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.

2009 has finished and 2010 has begun. Who knows what the next twelve months will bring? I do know, however, what the last few weeks brought. I may have done my Best of the Year (see here), but my last reading and watchings round-up was back on 8 December (see here). So, here’s a rundown of the books and films I consumed between then and the last day of 2009.

Books
Black Widow: The Sting Of The Widow, by many and various Marvel hacks, including Stan Lee himself (2009). Richard Morgan’s reinvention of Black Widow a couple of years ago (see here) piqued my interest in the character, and so I’ve trawled back through her history. This hardcover “premiere” volume contains some of Black Widow’s earliest appearances – from her origin as a Soviet spy who, for some strange reason, wore a mask, to the black-clad super-athlete with her “widow sting” bracelets. This is far from sophisticated stuff, but Black Widow has had a more interesting history than many Marvel characters.

Resistance, Owen Sheers (2007), was recommended by someone, but unfortunately I’ve forgotten who. Perhaps I just saw a positive review of it somewhere. It’s an interesting spin on an alternate history staple. The Normandy landings fail, the Germans invade Britain, and by 1942 the UK is an occupied country. Resistance is set in a Welsh valley, where a Wehrmacht patrol has been sent on a mission. All of the men in the valley’s scattered farms have left, slunk off into the hills to fight a guerrilla war against the Germans. During the course of a fierce winter, the Welsh wives and German soldiers draw closer together and… Well, that would be telling. A nicely-written novel, although on occasion the prose felt like it wasn’t quite as strong as it needed to be. Worth reading.

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A Heinlein (1961). Yes, I know, I still haven’t written about this. Soon. I promise.

Minority Report, Philip K Dick (1987), or Volume Four of the Collected Stories. Which is not to be confused with any other PKD collection which might happen to be titled Minority Report. Still, at least it’s not as confusing as van Vogt’s collections… A couple of gems in this, but a lot of crap too. Strangely, I’d always thought of Dick as something of an outsider, not really a part of sf fandom, but one story in this collection, ‘Waterspider’, has sf writer Poul Anderson as the protagonist. All the same, it’s probably a book for completists only.

Fire Sale, Sara Paretsky (2005). One of the reasons I like Paretsky is because she wears her politics on her sleeve. This novel is no exception – evil Wal-Mart-like corporation treats the South Chicago poor like slaves, and no good comes of it. Perhaps Paretsky painted the wealthy as a bit too evil (and stupid), and the ending was bit too pat, but she always makes good points. I’m surprised no one’s thought to make a TV series of her books – although they did make a film with Kathleen Turner of one of the VI Warshawski novels.

Stone, Adam Roberts (2002), is only the second book I’ve read by Roberts, although on the strength of it I shall certainly read more. The narrator of Stone, Ae, is a rare criminal in a far-future interstellar utopian society. He is broken out of an inescapable prison in order to murder all the inhabitants of a world. But he doesn’t know why. And Roberts does not reveal why until the end of the book. A nicely-paced narrative, with an interesting narrator. There are some good ideas in the book too – fast-space (the Local Bubble, perhaps?), the solitary mode of FTL, the various worlds Ae visits… Not sure about the nostril-sex, though. Or some of the terms in the glossary: “span-ton”? “spik-en-span”?

Collected Poems, Richard Spender (1944). Spender is another World War II poet who didn’t survive the war. He’s less well-known than Bernard Spencer (see here), and probably even more obscure than John Jarmain (see here, here and here). But, well, he’s not very good. There are one or two good poems in this collection, but most of them are pretty forgettable.

Films
The Handmaid’s Tale, dir. Volker Schlöndorff (1990), I watched simply because I’d read and liked the novel (see here). The film is low-budget and it shows, but is nonetheless done well. Perhaps not everything in it was how I’d imagined it – for some reason, I thought the novel took place in a small town rather than a large city – but the world it showed certainly worked. A good film.

Pather Panchali, Styajit Ray (1955), is another film from the Time Out Centenary Top 100 Films. I can’t say I enjoyed it all that much. It was long, didn’t seem to have much plot, and was not very involving. Ah well.

Avatar, dir. James Cameron (2009), I saw at the cinema in 3D. What can you say about this film that’s not already been said? It looked fantastic, although perhaps its visuals owed a little bit too much to the cover art of various albums by Yes. The story, however, was rubbish – old-fashioned, with some cringe-inducing dialogue, racist (only white man can show blue man how to save himself), and in parts completely logic-free. The floating mountains, for example, clearly did so because they contained “unobtainium”. So why not mine them instead of blowing up the Na’vi hometree? And the great “warrior” of Clan Jarhead (i.e., Jake Sully), his best tactic against the attacking corporate forces is… a frontal assault. Against superior weapons. Fortunately, the planet steps in to save them all. Ah well. Avatar is by no means as colossally dumb as Star Trek XI, but a sf film with great visuals and a modicum of intelligence would be nice…

Crossing Over, dir. Wayne Kramer (2009), I watched to review for Videovista. See here.

District 13 – Ultimatum, dir. Patrick Alessandrin (2009), I watched to review for Videovista. See here.

Walled In, dir. Gilles Paquet-Brenner (2009), I watched to review for The Zone. See here.

Quantum of Solace, dir. Marc Forsters (2008), pleasantly surprised me. Its plotting is chaotic, and it looks like it was edited by someone with Attention Deficit Disorder. But it is eminently stylish, and some of the set-pieces are excellent. Bond leaves an astonishing trail of destruction behind him wherever he goes – were Sean Connery, Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan ever this destructive? The anti-corporate politics were a bit old-fashioned, and the shadowy organisation which drove the plot felt as though most of it had been left on the cutting-room floor. But I liked Quantum of Solace better than Casino Royale.

Impostor, dir. Gary Fleder (2001), is yet another film adaptation of a Philip K Dick. Something about Dick’s fiction seems to appeal to Hollywood – I believe he has had more works adapted than any other sf writer. Admittedly, few of the adaptations much resemble their original source texts. I’ve not read the short story, also called ‘Impostor’, on which this film was based, so I can’t say how successful an adaptation it is. But its story is certainly Dickian. Spencer Olham is a weapons researcher who is fingered as a Centauri walking bomb – the unseen alien Centauri have replaced Olham with a replicant, who thinks he is the real Olham, and who will explode when he meets the Chancellor on a planned visit by her. Olham is arrested by the secret police, but manages to escape. And it’s a straight run from there to the final twist.

Books
The New Space Opera 2, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois (2009), I’d been looking forward to after very much enjoying The New Space Opera. Sadly, I found it disappointing. I shall be writing about it here shortly.

All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy (1992), is the first in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. I still don’t quite get the McCarthy thing. Yes, there’s some lovely prose in this – especially when describing the landscape. But. It took me half the book to work out the story was set in 1949. The two lead characters are supposed to be sixteen-year-old boys but come across as adult men. The plot fell apart somewhat near the end, when the protagonists are released from Mexican prison for no good reason – not to mention their arrest in the first place. And I still don’t understand McCarthy’s bizarre punctuation – the lack of quotation marks I understand, but why no apostrophe on some, but not all, contractions? All the same, I think I shall read more of his books.

Without Me You’re Nothing, Frank Herbert and Max Barnard (1980), I read because I went through a completist phase with Herbert’s books last year. Without Me You’re Nothing is an introduction to home computing and, as you can imagine given the year of publication, it makes for a somewhat peculiar read today. In some respects, it’s almost prophetic; in others, it couldn’t have been more wrong. Herbert suggests some future uses for computers which did indeed come true, but also thinks the price of UNIX will continue to rise (nowadays, of course, it’s free). Strangely, the authors seem almost apoplectic in their denunciation of those involved in the industry, claiming they’re deliberately obfuscating the technology in order to maintain their elite status. I suspect Herbert had a bad experience with someone who sold him a computer…

Brain Thief, Alexander Jablokov (2010), I reviewed for Interzone. So you’ll have to buy the next issue to find out what I think of it.

Spies, Michael Frayn (2002), took a while to get going. The narrator returns to his childhood home and, like many novels of this type, tells the story of his time there while leading up to a life-changing event. Frayn takes his time getting to that event – it took place during World War II, and it all begins when the narrator’s best friend declares that his mother is a Nazi spy. She isn’t, of course; but neither is she entirely innocent. Once the story started gather speed – about a third of the way in – I started to enjoy it more. The “dark secret” isn’t all that shocking, but it fits in with the rest of the story. Definitely worth reading.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (1890), must have been the Twilight of its day. I was not impressed by this one bit. The central conceit is one of those which has entered public consciousness but it’s not enough in my, er, book to forgive the novel’s faults. The writing in The Picture of Dorian Gray was poor – characters lecturing each other, aphasic dialogue, book-saidism, and when was the last time you saw someone “knit their brows”? Yes, Wilde had a way with paradoxical aphorisms, and there are plenty of bon mots in this book. But as a novel, as a piece of long prose, this is not up to much.

Austerlitz, WG Sebald (2001), was my first Sebald, although I’d been wanting to try one of his books for a while. The entire novel is written as one great wodge of text, with no paragraphs, in long rambling sentences in which dialogue is often reported at two or three removes. There are also a number of photographs scattered throughout the book, some of which directly relate to the story at that point, others which are only peripherally related. It sounds as though Austerlitz might be a book to avoid but, on the contrary, it’s one of the best novels I’ve read this year. Sebald’s prose is extremely readable, and the story he tells – digressive and rambling though it is – works extremely well. The title doesn’t refer to the Napoleonic battle, but is the name of a man the book’s narrator meets at intervals over thirty years, and who tells him his life story. Austerlitz the man, who grew up in Wales, was actually born in Prague of Jewish parents who were interned by the Nazis. His story is not only a search for identity but also to discover the fate of his mother and father. Recommended.

Reference Guide to the International Space Station, Edited by Gary Kitmacher (2006), is a hardcopy edition by Apogee Books of a NASA book – which can be found as PDFs here. I reviewed it for my Space Books blog here.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip José Farmer (1971), was November’s book for the reading challenge, read a little late. See my piece on it here.

The Sea, John Banville (2005), won the Man Booker in 2005, so I had high hopes for this. It’s another literary novel like Frayn’s Spies, in which a narrator revisits a place important to him during his childhood and gradually reveals an event which subsequently shaped his life. Perhaps I read The Sea too soon after Spies, but I found it a less satisfying read than Frayn’s novel. I was also less enamoured of Banville’s prose style – sometimes he just seemed to choose a word, or phrase, that didn’t seem to be the best he could have used. As for The Sea‘s “dark secret”, it’s certainly more shocking than that in Spies, but it didn’t actually seem to change the narrator’s life as much. Disappointing.

