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Interstellar (2014)

image courtesy of imdb.com

The world is getting safer every day.  When Cooper was a kid, people were killing each other just to get enough food.  Now there’s more or less plenty to go around, though there’s less variety.  We’ve traded in a world of innovation and ambition for a more stable world, a more sustainable world, and so far it seems to be working.  Smart kids have to settle to be farmers to keep the world fed, and getting into university is once again a meaningful challenge.  Maybe in a few decades things might get better; it seems like for now all humanity can really do is wait and hope.

But there are things going drastically wrong even in this simpler, unambitious, safe world, that no one is willing yet to face.  There is a plan to do something about these problems, a plan so huge, so ridiculously bold, that even its strongest supporters can’t imagine it all the way through to success.  But it also happens to be the best plan we have.

There are, roughly speaking, two kinds of science fiction films.  One has ordinary stories to tell and tells them in a science fiction setting; the future, outer space, the-1800s-but-with-computers, and so forth.  When done well, as with Star Wars or The Fifth Element, they’re one of the most exciting forms of diversion I’ve found.  Maybe things don’t quite add up in terms of plot holes, and maybe the physics isn’t always technically correct, but we’re too busy having fun to care.  As entertainment they’re gangbusters, and we expect no more from them than that.

Then there are movies which aren’t dependent on setting.  Like any good story, what matters most are the characters.  In good science fiction, ordinary people come into contact with something new, a technology, a way of living, maybe a philosophical idea, usually stemming from some scientific discovery not yet reconciled with the world as we understand it.  Because of this new thing their lives are changed, and in the end they have to find a new way of looking at the world.  When done well, we get to share with the characters in building that new way of seeing the world, and that’s one of the most valuable things fiction can do, whether it’s science-fiction or not.

Now, does Interstellar belong to the first category of film, or the second?  I’ll leave you to decide.  But I encourage you to go see it, because whether it’s just entertainment or something more, there is no doubt that it is very, very well made.

For better or worse, Christopher Nolan seems to love making tragedies.  All his heroes, to date, experience their journeys against a backdrop of grief, pain, and loss.  In this film, Nolan brings his wonderful knack for putting dreams smack down on the kitchen table and his expansive, sophisticated sense of style to perhaps the oldest story people have to tell: of going out to see, to discover.  And we have here a Nolan hero with a chance, albeit as slim a chance as can possibly be imagined, for finding redemption.

The world is spinning in Matthew McConaughey’s hand these days, and anyone left in doubt of his formidable abilities after his coup in Mud (2012), Magic Mike (2012), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), and True Detective (HBO series, 2014) most likely either haven’t seen the work or they weren’t paying attention.  After winning the Oscar last year, his first choice of script is a science fiction picture, a genre that has always suffered for lack of real acting talent, and he how lucky for us that he brings every ounce of his charisma, sincerity, and pathos with him.  Funny thing about film, that there can be scenes which break our hearts and somehow uplift us at the same time; there is a scene of that kind in this film which is one of the most powerful I have seen, solely through emotion McConaughey delivers.  It is absolutely and undeniably because McConaughey nails it, that we are unable to not feel for his character, that the film succeeds.

McConaughey plays Cooper, a corn farmer who used to be much more, raising his son Tom (Timothée Chalamet, later Casey Affleck) and his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy, later Jessica Chastain) with the help of their grandfather Donald (John Lithgow, for the win) following their mother’s death.  When a seemingly inexplicable phenomena leads him to unexpectedly discover the hidden last remnant of humanity’s best and brightest, and their wild secret project that he is the best possible candidate for leading, the worries he was struggling with in the terms of a farm’s household are suddenly dwarfed by those of a planetary, and then an interstellar scale.  Guided by his acquaintance from a former life, Professor Brand (regular Nolan co-conspirator Michael Caine) and in cooperation with the professor’s chilly daughter (Anne Hathaway), he undertakes to embark on an expedition that has become, he is unhappy to learn, the best final hope for mankind to last more than about one already-fleeting century longer.

image courtesy of imdb.com

 This covers roughly the first forty-five minutes of the picture.  I want to talk about the rest, and believe me, I could keep dropping names from its remarkable ensemble cast for paragraph after paragraph, but with a movie as intricately crafted as Interstellar, you’ll find I can’t really tell you much more than this without effecting what you’ll think it’s about, and that’s part of the journey you experience for yourself.

