I’m going to number these Reading & Watchings posts from now on. This year, they’re working out at sort of monthly, but I don’t want to keep to a regular schedule – as it depends on how much I’ve read and watched since the last post. Numbering them seems like an acceptable compromise. Anyway, since the last Reading & Watchings post – number 3, obviously – I have read the following books and watched the following films:

Books
Pashazade, Jon Courtenay Grimwood (2001), surprised me by holding up well for a book nearly a decade old. It’s cyberpunk, but it’s set in an alternate world – so that may be why. It provided enough of a spin on cyberpunk tropes for them not to feel like they were past their sell-by date (although the nine-year-old hacker did generate a small wince). But the novel is well-written, pacey, very good on place, and the world is put together well. I borrowed the copy I read, but I plan to keep an eye open for the remaining books in the trilogy. Incidentally, the edition I read wasn’t the one that had the back-to-front Arabic incorporated into the cover design…

Solaris, Stanislaw Lem (1961). I like Andrei Takovsky’s film adaptation of Solaris, although Lem apparently hated it. Steven Soderbergh’s more recent adaptation I found somewhat dull. And the book, now that I’ve finally read it… is surprisingly dull too. The writing is clunky – although I’m reliably informed that’s because it’s a bad translation (from the French, which was translated from the original Polish). Lem also goes off on these long info-dumps in which he references lots of made-up scientific papers, which have a tendency to make your eyes glaze. I’m glad I read Solaris, but I’ll stick to Tarkovsky’s film, I think.

One Giant Leap, Piers Bizony (2009), was a birthday present from my sister, and it’s excellent. I reviewed it on my Space Books blog here.

The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster (1985), was my first Auster. It is, as the title suggests, compromised of three linked novellas, all set in New York. In the first, “City of Glass”, a man is mistaken for a detective (called Paul Auster) and accepts a case to watch a recently-released felon, whose daughter-in-law is afraid will harm her husband. The ersatz detective, Quinn – actually a writer of mysteries – finds himself so wrapped up in the puzzle of the case that his identity begins to unravel. This story worked well… up to the point where Quinn meets Auster, which felt like the story’s theme blundering its way into the plot. “Ghosts”, the second novella, is less successful. Blue has been tasked by White with watching Black; and that’s all he does. Until his own life falls apart because of his monomaniac focus on Black. When – against White’s wishes – he engineers a meeting with Black, he discovers that the case is less straightforward than he had imagined. “The Locked Room” is the best of the three. The narrator is contacted by the wife of Fanshawe, a childhood friend. Fanshawe disappeared six months previously, and it was his wish that his wife contact the narrator in order to manage the many unpublished poems and novels he’d left behind. Fanshawe’s work proves to be excellent, and is subsequently published. The narrator also falls in love with Fanshawe’s wife. She divorces the missing man, and they marry. Then the narrator is commissioned to write a biography of Fanshawe, and begins to investigate what happened to him. Along the way, he tries to determine the identity, and eventual fate, of the man he is writing about. I liked this one and I liked its enigmatic ending. I might try more by Auster.

Empire of the Atom (1956) and The Wizard of Linn (1962), AE van Vogt. Of all the Grand Old Men of sf, the one I will still happily read is van Vogt. And yet he’s as bad as the others – and often worse. But his books are so bonkers, I often find their complete lack of coherence entertaining. That’s not true of all of them, of course. Many of them are just plain awful. Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn fall somewhere in the middle, although a little towards the crap end of the scale. They’re set in 12,000 AD on an Earth reduced to barbarism. But it still has spaceships, and colonies on Mars and Venus. Science is the province of temples dedicated to the “atom gods”. A “mutation”, Clane, is born to the ruling family of the Linn Empire. Clane is allowed to live, and grows up to be extremely clever. There are assorted dynastic struggles, which, typically for van Vogt, are just thrown in as the author thinks of them. Empire of the Atom carries on in that vein for 150 pages, and then takes an abrupt turn into metaphysics. And then ends. The Wizard of Linn continues on where Empire of the Atom finished. Except the implied atomic war which reduced the Earth to barbarism turns out to have been an invasion by the alien Riss (which actually contradicts several scenes in the earlier book, but never mind). Clane, in a giant spaceship captured from the Riss, goes looking for their home world. He finds a pair of human planets, like “giant twin moons” (wtf?), where everyone can teleport and is telepathic; but they won’t help him. He continues on, and finds a Riss world, which is also home to an underground civilisation of humans. He then returns to Earth and persuades the Riss invaders to leave by threatening them with a mysterious doomsday weapon he’s had knocking around since the last third of Empire of the Atom. End of story. Like most of van Vogt’s novels, if these two were made into a film they’d be brilliant if you watched them when you were pissed.

Black Widow: Deadly Origin, Paul Cornell (2010). Yet another UK genre author tackles a Marvel property, and runs up a story which successfully manages to munge in all the previous – and often contradictory – incarnations of the character. Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning did with the Guardians of the Galaxy, and Cornell has done it here with the Black Widow. This is not a Black Widow story like the one written by Richard Morgan, this is much more embedded in the Marvel universe, more in tune with Marvel sensibilities. I liked it. Perhaps not as much as Morgan’s, but I did like it.

A Vision of Future Space Transportation, Tim McElyea (2003), proved a somewhat less detailed study of its subject than I’d expected. I reviewed it on my Space Books blog here.

The Worlds of Frank Herbert, Frank Herbert (1980), is the Gregg Press hardback edition of a paperback first published in 1971. The stories in this collection first appeared in Galaxy and Analog magazines, between 1958 and 1966. They show their age. Collection opener ‘The Tactful Saboteur’ is a Jorj X McKie story and not too bad. But some of the others have dated badly. ‘A-W-F Unlimited’ starts well enough as a sort of 1950s spoof of advertising, but then flops over into bad 1950s gender stereotypes. ‘Escape Felicity’ has an interesting premise, but the execution is dated, ‘Old Rambling House’ reminds me of a Heinlein story but seems to have a bit of van Vogt about it, and though ‘Mating Call’ shows its age it also is quite modern. The others are pretty forgettable. The book also has a good introduction by William M Schuyler, Jr.

Apollo – The Epic Journey to the Moon, David West Reynolds (2002), I reviewed on my Space Books blog – see here.

