Theaker's Quarterly and Paperbacks

What contributors did next #1

2012-02-01T08:59:00.004Z

Rhys Hughes contributed Thornton Excelsior adventures to TQF38 and TQF39, and I'm pleased to announce that there will be another set of them in issue forty. There's a new interview with him on the Horrifically Horrifying Horror Blog. I'm currently reading his new book, Rhysop's Fables, and it's rather fab.

Bob Lock contributed the Halloween-flavoured "Jack" to TQF25, and what's more his new book, Eclectic Sheep That Androids Never Dreamed Of, features a number of my hand-drawn sheep on its cover! Guess which ones are mine and you'll be able to see why I stopped doing illustrations for our magazine.

KJ Hannah Greenberg contributed "Just One Case of Flash: Another Chimera Tale" to TQF30, and her newest poetry collection, A Bank Robber's Bad Luck With His Ex-Girlfriend, is out from Unbound CONTENT. Readers who use the code "sentiment’s chowder" on their order form will get a 10% discount. It's also available from Amazon.

“Every Dialogue Scene Is a Duel” – Matthew Hughes, interviewed by Stephen Theaker

2012-01-30T18:00:00.000Z

Hi Matt, thanks for agreeing to be our first interviewee.

I’m honoured to be here.

I’ve just finished reading the three Henghis Hapthorn novels, one after the other, and it was one of the most sheerly pleasurable reading experiences of my life. I’ve previously read The Damned Busters and Quartet & Triptych. Where would you recommend I head next? And is there one book of yours that you would recommend to first-time readers of your work?

Since you liked Quartet & Triptych, which is about my master thief and art forger, Luff Imbry, I would suggest The Other, from Underland Press in the US. It’s the first Imbry novel. It came out last month and it’s available in Kindle. You might also want to check with Angry Robot’s e-store in a little while. I’m just in the process of sending them the seven or eight Imbry stories that have appeared in various venues over the past few years.

But for someone coming to my work for the first time, the book I recommend is Template. It’s a stand-alone space opera, an Oliver-Twistish story about an odd fellow (all my protagonists are a little off the vertical) trying to find out who he is and why people are trying to kill him. It will give a first-timer a general introduction to The Ten Thousand Worlds and Old Earth, along with a rattling good read.

Does magic feature in your other novels of the Archonate, or is that unique to the Hapthorn books?

Yes and no. Back when I was writing what became Fools Errant, the first—though I didn’t know it at the time—Archonate story, I put in a mention of how the universe periodically alternated between rationalism and magic as its fundamental operating principle. At the time, I was interested in how Isaac Newton had started out as a full-weight medieval alchemist but then switched mid-career to rationalism and became essentially the founder of the Enlightenment. It was as if the rules of the game had abuptly switched one day, and he had stepped off one wave and onto the other without missing a beat.

Years later, when I found myself developing the idea of the Archonate universe, I thought it would be interesting to explore the culture at the time when the change was about to happen again, although virtually nobody knew it. So, in every subsequent tale, including the Imbry stories, the impending cataclysm is the background to the foreground events. It’s a bit like the first half of 1914, when there is a great, highly articulated civilization that does not know—although a few suspect—that it’s about to come to an abrupt and tragic end. “The lamps are going out all over . . . we will not see them lit again in our lifetime.” That kind of thing.

Henghis Hapthorn’s problem is that he is forced to accept that it’s going to happen in his time, horrifying though the prospect is to him, and he is trying to decide how he will ultimately respond to it. Luff Imbry, if there is ever a sequel to The Other, may make the conceptual leap and begin to become a thaumaturge.

One of the strengths of the Hapthorn novels is their even-handedness; the reader appreciates how Henghis feels, as a Sherlock who can no longer eliminate the impossible, but also shares the excitement of his intuitive alter ego regarding the age of magic to come. Would you secretly side with one of them? In which of the two ages would you prefer to live?

His alter ego is also, although this is not stressed, a complete egotist. Henghis is detached, Osk is engaged, which makes sense because the thing that counts in the coming age is not intellect but will (or axial volition, to use the technical term).

I think it should be clear to the discerning reader that I would side with Henghis—not that I consider him an epitome, but he is, at least, a civilized being. What comes after him is definitely a rough beast. In The Spiral Labyrinth, we see the world after the first few centuries of the world’s ultimate age that will culminate in Jack Vance’s Dying Earth: a decadent, amoral Old Earth of rogues, monsters, and self-involved sorcerers.

I am sure there are worlds among the Ten Thousand during the penultimate age where I would be happy to live out a life. What would those rich and mellow places become once will begins its reign as the be-all and end-all? I don’t know, but for most of them I doubt if it would be an improvement.

I read Majestrum after reading The Spiral Labyrinth and Hespira, and I was a bit surprised to find it wasn’t the beginning of the Henghis Hapthorn story (although it works perfectly well as a standalone novel). Similarly, you mentioned earlier the Luff Imbry novel, which follows on from short stories and novellas. That’s quite an unusual approach, reminding me in a way of how indie bands like Stereolab and New Order would leave singles off their albums; it encourages a certain kind of fan. Was that approach the result of a deliberate decision, or is it just how it’s worked out?

It’s just how it worked out, but it’s a long story.

In 2001, I had two books out from Warner Aspect (Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice) that did not do well enough for them to ask for a third. But an editor at Tor, David Hartwell, said he’d like to see an Archonate novel. So I wrote Black Brillion. While I was waiting for it to come out, I thought it might be a good idea to get into the digest mags to raise my profile (I had no idea how their circulation had declined). So I looked through my file of story ideas and found a premise: suppose you came to realize that you were living in a world that resulted from someone’s three wishes going, as they always do, wrong?

I thought I’d be cagey and set it in the Archonate universe. A detective seemed to be the right kind of character to solve the puzzle, so I created Henghis Hapthorn and set him loose. The story was called “Mastermindless”. I sent it to Gordon Van Gelder at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, not knowing that it was really hard to sell to him, and he bought it within a week. He told me later it was the first thing he’d received in two years that made him laugh out loud.

I formed the impression that he’d buy another one, so I wrote more Hapthorn. All told, over the next year or so he bought six stories, the last one of novelette-length. Rather than just write stand-alones, I decided to give them a continuing story arc, and I used the impending magic/rationalism switch as the frame.

Henghis turned out to be popular with the F&SF readership, and the agent that I had then suggested I should outline some novels. So I thought up Majestrum as the next element in the story arc and wrote it up as an outline, with sketchy ideas for Spiral Labyrinth and Hespira. Night Shade Books, which had already brought out my story collection The Gist Hunter and Other Stories (containing all the Hapthorn F&SF stories), bought into the concept and the novels duly appeared.

Which comes down to this: I needed a story to promote myself, and it turned into eight or nine plus three novels.

Meanwhile, Black Brillion came and went. Tor wouldn’t let me write the whole story I wanted to tell (I was limited to 80,000 words), so I wrote a companion novel, The Commons, in episodes that I sold one at a time to Gordon, then put the whole thing together and sold it to Robert J. Sawyer’s Canadian sf imprint.

Luff Imbry was another invention who grew in the telling. He began as a supporting character in Black Brillion. After it came out, I got a nice review of my early books from Nick Gevers, Jack Vance aficionado and co-editor of Postscripts, and when I got in touch he said he’d like to see a story from me. We talked about it a little and decided that Imbry had legs. I originally set out to be a crime writer, and only fell into writing science fantasy by accident (people kept telling me they’d buy novels or stories if I wrote them), and Imbry was an opportunity to create a real noir baddie. I think of him by the way, as much like Sydney Greenstreet’s character Kaspar Gutman in The Maltese Falcon, with a little Peter Ustinov stirred in.

I eventually sold a half-dozen Imbry tales to Postscripts, which led its publisher, Pete Crowther, to ask me for three novellas about him. They would come out once a year. The second, The Yellow Cabochon, should appear soon. I’ve just proofed the typescript.

So, to summarize, were there some deliberate decisions? Yes. Or did it all just work out that way? Yes to that, too. Years ago, I described my writing career as a succession of desperate hops from one ice floe to another, like Pearl Pureheart fleeing across the black and white river. Hapthorn and Imbry tales are just more ice floes.

You seem to love conversation, especially the verbal duels between your protagonists and their snarky subordinates, such as Henghis Hapthorn and his integrators, and Chesney and his demon in The Damned Busters. Is that something you enjoy about your own books?

It must be. I do a lot of it. It comes naturally, I suppose, because when I was growing up verbal repartee was what went on around the kitchen table, some of it close to vicious (maybe it’s a Liverpool thing). We honed our knives on each others’ hides.

But beyond that, I believe the fictioneer’s indispensible tool is conflict, and that means that every dialogue scene is a duel.

Do you draw on your experience in political speechwriting, which (going on The West Wing, at least) I imagine might have involved crafting perfect replies to difficult questions, as well as the speeches themselves?

Speechwriting, as I practised it, was the art of creating impressions in the minds of the listeners. You soon come to realize that no one actually remembers speeches, but everyone remembers the impression a speech made upon them. The other key thing is that you need to create a carrier wave of shared emotion between the speaker and the listeners, which is why speeches contain very few new facts but are full of old ones—especially the beliefs and assumptions that the speaker and listeners have in common.

It’s actually the very opposite of dialogue in fiction, because conflict is what the speechwriter (and speaker) are trying to avoid.

The first time I read your work, I think, was in the Jack Vance tribute, Songs of the Dying Earth: the brilliant “Grolion of Almery”. How was it to get the email inviting you to take part?

Gardner Dozois sent me an email describing the project and asking me if I wanted to put in a story. My response was: “Try and stop me!” I was overjoyed, not least because I actually revere Jack Vance. He is the only author I knowingly reread (I’m at an age when I can be a chapter into a novel before I’m fully certain I’ve read it before).

And did you feel any pressure to live up to the expectations of Jack Vance’s fans?

No. I don’t think of the readers when I’m writing. I’m an intuitive writer who starts with a character and a situation and a vague idea of where it all goes. Then I see what happens. It’s a very insular business, just me and the guy in the back of my head who does the heavy lifting.

Thanks for such fascinating answers. I’m very happy to know there’s so much more on the way from you (and so much out there already that I’ve yet to read). Coming very soon is Costume Not Included, your second novel from Angry Robot. What should readers expect?

Please note the comment above about seeing where it goes. In Costume Not Included, I bring in the historical Jesus and proceed with Chesney’s development as a crimefighter and, for the first time in his life, somebody’s boyfriend. Things get more complicated, which is problematical for someone who is a high-functioning autistic. Soon I have to start the third in the series, and at the moment I have only the vaguest idea where it will go.

Speaking of things on the way, I’ve just received the final typescript for The Yellow Cabochon and thought you might like to see it. You’ll note how Imbry brushes up against the return of magic.

Thank you very much for doing this. It’s been a pleasure.

This interview originally appeared in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #39, along with reviews of Majestrum, Hespira and The Spiral Labyrinth. Reviews of Quartet & Triptych and The Damned Busters appeared in TQF34 and TQF37. A review of The Yellow Cabuchon—thanks, Matthew!— should appear in our next issue.

Majestrum, by Matthew Hughes – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2012-01-23T18:00:00.000Z

This is the first of the Henghis Hapthorn novels. Having just read the second and third in the series I was surprised at how late in the story this one begins: already, Hapthorn is aware of magic, his intuition has developed a distinct personality, and his integrator has been turned into a grinnet. That is because the novel follows on from a series of short stories about the same character (collected in The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, now safely ensconced on my Kindle), but like novels two and three it stands perfectly well alone.

The opening of the book sees him deciding to ignore all that he has learnt about the imminent overthrow of rationality and get on with his work, which takes him to The Braid, the country house of Lord Afre, an aristocrat so refined he cannot focus on members of the lower classes unless they strike appropriate poses or wear the insignia of rank. His daughter, the Honorable Chalivire, has formed a relationship with “a person of indeterminate circumstances”, which leads Hapthorn to investigate the first annual convening of the Derogation, organised by the Grass Tharks Lodge on Great Gallowan. A second thread sees Hapthorn engaged by the Archon to investigate secret plots and mysterious disappearances from the Great Connaissarium.

Despite the freelance detective’s best intentions, these discriminations will once again bring him into contact with magic and its users.

The Kindle version of this Hapthorn novel is not set up quite so well as the other two, with a contents page that doesn’t work and text throughout that should presumably be in italics left underlined, but that barely affected my enjoyment. I’ll try not to duplicate here what I’ve said about books two and three, but it was a sheer pleasure to read, full of sharp, clever dialogue, novel ideas and characterful personages (such as Old Confustible, an integrator so old he remembers the last age of magic), and to that it added the most terrifying antagonist of the series, Majestrum, whose very name is enough to knock Hapthorn’s intuition unconscious.

It’s been quite a while since I read so much fiction by a single author in a row. At school I read all ten volumes of David Eddings’ Belgariad and Mallorean during the mock exams fortnight, but I barely remember a word of those. I doubt I’ll ever say that about The Spiral Labyrinth, Hespira and Majestrum. Reading all three together like this was one of the most pleasurable reading experiences of my life.

Majestrum, by Matthew Hughes (Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Kindle, 4487ll).

Crimewave Eleven: Ghosts, reviewed by John Greenwood

2012-01-18T22:00:00.001Z

According to the publisher's website, Crimewave magazine was established in order to "plug a gap in the UK marketplace by publishing a crime and mystery fiction magazine". That sounds more mercenary than the magazine's creators probably meant it to. The attention to detail in the design and production of the book feels more like a labour of love than a mere marketing opportunity.

Founding editor Mat Coward is quoted: "We don't do cosy, we don't do hardboiled, we don't do noir. What we do is something entirely different to anything you've ever read before." The lovely noirish, hardboiled cover illustration seems to suggest otherwise, but the contents bear out his assertion, partly at any rate. None of the short fiction represented here falls neatly within such sub-genres. Whether it is entirely different to anything I've ever read before is a rather stronger statement.

I did wonder about that "gap in the UK market" - there may be a gap, but is there such demand for crime fiction that is both short and genre defying? Crime readers like books in series, they like the same detective (or analogous investigator) to keep going through at least a dozen investigations. They're notoriously loyal; once they've latched on to an author, they'll keep rooting out every last Dick Francis, Alexander McCall Smith or Jo Nesbo book until they've read them all. Does this kind of market favour an unpredictable collection of genre-bending short stories by a collection of authors, some known, others not known especially for their crime writing, some not known at all?

