I didn't like this Connie Willis novella nearly as much as Bellwether Partially I thought it tried a little too hard to play cute with the "Hollywood movie magic", and partly I got distracted by the technical details, which struck me as unrealistic. I also thought that the future society it presented was a little too simplistic.

In this future, all films are controlled by a few studios which constantly battle each other over copyrights, so they can remake old films with digital technology, inserting some past star into a movie they were never in originally, or removing references to alcohol, etc.

While that sort of thing no doubt will happen, it ignores so many other social trends, like micro-markets, the success of indie films, the ability of people to make great looking movies for relatively little money (Sky Captain is a great example), and so on. The future of film is really complex, and the idea of a world where nobody is making new films is difficult to believe in.

Just started this one. Like other Connie Willis books I've read, it has a very funny, witty style, with interesting topics. It doesn't seem like it will have the depth of my favorite book of hers, The Doomsday Book, but it promises high entertainment value.

The story centers on a sociologist studying where fads come from, and will (I think) also involve another scientist studying chaos theory. The interaction between these two can only be amusing.