It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible

Author Archives: iansales


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The craft of space

I can’t decide if the success of USAF’s X-37B mission a couple of days ago is the most exciting thing to have happened recently regarding space, or simply further evidence that the US’s space programme is moribund. The Boeing X-37B is an unmanned orbiter which, like the soon-to-be-retired Space Shuttle, is thrown into orbit atop a launch vehicle (an Atlas V) but lands like an aircraft on a runway. The X-37B landed at Vandenberg AFB on 3 December after 220 days in orbit – photos here and video of the landing here.

The X-37B could be exciting because it’s a new orbiter. Admittedly, it’s the Space Shuttle’s Mini-me, and it’s robotic. But it’s new tech, and it’s likely to be kept up to date. So it might well be the first in a whole new, and evolving, generation of spacecraft. Which is important since, after all, launch vehicles haven’t substantially changed in more than fifty years. Rocket engines still work the same way; the same fuels are still used. But a cutting-edge orbiter? That’s a different matter.

Of course, there are a number of crewed spacecraft already in use, or at various stages of development. Soyuz, which is, ahem, as old as I am. Shenzhou. Also a handful of uncrewed spacecraft, such as Progress, ATC, H-II. SpaceX’s Dragon has had one test flight, but it was a stripped-down version and it’ll be a while yet before it’s capable of lofting people into orbit. Then there’s all those currently on the drawing-boards of numerous companies: Excalibur Almaz, Skylon, Lynx, CST-100, Dream Chaser… And, of course, NASA’s own Orion spacecraft.

I’m still not convinced that COTS, the reliance on the commercial sector to open up space, is going to work. It needs long-term, capital-intensive investment to really exploit space, and private companies won’t, and often can’t, do that. They may help populate LEO, but anything further, and more interesting, is out of their budget and timeframe. Perhaps it’s time the ESA’s member-states upped their contributions and set about doing something exciting involving people.

Some of you are no doubt wondering why this post isn’t on my other blog, A Space About Books About Space, as that would seem better suited to the topic. But I wanted to drag the news about the X-37B into the ongoing series of whinges I’ve posted here about realism in space-based science fiction. If it feels like I’m going on and on and on about this, it’s because a) I find the nuts and bolts of it all fascinating, and b) I think there’s plenty of opportunity in it for science fiction to do something interesting.

Which is not to say that I completely repudiate space opera and all that fanciful magic tech you find in most space-based science fiction. Yes, yes, I know: they’re literary devices. But the problem with literary devices is that they quickly become set-dressing. And then before you know it, they’re being used all over the place without any real thought for how they ought to be deployed. And, you know, sf has been doing that sort of thing for eighty years, so perhaps it’s time to try something a little different. Not that realistic space-based sf – or, as I call it, “spacecore” – has never been done before. You have everything from Jeff Sutton’s First On The Moon to Ben Bova’s Grand Tour series of novels. And plenty in between. For me, however, the two touchstones are Jed Mercurio’s Ascent and the BBC television series Space Odyssey.

More by accident than by design, I’ve been quite faithful in my own short fiction. My Euripidean Space stories (see here) may feature a mysterious alien sentinel loose in the Solar system, but otherwise treat space and space travel realistically. And my story in Postscripts 20/21, ‘Killing the Dead’ (see here), was set aboard a generation starship – so no fancy bending of the laws of physics there. I did say a couple of months ago that I was going to try writing a genre heartland sf story, with FTL and aliens and all the space opera trappings. But I couldn’t do it. One turned into a slower-than-light story, and the other ended up as a UK-based anti-capitalist tale.

Of course, not every sf story idea is suitable for either space opera or spacecore. But at the very least focusing on the mechanics and physics of space travel should prevent writers from writing skiffy – ie, sf stories that don’t really need to be sf. You know the sort I mean: the space destroyer and her noble captain, re-fighting WWII in outer space. I think they call it “military sf”… Recognising that space is not just the blank stuff between plot points can only help concretize the sfnal elements of a story, can only lead to a story which will only work in the setting invented for it.