Space Stations – Base Camps to the Stars, Roger D Launius (2003), will be reviewed this month on my Space Books blog. I usually try to read one space book a month, but I seem to have splurged a bit on them in the last few weeks.

The Age of Zeus, James Lovegrove (2010), was a review book for Interzone.

Agent of Chaos, Norman Spinrad (1967). Poor old Spinrad has been getting some hate in the blogosphere recently after an ill-judged article on world sf in the April/May issue of Asimov’s. Which came as something of a surprise, as I’d never thought him the type to wedge his foot in his mouth so effectively. I’d also imagined him to be one of the stalwarts of the New Wave. So Agent of Chaos proved another surprise – it’s the sort of badly-written, badly-dated tripe sf authors churned out in the 1950s. It has all the rigour and inventiveness of a van Vogt novel, without the madcap plotting. There’s a Solar system-wide totalitarian state ruled by a council, a pro-democracy underground fighting the state, and a Brotherhood of Assassins who commit random acts of senseless violence as some sort of defence against social entropy. Or something. And in the end, they escape on a big spaceship to Alpha Centauri. Or somewhere. Best avoided.

Gilbert and Edgar on Mars, Eric Brown (2009), is great fun. GK Chesterton is leaving the Athenæum Club after dinner with HG Wells and GB Shaw, when he is accosted by a short gnome-like man… and whisked off to Mars. Where he finds himself in the clutches of the Six Philosophers. He’s rescued by an American, Ed, and together they flee for the city of Helium to seek the aid of John Carter. It doesn’t take much intelligence to work out who Ed is, or why Mars strangely resembles Barsoom. But Brown manages a convincing pastiche of Chesterton’s style, and the phrase “I am in need of sustenance of a hoppish nature” has become my new favourite euphemism for “I could murder a pint”.

The Proteus Sails Again, Thomas M Disch (2008), was, I believe, Disch’s last written work. It’s a novella from Subterranean Press, and a sequel of sorts to the earlier The Voyage of the Proteus. The narrator – Disch himself – is back in his New York apartment, and about to be evicted, after his adventures during the preceding novella. The Greek sailor Socrates from that book and Disch’s Reader appear, and they go on a jaunt through a post-apocalyptic New York in a yellow cab. And, well, any resemblance to reality is clearly intentional. As is any non-resemblance. Not a comfortable read, given what happened to Disch.

Films
Rescue Dawn, dir. Werner Herzog (2006), is based on a true story – a US naval aviator who was shot down over Laos in 1965, was taken prisoner by the Pathet Lao, tortured and then imprisoned at a camp somewhere in the jungle. But he managed to escape, becoming the first American to do so. His fellow prisoners – five in the film, six in real life – didn’t make it. Like many Herzog films, Rescue Dawn was clearly a logistically difficult film to make. It’s also quite harrowing in places. But Christian Bale, who plays Dengler, is just so annoying throughout, it’s hard to really care. Rescue Dawn apparently did quite well on release and had good reviews from critics, but I much prefer Herzog’s other films.

Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2 (1988), or, as Adam Roberts told me he calls it, Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Nadir. And it is pretty dismal stuff. Having watched five seasons of Deep Space Nine, these early seasons of Next Generation seem crude sf telly by comparison – and Deep Space Nine is hardly the height of media sf sophistication. Some of the episodes in this season were embarrassingly bad. Like “The Outrageous Okona”, in which the Enterprise encounters a lovable interstellar rogue – Okona, O’Connor, geddit? – who proves to be secretly a Good Sort. Or “Up the Long Ladder”, with its lost colony of lovable Oirish rogues. Or “Pen Pals”, when Picard disobeys the Prime Directive yet again. Or “The Measure of a Man”, in which a hearing is convened to determine whether Data is a person or property, and in which the prosecution’s “killer” argument is that he has an off switch… These episodes are more than twenty years old now and they’ve not withstood the years well. I remember the excitement when they first came out – proper serious sf telly, not like Dr Who with its wobbly sets and wobbly scripts. In fact, it was a bit like the excitement new Who generated a few years ago. But watching season 2 and you can see how much anticipation made you overlook the episodes’ flaws, and how nostalgia had you remembering them as better than they actually are. Star Trek: The Next Generation did manage some good television sf drama during its seven seasons, but none of it is in season 2.

Murdoch Mysteries Season 2, ITV (2009), I reviewed for Videovista – see here.

Schindler’s List, dir. Stephen Spielberg (1993), I’d never actually seen before. Which is why I rented it. I’m not a fan of Spielberg’s films, and I can’t think of one less likely to appeal to me than his take on the Holocaust. In the event, I thought he handled the subject well. Ralph Fiennes came across as a bit like a comedy Nazi, Liam Neeson wasn’t too bad in the title role, and the supporting cast played their parts well. The decision to film in black and white worked, although the girl in red felt like a gimmick. Anyway, I’ve now seen it, so I can cross it off the list. But if you want to watch a film about the Holocaust, then Andrzej Munk’s Passenger is better.

The Bothersome Man, dir. Jens Lien (2006), I rented, but when it arrived I couldn’t remember why I’d stuck it on my rental list. I don’t normally seek out Norwegian films, and the director and cast were unknown to me. Perhaps it was this review by Jonathan McAlmont that caused me to add it to my rental list. Whatever the reason, I’m glad I did. The Bothersome Man is an excellent film. Andreas jumps in front of an underground train. When he comes to, he is on a coach, which lets him off at a garage in the middle of nowhere. He’s welcomed by a man in a suit – who had even put up a welcome banner – and then driven to a city, where he is given a job and a flat to live in. But everything in the city seems flat and washed out. Andreas tries to live a normal life, but he can’t cope with the lack of emotion and sensation. He tries to commit suicide by jumping in front of an underground train – leading to one of the film’s funniest scenes. Eventually, in the cellar rooms of another man, he finds a crack in the wall from which issues beautiful music. So the two of them widen the crack and dig a tunnel to the source of the music… Recommended.