Blood-Red Rivers, Jean-Christophe Grangé (1998), is the novel on which the film The Crimson Rivers was based. I quite like the film – yes, there’s a disconcerting jump in story logic about two-thirds of the way through (note to film-makers: if you have to choose between pace or story logic, you’ve probably done something wrong). So I fancied reading the book, to see how it compared to the movie and… it joins the ranks of Marnie and The Commitments as one of those books which are not as good as their film adaptations. Blood-Red Rivers is poor stuff. I don’t know if Grangé is just a bad writer, or was badly served by his translator, but Blood-Red Rivers contains Dan Brown levels of writing. The film also made a better fist of its plot. A book to avoid.

Pendulum, AE van Vogt (1978), is, well, is late van Vogt. I have a soft spot for van Vogt’s fiction because much of it is engagingly bonkers. But by the 1970s, that bonkersness had turned into senility. How else to explain the crap stories in this collection? Van Vogt always made it up as he went along, writing 800-word scenes which ended on cliff-hangers. But in these stories, he drags in stuff from nowhere to try and make sense of plots that ceased making any kind of sense by the third page. Somewhere in van Vogt’s career there must be a tipping point – good before that date, rubbish after. I need to find it, so I know which of his books to avoid. Sadly, that will probably involve reading a lot of the bad ones…

Films
Encounters in the Deep, dir. Tonino Ricci (1989), is spaghetti sci-fi, and as good as that description suggests. A newly-married couple disappear while cruising off the coast of Florida, and their father bankrolls a scientist’s expedition to search the area. They find a flying saucer on the sea bottom, and it’s the aliens who have kidnapped the newly-weds. And a lot of other people. And there’s this island which rises up out of the sea. And then sinks again when the UFO takes off. And I think my eyes had started to glaze over about twenty minutes into the film, so I have only a vague idea of what actually happened.

Skellig, dir. Annabel Jankel (2009) is an adaptation of David Almond’s novel. I’ve not read the book – which was selected by the judges of the Carnegie Medal in 2007 as one of the ten most important children’s novels of the past seventy years. That importance isn’t as evident in the film, which is done well but has probably lost something in the transfer to the big screen. Michael and his parents have just moved into a new house, and Michael finds an old junkie hiding in the garden shed. This is Skellig, who is very odd and has strange growths on his back. Michael suspects Skellig may be an angel, and certainly he seems to have strange powers. Meanwhile, Michael’s mother is pregnant but the baby is sickly when born and nearly dies. But Skellig saves her. A good film.

Manhattan, dir. Woody Allen (1979). Okay, so both Manhattan and Annie Hall regularly appear on “best of” film lists, but I’ve yet to understand why. Annie Hall was at least passable, but Manhattan is awful. A forty-two-year-old man is dating a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl and no one thinks he’s a disgusting letch. Most of the cast appear to be there to stroke Allen’s ego, while he himself continually whines and puts himself down – he wants to have his cake and eat it too. I think there’s a plot in there somewhere, but I can’t remember what it was. I was never a fan of Allen, but I’d always wondered if I was being unfair to him. I’ve now seen his two best films, and I thought they were terrible. So no, I wasn’t being unfair.

Alienator, dir. Fred Olen Ray (1989), was completely and utterly pants. The title character is a female wrester (I think) in a silver fright wig. She’s meant to be a cyborg assassin, sent to Earth to kill a prisoner who has escaped from a prison on some alien world (but which strangely resembles an earthly industrial plant). The prison warden is played by Jan-Michael Vincent of Airwolf fame, and I suspect he was pissed for the entire film. I probably should have been when I watched it.

Sci-Fighters, dir. Peter Svatek (1996), was a tiny fraction better than Alienator. Which makes it almost completely and utterly pants. Roddy Piper is a “black shield” detective, on the hunt for an ex-partner who had been sentenced to life at a penal colony on the Moon. But he died of some strange alien virus. So, of course, they shipped his body back to Earth… where he promptly came back to life, and then went on a rampage, infecting lots of other people with his alien disease. I never did figure out the relevance of the title.

The Decameron, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1971), is based on a series of novellas from fourteenth century Italy by Giovanni Boccaccio. The film is a series of linked comedy sketches, ranging from scatological (one character falls into a pit full of human shit) to ironic (a dumb gardener services each of the nuns at a convent, only to reveal that he could always speak). It’s an entertaining romp, a sort of cross between a Carry On (but without the verbal wit) and a Hollywood swords & sandal epic made on a low budget. Worth seeing.

Chrysalis, dir. Julien Leclercq (2007), is a stylish French near-future thriller, which is pretty much a genre of its own these days. Police lieutenant David Hoffman loses his wife / police partner to a villain he has been chasing, and subsequently becomes involved in an investigation into the death of an unidentified young woman. His case leads him to a top plastic surgery clinic, which is using, er, cutting-edge technology for purposes other than the clinic’s raison d’être. The blurb on the back of the jewel-case gives away the twist in Chrysalis, which spoiled it a bit. I’ll not do the same. A pretty good film.

Empire of Ash, dir. Michael Mazo (1988) – yes, I watch some shit films; no, I don’t really know why. This is one of those low-budget US post-apocalypse films that were churned out by the shed-load during the 1980s. I blame Mad Max. Despite the fact that civilisation has collapsed, the survivors still have trucks and guns. But not much in the way of clothes. Especially the women. They do have make-up, though. And everyone seems to have forgotten how to act. I think there was a plot in the film somewhere, but I don’t recall what it was – good bunch of survivors fighting evil bunch of survivors, probably. Isn’t that the plot all these sort of films use?

The Informers, dir. Gregor Jordan (2008), I reviewed for VideoVista – see here.

Stranger Than Fiction, dir. Marc Forster (2006), is one of those films which has a really neat idea at its core. But it also stars Will Ferrell. So I both wanted to watch it and avoid it. Neat idea… Will Ferrell. The premise won out… and, perversely, it turned out that the film only really worked because Ferrell played the lead. That neat idea didn’t actually work that well – it was good for the first ten minutes, but then it started to slowly unravel. Still, the film was mostly entertaining and engaging. It was spoiled a bit by the fact that Emma Thompson’s character is meant to be a Really Important Novelist, but the prose she read out wasn’t actually very good…

Somewhat later than usual, but here’s the usual roundup of readings and watchings…

Books
The Chimpanzee Complex 1: Paradox, Richard Marazano & Jean-Michel Ponzio (2009), is another European graphic novel published in English by Cinebook. The opening is a killer. It’s 2035, and an unidentified spacecraft is detected heading for a crash-landing in the Pacific Ocean. The US Navy sends a flotilla to intercept it. The spacecraft proves to be… the Apollo 11 capsule, containing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. So who were the three astronauts who returned to Earth in 1969? Unfortunately, Paradox can’t quite keep the sheer effrontery of that opening premise going. The military determine that the reappearance of Armstrong and Aldrin justifies a trip to the Moon, which subsequently takes place. Clues then point to an unknown Soviet mission to Mars contemporary with Apollo. So off they head to the Red Planet. Paradox is done well, with excellent artwork, and designs that have clearly been thought about. The sequels, The Sons of Ares and Civilisation, are already on my wants list.

Orbital 2: Ruptures, Serge Pellé & Sylvain Runberg (2007), is the sequel to Orbital 1: Scars, and continues immediately from it. The secret of the world of Senestam proves to be less than inventive than I’d expected, but Pellé and Runberg still tell a well-rounded story with excellent artwork. For a sf graphic novel, it’s surprisingly political – which is no bad thing. Apparently, two more books have been, or are due to be, published in France: Nomads and Ravages. Hopefully, they’ll be published in English by Cinebooks soon. Interestingly, according to an interview here, Runberg claims Iain M Banks’s Culture novels as an inspiration for Orbital.

T is for Trespass, Sue Grafton (2008), is the latest in the continuing alphabetical adventures of Kinsey Millhone, a private investigator in an invented city north of Los Angeles. The next, U is for Undertow, is due to be published in January 2010. Grafton has my respect for keeping this series going for so long, and managing to keep the characters and world consistent throughout. Since the books began in the early 1980s, and the internal chronology doesn’t map onto the real world, T is for Trespass takes place in late 1987. In this one, an elderly neighbour takes a tumble and is too injured to look after himself, so his niece hires a nurse to look after him. But the nurse is a sociopath who makes a living from selling off her charges’ assets, emptying their bank accounts, and then murdering them.

The Translator, Leila Aboulela (1999), is the first novel by a Sudanese writer, who was resident in Aberdeen but apparently now lives in Abu Dhabi. The title character is Sammar, a Sudanese widow living in Aberdeen. She translates work for the university and becomes involved with a Scottish Islamic expert, Rae Isles. I’m in two minds about this one – Sammar frequently describes things as though she is seeing them “through fog and mist”, and that’s what reading this book felt like. I like lyrical prose, but this often felt over-done.

An April Shroud, Reginald Hill (1975), is an early Dalziel & Pascoe novel, and not an especially memorable one. Pascoe gets married and disappears off into the wilds of Lincolnshire for his honeymoon. Which leaves Dalziel on his own in the county. He falls in with a dysfunctional family who live in a manor house, and when people start turning up dead he realises he’s become much too close to the family. I’ve read a fair number of the books in this series, but reading early books in series with which you’re familiar isn’t always a good idea.

The Brains of Earth/The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph, Jack Vance (1966), is an Ace double with a pair of early Vances back-to-back. The Brains of Earth is, well, just plain silly. An alien race have decimated their world in a battle to rid themselves of invisible mind-parasites, and now they have determined to clean Earth of the selfsame parasites. so they recruit an Earthman to do it for them. Except it proves to be more complicated that that. Despite nearly inventing dark matter, this isn’t Vance’s best by a long way. The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph, a collection of shorts from the late 1940s and early 1950s, is better. Ridolph is part Cugel and part Kirth Gersen, and the stories read like early trying-out of plots for both of them. Both books are for completists only.

Of Worlds Beyond, edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach (1947), is a 1964 reprint of a compilation of essays on writing science fiction by well-known writers from the early days of the genre – Robert Heinlein, Jack Williamson, EE Doc Smith, L Sprague du Camp, AE van Vogt, John W Campbell… Not, you would have thought, the best people from whom to take writing advice, given that none of them were especially good writers. But then writing per se was not seen as important in sf in those days – or even nowadays, according to some. The interesting thing about these essays is the fixity of opinion of the writers. There’s a right way and a wrong way – and their way is the right way. The fact that each author’s way is different, and each has been successful, doesn’t to them mean their way is not the one true way to writing publishable science fiction. An historical curiosity.

