerve conduction testing parameters available, those appropriate for the patient.
Treatment
The treatment of cubital tunnel syndrome is generally based on assessment of (1) the severity of symptoms and sensory or motor impairment upon presentation of the patient and (2) the duration of symptoms and nerve function impairment. In mild or moderate cubital tunnel syndrome a minimum of six months of non-surgical, conservative (medical) management is suggested before considering surgery [Idler, 1996]. Surgical intervention is generally recommended for severe sensory or motor impairment [Idler, 1996; Tetro and Pichora, 1996]. However, there is less agreement in the literature on the best method of initial treatment for moderate cubital tunnel syndrome, based on less successful outcomes compared to mild neuropathy. Medical monitoring of patients at 1±3 month intervals is warranted, which should include assessment of symptoms, signs of nerve impairment and compliance with treatment recommendations. If no improvement is seen or the clinical condition deteriorates, electrodiagnostic retesting is recommended by most authors and operative intervention should be considered [Tetro and Pichora, 1996].
Non-surgical management of the cubital tunnel syndrome should include modification of inciting exposures and activities at work and at home. Extreme elbow flexion should be avoided at home and at work. Patients frequently benefit from use of an elbow splint. The elbow should be splinted in elbow extension which limits flexion to no greater than 45 but does not apply direct pressure to the nerve [Sailer, 1996]. Splints should be used at night even in the absence of nighttime paresthesias noted upon awakening. During the day, elbow pads may be used to protect the ulnar nerve within the ulnar groove from direct pressure or trauma. Use of elbow padding and night splinting is suggested for a trial of at least three months. In severe cases, daytime splinting may be tried [Idler, 1996]. Additionally, for more chronic and severe cases of cubital tunnel syndrome, physical or occupational hand therapy should be performed.
Authors differ over the time from the onset of symptoms for which adequate conservative measures are to be tried before surgery should be considered in patients who present with mild or moderate cubital tunnel syndrome, but it ranges from six months [Idler, 1996] to one year [Tetro and Pichora, 1996]. Dellon et al. [1993] have found that a high percentage (89%) of patients with "mild, intermittent disease were successfully treated nonoperatively, whereas only 38% of those with moderate disease(persistent paresthesias, muscle weakness, abnormal two-point discrimination [less than 10 mm] were successfully managed conservatively." Urbaniak [1991] recommends a trial of conservative measures in patients with the following findings: "(1) early symptoms, intermittent episodes; (2) mild paresthesias without significant pain; (3) minimal physical findings (slight numbness), with normal motor examination.'' He suggests operative exploration without a trial of conservative treatment in those with "severe findings of weakness, decreased two-point discrimination, and electromyographic evidence of denervation potentials..."[Tetro and Pichora, 1996].
The medical literature varies on the most appropriate operative procedure for the different subtypes of cubital tunnel syndrome. Basically, releasing constrictions at all affected sites along the nerve in the elbow region is one surgical option (simple decompression), and changing the position of the nerve to the front of the elbow (anterior transposition) is the second major category of operation, with variations used within each category. Needless to say, there is debate over the best operative procedure to be used, and the reader can refer to the reference article by Tetro and Pichora for a discussion of the different operative procedures.
It is important to modify ergonomic risk factors associated with ulnar nerve entrapment flexion (greater than 45), repetitive elbow flexion, and forceful exertions of the wrist, forearm or elbow.
星期一, 2月 28, 2005
敦南兒童館小講堂：在過與不及之間‧‧‧
地點/敦南兒童館 小教室
主講.演出/蔡宜容(英國瑞汀大學兒童文學碩士)
什麼是青少年文本？
主角是青少年，讀者是青少年，或者你我青少年時期曾經讀過的作品？
3/04(五) 比愛情更堅固
‧福爾摩斯與華生
‧ 蝙蝠俠與羅賓(卡漫&電影)
‧ 西洋古董洋菓子店(卡漫&日劇)
3/11(五) 比親情更複雜
‧ 晚安，湯姆先生/嗑藥/小婦人
‧ 變奏家族(漫‧北條司)
‧ 流氓蛋糕店(漫‧漥之內英策)
3/18(五) 比童話更深沉
‧ 格林童話/安徒生&王爾德童話
‧ 毒伯爵該隱(漫‧由貴香織)
3/25(五) 比純真更曖昧
‧ 洛麗泰(納布可夫)
‧ 愛麗絲夢遊仙境(路易絲‧卡洛)
‧ 終極追殺令(電影‧盧貝松)
‧ 水手服與機關槍(赤川次郎&角川電影聯手打造萬歲少女)
地點/敦南兒童館 小教室
主講.演出/蔡宜容(英國瑞汀大學兒童文學碩士)
什麼是青少年文本？
主角是青少年，讀者是青少年，或者你我青少年時期曾經讀過的作品？
3/04(五) 比愛情更堅固
‧福爾摩斯與華生
‧ 蝙蝠俠與羅賓(卡漫&電影)
‧ 西洋古董洋菓子店(卡漫&日劇)
3/11(五) 比親情更複雜
‧ 晚安，湯姆先生/嗑藥/小婦人
‧ 變奏家族(漫‧北條司)
‧ 流氓蛋糕店(漫‧漥之內英策)
3/18(五) 比童話更深沉
‧ 格林童話/安徒生&王爾德童話
‧ 毒伯爵該隱(漫‧由貴香織)
3/25(五) 比純真更曖昧
‧ 洛麗泰(納布可夫)
‧ 愛麗絲夢遊仙境(路易絲‧卡洛)
‧ 終極追殺令(電影‧盧貝松)
‧ 水手服與機關槍(赤川次郎&角川電影聯手打造萬歲少女)
星期四, 2月 03, 2005
スチームボーイ
僕は、未来を、あきらめない。
比起Howl's moving castle, 個人更期待大友克洋的Steam Boy.