Taste Of Cherry, dir. Abbas Kiarostami (1997), is an Iranian black comedy like the excellent Secret Ballot. Mr Badi needs someone to do a job for him, and drives round Tehran and its environs looking for someone willing to do it. But no one will. The job is to bury Badi, in a grave he has already dug, after he commits suicide. Eventually, he finds someone who agrees to do the deed if he finds Badi dead in the grave the following morning. Badi lies down in the grave that night. A thunderstorm starts… And the film cuts to camcorder footage of Kiarostami filming Taste Of Cherry. A good film, but Secret Ballot was better.

Gabrielle, dir. Patrice Chéreau (2005), is an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad short story, ‘The Return’, which I have not read. I watched the film because it stars Isabelle Huppert. It’s set in late nineteenth-century Paris. A respected publisher’s wife leaves him for her lover, and then returns several hours later having been rejected. The film then dissects their life together. Gabrielle looked great, its cast were superb, and the dialogue was sharp. But dragging the story out to 90 minutes also made it really slow, and it was hard to stay interested and my mind wandered quite a bit as I watched it. Worth seeing, but I’ll not be dashing out to buy the DVD.

Off we go again. I’ve been getting quite a bit of writing and stuff done of late, but I still managed to read a lot of books and watch many DVDs. Not that the To Be Read pile is getting any smaller…

Books
Moonraker, Ian Fleming (1955), is actually the third of the Bond novels, and is very much a book of its time. The first third is about a bridge game Bond plays with Hugo Drax – who cheats – and was completely lost on me as I don’t know how to play the game. The rest of the book is about Drax’s “atomic rocket” – what we would call nowadays a “nuclear missile” – and the plotting is like one of those dot-to-dot pictures where the dots are so close together it’s bloody obvious what the picture is. The writing throughout is dreadful – Drax is introduced via one of the clumsiest info-dumps I’ve ever come across… and I read science fiction. Having said that, the Bond of the books is a more interesting character than the Bond of the films.

Nova War, Gary Gibson (2009), is the second book in the space opera trilogy begun with Stealing Light. There are some really good bits in this – a nuclear-warhead-powered Project Orion-type spacecraft landing on a planet is one scene that sticks in memory – but I found it a less satisfying read than the preceding novel. The lead Shoal character, Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals, started to really irritate me. It didn’t help that while his language rightly stuck to marine turns of phrase (he’s a giant fish, after all), every now and again he’d use a sailing expression. Fish don’t sail. There were also a few “As you know…” conversations, and one construction I especially hate in sf novels: “If Trader had ever seen a terrestrial bat, he might have recognized a certain passing resemblance.” This is breaking voice, and it stands out in a sf novel like a fart in a spacesuit. Having said that, the introduction of the Emissaries – another alien race, and the giant fishes’ enemy – is… Really! Very! Funny! This book sees the plot escalated to a level I think might be difficult to sustain in the final book of the trilogy. Nevertheless, Nova War is pretty much a textbook example of High-Stakes Bloody Great Huge Idea space opera, written with wit and invention… but a bit rough in patches.

The Science Fiction Poetry Handbook, Suzette Hayden Elgin (2005), I bought and read because of my own poetry here. Elgin’s background in linguistics is clear in the detailed analysis she performs on her sample poems. This was an interesting and, I hope, useful, read.

Mission to Mars, Michael Collins (1990), is by that Michael Collins, yes – the one who went to the Moon in 1969 but stayed in the CSM in lunar orbit. I reviewed this book on my Space Books blog here.

The Desert King, David Howarth (1965), is a biography of Ibn Saud, the man who founded Saudi Arabia. It read like Dune without the sandworms. Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdul-Rahman al Faisal al Saud, was a prince of one of the two royal houses of the Bedouin who occupied the central regions of the Arabian peninsula. But he was an exiled prince, living in Kuwait since the House of Rashid had thrown his father out of their home town of Riyadh. Ibn Saud won back his kingdom, united the Bedouin, defeated the Rashidis, and eventually took over the Hijaz, the southern strip of land in which are located Mecca and Medina. He was helped by the British, although he never fought for them. It was the Sherif of Mecca with whom TE Lawrence fought against the Turks during World War I. Ibn Saud sat out the war; and the Second World War, too. Having grown up in the Middle East – although I never lived in Saudi – I’ve always been fascinated by the area. Even so, I was surprised at how fascinating a read The Desert King proved to be.

From Saturn to Glasgow: Fifty Favourite Poems, Edwin Morgan (2008), is a collection of Morgan’s poems, chosen as favourites by a poll of Scots. Each of the poems in this book has a small paragraph by someone, explaining why it is their favourite. I’m in two minds about Morgan’s poetry – it’s very clever, but the language often feels too prosaic. Some of them in this book I like; some of them, I can’t see the appeal.

Assassin’s Apprentice, Robin Hobb (1995), was February’s book for this year’s reading challenge. I wrote about here.

Buck Rogers – A Life in the Future, Martin Caidin (1995). In 1988, TSR created a role-playing game based on the character of Buck Rogers. That lasted half a dozen years. Then, for some reason, they published a “re-imagining” of the character by Martin Caidin. In Buck Rogers – A Life in the Future, Rogers is an airline pilot who is fatally injured in a re-enactment of a WWI dogfight, and put into suspended animation in a secret government project. He is woken, and cured of his injuries, in the twenty-fifth century. Where he finds himself working for the military of the Federation of Amerigo against the Mongol Empire on an Earth only just recovered from a nuclear war a couple of centuries before. Oh, and there’s Atlantis, which is some sort of ancient history extra-terrestrial civilisation. It’s hard to describe quite how crap this book is – everyone is perfect, it’s sexist, Caidin’s attempt at science and technology is risible, the writing is appalling, and it’s put together in so slapdash a fashion the author contradicts himself from chapter to chapter. I have now read two sf novels by Caidin, and they were both shit. I won’t be reading any more by him. He gives hacks a bad name.

Exhibitionism, Toby Litt (2002), is a collection of short stories, most of which felt a little too self-consciously clever to work. When Litt stuck to more traditional narratives and structures, he was at his best – as in ‘My Own Cold War’ and ‘The New Puritans’. Not an embarrassing collection, but not an especially memorable one, either.

Films
Voices Of A Distant Star, dir. Makoto Shinkai and Steven Foster (2003), is a 25-minute sf anime and would have been really good if it hadn’t been so, well, dull. A pair of friends – boy and girl – separate when she goes into space to fight in a war against aliens. They keep in touch by texting each other. It’s all very poignant, and some of the imagery from the space war is pretty good. But the pace is so slow that its short length feels like twice as long.

