It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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