These days, no sf writer has an excuse for not making an effort – all the information you need is at your fingertips. Everything you could possibly want to know, about everything from the interstellar medium to star maps to the Pioneer Anomaly, can be found somewhere on the Internet. And all those spacecraft I mentioned earlier? There’s plenty of info on those to be found online too. You can get a very real idea of exactly what is required for travelling or living in space.

There are too many monsters in science fiction these days. It sort of takes the science out of it. Shine a spotlight on the hardware, on the physics required for all to work, and we might get back to the sort of sf that inspired generations of scientists and engineers. It’ll be optimistic too. It’s the nature of the material.

And, it goes without saying, there’s more than enough wonder for everyone.


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New moon

There’s a review here of issues 28 and 29 of Jupiter magazine on this month’s sfsite.com by Rich Horton. Jupiter XXVIII Autonoe has the second of my Euripidean Space stories in it (note to self: write more). Horton describes it as “a fun pure SF piece, a story of old wars and revenge in the moons of Saturn, with alien artefacts thrown in”. Not a bad response to a story I, er, “borrowed”  from an Ancient Greek tragedy…


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Do as Romanians do

I’ve been quiet the last week because I’ve not been at home. I went to Romania with some friends. We flew to Cluj, spent the weekend there, and then travelled onto Cugir, a small town in the mountains south of Cluj. Most of the nights were spent drinking Romanian beer and wine, and eating Romanian food. On one day, we walked up a mountain – about fifteen kilometres in total – and the weather chose that day to chuck it down. Otherwise, it was sunny and cool. The food was good, the people really nice, everything extremely cheap, and the language very easy to get by in. I’ll do a longer post on the week in a day or two, but thanks to everyone we met. I had a brilliant time.


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Calling occupants of interplanetary craft

I may have just destroyed my credibility by borrowing the title for this post from The Carpenters, but it does seem to fit the topic perfectly. To be fair, the song was written and originally recorded by Klaatu… and you can’t get more science-fictional a band-name than that. But, onwards…

There’s an excellent article on the New Scientist website Why space is the impossible frontier, which makes clear quite how hostile an environment outer space is. Space travellers can expect to suffer from atrophy of the heart (one week in space is quivalent to six weeks bed-ridden), loss of muscle volumne (six months in space leads to a loss of 32 percent of leg muscle power), and bone loss (about 1 to 2 percent per month). About one in ten space travellers can expect to develop cancer.

There are other hazards: micrometeroid strikes, solar flares, the fact that humans can only survive in a manufactured environment… And, to make matters worse, getting out of a gravity well is expensive, which means those environments must be as light as possible. The walls of the Apollo LM were famously thin – an engineer dropped a pencil in one while it was still at the Grumman factory; the pencil went straight through the wall. The entire craft weighed only 30,000 lb. That’s about as much as three African elephants. And two of those elephants were left behind on the Moon.

Charlie Stross has written in the past (see here; as have I here) how this shows the inappropriatness of the pioneer mentality when applied to outer space. Space is a new frontier; but it bears no resemblance to the old New Frontier of the Wild West. At present, the only means we have of colonising it is with our imaginations.

And sometimes those imaginations run a little too free. A lot of science fiction is set in outer space, or on worlds which orbit other stars. Or, indeed, other types of celestial objects, both natural and artificial. In these stories, much of the difficulties associated with space travel are blithely ignored. Spaceships magically travel out of gravity wells. Spaceships magically provide interior gravity. Spaceship hulls magically protect occupants from all manner of spaceborne hazards. And, of course, spaceships magically travel unimaginable distances within days or weeks.

Yet look here. It seems Panspermia as a theory has a serious hole in it. While life in some form, such as hardy microbes,  may be able to survive months or years in space, they’re not going to get very far in such timeframes. To travel between star systems could take millions of years. Not even a kevlar-coated microbe with an atomic pile for a nucleus is going to survive that journey. But its corpse might. And, providing radiation, etc, has not garbled too much of the information embedded in it, the microbe could be used as a template for life. So… zombie microbes. Zombie space travellers.