As a space movie, Interstellar has a heavy legacy to live up to, built up mainly in just the past few decades.  Following Apollo 13 (1995), Alfonso Cuarón’s brief and masterful Gravity (2013), the most recent peer of course and the most likely to be compared, and the gold standard, at least from a purely technical point of view, Stanley Kubrick’s immortal 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).  Here in 2014, humans can’t easily go into space to get real footage, and so outer space movies generally either live or die on the strength of their visual effects.

One of Nolan’s imminent charms, and one of the reasons the world desperately needs more filmmakers like him, is that he understands the limits of what special effects can do for telling a compelling story.  Every film of his from Batman Begins (2005) onward has made use of CGI effects to a limited extent, but whenever possible he’ll try to make a shot or sequence work using purely practical effects first.  Be they lavishly constructed sets, meticulously detailed costumes and props, or good old-fashioned user-friendly models, he does whatever he can to really photograph his footage before he resorts to digitally-attached illusions to make his vision a reality.

By keeping the action focused on what the characters can really touch and interact with, Nolan grounds the story firmly in a more real-feeling, believable experience for his audience.  Nolan wants the amazing things happening in his pictures to happen to his characters, not to happen with some characters off to the side, no matter how amazingly the images are contrived.

When it’s something only CGI can do, he makes sure it is so well-made, and happens for such a good reason in the story, that he can be sure it’s something we’ll remember.  Like a fine jeweler, he knows when in a story to bend the settings and events towards a set-piece of visual action, and he knows how to define, limit, and polish those set-pieces to make the whole work shine brighter.  

It’s in this spirit of dreams checked and well-grounded by reality that we’re coaxed into believing in his homely, ordinary, roughly futuristic world, and it’s on the same principle that the rest of the movie is carried out to such powerful effect.

In all other technical aspects, the film is excellent or better.  Nolan’s composer of choice Hans Zimmer provides another intense, minimalist, and largely melancholy score that perfectly agrees with the tone and action, while paying tribute here and there with huge swells of organs, yes organs, to some of the classic pictures and scores that came before it.  

Since shooting The Dark Knight, Nolan has favored the use of the 70mm IMAX format camera for giving his visuals an enormous feel and texture.  Sequence after sequence here, from cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (Let the Right One In (2008), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)), whether it’s shot on an IMAX rig or not, is so rich and engrossing that it’s largely worth the price of admission alone.  

Like in the great space films mentioned above, the sound department here knows exactly when to use wonderful foley, or the claustrophobic sounds of a character inside their helmet, or unsettling silence, to sell the experience’s authenticity.  

My favorite thing about this movie however may well turn out to be its art department, solely for giving us the coolest movie robots I’ve seen since Oblivion (2013) or earlier.

Like every film Nolan has made, the aspect that shows the most careful finishing and agonizing attention is also the most important: the script.  As with the masterful Memento (2000) and Inception, it’s penned by Nolan himself, together with his brother Jonathan.  Along with the usual hallmarks of their work (dead-on dialogue, incredible one-liners, endless call-backs and call-forwards, and a plot designed like a puzzle and masquerading as an illustrated lecture course), the script carries, integrates, and often elevates some of the best ideas from some of the best sci-fi novels of the last century, from Frederick Pohl’s Gateway (1977) and Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956) to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and even C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (1938). And like any great science fiction film it has space marines and sassy robots, only here they happen, delightfully, to be one and the same thing.

image courtesy of imdb.com

Of course, when we get to discussing the legacy of excellence in science fiction writing, it’s inescapable that 2001: A Space Odyssey be further considered.  In some ways, Interstellar is like a version of 2001 where people are actually allowed to speak to each other.  To be more specific, what differentiates this film’s version of a somewhat similar story from its predecessor’s is the understanding that the audience needs characters who have compelling reasons for the things they do, and whom they can sympathize with in a memorable way.

2001, its script by Kubrick himself and the well-famed novelist Arthur C. Clarke, sought to first raise profound questions about the cosmos, reality, and humanity’s place in it, and then to underscore the profundity of its questions by declining to comment on them.  Interstellar, on the other hand, raises similar questions on a similar journey, and is brave and, ultimately, limited enough, to pursue guesses about what the answers might be.  Because of this, the narrative is the basis of the film’s only unmistakable flaw: it is overambitious.

Clocking in at just under three hours, the picture still seems rushed, like it’s often saying “Alright, look.  Ideally, we’d give this idea more time, but there’s just too much else to we have to see, we’ve got to keep going.”  