Radix, AA Attanasio (1981), was October’s reading challenge novel, and I’ll be posting a piece here on it shortly.

Islands, John Fowles and Fay Godwin (1978), is a coffee-table book about the Scillies, with text by Fowles and black and white photos by Godwin. Fowles’ prose is good, but the book seems neither one thing nor the other – it’s not big enough or glossy enough to be a proper coffee-table book; it’s not informative enough to be a guidebook (nor are the photos – admittedly very nice – useful in that regard); and it’s not personal enough (cf Lawrence Durrell’s The Greek Islands) to be a book by and about Fowles…

My Death, Lisa Tuttle (2004), is a PS Publishing novella I bought in their recent sale. The narrator is an American writer resident in Scotland, as Tuttle is an American writer resident in Scotland. Her career has suffered after the recent death of her husband, and in an effort to find a project to pull her life back together, she decides to write a biography of early feminist novelist Helen Ralston. Who was also an American writer resident in Scotland. My Death ends twice – although one feels somewhat rushed – and each end gives an entirely different complexion to the story. Recommended

The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass, Vera Nazarian (2005), is another PS Publishing novella I bought in their sale. I thought this looked interesting when it was published, but never got around to buying it until recently. And… it’s not as interesting as I’d expected. In the distant future, Earth’s last civilisation creates a young woman to a much older genetic template. She is intended to mate with the Clock King, a man who is held in stasis for generations, and then brought for a short period… to mate with the young woman. The prose has its moments, but feels stilted in places; the world-building is a bit perfunctory; and the story is not entirely original. Overall, it felt like a valiant attempt to do something that someone else once did, only memories of the original one insisted it was better…

Age of Bronze: Betrayal Vol 3 Part 1, Eric Shanower (2008), is the first half of the third part of Shanower’s graphic novel retelling of the Trojan War. As comics go, this is a busy one, but there’s a lot to get through. Shanower is trying to be as authentic as possible, and each book includes an extensive bibliography. If it’s a bit soap-opera-ish in places, that’s perhaps from a need to humanise a story originally told using an entirely different story-telling paradigm.

Journey into Space, Toby Litt (2008). Lately a number of literary authors have written sf novels – more so than in earlier years, anyway. Some were happy to say their books were science fiction; others did all they could to distance their novels from the genre. Litt is one of the former – the Penguin web site describes Journey into Space as “science fiction at its most classic and beguiling: timeless, vast in scope and daring in execution”. Not that anyone would believe if he said it wasn’t sf: it’s set aboard a generation spaceship, which is very much a genre staple. Having said that, it’s clear Litt isn’t actually a sf writer. In parts, Journey into Space felt more like a writing exercise than an exploration of its ideas. And literary authors are often too diffident when deploying sf tropes, and that lack of confidence gives their novels a peculiar apologetic air, which often reads as old-fashioned genre-wise. I like literary fiction and I like sf, and I’ve been mostly dissatisfied by literary authors’ attempts at science fiction. Isn’t it about time a sf writer upped their game and wrote a proper literary sf novel?

Films
Marooned, dir. John Sturges (1969), features a subject I find appealing but which is typically done badly by Hollywood – the Space Race. Marooned is based on a novel by Martin Caidin, who wrote a number of books on space and space exploration, both fiction and non-fiction. In Marooned, the crew of an Apollo spacecraft are stuck in orbit after their retro-rockets fail. They’ve just spent the last five months in Skylab-like space station, so they’re not at their best. And their oxygen is running out. Cue rescue mission – sticking an experimental lifting body on top of a Titan launcher, and launching in the eye of a hurricane. The film-makers tried hard, especially at depicting zero gravity; but a lot looked wrong. The spacesuits, for example, looked mostly authentic, but had these cheap-looking red plastic helmets which looked silly. And the stock footage used for the launches mixed and matched Saturn V, Saturn IB, and Titan. Oh, and for men who had the “right stuff”, the marooned astronauts fell apart surprisingly quickly…

Annie Hall, dir. Woody Allen (1977) – I’m not an Allen fan. In fact, I dislike his films. But this is supposed to be one of his best, so I thought I’d give it a go. And… I found it mostly annoying. The only bit that amused me was when Allen dragged Marshall McLuhan into the frame from off-screen to prove that someone was misquoting him.

Blindness, dir.Fernando Mireilles (2008), was something of a surprise. I expected to enjoy this – a serious adaptation of a high concept literary/sf novel by a Portuguese writer. But I absolutely hated it. The plot is simple – people start to go blind, and because of fears of infection they are locked up in quarantine compounds. And in those compounds, society quickly breaks down. The speed with which the blind people turn into animals irritated me, their passivity in the face of threats of violence, their inability to rise above their situation… It probably works well in a novel, but in a film it makes for an excruciatingly dull and annoying experience.

Stranded, dir. María Lidón (2001), is an independent Spanish-made film about a group of astronauts who are, well, stranded on Mars. Plot-wise, it’s similar to Brian de Palma’s 2000 film Mission To Mars – astronauts are marooned on the Red Planet, but are saved by mysterious aliens. But in Stranded it’s the artefacts left by long-dead aliens which save the day. Considering that it was made for a twentieth of the cost of de Palma’s film, Stranded isn’t bad. It looks a bit cheap in places, and the characters are straight out of Central Casting, but it’s eminently watchable.

A Thousand Months, dir. Faouzi Bensaïdi (2003), is a Moroccan film and is one of those films with several intersecting stories. Some parts of it were amusing, such as the man who controlled the local television transmitter and would turn it off during the middle of a popular soap opera because he enjoyed being popular as the only person who knew what happened in it. Overall, a slow film but worth persevering.

Role Models, dir. David Wain (2008), I didn’t expect to like as much as I did. A pair of typical Hollywood dickheads have to mentor a kid each after being sentenced to fifty days of community service. It’s all typically Hollywood affirming life-lessons rubbish, but it’s also very amusing. Jayne Lynch, the founder of the mentoring programme the two join, speaks an inspired line in gibberish. And having one of the kids into live role-playing was different.

The Keeper, dir. Keoni Waxman (2009), I reviewed for videovista.net – see here.

Fragments, dir. Rowan Woods (2008), I also reviewed for videovista.net – see here.

The Gold Rush, dir. Charlie Chaplin (1925), is one of the American Film Institute’s 100 Movies – 10th Anniversary Edition, but I can’t say I enjoyed it all that much. Chaplin plays a prospector in the Alaska Gold Rush. There are some funny set pieces, but most of the film is embarrassingly mawkish. The version I watched was narrated by Chaplin, and it’s a bit weird watching something on the screen while a voice tells you what you’re seeing.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex, dir. Uli Edel (2008), tells the story of the Red Army Faction, a German terrorist group responsible for a number of murders and attacks during the 1970s. The film never quite engages with terrorists’ rhetoric, perhaps in an attempt to make them more sympathetic (which they’d need to be to carry the film). Their path to violence is clearly shown – while the film shows their response is extreme, it doesn’t present many alternatives. The groups mistreatment by the authorities after their arrest is also shown in detail. The Baader-Meinhof Complex does feel a little too slanted towards its subjects, which can make for uncomfortable viewing; but it’s still worth seeing.

Dragon, dir. Leigh Scott (2006), is a low-budget sword and sorcery film, and it shows. The acting was terrible, the CGI was poor, and the dialogue was cringe-inducing. One actor couldn’t decide if he had an American accent or a Northern Irish accent. I can remember little of the plot – lots of badly-staged sword-fights in some woods, that’s about all. Avoid.

Bridge To Terabithia, dir. Gábor Csupó (2007). Hollywood never lets a good idea go to waste. Children’s fantasies are doing well at the box office, so they dig up as many as they can find and adapt them – Narnia, The Golden Compass, Inkheart, City Of Ember, The Dark Is Rising… and now Bridge To Terabithia. Except this one is a bit different. Two lonely kids make friends and invent a fantasy land in a wood near where they live. So it’s not explicitly fantasy – either secondary world, or hidden mythology. I quite enjoyed it.

Planet Of The Apes, Beneath The Planet Of The Apes, Escape From The Planet Of The Apes, Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes and Battle For The Planet Of The Apes. I bought the boxed set containing these films cheap on eBay since I fancied watching them. The first two I knew I’d seen before, but some of the others I was less certain. I remember seeing one back in the 1970s when we lived in Oman. The cinema was at the army barracks in Ruwais – the side of one of the buildings was the screen, and auditorium was an area surrounded by a barasti fence and containing folding chairs. In the event, it turned out I’d seen the first four before; but I don’t think I missed anything by never having seen the fifth. The quality plummets as the series continues. By Escape From The Planet Of The Apes, much of the plot is carried by characters explaining it to each other, and both Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes and Battle For The Planet Of The Apes start with extended recaps of the entire series from the beginning. The original has its moments, and it has one of sf cinema’s great endings; but they should have stopped there.

Red Planet, dir. Antony Hoffman (2000), is the second of two Mars films from that year – the other is Brian de Palma’s Mission To Mars. And it’s hard to say which of the two is the best. De Palma’s is more realistic… up until the third act, where mysterious aliens show up and save the day. Red Planet is less realistic upfront – the Mars 1 spacecraft is too sf-nal to be plausible – but its plot and ending doesn’t involve an alien super-race. Unfortunately, it suffers from having an mostly unlikeable cast, and you don’t really care if they all die on Mars.

In lieu of intelligent content, here’s another trawl through the books what I’ve read and the films what I’ve watched since the last time I did one of these posts…

Books
Lord Valentine’s Castle, Robert Silverberg (1980), was September’s book for this year’s reading challenge. I wrote about it here.

Live and Let Die, Ian Fleming (1954), I found in a local charity shop and I’m glad I got it cheap. The films are much better than the books. The books may be very much products of their time, but the casual racism and sexism makes them hard to enjoy. The plot, incidentally, only vaguely resembles that of the movie.

Fantasms and Magics, Jack Vance (1969), is a collection of short stories. The opening novella, ‘The Miracle Workers’, is classic Vance, and ‘Guyal of Sfere’ (which I kept on misreading as ‘Gruyere’) is a Dying Earth novella and quite good. The rest are forgettable.