I suppose the fact that Crimewave has lasted eleven issues may partly be the answer to that question. The volume I read certainly brought three or four authors to my attention whose work I will keep an eye out for in future, and I am not a particular fan of crime fiction. Some might suggest that I am less than eligible to pass judgement on a "genre" collection like this, but if Crimewave is going to reach out to readers beyond the small-press then it needs to convince readers like me.

Particularly when you're pushing beyond the boundaries of "hardboiled", "noir" and other sub-genre restrictions, it's difficult to establish the boundaries of what you might call "crime fiction". How many novels of any genre don't frequently revolve around serious breaches of the law?

Two of the stories here could just as easily be described as weird fantasy. Of these, Alison Littlewood's "4a.m., When the Walls are Thinnest" is the most successful: an old lag's shaggy dog story about how he lost part of his thumb turns into a supernatural quest to perform a genuine Indian rope trick, and climb out of captivity, but climb to where? I was impressed by the unshowy but convincing dialogue, and by the way the author had captured a moment of failed bravado (the real reason for the missing thumb is less heroic than the raconteur would have us believe). I was less convinced by the mystical ending.

Mikal Trimm's "Who's Gonna Miss You When You're Gone" is a more overcooked and long-winded affair featuring the ghosts of murdered little boys coming back to help along an adult mama's boy to spiritual awakening in an unspecified Deep South setting. There's a great deal of squalid detail about the fantasies of paedophiles, and the story mistakenly believes itself important enough to warrant such treatment, but in the end it conforms to what everybody already knows about child abuse: that abused children often grow up to become abusers themselves. The supernatural element in this tale only gets in the way of any genuine understanding of a difficult subject.

There are two other stories in the collection that revolve around child sexual abuse. "Holderhaven" by Richard Butner is a laconic piece about a college graduate who wangles a job renovating an old country house museum built in 1911, but discovers a secret passage and, eventually, evidence of the original owner's predilection for little girls. What distinguishes the story from most investigative crime stories is that the mystery is solved in such a peremptory and casual fashion. After weeks of vague and mostly fruitless searching, the student bumps into a girl who has connections with the family, and who happily obliges by telling him all there is to know. Job done. It's a curiously deflating story, building up intriguing characters (the boy's acerbic boss is a black woman who was a member of both the Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as an accomplished stage magician) only to drop them before they can be of much use to the plot. There's a nice, clipped style to the narration, and the author has a good ear for crackling, loaded dialogue, but beneath all the intrigue one senses the protagonist's (and perhaps also the author's) boredom.

Nina Allan is at least more interested in exploring the subject. Why is our culture so obsessed with paedophiles? And what is it that marks some men out for this? Having already reviewed Allan's debut collection A Thread of Truth, I was familiar with her unique take on adolescence. She pinpoints the moments when children begin to feel themselves rubbing against the confines of their families, of their neighbourhoods, but half-knowing that they lack the worldly knowledge to move beyond what they are used to. The teenage would-be photographer in this story grows up in London, but Allan makes even this feel like a claustrophobic, small-town existence.

After the boy randomly photographs a man he thinks is the same photo-fitted suspect in a girl's murder, he unwittingly finds himself befriended by the older man. The way this ambiguous relationship develops is accomplished and disconcerting. Very occasionally, as in her other collection of stories, there's a tendency to try and overinterpret the themes on the reader's behalf, but overall this is almost the best story in the collection.

In a similar vein, Steve Rasmic Tem offers a nuanced character assessment in "Living Arrangement". An absent, thoughtless father, now an absent, regretful grandfather suffering the slow indignities of old age, moves back in with his daughter, his grandson and the latest in a long line of abusive step-fathers. I thought the gradual realisation on the part of the grandfather about what a selfish mess he'd made of his life was subtle and entirely without sentimentality: the old man is too soured to have any kind of epiphany about Family Values. The ending is sewn up a little too neatly for my tastes, but that's the way short stories go. Tem has found his character's inner voice, which is half the battle.

That can't be said for Ilsa J. Bick's "Where the Bodies Are". In this informative story about mothers who kill their own newborn children, the dialogue very rarely rings true. Characters stand around having arguments about the reasons for such murders, the correct medical, psychiatric and policing procedures, and whether these women deserve any of our sympathy. I'm guessing that the author was aiming for the kind of sparky belligerence in the dialogue that you find in shows like CSI, but nobody on a TV medical drama apart from perhaps Dr. Drake Ramoray, would be found uttering lines like, "What about morality, Miriam? What about what's right and decent? What the hell about justice? Oh wait...I forgot. I'm talking to a woman who thinks it's fine to renege on a promise and screw a guy - in more ways than one."

Bick has clearly done her research, and is keen that the reader appreciates this. Some parts of the story feel like the script of a role-play sketch designed to introduce students to the legal niceties of maternal infanticide. But as a short-story it comes across as slightly daft.

"Two Lions" by Luke Sholer has a premise that could have turned out equally fatuous - two gay hitmen get it together in the bedroom, but can't stop falling out on their assignments. It's not as silly as that makes it sound. In fact, I could easily picture this as a highly effective and slick techno-spy Hollywood blockbuster, although I'm not sure whether Tom Cruise would be up for this one. In the end though I lost interest in the weaponry and the austere, absurdly disciplined protagonist.

Similarly efficient and punchy is Christopher Fowler's "The Conspirators", which seems to enact the cliche of the corporation as a psychopathic entity. Fowler creates a world where every top executive post seems occupied by someone with the moral compass and capacity for violence of Patrick Bateman. It's compelling and expertly done, but perhaps a little bit too slick to be all that memorable, although it at least has a sense of humour, however black, that "Two Lions" seems to lack.

Cody Goodfellow's "Neighbourhood Watch" is funny too, and also rather appalling. A conservative Christian Neighbourhood Watch co-ordinator and junior sports coach surveys his neighbourhood with secret video cameras, enforcing his moral code with outrageous violence. When a brothel opens on his patch, he dons the ski mask and sets to work. The wit in this gruelling slog through various scenes of sexual degradation and bloody vigilantism, lies in how carefully Goodfellow has captured his narrator's voice. He sums up one stricken prostitute by observing, "Not a bad girl, at least not when she lived with her parents, but a timid hitter and apathetic outfielder."

The collection is bookended with the two halves of Dave Hoing's "Plainview", for my money the best thing in it. The first section takes place in 1975, during which the second of three teenage girls disappears and is later found raped and murdered. The second section takes place 35 years later, so it does make sense to physically separate the two halves, although I defy the reader to read through all the intervening stories before patiently reaching the conclusion to "Plainview". The story is really about collective apathy - three girls are murdered, the killer is never caught, and nobody outside of the families involved really wants the police to make much of a fuss about it. It's all rather embarrassing for the little midwestern town. There are a number of different narrators, all well drawn with their own distinctive voices. It's the sort of story the Coen brothers would have directed and cast M. Emmet Walsh in as a fat, ineffectual Police Chief.

For "Plainview" alone it was worth dipping into this collection. Of the thirteen stories collected here, I'd list four as very good and another three as interesting but improvable. That leaves six stories that either left very little impression on me, or that I felt didn't earn their place in such a nicely produced book. All in all then, rather uneven, at least to my tastes, but the best stories in here ("Plainview", "Wilkolak" and "Living Arrangement") really are very good.

Crimewave Eleven: Ghosts. TTA Press. ISBN 9780955368349. £9.99 (pb). 240pp

Hespira, by Matthew Hughes – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2012-01-16T18:00:00.000Z

Like the previous Hapthorn novel I had read, Hespira declares its intention to be interesting from the very first page, in this case by introducing the concept of retrospectants. Collecting significant items such as buttons and twigs over the course of their lives, devotees of this spiritual path choose a day to die, and gather their friends together in order to “explain the hidden meaning and structure” of their existences, “as revealed by the seemingly random milestones” collected in their soul boxes. After the final revelation “the adherent would then be quickly killed and cremated”, leaving their boxes to become, with the passage of centuries, highly collectible. One could pick almost any page of this book and find an equally interesting idea.

Hespira is the name chosen by a young woman who has lost her memory, encountered accidentally (or so it seems) by Henghis Hapthorn in the course of what should have been a simple transaction on behalf of wealthy maniac (when emotions run high, the “muscles in his jaw moved as if small animals were burrowing under his skin”) Irslan Chonder: the recovery of his favourite soul boxes from a thief. Finding Hespira strangely attractive, though she possesses “the complete combination of feminine attributes” that he finds least appealing, Hapthorn takes her off-world to investigate her past—and also to steer clear of the violent consequences of his recent work.

This third and so far final Henghis Hapthorn novel presents a level of invention and effort that is almost too generous to the reader, though of course some apparently incidental pleasures prove crucial to the denouement, which includes a revenge worthy of Kirth Gersen. One feels for Hapthorn, a detective in a universe that makes less sense by the minute, but enjoys his gentle frustration with the universe and admires his determination to keep trying. This is a highly amusing book full of mysteries and discoveries; there is always more to think about, always a reason to keep reading. People often say that they didn’t want a book to ever end; in this case upon discovering an epilogue my reaction was literally to shout “Yes!” (Embarrassing as it is to admit that.) Very much recommended.

Hespira, by Matthew Hughes (Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Kindle, 4990ll).

Reviewing under a pseudonym

2012-01-10T18:10:00.000Z

Guy Haley, a very experienced genre journalist, has been blogging about the critical response to his novel, Reality 36, a book I liked. There's a lot of good sense in the post, The Agonies of Criticism, plus a tiny bit of moaning about more negative reviews, but what caught my eye was this, with regard to his reviewing for SFX and Deathray:

“Sometimes I use a pseudonym Is there something that could possibly be construed as a conflict of interest by picky cyber-trolls? Then I write under a different name. There never is a conflict of interest, by the way, I’m always as subjectively objective as I can possibly be (or do I mean objectively subjective?), sometimes to the point of personal detriment.”

I can understand why reviewers might be tempted to use a pseudonym, to avoid all the hassle. People who get bad reviews have a tendency to assume there must be a reason for it (other than the obvious), and sometimes bear a grudge for years. We're frequently accused of having it in for people, and our reviews are only read by a handful of people, rather than the tens of thousands who read SFX.

But if you think people might perceive there to be a conflict of interest, surely the answer is to mention it, or hand the book over to someone else for review, rather than disguise it with a pseudonym? That's how I ended up reviewing Bob Lock's The Empathy Effect for Black Static; Peter Tennant felt there was a conflict of interest, having done a bit of work on the book, and asked me to pinch-hit.

Maybe it's because I spend most of my time working on legal books, but I can't help imagining the reaction if a retiring judge were to mention, casually, "Whenever there was a risk of looking biased, I just gave judgment under a pseudonym to avoid complaints from picky human rights lawyers..."

In the legal system, it's essential to avoid not just bias, but also the appearance of bias, for obvious reasons. In a review that isn't strictly necessary, because there aren't the same consequences: it's just your opinion about a book, and the reader is perfectly capable of taking your biases into account, if they're aware of them.

There are many good reasons for using pseudonyms (to be honest I wish I'd used one for all my reviews from the start, so I could go to conventions without fear of getting punched!), but a reviewer using a pseudonym specifically to conceal a perceived conflict of interest is, I think, deliberately misleading their readers, even if it's with the best of intentions.

There was quite a row last year when a pseudonym turned up in the first issue of the BFS Journal, and in the course of that discussion I said pretty much the same things. I have to admit, Guy Haley is a much more experienced reviewer than I am, so there are bound to be some aspects of this I haven't considered, but I hope it isn't a widespread practice.

(Full disclosure: I did use a pseudonym for a few TQF reviews in our early days, but that was part of the meta-fiction of the zine back then, the reviews being done in character, rather than to hide who the reviewer was. We also did daft things like reviewing imaginary books, writing fictional news, and having characters write editorials. Oh, youth!)

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2012-01-10T08:21:00.001Z

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The Spiral Labyrinth, by Matthew Hughes – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2012-01-09T18:00:00.000Z

This is the second novel in the Henghis Hapthorn series, but the first I read; the Amazon listings weren’t clear what the order should be, I downloaded the preview of this one to find out, and having read a page I refused to stop until I’d read the whole book. And what a fantastic and intriguing first page it was: by its end it had promised mysteries, thaumaturges, fancy words, an “intuitive inner self” called Osk Rievor, offworld travel, and that magic would “regain its ascendancy over rationalism”. I paid my eight pounds well before finishing the Kindle preview.

In the course of earlier adventures, Hapthorn has learnt that there are magical dimples on Old Earth, where the coming age of magic is starting to seep through. Upon visiting the deserted Arlem estate, at the intersection of two ley lines, he discovers to his discomfort that in such places his “intuition” Osk Rievor is able to take control of his body. Rievor is ensorcelled and takes them to the ruins of a hunting lodge in Hember Forest; they are thrown into the future, but separated. Thus much of this novel takes place in the period after sympathetic association has replaced rationality as the guiding principle of the universe.

Despite gaining the sympathy of one Pars Lavelan, wizard’s assistant, Hapthorn seems unlikely to survive; he is a pigeon thrown among cats. As his new friend warns, “the more expert the practitioner, the less he or she partakes of morality as you or I might frame it”, and the five great wizards of Bambles have already taken an interest in this new piece upon the board of their game. Hapthorn’s only advantages are his grinnet (a former electronic assistant—an integrator—transformed by a previous brush with magic), his wits, and the fact (though he doesn’t know it) that he is not the only new piece.

I appreciate that readers may be tired of the mention of his name in my reviews, but it’s impossible to review this book without reference to Jack Vance, in that it melds two sides of his work—the fantasies of the Dying Earth (as represented here by Bambles and the wizards) and the science fiction adventures of the cluster (paralleled here by the Ten Thousand Worlds of The Spray)—into a satisfying and coherent whole. Both futures are fascinating, as are the interconnections between them, and all mysteries have satisfying and surprising conclusions.

Though this isn’t a novel of gritty realism, there is psychological verisimilitude in its portrayal of a person trying to keep his life free of the chaos that surrounds it: who doesn’t feel like that sometimes? But it is escapism too, in that Henghis is generally able to sort things out, and if Hapthorn can’t, his intuition or his grinnet can. Despite the threats to his life, the route to success for Henghis often lies through the tangled knots of a difficult conversation with his allies: the battling dialogue is a constant pleasure, Olympic-level fencing with words.

I wish there were more novels like this; reading not one but three of them was the sweetest literary treat of my year.