Some sf novels have suggested that only information – carefully safeguarded, of course – may be the only way to colonise the stars. The Orphans of Earth trilogy by Sean Williams and Shane Dix springs to mind. In it, AI constructs based on real people are sent to various stars with exoplanets, and they then use robot bodies on arrival. Then there’s William Barton’s Dark Sky Legion, in which the protagonist travels dead from star to star, and is resurrected at each destination.

These are ways of dealing with the distances. Because the distances are vast. Sf writers and readers often lose sight of that. Take, for example, the heliopause, the point where the solar wind is too weak to push against the stellar winds of others stars. It’s approximately 100 AU from the Sun. That’s nearly fifteen billion kilometres. Voyager 1 is not expected to reach the heliopause until 2015, and it’s been travelling at around 67,000 km/h since 1977. Interstellar distances are orders of magnitude greater. Intergalactic distances are simply mind-boggling. There is a wall-shaped structure of galaxies some 400 million light-years from Earth called the Sculptor Wall. It is 370 million light years long, 230 million light years wide and 45 million light years deep. Try and picture that. It can’t be done. It’s impossible to imagine how long it would take just to travel its length. Yes, space is big, as Douglas Adams famously wrote. Human beings cannot travel to other planetary systems – space is too big. It’s also lethal. Human beings cannot survive in it unaided. At least, living human beings cannot survive. Perhaps the only well-travelled human is a dead human.

But, however humanity makes it to the stars, imagination will lead the way, and I think there’s plenty of room in the noosphere for stories which explore such futures with a more-realistic bent. Not Mundane science fiction; just “less magical” science fiction. I can’t think of a single sf novel which does not trivialise that first difficult step out of a gravity well. Perhaps the rocket, the brute force approach, is the most effective means of throwing something into orbit. Perhaps weight will be the most important limiting factor in interplanetary or interstellar travel – assuming all journeys start and end at the bottoms of gravity wells, of course… Well, living in space is untenable over the long term.

Instead of fighting aliens, or other interstellar empires of humans, it’s a battle for survival. The only enemy is the universe. And it’s a common enemy. If there are aliens out there, then they too will be fighting the same war. Why can’t we have more science fiction that reflects this? As Sir Arthur Eddington, an astronomer, said, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine”. And yet sf writers seem content to refight historical wars in some sanitised and romanticised and safe imaginery place which is supposed to resemble the universe around us. They’re ignoring the unimaginable strangeness and the mind-boggling vastness of it all. They turned the Orion Arm into a shopping mall, and the Milky Way into Smallville. They’ve taken the wonder out of the real universe.

It’s time to put it back. Please.


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Another Catastrophia review

Library Journal have posted a review here of Catastrophia, edited by Allen Ashley. My story, ‘In the Face of Disaster’, is one of four from the anthology mentioned in the review. Although the review only gives a short précis of each of the four stories, it says the anthology is “inventive though somewhat uneven in literary quality”.

There’s also a review of LE Modesitt Jr’s new novel, Empress of Eternity, on that page. Library Journal apparently liked it a great deal more than I did – see my review in this month’s Interzone.


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Readings and watchings 10

It’s been a month since the last one, so here goes:

Books
Interstellar Empire, John Brunner (1976), is a fix-up of three novellas from 1953, 1958 and 1965. They’re juvenilia and it shows. For a start, it’s “enslaved”, not “slavered”. Gah. And despite being set in a post-collapse galactic empire, everyone talks like comedy barbarians. Brunner admits in an included essay that the novellas were partly inspired by a desire to invent a workable swords & spaceships universe – ie, interstellar travel but each world possessing no more than Dark Ages tech (although a helicopter does make an appearance). The mention of mutants and telepathic powers, however, in no way explains the magic powers which feature in one of the novellas. Aldiss did it much better in Starswarm and Galaxies Like Grains of Sand.

Ascendancies, DG Compton (1980), I wrote about here.

Planet of the Apes, Pierre Boulle (1963), was terrible. The film is a great deal better. Although originally published in France in 1963, this book reads like it was written forty years earlier. And, annoyingly, the author (or perhaps the translator of the Penguin edition I read) refers to chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans throughout as “monkeys”. That’s in spite the book’s title. Gah. The story opens with a couple in a spaceship finding a message in a bottle floating in space – which is too dumb a concept to be taken seriously, as paper simply wouldn’t survive in space. The message is the story of Ulysse Mérou, who lands on an inhabitable planet in the Betelgeuse system and is captured by intelligent apes. He’s an unpleasant narrator, the swapping of humans for apes and vice versa is painfully obvious a conceit, and the details of the apes’ world don’t really add up. Avoid.