The Dan Dare Dossier, Frank Hampson et al (1990), is the last of the thirteen volume series of Dan Dare reprints issued by Hawk Publishing. Unlike the others it’s not a reprint of strips from Eagle, but a discussion of Hampson, his studio of artists, the characters, world, and merchandising associated with the strip. The text could have done with some serious editing, but if you’re a fan of Dan Dare – as I am – then it’s all interesting and useful information.

Broken Symmetries, Steve Redwood (2009), is a collection of short stories by a small-press writer which I reviewed for Interzone.

Winged Rocketry, James C Sparks (1968), I reviewed on my Space Books blog here.

Shades of Gray, Lewis Shiner (2008), is a chapbook given away with purchases of the limited edition of Shiner’s last novel, Black & White. Shiner himself describes the four stories in Shades of Gray as either too rough, too slight, or too silly to go into the upcoming Collected Stories. It’s hard not to disagree.

Shifts, Adam Thorpe (2000), is themed collection of short stories, the theme being careers and people whose lives are defined by their careers. The stand-out is the title story, about a Ghanaian immigrant eking out a living in London in 1966. ‘Sawmill’ is a Greenesque tale set in, I think, an invented African nation, and is also very good. Some of the others don’t seem to do much, but the writing throughout is of a very high standard. I plan to read more Thorpe.

The Lordly Ones, Keith Roberts (1986), is also a collection of short stories. I like Roberts’ fiction – in fact, one of his short stories is a favourite, ‘The Lake of Tuonela’. Sadly, there’s nothing as good as that in this; nor indeed is The Lordly Ones as good a collection as the collection in which that appears, The Grain Kings. On the whole, some lovely writing in places, but a little dated in execution.

Transition, Iain Banks (2009). A new novel by Banks deserves a review all its own. And it shall get one. Soon. Keep watching.

Films
Highlander, dir. Russell Mulcahy (1986), I first saw when it came out twenty-three years ago. I remember at the time thinking it reminded me of an sf novel – one I later identified as George Turner’s Vaneglory. Watching it again, it’s not so close to the novel, but it is, well, very camp. All that posing in dark alleys and lights shining through rain and steam. And the Queen soundtrack. I also seem to recall the film being held in relatively high regard, although I can’t see why. There’s the bizarre casting: a Frenchman as a Scot, and a Scot as a Spaniard (well, Egyptian originally). The badly-choreographed fight scenes. The stereotype characters. And the franchise degraded in quality, too.

The Spirit, dir. Frank Miller (2008), I’d heard plenty of bad words about, but I decided to see for myself. It is bad. The look of the film aping a comic – like Sin City and 300 – is just a gimmick. The story is silly, the characters are paper-thin, the women are there to make the men look good, and the dialogue is cringe-worthy. Not impressed.

The Faculty, dir. Robert Rodriguez (1998), has to be one of the most blatant metaphors ever committed to celluloid. Oh noes, the teachers have all been taken over by aliens! But it’s done with tongue firmly in cheek, and even Josh Hartnett’s brainiac slacker character doesn’t spoil the fun. Plus there’s a few mentions of sf and sf authors by someone who clearly knew what they were talking about. A fun film.

Total Reality, dir. Philip J Roth (1997), is a bad straight-to-DVD sf film. That should be enough to make me avoid it, but in fact the opposite happens. I want to watch these sort of films, no matter how crap they are. And I never really enjoy them. Because they’re so bad. But I keep on watching them. In this one, a team of soldiers sentenced to death for treason are sent back in time on the trail of a pair of rebels. They have to prevent the murder of the self-help guru whose “system” was adopted by a politician and subsequently resulted in a brutal interstellar empire several centuries later. The CGI is terrible, the production design is awful, and the acting is poor. But the explosion of the guru’s house is pretty impressive.

Futuresport, dir. Ernest R Dickerson (1998), is another bad straight-to-DVD sf film. But with a surprisingly high-powered cast: Wesley Snipes, Vanessa Williams and Dean Cain. How the mighty have fallen. Well, not Dean Cain – he was never A-list. Futuresport is little more than a remake of Rollerball, but nowhere near as good as that film. All you really need to know is that it’s about a new ball game, called Futuresport. If you were going to invent a new ball game, why would you call it “futuresport”? It’s a dumb name.

Letter From An Unknown Woman, dir. Max Ophüls (1948), is another film from the Time Out Centenary Top 100 films list. I have three lists on Lovefilm DVD rentals – one for recent films, one for foreign films, and one for films from the Time Out list. Each month, I’m sent two from each list. Not all the films from the Time Out list have struck me as enjoyable or impressive. Letter From An Unknown Woman was one such. Louis Jourdan plays a self-centred concert pianist who sleeps with, and then discards, a young woman – played by Joan Fontaine – who has had a crush on him since she was a girl. The story is framed as a letter written by the woman, and sent to Jourdan after she’s died. I found it a bit dull.

Soldier, dir. Paul WS Anderson (1998). Yes, I know: Anderson has never made a good film. (Although his television movie, The Sight, is actually not bad.) Soldier is certainly worse than Event Horizon (see here). It’s Rambo in all but setting. Which is a planet on which some vaguely-defined interstellar human federation dumps its rubbish (shades of Futurama). Kurt Russell plays a genetically-engineered soldier who is left for dead and dumped on the planet of rubbish after losing in a demonstration fight against a newer model. Where he is taken in by a lost colony. And those exact same newer models just happen to visit the planet of rubbish on manoeuvres. They attack the colonists. Russell fights back. It’s another Anderson film which makes very little sense if you think about it too hard. The story follows through from beginning to middle to end, but there’s no logic to it, or to the world on which it takes place.

Léon, dir. Luc Besson (1994), I reviewed for videovista.net – see here.

Earth Alien, dir. Kevin Tenney (2002), is yet another crap sf film. It doesn’t boast the talent of Futuresport, but it’s not that far off – Eric Roberts, Arnold Vosloo and the ubiquitous John Rhys Davies. Someone is killing people in gyms, and Roberts is the detective investigating. Turns out the serial killer is an alien on hunting trip. Earth is a game reserve, humans are the prey, and Vosloo is the game warden. A very silly film. There’s not even a good explosion in it.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, dir. Jack Perez (2009), I reviewed for videovista.net – see here.

Daratt, dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (2006), I rented after enjoying Haroun’s earlier Abouna. Like that film, it’s set in Haroun’s native Chad. Sixteen-year-old Atim, orphaned by the civil war, determines to find the man who killed his father – as all war criminals have been given amnesty by the government now that the civil war has finally ended. He heads for, I think, the capital N’Djamena, where he discovers that his father’s killer, Nassara, is now a baker, attends mosque regularly, and has a young pregnant wife. In order to get close to the man and so find an opportunity for revenge, Atim apprentices himself to Nassara. And as he gets to know him, the less he wants to kill him. An excellent film. Recommended.

Privates On Parade, dir. Michael Blakemore (1982), is based on a play by Peter Nicholls, which is in turn based on his own experiences, as described in his autobiography, Feeling You’re Behind, which I read several years ago. The film is about a British armed forces concert party in Malaysia in 1948. Many of the characters are apparently based on real-life individuals. It’s a comedy, but it’s hard to know exactly who or what are its targets. John Cleese plays the commanding officer, and he’s a typical John Cleese character. The rest of the cast are just as much caricatures. And the English countryside makes a poor stand-in for the Malayan jungle. Mildly amusing.

Burn After Reading, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen (2008). I’m not a big fan of the Coen brothers’ films. I’ll watch them, and I sort of enjoy them. But that’s about all. This one is fairly typical of their oeuvre. John Malkovich plays a nasty intelligence analyst fired by the CIA, who subsequently starts writing his memoirs. Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt plays a pair of dim-witted gym employees who find a CD-ROM containing Malkovich’s memoir. George Clooney plays an equally dim-witted philanderer who gets involved with Malkovich’s wife and McDormand, and so gets dragged into the whole sorry mess. More amusing than Privates On Parade, but not by a great deal.

The Stepford Wives, dir. Bryan Forbes (1975), is the original adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel of the same name. Which makes it the superior adaptation. It’s certainly an unsettling film, but not a very scary one. The plot staggers around a little and the sub-Hitchcockian ending is a bit of a let down, but it hangs together entertainingly.

All That Heaven Allows, dir. Douglas Sirk (1955), is from the Time Out Centenary Top 100 films list and… it couldn’t have been more different than Letter From An Unknown Woman. I don’t recall ever watching a film by Sirk before, and I didn’t expect much of this. A 1950s melodrama, starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson. But. I loved it. So much so that I immediately went and bought the Directed By Douglas Sirk boxed set from Amazon – well, it was reduced from £69.99 to £13.48. Bargain. So All That Heaven Allows is just Lady Chatterley’s Lover set in 1950s USA, but it’s beautifully done and the 1950s Technicolour looks wonderful. You expect some wit in films of that period, but the condemnation of contemporary society and mores is done with surprising subtlety. A new film for the favourites list. Recommended.

Loulou, dir. Maurice Pialat (1980), stars a very young-looking Isabelle Huppert, and Gérard Depardieu, who seems to have looked the same for the past three decades. Huppert leaves her husband and shacks up with aimless drifter Depardieu. Things happen. It’s all very 1970s, very French and very sexist. Enjoyable, but I felt no desire to dash out and buy the DVD.

I seem to have been a bit busy lately, which is why I’ve not posted here recently as often as I have done in the past. Here, anyway, is another catch-up post on what I’ve read and what I’ve watched.

Books
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985), I bought in Abu Dhabi, so I’ve had it at least seven years. I’ve no idea why it sat there neglected on my book-shelves for so long, because I expected it to be a good book. And so it proved to be. Admittedly, I’d also expected it to be a more straightforward approach to its premise – a US theocratic dystopia – that it actually was. But couching the story as the reminiscences of the narrator I thought worked very well. Some of the scenes were especially powerful. For all the bollocks Atwood talks in trying to distance herself from sf, it can’t be denied that she’s a very good prose stylist. An excellent book. Now I’d like to see the film.

The Power Of Starhawk, Stever Gerber (2009), is the second of Marvel’s collection of early Guardians of the Galaxy comics. These ones are at least better than the previous collection (see here). The Guardians are an odd group – they weren’t popular on their debut in 1969, but in the years following various people have tried to revive them – Gerber in 1976 (collected in this volume), Jim Valentino in 1990, and now Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning from 2008. It’s the Gerber ones – from Marvel Presents #3 to #12 – that I remember from my childhood. The artwork is typical of Marvel for the period, and the story has its moments. One for, er, fans, I suppose.