The Spiral Labyrinth, by Matthew Hughes (Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Kindle, 4565ll)

Ian Churchill’s Marineman, Vol. 1: A Matter of Life and Depth – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2012-01-06T18:00:00.000Z

Marine biologist Steve Ocean, known to fans of his TV show Ocean Encounters as Marineman, has a secret life as a water-breathing, super-fast, super-strong Navy operative. He’s a cross between Steve Irwin and James Bond, although if you’re a child he’s more likely to save your mum than dangle you in front of crocodiles, and he has a healthy respect for women rather than treating them as disposable playthings. That’s a major theme here: respect for women, and also for friends, colleagues, sea life and the environment.

Though initially this seems like Aquaman or Namor without the angst, Marineman really has more in common with Tom Strong than either of those grumps, especially once his powers become a matter of public knowledge and he discovers his secret origin. He’s an optimistic hero, concerned about the oceans and wildlife, but hopeful that the tide can be turned on the damage we are doing. He’s defined by his actions, not his origin.

The artwork is easy on the eye; it could be characterised perhaps as a constrained manga style; big features, expressive faces, exaggerated body types, but with a clean line. Panels often look like animation cels, and many are very memorable: Marineman punching a shark, the first sight of octopus-headed villain Octo, and a succession of buff gentlemen and voluptuous ladies. Good old Marineman nearly always looks ladies in the eye, but the scene where he’s thanked for that may raise eyebrows after so many panels that reward readers looking elsewhere!

You might wonder how a collection of six issues runs to three hundred pages; there's a fair bit of padding (the first story page comes nineteen pages in), and a lot of bonus features: pages from the comics Ian Churchill drew as a kid, articles on marine biologists, posters, and displays of art assets. All interesting – and much of it is genuinely educational. Just don't expect a story as substantial as the page count might make you think. This book is little more than a taster for Marineman’s story, but I hope there’s more to come.

Ian Churchill’s Marineman, Vol. 1: A Matter of Life and Depth, by Ian Churchill. Image, tpb, 304pp.

Asking people to vote for you in awards...

2012-01-04T15:53:00.000Z

Lots of debate among writers today on Twitter regarding literary awards – as usual, one might say. The question is: is it acceptable to ask people to vote for or nominate your work? Adam Roberts described it as a "demeaning and contemptible practice", to which Paul Cornell (one of my favourite writers of Doctor Who novels) replied "demeaning and contemptible my arse". The debate rages on, but that's the gist of it.

Asking people to vote for your work means you think your book would be a worthy winner, and that can look rather big-headed. Or even worse, it suggests you don't care if your book is the best: you want to win anyway. Both of those can rub people up the wrong way.

For example, just before Christmas I saw a guy on Facebook saying that "anyone who hasn't yet read my ---- can assuage their guilt by voting for it in the ---- awards". Now, that is exactly the worst of it: you haven't read my book, but vote for it anyway. Ptui!

Awards are nice, and I'll admit that, now TQF is eligible again for the British Fantasy Awards, I'd be very excited to pick up another nomination, even if I don't think we quite deserve it yet. But they're not worth being silly about. Be cool. Encourage people to engage with the awards process properly, to read as many nominees as they can, not just vote for you because they're your pals.

Incredible Change-Bots, by Jeffrey Brown – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2012-01-02T18:00:00.000Z

The incredible Change-Bots are divided into two camps: the Awesomebots, led by Big Rig, and the Fantasticons, led by Shootertron. Having devastated their home planet of Electronocybercircuitron, they come to a temporary truce and pile into a spaceship, but fighting breaks out over whether word processors and incredible Change-Bots evolved from a common ancestor and they crash land on Earth. With a handful of unfortunate humans caught in the middle, their never-ending but rarely fatal battle continues to continue.

As you have probably guessed, this is an affectionate take on the original Transformers animated series. It’s drawn in a deliberately childish way, coloured with thick lines of felt tip pen. It’s the graphic novel you might have created as a child if a rainy afternoon had gone on forever.

Of course, there’s an adult intelligence behind all this; while the art style is childish, the composition and writing are not. The humour is gentle, poking fun at the daftness of the concept and the quirks of the cartoon (“Fantasticons, I have discovered why we always fail in battle. Improving our aim will lead us to victory!”) and finding its funniest moments through repetition (“Incredible change! Chee chee choo chee!”).

Some robotic rumpy-pumpy and a throat slice make it less than ideal for children, and they probably wouldn’t understand the appeal of the art style, but it’s a very sweet book that I’d recommend over the recent Transformers films to anyone looking to recapture the magic of the old cartoons.

Incredible Change-Bots, by Jeffrey Brown. Top Shelf, digital graphic novel, 144pp.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #39 – now available for free download!

2011-12-30T18:00:00.001Z

Merry Christmas and a happy new year! In this issue we have six more stories of Thornton Excelsior from the magnificent Rhys Hughes, mutant ultraviolence from Mike Sauve, and a science fiction tale from our dear friend Douglas Thompson. Ben Ludlam illustrates a Thornton adventure, and there are lots of reviews, from Jacob Edwards, Douglas Ogurek and me. Also, a mention for two people without whom I would have struggled to keep the magazine going these last two years: Howard Watts, who with his wonderful cover art has saved me from the quarterly hell of trying to create covers myself (TQF21’s awful, awful artwork still makes me shudder), and my co-editor John Greenwood, who has read virtually all the submissions this year.

In this issue we also have our very first interview! I found the interviews I did for the BFS’s Dark Horizons (with Brian Stableford, Lev Grossman and Allen Ashley) to be a fascinating challenge, and had wanted to initiate something similar here. I was in the middle of reading three brilliant books by Matthew Hughes (see Majestrum, Hespira and The Spiral Labyrinth in this issue’s review section) and so he seemed like the perfect choice. I hope such interviews will become a regular part of the magazine, but I will try to restrict myself to people for whom I can formulate at least semi-intelligent questions.

I made one big mistake with this issue, letting unfinished reviews build up and then trying to finish them all at the last minute. It’s delayed this issue by about a week, so to avoid that in future I’ve introduced a new Theaker rule: no starting a new book till I’ve finished a first draft review of the last one. (The most important Theaker rule is that having offered a cup of tea, you must make it.) A pile of yellow Silvine exercise books will assist in this plan.

But although it made us late, we did end up with lots of reviews: of books from Matthew Hughes and E.C. Tubb, audio adventures for Dick Barton and Doctor Who, and comics featuring Atomic Robo, Conan the Barbarian, Frank Miller's Holy Terror, Ian Churchill’s Marineman, the Incredible Change-Bots, Stan Nicholls' Orcs and many more. In games we look at Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition and Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. In film and television we review Melancholia, Paranormal Activity 3, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.

One previous reading rule came a bit of a cropper this quarter: Even Stephens, my plan to review books by male and female writers alternately. It worked pretty well at first, but then got quite confusing when I read some books by male writers, but not for review, and then reviewed them anyway, and then had to hold them back while I tried to get some books by female writers reviewed to catch up. What a mess! But I’ll try to do better next time, perhaps by tweaking the rule so that instead of reviewing books by men and women alternately, I read books by men and women alternately. That’ll stop me getting into a muddle.

In 2012 we have to bring you more fantastic fiction, more reviews, more artwork, more features and interviews, and if we can persuade our ducks into a line, more books. We’ll continue to be quarterly—seems to be working well—with weekly (if not twice-weekly) reviews appearing on the blog, along with comment pieces and flagrant hit-bait. Let us know if there’s anything you think we should be doing, because, to be frank, your ideas are probably better than ours!

This 96pp issue is available in all the usual formats, all free except the print edition, which we’ve priced as cheaply as possible:

Paperback from Lulu
PDF of the paperback version (ideal for iPad – click on File and then Download Original)
Kindle (free)
Epub (ideal for Sony Reader)
TQF39 on Feedbooks

More about the sweet-toothed elves who have let us steal their candy sticks this Christmas…

Ben Ludlam is an artist from the wastelands of County Durham. See http://banthafodder.deviantart.com for more of his work.

Douglas J. Ogurek’s work has appeared in the British Fantasy Society Journal, The Literary Review and Dark Things V (Pill Hill Press). He has also written over fifty articles about architectural planning and design. He contributes reviews of Paranormal Activity 3 and Breaking Dawn to this issue. He lives in Illinois with his wife and their six pets.

Howard Watts is an artist from Brighton who provides the Christmassy cover to this issue. He has previously provided covers for Pantechnicon, Dark Horizons and TQF.

Jacob Edwards is currently indentured to Australia’s speculative fiction flagship Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, as Jack of all Necessities (Deckchairs and Bendy Straws). To this issue he contributes a review of the film Melancholia. The website of this writer, poet and recovering lexiphanicist is here: www.jacobedwards.id.au.

Mike Sauve has written non-fiction for The National Post, The Toronto International Film Festival Group, Exclaim Magazine and other publications. His online fiction has appeared everywhere from Feathertale, Frost Writing and Rivets to university journals of moderate renown. Stories have also appeared in print in M-Brane, Black and White Journal, The Coe Review, Palimpsest 2010, and elsewhere.

Rhys Hughes has been a published writer for almost twenty years and in that time he has written six hundred stories, published twenty books and been translated into ten different languages. The Tellmenow Isitsöornot, a bumper ebook collection of one hundred stories, is available from Smashwords here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/88734.

Stephen Theaker is the eponymous co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, and writes many of its reviews. His work has also appeared in otherwise respectable publications such as Prism, Black Static, Spark (a long, long time ago) and the BFS Journal.

All thirty-eight previous previous issues of our magazine are available for free download, and in print, from here.

Past contributors, new projects!

2011-12-28T18:00:00.001Z

Some of our contributors have new projects out!

D. Harlan Wilson ("Houseguest", TQF33) and Douglas J. Ogurek ("NON", TQF33, and many, many reviews in recent issues) both appear in WTF?! from Pink Narcissus Press, which features "corrective surgery gone wrong, punk rockers abducted by aliens, zombie sharks, dead matadors, exploding ice cream factories, and dwarfs obsessed with pomegranates".

Alison Littlewood ("The Eagle and Child", DH53; "Day of the Bromeliads", TQF31; "Sarkless Kitty", DH55; "Off and On Again", TQF38) has a novel from Jo Fletcher Books about to hit the shelves, A Cold Season, about a young widow who takes her son back to the town she grew up in. I've read it, and let me tell you, that book is enough to give any freelancer nightmares for weeks. Especially if they're also a parent!

David Tallerman ("Imaginary Prisons", TQF29; "Friendly", TQF31; "Glass Houses", TQF34; "Devilry at the Hanging Tree Inn", TQF37) has a novel out from Angry Robot, Giant Thief, on February 2. I hope it's about someone who steals giants. That would be awesome. He'd have to take them to a giant fence, or possibly a giant launderer.

A reminder to any contributors to Theaker's Quarterly Fiction (or to Dark Horizons 53 to 57): we're always happy to run free adverts for you in the magazine, so do get in touch if you have a new project out.

(Thanks to ISFDB and its capable indexers for assistance in putting this blog post together!)

Atomic Robo, Vol. 2: The Dogs of War – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-12-26T18:00:00.000Z

Created by Nikola Tesla, Atomic Robo is a stout robot with big, expressive eyes who seems to have spent the twentieth century fighting evil and having adventures. There are similarities with Hellboy – his dry sass, the art style, his strength and toughness – and in some ways the comic does for science and adventure stories what the Hellboy comic does for supernatural tales and the weird. Unlike Hellboy, Atomic Robo wears trousers and shirts, which may seem a silly thing to note, but there’s no doubt that it’s part of the character’s appeal: it is visually intriguing to see a robot wearing clothes.

In volume one Atomic Robo fought mad Nazi scientists, giant ants and a pyramid advancing on Luxor, and accompanied the Viking probe to Mars (at Carl Sagan's request). Volume two, again written by Brian Klevinger (as are all volumes to date; the book feels very much like the work of contented creators), continues in a similar vein, with much light-hearted Nazi-smashing, though this time the action all takes place in World War II.

With the assistance of Atomic Robo's arch-enemy, Lord Heinrich von Helsingard, Nazi scientists have built Laufpanzers, walking tanks, and it's the hero robot's job to destroy them before they stymie the allied invasion of Sicily. If he can manage that, it's on to Guernsey where the Germans have built a second superweapon, a weather cannon that will “destroy England with a hurricane the size of England”. All it lacks is a power source…

The predominant mode is three or four stacked panels per page, the widescreen ratio thus gently created lending itself very well to Scott Wegener’s cinematic action. The reader drops through the panels at pace, but dawdlers are repaid in detail and character. The book looks fantastic on an iPad, Ronda Pattison's colours being particularly attractive when backlit, although the close-up approach taken by Guided View, presumably to make the book readable on smaller devices, soon annoys; iPad readers will revert to the full-page view.

The first five volumes of the comic are all currently available on Comixology for three pounds or so, but the two I've read so far would still be recommended at double the price. I like Captain America comics, but if you’ve ever thought they’d be better if Cap was pals with the Challengers of the Unknown and rather more of an atomic robot, this is the series for you. A quick but charming read with wide appeal.

Atomic Robo, Vol. 2: The Dogs of War, by Brian Klevinger, Scott Wegener and Ronda Pattison. Red 5, digital collection, 114pp. Available on Comixology.

Kalin: The Dumarest Saga Book 4, by E.C. Tubb - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-12-23T18:00:00.001Z

The format of the Dumarest books is perhaps ideal for a long-running series. Earl Dumarest is searching for Earth, travelling from one planet to another, sometimes in time-dilated luxury, the next in frozen popsicle coach. On each world he has two goals: to find clues to Earth’s location, and to raise enough money to buy a ticket for the next hop. Each planet has its own cast of characters, its own particular challenges. That means you can pick up any in the series without struggling to follow continuity: any of the four books I’ve read in the series could have stood as the first.

Having said that, Kalin is something of a format breaker, in that it sees Dumarest - and Kalin, his companion on this adventure - travelling between planets mid-book. It begins on Logis, with the Bloodtime imminent. Seeing an attractive girl chased by a “yammering, screaming mob” giving legal vent to a year’s frustrations, Dumarest dives into the fight, snaps some bones, buys her a ticket and gets her back to the apparent safety of the spaceship, where they begin to fall in love. A pair of saboteurs provide Dumarest with more opportunity for action, but ultimately cause our heroes to be stranded on a dead-end world.