Alanya to Alanya (2005), Renegade (2006) and Tsunami (2007), L Timmel Duchamp, are the first three books of the Marq’ssan Cycle. I’m currently reading the fourth book, and I plan to write about all five once I’m done. Just like I planned to write about the five books of Gwyneth Jones’s Bold as Love Cycle – the piece on those is almost done, and should be going up here soon-ish. So far, however, the Marq’ssan Cycle is proving an excellent thought-provoking read, and I’d certainly recommend it.

The Collector, John Fowles (1963). Perhaps when reading an author’s oeuvre, you should start with their debut novel. I didn’t. The first novel I read by Fowles was A Maggot, and I thought it was excellent. When I later read The French Lieutenant’s Woman, I was even more impressed. The Collector can’t match either of those. Fowles’ maintenance of his two characters’ voices is good throughout The Collector, and the novel is cleverly-structured. But it all seems a bit, well, tame. The eponymous entomologist kidnaps Miranda, locks her in his cellar, and then treats her like an imprisoned princess. When you compare that to similar situations from television shows such as CSI, or even from the real world, it all seems a bit too comfortable and home counties. Disappointing.

The Girl At The Lion d’Or, Sebastian Faulks (1989), is Faulks’ second novel. The eponymous character is a young woman of mysterious background who takes a waitress job at the titular hotel in France during the early 1930s. She immediately falls in love with wealthy lawyer Charles Hartmann. The two have an affair, and she tells him her secret. This changes his view of her, and so he breaks off the relationship… The Girl At The Lion d’Or has a good sense of time and place – and the heroine’s secret is very much a product of the time – but the writing is a little too flowery in places. But then it is only Faulks’ second novel…

The Secret History Omnibus Volume 1, Jean-Pierre Pécau (2010), is a graphic novel. Back in the Stone Age, four youths were each gifted with a powerful magic rune – the shield, sword, chalice and lance. These four Archons were immortal, and have battled throughout human history for supremacy. When one’s plan backfired during the early years of the Holy Roman Empire, it created William of Lecce, an evil immortal, who has subsequently been responsible for all the wars and tribulations since. There’s a good idea at the heart of this graphic novel, and the historical periods are handled well. But a lot seems unexplained, and it’s easy to get confused. This first volume covers from the Stone Age to the First World War, with episodes set in Ancient Egypt, the reign of Frederick I, the Great Fire of London, and Napoleonic France. I’ll be picking up Volume 2 when that becomes available.

The Flying Saucer, Bernard Newman (1950), I read to review for Interzone.

Films
Déjà Vu, dir. Tony Scott (2006), is one of those high-concept thrillers Hollywood likes to rip bleeding from the oeuvre of Philip K Dick. Except this one isn’t based on anything by PKD. A bomb explodes on a ferry in New Orleans, killing everyone aboard. Denzel Washington investigates, and is seconded to a super-secret taskforce which has access to… a time portal. They can see back in time, to the very moment of the explosion. There’s some guff about wormholes and Einstein-Rosen Bridges, but this is Hollywood so it’s not very plausible. It all ends up with Washington getting sent back in time to rescue a woman who might hold a clue to the bomber’s identity. Entertaining, but it’s best not to think about it too hard.

The Men Who Stare At Goats, dir. Grant Heslov (2009), surprised me. I was expecting some stupid gung-ho thriller related to the title, but it turned out to be a funny and slightly offbeat comedy. The book on which it was based is actually non-fiction. Yes, the US military really did train soldiers in telepathy and telekinesis. Not to mention lots of other weird hippy-type crap. Not that they were successful. At least, not in the real world. In this movie, it’s left open. George Clooney is good, Spacey plays a nasty piece of work convincingly, but Ewan McGregor seems a bit out of place. A fun film.