Secret Ballot, dir. Babak Payami (2001), is probably going to appear in my top five films of the year list. It’s an Iranian film and, like one of my favourite movies, Divine Intervention, it’s deadpan absurd humour. A female election agent is dropped off on a remote island to collect the votes of its inhabitants. She is accompanied round the island by one of the local soldiers. He’s as laconic and cynical as she is idealistic and voluble. It’s very funny. Recommended.

Superbad, dir. Greg Mottola (2007), is another Judd Apatow comedy, and as unlikeable and dumb as his others. The two main characters are prats, who do prattish things. With much foul language. One or two set-pieces are vaguely amusing, but it’s one of those films that fails to entertain because five minutes in and you just want a bus to appear and drive over the two leads.

Outlander, dir. Howard McCain (2009), I reviewed for The Zone – the review hasn’t gone up yet. I’ll link to it when it has.

Travelling Man – The Complete Series, Granada Television (1984), I reviewed for VideoVista – see here.

Death Race, dir. Paul WS Anderson (2008), is yet another film by a man who doesn’t have a decent film in his oeuvre. It’s a remake of Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000 from 1975, and I can think of no good reason why the original should have been remade. In this version, the drivers are all prisoners, and the company which runs the prison makes huge profits from the race. Most of the film is taken up with the titular contest – which involves lots of crashes and people getting killed in various gruesome ways – and then star Jason Statham stages a jailbreak. Yawn. If by-the-numbers didn’t imply the ability to count to more than three, I’d have described Death Race as by-the-numbers…

The Interceptor, dir. Konstantin Maximov (2009), I reviewed for VideoVista – see here.

A Sound Of Thunder, dir. Peter Hyams (2005), surprised me. It is actually dumber than Star Trek XI. I didn’t think that was possible. But then, I hadn’t considered someone trying to make a film adaptation of a short story in which a man steps on a butterfly during a time-travel trip to the Cretaceous, and returns to his present to find the world changed. Because, of course, that’s a story that’s pretty much immune to adaptation. So instead, this movie has “time waves” sweeping through the city every twenty-four hours after the butterfly-squashing incident, and these result in man-eating plants sprouting everywhere. And armoured reptilian baboons. Every time one of the characters attempts exposition, they open their mouth and complete and utter bollocks comes out. This is definitely a film to avoid.

The Apartment, dir. Billy Wilder (1960), won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars in 1960, and is in the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Films. As a satire, it seems a bit feeble, although the world in which it’s set holds a certain fascination. Jack Lemmon plays a clerk in a New York insurance company (which employs over 35,000 in a single skyscraper). He allows a group of four executives to use his apartment for trysts with their mistresses and girlfriends. This arrangement comes to the attention of the director of human resources, who wants to join in. Lemmon is suitably rewarded – an office on the 27th floor, a key to the executive washroom – for agreeing. Meanwhile he’s fallen for elevator girl Shirley Maclaine, who also happens to be the director’s mistress… There are no real surprises in the plot, but it’s witty, well-played by its cast, and ends well.

Rien ne va plus, dir. Claude Chabrol (1997), is the second of Chabrol’s films I’ve seen, both of which I’ll happily admit I rented because they starred Isabelle Huppert. And both of which proved to be fairly ordinary thrillers, In this one, Huppert and her father (played by Michel Serrault) are con artists. They decide to rip off a courier who is carrying five million Swiss Francs to the Caribbean… but the owners of the cash prove to be somewhat less business-like and, well, legal, than they’d anticipated. The plot is as twisty-turny as a twisty-turny thing, but the mechanisms are all set up well in advance so it rolls along like a well-oiled machine. A well-made thriller, certainly; but not an especially memorable one.

Flash Gordon – Complete Series 1, Sci-Fi Channel (2007), has been roundly panned by all and sundry. But the more I watched it, the more I found it growing on me. It’s sort of like a high school version of Flash Gordon, put on by a group of people who didn’t actually know much about Flash Gordon in the first place. But what they’ve come up with actually works quite well. Unfortunately, the cast aren’t especially good. John Ralston plays Ming well, but the character is too erratically written. Amanda van Hooft plays Princess Aura as petulant and, er, that’s about it. But Karen Cliche as Mongo bounty hunter Baylin and Jody Racicot as Dr Zarkov aren’t bad. The world of Mongo makes more sense in this series than it does in the original – and has an interesting back-story – although it does look cheap and under-populated. It’s not great television by any means, but it’s less embarrassing than I expected it to be. A shame it got cancelled…

The International, dir. Tom Tykwer (2009), is a film of two very distinct halves. It starts off well, as a European thriller about international banking and the arms trade. A Luxembourg-based bank, the International Bank of Business and Credit – gosh, do you think that could be based on the BCCI? – is buying weapons, and both Interpol and the New York attorney’s office are interested. Then the action moves to New York… and the film turns into some implausible over-the-top Bruce Willis-type action movie. An Italian arms magnate backs out of his deal with the bank, and so the IBCC has him assassinated. Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, the two stars, track the assassin to New York. Owen and a NYPD officer follow him to the Guggenheim, where he meets his handler from the IBCC. When they try to take them into custody, they’re attacked by fifty Uzi-wielding thugs, who shoot up the museum. Bah.

Atomised, dir. Oskar Roehler (2006). I read Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised last July, and thought it good. I hadn’t known it had been made into a film, until I spotted this going cheap in HMV. So I bought it. It’s an excellent adaptation of the novel – especially the use of colour in the flashback sequences – and is as bleak as the source text. But, where the novel tried to turn the narrative on its head in an epilogue, the film tries to do the same with two paragraphs of text before the end. And it doesn’t quite work. I always felt the epilogue was meant to redeem the story, but in the novel it didn’t quite succeed. The film feels like it handles the story’s emotional arc better, but then flubs the epilogue. I’m not sure if this film will make my best of the year list, but it’ll probably get an honourable mention. Recommended.