【阿基拉】動畫教父 大友克洋Katsuhiro Otomo歷時八年，全力打造 古典科幻冒險史詩
耗資24億日幣，打造影史最昂貴動畫長片，氣勢恢弘，遠勝【霍爾的移動城堡】
2004年威尼斯影展閉幕片
「人類的福音」？抑或「惡魔的渴望」？蒸氣男孩的冒險篇章
十九世紀中葉，維多利亞時代的大英帝國，工業革命方興未艾，理性與進步似乎凌駕一切，標誌了人類文明昂首進步的無限可能。就在第一次萬國博覽會揭幕前夕，住在倫敦的13歲少年雷‧史汀（Ray Stim）突然收到發明家祖父從美國寄來，稱之為「蒸氣球」（Steam Ball）的神秘動力裝置。「蒸氣球」依據全新機械理論所設計，可以產生一種劃時代的龐大能源，足以供應整個國家所需。同時間，英國情報組織，以及一個名為奧哈拉基金會（Ohara Foundation）的黑暗組織，都覬覦「蒸氣球」所蘊含的驚人力量，準備策動陰謀，從雷的手中加以奪取。一場壯大的復古科幻冒險，就在各種複雜的爭逐角力間磅礡登場……
大友克洋&【阿基拉 】AKIRA 末世預言的科幻經典
1988年，來自東瀛的大友克洋以【阿基拉】一片震撼世界影壇！這部以二十一世紀新東京毀滅預言為主題的科幻動畫，以有別於宮崎駿的超限寫實筆調，以及【銀翼殺手】般深沈詭異的哲學思考、迷離頹廢的美術風格，一舉改寫動畫電影的想像疆界，也奠定了大友氏無可動搖的教父級地位，影響之廣，連之後延燒全球的【駭客任務】三部曲導演 華喬斯基兄弟也肯定該片在科幻類型上無可比擬的劃時代意義。
這部耗資一億日圓（當時已屬天價）的電影，在美國上映時曾創下首週票房冠軍的光榮記錄，也讓一向以迪士尼橫掃全球的美國動畫產業，見識到日本同業在技術上的精密紮實與匠心。而【阿基拉】最具革命性的創舉，就在於片中配音與嘴型同步，這在宮崎駿之前是見不到的。暌違16年後，讓億萬影迷望穿秋水的【蒸氣男孩】，將再次以融合復古與幻想的全新風格，掀起一場前所未有的壯闊體驗。
《蒸氣男孩 Steamboy》電影預售票
上映時間：2005年3月18日晚場起上映
上映地點：台北首輪上映戲院
票價：單張全票250元。雙人套票2張380元 (另加贈〝蒸氣男孩〞原文海報乙張，自2月5日起憑2張預售票至國家戲劇院或音樂廳售票口換取)
僕は、未来を、あきらめない。
比起Howl's moving castle, 個人更期待大友克洋的Steam Boy.
【阿基拉】動畫教父 大友克洋Katsuhiro Otomo歷時八年，全力打造 古典科幻冒險史詩
耗資24億日幣，打造影史最昂貴動畫長片，氣勢恢弘，遠勝【霍爾的移動城堡】
2004年威尼斯影展閉幕片
「人類的福音」？抑或「惡魔的渴望」？蒸氣男孩的冒險篇章
十九世紀中葉，維多利亞時代的大英帝國，工業革命方興未艾，理性與進步似乎凌駕一切，標誌了人類文明昂首進步的無限可能。就在第一次萬國博覽會揭幕前夕，住在倫敦的13歲少年雷‧史汀（Ray Stim）突然收到發明家祖父從美國寄來，稱之為「蒸氣球」（Steam Ball）的神秘動力裝置。「蒸氣球」依據全新機械理論所設計，可以產生一種劃時代的龐大能源，足以供應整個國家所需。同時間，英國情報組織，以及一個名為奧哈拉基金會（Ohara Foundation）的黑暗組織，都覬覦「蒸氣球」所蘊含的驚人力量，準備策動陰謀，從雷的手中加以奪取。一場壯大的復古科幻冒險，就在各種複雜的爭逐角力間磅礡登場……
大友克洋&【阿基拉 】AKIRA 末世預言的科幻經典
1988年，來自東瀛的大友克洋以【阿基拉】一片震撼世界影壇！這部以二十一世紀新東京毀滅預言為主題的科幻動畫，以有別於宮崎駿的超限寫實筆調，以及【銀翼殺手】般深沈詭異的哲學思考、迷離頹廢的美術風格，一舉改寫動畫電影的想像疆界，也奠定了大友氏無可動搖的教父級地位，影響之廣，連之後延燒全球的【駭客任務】三部曲導演 華喬斯基兄弟也肯定該片在科幻類型上無可比擬的劃時代意義。
這部耗資一億日圓（當時已屬天價）的電影，在美國上映時曾創下首週票房冠軍的光榮記錄，也讓一向以迪士尼橫掃全球的美國動畫產業，見識到日本同業在技術上的精密紮實與匠心。而【阿基拉】最具革命性的創舉，就在於片中配音與嘴型同步，這在宮崎駿之前是見不到的。暌違16年後，讓億萬影迷望穿秋水的【蒸氣男孩】，將再次以融合復古與幻想的全新風格，掀起一場前所未有的壯闊體驗。
《蒸氣男孩 Steamboy》電影預售票
上映時間：2005年3月18日晚場起上映
上映地點：台北首輪上映戲院
票價：單張全票250元。雙人套票2張380元 (另加贈〝蒸氣男孩〞原文海報乙張，自2月5日起憑2張預售票至國家戲劇院或音樂廳售票口換取)
星期二, 2月 01, 2005
So What Exactly Is Fantasy?
Vol II, No. 1 (February, 2005) by Cheryl Morgan
Cheryl Morgan is the editor of the online science fiction and
fantasy review magazine Emerald City. Ms. Morgan and the magazine
have been nominated for Hugo awards and for a British Science Fiction
Association award. In 2004 Emerald City won the Hugo award for Best
Fanzine."Cheryl is also a regular contributor to Locus magazine. When
not writing she can normally be found at conventions, or saving up for
her next convention.
The thing that surprised me most about my last essay for IROSF was the level of emotional outrage caused by my expanding SFWA as “Science Fiction Writers of America.” Now of course that was the original name, which is why it is still abbreviated with just one F. But as a SFWA member myself I guess I should have known that these days it is “Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.”
Sadly that sort of thing doesn’t register with me. I’m one of those terrible people who tend to lump “science fiction” and “fantasy” all in the same bucket. It never occurs to me that the “World Science Fiction Convention” would try to ban fantasy fans from becoming members, and of course it never has, but I still regularly meet people who are absolutely convinced that it does. And my forgetting that vital little “and Fantasy” from the full name of SFWA engendered the sort of reaction you might get if I carelessly described the USA as a British colony, or Pakistan as part of India.
I can see at least two possible reasons why I might have got people so upset. The first is that some time back in the dim and distant past some people in SFWA might have tried to bar fantasy writers from membership (though quite what they’d be doing banning the likes of Fritz Leiber and Roger Zelazny is a mystery to me). Certainly the SFWA web site says that the “and Fantasy” was added as an important signal to people who felt that they might not be welcome. It may also be the case that some of the fantasy-writing members of SFWA believe that their craft is special and unique and does not deserve to be hidden under the catchall term of “science fiction”. After all, a lot of fantasy has little or nothing to do with science, even though it generally appears on the “science fiction” shelves of bookstores. Terminology is important, and people get upset about it. Ultimately, however, I believe that attempts to draw a firm dividing line between science fiction and fantasy are not only doomed to failure but are foolish. Here’s why.
