July | 2015 | It Doesn't Have To Be Right...

July 31, 2015
by iansales Leave a comment

Moving pictures, #19

Yet more movies, of varying quality, worthiness and entertainment value. Which I shall continue to document, even if a year from now I read what I’ve written and wonder why the hell I watched a particular film.

Scarlet Street, Fritz Lang (1945, USA). Godard’s Le Mépris has almost spoiled Lang’s films for me. There I was, picturing him as some sort of industrious Modernist German film-maker but in that movie he played a louche Prussian aristocrat with monocle and cigarette holder. And yet he made some wonderful noir films, full of Modernist sets and starkly-lit shots. Scarlet Street boasts plenty of the latter, but none of the former. Edward G Robinson plays a meek cashier. After a party celebrating his twenty-five years of faithful service, Robinson gets involved with femme fatale Joan Bennett, and is consequently persuaded to commit various crimes to support her… while he indulges in his hobby of painting. And then his art suddenly becomes desirable, but Bennett claims to be the painter and… well, it all gets a bit complicated after that. Scarlet Street is a well-made film, of course, but there’s nothing in it that makes it stand out from others of its time and genre.

Picnic at Hanging Rock*, Peter Weir (1975, Australia). So I’ve watched several of Weir’s films over the years and he’s not a director who’s really stood out for me – I mean, Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Mosquito Coast… er, Green Card? This is middle-brow, if not lower, Hollywood entertainment, sometimes with a nod at worthiness – Gallipolli, for example – but just as often not. But Picnic at Hanging Rock is on the 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die list, and I was aware of the regard in which it was held, so… Okay, the mystery is never solved and I can see how that sort of bounces you out of your typical Hollywood box, and the movie is also resolutely Australian, to a degree that a film such as Mad Max most certainly isn’t, so that perhaps some people thought better of the film than it deserved. Because it is, to be honest, a bit dull. It is also, to be fair, a period piece and it does present its period well. But, meh.

A Humble Life, Aleksandr Sokurov (1997, Japan). The third of Oriental Elegy‘s three documentaries – did I mention I managed to buy a copy for £25 and currently copies go for £200 to £300? Anyway. Like the other two films, it was made in Japan and takes as its topic an old Japanese woman who lives alone in an old house in a small mountain village. It is also engimatic, features Sokurov’s trademark distortion of the image, such that it often appears like a painting, and lots of intense close-ups. Sokurov documents the woman’s daily activities, often without voice-over, and achieves more in setting tone and mood than incidental music could have done (although Sokurov often makes excellent use of music). This is perhaps the most elegiac of the three films on the disc, and I’ll be watching again. Several times, no doubt.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage*, Dario Argento (1972, Italy). This was apparently Argento’s first film, and it’s pretty obvious it’s a giallo right from the start. An American writer resident in Rome – you can only tell he’s American because he mentions it in conversation, as, of course, his dialogue is dubbed into Italian – witnesses a man attack a woman in a gallery late one night. He fails to break into the gallery, but does scare off the attacker. Another passer-by calls the authorities, who arrive in time to save the woman, who had been knifed. Then further murders following the same modus operandi take place, and the inspector in charge of the case asks the American for help in solving it. It’s all very giallo, and there’s a twist in the end which I probably should have spotted, but it’s probably closer to Mario Bava’s Baron Blood and Lisa and the Devil than it is to Suspiria. I’m not entirely sure why it makes the 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die list, but there’s a lot of films on there I could say the same about.

Le Bambole, Franco Rossi et al (1965, Italy). This is another one of those Italian anthology films, which are, of course, about women – well, women as men see them – and perhaps might once have been described by Brits as “sex comedies” given that at some point the actresses usually end up clad in only their lingerie. The first of the four “episodes” is about a young woman on the telephone to her mother while her husband slouches about the apartment trying to amuse himself until she is ready to accept his sexual advances. The second has Elke Sommer looking for the ideal father for her child – something to do with the shape of his ears – before eventually recognising the suitability of her young and virile guide about town. The third sees a wife trying to rid herself of her husband so she can be with her lover, only for her various plans for his demise to go awry. And the final section is apparently an adaptation of a segment of Boccaccio’s The Decameron and stars Gina Lollobrigida, but to be honest I can’t really remember what it was about.

Ace in the Hole*, Billy Wilder (1951, USA). Oof, this was nasty one, not the sort of thing you’d expect from Billy Wilder. A disgraced big city reporter pulls into a small New Mexico town and persuades the local paper owner to take him on. A year later, while covering a rattlesnake hunt he learns of a local man trapped by a rockfall in a cave. It’s the story he’s been waiting for. If it gets syndicated, it could get him back into the big time. So when a mining engineer proposes shoring up the cave and then digging out the trapped man, the reporter vetoes it and instead they start to drill down from the top of the cliff. Meanwhile, the media has picked up the story and descended on the region. It becomes a complete circus. The reporter, of course, is loving it as he controls access to the trapped man. Meanwhile, the days pass, the trapped man weakens… The ending hardly comes as a surprise – people who play with others’ lives in flms generally get their comeuppance. Although, of course, it’s the trapped man who pays the bigger price. I can sort of see why this is considered a classic, but it leaves a nasty after-taste and for that reason I couldn’t like it.

1001 Films You Must See Before You Die count: 606

July 24, 2015
by iansales 1 Comment

Moving pictures, #18

I bought an Amazon Fire TV Stick in their recent Prime Day, so these Moving pictures posts may become a little less frequent as I can now catch up on some 2015 television series I’ve missed. Because, despite having umpty-zillion cable television channels, there’s generally fuck-all on them worth seeing or that I haven’t seen before. One channel, for example, has been back-to-back episodes of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda for several weeks. Why? And other channels have gone right back to the first seasons of their most popular television shows, which of course I’ve already seen. Anyway, this all sort of explains why I watch so many movies…

Trance, Danny Boyle (2013, UK). A charity shop find. Boyle is a name I know, though I can’t say I’m a fan, and the plot sounded twisty-turny enough to promise a reasonable night’s entertainment. And so it proved. James McAvoy works at a high-end auction house when a very valuable painting is stolen by thief Vincent Cassell and a team of thugs. During the robbery, McAvoy is beaten about the head by Cassel and subsequently suffers retrograde amnesia. Which is a problem, as he was actually in on the robbery and seems to have hidden the painting before apparently handing over the case containing it (under feigned duress) to Cassel. So McAvoy visits hypnotherapist Rosario Dawson in order to recover his lost memories… and it then gets all twistier and turnier. And there you have it. Thrillers this twisty-turny are nothing new, and the twenty-first century seems to have added a level of unnecessary gloss, and even-more-unnecessary gore – not to mention an often dodgy treatment of the female characters – and Trance is one of these in pretty much all respects. You’ll watch it, you might well enjoy it, but a couple of days later you’ll probably need hypnotherapy in order to remember it.