It’s the terrible paradox of movies about ideas.  If you spend enough time on the characters to make a good story, then you usually don’t have time left to give the theories and their supporting details their due.  If you spend all your time on your ideas, and none on your characters, and when you answer all your own questions, not only do you deprive the audience of an opportunity for wonder, there’s no time really for the characters to advance, and therefore no reason for anyone to care.  

Kubrick and Clarke settled for ineffability, which is perhaps a wise move when you’re trying to make a movie about everything.  Nolan gives us suggestions for answers, and tries to plant some new questions of his own.  I would say the film and its ideas are for the most part a resounding success when it comes to crafting a compelling storyline; it’s just obvious that occasionally they wished to do more, to make an idea clearer or unfold part of the plot line longer, and they just couldn’t fit it all in.  When this is a side detail it’s jarring, when the weight of the plot falls on points of this kind, it’s worrisome, but not so much so that the film’s feeling is diminished, or the ideas it does manage to get across are made less interesting.

In some ways the movie is about this very problem, about whether people will necessarily fail at undertakings fundamentally beyond their understanding, with consequences disconnected from their own personal interests.  All the wonderful visual effects and technological innovations in the world will not help people believe in your story if there aren’t sympathetic characters and a meaningful struggle to overcome.  And if we ever do venture out into new worlds, if there’s any evil out there, any hidden daemon to ruin our chances, it’s something we’ll take with us, in our nature, in being too scared and short-sighted to be ambitious for the sake of others, for the people with whom we empathize.

image courtesy of imdb.com

When all is said and done, it’s a heavy film.  It requires attention and a good deal of emotional stamina: it cuts closer to being an honest-to-god tragedy than many films I’ve seen in recent years, and will wring you dry before it’s done.  It’s not something you’re likely to pop on at a party, or watch to wind down a weary day.  But though it is enormous and challenging, it’s also beautiful and considerate and deeply affecting.  If you wait to see it on the small screen, odds are you’ll wish you hadn’t.  So clear your schedule for an evening, take someone you’re not afraid to feel feelings with, leave your earthbound worries at the door, and join these extraordinary characters on their journey.  I doubt that it’s one you’ll soon forget.


this post was also published on Literally, Darling

NaNoWriMo: Day Ten

I can tell already, you'll be fast friends.

This month we interrupt our regularly scheduled blog to post the progress made in this year's National Novel Writer's Month (NaNoWriMo).  The idea is, you write at least 1600 words a day for each of the 30 days in November, and at the end you have a novel, technically, at a total of 50,000 words.

For those just tuning in, here's a link to Chapter One to get started.  Navigate using the shortcuts at the bottom of each chapter, or of course with the post-by-post shortcuts on the right-hand side of the blog.

Watch a (short) novel emerge from beginning to end as you read it!  Will it be 50,000 words long? Very probably! Will it have a beginning, middle, and an end? Hopefully!  Will it be any fun to read?  You decide.

The Stats:
Words this entry: 1913          Words total: 22,165         Words to go: 27,835

Nota Bene: This one started out with a general idea of what I wanted the story to do, followed instantly by a picture image in my head.  I drew the picture (see above), and then wrote it, which is backwards for me in retrospect, but was fun to do.  After drawing, this chapter sort of came out more or less on its own, which is always exciting to me.  Let's see if it works in the future.

Comic: Every Year

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NaNoWriMo: Day Five

*thinking cap optional

This month we interrupt our regularly scheduled blog to post the progress made in this year's National Novel Writer's Month (NaNoWriMo); the idea is, you write 1600 words a day for the 30 days of November, and at the end you have a (nominal) novel of 50,000 words.

On the plus side, this means there'll be 30+ TPU posts for November instead of the usual 20-25, on the downside there's no essays or short stories for a bit (comics will keep coming, they're too much fun).

For those just tuning in, here's a link to Chapter One to get started.  Navigate using the shortcuts at the bottom of each chapter, or of course with the post-by-post shortcuts on the right-hand side of the blog.

So follow along if you dare and see a start-to-finish novel (albeit a short one) emerge before your very eyes!  Will it be 50,000 words long? Probably! Will it have a beginning, middle, and an end? Hopefully!  Will it be any fun to read?  You decide!

The Stats:

Words this entry: 2,747          Words total: 11,145          Words to go: 38,855

NaNoWriMo: Day Four

Words words words words words.