Let’s start right back at the beginning. When Homer was recounting The Iliad to rapt audiences in ancient Greece no one worried about whether his stories were fantastical or mimetic. They probably didn’t even worry very much about whether the events he described were true or fictional. People accepted that the Trojan War had happened, and that the Gods existed. If Homer embellished a little on the truth to produce a better story, well who cared, except of course the lord paying the bard’s keep that night.
When Japanese court women started writing novels (monogatari) back in the 11th Century I am pretty sure that they would have written about spirits. It would have been expected. Shinto is an animistic religion. Even as far forward as the 16th Century, when Shakespeare put witches in Macbeth and fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, no one buried their heads in their hands in horror and raved about how poor, foolish Will was ruining his reputation by turning his back on the purity of historical plays and instead was writing—shock! horror!—fantasy.
Civilization, however, moved on, and by the time that Samuel Richardson helped the Western world catch up with Japanese culture there was a distinct whiff of science in the air. Things were either real, or they weren’t. Richardson’s novels were entirely about ordinary people facing ordinary moral problems. And when Mary Shelly came to write Frankenstein, it was generally understood that there were two kinds of books that a novelist might write. Either one based one’s story on the real world, or one wrote a book in which one “phantsied” things that did not really exist. Or rather, of course, things that could not exist, for wasn’t much of fiction actually about people that didn’t really exist, or people that did exist doing things they never actually did? When you think about it, the distinction isn’t really that watertight. Whateve; to a reader of Ms. Shelley’s day Frankenstein was a fantasy.
And so at last we come to the late 19th Century and the flowering of science fiction as we know it. We have Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Wells referred to his famous early works as “scientific romances”. This might have been a polite nod to M. Verne, as “roman” is the French word for novel and “romance” is still occasionally used in (British) English to mean a novel rather than specifically a book about love. Generally the term “romance” is used for the more fanciful type of novel, because every Briton is brought up to believe that those Frenchies are not well grounded in things like common sense and practicality. Later in his career, when Wells was attempting to establish himself as a serious novelist, he got quite angry with those fans who wanted him to turn out more books about Martians and time machines. Wells was going to prove that he could write proper books, and so he did, although of course few people remember them today.
Then there was the famous spat between Wells and Henry James. James was big on the idea of the novel as an exploration of the human psyche. That was, after all, what Richardson had done. Wells believed that the remit of the novel was much broader. He wanted to write about social relations and politics. After all, wasn’t that what people like Dickens and Trollope had done? And somehow out of this we have, at least in the UK, ended up with a ridiculous divide in the literary establishment between “real novels”, which are never about anything except the real world, and “populist crap”, which is a convenient short-hand term for science fiction, fantasy, horror, mysteries, romance, westerns and anything else that the guardians of literary excellence happen to turn their noses up at. And the symbolic champion of the “real novel” is Henry James, a man who is famous for writing (wait for it. . . ) ghost stories. Well, that’s all very clear isn’t it?
By the late 19th Century, however, there was a new idea in the literary firmament, one that made it easier to distinguish between “real novels” and “populist crap”. That idea was genre. Now I’m not a big fan of genre myself. The whole idea of genre is that the novelist should leave her imagination at the door and instead write to a set of rules, a formula.(1) The best known examples come from the romance industry where aspiring “novelists” wishing to write for the big publishing houses are actually given a set of rules as to when the first kiss should occur, in which chapter the hero should propose marriage, and so on. Science fiction and fantasy publishers are by no means as prescriptive but, as Diana Wynne Jones showed with her fabulous Tough Guide to Fantasy Land, many fantasy writers have voluntarily confined themselves to a formula nonetheless. Doubtless the same could be said of certain subdivisions of SF, particularly those with TV or film tie-ins.
Genre, then, is a form of fossilization of the imagination, but it is fossilization with a purpose. It is a marketing tool, a means by which eager customers can find exactly the sort of book they are looking for. It is, if you like, the McDonalds of the publishing industry. No matter where you are in the world, if you walk into a bookstore and see a book whose cover shows a girl in a chain mail bikini riding a dragon and waving a sword you will know exactly what to expect. If instead the girl is wearing a long, white dress and is snuggling up to a unicorn in a flower-strewn woodland glade then a subtly different type of book is on offer. It doesn’t really matter whose name is on the cover. Authors, however, bless their imaginative little hearts, generally refuse to be tied down. And unless they are writing for one of those publishers that insists on following the formula they quite often get away with some rather clever subversion. Those of you who have ever been to a convention panel on the difference between fantasy and science fiction can skip the next two paragraphs, because the examples I am going to give are much over-used, but they do make the point.
Consider, if you will, a series of books in which space travelers land on an alien planet and use genetic engineering to help mould some of the local fauna to their requirements. Although they eventually lose most of their technological skills, they continue to use logic and ordinary human bravery to combat whatever menaces come their way. Is that science fiction or fantasy? Yep, you got it in one. That was Anne McCaffrey’s Dragon Riders of Pern series, one of the most famous sets of “fantasy” books ever written.
Now, consider instead a story in which an evil sorcerer has taken over the empire and the young prince has been forced into hiding, not even knowing who he really is. Thanks to the help of a set of loyal, if somewhat strange, companions, a sword with strange powers, and a wizened old guru, he succeeds against all odds and defeats the bad guys, because of course it is right that he should do so. Got it? Yes, quite right, that was Star Wars, possibly the most famous “science fiction” movie ever made.
One of the obvious problems with genre, then, is that it is rather easily subverted. Indeed, any author worth her salt should want to subvert it. Writing novels should be about using your imagination, not about following a formula. (Yes, OK, I know that there are those writing courses that say that novels are all about making a living and if you want to get published you have to follow the formula. But IROSF is a serious literary magazine and we have pretensions to creativity here.) But the other problem with genre is that the rules are very hard to apply, even though they seem simple.
Take the obvious thing about magic. You would have thought that it would be easy to decide whether a book was fantasy or not simply by whether or not magical things happened during the story. But you can’t. And one of the reasons that you can’t is that the idiotic divide between “real novels” and “populist crap” really only applies in the English-speaking world. And the white English-speaking world at that. If you look at novels written in Spanish or Italian or Finnish or Russian (to name but a few) you find quite a lot of big-name writers putting magic into their books. If you read books in English by people from India or the Caribbean they too have magic in them. Salman Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus, is an out-and-out fantasy. It is hard to find these days, probably because his publishers don’t want to admit that he wrote “that stuff”, but he did. The bottom line is that if people have won Nobel prizes for literature for writing books with magic in them, then those books can’t be “populist crap”, they must be “real novels”. Which means that they must be “magic realism”, not “fantasy”. Got that? Clear as mud, isn’t it.