Ministry Of Fear, dir. Fritz Lang (1944), is based on the novel of the same name by Graham Greene. Which I read many years ago. Which means I can’t recall its plot. But surely it can’t have been this WWII clone of The Thirty-nine Steps? Ray Milland is released from a mental hospital after serving two years for assisted suicide. He stops off at a village fête, is mistaken for someone else by the fortune-teller and so given the cake from the Guess the Weight stall. It’s all to do with a spy ring based in Britain, with a contact in one of the ministries, and which for some bizarre reason uses village fêtes as dead letter drops. There’s some excellent camera-work and mise-en-scène, which lift this above other films of the period. It’s just a shame the plot is a by-the-numbers wartime thriller.

Not so many books and films for this update, since I’ve been working on, well, stuff. Incidentally, after the nonsense pulled by Amazon in the US, I’m trying a bit of an experiment here and using affiliate links to Book Depository – for the books, anyway.

Books
Chimpanzee Complex 2: The Sons of Ares, Richard Marazano and Jean-Michel Ponzio (2010), continues on from the first volume (see here), both in terms of plot, but also in containing an excellent idea which the story doesn’t quite use to its full potential. In the first book, it was the landing of a second Apollo 11 capsule sixty-five years after the original. In The Sons of Ares, the crew of the Mars mission have reached their destination and found the base of a secret Soviet Mars mission from the 1980s. Which was commanded by Yuri Gagarin. Whose death had been faked by the Politburo. But the Soviet cosmonauts don’t seem to have aged a day and… I guess I’ll have to wait for the third volume, due later this year, to find out what’s really going on in this series. Right now, I haven’t much of a clue.

Guardians Of The Galaxy: War Of Kings Book 2, Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning (2010), is also a little confusing, but that’s because it’s part of one of those Marvel “event” things, where they spread the story across half a dozen titles, requiring you to read them all if you want to get the full, er, picture. While this installment features lots of references to events not covered in earlier Guardians of the Galaxy volumes, it does make sense on its own. It’s also witty and funny, and Abnett and Lanning manage to shoehorn all the previous incarnations of the Guardians of the Galaxy into the story, without falling foul of Marvel’s typically unwieldy mungeing together of disparate character universes. When I first heard that the Guardians of the Galaxy were coming back, I was looking forward to reading their new incarnation. When I learnt the group now featured a talking raccoon, I was not so happy. But Abnett and Lanning have done an excellent job, and I’ve enjoyed the three volumes I’ve read so far. I hope there are more to come.

Prince Caspian, CS Lewis (1951), is the second book of the Narnia Chronicles. Well, it’s the second book to be written, but the fourth by story chronology. It’s not as patronising as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but nothing very much happens in it. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are dragged back to Narnia, only to discover the world very much changed. Well, it’s been a few hundred years since they were last there. Now, nasty men from Telmar have taken over, and all the talking animals and magical things are slowly disappearing. The titular prince is a Telmarine but he wants Narnia back how it was. His uncle, who has seized the throne, wants rid of him. But Capsian escapes and, with the help of Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy – and Aslan, of course – overthrows his uncle and everyone in Narnia lives happily ever after. Except for most of the Telamrines – but they get to travel back through a magical gate created by Aslan to their original world, which is actually our world. There are two really interesting ideas in Prince Caspian, but Lewis makes nothing of them. First, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy lived and ruled in Narnia for fifteen years – and so grew to early adulthood. But when they returned to the real world, they reverted to their original ages. And when they find themselves once again in Narnia, they remember ruling Narnia but they’re still children – those fifteen years don’t appear to have affected them all. Likewise, the fact that the Telmarines are originally from the real world – there’s an entire story all its own in that… As it is, Prince Caspian is mostly taken up with the four kids blundering through a wood as they attempt to reach a meeting of Narnia’s inhabitants in order to lead the fight against the Telmarines. I realise I’m the wrong age to read these books, but I’d not expected them to be so disappointing.

Animal Farm, George Orwell (1945), I don’t believe I’d ever read before, but it’s hard to say because it’s one of those stories which have entered popular culture so you know everything about it anyway. Orwell lays it on a bit thick – there are dumb animals and there are dumb animals. And the story displays a real cynical view of people I’d not thought George “you have nothing to lose but your aitches” Orwell subscribed to. I’m glad I read the book, and I did enjoy it. Liked the ending too.

T-Minus: The Race to the Moon, Jim Ottaviani, and Zander & Kevin Cannon (2009), is a comic-book retelling of the Space Race, which I read to review on my Space Books blog – see here.

The Poison Throne, Celine Kiernan (2010), was a review book for Interzone. It was originally published in Ireland in 2008 as a YA novel, and I’m not entirely convinced it will find many fans among fantasy readers.

Moon Lander, Thomas J Kelly (2001), I read to review on my Space Books blog – see here. Having recently found myself annoyed at the fluffy approach to invention in several sf author’s works, I found the authentic real detail in this book fascinating. The prose was pretty awful, but I wish science fiction could manage the same level of authenticity.

A Better Mantrap, Bob Shaw (1982), is a collection of short stories. The contents are polished, if lightweight, but they’ve mostly aged badly. It killed an afternoon, but it’s not Shaw’s best work by a long shot. Bizarrely, none of the stories in the book has the title ‘A Better Mantrap’, and I never did figure out why they called the collection that.

The Turing Test, Chris Beckett (2008), is a much better collection. Many of the stories in The Turing Test appeared in Interzone, and it’s also the book which won Beckett the Edge Hill Prize last year. One of the judges remarked that they hadn’t known they were science fiction fans until reading The Turing Test, but… I found several of the stories in this collection a little old-fashioned in their use of sf – something I’d also noticed about Beckett’s novel, The Holy Machine, when I read it. He’s an excellent writer certainly, but his fiction feels more like it’s touching the edges of genre than actively engaging with it. Perhaps I’ve been reading too many books about the Apollo programme, too many books which present something that, while real, is about as science-fictional as you can get and yet is wholly authentic. Beckett uses sf tropes, but they feel like literary tropes. In ‘La Macchina’, one of the stories in The Turing Test, there are robots and they go “rogue” – or seemingly develop artificial intelligence. That’s the idea which enables the plot, but it doesn’t quite convince – it doesn’t quite feel like sf. For me, the best story in the collection was ‘Karel’s Prayer’, which displays an almost Chiang-like working out of its central premise. Still, these are minor quibbles – this is a very strong collection of stories, and definitely worth reading.