World Without Sun, Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1964, France). This is one of a number of documentaries Cousteau made about his underwater exploits, but I bought this one because it focused on Conshelf Two, the habitat he built ten metres underwater in the Red Sea. I remember Cousteau from my childhood, his films were a staple of Middle East English-language television channels, so I knew all about the Diving Saucer and the Calypso and I have fond memories of the films featuring them. But Conshelf Two I find much more interesting these days, so hence my purchase of this. And it was… weird. They all smoke! In an undersea habitat! Two of the divers spend a couple of days in a heliox environment in a tiny habitat much deeper, and the first thing one of them does on his return to Conshelf Two is… light up his pipe! The underwater photography was, of course, excellent and fascinating, and Cousteau’s narration was interesting and informative. But the sight of half-naked Frenchmen smoking Gauloises in a metal box thirty feet underwater is just…

From The New World, Pt 1 (2012, Japan). This was the second anime mentioned by David Tallerman, and while I sort of liked his first recommendation – Royal Space Force: Wings of Honnemâise, see here – I really didn’t take to this one at all. (He did say, incidentally, to ignore the somewhat dodgy cover – but, of course, Amazon rental only send me the disc so this is actually the first time I’ve seen it and… oof, it is pretty dodgy.) Anyway, From The New World is apparently based on a novel by Yusuke Kishi, and the anime adaptation is done in that big-eyed tiny-nosed style which is what most people probably think of when they think of anime. The story is set in the distant future, long after humans start manifesting psychic abilities and so bring about the collapse of civilisation. But everything is now happy and peaceful and agrarian – or so it seems. Much of the story concerns Saki Watanabe being trained in the use of her powers, her friends and lovers at special powers school, and a long adventure in which Saki and some friends get involved in a war between two groups of Monster Rats and there’s this creature which spends an entire episode giving them a history lesson and… I found this really quite dull. While I began to think more kindly of Royal Space Force: Wings of Honnemâise several days after watching it, I can’t say the same of this. Just Not My Thing. At All.

Ordinary People*, Robert Redford (1980, USA). A week or so after watching this film from 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and I’m having trouble remembering what it was about. I can recall it was Robert Redford’s directorial debut, and it was nominated for a load of Oscars… but the story has mostly gone. Something about a teenager suffering after a suicide attempt, and Mary Tyle Moore as his completely unlikeable mother. Let’s see… There’s an American family, middle-class, affluent, normal by Hollywood middle-America standards, and the eldest son drowned in a boating accident before the film started, the younger son has been suffering from survivor guilt and attempted suicide before the film started… and things on the home front are now pretty fraught. But the son is seeing an unconventional psychiatrist and the therapy seems to be working. However, things are getting worse at home because mother is being mean and father’s peace-keeping isn’t always successful and… yawn. Cross this one off the list, I’ve seen it, I’m likely never to watch it again and I’m perfectly happy with that.

The Passionate Friends, David Lean (1949, UK). The DVD cover alone should tell you this is a romantic triangle story, and the year and country indicates that it is, of course, all terribly terribly, with Ann Todd married to Claude Rains but still in love with ex-boyfriend Trevor Howard, against a backdrop of the Swiss Alps, and based on a novel by, of all people, HG Wells. It’s structured, as many British romantic dramas of the time seem to be, as a series of extended flashbacks. Todd arrives at a Swiss hotel, and learns that Howard has booked into the room next her, quite by coincidence. And so the film goes back nine years to Todd and Howard’s relationship, and then slowly winds its way forward through Todd’s rejection of Howard, her marriage to Rains, and thence to the meeting which opens the film. And from there it moves smoothly into a rekindling of their relationship, hubby finds out, divorce papers served, etc, etc. I actually quite enjoyed this – Todd is very watchable, the flashbacks explained the story rather than confused it, and the ending was a pleasant surprise. It’s a minor Lean work, although to be fair I’m pretty sure that everything he did except Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and The Bridge On The River Kwai was a minor work…

Jupiter Ascending, Wachowskis (2015, USA). I waited for the DVD before watching this because, well, what I’d heard about it didn’t bode all that well. It did, however, prove to be mostly accurate. You can call Jupiter Ascending bollocks or tosh or fluff or any number of terms that basically require you to turn off your brain before you attempt to watch it, but it is nonetheless undeniably pretty. This is a film which exists because of its visuals, and the fact they don’t entirely make sense is irrelevant. The story, a rags to riches, toilet cleaner to heiress to the entire galaxy, is just so stupid it completely bypasses the stupid filter. Eddie Redmayne is bloody awful as the main villain, Mila Kunis as the eponymous heroine is a charsima-free zone, and Channing Tatum’s character, a soldier engineered from dog/human genes, is just too daft to take seriously (not to mention Sean Bean’s half-human/half honeybee). There is some very pretty CGI, lots of gurning, evil villainess Tuppence Middleton looks weird for half the film but that’s because she’s wearing make-up so she appears old, and I really can’t remember most of the plot even though it’s only been a couple of weeks since I saw the film. Ten years from now, no one is going to be sticking this on their list of “ten great sf movies”, not unless they have zero critical faculties.

Dolce, Aleksandr Sokurov (2000, Japan). This is one of three films on Sokurov’s Oriental Elegy DVD, which is extremely hard to find. I’d seen one or two copies on eBay and Amazon, going for between £200 and £250 each, which was way more than I was prepared to pay no matter how much I admire Sokurov as a director. But then a copy of Oriental Elegy popped up on eBay with a Buy-It-Now price of £25. I bought it. I was a little worried the item had actually been mislabelled, as there was no photograph, but it not only turned out to be a proper copy of Oriental Elegy but also still in its shrinkwrap. Result. But, Dolce… Sokurov’s documentaries resist easy classification, some more so than others. This one opens with a quick summary of the life of Japanese writer Toshio Shimao, a series of photographs with Sokurov in voiceover, the sort of stuff he started his career doing back in the early 1980s with Dimitri Shostakovich: Sonata For Viola, patching together archive footage and photographs to form a narrative. Dolce then becomes an interview of sorts with Mihao Shimao, who talks about her life with her father, although not in a conventional interview-sense, more as private reminiscences spoken out loud while alone (in Japanese, which Sokurov then speaks in Russian, and then appear in English subtitles). It’s affecting stuff, and very Sokurov – which means it’s likely to take a number of rewatches before I begin to understand exactly what is being said. Which is, of course, one of the reasons I like Sokurov’s stuff so much.