Chron is Dumarest’s nightmare: a planet where there’s no chance of making enough money to leave. Will Dumarest’s courage, toughness and sense of honour be enough to save them? Well, there’s another couple of dozen books in the series, so what do you think? What’s more, he discovers the secret behind Kalin’s unearthly powers and does lots more good fighting (which is what these books are mainly about). He reveals a bit of a sexist streak (“Woman-like, she was indifferent to the comfort of others when a problem filled her mind”), but one imagines Kalin hardly cares about that when he’s working so hard to keep her alive.

Though at times this book surprised me, for example with its thoughts on living in poverty, and the choice between freedom and slavery, it wasn’t exactly brain food; it was exciting, unchallenging and straightforward, and that’s okay. It’s not the only kind of book I like to read, but there’s room for it in my life. The chances are good that I’ll go on to read the rest of the series, if they continue to offer the same kind of pleasures.

However, there was a huge problem with this edition: it was one of the shoddiest professionally released books I've ever read. It looks like it's been scanned in but not proofed. I won't give many examples, though two dozen are highlighted in my Kindle notes, because it feels wrong to offer free proofreading when the publisher has apparently not bothered to pay anyone to do it. There were two occasions on which characters smacked their hps after eating the last erf their food. If this is representative of the SF Gateway titles, I’ll regret the money I’ve already spent on them.

Kalin: The Dumarest Saga Book 4, by E.C. Tubb. SF Gateway, Kindle, 2747ll.

Game of Thrones, Season 1 – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-12-19T18:00:00.000Z

To quote Andrew Collins, where did it all go right? Heroic fantasy on television should look shoddy and embarrassing, not as sumptuous as Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra. The dialogue should be stilted and silly, not as sharp, wise or venomous as the very best on television. The cast should be self-consciously slumming, not delivering – as Sean Bean does – what might be the best performances of their careers. If fantasy on television can be this brilliant, why were we so happy to have Hercules: the Legendary Journeys? And it’s from HBO, a channel whose dramas I traditionally enjoy for one or two episodes before drifting away. Cinematic television is a lovely idea, and I watched the first episode of Boardwalk Empire as if it were a movie, but was never quite in the mood for the sequel. Game of Thrones, however, is the most watchable, thrilling HBO drama since Band of Brothers, a million miles away from the elegant tedium of a Carnivale. Perhaps most astonishing yet is that for all the talk of how expensive it was, the budget of these ten incredible hours of television was reportedly less than half that of a film like Knight and Day.

To a viewer who has not read George R.R. Martin’s original novels, it’s striking that the story told here bears little resemblance structurally to fantasies like The Lord of the Rings and its imitators. It’s not a simple quest from A to B, nor a straightforward narrative of good versus evil – although there are the first signs of an overwhelming evil to come from the frozen north. This story of great houses battling for supremacy, of intrigues, betrayals and assassinations, reminded me of Dune more than any heroic fantasies I had read. (Early on I wondered if this was in fact science fiction rather than fantasy, the long but irregular winters suggesting an alien planet, but later developments establish that this is a magical setting.) And that structure makes it ideal for television, because it throws the characters repeatedly together, constantly in conflict, rather than dispersing them on interminable hiking trips. The balance of power jerks violently about, every episode a game-changer.

If it weren’t for the slightly over-enthusiastic use of female nudity, and its budget-led coyness about showing the actual battles, I would love Game of Thrones unreservedly. There are lots of fantastic programmes on television, and there are lots of fantasy programmes on television, but this is one of the rare, joyful occasions on which the two categories overlap. It’s a shame that Sky’s decision to show it on Sky Atlantic has blunted its impact a bit here in the UK, but if you’re not a satellite customer, don’t worry: this is one you’d want to own on DVD anyway.

This review originally appeared in BFS Journal #4.

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-12-16T18:00:00.000Z

This twin stick shooter acts as an aperitif for the full price Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, but works in isolation. There are only five levels, all part of an assault upon an ork Kroozer, but each takes forty minutes or so to complete, and the different talents of the grunts provide a good deal of replayability. As a Sternguard Veteran the player mows the orks down the minute they pop out of their cauldrons; the melee weapons of the Librarian give them time to unholster their weapons, requiring more tactical play.

It's quite a tricky game in places, and not always intentionally. Set brightness to full for the best chance of spotting holes in the deck, and play the first level over a few times to unlock essential perks before proceeding. The camera is often a bit too distant from the action, this player frequently taking hits from nasty little guys he just hadn’t noticed.

The game's great weakness is its frustrating penultimate level, set inside the ork Cargo Teleporta facility, which among other things involves a lengthy set piece battle with a carnifex followed, without checkpoints, by an ambush that is very difficult to survive, making it necessary for less capable players to replay the carnifex four or five times too often.

Another part of that level advises you to get to a safe distance before detonating explosives, but prevents you from doing anything of the sort, forcing you to run helter-skelter across a poorly-defined network of walkways while they collapse, with sudden death on either side, the experience not enhanced by debris and pillars that obscure the player's line of sight.

The offline multiplayer mode is noisy fun, and features an interesting mechanic: sharing power-ups (including health potions) between players when they stand nearby. This means the better player doesn't need to hold off collecting power-ups, but is discouraged from running off on their own, creating a nice balance. A survival mode is good for a few minutes, but players are unlikely to return to it much once the achievement is gained.

Kill Team is a decent, cheap game, the sort of thing the XBLA is made for, but I can't help wishing someone would produce a turn-based Warhammer game featuring the proper tabletop rules. When the very similar characters of Gears of War are doing so well, it's obvious why there's an interest in creating W40K action games, but imagine how disappointed people would be if the only chess games you could buy featured the pieces running around and shooting each other in real time…

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. THQ Digital Studios UK. Xbox 360 (version reviewed), PS3.

The Walking Dead, Season 1 - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-12-12T18:00:00.000Z

Post-apocalyptic programmes don't tend to do very well. Jericho, Jeremiah, The Survivors (both versions), The Tripods, Three Moons Over Milford, etc – not many have made it past or even reached a third series. After all, just how miserable do you want to make yourself just before bedtime? But The Walking Dead is good enough that it might just buck the trend. The six-episode first season certainly looks great. Occasional shots of massed CG zombies are used sparingly, physical make-up being more frequent. The story follows young police officer Rick Grimes as he emerges from hospital and makes contact with other survivors. This Life’s Andrew Lincoln makes an excellent lead and the rest of the cast is just as good. In Frank Darabont, director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist, the programme has a showrunner to die (and then return from the grave) for.

Unusually, the writer of the comic, Robert Kirkman, is also on the writing team of the adaptation, and thus he gets the chance to do what you can't in a serial comic: have second thoughts, and go back and rewrite things. So interesting characters and relationships previously lost early on are given more time, and the last couple of episodes introduce a situation that wasn't in the comics I read; a good sign that readers won't simply be sitting around waiting for expected events to play out. One less welcome change, in my opinion, is that the series shows a character having premonitions. For once it would be nice to have a fantasy show that didn't rely on prophecies for lazy foreshadowing. One other unfortunate change from the comic is that these zombies sometimes run as well as walk, which makes behaviour that was reckless in the comic perfectly insane in the TV programme.

On TV the influence of (or just structural similarity to) Lost is even more notable than in the comics (of which I've read the first fifty): the adventurers head out on sorties while everyone else makes camp and waits for them to return. What it perhaps lacks in comparison is a bit of mystery and humour, but perhaps when the reasons for the zombie outbreak are investigated that will lead in some interesting directions. I hope the series stays broadly realistic: in the second half of the Compendium the comic veered sharply into OTT Garth Ennis territory; right for Garth Ennis, but wrong I think for a show that has thrived on a realistic approach. But they haven't set a foot wrong so far, so perhaps I should have faith that whichever storylines are followed they'll make good TV out of them. Post-apocalypse shows don't last, but this one feels different. I can't wait to see more.

This review originally appeared in BFS Journal #4.

Dick Barton and the Paris Adventure – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-12-09T18:00:00.000Z

In a series of fifteen-minute episodes, Dick Barton and his chums work their way into the gang of black marketeer Spider Kennedy, who has a nasty habit of blowing up trains. Rather than the originals transmitted between 1946 and 1951, these are re-recordings produced for overseas transmission in 1949. Occasional line fluffs are not a problem, but do suggest these were recorded very quickly. Though there’s buzzing in places, the sound is good for such an old recording – particularly when it comes to the blood-curdling death screams.

Listening to the story over a couple of days, the accent Dick adopts in his guise as an American gangster begins to grate. Spider Kennedy quickly drops his own silly accent, but their initial meeting is unintentionally comical; think Vic and Bob as FBI agents. The story can be repetitive, the crooks becoming suspicious more or less every fifteen minutes, but the way Dick talks his way out of trouble is often quite ingenious. Its villains are colourful and menacing, if stereotypical (for example a lisping man Dick dubs “honeybunch”).

Though the story begins unpromisingly with a “half-wit” driving into a mine, it’s the now-historical setting of the story that modern listeners may find most interesting. It takes place against the background of post-war shortages, and when Barton goes to France, he notes that the operation is using the same beaches that were used for the D-Day invasion, and expresses surprise that there are any buildings left standing. That he uses the word invasion is interesting in itself.

The greater appeal, though, will be for fans of the character or the genre, and those who remember the story’s radio broadcast, all of whom will I imagine be delighted that these recordings exist at all. Those with only a passing interest in the material should probably listen out for an episode on Radio 4 Extra before buying.

Dick Barton and the Paris Adventure, by Edward J. Mason, starring Douglas Kelly. AudioGo, 4xCD, 4hrs.

Theaker’s Fab Five #2: Radiohead, M83, New Order, Broken Social Scene

2011-12-07T18:00:00.000Z

I bet you’re excited, aren’t you? I’m going to talk about the CDs I’ve been listening to again! If this were a school it would be Excitement High! The numbers don't indicate an order of preference, but rather their slots in my five-CD stereo.

1. Radiohead - TKOL RMX 1234567 - CD1

I never quite noticed that I was becoming a fan of Radiohead, but I’ve bought three albums in a row now, and listened to them all an awful lot. This remix album continues the odd funkiness of the previous two, and has barely left the CD player since I got it. A good remix album can be perfect for listening to while working, since the words are usually broken up enough to stop you paying too much attention. I still have a soft spot for The Cure’s Mixed Up, and I used to love, inexplicably, The Beloved’s Blissed Out. My favourite remix album of all is probably Mogwai’s Kicking a Dead Pig. It was a track off there, R U Still In 2 It? (DJ Q Remix) which led me to them in the first place, after it was featured in a demo for Actua Ice Hockey 2. Apparently the full game featured two of the band as unlockable characters.

2. M83 - Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming - CD1

Still a bit on the fence about this one. I love Midnight City, in a Magnetic Fields disco kind of way, but not convinced by a lot of the rest just yet. Reunion sounds like Simple Minds or U2 or something equally abominable, but I almost like it. Since seeing the video for Midnight City (see below), which features a bunch of superpowered kids escaping from a facility, I’ve been looking out for clues that John Byrne’s Next Men was an influence on this album: at the beginning of their story the Next Men are dreaming…

3. New Order - Movement - Collector’s Edition CD2

The Radiohead remix album – specifically Nathan Fake’s remix of Morning Mr Magpie and the Mark Pritchard remixes of Bloom – has sent me back to early New Order in a big way. In the space of a couple of weeks I’ve bought Singles, the collector’s edition of Movement, Taras Schevchenko and Control on DVD, and even a Movement t-shirt. (Plus New Order’s last album, Waiting for the Siren’s Call, and Bad Lieutenant’s Never Cry Another Tear, which to a brief listen sounded a lot like The Cure at their cuddliest.) This CD has some of my very favourite New Order tracks: In a Lonely Place, Procession, Cries and Whispers, Hurt and Mesh. Wish they’d revisited that style a bit more in later years.

4. Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record

A bit quieter and easier to take in than the eponymous album, which sounded like ten bands in a blender – but I miss the little rapping bits. I like a bit of rapping in a song. Some may think this heresy, but I thought Dizzee Rascal’s bits in the Feed the World remake were the best thing about it. This album has a nice cosy sound. But Texico Bitches uses the second word of its title way too much for me to be able to have this album on in the house very often. This may well find itself tucked away with the work of potty-mouths like the Wu-Tang Clan before I get a chance to develop any real affection for it.

5. New Order - Movement

One of my favourite albums since my school days. If I had any musical talent, I’d be making albums that sound pretty much exactly like this.

And on the iPlayer I’ve been enjoying Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, the Now Show, Richard Herring’s Objective, and Kermode and Mayo’s film programme.

I’m so lucky to work at home... Here's that M83 video.

Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead, read by Peter Davison – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-12-05T18:00:00.000Z

In the fifth Doctor’s first full adventure, he’s accompanied by Tegan and Nyssa; Adric is in the clutches of the rejuvenated Master. The Doctor’s fourth regeneration has not gone at all well, and he needs to rest. The recuperative properties of the zero room lost to a brush with the big bang, the Tardis heads for peculiar Castrovalva – which ultimately proves to be another of the Master’s traps.

Like Bidmead’s previous story, Logopolis, Castrovalva plays with lots of clever ideas: the zero room, recursion, Escher’s artwork and entropy. The original broadcast of the television version was, for a child, quite mind-blowing (and, years later, helped me get my head around first year philosophy). Freed from budgetary constrictions, the audio version achieves moments of real grandeur. Freed from acting constrictions, Adric, Tegan and Nyssa become almost three-dimensional.

There are also some very nice phrases – believing the Doctor dead in the Big Bang, the Master feels “deep intestinal satisfactions” – and lots of nice continuity touches. It’s perhaps a little humourless, some of the light touches that Davison brought to his on-screen performance not coming through on CD – he sometimes sounds as if he has a cold – but these things don’t spoil it. Castrovalva has its share of pompous and silly moments, but remains a surprisingly stimulating adventure.

Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by Christopher H. Bidmead, read by Peter Davison. BBC Audio, 4xCD, 4 hours. This review originally appeared in BFS Journal #4.

A few thoughts about the William Morrow letter

2011-12-03T10:38:00.001Z

I started to write a blog post about the William Morrow letter (the problem with which, in short, is that it says “thank you for reviewing books for us” rather than “thank you for reviewing our books”), but I think these two articles from Larry at The OF Blog sum it up pretty well: I Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Farm No More: William Morrow and Blogger Reviewers and Follow-up on yesterday's rant.

It’s easy to see why a publisher might want to ask people to request print copies rather than sending them out willy-nilly, because they can be expensive, and William Morrow aren't the first publishers to cut back. Angry Robot are extremely generous with eARCs, but for print ARCs bloggers must guarantee a review. PS Publishing have dropped print ARCs altogether.