A Very British Coup, Chris Mullin (1982), I bought in a charity shop as I remembered enjoying the television series when it was broadcast back in the 1980s. But what an annoying book this proved to be. In A Very British Coup, the Labour Party is taken over by left-wing extremists, led by Harry Perkins, an ex-steel worker from Sheffield. Labour wins the 1987 General election by a landslide. But the establishment – and the US – are not happy at having a bunch of lefties in Number Ten, what with all their lefty policies such as nuclear disarmament, removal of US military bases, protectionism, forcing pension funds and insurance companies to invest in industry, etc. So a loose alliance of press barons, civil servants and the US government set out to destroy Perkins and his Cabinet. And they succeed. I actually agreed with most of Perkins’ policies, but what made A Very British Coup so annoying was that Mullin made Perkins completely powerless. Despite being the legally elected leader of the country, he could do nothing. I also found it hard to believe that the civil service would actively work against the leader of the government – that would be treason, after all. A quick read, and a bit too simplistic to be a good read.

Films
Secrets Of Sex, dir. Antony Balch (1970), was one of this month’s review DVDs from VideoVista – see my review here. A bizarre and amateur, albeit mildly entertaining, look at the war of the sexes by a cult UK director. The DVD includes two short films directed by Balch, but written and starring William S Burroughs.

Hatchet For The Honeymoon, dir. Mario Bava (1970), was one of this month’s review DVDs from VideoVista – see my review here. My first Bava, and I was definitely not impressed.

Heart Of Fire, dir. Luigi Falorni (2008), was one of this month’s review DVDs from VideoVista – see my review here. A good one this one. I like North African cinema, and this was a quality film.

It’s A Wonderful Life, dir. Frank Capra (1946), unbelievably I had never seen before. It’s one of those films which everyone knows about – and knows the story of – although it’s never been shown on British television with anything like the frequency it has been on US television. I’d heard it was sentimental tosh, and I thought I knew what the story was… and perhaps for the final third of the film, when Clarence the angel appears and shows Jimmy Stewart what life in the town would have been like without him, It’s A Wonderful Life is indeed overly sentimental. But it’s mostly a portrait of small town American life in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and it does that very well. I thought it was very good, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

As You Like It (1978) is one of the BBC’s The Complete Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare series, which I plan to slowly work my way through. I’ve probably seen a handful of Shakespeare’s plays all told, and none since leaving school. And yet he is a sort of important writer for us Brits. But rather than wait for a production to appear at my local theatre, I thought I’d watch the BBC versions on DVD. This one stars Helen Mirren in the role of Rosalind / Ganymede. Unlike most of Shakespeare’s plays, I’m familiar with the story of As You Like It, since I researched it for my story ‘In the Face of Disaster’, which will be appearing in PS Publishing’s Catastrophia anthology, edited by Allen Ashley (and due to be launched at Fantasycon in September of this year). Put simply, Duke Frederick has booted his brother out of power, and the latter now lives rough in the Forest of Arden (which apparently contains lions, giant snakes and palm trees). The exiled duke’s daughter, Rosalind, has remained in the palace, as she’s the best friend of Duke Frederick’s daughter, Celia. Meanwhile, Orlando, the youngest son of one of the exiled duke’s strongest noble supporters, has been cut out of his inheritance by his nasty older brother, Oliver. Orlando travels to Duke Frederick’s court and challenges the duke’s champion wrestler (Darth Vader David Prowse). He manages to beat him in one of the worst choreographed fights I’ve ever seen. Rosalind and Orlando fancy each other, but are too tongue-tied to say as much. Then Duke Frederick boots Rosalind out of the palace, and so she and Celia run off to the Forest of Arden. Rosalind decides to disguise herself as a boy, Ganymede. They stumble across a shepherd, hire him and buy a cottage in which to live. Orlando, meanwhile, has also wandered into the Forest of Arden, where he joins the exiled duke’s followers. And he leaves poems praising Rosalind’s beauty nailed to trees. He meets Ganymede, but does not recognise her, er, him. Rosalind as a boy is hugely irritating – like some sort of fast-talking woodland wide boy. He persuades Orlando to woo him as if he were Rosalind in order to improve Orlando’s chances with her, er, him. So, in Elizabethan times, this would have been a boy playing a girl pretending to be a boy who has just persuaded another character to treat him as a girl. No wonder they went and carved out an empire… Anyway, it all ends happily. Amazingly so, in fact. There’s just been a triple wedding in the forest, officiated by an angel, when up rides a member of Duke Frederick’s court. He explains that Duke Frederick was on his way to the forest with an army to wipe out the exiled duke and his followers when he met a monk. He got chatting to him, found God, and has decided to abdicate and lead a religious life. So the exiled duke can have his throne back. Oh, and nasty Oliver turned nice earlier after Orlando rescued him from a giant snake and a lion. As stories go, it’s complete tosh, a bunch of costumed nitwits wandering around in an English wood. Back in Old Bill’s day, it must have been hilarious. A couple of the jokes are still funny – although, to be fair, I had to watch the play with the subtitles on in order to follow it. But I still plan on watching the rest of Shakespeare’s oeuvre.

The X-Files – I Want To Believe, dir. Chris Carter (2008). Several years ago, I borrowed the first five seasons of The X-Files from a friend, and watched them back-to-back, two to three episodes a night. By the end of it, I was so paranoid, I could barely sleep… But the television series died a long drawn-out death back in 2002 and, despite many promises, seemed unlikely to revive. Until this film. Which, to be honest, wasn’t really worth the wait. Mulder and Scully sleepwalk through their roles, Billy Connolly plays a bizarrely Scottish paedophile ex-priest who has psychic flashes which leads him to the victims of a serial killer. Or is it a serial killer? This felt like a weaker episode from the television series, stripped of much of what made the series required viewing in the first place. It worked as a thriller, but it didn’t work as an X-Files film. A disappointment.