Lured, dir. Douglas Sirk (1947), is an early thriller by the master of melodrama. It’s set in London, but made in the US with a US cast. Which makes for an odd viewing experience as the accents are variable. Lucille Ball plays an American, however. She gets embroiled in the hunt for a serial killer when Scotland Yard ask her to act as bait. There are several Sirk touches in the film, but it’s not a patch on his later stuff. It’s too light-hearted to really pass as noir, and a bit too bizarre in places as well; and some of the faux Hitchcockian staging sits at odds with the more conventionally-filmed interior scenes. One for fans.

Fanboys, dir. Kyle Newman (2008), I reviewed for VideoVista here.

The Time Traveler’s Wife, dir. Robert Schwentke (2009), I watched because I’ll probably never get around to reading the book. And, to be honest, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Man stalks woman through time, right from when she was really young. It struck me as a bit unhealthy. Meh.

Black Lightning, dir. Dimitriy Kiselev & Aleksandr Voytinskiy (2009), I reviewed for VideoVista here.

Sherlock Holmes, dir. Guy Ritchie (2009), entertained me more than I expected. I don’t have much time for Ritchie’s films, but a few people had told me Sherlock Holmes was actually quite good. And so it proved. Nothing to do with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, though. Well, it was about a detective and his sidekick; and they happened to be named Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. But that’s about as far as it went. Entertaining, if supremely silly. It’s been a couple of weeks since I watched the film, and I find I can’t remember any of the plot. Which pretty much sums it up.

The Woman In Question, dir. Anthony Asquith (1950), I reviewed for VideoVista here.

La Reine Margot, dir. Patrice Chéreau (1994). They were a nasty lot those French royals in the 16th century. We might piss and moan about our current government dumping on the population from a great height, but at least they haven’t manufactured a massacre just to keep themselves in power. That’s what the mother of King Charles IX did in France in 1572. Since he was Catholic, and she didn’t want the Protestants to gain the throne, she had a bunch of them killed, which in turn sparked off a wave of mob violence. As many as 30,000 might have died (estimates vary). The title character is the sister of King Charles IX, who is married off to Henri, King of Navarre (a separate kingdom in the Pyrenees), who is Protestant. This is allegedly to placate the French Protestants, but it doesn’t go very well. Henri is imprisoned, and forced to convert to Catholicism. He eventually escapes, with the help of his wife. But not before King Charles IX’s mother tries to poison him, but inadvertently poisons her son, the king. When he dies, his brother takes the throne. But then he dies too, and Henri ends up as King of France. So he got the last laugh, after all. You couldn’t make this sort of stuff up. If you put it in a fantasy novel, readers would say it was too implausible. This film adaptation is noted for its excellence, and it’s easy to see why. Although sixteenth century France seems a bit minimalist and flat, and there are lots of meaningful glances between members of the cast. And it’s a long film. But it’s definitely worth seeing.

Edge of Darkness (1985), is the original BBC television series, not the inferior Hollywood remake. I thought I’d seen this before, perhaps when it was originally broadcast. But apparently not. Bob Peck plays a Yorkshire policeman, whose activist daughter is shot by an assassin on his doorstep. It turns out it’s all to do with Northmoor, a nearby nuclear waste facility based in an old mine. Peck’s character was a bit odd, even kissing one suspect in order to get him to confess, and later trying a similar trick on the assassin. Also bonkers was Joe Don Baker’s CIA agent, who helps Peck to crack the case because it’s in the interest of the US to blow the lid on the secret British plutonium project and the sale of Northmoor to a US billionaire. I can see why the series has become a cult favourite – it’s not the straightforward thriller a summary of its plot might suggest. It’s a little odd, but compelling viewing nonetheless. And the ending is completely mad.

The Last Mimzy, dir. Robert Shaye (2007), is a genre film which seems to have slipped beneath a lot of people’s radars. It’s based on a short story by Lewis Padgett (AKA husband and wife Henry Kuttner and CL Moore). Basically, the future is in trouble, so they send kids’ toys back into the distant past in the hope of educating a child to send them what they need. A brother and sister, aged six and twelve, who live in Seattle in the present day find the toys. And they make the kids smarter. And also provide some good sfx. While this is a family film, I think it’s concept is a little too high for its target audience. It’s done well, but it tries too hard to get its central conceit across and comes close to losing its viewers in parts. Entertaining, but, well, perhaps the filmmakers shouldn’t have thought about it too hard.