This month we interrupt our regularly scheduled blog to post the progress made in this year's National Novel Writer's Month (NaNoWriMo); the idea is, you write 1600 words a day for the 30 days of November, and at the end you have a (nominal) novel of 50,000 words.

On the plus side, this means there'll be 30+ TPU posts for November instead of the usual 20-25, on the downside there's no essays or short stories for a bit (comics will keep coming, they're too much fun).

For those just tuning in, here's a link to Chapter One to get started.  Navigate using the shortcuts at the bottom of each chapter, or of course with the post-by-post shortcuts on the right-hand side of the blog.

So follow along if you dare and see a start-to-finish novel (albeit a short one) emerge before your very eyes!  Will it be 50,000 words long? Probably! Will it have a beginning, middle, and an end? Hopefully!  Will it be any fun to read?  You decide!

The Stats:

Words this entry: 2,369          Words total: 8,398          Words to go: 41,602

NaNoWriMo: Day Three

Just have to press these in the right order...

This month we interrupt our regularly scheduled blog to post the progress made in this year's National Novel Writer's Month (NaNoWriMo); the idea is, you write 1600 words a day for the 30 days of November, and at the end you have a (nominal) novel of 50,000 words.

On the plus side, this means there'll be 30+ TPU posts for November instead of the usual 20-25, on the downside there's no essays or short stories for a bit (comics will keep coming, they're too much fun).

For those just tuning in, here's a link to Chapter One to get started.  Navigate using the shortcuts at the bottom of each chapter, or of course with the post-by-post shortcuts on the right-hand side of the blog.

So follow along if you dare and see a start-to-finish novel (albeit a short one) emerge before your very eyes!  Will it be 50,000 words long? Probably! Will it have a beginning, middle, and an end? Hopefully!  Will it be any fun to read?  You decide!

The Stats:

Words this entry: 2,028          Words total: 5,999          Words to go: 44,001

NaNoWriMo: Day Two

One down, infinity to go

This month we interrupt our regularly scheduled blog to post the progress made in this year's National Novel Writer's Month (NaNoWriMo); the idea is, you write 1600 words a day for the 30 days of November, and at the end you have a (nominal) novel of 50,000 words.

On the plus side, this means there'll be 30+ TPU posts for November instead of the usual 20-25, on the downside there's no essays or short stories for a bit (comics will keep coming, they're too much fun).

For those just tuning in, here's a link to Chapter One to get started.  Navigate using the shortcuts at the bottom of each chapter, or of course with the post-by-post shortcuts on the right-hand side of the blog.

So follow along if you dare and see a soup-to-nuts novel (albeit a short one) emerge before your very eyes!  Will it be 50,000 words long? Probably! Will it have a beginning, middle, and an end? Hopefully!  Will it be any fun to read?  You decide!

The Stats:

Words this entry: 2059          Words total: 3971          Words to go: 46,029

NaNoWriMo: Day One

Nothing at all intimidating about a blank screen

This month we interrupt our regularly scheduled blog to post the progress made in this year's National Novel Writer's Month (NaNoWriMo); the idea is, you write 1600 words a day for the 30 days of November, and at the end you have a (nominal) novel of 50,000 words.

On the plus side, this means there'll be 30+ TPU posts for November instead of the usual 20-25, on the downside there's no essays or short stories for a bit (comics will keep coming, they're too much fun).

Navigate using the shortcuts at the bottom of each chapter, or of course with the post-by-post shortcuts on the right-hand side of the blog.

With a website that's more than half social-media tool and local chapters seated around the globe, NaNoWriMo has grown from its start in 1999 and currently hosts 200,000+ active participants.

Now, 50,000 words is a short novel, I would guess most people could get through a book that size in a short-length road trip (one or two days).  Some books that are about this long include Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (46,118 words), Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (49,459 words), or Lord of the Flies by William Golding (59,900 words).  

(information courtesy of indefeasible, a bog on wordpress)

By comparison, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is about 100,000 words, or twice as long as a NaNoWriMo novel.  Watership Down by by Richard Adams and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez are both about 150,000 words.  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville is about four times this long, the Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky is about seven times this long, and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien all told is about ten times this long.

The tricky thing about shorter works is it tends to get harder, at least for me, to convey a good story clearly with only a few words instead of many; coming up with a lot of words isn't as important as choosing exactly the right words to say what you want quickly and cleanly.  