Sicilian Carousel, Lawrence Durrell (1977). I adore Durrell’s writing, and there’s plenty of good stuff in this one to salivate over. It’s one of his Mediterranean travel books, which, of course, are not travel books per se. In Sicilian Carousel, Durrell joins the eponymous package tour of Sicily, and writes as much about his fellow travellers as he does the island. As usual, he evokes place with near-perfect prose, and characterises his companions with a mixture of affection and pomposity. Typical Durrell – brilliant, in other words.

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin (1969), was August’s book for my 2009 reading challenge. I wrote about it here.

De Secretis Mulierum, L Timmel Duchamp (2005), is a novella originally published in F&SF magazine in 1995, but now available from Aqueduct Press as one of their “Conversation Pieces” series of fiction and non-fiction. A time-viewing project discovers that Leonardo da Vinci was a woman masquerading as a man… and that the same was also true of Thomas Aquinas. A female history doctoral student, against the wishes and advice of her sexist controlling male professor, continues with her thesis on da Vinci. I liked the central conceit, and the discussion of history and women’s roles in it that the conceit generated… but the professor was such a complete wanker he seemed a little as though he had been deliberately made so as a counterpoint to the conceit. A very good novella.

The Buonarotti Quartet, Gwyneth Jones (2009), is also a Conversation Piece, and is a collection of four short stories set in the same universe as Jones’ excellent Spirit, or The Princess of Bois Dormant (see here). The four stories are ‘Saving Tiamaat’ (originally published in The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan), ‘The Fulcrum’ (Constellations, edited by Pete Crowther), ‘The Voyage Out’ (Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures, edited by Lynne Jamneck), and ‘The Tomb Wife’ (F&SF, August 2007). The last story was also shortlisted for the 2008 Nebula Award. Like the novel, these are rich stories, and while sometimes that richness feels like it’s obfuscating the story, it also helps create a physicality to the invented universe. Of the four, I liked ‘The Fulcrum’ the best, although some of the characters felt as though Jones was having too much fun with the space opera furniture.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Samuel R Delany (1984), I read for the LibraryThing sf reading group and… it was a bit of a slog. Delany is a writer I admire, and his Dhalgren (see here) has long been a favourite. But for some reason I find Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand really hard to get into. I tried three times to read it back in the 1980s when it was first published, and failed. This time at least I finished the book. I’m not sure what it is that gives me so much of a problem – perhaps it’s the way the story gets heavier and heavier under the weight of accumulated detail, and so the plot gradually grinds to a halt. Perhaps it’s the bizarre society Delany has invented – in which everyone is addressed using the female gender, but the masculine gender is reserved solely for objects of lust – and which Delany seems determined to explain as much as possible about. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand doesn’t feel like a novel. It’s not just that it’s half of a diptych – which is unlikely to ever be completed – but it reads like 500 pages of set-up, of prologue, and the real novel, which would probably rival anything by Peter F Hamilton in size, isn’t there. One day I may have another go at reading it.

One Small Step, PB Kerr (2008), I reviewed on my Space Books blog here.

Renaissance, AE van Vogt (1979), is late van Vogt and… oh dear. There’s something I find entertainingly bonkers about van Vogt’s fiction, but his later novels are embarrassingly bad. This one is based on a premise so slight, so badly put together, and so stupidly old-fashioned in its attitudes, it made for a difficult read. Aliens have conquered Earth, put women in charge, and through the use of a drug made all men near-sighted so they are forced to view the world through “rose-tinted” spectacles (which have made them meek and mild and non-sexual). But when one man’s glasses are broken, he starts to regain masculine mastery, shows his wife who’s boss, and goes head to head against the aliens. If this had been written in the 1940s and 1950s, the attitudes in it might have been understandable. Definitely one for laying down and avoiding.

Orbital Vol 1: Scars, by Sylvain Runberg & Serge Pellé (2009), is one of the many French sf comics Cinebook is publishing in English editions. It’s not unlike Valérian: Agent Spatio-Temporel (see here), which I like very much. A couple of hundred years from now, Earth joins a galactic federation, although a faction of isolationists still cause trouble. A human and an alien Sandjarr are teamed together as diplomats, sort of federal marshals and mediators, to resolve a dispute between a human colony and their world’s owners, the alien Jävlodes. There’s a nasty info-dump in the middle of the story, but otherwise this is pretty good stuff. The sequel is on my Amazon wish list.

Nights of Villjamur, Mark Charan Newton (2009), is a debut-that’s-not-a-debut which landed earlier this year with quite a splash. (Newton’s actual first novel was The Reef, published in 2008 by small press Pendragon Press.) Nights of Villjamur was very well-received – except here, where a negative review caused a bizarre backlash in the comments thread. So, is the book worth the hype? Sadly, no. Newton has created an interesting world, but there are infelicities in the prose – caused, I suspect, by him trying too hard; his writing’s better when he sticks to plain language – and a couple of the narrative threads didn’t seem to add much to the plot. It shows plenty of promise; and yes, it’s a better book than The Reef. While it’s certainly a respectable debut, I’ll be surprised if we see it on any shortlists next year.

Films
One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing, dir. Powell & Pressburger (1942), is one of the Archer’s wartime films, and while it’s done with wit and style the heavy hand of propaganda flattens parts of the story. The crew of B for Bertie, a Wellington bomber, bail out over the occupied Netherlands when their plane is damaged by flak – but it flies on, unmanned, to cross the Channel and crash in England. The Dutch resistance take the downed crew in hand and smuggle them to the coast, where they’re given a boat and must row for Britain. Bizarrely, the film ends, and then a series of title cards appear on screen explaining that the cast, crew and everyone associated with the film wanted to know what happened to the crew of B for Bertie after their rescue. So there’s a brief epilogue showing the airmen doing their bit for Blighty.

Nosferatu, dir. FW Murnau (1922), is a famous silent film, the first to put Bram Stoker’s story of Dracula on celluloid – the names were changed because it was an unauthorised adaptation. I have yet to quite figure out how to approach silent films. I find them slow, and often my attention begins to wonder… but afterward I want to be able to watch them again. Nosferatu was a rental DVD, but I’m tempted to buy a copy of my own so I can watch it again. While the presentation – silent, black & white, the odd mugging style of the acting in those days, dialogue carried on infrequent intertitles – is something of a barrier to someone used to cinema as it exists now, that difference also forms part of the appeal.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, dir. Jamoril Jires (1970), is like Jodorowsky meets Buñuel. I didn’t understand one bit of it. The titular Valeria floats about; there’s a vampire-like figure who pops up every now and again, and who might or might not be her father; there’s her mother, who gets bitten by the vampire and grows younger; and… lots of other bits and pieces I couldn’t quite fathom, It’s all very dream-like… which is the apparent intent. I like strange films, but for some reason this one didn’t really appeal to me.

A Comedy of Power, dir. Claude Chabron (2006), stars the excellent Isabelle Huppert. In this films she’s a judge heading an investigation into a government-supported body which donates money to other nations for large infrastructure projects – the French equivalent of the Overseas Development Agency, in other words. And, like the OSDA, just as corrupt. There’s not much that’s actually funny in A Comedy of Power, despite its title; except perhaps the drôlerie of a system in which corrupt officials are protected by officials who are themselves corrupt… except for the one they’ve decided to sacrifice, of course. A surprisingly lightweight thriller.

Outland, dir. Peter Hyams (1981), may be High Noon in space – well, on a moon of Jupiter – but it never pretends to be anything else. Sean Connery plays the local marshal, who uncovers a conspiracy at the mine. So the mine owners send a team of assassins to Io to rid themselves of the troublesome sheriff. Mostly, it works; except for repeated instances of people exploding in vacuum. That doesn’t happen – in fact, it’s believed a person can survive for about three minutes in vacuum. Even then they won’t inflate like a balloon and then burst. If it hadn’t been for that, and the mysterious earth-like gravity (on a moon with a diameter 3,642 kilometres) – oh, and the lack of vulcanism on Io’s surface – Outland might have been quite a good sf film.

A Kind of Loving is a 10-episode television drama from 1982 I reviewed for videovista.net. See here.

Let The Right One In, dir. Tomas Alfredson (2008), is a vampire film from Sweden, which has deservedly won a bunch of awards. Oskar, a twelve-year-old boy, is being bullied at school. He makes friends with the girl who has just moved in next door, Eli, and who only appears at night and seems a bit odd. I’m not a big fan of horror films, or vampire films for that matter – notwithstanding Nosferatu above – but Let The Right One In really is very very good. It’s perhaps slower than I’d expected, more of a drama than a horror film per se. But it’s very effective, and definitely worth seeing.

Event Horizon, dir. Paul WS Anderson (1997), I remember first seeing at the cinema in Abu Dhabi. I wasn’t impressed then, and I’m still not impressed after watching it again more than a decade later. There’s nothing wrong with the central premise per se – Earth’s first FTL ship goes missing on its maiden voyage, and it transpires its FTL drive opened a portal into another dimension, Hell. Yes, the eponymous ship is little more than a haunted house in space; but the “hauntings” are effectively done. But that doesn’t mean it has to look like a haunted house. It should look like a spaceship. It doesn’t matter how cool it looks, it still has to look plausible.

Equilibrium, dir. Kurt Wimmer (2002), I’d heard vaguely good things about. So it came as a bit of surprise to discover that this film was rubbish from start to finish. The opening exposition is clumsy. The main character (Christian Bale, putting on a terrible American accent) is a “Grammaton Cleric”, which sounds like something out of a fourteen-year-old’s Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The story is ripped off from 1984. The final reveal that “Father” died years before is obvious right from the start. Throughout the film, everyone is supposed to be emotionless, thanks to a wonder drug called Prozium, yet all the dialogue references feelings and emotions. Even the “Gun Kata”, the firearm/martial art, is daft – watch any of the firefights and there’s no way any of the clerics could have survived. The film is stupid nonsense from start to finish.

Ordet, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer (1955), is a film from the Time Out Centenary Top 100 Films list. It’s also very grim and dour. Perhaps that’s because it’s Danish (joke). It’s filmed in black and white, with a small cast, none of whom ever seem to smile. Anders Borgen wants to marry Anne Petersen, but their parents won’t allow it because each family belongs to a different Christian sect. The Borgens are, ironically, “Glad Christians”, while the Petersens are “Inner Mission”. Then Anders’ sister-in-law, Inger, suffers a stillbirth and then dies. Petersen relents and allows Anders and Anne to be betrothed. Then Anders’ older brother, Johannes, who is mad and believes himself to be Christ, reappears after vanishing earlier, and resurrects Inger. He also appears to be sane. Despite the flatness of its presentation – the sparse décor of the interior sets, the black and white film stock, the monotonous landscape – Ordet is a study in opposites: one faith against another, science against religion, sanity against insanity…. Perhaps it’s the straight face, which never cracks a smile, with which the film is played that makes the final scene so affecting.