Oh, and just in case you think that argument only applies to fantasy, stop right there and go out and read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. That book was shortlisted for the UK’s prestigious Booker Prize in 2004. It consists of six inter-woven narratives, two of which take place very clearly in the future. One of them features a character who is a clone, and the other is set in a post-apocalyptic world. But do any of the mainstream critics who rave about the book describe this as “science fiction”? Dear me no, it is serious literature. A science fiction novel would never get shortlisted for the Booker Prize. (And come to think of it, you quite possibly won’t find Jurassic Park in the science fiction section of your bookstore either. It is too popular to get hidden away in the ghetto.)
And this is how I found myself stuck in a London restaurant seated next to a guy who insisted that “fantasy” only meant books with elves and dragons and wizards in them. Extending the definition of fantasy, he told me, to include anything with magic in it, was a shameful attempt on my part to give spurious and undeserved legitimacy to the dreadful crap that I read. If I had given him a Jeff Vandermeer novel to read he would have told me that it wasn’t fantasy, it was too good. But if I had given him a Jeff Vandermeer novel and had first told him that Jeff was a past winner of the World Fantasy Award he would have told me that he didn’t want to waste his time reading that crap.
And what exactly is “that crap” anyway? Ask people to name a famous fantasy author and there is a good chance that they will very quickly come up with three names: J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, and Terry Pratchett. They all write that stuff with elves and dragons and wizards, right? It is all the same.
Well, let’s think about that. Tolkien wrote books set entirely in an imaginary world. Sure there were elves and dragons and wizards, but it would be entirely legitimate to say that they were not real. Tolkien didn’t try to place them in our world. He made up a world in which such things could exist, but it was all a story, albeit a story with a message for us. Rowling, on the other hand, has her magicians and magical creatures very firmly located in our world. Magic does exist, she says. And she pokes fun at the ignorant muggles who don’t understand this. That is a very different approach to using magic in a novel. At first sight you might think that Pratchett is doing the same sort of thing as Tolkien. He too has created an imaginary world. But whereas Tolkien took great pains to make his imaginary world seem real when you were inside it, Pratchett deliberately makes his world absurd. And once you have got into his books you realize that he has done this for a purpose. It is all a joke. The imaginary world is not there to be taken seriously, it is there to allow Pratchett to poke fun at politicians, and religion, at the military, at the media, and at anyone else he thinks needs taking down a peg or two.
So there we have three very different approaches to writing “fantasy” and the relation of the fantastic elements of the story to the real ones. In one set of books the magic is claimed to be real and exist in our world, in another it is real but only within the confines of an imaginary world, and in the third it is a deliberate joke, a vehicle for satire. Three of the most famous fantasy writers in the world, and they are not writing the same thing at all.
We should also note in passing that not all science fiction is the same. One of the most recent literary movements to grace the SF scene is something called Mundane SF. The people involved in this movement believe that SF has become much too fanciful. Everyone knows that if there is life on Mars then it is limited to tiny bacteria. Everyone knows that you can’t travel faster than light. Uploading human minds into computers is an absurd idea. And even the simplest forms of nanotechnology are indistinguishable from magic. No, say the Mundane SF folks, science fiction should be firmly rooted in real science, it should limit its subject matter to what we know is possible. Everything else is just fantasy.
This is all getting rather complicated. But SF and fantasy are commonly studied in universities these days. Do those clever literary professors have any ideas of offer? Can they tell us what fantasy is? Sadly most of them are not much help. Part of being a literary academic is that you tend to study certain writers in great detail. So we might find some professor who knows everything about everything that the Inklings wrote, but who has never even heard of Tad Williams, and only knows of Guy Gavriel Kay because of the work he did on Tolkien’s back catalog. Such people tend to come up with definitions of fantasy that are barely recognizable to those of us who actually read a lot of fantasy. What we need is an academic with a breadth of vision.
Well actually what we need is an academic who is also one of the world’s leading reviewers of SF&F books. Gary K. Wolfe, the Locus reviewer, happens to fit the bill, and he has come up with some interesting ideas that revolve around the mode in which a book is written rather than the tropes that the stories use. What does that mean? Well, let’s go back to our examples. A science fiction book, by Wolfe’s classification, is one that takes a logical, scientific approach to the plot. How does that affect Anne McCaffrey? So Pern is threatened by Thread. But Thread is a natural phenomenon. Its appearance in the skies of Pern is explained by studying astronomy. And if Lessa, F’lar and co. are the people who defeat it, that is because they are unusually intelligent, determined and brave, not because they are of royal birth.
In contrast, Wolfe argues, a fantasy story is one in which the threat to the heroes is somehow morally wrong. It isn’t just that there are enemies; it is that they are Evil. And in general they can only be overcome by someone who is fated to do so. Often that person has to be of royal birth, although this isn’t essential. Some fantasies require that the hero be particularly innocent (Parsival being the classic example). But the point is that the heroes don’t succeed because they work things out—indeed doing so is often shown to be totally impossible—they do so because they were meant to do so. The Grail myth is a classic example of this. Gawain fails, Lancelot fails, all of the best knights of the Round Table have no chance at all, because only one man is destined to complete the quest.
Take the end of The Lord of the Rings, for example. For all of his effort and heroism, when Frodo finally gets to Mount Doom he finds himself unable to destroy the Ring. In the end, Good only triumphs because Gollum bites Frodo’s finger off, and in his excitement falls into the volcano. Sure it took great heroism for Frodo and Sam to get to Mount Doom in the first place. But Tolkien can’t allow the Hobbits to succeed in their own right. He is writing a fantasy and he has to make a moral point, presumably one about evil carrying the seeds of its own destruction.
Personally I rather like Wolfe’s classification. It makes a lot more sense to me than relying on tropes. But it isn’t everyone’s cup to tea. We are back with Star Wars again. There is no way that Han Solo could ever have done what Luke Skywalker did. It wasn’t because he wasn’t skilled or brave enough. He just wasn’t the right hero. Heck, George Lucas openly admits that the whole plot was based on the ideas about hero tales developed by the famous mythologist, Joseph Campbell. But you try telling most people that Star Wars isn’t science fiction. It has space ships in it, for heaven’s sake. And Wookies and Ewoks are aliens whereas Elves and Dwarves are, well, you know, magical. Not the same things at all. Dear me no.
So I say to myself, why bother? Why get so hot under the collar about what “fantasy” is, or what “science fiction” is? It is hard enough to define in the first place. And if you come up with a definition there’s a good chance that most people won’t agree with it. Besides, both science fiction and fantasy are all about imaginative writing. And if your writer is imaginative then there is a good chance that she will want to blur the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy anyway. OK, so the marketing people at the publishers will want to have their little boxes. But it is our job to break out of boxes, not to invent new ones in which we can confine ourselves. Is it fantasy? Is it science fiction? Clearly there are a lot of people out there who care deeply about this issue, and these things are fun to argue. But given the difficulty of coming to a conclusion, and the fact that the best stories are generally those that are hardest to pigeonhole, you have to wonder how important the distinction really is and why we get so agitated about it. Isn’t the quality of the story rather more important than whether the characters are wielding ray guns or swords?
