12 Because a decene Schwarzenegger — compared to whom Chuck Norris is an Olivier — is not an actor or even a performer. He is a body, a form — the closest thing to an actual machine in the history of the S.A.G. Ahnode’s elite bankable status in 1991 was due entirely to the fact that James Cameron had had the genius to understand Schwarzenegger’s essential bionism and to cast him in T1.
13 It augurs ill for both Furlong and Cameron that within minutes of John Connor’s introduction in the film we’re rooting vigorously for him to be Terminated.
14 A complex and interesting scene where John and Sarah actually open up the Terminator’s head and remove Ahnode’s CPU and do some further reprogramming — a scene where we learn a lot more about neural net processors and Terminative anatomy, and where Sarah is strung out and has kind of an understandable anti-Terminator prejudice and wants to smash the CPU while she can, and where John asserts his nascent command presence and basically orders her not to — was cut from the movie’s final version. Cameron’s professed rationale for cutting the scene was that the middle of the movie “dragged” and that the scene was too complex: “I could account for [the Terminator’s] behavior changes much more simply.” I submit that the Cameron of T1 and Aliens wouldn’t have talked this way. But another big-budget formula for ensuring ROI is that things must be made as simple for the audience as possible; plot- and character implausibilities are to be handled through distraction rather than resolved through explanation.
15 (around which the security must be just shockingly lax)
16 That’s the movie’s main plot, but let’s observe here that one of T2’s subplots actually echoes Cameron’s Schwarzenegger dilemma and creates a kind of weird metacinematic irony. Whereas T1 had argued for a certain kind of metaphysical passivity (i.e., fate is unavoidable, and Skynet’s attempts to alter history serve only to bring it about), Terminator 2’s metaphysics are more active. In T2, the Connors take a page from Skynet’s book and try to head off the foreordained nuclear holocaust, first by trying to kill Skynet’s inventor and then by destroying Cyberdyne’s labs and the first Terminator’s CPU (though why John Connor spends half the movie carrying the deadly CPU chip around in his pocket instead of just throwing it under the first available steamroller remains unclear and irksome). The point here is that the protagonists’ attempts to revise the “script” of history in T2 parallel the director’s having to muck around with T2’s own script in order to get Schwarzenegger to be in the movie. Multivalent ironies like this — which require that film audiences know all kinds of behind-the-scenes stuff from watching Entertainment Tonight and reading (umm) certain magazines — are not commercial postmodernism at its finest.
17 (His hair doesn’t catch on fire in the molten steel, though, which provokes intriguing speculation on what it’s supposed to be made of.)
1 These are rich and well-written biographies of the twentieth-century mathematicians Paul Erdos and John Nash, respectively.
2 This classic long essay, originally published in 1940 and re-released by Cambridge University Press in ’92, is the unacknowledged father of most of the last decade’s math-prose. There is very little that any of the receny o byt books do that Hardy’s terse and beautiful Apology did not do first, better, and with rather less fuss.
3 (i.e., the formal study of integers/rationals, the world of Diophantine equations, of Hilbert Problems 9–12, etc. — and also the specialty of both G. H. Hardy and A. Wiles)
4 WN’s cover comes with a blurb from Fermat’s Last Theorem’s Aczel, who must have been on some kind of euphoriant medication—“I have never read a better fictional description of what it’s like to work in pure math”—as well as the breathless marketing tag “THE LINE BETWEEN GENIUS AND MADNESS IS A THIN ONE.” UPGC’s publisher’s big tactic is to offer a $1,000,000 bounty to anyone who can prove Goldbach’s Conjecture before 2002.
5 “Vocational Travelogue” is a very shorthand way of acknowledging that for a long time one reason people used to read fiction was for a kind of imaginative tourism to places and cultures they’d never get to really see; that modernity’s jetliners, TV, etc. have pretty well obsoleted this function; but that modern tech has also created such extreme vocational specialization that few people anymore are in a position to know much about any professional field but their own; and thus that a certain amount of fiction’s “touristic” function now consists in giving readers dramatized access to the nuts and bolts of different professional disciplines and specialties. It is not an accident that the first important Vocational Travelogues, novels like Hailey’s Airport and Hotel and Ed McBain’s “police procedurals,” began appearing in the late ’50s and early ’60s.
6 (Q.v. here WN’s marketing tag about GENIUS and MADNESS in FN4 supra, or UPGC’s flap copy’s heavy description of the novel as “about the search for truth at all costs, and the heavy price of finding it” [sic].)
7 In fairness to all concerned, this variability in readers’ mathematical backgrounds is a problem for pretty much anyone trying to write general-interest prose about math, a problem that Hardy refers to as “the restrictions under which I am writing. On the one hand my examples must be very simple, and intelligible to a reader who has no specialized mathematical knowledge…. And on the other hand my examples should be drawn from ‘pukka’ mathematics, the mathematics of the working professional mathematician.” Note that this sort of thing is a problem even for rather more “special-interest” writing like this book review itself. Is it, for example, necessary to inform or remind the average Science reader that Fermat’s Last Theorem (c. 1637) states that where n is an integer and n > 2, the equation x n + y n = z n has no nonzero integer solutions? or that Goldbach’s Conjecture (or rather the “strong” G.C. as reformulated by Leonhard Euler in 1742) is that every even integer > 4 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers, etc.? As it happens, this reviewer is not certain whether it’s necessary or not, and the fact that these lines have not been deleted by Science’s editors (i.e., that you are reading them at all) may indicate that the editors are not totally sure either.
8 Hardy, whose Apology talks about this better than anything else ever has, explains that “the mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, liktheboue the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”
9 (The assumption here will be that the typical Science reader already knows what “a priori,” “deductive truth,” and “logical proof” mean and is at least roughly familiar with the relationship between pure math and formal logic… if for no other reason than that to gloss tangential stuff like this would take up enormous amounts of space and time and might well also alienate the [presumably large] percentage of Science’s readership who already know the stuff and are apt to find such glosses not only otiose but annoying — this reviewer can actually imagine such readers looking increasingly aggrieved and impatient and saying to themselves, Whom does he think he’s talking to? All this is mentioned only to underscore once again the rhetorical diciness of the whole math-prose enterprise, a diciness that lies at the very center of this review’s criticisms of the actual novels to be discussed, which critical discussions are upcoming very, very shortly.)