Death Watch, dir. Bertrand Tavernier (1980), I wrote about here.


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Watch Death Watch

So I managed to get hold of a copy of Bertrand Tavernier’s adaptation – La mort en direct, or Death in Full View, or Death Watch – of DG Compton’s The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe. And I watched it last night.

The book was published in 1974 (I wrote about it here). The film was released six years later in 1980. It was directed by Bertrand Tavernier, and starred Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel, Harry Dean Stanton, Max von Sydow, and Thérèse Liotard (and a young Robbie Coltrane). Although the movie’s director is French, and the cast is international, it was filmed in Glasgow in English.

I think Death Watch is the first film by Tavernier I’ve seen. I was, of course, more interested in how it was adapted from the novel than in it as a film per se, but even so some parts seemed curiously inept. The editing is especially noticeable, featuring abrupt cuts which badly impact the flow of scenes. The cast also appear to be improvising… but after a night on the town and so suffering from bad hangovers. Some of the dialogue is not so much banal as downright phatic. In one scene, television producer Vincent (Harry Dean Stanton) picks up Roddy (Harvey Keitel) in his limousine. After settling into the car, Roddy asks with a smirk, “Did your handkerchief die?” Vincent gives an embarrassed laugh, and fiddles with the handkerchief poking from the breast-pocket of his jacket. Dialogue in books, plays and films rarely approaches realism because so much real-life dialogue is wasted breath.

The film also shifts the story from the title character, Katherine Mortenhoe (Romy Schenider), onto Roddy, the man who has had his eyes replaced by television cameras. The novel presents Roddy’s narrative in first-person, and Katherine’s in third-person, but Katherine is very much the subject of the story. She has to be for the ending to work. Focusing the film on Roddy makes it unbalanced. It is through Roddy’s eyes that we explore Katherine’s character, which means we should be looking out through them (as we do in the book). We should not see Harvey Keitel’s gurning mug plastered across the screen… Not that I’ve ever understood how Keitel manages to appear in so many well-respected films. He can’t act.

The film follows the plot of the book reasonably closely, although several scenes have been left out. Katherine is told of her fatal illness by a doctor – her reaction to this, and her husband’s response, are both treated quickly. Which makes her decision to run away, and so avoid appearing as contracted on the eponymous television programme, seem somewhat abrupt. She visits the Depot, a street market, and buys a disguise. She escapes her minder from the television studio (Robbie Coltrane), and spends the night in a church dormitory. This is where Roddy befriends her, and perhaps is one of the few scenes in the film in which Keitel does a good job. Together they go on the run, eventually making their way to Katherine’s ex-husband Gerald (Max von Sydow).

Few films are better than their source texts. Death Watch is not one of them. It is only when von Sydow appears on screen that the film feels as serious as its subject matter demands. Nor has Katherine’s character been built up enough to fully explain the choice she makes which ends the film.

Having said that, Glasgow makes suitably grim backdrop – although I felt the book deserved to be set in a town filled with Brutalist architecture. Its world felt grey and slab-faced, which Glasgow certainly isn’t. A couple of scenes were staged cheaply, and it shows in the sparseness of the set-dressing and extras. The acting is mostly good, but von Sydow is, as usual, excellent, and Keitel is, as usual, terrible. I’m glad I watched the film, but it’s not a patch on the book.


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Mentioned in despatches

It must be some sort of milestone in a writer’s career when something of theirs is reviewed in the national press for the first time. Today is that day for me. In the Guardian Reviews section, Eric Brown has reviewed the Catastrophia anthology edited by Allen Ashley, and in which I have a story. Eric mentions four stories from the anthology, one of which is mine, and writes: “…the more sober, literary examination of the breakdown of society when humanity suffers apperceptive prosopagnosia – face-blindness – in Ian Sales’s affecting ‘In the Face of Disaster'”. You can see the full review here.