Footnotes
1. OK, this isn’t a usual definition of genre, but it is the only one that works for me. I’ll probably write more about this later, but in the meantime readers are referred to my “Searching for Copernicus”essays in Emerald City #91 and #92 and in particular the essay by Gary K. Wolfe that I talk about in them. Those essays also talk a lot more about definitions of “SF” and “fantasy”.
Vol II, No. 1 (February, 2005) by Cheryl Morgan
Cheryl Morgan is the editor of the online science fiction and
fantasy review magazine Emerald City. Ms. Morgan and the magazine
have been nominated for Hugo awards and for a British Science Fiction
Association award. In 2004 Emerald City won the Hugo award for Best
Fanzine."Cheryl is also a regular contributor to Locus magazine. When
not writing she can normally be found at conventions, or saving up for
her next convention.
The thing that surprised me most about my last essay for IROSF was the level of emotional outrage caused by my expanding SFWA as “Science Fiction Writers of America.” Now of course that was the original name, which is why it is still abbreviated with just one F. But as a SFWA member myself I guess I should have known that these days it is “Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.”
Sadly that sort of thing doesn’t register with me. I’m one of those terrible people who tend to lump “science fiction” and “fantasy” all in the same bucket. It never occurs to me that the “World Science Fiction Convention” would try to ban fantasy fans from becoming members, and of course it never has, but I still regularly meet people who are absolutely convinced that it does. And my forgetting that vital little “and Fantasy” from the full name of SFWA engendered the sort of reaction you might get if I carelessly described the USA as a British colony, or Pakistan as part of India.
I can see at least two possible reasons why I might have got people so upset. The first is that some time back in the dim and distant past some people in SFWA might have tried to bar fantasy writers from membership (though quite what they’d be doing banning the likes of Fritz Leiber and Roger Zelazny is a mystery to me). Certainly the SFWA web site says that the “and Fantasy” was added as an important signal to people who felt that they might not be welcome. It may also be the case that some of the fantasy-writing members of SFWA believe that their craft is special and unique and does not deserve to be hidden under the catchall term of “science fiction”. After all, a lot of fantasy has little or nothing to do with science, even though it generally appears on the “science fiction” shelves of bookstores. Terminology is important, and people get upset about it. Ultimately, however, I believe that attempts to draw a firm dividing line between science fiction and fantasy are not only doomed to failure but are foolish. Here’s why.
Let’s start right back at the beginning. When Homer was recounting The Iliad to rapt audiences in ancient Greece no one worried about whether his stories were fantastical or mimetic. They probably didn’t even worry very much about whether the events he described were true or fictional. People accepted that the Trojan War had happened, and that the Gods existed. If Homer embellished a little on the truth to produce a better story, well who cared, except of course the lord paying the bard’s keep that night.
When Japanese court women started writing novels (monogatari) back in the 11th Century I am pretty sure that they would have written about spirits. It would have been expected. Shinto is an animistic religion. Even as far forward as the 16th Century, when Shakespeare put witches in Macbeth and fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, no one buried their heads in their hands in horror and raved about how poor, foolish Will was ruining his reputation by turning his back on the purity of historical plays and instead was writing—shock! horror!—fantasy.
Civilization, however, moved on, and by the time that Samuel Richardson helped the Western world catch up with Japanese culture there was a distinct whiff of science in the air. Things were either real, or they weren’t. Richardson’s novels were entirely about ordinary people facing ordinary moral problems. And when Mary Shelly came to write Frankenstein, it was generally understood that there were two kinds of books that a novelist might write. Either one based one’s story on the real world, or one wrote a book in which one “phantsied” things that did not really exist. Or rather, of course, things that could not exist, for wasn’t much of fiction actually about people that didn’t really exist, or people that did exist doing things they never actually did? When you think about it, the distinction isn’t really that watertight. Whateve; to a reader of Ms. Shelley’s day Frankenstein was a fantasy.
And so at last we come to the late 19th Century and the flowering of science fiction as we know it. We have Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Wells referred to his famous early works as “scientific romances”. This might have been a polite nod to M. Verne, as “roman” is the French word for novel and “romance” is still occasionally used in (British) English to mean a novel rather than specifically a book about love. Generally the term “romance” is used for the more fanciful type of novel, because every Briton is brought up to believe that those Frenchies are not well grounded in things like common sense and practicality. Later in his career, when Wells was attempting to establish himself as a serious novelist, he got quite angry with those fans who wanted him to turn out more books about Martians and time machines. Wells was going to prove that he could write proper books, and so he did, although of course few people remember them today.
Then there was the famous spat between Wells and Henry James. James was big on the idea of the novel as an exploration of the human psyche. That was, after all, what Richardson had done. Wells believed that the remit of the novel was much broader. He wanted to write about social relations and politics. After all, wasn’t that what people like Dickens and Trollope had done? And somehow out of this we have, at least in the UK, ended up with a ridiculous divide in the literary establishment between “real novels”, which are never about anything except the real world, and “populist crap”, which is a convenient short-hand term for science fiction, fantasy, horror, mysteries, romance, westerns and anything else that the guardians of literary excellence happen to turn their noses up at. And the symbolic champion of the “real novel” is Henry James, a man who is famous for writing (wait for it. . . ) ghost stories. Well, that’s all very clear isn’t it?
By the late 19th Century, however, there was a new idea in the literary firmament, one that made it easier to distinguish between “real novels” and “populist crap”. That idea was genre. Now I’m not a big fan of genre myself. The whole idea of genre is that the novelist should leave her imagination at the door and instead write to a set of rules, a formula.(1) The best known examples come from the romance industry where aspiring “novelists” wishing to write for the big publishing houses are actually given a set of rules as to when the first kiss should occur, in which chapter the hero should propose marriage, and so on. Science fiction and fantasy publishers are by no means as prescriptive but, as Diana Wynne Jones showed with her fabulous Tough Guide to Fantasy Land, many fantasy writers have voluntarily confined themselves to a formula nonetheless. Doubtless the same could be said of certain subdivisions of SF, particularly those with TV or film tie-ins.
Genre, then, is a form of fossilization of the imagination, but it is fossilization with a purpose. It is a marketing tool, a means by which eager customers can find exactly the sort of book they are looking for. It is, if you like, the McDonalds of the publishing industry. No matter where you are in the world, if you walk into a bookstore and see a book whose cover shows a girl in a chain mail bikini riding a dragon and waving a sword you will know exactly what to expect. If instead the girl is wearing a long, white dress and is snuggling up to a unicorn in a flower-strewn woodland glade then a subtly different type of book is on offer. It doesn’t really matter whose name is on the cover. Authors, however, bless their imaginative little hearts, generally refuse to be tied down. And unless they are writing for one of those publishers that insists on following the formula they quite often get away with some rather clever subversion. Those of you who have ever been to a convention panel on the difference between fantasy and science fiction can skip the next two paragraphs, because the examples I am going to give are much over-used, but they do make the point.