Even Dwarfs Started Small, dir. Werner Herzog (1970), is the final film in the Werner Herzog Collection and… I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. The entire cast are dwarfs and the plot is, well, there’s little plot, in fact (no pun intended). A bunch of dwarfs are behaving anarchically outside an institution, and demanding the return of their leader who is imprisoned within by another dwarf. One dwarf rides round on a motorbike. Later, he hotwires a van and ropes the steering-wheel so it drives round continually in a tight circle. Another dwarf, Helmut Döring, has the most bizarre chuckle I’ve ever heard. Some films you are better if you have a bottle of wine or a few cans of beer as you watch them; Even Dwarfs Started Small is one of those films which are better if you have a bottle of wine or a few cans of beer before you watch them.

More reading and watching over the past few weeks…

Books
The Affinity Trap, Martin Sketchley (2004), is solid twenty-first century British space opera: take some Banks, mix vigorously with Reynolds, add a pinch of Morgan, a soupçon of McAuley and garnish with a sprinkle of Warhammer 40K. Which is not to say that the end result is not done well. If my TBR weren’t already approaching Olympian heights, I’d be tempted to pick up books two and three in the trilogy begun by this novel.

Guardians Of The Galaxy: War Of Kings Book 1, Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning (2009), is the further adventures of the “re-booted” Guardians of the Galaxy sfnal superhero team from Marvel. The plot thickens, the dialogue continues to entertain, and the art is (mostly) high quality. I’ll admit I don’t understand why Marvel change artists from episode to episode on these mini-series things. I’d have thought consistency would be best. But perhaps they have to spread the work around to hit the planned publication date.

Return to Earth, Buzz Aldrin (1973), I reviewed for my Apollo 40 celebration on my Space Books blog here.

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys, Michael Collins (1974), I reviewed for my Apollo 40 celebration on my Space Books blog here.

First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong, James R Hansen (2005), I reviewed for my Apollo 40 celebration on my Space Books blog here.

A Fair Day’s Work, Nicholas Monsarrat (1964), is a potboiler which paints its characters with a little too broad a brush to be entirely plausible. It’s set aboard a liner on the eve of departure from Liverpool. Except the new “breed” of stewards – the first post-war generation, in other words – are lazy goodfornothing union layabouts, and they keep on staging strikes to delay the ship. It’s up to the captain – the best-drawn character in the book – to sort it out. Which he does.

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005), I read on the train travelling up to Glasgow for Satellite 2. It was not the book I’d expected it to be. Set in an alternate recent past, it posited a UK in which clones exist as an underclass to provide replacement organs. They’re treated worse than slaves. Except for those at Hailsham, a boarding school where they were given special treatment. I suspect Ishiguro has never attended boarding-school. And a stylistic tic, in which the narrator mentions some event or past incident, and then breaks from the main plot to to describe it, became increasingly irritating as the novel progressed. But it was nice to read a science fiction novel with real characters and lovely prose, even if it was a very thin on ideas. Why can’t we have sf novels with all three, eh?

Atomised, Michel Houellebecq (1999), I read on the train travelling down from Glasgow after Satellite 2. An odd book, and I’m not entirely sure how successful it was. It’s certainly bleak, and the didactic tone of the early part of the novel made for an interesting read. But when one character started telling their life story to another character for no good reason, my sense of disbelief began to falter… and when I got to the final section in which a narrator describes Michel’s work following the years described in the rest of the novel, well, at that point my suspension of disbelief just gave up the ghost and expired. I like the idea of a postscript which changes all that has gone before, but you have to do the necessary preparation for it. Atomised didn’t. I’d still like to read more by Houellebecq, however.

Open Your Eyes, Paul Jessup (2009), describes itself as a “surreal space opera”, but I was reminded more of Delany’s early works than anything else – especially Nova, Babel-17 and ‘The Star Pit’. This is not a bad thing; they are fine antecedents. The universe of this novella was weirdly original, the writing worked more often than it failed, and the ideas may not have been entirely original but were given interesting spins. Unfortunately, the characters were a little flat. Nevertheless, a good novella, and I think it’d make a more interesting nomination for an award next year than most of those which end up on shortlists.

The Steel Remains, Richard Morgan (2008), is a book which promised so much before its arrival, but seems to have slowly faded from sight in the year since its publication. Morgan Does Fantasy. You can understand why this made many salivate – high fantasy as a genre is turning moribund, and after Black Man I can’t think of another writer better suited to inject some fresh vigour. But. Morgan made some interesting choices for his novel – his protagonist, Ringil Eskiath, is an out homosexual, in a world in which such a sexual orientation is a sin and illegal; his world is high fantasy, but hints at an underlying science-fictional nature; he begins his story with his “hardy band of adventurers” (so to speak) leading separate lives, so it takes a while to get them together for the climax…. Morgan wields his genre clichés as though they were morning stars, dirty great maces with heads covered in lethal spikes – blunt trauma and puncture wounds. It all makes for a high fantasy novel which struggles to escape the straitjacket of its genre trappings and succeeds only in rolling about loudly on the floor. All the same, The Steel Remains is a superior example of its type, and I’m a little disappointed its brightness seems to have waned over the past twelve months.

The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde (2001), was a book of which I had high hopes. I was told it was funny, and I do like literary metafictional tricks – even populist stuff like Lost In Austen (but not, I have to admit, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). So The Eyre Affair promised much… but delivered very little. It’s a first novel, and it shows. Fforde breaks out of PoV all over the place, telling the reader stuff his narrator could not know; he can’t decide whether to focus on his alternate world with its 130-year-long Crimean War and high literature pop culture, or on the “Prose Portal” which allows characters to visit the world’s books; and there were a couple of places where the logic of the story broke down. Oh, and the puns were bad too. It didn’t help that I read a US edition, so the shoehorned-in references to US cultures, such as car models, just seemed really odd. I’ll not be bothering with the rest of the series….

Films
Taxi Driver, dir. Martin Scorsese (1976). I consider Scorsese the second most over-rated director after Tim Burton. His first few films weren’t bad, although they were pretty much the same movie with the same cast playing different parts. Once he stopped making his wiseguy picture, he started churning out Hollywood “product”. Taxi Driver is about the best of Scorsese’s early works, and if you have to watch one film by him then, yes, I’d say it was this one.

The Sheltering Sky, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci (1990), I didn’t expect to like very much. It was slow to start, and the characters were really unlikable. But then scenery began to take over the film… and for the second half I was hooked. Now I want to read the book.

Knowing, dir. Alex Proyas (2008), was reviewed for videovista.net. See here.

Fata Morgana (1971), Heart Of Glass (1976), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), and Stroszek (1977), dir. Werner Herzog, are four of the five films in the Werner Herzog Box Set, and I was a bit surprised at which I discovered I liked and which ones I didn’t. Fata Morgana sounded as though it would appeal – it has no plot, and consists solely of footage shot in Africa while a voice reads out creation myths, strange observations, song lyrics, etc. Despite the arresting photography, it proved uninvolving. It probably needs a second attempt at watching it. Heart Of Glass is notable chiefly because the entire cast acted their parts while under hypnosis. It’s… odd. Not the story, but the way the cast behave. Not a very successful experiment, I suspect. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser was held together by Bruno S’s bizarre performance. It’s a more traditional film than the previous two, but for Bruno S and his odd declamatory method of acting. It’s certainly easy to understand why Herzog was so taken with him that he went on to write Stroszek specially for him. And that last film proved the most watchable and involving of the four. Bruno S is released from prison, is bullied by his prostitute girlfriend’s pimps, and leaves with her for the US. In deepest, darkest Wisconsin, he struggles to survive as the American Dream drowns him in debt. Bruno S is still odd, and his peculiar acting style gives Stroszek a near-documentary feel which works in its favour. Easily the best of the four.

Lions For Lambs, dir. Robert Redford (2007), is one of those movies Hollywood releases at intervals as a sort of “sorry for being so venal and mercenary” note. It attacks Bush’s Administration with all the impact of a wet haddock across the face, is as wishy-washy in its criticisms as Bush’s government was in its justifications, and is basically little more than muddled moralising from a high ground no more than one step up from its target. Hollywood should stick to brainless action movies.

Time Regained, dir. Raoul Ruiz (1999), is, I think, the only cinematic adaptation ever made of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. And even then it’s not especially faithful to the books; although, I suspect, it is in spirit. I have the novels on my bookshelves, but I’ve yet to read them. The film is surreal in parts, and a relatively straightforward historical movie in others. Definitely a film which bears rewatching. It’d be interesting to see it again after I’ve finally got round to reading the books.

The Quiet Man, dir. John Ford (1952), is a film from the Time Out Centenary Top 100, and I have absolutely no idea why. John Wayne returns to the Irish village where he was born, and woos fiery spinster Maureen O’Hara. The village is populated by stage Oirish stereotypes, Wayne happily beats O’Hara when she refuses to do his bidding – a female villager even offers him a stick as a weapon! – and even the film’s colour palette seems better suited to Oz than Eire. Most blarney is more plausible than this old-fashioned, offensive rubbish.

Pierrot Le Fou, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (1965). The version I watched was dubbed rather than subtitled, and it’s amazing how much more pretentious Nouvelle Vague films seem when the dialogue is in English. You can more or less forgive the pretentious bollocks most of the characters speak when you’re reading a subtitle or puzzling out the spoken French. But when drawled in American English, it sounds like the sort of stuff that makes you doubt the sanity of the speaker. Mind you, I’m not a big fan of the Nouvelle Vague – I quite like Alphaville, but not those of Godard’s other films I’ve seen; I love Fahrenheit 451, but have not enjoyed any of Truffaut’s other movies; and Last Year In Marienbad is tosh. Give me Tarkovsky any day of the week.