So writing 50,000 words in a month may be doable; in my experience it's getting the story and the characters to a satisfying and definite conclusion in that time that's difficult to do.  Going over 50,000 words is certainly allowed, but hopefully going over 30 days to get it right won't be necessary.

But it's an undeniably a clever and worthy idea, especially since for many aspiring writers (yours truly included) doing the actual work of a complete first draft, beginning to end, is something they struggle with developing the energy and focus for.

I'm looking forward to this year's project, now that I've put a few short stories on here, as an exercise in building a comparatively complex story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Will it be any good?  Who knows.  Will it be fun to read?  I hope so.

Post one follows!  Let's see if this is any good.

The Stats:

Words this entry: 1912          Words total: 1912          Words to go: 48,088

=======================================================

Chapter One

When she’d first met the Rooters, Eva wasn’t bothered by their ideas, or the weird way they talked, but by their smell.  Their stink -- and it was a stink, there was no nicer word for it -- was a strange one, not dirty like mud or garbage, or like most stinks really, but very clean-smelling, as though something stainless but also not very good for you for you had been dissolved in hot water and thrown into a vapor all around.  It was a smell that got your attention and set your teeth firmly in place, though it didn’t make you want to get away, on the contrary, it made you want to breathe deeply, analyze it, find out what it was, because it was a smell you’d never smelled before.  Later on, when she did start to understand their ideas, she found that these were at least twice as bad as the stink, and for similar reasons.

Eva first smelled late one night, or early one morning (she had lost track of the time), at the big computer lab across the campus from her tiny lodging.  She was feeding the equations of her thesis proposal through the big computers there to see if they would work correctly, and had been scribbling over a pocket notebook beside the control console for hours, trying to get her math work make sense, which in the big picture was rather poor form, since she had booked time on the big computer more than a month before.  She really should have known what she was doing with the time before she’d booked it, but she’d imagined, and hoped, that she’d be able to make her ideas make clear and sensible sense before the time for the computer actually arrived.  Besides, she needed something to show her advisor soon, or else they would start to suspect that she’d spent the last ten months doing nothing at all (which was essentially the truth), and she’d be kicked out of the department without so much as a letter of recommendation for her efforts.  Or lack thereof, whatever.

The important thing was: she was onto something.  These ideas had substance to them, though she was still chasing after a guess of it, there was something hidden in what she was struggling to express that had weight to it.  She wasn’t sure what the idea was, but she knew what it involved, and it was almost paralyzing with excitement when she took the time to hold her breath for a moment and dare, just dare, to believe it could be true.  It could change everything.  If it was true.  But it was a long way to proving what her numbers said was true; first she had to figure out what she was actually even trying to say.  And so far, despite a month and a half of nights just like this one, cramped in an uncomfortable student’s chair, swapping and tweaking and erasing numbers and symbols until the paper nearly tore from re-erasing and the smudges of graphite from the edge of her hand blotted over everything she tried to put down, and she wanted to go lay down in the dark somewhere and cry.  

She guessed (she didn’t dare look at the clock) there were about two hours of her four-hour block of time still left.  She had maybe an hour, maybe to get this figured out, and get it all fed in, if she wanted even partial results to present on Monday.  She stopped again, erased what she had written down, noticed her paper had been reduced to the consistency of ashy kleenex, and flipped to the next page of her little notebook.  She pulled the rumpled paper out of her pocket on which she had her starting equations, copied them down onto the new page (more than half from memory at this point, but by now the paper had become her talisman, she needed it in order to feel like she was getting off to the right start -- this was also why she hadn’t copied these important equations onto a new and less crumpled piece of paper), and started over.  She wanted a break, to stretch her legs and get a cup of coffee from down the hall, but there was no time for that now.  After a moment the struggle of making the numbers fit together had her attention and her imagination again, and she quite forgot the coffee anyway.

She had hoped that the pressure of the session on the big computer would help trigger whatever was holding back in her brain and make her ability to get this right fire into action.  At first, when she’d started realizing what a struggle it would be to make this work, this belief had come from a sense of exciting crisis and emotional satisfaction: just in the nick of time, everything would work out, the story neatly told and happily ended with plenty of danger averted.  Later, especially in the last feverish week, it had become a last hope: nothing else had worked, so surely the prospect of eminent failure and disaster would cause it all to work.  But so far it wasn’t working.  If anything, the numbers on her notepad were getting harder to read.

Whump!