Some publishers are clearly being a bit profligate with their ARCs. There are some blogs out there getting 100+ books a month, and reviewing half a dozen at most. If Amazon ever offer publishers a way to distribute DRMed kindle review copies, print ARCs will be dead and buried so far as most bloggers are concerned. Publishers will just have a handful printed for the really important venues that refuse to accept anything else.

For us, as with most publications that publish reviews, an expression of interest in seeing a book isn't a guarantee that we'll review it, and while publishers are within their rights to request such guarantees (not that any ever have), we're within our rights to refuse them. The agreement between publisher and reviewer/blogger should amount to this: send them if you like, I'll review them if I want to.

Where bloggers specifically request books, you'd expect them to make those books a priority, but still, there's no guarantee. If the blogger or reviewer never reviews anything, of course, you'd expect a publisher to stop sending them books. I try to operate an informal rota, hitting each publisher more or less in proportion to how many books they send us.

All of which is why we've always preferred to receive electronic review copies. We can say, sure, send us everything, without having to worry that our open policy is having an effect on anyone's bottom line. If I spend a month reading books that I've bought – as I've just done – that might be disappointing for the people hoping for a review, but on the whole I haven't cost them any money.

We've settled into a very nice arrangement with Black Coat Press, who supply print copies: I pick a couple of books from their catalogue, and when I've reviewed them they ask if I'd like another two. There's no need for them to think, "Am I wasting money on this guy?" and no need for me to think, "Are they getting annoyed because I can't keep up?"

Similarly, I love that Netgalley.com lets me select the books I actually want to read, rather than feeling obligated to work through the MOR that tends to arrive in print ARC. I have some reservations about the way Netgalley lets publicists pick and choose who they approve to receive their books – it would be worrying to hear about critical reviewers being shut out – but that applies to print ARCs too. And to their credit Netgalley seem to be trying to make it a more mathematical process, encouraging publishers to auto-approve reviewers who have written a certain number of reviews.

But in the end, if our requests don’t get approved, we’ll review something else. Any one of Angry Robot, PS Publishing or Chômu Press could keep us in books to review all year round. There are enough publishers out there – and enough books on our shelves already! – that we don’t need to worry about any given publisher pulling its books. Unlike the readers of a big genre magazine, our readers don’t expect us to cover the big new releases.

Well, what do you know: I wrote a blog post after all…

Warlord of Mars, Vol. 1, by Arvid Nelson, Stephen Sadowksi and Lui Antonio – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-12-02T18:00:00.000Z

It’s a story most of you will already know. John Carter, Confederate soldier and immortal, falls comatose in a cave and wakes on Mars, called Barsoom by its inhabitants. He falls in love with Dejah Thoris, princess of Helium, fights four-armed green men, two-armed red men, great white apes and anything else that gets in his way. Once that’s all sorted out, the two of them settle down to raise a nice egg.

This volume collects issues 1 to 9 of the ongoing series, adapting the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books, A Princess of Mars. Though my memories of that book are distant and foggy - it must have been twenty-five years ago that I read it - my impression is that this is a faithful adaptation. Despite the pin-up covers, it’s a surprisingly solid read, and I couldn’t help getting caught up in the story all over again.

It’s easy to overwrite an adaptation. Boom’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – which crammed in every single word of the novel – showed how unreadable the results can sometimes be. Arvid Nelson’s script here is unfussy and effective, and gets out of the way whenever it can; there are many wordless pages. Admirably, it doesn’t ride a thoat over the fact that Carter isn’t a modern hero.

For example, like Conan of Cimmeria and Anthony (“Buck”) Rogers, he doesn’t place much value on the lives of his enemies. He leaves a city full of people to be pillaged by forty thousand tharks that were under his command; he doesn’t relish that, but accepts it as the cost of doing business. Also, his moral certainties are never seriously challenged, nor is his right to impose those standards on the “savages” of Barsoom.

That sometimes seems a little silly: tharks live for up to a thousand years, but none of them have ever discovered that being nice to their thoats makes them easier to handle? And one might observe that his Southern gentleman’s honour is actually somewhat wobbly; he despises a Thark female for her betrayals, but murders every last member of the Zodangan court despite accepting a position in their army.

I enjoyed artist Stephen Sadowski’s run on JSA, and his work here is of a similar standard. The action is nearly always very clear, and it’s rarely difficult to tell characters apart, even the tharks. Though you might wonder what an artist like P. Craig Russell or John Ridgway would have done with the material, this is a belt and braces adaptation, and Sadowski does the job that’s asked of him. Colourist Adriano Lucas resists the temptation to use seven shades of red for Mars, but Carter’s skin is a peculiar shade of purple in some night scenes.

Ironically the book’s only real problems are also its biggest attractions: the Heliumite Barsooms of princess Dejah Thoris. Indisputably attractive on the covers, they embarrass in the book, and take the reader out of the story to ruminate on how impractically huge they are, and how resistant they are to the admittedly lessened effects of Martian gravity. And could anyone be so comfortable in a metal minikini that they would wear one, all the time, by choice?

(We came perilously close to naming our first daughter Dejah. We decided against it because (i) we thought she’d get sick of people saying “Have we met before?” and (ii) it seems to be pronounced Dee-Jah, which doesn’t sound so good. Looking at some of the images in this book, I think perhaps she dodged an embarrassing radium shell.)

The book closes with forty pages of notes, sketches and alternate covers, many of which are very impressive. A thumbs down to J. Scott Campbell’s sex-kitten Dejahs (though they were probably good for sales), but thumbs up to Lucio Parillo and Patrick Berkenkotter’s fierce and tough-looking John Carters.

It’s a workmanlike comic, but an entertaining one, and a good way to bring the legend of John Carter to people who might imagine the original novel to be a bit dry. It’s not high art, but then neither was the novel. Sex and violence are front and centre, and they never go out of fashion: this is pulp with high production values. If the forthcoming film plays to its medium half as effectively I’m going to be a very happy sorak.

Warlord of Mars, Vol. 1, by Arvid Nelson, Stephen Sadowksi and Lui Antonio. Dynamite Entertainment, tpb, 264pp.

Writing Raw: Amazon clamp down on paid-for reviews

2011-12-01T08:03:00.000Z

I was immensely cheered today to read in Writing Raw that Amazon are clamping down on paid-for book reviews provided by author promotion organisations. Ironically, the article was penned by someone who runs one such website, Shirley A. Roe, of Allbooks Review.

Writing Raw is an online magazine that grew out of Raw Edge, a nice Arts Council-funded literary magazine that was handed out for free at libraries here in the Midlands. (I always picked one up, and our own Michael Thomas reviewed books for them.) The current issue is here, but apologies to future readers: from the look of it, old content on the site is scrubbed when a new issue is added, so I can't permalink to the issue, and I can't directly link to the articles I'm talking about.

Shirley Roe's article, "David vs. Goliath or Allbooks Review Int. vs. Amazon.com", can be found about two-thirds down the left-hand column on this page. It begins:

"Allbooks Review started in 2000 and has reviewed thousands of books, encouraging and supporting new and established authors for more than eleven years"

According to the Publishers' Area on the Allbooks website, the cost of a review is currently $45. Quite a bit of money for an author, although if you wanted to pay someone by the hour to read and review a book of any length it wouldn't come close to minimum wage. The FAQs reassure authors that "98% of our reviews are positive". Their Goodreads account is still up, and all books get either four or five stars, including, naturally, five stars for Shirley Roe's books.

Amazon have removed all of those reviews from their website, because:

"We found your reviews to be in violation of our guidelines and have removed them. Because of this violation, we've removed your reviewing privileges from your account."

Looking at Amazon's review guidelines, I would guess that this is the part of the guidelines that the company is said to be violating:

"Reviews written for any form of compensation other than a free copy of the product. This includes reviews that are a part of a paid publicity package"

Seems perfectly clear and sensible to me. Free books sent out to reviewers are fine, but reviews for which you have been paid are not. Another relevant part (and it's something that I will have to be careful to do in future) is that:

"If you received a free product in exchange for your review, please clearly and conspicuously disclose that that you received the product free of charge."

At the conclusion of the article, Shirley speaks of becoming the "Michael Moore of the book industry". Erm, no. The Michael Moore in this situation would be whoever noticed the thousands of paid-for book reviews that were potentially misleading consumers and got Amazon to do something about them. Ideally by way of a comical prank.

So, in short, good for Amazon.

To open the issue out a bit more generally, indie and self-published authors and their friends should really understand that in many regards a range of reviews is better than nothing but five-star reviews. A range of reviews looks honest. Think of your favourite book of all time, and look at it on Amazon: I bet it's got a handful of one and two star reviews (often from complete idiots, or relating to particularly bad editions, but you get my point).

By all means encourage your friends and family to read your books, and to review them on Amazon. But encourage them also to be honest and to disclose their relationship with the author. Do all you can to discourage them from harassing less enthusiastic reviewers. Someone doing this kind of thing is not doing you any favours. (That commenter is also responsible for the silliest, unfairest review I've ever read.) Even if they didn't like your book, those are your actual readers, and if your friends and family post harassing comments, mark their reviews as unhelpful, and so on, that's going to put them off ever trying and reviewing your work again.

If you want the wider world to treat you like a proper, professional writer, ask your friends and family to treat you like one as well.

The other article that caught my eye in this issue of Writing Raw was a guide to "How Book Awards Can Boost Your Marketing Campaign" by Mary Greenwood. (It's the first article in the left-hand column here.) She's not talking about serious awards, but rather about paying to enter your books in things like the ForeWord Book of the Year, which I think are called awards mills (though apologies if I have the terminology wrong). Note that like Allbooks Review, ForeWord provides a paid-for review service.

Though the content of the article is not untrue or misleading, I would suggest that a magazine like Writing Raw shouldn't really be encouraging its readers to pay "$50.00 to $150.00" to enter such awards. You may well be able to tag it onto your bio and make a few people think your book is a worthy award-winner, and it might even help sales, but – and this is a big but – these awards are there to exploit writers, to take your money. Even if you might get something out of it, should you encourage and participate in such exploitation? To readers who don't know what it is, a ForeWord Book of the Year award has no more weight than an award you made up yourself; to people who do know what it is, it is arguably worse than no award at all.

If you want my advice, instead of paying $45 on an Allbooks review or $150 on the ForeWord awards, set up a Goodreads giveaway. For that money you could send ten or twenty copies of your book out to real-life, independent, interested readers, all of whom have friends, online and offline, who trust their opinions and reviews.

TQF: interviews and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

2011-11-30T18:00:00.000Z

A round-up of TQF-related bits and bobs you may have been lucky enough to miss...

In this interview from 2009 on the blog of Gareth D. Jones I talk a bit – or rather, at extraordinary length! – about TQF, what kind of fiction we're looking for, and why I don't think we'll go semi-pro in the near future.

In December 2010 I was interviewed by Justin Bostian, who included it in this market report for students at Columbia College Chicago. (Link is to a pdf.)

In September 2011 I was slightly less loquacious answering a few questions from Duotrope.

We got a nice write-up in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 3rd edition – "its real purpose is the publication of absurdist fiction which uses all of the images, tropes and concepts of science fiction and mutates them into indescribable forms" – as did one of the contributors to our most recent issue, Rhys Hughes.

I spent hours as a youngster reading the first and second editions of the Encyclopedia in the university library, so you can imagine how thrilled I was that we got a mention…

A Chômu Press happening: Thursday night in London

2011-11-30T13:15:00.001Z

The ever-interesting Chômu Press have organised a unique book launch for Jeremy Reed’s novel Here Comes the Nice, with two bands playing: The Ginger Light, fronted by the author, and Lord Magpie and the Prince of Cats.

Admission is five pounds, which will be refunded upon purchase of a copy of the book (as long as stocks last).

So that's at 8.00pm till 11.00pm on Thursday, November 31, at Jamboree, 566 Cable Street, London, E1W 3HB.

Sounds to me like an event well worth supporting. Really: if I went to something like that I'd feel like I were in a film. But then that's how I feel whenever I'm in London!

More information about the book here.

I’d also like to draw readers’ attention to Peter Tennant’s lengthy and fascinating interview with Quentin S. Crisp, one of the prime movers behind the press, over on the Black Static blog: Chomu Press in Focus. I love that they have a secret aesthetic, and that somehow Quentin manages to seem both idealistic and practical.

One last point. Perhaps some of you think I’m too fusty to use a word like “happening” and get away with it? Well, I’ll have you know that as I type this I’m wearing a necklace of huge pink beads. Thank you, daughters! I’m with it!

Doctor Who: The Wreck of the Titan, by Barnaby Edwards – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-11-28T18:00:00.000Z

Every so often an item refuses to be reviewed, fights me at every turn, or like Lucius Shepherd’s Viator Plus is simply beyond the limits of my barely nascent critical faculties. I’ve struggled to review this sixth Doctor adventure. At first I used MP3 Merger to turn it into one long audio file and put it on the Kindle to listen to, but the way it begins with a preview of the next story, the long stretch of incidental music at the end of episode two (during which I invariably fell asleep), and a big chunk of episode three going missing during the merge process all conspired with a story of timeslips and shifting locations to leave me as confused as Jamie and the Doctor are in this story. Trying to listen to it on the iPod or iPad didn’t go any better – I kept losing my place. The PC then? No, Windows Media Player got muddled up by the metadata.

Newer, less intransigent stories came in for review, and I retreated from this one, defeated by a combination of circumstance, technology and sleepiness. Now, having built up my strength reviewing the Companion Chronicles, I decided it was time to make another assault upon the Titan. I’ve got into the habit of burning the digital Who releases to CDs, which might seem a surprisingly retrograde step for someone so keen on ebooks and other forms of digital delivery, but if a CD is one of the five in my stereo I’ll usually listen to it once a day at least while working. This one I must have listened to nine or ten times, and I still can’t be sure I’ve quite got it, so I beg your indulgence for any silly mistakes.

The sixth Doctor and the older Jamie we met in City of Spires land on a grand ship, which they expect to be the Queen Mary, for whose maiden voyage the Doctor has tickets. But things aren’t right, and Jamie is the first to spot it: they are on the Titanic. Doors leading below decks don’t open, the band seems out of sorts, and the first officer is not the man the Doctor remembers. And then it gets really strange, with the story introducing people who are either pretending to be or really think they are Captain Nemo (played perfectly by DS9’s Alexander Siddig) and Professor Aronnax. This mysterious, adventuresome story forms the second part of a trilogy, continuing themes from the City of Spires, and ending on a remarkable cliffhanger that is surely resolved in the next story, Legend of the Cybermen. I can’t guess how a cyberman story might relate to this one, so there must be further surprises to come.