10,000 BC, dir. Roland Emmerlich (2008), is the latest film by a director who seems to have carved out a career making films which present in believable detail worlds which are complete and utter tosh. In this one, slavers on horses attack the village of a tribe of mammoth hunters, and cart off several. The film’s hero, a Hollywood Cro-Magnon with good teeth and male model looks, follows them to effect a rescue. This means crossing a huge mountain range, stumbling into the territory of a Nilotic race, trekking through a jungle and then through a desert, to reach… the pyramids of Egypt. Er, hang on. Caucasian Cro-Magnon travels south to the Nile via a jungle, the African plains and a desert? Not to mention all the fauna he meets, most of which went extinct a million years before 10,000 BC. And the stupid put-on accents didn’t help, either. Gah.

eXistenZ, David Cronenberg (1999), is a film which has sort of passed its sell-by date. Perhaps there were people out there ten years ago who would have found the nested virtual realities of eXistenZ‘s story confusingly impressive. But it’s old hat now, and the “are we still in the game or not?” mind tricks of the film are ho-hum and predictable. But, this is a Cronenberg film, so there’s a patina of strangeness which sort of makes the movie less dated than it should be. Jude Law’s bad America accent throughout is a bit annoying, though.

Here’s what I’ve been reading and watching in the last few weeks:

Books
The Pilgrim Project, Hank Searls (1964), I reviewed on my Space Books blog here.

The Daily Mirror Book of Garth 1975, Frank Bellamy (1974). I remember Garth from the 1970s and early 1980s. I often stayed at my grandparents, and they took the Daily Mirror every day. The central premise is that Garth, who is immensely strong, has various adventures in time and space, usually righting wrongs as part of a war between Good and Evil – with Good represented by Garth’s “lover through the ages”, Astra. Usually, when travelling through time, Garth occupies the body of a man who resembles him in every way. The comic strip was limited by its format, and often had to repeat information each day, but the stories were reasonably inventive and Frank Bellamy’s art was excellent.

The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler (2004), I decided to read after seeing the film, which I enjoyed. I have several books by Fowler – Sarah Canary, and a couple of collections – but I’d not read any of her mainstream fiction. The Jane Austen Book Club is cleverly structured – the discussion of each of Austen’s books is led by one member of the group, and that allows Fowler to tell their life-story, which in part echoes the themes of the Austen novel. Fowler also plays games with the narrator – the book opens with “our book club” and “we”, and returns to second person at various points, but none of the characters actually narrates the book. The film is a mostly faithful adaptation, although Jocelyn is played by Maria Bello and so younger than the book version. The sole male, Grigg is also more successful in the film, having made money in a dot com start-up; in the book, he’s just tech support. Overall, it seems strange to describe a novel by Karen Joy Fowler as light reading, but that’s what The Jane Austen Book Club is.

Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes (1984), I picked to broaden my reading. I’d not read any Barnes before, so I had little idea what to expect. And… this is not a book which wears its research lightly. The narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, is an amateur Flaubert expert and the novel is as much a dissection of the French writer’s life as it is about its putative plot – in which Braithwaite tries to determine which of the stuffed parrots on display in two Flaubert museums is the actual one Flaubert used when writing ‘Un coeur simple’. Braithwaite also has a secret of his own, which he gradually reveals as the book progresses. Flaubert’s Parrot is very clever and informative… but the central metaphor strikes me as a bit thin and Braithwaite’s own story doesn’t actually reflect thematically on his Flaubert expertise. As a readable and interesting treatise on Flaubert, the book succeeds very well; but as a novel, it feels unbalanced and Braithwaite fails to compete with the subject of his expertise.

After the Vikings, G David Nordley (2004), is a self-published collection of five stories which had previously appeared in Analog and Asimov’s during the first half of 1990s. They all take place on Mars, and are tied together with a framing narrative in which a pair of aliens discuss the extinct race which once lived on the planet. My copy is the 2004 revised edition, and it features some of the worst cover art I’ve ever seen (not the same as the version shown on Amazon). But the stories…. Back in the late-1990s, I tipped Nordley as a writer to watch, chiefly on the strength of his novella ‘Into the Miranda Rift’, originally published in the July 1993 issue of Analog and nominated for the Hugo and Nebula that year. He’s still regularly published in Asimov’s and Analog but since I’ve not seen either magazine for nearly 10 years, I’ve read only a handful of stories by Nordley and none recently. And he’s yet to produce a novel. After the Vikings is less good than I expected – the stories are very much 1990s Analog/Asimov’s sf, a little heavy in places on the science and the moralising, but well put together. I’m not sure about the final novelette, ‘Martian Valkyrie’, which features an inventive means of getting to Mars, but also includes some heavy-handed racial stereotyping and an unpleasant undercurrent of sexism.

Eclipse 2, edited by Jonathan Strahan (2008), I bought because of the good reviews it’s received. And because I wanted to read more recent genre short fiction. The anthology is a good read, although I found the contents mixed. The stand-outs are Tony Daniel’s ‘Ex Cathedra’ and Peter S Beagle’s ‘The Rabbi’s Hobby’. Terry Dowling’s ‘Truth Window: A Tale of the Bedlam Rose’ is near-incomprehensible as it requires the reader to be familiar with the universe of Dowling’s novel, Wormwood – although, to be fair, the novel does seem like it might be worth reading. Alastair Reynold’s ‘Fury’ contains some good ideas, but feels a bit weak for him. Stephen Baxter’s ‘The Turing Apples’ is polished, but felt a bit cold and uninvolving to me. Nancy Kress’s ‘Elevator’ is just plain dull. The rest are all enjoyable and well-written, but none really struck me as especially exciting. Oh, and there’s a Chiang too. Which won the BSFA Award this year. And I wrote about it here.

Starship Fall, Eric Brown (2009), from NewCon Press is a sequel of sorts to an earlier novella, Starship Summer, published by PS Publishing. It’s set on the same world, Chalcedony, and features the same cast. With Brown, you always know you’re going to get well-written character-driven sf, and Starship Fall is no exception. There’s no cutting-edge idea at the heart of it, just a story about people on an alien world which unfolds in elegant prose to an inevitable bitter-sweet conclusion.

Apollo 11 Owners’ Workshop Manual, Christopher Riley & Phil Dolling (2009), I read for my Space Books blog. A review will be appearing there later this month.

Films
The Dark Is Rising, dir. David L Cunningham (2007), is yet another attempt to create a film franchise from a YA fantasy series. Hollywood hasn’t done too well so far – Pullman’s His Dark Materials never got to book two, which is a shame; and the second Chronicles of Narnia film didn’t do very well at the box office. The Dark Is Rising is adapted from the 1973 novel of the same name by Louise Cooper, actually the second book of the series. A boy on his fourteenth birthday learns that he is the “Seeker”, who must find the six Signs so the Light can defeat the Dark. There’s something old-fashioned about the film despite an attempt to drag it into the twenty-first century. It feels very mid-twentieth century, all English village halls and village schools and fierce winters. Although it doesn’t appear on screen, there’s a sense of austerity to the story. Not having ever read the book, I can’t say how well it has been adapted, but most of the adult cast appear to be sleepwalking through their parts. Christopher Ecclestone as the Rider is especially poor. I suspect The Dark Is Rising will be another film franchise which slowly fades away uncompleted.

Guard Post, dir. Su-chang Kong (2008), is set in a, well, in a guard post, in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. A company of South Korean soldiers have turned up to GP 506 (the film’s original title) to relieve the company on duty. Except they find said company slaughtered, but for a single survivor. Over the next few days, they try to discover what happened, while one by one they themselves die. This film isn’t as gruesome as I expected – which is good, because I’m not a big fan of grue. But neither is it quite as suspenseful as the premise suggests. It’s done well, but nothing about it really stood out for me.

Battlestar Galactica: Season 4 and The Final Season (2008 – 2009), probably deserves a post of its own, but never mind. Lots of people have written at greater length and more intelligently than I could manage on this television series. What is interesting about the various commentaries scattered about the tinterweb are the points each commentator has picked up on. For me, BSG often failed because the writers didn’t have a clear idea right from the start what they were trying to do. So some episodes contradicted others, some made no sense in light of earlier revelations, and some were clearly knocked together in service to the “moral of the week”. The devil, they say, is in the details, and that’s where BSG often let itself down. When the fleet finds Earth, they determine that it was once populated by Cylons…. How? If they can identify 2,000 year old remains as Cylons, then why could they never determine who was a Cylon in the earlier seasons? But then I was never convinced by the Cylons – the BSG writers never seemed to grasp what machine intelligence might actually mean, or what machine intelligences in human bodies would be like. As for the final episode, ‘Daybreak’, I’m not as annoyed by it as some were. I quite like the idea of the Colonials feeding into the genetic heritage of Earth, and I can’t get upset at them walking away from their culture. Which is notoriously ephemeral anyway.

Boy Meets Girl (2009), was for review for videovista.net. See here.

The Last Sentinel, dir. Jesse V Johnson (2007), was also for review for videovista.net. See here.

Once Upon A Time In America, dir. Sergio Leone (1984), is in the Time Out Centenary Top 100 Films, but I don’t understand why. How a film can be so highly regarded when its central character rapes two women and suffers no qualms or consequences is beyond me. Once Upon A Time In America covers the beginnings of a group of Jewish gangsters in New York during Prohibition, and their eventual demise. The story is framed by the return of one, played by Robert DeNiro, thirty years later in answer to a mysterious summons. It’s all to do with the way his fellow gangsters met their deaths. The characters, being gangsters, are all nasty pieces of work, and quite frankly it’s difficult to care about them or what happens to them. At least in Westerns, there’s a disconnect – the milieu seems to be unrelated to the world as it is – so vile behaviour by characters is less likely to break the emotional compact with the viewer. And anyway, most Westerns are essentially white hats versus black hats. Once Upon A Time In America at least doesn’t romanticise gangsters – but then, that’s why it’s not especially entertaining.

Inkheart, dir. Iain Softley (2008), is yet another attempt by a Hollywood studio to kick off a new fantasy franchise. This time it’s based on the YA novels by Cornelia Funke. Brendan Fraser can apparently bring characters to life when he reads a story out loud – i.e., magically create them as real live people in his world. And he discovered this by reading a blindingly-obscure YA fantasy by an Italian writer to his young daughter… and subsequently giving life to the book’s chief villain and causing his wife to disappear into the book. And ever since he’s been hunting for copies of that book in order to try and “read” his wife out of it. With daughter, now twelve-years-old, in tow. Funke is German, and her books were first published in that country… which means this film has a European flavour somewhat at odds with its Hollywood treatment. It’s all very picturesque, and the European view of literature and fairy-tales sits uneasily on the US’s typical approach to this type of fiction. If The Dark Is Rising felt like 1950s England, then Inkheart feels even less anchored in the here and now.