Consider, if you will, a series of books in which space travelers land on an alien planet and use genetic engineering to help mould some of the local fauna to their requirements. Although they eventually lose most of their technological skills, they continue to use logic and ordinary human bravery to combat whatever menaces come their way. Is that science fiction or fantasy? Yep, you got it in one. That was Anne McCaffrey’s Dragon Riders of Pern series, one of the most famous sets of “fantasy” books ever written.
Now, consider instead a story in which an evil sorcerer has taken over the empire and the young prince has been forced into hiding, not even knowing who he really is. Thanks to the help of a set of loyal, if somewhat strange, companions, a sword with strange powers, and a wizened old guru, he succeeds against all odds and defeats the bad guys, because of course it is right that he should do so. Got it? Yes, quite right, that was Star Wars, possibly the most famous “science fiction” movie ever made.
One of the obvious problems with genre, then, is that it is rather easily subverted. Indeed, any author worth her salt should want to subvert it. Writing novels should be about using your imagination, not about following a formula. (Yes, OK, I know that there are those writing courses that say that novels are all about making a living and if you want to get published you have to follow the formula. But IROSF is a serious literary magazine and we have pretensions to creativity here.) But the other problem with genre is that the rules are very hard to apply, even though they seem simple.
Take the obvious thing about magic. You would have thought that it would be easy to decide whether a book was fantasy or not simply by whether or not magical things happened during the story. But you can’t. And one of the reasons that you can’t is that the idiotic divide between “real novels” and “populist crap” really only applies in the English-speaking world. And the white English-speaking world at that. If you look at novels written in Spanish or Italian or Finnish or Russian (to name but a few) you find quite a lot of big-name writers putting magic into their books. If you read books in English by people from India or the Caribbean they too have magic in them. Salman Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus, is an out-and-out fantasy. It is hard to find these days, probably because his publishers don’t want to admit that he wrote “that stuff”, but he did. The bottom line is that if people have won Nobel prizes for literature for writing books with magic in them, then those books can’t be “populist crap”, they must be “real novels”. Which means that they must be “magic realism”, not “fantasy”. Got that? Clear as mud, isn’t it.
Oh, and just in case you think that argument only applies to fantasy, stop right there and go out and read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. That book was shortlisted for the UK’s prestigious Booker Prize in 2004. It consists of six inter-woven narratives, two of which take place very clearly in the future. One of them features a character who is a clone, and the other is set in a post-apocalyptic world. But do any of the mainstream critics who rave about the book describe this as “science fiction”? Dear me no, it is serious literature. A science fiction novel would never get shortlisted for the Booker Prize. (And come to think of it, you quite possibly won’t find Jurassic Park in the science fiction section of your bookstore either. It is too popular to get hidden away in the ghetto.)
And this is how I found myself stuck in a London restaurant seated next to a guy who insisted that “fantasy” only meant books with elves and dragons and wizards in them. Extending the definition of fantasy, he told me, to include anything with magic in it, was a shameful attempt on my part to give spurious and undeserved legitimacy to the dreadful crap that I read. If I had given him a Jeff Vandermeer novel to read he would have told me that it wasn’t fantasy, it was too good. But if I had given him a Jeff Vandermeer novel and had first told him that Jeff was a past winner of the World Fantasy Award he would have told me that he didn’t want to waste his time reading that crap.
And what exactly is “that crap” anyway? Ask people to name a famous fantasy author and there is a good chance that they will very quickly come up with three names: J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, and Terry Pratchett. They all write that stuff with elves and dragons and wizards, right? It is all the same.
Well, let’s think about that. Tolkien wrote books set entirely in an imaginary world. Sure there were elves and dragons and wizards, but it would be entirely legitimate to say that they were not real. Tolkien didn’t try to place them in our world. He made up a world in which such things could exist, but it was all a story, albeit a story with a message for us. Rowling, on the other hand, has her magicians and magical creatures very firmly located in our world. Magic does exist, she says. And she pokes fun at the ignorant muggles who don’t understand this. That is a very different approach to using magic in a novel. At first sight you might think that Pratchett is doing the same sort of thing as Tolkien. He too has created an imaginary world. But whereas Tolkien took great pains to make his imaginary world seem real when you were inside it, Pratchett deliberately makes his world absurd. And once you have got into his books you realize that he has done this for a purpose. It is all a joke. The imaginary world is not there to be taken seriously, it is there to allow Pratchett to poke fun at politicians, and religion, at the military, at the media, and at anyone else he thinks needs taking down a peg or two.
So there we have three very different approaches to writing “fantasy” and the relation of the fantastic elements of the story to the real ones. In one set of books the magic is claimed to be real and exist in our world, in another it is real but only within the confines of an imaginary world, and in the third it is a deliberate joke, a vehicle for satire. Three of the most famous fantasy writers in the world, and they are not writing the same thing at all.
We should also note in passing that not all science fiction is the same. One of the most recent literary movements to grace the SF scene is something called Mundane SF. The people involved in this movement believe that SF has become much too fanciful. Everyone knows that if there is life on Mars then it is limited to tiny bacteria. Everyone knows that you can’t travel faster than light. Uploading human minds into computers is an absurd idea. And even the simplest forms of nanotechnology are indistinguishable from magic. No, say the Mundane SF folks, science fiction should be firmly rooted in real science, it should limit its subject matter to what we know is possible. Everything else is just fantasy.
This is all getting rather complicated. But SF and fantasy are commonly studied in universities these days. Do those clever literary professors have any ideas of offer? Can they tell us what fantasy is? Sadly most of them are not much help. Part of being a literary academic is that you tend to study certain writers in great detail. So we might find some professor who knows everything about everything that the Inklings wrote, but who has never even heard of Tad Williams, and only knows of Guy Gavriel Kay because of the work he did on Tolkien’s back catalog. Such people tend to come up with definitions of fantasy that are barely recognizable to those of us who actually read a lot of fantasy. What we need is an academic with a breadth of vision.
Well actually what we need is an academic who is also one of the world’s leading reviewers of SF&F books. Gary K. Wolfe, the Locus reviewer, happens to fit the bill, and he has come up with some interesting ideas that revolve around the mode in which a book is written rather than the tropes that the stories use. What does that mean? Well, let’s go back to our examples. A science fiction book, by Wolfe’s classification, is one that takes a logical, scientific approach to the plot. How does that affect Anne McCaffrey? So Pern is threatened by Thread. But Thread is a natural phenomenon. Its appearance in the skies of Pern is explained by studying astronomy. And if Lessa, F’lar and co. are the people who defeat it, that is because they are unusually intelligent, determined and brave, not because they are of royal birth.