Though I found this story quite hard to get to grips with, that’s a function of how I listen to these adventures (usually while working or on my way to sleep). The script is keen, Colin Baker and Frazer Hines as the Doctor and Jamie clearly enjoying the quality of their dialogue. Howard Carter’s incidental music is very good, creating quite the grand sweep in the listener’s mind. The Doctor is completely wrong once or twice in this story, which he would presumably find a novel experience. It’s good for him, and good for the story: for once he isn’t in complete control of the situation and that encourages the listener to take it more seriously. It’s a good story for Jamie, too. He may not remember the Doctor, but his good sense is unimpaired, and he shows himself ready to think his way around a problem – or a conversation – until he finds a way in.

I enjoyed City of Spires, but this one just about tops it. The only disappointment is a sneaking suspicion that the next story will bring this excellent reunion to an end. I hope not, but shall find out soon.

Doctor Who: The Wreck of the Titan, by Barnaby Edwards. Big Finish, 2xCD. This review (leaving off the first two paragraphs) originally appeared in BFS Journal #4.

British Fantasy Awards: why I'd reluctantly suggest that BFS members vote against the proposed changes

2011-11-27T16:13:00.001Z

The BFS has announced its proposals for the British Fantasy Awards, and, to be frank, I think they’re a bit of a mess. The previous procedure had a leak or two, but the new proposals chop up the boat and build a rickety raft that I reckon will sink the first time it hits a storm. Even the new awards administrator says she has a lot of questions about how they are supposed to work, and no one involved in proposing them has come forward to explain.

It's a procedure that's been put together in a rush – albeit with good intentions – and it shows. Basic issues are unaddressed, such as how the administrator should decide between ties. When you have a hundred or so people recommending a hundred different books for four slots, you’re going to get a lot of ties. I can't imagine that there’s a fair way to decide between ten books that all got three votes, and putting them all onto the shortlist would be ridiculous (and isn’t countenanced by the new rules). Rolling a D10 is great when it comes to dodging a goblin's sword thrust, but it's not how the BFA shortlist should be decided!

I’m not sure why they didn’t just keep the old system but have a jury read the shortlist. That was what we thought we were voting for, more or less. For example, there had been no suggestion until this procedure was announced that voting on the longlist was going to be abolished. Or that members would be limited to making three recommendations. At the 2010 AGM I tried introducing a rule that limited members to five recommendations: the response was so negative I withdrew the proposal without even putting it to the vote!

I’m really disappointed by what that all means: there’s going to be very little member participation in the awards. We won’t get to vote, and only a handful of us, if any, will be involved in the juries, which are unclearly stated to "comprise individuals directly or indirectly related to the writing, publishing and bookselling genre fields". Although everyone who reads a book is at least indirectly related to the publishing fields, the intention seems to be to limit the jurors to industry types. Ordinary BFS members are going to pay for the awards, but will have practically no say in the results. (Except in so far as their recommendations will contribute to the shortlist, and that contribution may be discounted at the discretion of the juries – see below.)

One big but unannounced (and possibly inadvertent) change is in the detail of the wording: what was a constitution now becomes just guidelines. This is a potential nightmare: under these proposals the BFS committee will lose the ability to vote for changes to the procedure, but since the rules will now be just guidelines, the administrator can make up new rules on the fly as they need them, as long as they don’t actually add them to the formal rules. So we’ll end up with the awards being run on a series of unwritten and informal – and thus inconsistent and unaccountable – rules. I’ve seen that happen in the past, and it wasn't pretty.

The problem is, I think, that the people who have put together the new procedure haven’t (as far as I know) run a cycle of the awards between them. So they’ve decided what the rules should be, based on what they don’t want to happen (i.e. they don’t want Sam Stone to win again), but don’t seem to have thought ahead and imagined how the awards will play out based on these rules.

Let’s do that.

For example, we know that Sam Stone won best novel having got at least 24 votes this year. Let’s imagine that those 24 people split their 72 short story recommendations for 2012 over four of her short stories from her 2011 release, Zombies in New York. All four stories would be practically guaranteed a place on the shortlist.

(In fact, going on recommendations levels in previous years, I reckon six, five or even four recommendations will usually be more than enough to get a spot on the shortlist under the new rules - in the best novel category in 2010, only one title got as many as six recommendations, and that was when members could make unlimited recommendations per category, not just three. I reckon that under the new rules a canny publicist could buy a book straight onto the shortlist for under £300.)

So we have a shortlist for best short story that is entirely made up of Sam Stone’s short stories. Now what does the awards admin do? Well, nothing, the rules don’t allow her to. Although since the rules are now just guidelines, she could go off-track... but that way lies madness!

So the shortlist goes to the jury, who have no idea who recommended a piece or why. By the rules proposed they have to read the stories to decide whether they should be kicked off the shortlist. So they request them from the publisher, who supplies five copies of Zombies of New York. The jury reads them, and then has to decide whether to throw them off the shortlist.

If they don’t kick them off, the shortlist is announced as four stories by the same author from the same book, and the BFS is right back where it started, mired in controversy and accusations of nepotism.

If they do want to blackball them, they’re going to have to play detective. They’ll have to trawl Facebook and Twitter to see if there’s any evidence of the suspected canvassing, which is just a ludicrous thing to expect of literary jurors. If they find any, they can then kick the stories off the shortlist. If they can’t, then presumably the stories stay on the shortlist.

(Note that the option to remove books from the shortlist for canvassing only applies to bad books. If you have what the jury considers a good book, canvassing is not against the rules, and no one will go looking for it. Nothing unfair about that, is there?)

If the shortlist is then announced without any of Sam’s short stories, the publisher is going to know that she has been kicked off the list, and there is going to be a scandal. BFS members are going to know that their votes have been discounted. The publisher will be annoyed about all the money he spent on supplying those books. And the BFS is going to have to publicly defend its decision that the short stories were so bad that they only got onto the shortlist by “canvassing”. It’s not catastrophizing to say that the BFS, its award administrator and the jurors could very, very quickly (by which I mean next April) find themselves on the wrong end of a defamation suit.

So that’s why I’m against that bit. Another problem is that although 50% of people surveyed voted against splitting the best novel category into fantasy and horror awards, it’s been proposed anyway. The proposers think it’s an important step to put fantasy back at the heart of the awards, and I can see why they think that. But this has been proposed before, and the proposed new rules don’t address any of the problems that have previously been raised with it. They have just left all the problems for the next awards admin to sort out. Lucky her!

My preference would have been for the “Conan” amendment I suggested, reserving one spot on each fiction shortlist for sword-swinging fantasy. Easy and practical to implement, saves the cost of an extra awards trophy, and sidesteps all the problems a split award will introduce. Another obvious and fairly easy option would have been to have a separate award for sword-swinging fantasy. Keep the best novel, but add an award for that particular sub-genre. (The David Gemmell Legend Award for Fantasy had its roots in a proposed BFS award of this type.)

It’s also frustrating that in naming the award for Fantasy after Robert Holdstock – who was of course a wonderful writer who fully deserves to have awards, streets and bridges named after him – they’ve (i) failed to identify it as an award intended to highlight the kind of fantasy that is so neglected in the BFS awards, and (ii) named yet another award after a man. If this proposal goes through we’ll be up to four awards named after men (some of them fairly obscure), and none named after women. The BFS has an ongoing problem with gender representation in its awards: this would have been an ideal opportunity to do something about that, rather than make it worse.

Members will take part in an online vote on these proposals from from mid-day on 1 December 2011 to mid-day on 8 December 2011. Ideally, one would hope that the proposers will take the criticism of the proposals on board and try to fix them before we have to vote, or at least separate out the controversial bits. If they don't, would voting against these proposals leave the BFS in a fix, as has been suggested? No, because the existing awards constitution, which is a pretty robust document, allows the committee to introduce changes by a formal vote. The new committee will be able to sift through the wreckage of these proposals and implement the bits that were a good idea (having a jury read the shortlist) and ditch the rest (pretty much everything else, as far as I can see).

The key question for BFS members to consider is this: would things have been better had these rules been in place for this year’s awards?

If you didn’t like David Howe asking his girlfriend, her BFF and their other friends to hand out the awards at the ceremony, how would you have felt if they had been appointed to a jury that decided eight of the awards? And how would you have felt about them having the ability to secretly kick your books off the shortlist? I doubt David would actually have done that, of course, and had those people been on a jury I’m sure they would have fulfilled their duties admirably and conscientiously, but that's the power the awards administrator and the jury will now have. It's easy to trust a hypothetical juror. Think of people you don't trust (for some of you that'll be me!): would you want them to have that power?

I wanted a change to the procedure as much as anyone – I was one of the first to say online that this year's results were a sign we should consider introducing a jury system – but I can't in good conscience vote for proposals that include secret blackballing of nominees, give a commercial sponsor the power to pick a jury, make it easier than ever to game the shortlist, and reduce the rules to the status of guidelines. Unless these things get fixed, I'm afraid I think that members should vote no. The proposals, as they stand at the time of writing, will in my opinion make the awards worse, not better.

But if you vote yes, I’ll forgive you. I just want to point out the problems before it all gets set in stone. We can always get rid of the bits that don't work at the next AGM.

Holy Terror, by Frank Miller – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-11-25T18:00:00.000Z

The names have been changed to protect the innocent intellectual properties, but it’s basically Batman and Catwoman snogging away when a sexy exchange student suicide bomber blows up the club on which they're snogging. They get to their feet, swing around the block, and take the fight to the oldest mosque in Empire City, beneath which they find a secret underground Al-Qaeda base.

I’ve loved or at least enjoyed everything I've read that Frank Miller’s been involved in: Daredevil, Ronin, The Dark Knight Returns, Martha Washington, Sin City, 300; I even enjoyed his film The Spirit – so not liking this should have been an uphill struggle. It really wasn’t. The story is thin, the artwork feels like a cut and paste of Miller’s earlier work, and, to be blunt, it’s completely bonkers.

If, as Miller has said, this is propaganda, what is it propaganda against? It’s not as if many people in the West need persuading that terrorists are thoroughly bad people. Batman punching Bin Laden would have been as reasonable as Rory Williams telling Hitler to shut up and locking him in the cupboard. But this isn’t propaganda against Al-Qaeda: it’s propaganda against Muslims.

What this comic seems to posit is that every Muslim out there shares an implacable hatred of the West, that anyone not fighting them is letting them win. Of course there are insane, murderous Muslims, but there are insane, murderous Christians, Hindus and Jews as well. There are nutters of every denomination. And sane people too.

This book seems so paranoid that it’s hard not to read it as satire. If the last page had shown George W. Bush face-down in a mountain of cocaine, it would have made perfect sense. Unfortunately, time overtook this review and Miller’s comments about Occupy Wall Street make such a sympathetic reading impossible. He really seems to mean it.

What to make, for example, a panel that shows Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter (I think it is) grinning under the banner “Our Moment Now”, as the Statue of Liberty is blown up? They’re in a line-up that includes Gaddafi, Ahmedinajad, Kim Jong Il and a shocked Hilary Clinton, obviously realising the error of her peacenik ways.

If you’re going to fight a war with comics, best make them good ones. If Miller has a point to make – and in The Dark Knight Returns, for example, I think he did have an at least arguable point about the Batman’s responsibility for the Joker’s murders – it’s lost among the sheer hysterical silliness. It’s like reading a comic written by a Daily Mail columnist.

Holy Terror, by Frank Miller. Legendary Comics, hb, 120pp.

Doctor Who: The Whispering Forest - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-11-21T18:00:00.000Z

Following the events of Cobwebs, the fifth Doctor asks the Tardis to listen out for trouble. She takes them to Chodor, a planet on which the listener has already encountered human colonists. Besieged by Takers who snatch them from their beds and the whispering ghosts that flock in their wake, they rub their skin raw to keep themselves clean and cut their hair short. The humans have lost their leader, and the Doctor and friends, with their dangerously long hair and baby soft skin (“Er, thanks...” says Tegan), become pawns in a power struggle, between Sesha, progressive daughter of lost Anulf, and Mertil, his righteously murderous widow.

Whether Mertil was a true believer or a cynical manipulator of the belief of others I wasn’t sure; each interpretation would make her actions and tone of voice at certain points a bit out of character. Also, I had a problem I often do with stories where the status quo is so badly out of balance, and yet the situation has persisted for a very long time. As Tegan says, "Things change around the Doctor", but they tend to change without him too, and it’s hard to believe none of the humans have figured anything out for themselves. People brought up in a religion inevitably ask themselves at some point whether it’s all made up; hard to believe people forced to scrub their skin raw wouldn’t ever question its utility.

So it’s a story that brings up some big questions, and as usual the Doctor helps everyone find the answers they need. As in the previous story, there’s a big secret to be discovered, but the resolution of this one is not quite as satisfying, and the story as a whole is rather gruelling. One answer is given away a bit too early: what’s up with Tegan? Be sure to skip the trailer for the following story, inconveniently placed before the first episode of this one. Then again, I missed the trailer, and so the answer to that question hit me with full, nightmarish force. You might want to avoid that experience..! Overall, a decent but not outstanding adventure - with an unforgettable ending.

Doctor Who: The Whispering Forest, by Stephen Cole, starring Peter Davison. Big Finish, 2xCD.

Melancholia – reviewed by Jacob Edwards

2011-11-18T18:00:00.000Z

Bats in the belfry, beans in the bell jar.

As the rogue planet Melancholia performs a crazy, slingshotting trapeze across the galaxy, privileged sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) live out their final days in dismal, otherworldly isolation and country estate gloom, a state of existence that is induced only in part by the prospect of planetary dancing partners Melancholia and Earth spinning and twirling their way to doomsday.

Melancholia commences with eight minutes of self-spoiler, the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde flowing forth and bringing with it a collage of slow-motion images: stately lines of dual-shadowed hedges; a bride, page boy and bridesmaid stepping forward beneath the light of twin moons; a woman fleeing with child in arms across the nineteenth green of a deserted golf course; bats dropping from the sky; falling leaves, falling horses; the bride floating serenely in water, standing unaffected, striding through sticky undergrowth like Mr Knox through Mr Fox’s new blue goo; and, most notably, ectoplasmic wisps of electricity dissipating off into space, upon which galactic stage there unfolds an impending, then actual, planetary collision. By “outing” his movie’s cataclysmic ending in this way, writer/director Lars von Trier ensures that it remains just a backdrop to the story. Planets will clash, the world will end, yet – freed from any worrying uncertainty as to how events may pan out – fretful viewers are left to focus unencumbered on what the film really has to say.