The Band’s Visit, dir. Eran Kolirin (2007), is an Israeli film about, well, a band visiting Israel. The band are the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra from Egypt, and they’ve been invited to play at the opening of a new Arab cultural centre in Petah Tikva. Unfortunately, when they arrive at the airport, there’s no one there to meet them so they have to make their own way. They get it wrong and end up in Bet Hatikva, a dead-end town on the edge of the Negev Desert. (Arabic has no “p”, only a “b”, so the confusion is understandable.) The band are stuck overnight in Bet Hatikva, as there are no more buses. A local café owner, Dina, helps out, providing food and somewhere for the band members to stay. This is not a film in which much happens, but it’s well observed and the gentle humour and sharp characterisation carries you through to the end. Sasson Gabai as band leader Colonel Tawfiq Zakaria is especially good.

Honeydripper, dir. John Sayles (2007), is the latest film from my near-namesake. In this one, Danny Glover plays the owner of the eponymous ramshackle club in Alabama in 1950. He’s in danger of losing it – receipts are down and his unscrupulous landlord wants him out; and the local sheriff also wants to go into “partnership” with him. So Glover pins all his hopes on a live performance by Guitar Sam, a New Orleans star. Who doesn’t show. Happily, a young substitute takes his place, the concert is a success, and Glover gets to keep his bar. Given the period and location, it’s no surprise that the whites are pretty much entirely unlikable; but then neither are the blacks presented as paragons. Of course, much of the appeal of a film like Honeydripper is the music – blues, and early rock and roll. Although the latter only makes an appearance in the final scene. A polished work, with a sharp script, featuring polished performances and some good music; although overall not as good as Sayles’s Lone Star or Matewan.

This is turning into a sort of irregular thing. And why not? This time it’s more watching then reading, but never mind.

Books
The Dorsai Companion(1986) and The Spirit of Dorsai (1979), Gordon R Dickson, I read in the, ah, spirit of completeness. I’d loved the original Dorsai trilogy when I’d read them as a kid, but I was less impressed when I reread them a couple of years ago – see here. But there is still something a little fascinating about Dickson’s future history, and The Dorsai Companion gives more information on it than are contained in the various novels. It also contains several short stories set in that future history. And like a lot of sf of that period, the plot is carried via the dialogue. They’re very talky. Which made for an odd experience after reading more contemporary sf. The Spirit of Dorsai shares much of its contents with The Dorsai Companion (or vice versa), so I only had to read a handful of additional pages to finish both books.

How to Build Your Own Spaceship, Piers Bizony (2008) was a review book sent to me by Portobello Books – well, I requested it, and they kindly sent me a copy. So, thank you very much. I reviewed it here on my Space Books blog. It’s very good.

The Discovery of Heaven, Harry Mulisch (1992), I wanted to read after seeing and liking the film (which I reviewed for videovista.net – see here). Having now read the book, I think the film adapted it very well indeed. The novel is richer, of course, and more happens in it, but nothing of real substance is missing from the movie – if anything, the book does have a tendency to ramble in places. I can also understand Mulisch’s insistence that Stephen Fry be cast in the role of Onno Quist. I doubt it’s a novel I’ll be returning to, although it is very good. Bizarrely, it didn’t strike me as being very Dutch, despite Mulisch being one of the “Great Three” of Dutch postwar writers and this his best-known and best-selling work.

First on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins (1970). I’m reading a bunch of books on Apollo 11 in order to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing on my Space Books blog. So a review of this book will appear there some time around 20th July. For now, it’s much, much, much better than Shepard & Slayton’s Moon Shot (reviewed here).

Offworld, Robin Parrish (2009), was read for a review for Interzone.

A Law for the Stars, John Morressy (1976), is the first of two of Morressy’s Sternverein novels which were never published in the UK. I managed to pick up a Laser Books edition a while ago (which has an especially ugly cover). Unlike the other Sternverein novels, this one focuses on the Security Troops. Ryne is an orphan from a low-tech world who becomes the perfect Sternverein Security Trooper. From what I remember of the other books, this one isn’t quite as well written, although it does have its moments.

Films
The Duchess, dir. Saul Dibb (2008), is a dramatisation of the life of Georgiana Cavendish, the 18th century Duchess of Devonshire. It’s clearly a star vehicle for Keira Knightley, so it’s somewhat unfortunate that throughout the film she looked uncannily like a puppet from a Gerry Anderson television programme. Other than that, it’s a British period drama. It probably takes liberties with history – I’ve not read the book on which it is based, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman, so I’m only guessing. Sumptuously shot, slow in places, and it provided a couple of hours of mild entertainment.

Star Wreck 6: In The Pirkinning, dir. Timo Vuorensola (2005), I watched and reviewed for videovista.net. See here. I also watched Star Wrecks 1 through 5 in order to write my review. I won’t be doing that again in a hurry….

Valkyrie, dir. Bryan Singer (2008), I watched and reviewed for videovista.net. See here.

Tokyo Story, dir. Yasujiro Ozu (1953), is on the Time Out’s 1995 Centenary Top 100 Films at No. 9. Much as I appreciate Tarkovsky’s films and their glacial pace, at least his cinematography provides sufficient eye candy to hold your attention. Tokyo Story is a slow film, but its focus is on its characters. They’re well-drawn but ultimately it wasn’t enough for me and my eyes were starting to glaze before reaching the halfway mark. Perhaps I’ll try it again some day, although I may need to down half a dozen cans of Red Bull first.

Sunrise, dir. FW Murnau (1927) is also on Time Out’s 1995 Centenary Top 100 Films. At No. 84. And despite being only 95 minutes, it felt as long as Metropolis (153 mins) or Pandora’s Box (133 mins). Perhaps that was because it was silent. Or perhaps German Expressionist films just seem to drag on and on. Ah well, at least I can cross it off the list.

Titan A.E., dir. Don Bluth (2000), is a strange beast. It’s an animated sf film, which uses CGI backgrounds but traditional cell animation for the characters and foreground “sets”. The two main characters are voiced by Matt Damon and Drew Barrymore, and her voice doesn’t quite fit her character’s appearance. The story has its moments, and some of the CGI set-pieces are quite impressive. Apparently, it’s now a cult film. Maybe that’s because it feels like anime, although it looks like a Hollywood animated film.

Juno, dir. Jason Reitman (2007), is a mildly-amusing comedy about a teenage mother, the title character. Unfortunately, she talks throughout like someone whose lines were written to be witty and precocious, so she never feels real.

Battle Beyond the Stars, dir. Jimmy T Murakami (1980), is a Roger Corman cash-in onStar Wars, with a plot shamelessly stolen from The Magnificent Seven (and Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai). Robert Vaughn even reprises his role from the western. There’s a lot in it that will make you cringe – George Peppard especially, who appears to have spent the entire film pissed – but Richard Thomas plays a good part, and John Saxon as the villain gives the scenery a thorough chewing.

Code Unknown, dir. Michael Haneke (2000), is one of those films whose plot spirals out from a single seemingly unimportant event, showing the ramifications of it on a variety of peoples’ lives. In this case, it’s the casual mistreatment by a French teenager of a Romanian woman begging on the streets of Paris. A young man, the son of Malian immigrants, tells the teenager to apologise to the woman. He refuses… and this leads to a fight. The police turn up and the Malian is carted off. By the time the film finishes, we’ve seen how that one moment of thoughtlessness altered their lives, and yet nothing much seems to have changed. A film it is difficult to like.

Supernova, dir. Thomas Lee (2000) – Thomas Lee is actually Walter Hill, but he pulled his name from this, because apparently the studio were unhappy with his cut and brought in Jack Sholder to film additional scenes and Francis Ford Coppola to re-edit it. I can’t say I think much of their “rescue” job because the film is rubbish. I wonder if Hill’s original was any better.

Tales From Earthsea, dir. Goro Miyazaki (2006), is a charm-free adaptation of Le Guin’s tetrology. Sort of. It’s been a while since I read the books, But I seem to recall that Tehanu dealt a lot with Tenar’s domestic life – and she lives on small farm in this film. Sparrowhawk is also in his thirties or forties – hard to tell, being animation. He’s voiced by Timothy Dalton, and he’s another example of an animated character whose voice doesn’t fit their appearance.

My Darling Clementine, dir. John Ford (1946), is another film from Time Out’s 1995 Centenary Top 100 Films. It’s at No. 38. The film is also notable for its claim of accuracy – when a youth Ford had known Wyatt Earp, and the shoot-out at the OK Corral is staged as Earp described it to him. There’s a horrible casualness to killing in the film, as if the first solution to every problem was to shoot the other person in the back. Makes you wonder why they ever bothered with marshals and sheriffs. I’m not a huge fan of westerns – well, except for Rio Bravo – but this is one of the good ones.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars, dir. Byron Haskin (1964), is a classic piece of sf cinema. A US spacecraft surveying Mars narrowly avoids a collision with a meteorite. Both crewmen ject, but only Commander Draper and the craft’s pet monkey survive the landing. He is marooned on the red planet, where he discovers how to manufacture sufficient “air” for him to breathe, finds water, and even finds a native plant which proves edible. It’s all wildly inaccurate – hardly surprising given when it was made. And gets even more fanciful when alien humans from a star in Orion’s belt appear and mine ore using slaves. One of the slaves escapes and becomes Friday to Draper’s Robinson Crusoe. The slave is played by Victor Lundin, and I kept on expecting him to break into an Elvis Presley impression.

Fahrenheit 451, dir. François Truffaut (1966), remains a favourite after this rewatch. It’s complete nonsense of course, although it makes more sense than Bradbury’s vastly overrated novel. Books are banned… but people can still read. How do they learn to read if there are no books? Never mind. There’s something quintessentially English about the film – despite being directed by a Frenchman, starring an Austrian, and based on a novel by an American. It sort of exudes a late 1960s / early 1970s menacing UK charm, a cross between the quaint contemporary futurism of G-Plan-furnished A-plan houses in green suburban streets lined with silver birches and the reality of Brutalist high-rise sink estates.

5 X 2, dir. François Ozon (2004), is constructed from five incidents in the shared lives of a married couple, recounted backwards from their divorce to their first meeting. The husband, Gilles, is thoroughly unlikeable, and any explanation for his bad behaviour is only hinted at and never explained. It’s clear where Ozon’s sympathies lay. I like Ozon’s films, but he never quite delivers what you expect, or quite lives up to what he’s promised. Admittedly, I’ve not seen all his films. Yet.