The Exterminating Angel*, Luis Buñuel (1962, Mexico). I have so far found Buñuel a bit hit and miss for me, but this particular film I found I liked the idea of it much more than I liked the execution. Which is not to say it’s a bad film – on the contrary, it’s very good. But the premise is one I find particularly appealing… but I do wonder if perhaps it wasn’t stretched out a bit too long. A group of affluent people meet up for a dinner party. Over the course of the evening, the servants quit and leave for no reason. The diners retire to the sitting-room… and then find they can’t leave it. At first it seems that they have no desire to, and start bedding down for the night. But then it becomes obvious they are psychologically incapable of doing so – for reasons no one understands. And as their “imprisonment” continues, so their civilised veneer is stripped away and their bestial natures are revealed. Now I don’t believe in all that “animal natures” crap, but I do like the idea of people being mysteriously trapped in a room which has a clear and obvious exit. Buñuel makes a proper meal of his conceit, before eventually reeling it all back, and leaving cast and audience no wiser as to what has happened. I liked that. Worth seeing.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 603

July 22, 2015
by iansales 1 Comment

Reading diary, #10

I’ve given up on writing actual full-length book reviews on this blog – you know, a post about a single book, covering it in some detail. I do that for SF Mistressworks and Interzone (and occasionally Vector). Besides, I read so widely these days, it would seem weird to review only science fiction books here, not to mention only recent science fiction novels. These reading diary posts strike me as an acceptable compromise – a couple of hundred words on every book I’ve read, irrespective of genre or year of publication – serving both to remind me of what I’ve read as well as perhaps point followers of this blog at something they might find worthwhile reading.

And after my last reading diary was almost all genre fiction, this one sees something of a return to form, with only a pair of sf books, and a third which was published as literary fiction but was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2008 (it lost out to Richard Morgan’s Black Man).

The Rainbow, DH Lawrence (1915). Three books into working my way chronologically through Lawrence’s novels, and he’s yet to move outside of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire (I’ve also read the later Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which also takes place in Notts). The Rainbow follows the Brangwen family through several generations, from the 1840s through to 1905. It starts with the family patriarch before eventually settling on Ursula, who comes of age at the turn of the century, is fiercely ambitious, and ends up teaching at a local school. It’s a more structured novel than The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers, although only inasmuch as the passage of years provides a framework for the story – it still has a tendency to randomly move from one member of the family to another, and it’s not always clear where the novel’s focus lies. But Lawrence’s descriptive prose, particularly in regard to the landscape, shines; and he brings his usual detailed, if occasionally heavy-handed, eye to the emotional landscapes of his cast. I set out to work my way through Lawrence’s oeuvre because a read of Lady Chatterley’s Lover persuaded me I’d been missing out by avoiding him, and because my father was a huge Lawrence fan. The more I’ve read, the more I too have become a fan of his writing – and collecting the books is fun too, of course.

A Voice Out of Ramah, Lee Killough (1979). I picked this up from Alvarfonden at Archipelacon in Mariehamn – did I mention I went to a con in Finland, well, the Åland Islands to be precise, and it was excellent? – anyway, I bought this with the intention of reviewing it for SF Mistressworks. I’d come across Killough’s name in an anthology of sf by women, but I’d never read anything else by her. I started the book while waiting for my connecting flight to Manchester in Helsinki Airport, and ended up finishing it before my flight was called (it was a five hour wait). And I really liked the novel. As you can no doubt tell from my review on SF Mistressworks here.

Strange Bedfellows, Thomas N Scortia, ed. (1973). This I also bought from Alvarfonden, and read during the flight from Helsinki, and train journey from Manchester. And I suspect it’s the worst sf anthology I’ve ever had the misfortune to read. I mean, just look at that strapline on the cover: “Can sex survive the space age?”. I’m guessing yes it will, it’ll survive a whole lot of things, like climate crash, nuclear armageddon, global economic meltdown… maybe even the heat death of the universe. There are nineteen stories, two are by women (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Miriam Allen deFord); the remainder are by a mix of well-known names (Silverberg, Sturgeon, Aldiss, Farmer), and a few that were unknown to me. The stories, on the other hand, are full of the worst of early seventies sensibilities – the Silverberg is about a young man who discovers he has mental powers and uses them to stalk women, there’s a section titled “Toujours Gay” which opens with the frankly awful ‘The World Well Lost’, another story has serial rape as the “twist”, and the Aldiss is racist and features sexual slavery. The rest are either worse, or completely unmemorable. Best avoided.

The Cuckoo’s Calling, Robert Galbraith (2013). According to the blurb on this book, it was a huge best-seller and then the author was revealed as JK Rowling, which is not how I remember it happening. The Cuckoo’s Calling received several positive reviews and sold modestly. Then someone at Rowling’s solicitors (I think) leaked Galbraith’s true identity, and sales shot up overnight by about 5000%. But hey, let’s rewrite history anyway and make out that it’s not Rowling’s name that sells books, that’s she still a really good writer even when no one knows it’s her. So, of course, it comes as little surprise to find The Cuckoo’s Calling is… okay. It has too many words for its story and could have done with losing 100 pages, the most interesting thing about its hero, Cormoran Strike, is his improbable name, and the whole thing feels like it was written by someone who’s a little bit out of touch. A supermodel falls to her death from her penthouse flat and the police initially rule it suicide. But the supermodel’s brother, a solicitor, thinks this is wrong and hires Strike to investigate. At the same time, a new temp has started as Strike’s secretary, and she proves to be highly competent and very much in love with the idea of being a private investigator – parts of the novel are written from her perspective. The plot moves smoothly, but it feels wordy, yet nowhere near literary enough to be literary fiction. There are a few digs at the ultra-wealthy, which feel like they’re the result of personal experience, but mostly Strike’s life seems to belong to an earlier decade. I now have a copy of the sequel, The Silkworm, but I’m not expecting it to be any better.

Research, Philip Kerr (2014). John Houston is a mega-selling author, who runs an “atelier” of writers – he comes up with the stories, they bang out the actual prose… and the books are of course sold under Houston’s name. It makes him millions of dollars a year and his writers a comfortable living. If this sounds a little familiar, it’s because Houston is clearly based on James Patterson. But Houston has decided to pack it all in. He wants to write something himself, to prove he has the writing chops. So he closes down his atelier and pays off his writers… Shortly afterwards, his wife is found murdered in their Monaco apartment, and Houston has done a runner. The police contact Don Irvine, the first writer to join Houston’s atelier (the two were friends and colleagues at an advertising agency), but he can shed no light on the murder. And then, as you’d expect to happen in a novel such as this, Houston contacts Irvine, pleads innocence and asks for Irvine’s help. Which he is happy to give. The novel is broken into sections, alternating between first-person narrations from Irvine’s and Houston’s point of view. And pretty soon things aren’t what Houston, Irvine or even the Monaco police thought they were. As thrillers go, there’s not much in here that hasn’t been done before. However, Kerr does a top job of satirising mega-selling authors of the likes of Patterson, their books, and the publishing industry which supports them. For that alone, it’s worth reading.