Passenger, dir. Andrzej Munk (1963), I stuck on my lovefilm rental list because… er, because… well, it must have looked interesting or something. Much as I like and admire the films of Kieslowski, I can’t say I’m a big fan of Polish cinema. Passenger was indeed interesting, although something kept it just short of being excellent. And that’s despite the fact that it’s unfinished. Munk died in a car crash before he completed filming, so half of the film is a series of stills and a voiceover – like Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Those scenes take place aboard a cruise liner, in which a German woman recognises another passenger – and subsequently comes clean to her husband about her past. She was a guard at Auschwitz, and the woman she recognised was one of the political prisoners. The scenes set at Auschwitz were complete, and apparently filmed at the death camp. While the juxtaposition of film and stills makes for an interesting approach to the material – even if it was accidental – the scenes set at Auschwitz seem to weaken as the story progresses, and that robs what should have been a powerful story of some of its, well, its power. Passenger is an interesting film, but it did feel as if it could have been a great film.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, dir. Milos Forman (1975), is another from the Time Out Top 100 Centenary List I’d never seen before. I can’t see what all the fuss was about, to be honest. Jack Nicholson played Jack Nicholson, as he always does. The rest of the cast – including some well-known names in their debut roles – played their parts well. But throughout it felt like you were missing something that you knew was there in the source novel. Perhaps it was because the story was so clearly one which demanded a first-person protagonist, and that’s something that’s never really works in films. The act of watching a film by definition puts you outside the protagonist’s head. Apparently, Ken Kesey refused to watch the film since it didn’t use Chief Bromden as the narrator. I can sort of understand how he felt. Not sure if I ever want to read the book, though.

Not read all that many books, or watched many films,  since the last one of these I did. Never mind.

Books
The Night of the Mi’raj, Zoë Ferraris (2008), is a literary murder-mystery set in Saudi. According to the one-line bio, the author “lived in a conservative Muslim community in Jeddah”, but I’m not entirely convinced. Some details ring false. There’s a reference to the “rear hump” of a camel – two-humped Bactrian camels are only found in Asia; in Arabia, they have one-humped Dromedaries. Ferraris also mentions “pita bread”, which is Mediterranean – in the Gulf, it is Arab bread, or khubz. Domestic staff in the Gulf are also typically Filipino, not Indonesian – in fact, I don’t think I ever met any Indonesians in the Gulf. Ferraris also mis-uses alhumdil’Allah, she writes bazaar instead of suq; and I heard it called a dishdasha more often than a thobe, and gutra or shamgh rather than keffiyeh (which is Palestinian). The novel’s two main characters, a religious desert guide of Palestinian origin, and a modern Jeddah woman who works in the women’s laboratory at the city coroner’s, are handled well, although both seem suspiciously good at English.

Dinosaur Junction, Ann Halam (1992). It’s taken me years to hunt down a copy of this book and, well, I must admit it wasn’t exactly worth the wait. It’s one of Halam’s weaker efforts. After the superb Inland trilogy – The Daymaker, Transformations and The Skybreaker – this is a disappointment. Her next book, The Haunting Of Jessica Raven, is much better – and had a different publisher; and Jones once told me that Dinosaur Junction had got “lost” in the change of publishers. The central premise, a young boy called Ben hunts fossils and gets embroiled in a plot by his sister to grow a dinosaur from DNA, just doesn’t seem to hang together plausibly. Having said that, Ben’s sister, Rowan, is an interesting character – an ambitious schemer, who admires Napoleon and Machiavelli. You don’t meet young female characters like her in many books. I did wonder if the setting, a town called New Bruton, was named for the architectural style of Brutalism.

Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, John Crowley (2005). Crowley is a writer I greatly admire, but his books are not ones you can knock off in a weekend. And that’s probably more true of this one than most. Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land is a novel of three interwoven parts. The framing narrative is presented as a number of email exchanges. Smith (a nickname) is the UK researching for a web site on women in science the life of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and, for her work with Babbage on his Difference Engine, often considered the first ever programmer. But the site’s patron in the UK has come into possession of some papers of Ada’s. And in among them – encrypted by Ada – is the entire text of an unknown prose novel written by Lord Byron himself. Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land presents this novel. The third part is Ada’s notes on the novel. Many years ago, I read Robert Nye’s The Memoirs of Lord Byron, but I remember nothing about it. Which is unfortunate, as Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land is a novel which is clearly improved by knowledge of Byron and his works. Certainly Crowley’s channelling of the Romantic poet convinced me – although some of the email exchanges didn’t quite. Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land is, of course, beautifully written. If this novel doesn’t make my best of the year list for 2010, it’ll certainly get an honourable mention…

Pawn of Prophecy, David Eddings (1982), was the first book of this year’s reading challenge. see my review here.

The Rim World series – The Rim of Space, When the Dream Dies, Bring Back Yesterday and Beyond the Galactic Rim – A Bertram Chandler (1961 – 1963). When Sphere chose to publish Chandler’s Rim World series in the UK twenty years after they’d been published in the US by DAW, they did so for only four of the six books. They also retitled the second book – from Rendezvous On A Lost World to When the Dream Dies (which is actually a better title). Having now read all four books, I have to wonder why they bothered. I have vague memories of reading and enjoying Chandler when I was in my early teens – they had several in my local library. But these four really are quite poor. Chandler was a merchant marine officer, and while that gives him a certain authority when it comes to describing the operations of starships in his invented universe, the actual level of invention shown in his far-future interstellar merchant service is pretty low. All the starships are the pointy rockets of yore. They don’t have internal gravity; and their FTL is the Mannschenn Drive, which uses “gyroscopic precession”. There are no computers. The men are men, and the women exist to either serve them or act as love interest – they’re “Catering Officers” aboard the ships, or they fall for the protagonist (most of whom are pretty unlikeable, yet the women are uniformly beautiful). The stories themselves are no better. The Rim of Space is essentially a travelogue, in which the protagonist joins Rimrunners and visits several worlds of the Rim – and upon which he has adventures. When the Dream Dies is nonsense – a “gaussjammer” is “blown off course” and crash-lands on a world run a by a single AI called Central Control. It wants to look after the humans, but they want to return home. Which they do, with the help of four gorgeous robot women, created for their amusement but operated by Auxiliary Control – the “feminine aspect” of the masculine Central Control. Pfft. Bring Back Yesterday starts well enough – man misses his ship by over-sleeping, has little or no prospects, but is then hired by a detective agency. Which wants him to break into the laboratory of a reclusive billionaire scientist who was invented time travel. But it turns out the spacer is part of the causal time loop. Chandler is overly fond of “as you know”, and perpetrates some of the most inelegant info-dumping I’ve ever come across, but this one also has dirty great signposts to the end placed throughout the story. Finally, Beyond the Galactic Rim is a collection of four stories, each of which features the faults of the three preceding novels, but in less words.