At first the sound didn’t clearly register, she was so bent on making just that part of the math which she was then struggling with work.  But it did occur to her after a moment that there had been a sound, or a something, and she looked around herself and up in the air with a baffled expression.  The lab, except for the creak of her chair, the chitter of the tiny lights on the board, the whoosh of the cooling fans, and the steady hum of the enormous engines of artificial portions of thoughts in the next room, was perfectly still.  After a moment she went back to her work.

Maybe if she went down the hall for coffee and stopped staring at the paper for just a few moments it would be fresher, she would be fresher, and it could make a little more sense.  At least it would be nice to get up off this chair.  She thought a little longer about it, sitting and staring before her the way a person does when they wake up too early for their custom, and are in a daze: she was doing her math still, in just another minute, the way a sleepy person is getting up to grab their socks in just another minute.  She thought that way while three or four precious minutes slid by.  It cost a lot of money, first to purchase and then to run, that powerful and expensive computer array.  The value of those three or four minutes’s worth of time, for instance, would have paid for an expensive meal for you and I at a better-than-middle-luxury-grade restaurant.  It was a very powerful and cutting-edge array.  Eva stared at her paper.

When she realized she had been staring blankly and not working, she started, and reproached herself, and tried to get back to work, feeling like jumping up and down on her papers and stamping them into the tiled floor.  Then did the only sensible thing she could think of.  She got up, put her papers into her satchel, drew out her pass-key for the lab doors, left the satchel slung over the back of the chair, and walked out to the hall, down towards the coffee room.

The corridor was long and only half-lit at this hour, every other fluorescent light set in the ceiling left alight by the cleaning staff, who had probably finished long since and gone home.  She wanted to look at her watch, but resisted the impulse.  She would look as soon as she got back; maybe that would make her panic badly enough to get to work.  Had the cleaning people finished, though? There was a funny smell in the hallway.

Whump!

She halted mid-step.  It had come from behind her somewhere, as if a heavy bundle of clothes or something had been dropped on the floor.  She didn’t want to turn around at first, but she did.

There was nothing there.  Just empty hallway.

It’s finally happening, she thought as she continued towards the coffee room.  I’ve started hearing things.  Seeing things comes next, or hearing voices, she wasn’t sure which.  She felt like yawning but didn’t.  Coffee.

The break room was more of a furnished closet, counters and a sink down one wall, fridge at the end, coffee machine on the counter.  It was the big inexpensive kind that she loathed (she wished they’d had an espresso machine, though they took time and care to operate and she had no idea how) where the steel shelves held glass-bulbed caraffes with the orange and green handles.  The green-handled caraffe was decaf, and no use to her: the orange handled one had the good stuff.  Except it was empty.

She was reaching over to pull open the drawer when she saw a figure standing in the open doorway.  She gave a little shriek and jumped back, she was so startled to see anyone there.  She landed in a half-karate stance (she didn’t know any martial arts), hands half-closed in little fists and elbows hovering against her sides.  She was about to say “who are you?” or “what do you want,” just as soon as she got breath in her to speak.  She noticed at once, but didn’t process the information for a moment, that the smell had gotten much stronger.

It was a man, she’d never seen him before, very tall and odd-looking.  He had very large eyes behind very thick glasses, a pointed chin and a large nose, like a stork’s bill.  His hair was cut longish short and very neat, and his dress was the weirdest part: he was dressed in a grey pinstripe three-piece suit and blue tie, which had something about it that looked old-timey, and was holding a grey bowler cap in his right hand.  He stood very straight, shoulders back and chin up, as if he was more or less standing at attention.  Though his clothes looked neat and clean and freshly-pressed, there was something rumpled about him, as if he’d just been knocked over or fallen down and hastily re-arranged himself on the go.  A shiny watch chain was slung across the vest buttons at his narrow abdomen, only the middle hook had fallen down and hadn’t been fixed yet.  He looked a little like he was lost.  

He moved his left hand, the one not carrying his hat, and Eva started again, raising her hands into a defensive posture.  He fixed his watch chain so it hung properly (he must have noticed her staring), and then raised the hand in a half-hearted greeting.

“Good evening,” he said cheerfully, and a little apologetically.  “Or good morning.  I’m very sorry to startle you.  Do you happen to have the time?”

“Who are you?” asked Eva finally, not moving her feet from their semi-combat ready stance, in case that part of her was at all intimidating.

“My name,” said the man, “is Nibb.  I was wondering if you perhaps could use any assistance this evening, or morning, with checking over your maths.”

== == ==

Chapter Two