The Carhullan Army, Sarah Hall (2007). I picked up this in Oxfam in Micklegate, just before the York pub meet back in May. I’d been after a copy for a while, so I was pretty chuffed when I found this one. I had high hopes too of the novel, as it had been repeatedly recommended to me, but initially I wondered if it had been over-praised. It’s structured as segments of found testimony by Sister, who leaves her husband to join a women’s militia based at a remote farm. In the near-future UK of the book, the economy has crashed, the US sends aid, and an oppressive political regime is tightening its grip on an already downtrodden and poor population. Once Sister reaches Carhullan, the militia’s farm, the story picks up, and when she is recruited to the women’s army which is planning a coup on a local town, then it really moves into gear. By the end of the novel, I was much more impressed than I had been after the first dozen or so pages. On balance, definitely worth its position on the Clarke Award shortlist (and arguably better than the eventual winner).

July 20, 2015
by iansales 5 Comments

Space movies

I saw a list recently of “space movies” and the first film on the list was… Star Wars. I like lists, and though they usually make me angry I also like bad lists – because they inspire me to create my own. After all, if you’re going to put together to a list of “space movies”, then you’d expect “space” to play a major role in the film. And yes, there’s the Death Star and the Millennium Falcon running away from the Imperial space destroyer and that final space battle and it’s space opera which even has the word “space” in it… but is Star Wars really a “space movie”?

There are plenty of films – not just Hollywood ones, either – where space or space travel forms a major portion of the plot, or is indeed the actual subject of the film. Having said that, any list of films which comprises almost entirely Hollywood output, bar one or two token world cinema entries, is also going to generate rage. I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve seen Tarkovsky’s Solaris as the token non-Hollywood sf movie in a lists of sf movies. Tarkovsky was a great director, no doubt about that, but he made two other sf films – all of which is beside the point, as there are a huge number of non-US and non-Anglophone directors who have made science fiction movies, many of which are excellent.

All this is, of course, a somewhat long-winded way of introducing my own list of “space movies”, ie films that are space-related – inasmuch as they are about space exploration, or the setting is space for at least more than half of the film. I have, as is my wont, tried to avoid the obvious and commercially safe choices…

Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets (2004, UK). This is my go-to for near-future space-based science fiction. It’s a television dramatisation of a near-future Grand Tour, made chiefly by the BBC. It’s hard to find these days, but it’s definitely worth hunting down a copy. The CGI hasn’t aged especially well, the acting is not great, and the talking heads often slow things down… but much of it was filmed on the Vomit Comet and it does a top job of presenting life aboard a spacecraft travelling about the Solar Sytem. In fact, it does a top job of presenting all the technology required to visit all the planets of the Solar System. Good stuff.

Apollo 18, Gonzalez López-Gallego (2011, USA). Okay, so the rock monsters are a bit silly, as is the, er, plot. But this is still the best fictional presentation to date of an Apollo mission on celluloid. And it also scores highly because it shows a Soviet LK and gets it absolutely right. This is the proper way to do a space movie… even if it’s in service to a hoary old plot. Admittedly, it’s a found footage movie, and it’s never quite made clear how they found the footage, given we’ve never been back to the moon… but never mind.

Cargo, Ivan Engler & Ralph Etter (2009, Switzerland). This is a polished piece of sf from a country not really known for producing science fiction movies. The story takes place aboard a starship on its way to an Edenic colony world, which is closed to the masses teeming in space stations orbiting a poisoned Earth except as a prize in a lottery. En route, the film manages to pull in most modern sf movie tropes, but it handles them well and even manages a few – albeit somewhat predictable – scares along the way.

Eolomea, Herrmann Zschoche (1972, East Germany). Deutsches Film-Aktiengesellschaft made four big-budget – for East Germany – sf movies during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They’re a bit dippy, but they did go all out to make good-looking, globally-minded intelligent science fiction. Eolomea is perhaps the best of them, a mystery about the plan to settle the eponymous exoplanet and a space station that has suddenly gone silent. Some great 1970s retro-futuristic production design, too.

Test Pilot Pirx, Marek Piestrak (1979, USSR). AKA Pilot Pirx’s Inquest. Based on the character created by Stanisław Lem, this sees Pirx take a trip to the rings of Saturn, with a crew which contains one or more androids – but he doesn’t know who is which. It starts as a weirdly-paced future thriller, before turning into a space movie that strives for accuracy in some areas but gets it bizarrely wrong in others. And, like most Eastern Bloc sf movies, the future is assumed to be a world of peaceful multinational cooperation, unlike in US films. The soundtrack is also surprisingly ahead of its time.

Ikarie XB-1, Jindřich Polák (1963, Czechoslovakia). The titular spacecraft is sent on a long mission to Alpha Centauri, and various incidents happen en route, including one member of the crew going mad. The production design reminds me a little of Raumpatrouille Orion in places, and there’s plenty of Anglophone films that were later influenced by it – perhaps because, unlike Hollywood sf films of the time, it had an intelligent script.

Frau im Mond, Fritz Lang (1929, Germany). Not the first ever sf movie, that was Georges Méliès’s Le voyage dans la lune in 1902 (which is worth seeing), but Lang’s silent epic Frau im Mond is considerably more realistic and famously gave us the rocket launch countdown. It perhaps spends overmuch of its length laying out the background to the moon shot, and the scenes set on the lunar surface are unsurprisingly not especially accurate, but I’m pretty sure it’s the first actual space movie.

Queen Of Blood, Curtis Harrington (1966, USA). This is one of those films Roger Corman cobbled together from footage from a pair of Soviet sf movies – in this case, Небо зовет and Мечте навстречу – with US-filmed material starring John Saxon, Dennis Hopper, Judi Meredith and Basil Rathbone. Florence Marly plays the title role, an alien vampire stranded on Mars who is rescued by a mission from Earth. Although considered a B-movie, Queen Of Blood rises above its humble origins – those astonishing Soviet visuals, Meredith’s equal treatment alongside Saxon and Hopper, and Marley pulling a star turn as the alien vampire.