In contrast, Wolfe argues, a fantasy story is one in which the threat to the heroes is somehow morally wrong. It isn’t just that there are enemies; it is that they are Evil. And in general they can only be overcome by someone who is fated to do so. Often that person has to be of royal birth, although this isn’t essential. Some fantasies require that the hero be particularly innocent (Parsival being the classic example). But the point is that the heroes don’t succeed because they work things out—indeed doing so is often shown to be totally impossible—they do so because they were meant to do so. The Grail myth is a classic example of this. Gawain fails, Lancelot fails, all of the best knights of the Round Table have no chance at all, because only one man is destined to complete the quest.
Take the end of The Lord of the Rings, for example. For all of his effort and heroism, when Frodo finally gets to Mount Doom he finds himself unable to destroy the Ring. In the end, Good only triumphs because Gollum bites Frodo’s finger off, and in his excitement falls into the volcano. Sure it took great heroism for Frodo and Sam to get to Mount Doom in the first place. But Tolkien can’t allow the Hobbits to succeed in their own right. He is writing a fantasy and he has to make a moral point, presumably one about evil carrying the seeds of its own destruction.
Personally I rather like Wolfe’s classification. It makes a lot more sense to me than relying on tropes. But it isn’t everyone’s cup to tea. We are back with Star Wars again. There is no way that Han Solo could ever have done what Luke Skywalker did. It wasn’t because he wasn’t skilled or brave enough. He just wasn’t the right hero. Heck, George Lucas openly admits that the whole plot was based on the ideas about hero tales developed by the famous mythologist, Joseph Campbell. But you try telling most people that Star Wars isn’t science fiction. It has space ships in it, for heaven’s sake. And Wookies and Ewoks are aliens whereas Elves and Dwarves are, well, you know, magical. Not the same things at all. Dear me no.
So I say to myself, why bother? Why get so hot under the collar about what “fantasy” is, or what “science fiction” is? It is hard enough to define in the first place. And if you come up with a definition there’s a good chance that most people won’t agree with it. Besides, both science fiction and fantasy are all about imaginative writing. And if your writer is imaginative then there is a good chance that she will want to blur the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy anyway. OK, so the marketing people at the publishers will want to have their little boxes. But it is our job to break out of boxes, not to invent new ones in which we can confine ourselves. Is it fantasy? Is it science fiction? Clearly there are a lot of people out there who care deeply about this issue, and these things are fun to argue. But given the difficulty of coming to a conclusion, and the fact that the best stories are generally those that are hardest to pigeonhole, you have to wonder how important the distinction really is and why we get so agitated about it. Isn’t the quality of the story rather more important than whether the characters are wielding ray guns or swords?
Footnotes
1. OK, this isn’t a usual definition of genre, but it is the only one that works for me. I’ll probably write more about this later, but in the meantime readers are referred to my “Searching for Copernicus”essays in Emerald City #91 and #92 and in particular the essay by Gary K. Wolfe that I talk about in them. Those essays also talk a lot more about definitions of “SF” and “fantasy”.
The Rhythm of Poetry
最近在看Angels and Demons時, 為了要解書中的字謎, 是有關於iambic pentameter,
左看右看不知道這個這是啥, 所以用google找了一下, 翻成"抑揚五音步", 再看了一下其他
資料, 原來這是英詩其中的一種格律. 才知道英詩也像唐詩一樣, 有平仄, 絕句/律詩等稱為
"格律"的東西.
英詩的格律就是由meter和feet組成, 這2者有點像樂曲中的拍子和小節的關係. 因為英語有
輕重音的分別, 所以詩句的韻律是由輕重音的不同組合來決定, 而輕重音的排列方式稱為音步
(feet), 而一行詩文中feet的數量則稱為meter. 英詩中常見的音步有下列幾種:
1.iambic, iambus 抑揚格, 輕重格
一輕讀音節後跟一個重讀音節即構成抑揚格, 是英詩的最重要也最常用的音步.
2.trochaic, trochee 揚抑格, 重輕格
由一個重讀音節後跟一個輕讀音節構成.
3.anapaestic, anapaest 抑抑揚格
由兩個輕音節後跟一個重音節組成.
4.dactylic, dactyl 揚揚抑格
由一個重音節後跟兩個輕讀音節組成.
5.spondaic, spondee 揚揚格
由連續兩個重音節組而成, 表現沉重、緩慢、困難的動作或情緒﹔
也用於表現感情的突然變化或強調語氣. 此音步主要與其他音步合用,
甚少有以揚揚格為主的詩.
由上述幾種不同的格式排列數量, 則稱為meter, 常見的有單音步(monometer),
二音步(dimeter), 三音步(trimeter), 四音步(tetrameter), 五音步(pentameter),
六音步(hexameter), 還有少見的七音步(heptameter)和八音步(octameter).
而不同的音步和音步數目就組成了英詩的格律. 例如anapaestic trimeter, trochaic dimeter
iambic pentameter, iambic hexameter...ect.
舉個例子,
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?(Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)
- / - / - / - / - /
標"/"屬於重音, "-"屬於輕音, 所以這首詩的韻律是"輕重輕重輕重輕重輕重", 5個iamb重複五次,
所以這個句子就是屬於iambic pentameter. 而不同韻律也有各自的主要用途, 如四音步、五音步
用於各種抒情詩、敘事詩. iambic pentameter是英詩中最常見的, 如sonnet通常是iambic pentameter.
最近在看Angels and Demons時, 為了要解書中的字謎, 是有關於iambic pentameter,
左看右看不知道這個這是啥, 所以用google找了一下, 翻成"抑揚五音步", 再看了一下其他
資料, 原來這是英詩其中的一種格律. 才知道英詩也像唐詩一樣, 有平仄, 絕句/律詩等稱為
"格律"的東西.
英詩的格律就是由meter和feet組成, 這2者有點像樂曲中的拍子和小節的關係. 因為英語有
輕重音的分別, 所以詩句的韻律是由輕重音的不同組合來決定, 而輕重音的排列方式稱為音步
(feet), 而一行詩文中feet的數量則稱為meter. 英詩中常見的音步有下列幾種:
1.iambic, iambus 抑揚格, 輕重格
一輕讀音節後跟一個重讀音節即構成抑揚格, 是英詩的最重要也最常用的音步.
2.trochaic, trochee 揚抑格, 重輕格
由一個重讀音節後跟一個輕讀音節構成.
3.anapaestic, anapaest 抑抑揚格
由兩個輕音節後跟一個重音節組成.
4.dactylic, dactyl 揚揚抑格
由一個重音節後跟兩個輕讀音節組成.
5.spondaic, spondee 揚揚格
由連續兩個重音節組而成, 表現沉重、緩慢、困難的動作或情緒﹔
也用於表現感情的突然變化或強調語氣. 此音步主要與其他音步合用,
甚少有以揚揚格為主的詩.