Cue the Emperor’s special new 2D glasses.

Plot-wise, Melancholia is split into two parts – the bizarre, hoity-toity wedding reception of Justine and Michael (Alexander Skarsgård), and the post-wedding, pre-apocalyptic calm wherein Justine comes to stay with her sister Claire and brother-in-law John (Kiefer Sutherland). The imagery is striking throughout, the music portentous, and with the protagonists’ fates already determined, the planets are in perfect alignment for insightful character studies and explorations as to what makes the main players tick.

Which is where von Trier’s cinematic cleverness turns problematic.

Melancholia presents a plethora of odd characters, from sisters Justine and Claire themselves (supernaturally disengaged and obsessive-compulsive, respectively) to their bipolar-disorderly and estranged parents (Charlotte Rampling and John Hurt) to Justine’s supercilious boss (Stellan Skarsgård) and fleeting, interloperly co-worker (Brady Corbet) to new brothers-in-law Michael and John, both of whom display a quirkiness that, though palpable in its own right, barely registers against the film’s high background levels of outlandish and unnatural behaviour. The acting in all cases may be unimpeachable, but in no instance is an explanation given for any of these extremes of personality. Dunst and Co. seem to be portraying strange for the sake of strange, and as Melancholia falls with art-housed inevitability across its own backdrop, many cinema-goers will find such deliberate sketchiness – a conscious surrealism, almost – to be painfully insufficient.

Having already disavowed the scientific rigour of his fiction¹ – but leaving incredulous viewers with plenty of downtime in which to wrap towels around their heads and wrap their heads around the so-called planetary dance of death – von Trier pleads the Fifth Amendment vis-à-vis character exposition, wilfully negating all the character in what purports to be a character study. Consequently, what remains to the viewer is little more than what Justine constructs for her young nephew; that is, a “magic cave” tee-peed together from whittled sticks; the fashionable illusion – or delusion – of a privately beholden intellectual mansion or exclusive golf course par excellence. In short, it is The Emperor’s New Clothes – another Danish creation – all over again, only with Hans Christian Andersen dying in pre-production and his place having been taken by Lars von Trier, lost progeny of the Brothers Grimm.

For those viewers whose bent it is to suffer through wistfully hollow cinematography, let it not be said that Melancholia offers nothing of value. Alluded to in plain sight within the movie’s title is a striking (if harrowing) mood piece: a study in depression and of the debilitating – or, in times of great stress, liberating – effect this can have on people. Depression, of course, is a serious subject, and is perhaps felt especially close at heart by light-starved denizens of the Nordic countries; yet, as much as Melancholia might capture the stark emptiness or colourless stupor of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), the realisation of this condition on-screen, even at its most haunting and compelling, cannot disguise or excuse the film’s wanton faithlessness in respect to creating representative, believable characters. If mood disorder is the opera of the day – lugubrious melancholia, Wagner riding shotgun – then von Trier, in scripting so artificial a clique of players, seems to imply that it affects only those who are in some way peculiar or mentally unstable to begin with. He excludes out of hand all the everyday people who are afflicted, and by focusing instead on strangely flawed, “interesting” protagonists – an admission, surely, that mood alone cannot sustain a movie – he cheapens the film’s underlying premise. If Melancholia is intended to present itself as a lingering, evocative landscape of mental disorder, then it does so only covered in pointless and fanciful anomalies – as if Easter Island were dotted not only with hundreds of Moai but also with five or six randomly assembled, thirty-foot-high Mr Potato Heads.

The sad truth of Melancholia is that it fails to engage. Whole scenes could be shunted around – many a forlorn and popcorn-bereft viewer will have contemplated this, surely? – all dialogue could be omitted save Kiefer Sutherland’s, and it would hardly make any difference. The most damning reaction that can follow a movie is the one where nobody leaves the cinema when the end titles roll, not because they are so enamoured that they wish to hang on to every last tendril of the experience, but rather because stultification has set in and every pair of eyes is locked to the credits, wild and staring like those of a gambler on a losing streak, searching feverishly for an unnoticed cameo or funny crew name or anything that might justify having frittered away the preceding two hours.

Melancholia, for those who might have missed it, gives thanks to Penélope Cruz (who made no appearance) and employed Dr Dirk Poppendieck as legal advisor.

Melancholia, directed by Lars von Trier. Zentropa, 136 mins.

1. Per Juul Carlsen, “The Only Redeeming Factor is the World Ending”, FILM 72 (May 2011), pp. 5–8. [http://www.dfi.dk/Service/English/News-and-publications/FILM-Magazine/FILM-72.aspx]

Paranormal Activity 3 – reviewed by Douglas J. Ogurek

2011-11-14T18:00:00.000Z

With each instalment in a series spawned by a groundbreaking horror film, the risk for failure increases. Many things can go wrong: the once effective scare tactics grow tired; acting talent diminishes; humour scenes fizzle. In a worst case scenario, the film flounders as a hastily assembled disaster that pales in comparison to its namesake. Paranormal Activity 3, like its predecessor, manages to avoid this fate.

This prequel reveals the haunted childhood of sisters Katie (PA 1 protagonist) and Kristi (PA 2 protagonist). In 1988, Dennis, the girls’ somewhat bumbling yet loving stepfather, discovers on a home video something odd enough to impel him to pursue it further (and therefore resume the raw footage technique that fuels the PA dynasty).

Though Dennis, a wedding videographer by profession, uses a roving camera to capture some of his home footage, his stationary cameras create the biggest impact. The camera in the couple’s bedroom shows a side view of the bed, a slightly opened door with views to the hallway, and, in a nod to the eighties, a view of itself in a mirrored closet. Another camera films the girls’ room, which, at night, glows with an eerie purple-white luminescence cast by their aquarium. What that camera doesn’t reveal is the waist-high storage space just behind it. This creates a particularly creepy effect when younger sister Kristi converses with an off-camera presence she calls “Toby”.

But the camera that gets the viewer’s heart pumping the fastest is the one that Dennis, seeking a wider vista of his lower floor, mounts on a rotating fan. This view moves between the foyer, a brick-enclosed fireplace, and the kitchen. The effect is one of severe tension: as the camera pans back and forth, the anticipation builds. What will it reveal?

PA 3 delivers a fun theatregoing experience. At several points, when the tension escalates, the directors treat the viewer to a laugh. For instance, Dennis’s videographer sidekick Randy shines as a gawky counterpoint to the gravity of the situation and the rigidly defined sets. The shaggy haired, rail-thin young man’s reactions to Dennis’s footage are legendary. At one point, Randy gives in to Katie’s whim to play “Bloody Mary” using the bathroom mirror. His response to what transpires admirably combines horror and humour. After another conflict-heavy scene, the camera shows a close-up of Teddy Ruxpin, the iconic eighties teddy bear.

Though it by no means equals PA 1’s ability to implant in the viewer a tension that lingers well beyond the experience of the film – perhaps no horror film does – PA 3 does pass the litmus test for a true horror film: it creates a physical reaction.

The PA trilogy has achieved its success not through eccentric characters, complicated plots, or vibrant settings. Each of these facets is developed only to the point it supports the cameras, and frightens the moviegoer. The strength of the PA series is keeping the viewer focused on what’s around the corner; what is not shown is just as important, if not more important, than what is. Thus, these films have the unique and surprisingly effective strategy of entrancing viewers by showing them an empty room in which nothing is happening.

In hindsight, one may unveil several flaws within PA 3: the motivation of the supernatural entities, the use of a mysterious symbol, straying a bit too far from the PA “less is more” mantra, and connection issues with the previous films. But these shortcomings should not impact one’s experience of the film. It’s a movie. So let it be a movie. And let it scare you.

Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. Paramount, 84 mins.

Sword Man on a one-star Goodreads rampage!

2011-11-10T17:22:00.000Z

Returning to the blog for a minute – and no, my novel isn't going well at all, thanks for asking! – to note that Goodreads has got itself an amusing new anonymous member, going by the moniker of Sword Man, who has been handing out one star reviews like he or she bought a big box of them at a fire sale.

See if you can spot a connection between the people whose books are getting slammed:

The Taken, Sarah Pinborough
Torchwood: Into the Silence, Sarah Pinborough
A Matter of Blood, Sarah Pinborough ("Really badly written")
Zombie Apocalypse, Stephen Jones (ed.)
Mammoth Book of Zombies, Stephen Jones (ed.)
Mammoth Book of Vampires, Stephen Jones (ed.)
Shadows Over Innsmouth, Stephen Jones (ed.)
The Art of Coraline, Stephen Jones
Department Nineteen, Will Hill
The Deluge, Mark Morris ("Weak")
The Silent Land, Graham Joyce ("Dull Characters and an unoriginal setting")
TQF36, Stephen Theaker [and John Greenwood] (eds.)
TQF Year One, Stephen Theaker (ed.)
TQF Year Two, Stephen Theaker [and John Greenwood] (eds.)
TQF Year Three, Stephen Theaker [and John Greenwood] (eds.)
TQF Year Four, Stephen Theaker [and John Greenwood] (eds.)

Most of the reviews were posted on October 16, with a few more added today after I started following his/her reviews. S/he has also voted two of Sarah Pinborough's books onto the Worst Books of All Time list.

But you'll be glad to hear Sword Man is not all negative!

Sword Man has, just in case you haven't made the connection to the BFS awards brouhaha yet, given five star reviews to Sam Stone ("She calls hersle the New Queen of Vampire Ficion on her website and I'm inclined to agree"), Raven Dane ("Well written and a golly good read") and Rules of Duel from Telos.

The highlight for me is the one-star review of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction: Year Two, which states:

"This man really has no clue at all when it comes to reviews and reviewing. It seems to me that Theaker enjoys writing self-indulgent twaddle - nasty gibes - and spends most of his time writing negative, not informative reviews. I haven't seen one he's written that I would say I agreed with."

The funny thing is that there are no reviews in that book. None whatsoever!

Sword Man strikes – and fails!

The irony is that this is exactly the kind of behaviour that seems to have got the BFS and its awards into hot water into the first place. So while Sword Man may feel like s/he is hitting back, s/he is really just confirming that people were right to suggest that there might be a bit of a problem.

The Gift of Joy, by Ian Whates – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-11-07T06:00:00.008Z

Though Ian Whates, chair of the BSFA and organiser of Northampton’s Newcon convention, has gone on to (presumably) greater things with novels for Solaris and Angry Robot, this self-published collection of short stories is an inauspicious beginning, one that never strains to reach beyond the closest language to hand, and rarely reaches beyond the most obvious ideas. The best of the stories are perhaps “Darkchild”, in which psychics are caught in an alien trap found in the asteroid belt – the ending was surprising – and “The Gift of Joy”, in which a former deep cover spy uses his talents for mimicry to work as a gigolo. “Hanging on Her Every Word”, horror rather than sf, has an old plot but a painful conclusion.

The book bears a self-inflicted wound: author’s notes at the end of every story. At best such notes are like a magician showing the secrets of his tricks; how much worse when the tricks weren’t all that magical. For example, we learn with very little interest that the plot of “Knowing How to Look” was sketched out in a pub. That “The Final Hour” – which features seconds ticking away between paragraphs, an interesting effect spoilt by dialogue that would take much more than a second to say – was rejected by the anthology for which it was written. And that “Fear of Fog” lifted the collection’s most interesting idea – a human world living peacefully in alien space when Earth is at war with those aliens – from Stephen Baxter.

“Ghosts in the Machine” provides a line that could well be applied to the whole book: “What remained of the adventure was pretty straightforward.” The Gift of Joy is not awful; that would at least be entertaining. It’s just unremarkable, generic and straightforward, the stories feeling more like competent assignments than bursts of inspiration. The part of the book I’m most likely to remember, unfortunately, is when the protagonist of “Flesh and Metal”, prior to his fight with a shape-shifting android assassin, passes blithely by the scene of a gang-rape, describing the girl as a “stupid cow” for wearing the wrong clothes. “She’d certainly have something to tell her friends in the morning.”

The Gift of Joy, by Ian Whates, NewCon Press, hb, 254pp. Amazon UK. Amazon US. This review was originally written for BFS Journal #3.

Abandoning my post!

2011-11-01T16:30:00.001Z

Upon reflection, to give myself the best possible chance of completing a novel this month (as mentioned here), I'm going to abandon the blog, along with, as previously mentioned, Facebook, the forums and Twitter, until I'm done with the novel – or until November is done with me!

We're open to short story submissions for the magazine as usual. Guidelines here. I've preloaded a few reviews, so the blog won't go completely dead. See you on the other side!

NaNoWriMo 2011

2011-10-31T20:31:00.002Z

I've got a brilliant idea for a short story. And we could publish half a dozen ebooks this month with a little work! I'm dying to get stuck into my next batch of reviews. I'd just love to spend an entire day reading a single novel. Wouldn't it be nice to take the kids out for a walk in the park? Or take Mrs Theaker out to a fancy restaurant? Look at all those unread books on the shelf! All those unwatched DVDs! All those unplayed games! I must play Fallout 3 right now! RIGHT NOW!

And why are all these things barking at my attention? Because tomorrow is the beginning of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, and I'm going to have another go at it! Which of course makes everything else in my life seem twice as shiny as it did yesterday.

John and I used to be very involved with NaNoWriMo, organising local events here in Birmingham, and one thing we did was put together a Novel Writing Handout that we could give out to people attending them. (That link'll take you back to our old website. I loved that bright yellow, even if one correspondent complained that it made his eyes bleed...)

I eventually went off the event a bit over two things - the increasing demands on MLs to act as fundraisers, and the increasing acceptance of people on the forums who weren't actually taking part in the event. The brilliant thing about NaNoWriMo was that it helped loads of people to finish novels, but that got a bit lost as more and more people showed up who weren't even going to try. It started to feel like trying to run a race while other people were unicycling down the track in the wrong direction.

On the plus side, the NaNoWriMo forums were where I first heard of the Dvorak layout. Hard to believe there are any novelists out there still using Qwerty! And of the six and two bits novels I've written, all but two were written as part of the event, and it's been ten years now since I wrote a novel outside of NaNoWriMo.