Into Infinity, Charles Crichton (1975, UK). AKA The Day After Tomorrow. A live-action made-for-television film by Gerry Anderson, it describes the maiden voyage of Altares, the first human spacecraft to travel at the speed of light. The dialogue is mostly exposition, there’s an explanatory narration by Ed Bishop, and, to be fair, the plot is somewhat on the dull side… but I remember loving it as a kid, and although a recent rewatch did reveal many of its flaws it still fired the sense of wonder I recalled from all those decades ago.

Royal Space Force: Wings of Honneâmise, Hiroyuki Yamaga (1987, Japan). An anime film about a space programme on an entirely invented world, and which ends with the first launch of a crewed rocket, should surely qualify for this list. I only watched this for the first time recently, and I wasn’t that taken with it – but in the weeks since I found myself thinking more kindly of it, and I’m even considering getting hold of a copy of my own.

There are some others I could have included, one or two of which I might even hold in higher regard, but for this list I wanted a good geographic spread.

July 17, 2015
by iansales Leave a comment

The great big space opera giveaway

And that’s not “great big” because there’s lots of copies to give away, I’m afraid, but because the single copy of A Prospect of War I’m giving away is itself “great big”. The give away bit is certainly true, however. The rules are simple: send an email to sales at whippleshieldbooks dot com (you’ll have to translate that yourself) before midnight GMT of Sunday 19 July 2015. Open to everyone.

July 13, 2015
by iansales Leave a comment

Reading diary, #9

Yet more books read, and this time they seem to be mostly genre. Including a – kof kof – fantasy novel. And even a horror novel. If I keep this up I’ll have to give back my science fiction curmudgeon badge.

The Thousand Emperors, Gary Gibson (2012). This is a sequel to 2011’s Final Days, in which humanity has spread out across a number of exoplanets after losing the Earth to an artefact brought back through the wormhole network they had been exploring. But all that – an alien network of wormhole tunnels created billions of years earlier by an unknown race (an idea last seen in Williams & Dix’s Geodesica: Ascent and Geodesica: Descent a decade ago, not to mention Alastair Reynolds’ The Six Directions of Space from 2009) is pretty much just background in Gibson’s novel. It’s more about one of the two human interstellar polities which has formed in the wake of Final Days‘ events. The Tian Di was founded in revolution, and the revolutionary council grew until it numbered one thousand – hence the title – but now power is pretty much concentrated in the hands of Father Chang, the council leader (after a coup a century or two previously), and the council members are just a hugely powerful elite, sort of a cross between the One Percent and Saudi princes. They even have their own secret planet, where they maintain luxurious estates untainted by proximity to the unwashed masses. When a council member is murdered on that secret world, Luc Gabion is asked to investigate, and though he’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to solve the crime, he does learn a lot more about politics inside the council – which at that point is concerned chiefly with the Tian Di’s possible response to diplomatic approaches from the other human polity, the Coalition, after more than a century of isolation – and it all ties into a move to make the Tian Di even more repressive a regime than it currently is. This is heartland sf, full of well-polished tropes deployed with assurance. If it all feels a bit disposable, it’s not because it’s not done well but perhaps because it’s done a bit too well: familiar ideas given an interesting spin, prejudices given a little tweak just so readers are reminded they have them, and a plot which gallops forward at a pace that discourages too much close scrutiny.

Breed, KT Davies (2014). I was fortunate enough to win two of Davies’s novels – this and The Red Knight – at the last York pub meet, at which Davies read from Breed. The novel is a fairly standard fantasy – while certainly not epic, its setting is plainly of that subgenre – but enlivened by an assured comedic touch, some nice pieces of invention, and a clever use of first person that doesn’t reveal the gender of the narrator. The book opens with a prologue – argh – it could just have easily been the first chapter – in which the narrator escapes imprisonment in an ancient demon’s castle but comes a cropper on learning they had been tricked. Back home in Appleton, where Breed’s mother runs one of the local criminal gangs, Breed is sentenced to five years of bonded servitude for a one-handed wizard after getting caught up in a riot following Breed’s attempt to assassinate the leader of a rival gang. The wizard wants to head for the capital, which is fine as that’s where Breed needs to go in order to fulfil their bargain with the demon of the prologue. Adventures ensue. The characters are all venal, the world is dirty and grim and has never really recovered from a catacylsmic war centuries before, and Breed is an amusingly foul-mouthed narrator. The plot may run on well-polished rails but it does so like clockwork, sort of like a toy train then… but Breed is never less than a fun read, and if grim-but-funny – grimlight? – fantasy is your thing you could do a lot worse than this.

Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell, Jacques Tardi (2015). Tardi’s bande dessinée are more often mainstream thrillers than genre, and it makes for a pleasant change from your typical Anglophone graphic novel. A young woman from an institution is hired by a wealthy and philanthropic industrialist to be the nanny for his nephew. The industrialist inherited the wealth, and care of the boy, when his brother and sister-in-law died in a car crash. Shortly after taking up her duties, while the uncle is away on business, the boy and nanny are kidnapped by a dyspeptic hitman and his dim henchmen. But the two manage to escape, and head across France to the eccentric retreat of the industrialist, where they hope to find sanctuary. En route, the nanny proves more than a match for the henchmen, and then the hitman. This is a pretty gruesome story, and Tardi’s art doesn’t shrink from the gore. It’s not the cartoon violence you’d seen in some superhero comic, but more like that of an 18-certificate brutal thriller. Good, though. I shall continue to buy these for as long as Tardi and Fantagraphics churn them out.

The Lady of Situations, Stephen Dedman (1999). I forget where I first came across mention of Dedman, but back in 2002 I read his 1999 novel Foreign Bodies, and thought it pretty good. But quality Australian genre fiction, especially that published by small presses, is not easy to get hold of in the UK, and I seem to recall buying The Lady of Situations when I bought Justina Robson’s collection Heliotrope from Ticonderoga Press (who are definitely worth checking out as they publish some excellent books). Anyway, provenance aside, this is a strong collection. Several of the stories concern a man who has been befriended by vampires, particularly one that looks like a young girl. I’m no fan of vampire stories, but these are handled well – especially the one about Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell. ‘Transit’ is probably the most sfnal story, a young love tale set on a world of hermaphrodites during the visit of some Muslims en route to Earth on Hajj. ‘Amendment’ is fun, an alternate history set at a sf con where Charles Manson turns up to get a book signed by GoH Heinlein. ‘Founding Fathers’ is a nasty story, about a world settled by a small colony of white supremacists, and a visit by a mission from Earth causes a couple of murders and reveals the horrible secret at the heart of the colony. There are a couple of slight pieces here, but the rest more than make up for them. Recommended.