Machine Sex and Other Stories, Candas Jane Dorsey (1988). The Women’s Press used to publish some good science fiction back in the 1980s and 1990s. As I don’t recall seeing any of their books for a while, I assumed they’d packed in. Apparently not – their website is here. Perhaps they no longer have the distribution they once had. But. Dorsey is a Canadian sf writer. She won the James Tiptree Award in 1997, for her novel Black Wine. Machine Sex and Other Stories – my edition is published by The Women’s Press – is my first exposure to her fiction, and… There are a couple of stories I liked – ‘The Prairie Warriors’ and its sequel of sorts, ‘War and Rumours of War’. ‘Sleeping in a Box’ is also quite good. But there are a couple of experimental pieces I didn’t like at all; and several others were written in that sort of elliptical prose which refuses to focus on the actual story – and that doesn’t really appeal to me.

Films
Push, dir. Paul McGuigan (2009). There’s a lot in Push which resembles Jumper. Well, the central premise for a start – anti-authoritarian teens with ESP. In Push, they’re trying to prevent the mysterious organisation which controls their kind, Division, a part of the US government, from gaining access to a drug which will take their powers to the next level. Except the anti-division teens don’t know what it is they’re after, or why. The film is set in Hong Kong, and is kinetically edited – but otherwise it’s very much like other films of its type.

Triple Agent, dir. Eric Rohmer (2004), was one of those films you stick on your rental list because it looks vaguely interesting, but when it hits the top of your list some indeterminate time later, and is sent to you, you wonder what it was that caused you to pick it. And then you stick it in the DVD-player and watch it… And you’re really glad you put it on your rental list. Triple Agent is slow, not very dramatic, and covers a period of French history I know little or nothing about (France between the wars). Serge Renko plays his character, White Russian emigré Voronin, very close, so you’re never entirely sure what’s going on. And you feel sorry for his Greek wife, played by Katerina Didaskoulou, who clearly hasn’t a clue either. But Triple Agent slowly draws you into its story, and when it finishes you’re never quite sure it’s over. Sadly, Eric Rohmer died earlier this year – Triple Agent may be the first film by him I’ve seen, but on the strength of it I stuck a few more on the rental list.

Un Coeur En Hiver, dir. Claude Sautet (1992), is one of those films the French do so well. Two men run a violin-repair business, but when business owner Maxime starts seeing violin soloist Camille, expert violin-maker and introvert Stéphane finds himself jealous. Camille is also attracted to him. Sautet handles the relationship between the three perfectly – and the three actors – André Dusollier, Daniel Auteuil and Emmanuelle Béart – handled their roles also perfectly. An excellent film.

Fringe – Season 1 (2008). I’d seen a couple of episodes of this, and it looked interesting enough for me to bung it on my Amazon wish list. And happily I received the DVD boxed set for Christmas. Having now watched the first season, I have every intention of getting the second season. Obviously, parallels with The X Files, another TV programme I liked a great deal, are obvious – if not even deliberate. But like Mulder and Scully were very much products of their time, so are Dunham, Francis, Broyles and the two Bishops. Fringe succeeds when it focuses on “fringe science” and its “canon” episodes, but is less successful when it throws in some CSI/US television fantasy science technology – you know, all that software which can do magical things with trace evidence. The whole “war with alternate earth” series arc is warming up nicely, although the producers are making a bit of meal out of the connection with multinational technology company Massive Dynamic. The cast are good – John Noble as Walter Bishop especially – and I really like the way they introduce each location with those floating letters.

The Postman, dir. Kevin Costner (1997). Readers of this blog will be aware that I have watched a great many crap sf films – B-movies, straight-to-video and straight-to-DVD. A lot of those crap films were set in a post-apocalyptic USA. Everyone, it seems, has something to say about the US after the apocalypse. Sadly, most of them should have kept their mouths shut. And that’s as true of The Postman as it is of any other film of its type – and probably more true for the novel by David Brin from which the film was adapted. Ten minutes into The Postman and I was irritated – by Costner’s bad acting, by the cartoon evil villains, by the silly Thunderdome quarry in which the baddies live, by how unrealistic the world of the film looks… A lot of those crap post-apocalypse films I’ve watched were better than this.

Slumdog Millionaire, dir. Danny Boyle (2008). There’s not much you can say about this that’s not already been said. It’s both a feel-good film and deeply upsetting. Perhaps the story’s manipulativeness gets a bit wearying after a while, but it was a deserved winner of the Oscar for Best Picture – certainly a better film than many that have won that award.

The Last Man on Earth, dir. Sidney Salkow (1964), is the first film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. It’s also the one that’s the most faithful to the book. Vincent Price plays the scientist who is the sole person not infected with the virus which has turned everyone else into vampires. The Last Man on Earth didn’t have the budget of the Charlton Heston or Will Smith versions, so the vampires look a bit crap and the emptiness of the city doesn’t convince quite as much. But it has a great deal more charm than the other films.

Jar City, dir. Baltasar Kormákur (2006), is an Icelandic thriller, and a pretty good one. Having said that, it can’t have done much for the country’s tourist industry. Iceland looks especially grim in this film. The plot is the sort of story which would fill up an hour, or two hours, of a UK thriller drama – perhaps even something like Waking the Dead. A man is found murdered, and it proves to be linked to a rape he committed, and was not charged with, twenty years earlier. A police inspector and his team need to solve both crimes in order to learn the identity and motive of the murderer. Definitely worth renting.

Cries And Whispers, dir. Ingrid Bergman (1972). Many of Bergman’s movies feel like plays captured on film. Bizarrely, this one felt more like a short story. Perhaps it’s the opening narration, perhaps it was the discreteness of the scenes which made up the story. Set at the turn of the twentieth century in Sweden, three sisters and their maid live in a large country mansion. One of the sisters is dying, and her condition is splitting the sisters apart. Like many of Bergman’s films, parts of this are quite harrowing. Other parts are beautifully filmed. and the whole is beautifully acted. A bit grim, but one of his good ones.