由上述幾種不同的格式排列數量, 則稱為meter, 常見的有單音步(monometer),
二音步(dimeter), 三音步(trimeter), 四音步(tetrameter), 五音步(pentameter),
六音步(hexameter), 還有少見的七音步(heptameter)和八音步(octameter).
而不同的音步和音步數目就組成了英詩的格律. 例如anapaestic trimeter, trochaic dimeter
iambic pentameter, iambic hexameter...ect.
舉個例子,
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?(Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)
- / - / - / - / - /
標"/"屬於重音, "-"屬於輕音, 所以這首詩的韻律是"輕重輕重輕重輕重輕重", 5個iamb重複五次,
所以這個句子就是屬於iambic pentameter. 而不同韻律也有各自的主要用途, 如四音步、五音步
用於各種抒情詩、敘事詩. iambic pentameter是英詩中最常見的, 如sonnet通常是iambic pentameter.
星期五, 1月 28, 2005
星期日, 1月 23, 2005
星期六, 1月 22, 2005
星期五, 1月 14, 2005
A good blog for reading fantasy
亂逛網路 逛到一個不錯的blog.
http://whiteg.dyndns.org/debby/
其中"閱讀奇幻"分類下有些很棒的評論文章, 包括派翠西亞‧麥奇利普(Patricia A. Mckillip)的魔幻之海(The Changeling Sea), 安潔拉‧卡特(Angela Carter)的魔幻玩具舖(Magic Toyshop), 羅賓‧荷布(Robin Hobb)的刺客三部曲(The Farseer trilogy: Assassin's Apprentice, Royal Assassin, and Assasin's Quest), 以撒‧艾西莫夫(Issac Asimov)的基地系列(The Foundation), 托爾金的精靈寶鑚(The Silmarillion)與魔戒...等等. 評論內容並非是全然的吹捧與歌功頌德, 而是清楚明白地指出這些作品吸引人的地方或是其俗濫之處, 有興趣的人可以去看看.
亂逛網路 逛到一個不錯的blog.
http://whiteg.dyndns.org/debby/
其中"閱讀奇幻"分類下有些很棒的評論文章, 包括派翠西亞‧麥奇利普(Patricia A. Mckillip)的魔幻之海(The Changeling Sea), 安潔拉‧卡特(Angela Carter)的魔幻玩具舖(Magic Toyshop), 羅賓‧荷布(Robin Hobb)的刺客三部曲(The Farseer trilogy: Assassin's Apprentice, Royal Assassin, and Assasin's Quest), 以撒‧艾西莫夫(Issac Asimov)的基地系列(The Foundation), 托爾金的精靈寶鑚(The Silmarillion)與魔戒...等等. 評論內容並非是全然的吹捧與歌功頌德, 而是清楚明白地指出這些作品吸引人的地方或是其俗濫之處, 有興趣的人可以去看看.
星期二, 1月 11, 2005
New Line Cinema on His Dark Materials
Source: Los Angeles Times January 10, 2005
The Los Angeles Times reports that New Line will consider shooting the second and third novels of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" simultaneously if the first film, The Golden Compass, strikes a chord with moviegoers. This is much like how Warner Bros. filmed "The Matrix" trilogy and New Line says the "Materials" trilogy would soar far beyond the $350 million the studio spent on "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
Based on the bestselling Pullman novels, "His Dark Materials" is comprised of "The Golden Compass," "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass". It revolves around a young girl who travels to the far north to save her best friend. Along the way she encounters shape-shifting creatures, witches, and a variety of otherworldly characters in parallel universes.
New Line has committed to producing only The Golden Compass, a special-effects-driven fantasy which could cost more than $150 million to bring to the screen.
The project has been on the drawing board for years. In 2002, New Line executives talked about wanting to complete The Golden Compass in time to have it in theaters last month. Now it looks like the release date will be Christmas 2006 at the earliest.
The studio is still on the hunt for a director. Chris Weitz (American Pie, About a Boy) recently dropped out of The Golden Compass. After spending six months researching the script - he rewrote Tom Stoppard's original adaptation of the novel -and meeting with design consultants and special-effects houses, Chris Weitz concluded that he didn't have the expertise to tackle such a technologically difficult movie.
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2002年底就聽說New Line要拍His Dark Materials trilogy,
那時FoTR才剛上映(美國),拍到現在三集魔戒都上映完畢,還沒看到第一集"黃金羅盤"...
之前又聽說劇本改編之後要把教會的戲給改掉?!(導演說法是指教會的角色可以用任何專制獨裁的權威體制來代替)過沒有多久, 連導演Chris Weitz都辭職了. 據New Line的說法是最快2006年才能看到第一集"黃金羅盤"的上映. 真是蠻多災多難的...
不過沒關係, 想當初LOTR也是花了7,8年才拍完. 只希望New Line可以照這樣堅持下去...:P
Source: Los Angeles Times January 10, 2005
The Los Angeles Times reports that New Line will consider shooting the second and third novels of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" simultaneously if the first film, The Golden Compass, strikes a chord with moviegoers. This is much like how Warner Bros. filmed "The Matrix" trilogy and New Line says the "Materials" trilogy would soar far beyond the $350 million the studio spent on "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
Based on the bestselling Pullman novels, "His Dark Materials" is comprised of "The Golden Compass," "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass". It revolves around a young girl who travels to the far north to save her best friend. Along the way she encounters shape-shifting creatures, witches, and a variety of otherworldly characters in parallel universes.
New Line has committed to producing only The Golden Compass, a special-effects-driven fantasy which could cost more than $150 million to bring to the screen.
The project has been on the drawing board for years. In 2002, New Line executives talked about wanting to complete The Golden Compass in time to have it in theaters last month. Now it looks like the release date will be Christmas 2006 at the earliest.
The studio is still on the hunt for a director. Chris Weitz (American Pie, About a Boy) recently dropped out of The Golden Compass. After spending six months researching the script - he rewrote Tom Stoppard's original adaptation of the novel -and meeting with design consultants and special-effects houses, Chris Weitz concluded that he didn't have the expertise to tackle such a technologically difficult movie.
====================================================================================
2002年底就聽說New Line要拍His Dark Materials trilogy,
那時FoTR才剛上映(美國),拍到現在三集魔戒都上映完畢,還沒看到第一集"黃金羅盤"...
之前又聽說劇本改編之後要把教會的戲給改掉?!(導演說法是指教會的角色可以用任何專制獨裁的權威體制來代替)過沒有多久, 連導演Chris Weitz都辭職了. 據New Line的說法是最快2006年才能看到第一集"黃金羅盤"的上映. 真是蠻多災多難的...
不過沒關係, 想當初LOTR也是花了7,8年才拍完. 只希望New Line可以照這樣堅持下去...:P
星期日, 1月 09, 2005
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