The Zanzibar Cat, Joanna Russ (1983) was Russ’s first collection, published first by Arkham House and then by, of all publishers, Baen. A more variable collection than I’d been expecting, perhaps because it contained so many of her early stories. I reviewed it for SF Mistressworks here.

No Time on Our Side, Roger Chapman (1975). In 1973, some 240 km south of Ireland, while engaged in burying an undersea cable to prevent it being caught by trawlers’ nets, the submersible Pisces III sank in 500 metres of water. The crew of two had just completed their shift, but when surfacing in rough seas, the hatch on the rear pressure sphere (which contained machinery and supplies) broke open and filled the sphere with water. The submersible promptly sank tail-first and ended up stuck vertically in the ocean bottom (just like in the cover art). A full-scale rescue operation began. But first they had to find Pisces III. Chapman was one of the two crew, and No Time on Our Side is a blow-by-blow account of the three days he spent trapped in the submersible. Thanks to the dwindling air supply and increasing carbon dioxide, he was not wholly compos mentis for much of the period, so portions of the book skip over a lot of the hours spent on the bottom. Everything seems a bit slapdash to modern eyes – the submersible crew barely managed a couple of hours sleep each night due to things repeatedly failing and needing fixing before each dive – but once disaster strikes, the response is quick and widespread (and, it seems, happily inconsiderate of cost… which I suspect is not something that would happen in today’s neoliberal uber-capitalist global economy; progress, eh).

Luminous, Greg Egan (1998). Egan is one of those authors whose fiction I’m repeatedly told I’d like, but everything by him I’ve read in the past has left me a little bit cold – which is one novel, and a handful of stories in Interzone over the years. Nevertheless, if I see one of his books going cheap in a charity shop, I buy it. And even now, when perhaps my taste in fiction is somewhat more discriminating and I look for different things in the fiction I read than I did twenty or thirty years ago… Egan’s fiction still leaves me mostly cold. There were a couple of good stories in this collection – I especially liked ‘Silver Fire’, about a epidemic in the US; and ‘Our Lady of Chernobyl’ had some narrative impetus to it, even if the central conceit was weak – but many still felt cold to me, peopled by little more than walking, talking ideas. And ‘The Planck Dive’ is just a really dull physics lectures with a bunch of character interactions to provide something for the reader to connect with. Interestingly, although most of the stories in Luminous were written in the mid-1990s, they’re chiefly set in this decade, the second of the twenty-first century. Egan got one or two things right, but he also got a lot wrong – and yet he still manages to catch the flavour of now better than many other sf authors of the time who wrote stories set in the early twenty-first century. I’ll still keep my eye open for Egan books in charity shops, but I doubt I’ll ever be able to call myself a fan.

The Three, Sarah Lotz (2014). I took this with me to Finland – did I mention I went to Archipelacon in the Åland Islands in Finland, and it was excellent? – anyway, I took The Three with me to read during the convention. I had no intention of reading it during the journey – for that I had DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow – but I started it shortly after I arrived in Mariehamn, and had finished it by the Sunday so I left it on a table for someone else to, er, enjoy. The central premise is, well, pretty much the same as James Herbert’s The Survivor (an awful book, but actually quite a good film). Four planes crash within minutes of each other around the world – in Japan, the US, the English Channel, and South Africa – and a child is the only survivor in three of the crashes. No one survives the fourth. An enigmatic phone call by an American passenger on the plane in Japan, shortly before she succumbs to her injuries, prompts a US evangelist to declare the three children the, er, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Um, yes. He claims there’s a child who survived the fourth crash, and various hints suggest this may be true, but… Why? Why base the plot on the Four Horseman but only have three of them? It makes no sense. The kids are certainly not ordinary and who, or what, they are is never categorically stated. The novel is also presented as found documents, the research materials of a journalist writing a book on the whole affair. Lotz handles her voices impressively well, and for commercial fiction this is a well put-together piece of work. But the premise is weak and over-stays its welcome by a couple of hundred pages. Oh, and definitely don’t read this book when travelling by air…

July 11, 2015
by iansales Leave a comment

Books everywhere

At least these book haul posts are now less frequent, and feature fewer books, than they did in previous years. Even so, I really need another big clearout – I can even reach some of my bookshelves because of all the books stacked in front of them. Buying new bookcases won’t help as I already have bookcases on every wall – most of which are double-stacked. If I could read faster, I could probably get rid of quite a few books…

Some graphic novels. Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell is the latest Tardi, a slick and quite sick thriller. The Nemo trilogy – Heart of Ice, The Roses of Berlin and River of Ghosts – is a spin-off from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the Nemo here is the daughter of Verne’s original. I wrote about the trilogy here.

A mixed bag. Soviet Ghosts is lovely photographs of abandoned buildings in what was the USSR. Notes for a Myth is a 1968 poetry collectionm by Terence Tiller. I now have all of his books. And Home, Marilynne Robinson’s third novel, is a signed first edition.

A pair of charity shop finds: a collection by Sarah Hall, The Beautiful Indifference; and The Teleportation Accident, a book Lavie Tidhar has raved about for a while now.

Three more Penguins for the DH Lawrence collection: The White Peacock, his first novel; Selected Essays; and a travel book, Sea and Sardinia. I now have 21 of these white Penguin paperbacks, from a total of, I think, 27.

And finally, another two books for the deep sea collection. No Time on Our Side details the three-day rescue of the two crew – the author was one – of the submersible Pisces III, which sank in 500 m of water 250 km south of the Irish coast. The Danger Game is the autobiography of a diver for the North Sea oil industry.

July 10, 2015
by iansales 1 Comment

Moving pictures, #17

Six months into the year and I’m on my seventeenth film post already. And it’s not like I include every film I watch here – I don’t, for instance, bother writing about films I’ve seen before, or crappy ones on Movies24 that I find myself watching on a Sunday afternoon after my brain has given up the ghost… Anyway, as usual asterisked films are from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list (or at least the version of the list I’m using).

Flight from Ashiya, Michael Anderson (1964, USA). Richard Widmark is a tough-talking USAF Rescue Service pilot stationed in Japan. Yul Brynner is his Japanese sergeant and medic, and George Chakiris is a pilot lieutenant with confidence issues. A Japanese ship goes down in a fierce storm, and two Rescue Service Grumman HU-16 Albatross seaplanes are sent to rescue them. As they fly to the site of the sinking, and begin searching for survivors, flashbacks cover important events in the past of each of the three main characters. It’s melodramatic, but surprisingly dull, stuff. Suzy Parker has a not-much-more-than-walk-on part as Brynner’s latest flame, and the aerial sequences aren’t too bad; but other than that, this isn’t even the sort of film you’d stop to watch if you were channel-hopping on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Disappointing.

Royal Space Force: Wings of Honnêamise, Hiroyuki Yamaga (1987, Japan). I know only a little about anime, and have seen only a dozen or so of the best-known ones and, of course, pretty much all of the Studio Ghibli movies… but I’m open to learning more. So when David Tallerman recommended a handful of titles I should add to my rental list, I picked two of them and this was the first that arrived. And… while the world-building in Wings of Honnêamise was cleverly done it wasn’t enough to offset that style of overly-broad humour and the characters mugging all the time common to much anime that I find really hard to take. The launch sequence at the end, however, where Honnêamise’s first crewed rocket makes it into space while an air and ground battles rages around the launch pad is actually really good. I’m not sure if it’s worth sitting through near enough 100 minutes of the film to get to that point, but even now, weeks after watching the movie, that sequence sticks in my memory. Perversely, thinking about it for this post is sort of making me want to have another go at watching the film. Apparently, a sequel titled Aoki Uru (Uru in Blue) is finally in preproduction, after a number of aborted previous attempts, with a proposed launch date of 2018.

Continuum, Richie Mehta (2013, Canada). AKA I’ll Follow You Down. Physics professor Rufus Sewell says goodbye to wife Gillian Anderson and son (who, twelve years later, grows up to be Haley Joel Osment) and heads for a scientific conference in Princeton, but never returns. It turns out he’s actually invented a time machine, and he uses it to travel back to the 1940s in order to meet Albert Einstein. But he is mugged and killed before he can return. Fortunately, Osment is a genius and he manages to figure out his dad’s arcane physics and so build a replica of his time machine. Which he then uses to go back in time to save Sewell. It’s hardly the most original plot in media science fiction – at least half a dozen sf television series have used it more than once throughout their runs – and it’s all played very low-key… But Osment is too much a genius to be really plausible – and that’s after you’ve swallowed Sewell inventing a time machine. Meh.

Adam’s Rib*, George Cukor (1949, USA). Much as I enjoy screwball comedies, I’ve never really seen Spencer Tracy as a screwball romantic lead. He never quite seemed light enough on his feet, if you know what I mean. But here he is with Katherine Hepburn, as a married couple who are also lawyers who end up opposing each other in court. She’s defending a woman who took a potshot at her philandering husband, he’s the prosecuting attorney. The result is a battle of legal wits and domestic rivalry in the court room. To be fair, I thought Tracy and Hepburn were better in Desk Set – while the film was not especially witty, it was in Technicolor – Technicolor! – and there was a giant 1950s computer in it. It was also a bit, well, sweeter. (And Tracy played a good curmudgeon.) Anyway, I’ve seen Adam’s Rib, so meh.

The Island, Pavel Lungin (2006, Russia). Amazon insisted on recommending this film to me – repeatedly – because I’d bought, or searched for, films by Aleksandr Sokurov. I checked it out on Wikipedia, and it looked like it might appeal… so I bought a copy. And it did appeal. During WWII, Germans board a Russian coal barge and force the crewman to shoot his captain. The Germans then mine the barge. The crewman survives and is wracked with remorse for killing his captain. The film jumps ahead thirty years. The crewman, Anatoly, is a monk on the tiny island on which he washed ashore. He is also something of a Holy Fool, and tells people things which then come true. He looks after the monastery’s boiler, is perpetually filthy, and talks back to the monastery’s abbot. But one day an admiral brings his daughter to be exorcised by Brother Anatoly… Some films take you by surprise not simply because of the way they’ve been shot – and The Island is indeed beautifully shot – but because of their story and what they say. And The Island certainly did that. I was initially expecting something like one of Béla Tarr’s movies – I seem to recall the phrase “slow cinema” being used in reference to Lungin – but The Island soon became something very different. I now want to watch more films by Lungin. But, since he’s Russian, very few of them have been released in the UK – only this one, in fact. Gah.

Paddington, Paul King (2014, UK). This was pretty successful last year, so I thought it might be worth a go. I should have known better. Yes, I remember the Paddington Bear cartoon from my childhood, but this was some bizarre story that didn’t seem to know in which decade it was set. An explorer in “deepest, darkest Peru” finds some talking bears, and years later the child bear heads to London to find the family of the hunter. Though the film was sent in the present day, it only made sense – talking bears notwithstanding – if it was sent in the 1940s. And everything in the plot was structured as if the story were set in the 1940s. It made for a weird disconnect between plot and visuals, and even the modicum of wit couldn’t rescue the movie from total crapness. And comedy cross-dressing? When was the last time a movie featured that? Whatever happened to the British film industry? All it seems capable of turning out these days are mockney gangster movies, execrable upper middle class rom coms, and appalling comedies. Those “quota quickies” they banged out during WWII? Most of those are better than this shit.

Hud*, Martin Ritt (1963, USA). Paul Newman plays the ruthless and self-centred son of a rancher, and he’s more concerned with making money than anything as profit-jeoparding as principles (such as, for example, not drilling for oil on the land). So Hud sleeps around, gets into fights, argues with his dad, patronises his younger brother, and generally presents as one of those arsehole characters Hollywood likes to build films around because they’re good for winning awards. (Hud, incidentally, was nominated for seven Oscars, but only won for best actress, best supporting actor and best cinematography.) Working my way through the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list has introduced me to films, and directors, I might not otherwise have seen and which I have greatly appreciated and admired. But it has also resulted in me watching a great deal of middle-brow Hollywood output that I would otherwise have quite happily not bothered seeing. Hud is one such movie. Oh, the scene where they massacre the cattle because it has foot and mouth disease is affecting, but centring the film on an unlikeable prick doesn’t to me feel like it adds anything useful or interesting. I’m sixty percent of the way through the list now, and I suspect of those I’ve seen I’d only consider around a quarter truly belonged there.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die count: 601

July 1, 2015
by iansales 4 Comments

Åwesome

When I learned the 2015 Eastercon would be in Heathrow, I knew I’d be giving it a miss. And when I discovered its guests of honour were urban fantasy writers, then I had even less reason to attend. At Fantastika, Swecon 2013, in Stockholm, I’d heard about Åcon, a small con which takes place in Mariehamn in the Åland Islands, an archipelago between Finland and Sweden (it’s a self-governing part of Finland, although the natives speak Swedish). I quite fancied attending Åcon – I’d found Nordic fandom hugely friendly at Fantastika, and Mariehamn looked like a nice place to visit – but plans to do so in 2015 came to nothing… But that was okay because then Archipelacon was announced. An Eastercon-sized convention. In Mariehamn.

So that would be my alternative to the Heathrow Eastercon.

As the date of the convention approached, I started to worry about travelling to Åland – the Finnish fans catch a ferry from Turku, and the Swedish fans from Stockholm. I didn’t fancy finding my way from Helsinki to Turku and onto the ferry in a country I’d never visited before. But then I found out Mariehamn had an airport… and I could fly there from Helsinki Airport. Sorted. I booked my flights, my hotel room, and my days off from work.

As journeys go, it wasn’t too bad. I had to spend five hours in Helsinki Airport waiting for my connection, but it’s a nice airport so it was no real hardship. And at the gate to the flight to Mariehamn I ran into some friendly faces, Icelandic writer Emil Hjörvar Petersen and his girlfriend Kristin. We were staying in the same hotel too, the Park Alandia. So on reaching Mariehamn, we shared a taxi from the airport. And met up later for food and drinks in the hotel bar… where I discovered all food in Finland is either gluten-free, lactose-free or both. (I was told a lot of Finns are lactose-intolerant, but most food is actually only “low lactose”. However, I had no problem finding lactose-free food during my stay – and even in Helsinki Airport half of the sandwiches in the café were labelled lactose-free.)

The following morning, I went for a wander in the centre of Mariehamn. Which didn’t take long. It may be small, but it’s very pleasant. I found the convention venue, the Alandica conference centre, quite easily, but when I turned up they were still getting things ready. I returned later, bumped into some friends, and so Archipelacon began in earnest…

Much as I’d like to mention everyone I spoke to during the con, I’m likely to miss someone off so if I have done, apologies. But here goes anyway: Tobias, Ian, Cristina, Edward, Farah, Johan, Linnéa, Johan, Kimmo, Rollo, Kristina, Alexander, Emil, Kristin, Jukka, Juha, Elio, Linda, Gary, Niall, Liz, Nic, Jukka, Polar bear, Loponen, Jerry, Juha, Christina, Doug, Dave, Gaie, Minnow, Alexander, Eugene, Cheryl, Karin, Mia… and no doubt there’s someone I’ve forgotten. I met people from a dozen nations, and hung out with people I knew from Fantastika, UK fandom, online fandom, not to mention lots of very friendly people I’d never met before. Archipelacon is also the only time I’ve had a convention-goer introduce themselves to me in a non-convention venue. I’d nipped back to the Park Alandia Hotel bar for some food on the Thursday night, and the person next to me spotted my membership badge and introduced himself and his wife – they were, of course, also members. We were then joined by a fourth person who had spotted our badges. I don’t recall anything like that ever happening at a UK con.

The programme was very good, although I didn’t attend as much as I’d planned (but certainly more than I typically do). I was on only one programme item, “Why SF Writers Should Rule the World — or Should They?”, with Kristina Hård, Kimmo Lehtonen and Farah Mendlesohn. Obviously, we all said they shouldn’t. Then we sort of talked around the subject, prompted at intervals by Kristina. The audience seemed to enjoy it.

There was also a strong academic track – and a lot more academics present than is the case at Eastercons. In fact, sitting outside on the Alandica deck at one point I found I was the only non-academic in the group at the table. On the Friday night, there was a big party around the pool of the Hotel Arkipelag (the main con hotel). The Arkipelag also has the only nightclub in Mariehamn – so when we moved indoors later, it was very busy. The nightlife in Mariehamn is… odd. It all felt a bit nineties. At the Saturday night pool party, I left around midnight, and took a wrong turn leaving the hotel… and found myself at the nightclub entrance, where bouncers held back Mariehamn twentysomethings queuing behind a rope. And when I got to the Park Alandia Hotel and entered through the bar, I noticed that everyone there was over the age of forty-five. I was later told the nightlife in the town revolves around the hotels, but wandering about town on the Sunday I found a couple of small bars. Outside one were three men who looked like they’d just stepped out of an Aki Kaurismäki film. Except they were speaking Swedish, of course.

The Alandica was a superb venue. The central space was big and airy, with plenty of seating. The two auditoriums were excellent. There was food available throughout the day – much of which was lactose-free. And the bar sold bottles of the local beer, Stallhagen – which is what I drank for most of the weekend. It’s very nice. Sunset each day was around 11:30 to midnight. Which meant it was always later than you thought. The weather was sunny and hot – you don’t expect to get suburned in Finland, but I did.

I’d promised myself I wouldn’t buy any books at the con, but I’d said the same at Fantastika and still left with a dozen or so. Thanks to Alvarfonden. This is a fan-run fund which sells secondhand US and UK paperbacks cheap – at Archiepelacon for between €1 and €2. So I ended up coming back with half a dozen or so, mostly for SF Mistressworks: The Clewiston Test, Kate Wilhelm; Outer Space Stories, AL Furman; Strange Bedfellows, Thomas N Scortia; The Tomorrow People, Judith Merril; Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue, Rosel George Brown; Godsfire, Cynthia Felice; A Woman A Day, Philip José Farmer; and A Voice Out of Ramah, Lee Killough. I read the last during my flight home, so a review of it will be going up on SF Mistressworks this coming Wednesday.

The only bad thing to happen during the weekend was entirely my own fault. On the Sunday afternoon, I received a telephone call from my hotel. “You must check out now.” “I’m booked through until tomorrow.” “No, you’re not.” I wasn’t. Gah. I’d booked a room from Wednesday to Sunday, meaning including Sunday night. But the hotel took that to mean checking out on Sunday. And I never noticed I’d only booked four nights instead of five (possibly because Archipelacon started on a Thursday rather than a Friday, and that threw me). Tobias offered the spare bed in his room – he was in the same hotel – but the hotel managed to find me a free room. Except it had no shower. Which meant using the one down in the saunas. I took that room because I’d be up at seven am to catch my flight, and thought it unfair to Tobias. But skulking naked around the hotel sauna was not an experience to be repeated.

It seems likely Archipelacon was a one-off, but I think pretty much everyone who attended would like it to be repeated. The Alandica was an excellent venue, Mariehamn (nightlife notwithstanding) was a lovely little town, and everyone seemed to have a really good time. I know I did. It was the best con, in fact, I’ve been to for a long time. I certainly plan to visit Finland again – perhaps an Åcon, or maybe a Finncon (next year it’s in Tampere, I believe). And, of course, there’s always Sweden – Fantastika is back at the Dieselverkstaden in Stockholm in 2016. There was even talk of running small con in Reykjavik. I’d definitely go to that.

ETA: Archipelacon has posted all the photos by official con photographer Henry Söderlund. You can find them here.