Partly that's because I'm not really serious about novel-writing, and do it for a bit of a lark, but it's also because this event really does give you the excuse to clear all your other hobbies, interests, friends and family aside for a month while you get some serious writing done.

One thing that's often said about the event is that it's just an exercise in writing rubbish, but that's not entirely true. For one thing, a month is really quite a generous amount of time to write a 50,000 word novel. Last time I won, I think I only wrote on ten or twelve days in the month. If you write daily (and can touch type), it's just an hour and a half out of your day. A decent writer could write a more than decent short novel in a month.

The point isn't to write rubbish, it's to not worry about whether you're writing rubbish. Let's face it, for most us, worrying about whether we're writing a rubbish novel is a complete waste of time: our novels will be rubbish whether we worry about it or not!

I've sworn off forums, Facebook and Twitter until either the novel or the event is finished, and if you see me posting on any of them before then I'll pay you a fiver by PayPal. (Automatic cross-posting from the blog doesn't count, I'm afraid.) Participants can add me as a writing buddy here. Although, in my experience, writing enemies are much better: you're always happy when friends do well, but seeing enemies do well? That's a real spur!

So things might be a bit quieter here on the blog for the next month. Or it might be busier than ever as I look for ways to avoid the daily grind of the 1666! I have an idea for the novel I'm quite pleased with, but I'm not going to talk about it here or anywhere else, because it's a kind of crappy, crass, commercial idea and I don't really want my name connected to it if it gets published…

And no, it isn't anything saucy, if that's what you were thinking... Shame on you!

Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-10-31T06:00:00.002Z

Originally released in 2009 to good but not stellar reviews, Borderlands has been the very definition of a slow-burning hit, going on to sell over three million copies. This two-disc edition, containing the original game plus four add-on packs, seems set to keep sales simmering. It opens with the player in a run-down bus, being dropped off on the East Coast of Pandora, a rusting, abandoned junkyard world of lunatics, treasure hunters and savage alien wildlife. In theory you’re there to find the Vault, a fabled source of treasure, power and sex appeal, but you quickly get sidelined, in true RPG style, into a series of smaller quests, such as retrieving T.K. Baha’s stolen food from the dog-like Skags, collecting incriminating recordings made by insane scientist Tannis and her unfaithful Echo device, and fighting your way through hordes of bandits to remove obscene graffiti about Mad Moxxi.

But though the structure of quest givers, waypoints, experience points and loot is that of an RPG, Borderlands plays as a first-person shooter. You don’t get to chat with NPCs, and if you see a human moving around it’s time to draw your guns. And what a lot of guns there are! Randomly generated in endless, fascinating variety, there’s always a new type to try: caustic weapons that melt your enemies, rocket launchers that bury them in fire, sniper rifles that can turn a distant bandit’s leg into Skag food. And each of the four playable characters has their own special, upgradable attacks – a vicious bird, pounding fists, a machine gun turret and phase walking – meaning that there’s always a novelty to the fighting, especially when teaming up with others in multiplayer, whether online or in the superbly fun split screen mode. A small selection of vehicles handles well but is sensibly excluded from many quest areas.

The main mission done – or even sooner for impatient players – the add-on packs call. Being returned to the start-point of each add-on when reloading is frustrating, and encourages longer – sometimes too long – play sessions. But Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot is the only disappointment, a horde mode in which players gain no experience for kills and enemies drop few weapons. Gaining the least of its achievements involves surviving 60 tedious waves of enemies (and an awful lot of hiding while health recharges). A good shotgun is recommended for The Zombie Island of Doctor Ned, in which a tannoy warns survivors not to engage in “oral contact” with the undead. After hearing his increasingly forlorn missives to high command one can’t help sympathising with the title character of The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, despite his determination to kill you. And as well as your little robot friends, Claptrap’s Robot Revolution sets you against Brainiac versions of all enemies to date, who whimper sadly when shot.

Borderlands isn’t a game with a fantastic plot, and it can be a bit repetitive – enemies and environments are endlessly recycled – but it’s funny and well-balanced. Enemies level up and respawn, meaning there’s always a reason to have another go. This game of the year edition is a substantial package at an excellent price, and is highly recommended.

Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition, Gearbox Software, reviewed on Xbox 360 (also available in other formats). This review originally appeared in BFS Journal #4.

Quartet & Triptych on Kindle – for free!

2011-10-30T07:43:00.002Z

Readers with Kindles (or Kindle apps) may be interested to know that Matthew Hughes' very fine novella Quartet & Triptych is in the current issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Take them up on a 14-day trial subscription and you can read one of my very favourite novellas of the last couple of years for free.

My review is here ("I loved every word of it, and if this is typical of Hughes' work I expect I'll read every novel he ever writes"), and you can get the trial subscription here.

The original hardback from PS Publishing (pictured) has sold out, but a signed edition is still available.

I was also really pleased to see that his Henghis Hapthorn novels have just been published to Kindle too, because I've been looking forward to reading them: The Spiral Labyrinth, Hespira and Majestrum. At eight quid they're a little pricey for ebooks, but the previews are extensive, so you can have a good read of them before deciding whether to buy.

The British Fantasy Awards kerfuffle: a view from a former awards admin

2011-10-29T14:43:00.001+01:00

My post from September 2010 on Withdrawing TQF from the British Fantasy Awards now seems unfortunately prophetic, given the doorway the BFS and its awards walked into at FantasyCon a year later. Among other things I said (emphasis added in bold):

"The BFS is now taking recommendations for next year's awards, and I've decided to withdraw Theaker's Quarterly Fiction from the Best Magazine/Periodical award for as long as I'm the awards administrator, or as long as I'm the editor of the magazine – whichever tenure comes to an end first. …

That's partly because I'd have been profoundly embarrassed to win the award over a shortlist that included for example Black Static and Interzone, magazines to whom, for all our good qualities, we can't hold a candle. But also because a win for us in that category would have cast not just my integrity into doubt, but the integrity of the entire awards."

Hard to believe now that some people thought I was over-cautious. (In the event I had resigned from the post of British Fantasy Awards admin by the time this year's awards got seriously underway. I did offer to stay on until the AGM, but luckily (for me, at least) I was given permission to leave straight away.)

Of course it wasn't just the results of this year's awards that caused all the fuss. It was also the people chosen to present the awards (the chair's partner, her close friend, and other friends and colleagues of theirs), the toe-curling scripting of the entire ceremony, the scolding of the MC when she went off-script, etc. The lack of any accounts at the AGM caused a lot of concern. There had also been rumblings before the event: there seems to have been some ongoing quarrelling between the BFS chair and the FantasyCon organisers, and about a week before the event the BFS cancelled all its rolling PayPal memberships, because they wanted to be able to increase fees each year more easily. Not the best PR move in the world.

But the results played a pretty big part. I've said before that I think this year's results would have been the same had I still been running them, which in a way is more depressing than the idea that they were down to one dodgy geezer. It's hard to find anyone who has actually said they believe the results were falsified – although since that suggestion was made in the newspapers, the BFS should have done a full audit, as allowed for by the awards constitution, before declaring that they absolutely, definitely hadn't been in a statement that seems unreliable, to put it kindly, in other respects.

BFS committee members have said that the results were counted electronically, as if that automatically removes any opportunity for wrongdoing (or error). It doesn't, of course. For example, in 2010 TQF got onto the shortlist as a result of a non-member vote being disqualified by the secretary at the last minute (I don't think the other magazine lost its place on the shortlist – the lost vote created a tie which took us both on). It's not hard to imagine a situation where the disqualified vote would have knocked my magazine out of the nominees. Who would have known if I decided to leave that vote in?

The "electronic counting" in question is just using Gdocs or Excel to count up the results, or at least it was in previous years: that most definitely does not exclude the possibility of wrongdoing, even if we don't think it happened. The awards admin could get up to any old nonsense if they were so inclined - excluding valid nominees, creating fake voters, excluding valid voters, etc.

And there's always room for error. Last year a couple of items were initially left off the longlist after I lost them in a mail merge. The previous year there was a novella on the shortlist for best short story. This year, we know that there was at least one very significant mistake at the shortlisting stage: the awards admin forgot to count up the write-in votes.

In the end, though, we don't need to look for wrongdoing or error to explain the results. After all, if you look at the 2010 nominees, when I was running the awards, a lot of the same people show up in similar categories.

What happened this year, I would imagine, is simply that a smallish group of BFS members and FantasyCon attendees wanted to see particular people win, for reasons of business, friendship or their own contributions to the nominated works. There's nothing unusual or evil about voting for someone because they are your chum - but it becomes a problem for the organisation when that has the appearance of having been the deciding factor in many of the awards given out. That's why there has been such a demand for reform this year.

As I said on the BFS forums, I hope that the reaction to this year's results will have a positive effect even if the rules don't change a great deal, because it will encourage people to think twice before helping to push someone they are friendly with into a potentially awkward and embarrassing position. The results of these awards come under intense scrutiny every year, and if the winning material struggles to stand up to that scrutiny, questions are always going to be asked about how it came to win.

Anyway, the BFS is now consulting BFS members and attendees of FantasyCon 2010 and 2011 on the direction the awards should take. The tricky thing, I think, is that there are competing urges, both coming out of the negative reaction to the results of this year's awards.

On one hand, there's a desire to see the best nominee win. I hadn't read all of the items in every category this year, but as far as the short story category goes, it's practically impossible to believe that anyone who had read all five of the short stories could have voted for the eventual winner in good conscience (four of them were available for members to read online). If a panel read the shortlisted works, that wouldn't necessarily lead to the best in the category winning (remember M People winning the Mercury Music Prize?), but we would at least know that the decision was an informed one. If the result was odd, we would know exactly who to blame for it! However, the idea that one item out of a bunch of usually very good nominees can be categorically described as the best has its own problems. During the couple of years I ran the BFS short story competition, it wasn't at all unusual to see stories given 5/5 and 1/5 by different readers. One would praise the elegant style, the other decry the purple prose.

On the other hand, and perhaps more significantly in the context of the BFS, is the desire to see winners of whom BFS members and FantasyCon attendees approve. Part of that, unfortunately, is that a lot of BFS people like to see awards go to people who attend FantasyCon, something you can see in the ridiculous decision this year to abolish the film and television awards (consistently among the most popular with voters since their introduction). It's clear, watching the YouTube videos of this year's awards, that there was a great deal of unhappiness at the event about the results, in particular best novel, which was greeted very quietly indeed, rather than the rapturous applause of the last couple of years. A preferential voting system, or a 3/2/1 points system (as used at the longlist stage), would at least ensure that each winner had the backing of many members. Even if those members hadn't actually read any of the nominees, they'd be happier with the result. But is that something we should settle for?

The BFS's survey can be found here. Tough choices to make!

Perhaps it would help a little if we stopped being quite so polite about the nominees - if we did actually make the effort to discuss their relative merits. It's just a little awkward when so many of the writers, publishers and editors are on the BFS forums too.

Mr Johnny Mains got quite a bit of criticism a couple of years ago for saying exactly what he thought of one winner, but as I said back then: we've all moaned when a film we think is rubbish wins the Oscars. That's an essential part of the fun of awards! Does it make a difference when we know the people involved? Should it? There is a definite double standard, where people are happy to slag off the work of Stephen King on the BFS forums, assuming he won't read any of it, barely even acknowledging that he's a human being, but call it bullying if anything at all critical is said about the work of people they know. If more people had been a bit less polite about the nominees this year, the principals involved might have had their feelings hurt a bit, but they would have been better prepared for the reaction to the wins, and better prepared to manage the situation.

Certainly, although I loved running the British Fantasy Awards, and it broke my heart to see what happened to them this year, I'm very glad to be free of the need to appear neutral, and glad to have the freedom to say what I actually think of the nominees I've read. If anything, I wish I'd been a bit less subtle, and come out and said outright how crap I thought some of them were. Next year, when the shortlist is announced, let's have a thread on the BFS forums, saying "What do we think of the nominees?" It will be easy for the nominees to stay out of it if they want to protect their feelings.

The Sixth Gun, Book 1: Cold Dead Fingers, by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-10-28T06:00:00.000+01:00

Collecting the first six issues of an ongoing series, this book takes us to the wild west, a generation or so after the American Civil War, during which vicious Confederate warlord General Oliander Bedford Hume acquired six unholy weapons. He kept one for himself, gave four to his best/worst men and one to his wife. Defeated, killed, chained and buried in a monastery, he didn't give up for all that, and all that can stop him from re-unleashing hell is a girl who only picked up her stepfather's gun to fight the men who shot him. It's the Sixth Gun, the one that gives its owner a glimpse of the future, and the general needs it back.

I've never read a book from Oni Press that wasn't well put together - they've been responsible for well-drawn, well-written titles like Whiteout, Queen & Country, Soulwind and Geisha - and this doesn't spoil the run. The wild west isn't my favourite setting for stories, but there are enough nifty ideas here, like a gun that can summon the souls of those it kills to fight as sandpeople, to keep it interesting. General Hume and his widow are as nasty as villains should be, while Becky is a brave and sensible heroine who would be doing the right thing even if she had a choice. Drake Sinclair, her guide through all the death, has the looks of Clark Gable and the ethics of Han Solo. They make a good pair, and it'll be interesting to see where they go next.

The Sixth Gun, Book 1: Cold Dead Fingers, by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt. Oni Press, tpb, 176pp.

The Black Abyss is sealed…

2011-10-27T06:00:00.000+01:00

Colin Leslie, who reviews books over at The Black Abyss, has announced he’s calling it a day, at least for now. He’s got through a heck of lot of books in the last three years, but he’s basically just got sick of reading books for the purpose of writing reviews. He writes:

“I want to be able to choose what I read and when. I don’t want the pressure of having to read in a certain sequence to ensure reviews are posted in anything like the timescale publishers might want. I don’t want to persist with an average book in order to review it when a thousand great books lie in wait. In short I want to go back to reading for pleasure.”

I enjoyed his blog, so I wish he felt differently. But I know that feeling! And as with Terry Martin and Murky Depths yesterday, when someone doing something quite similar to what you do decides to pack it in, you can't help having a think about why you're still doing it.

When I first started to get the occasional print copy from the bigger publishers, I made a big effort to have reviews ready for more or less the on-sale date, and for a while that was kind of fun. The problem with that approach was that I always had one or more deadlines hanging over me, and that’s kind of a grim way to spend your leisure time.

One thing that's made it easier for me to move away from that focus on deadlines is the increasing number of eARCs that are becoming available to reviewers, and the emergence of www.netgalley.com as a source of reviewing material. When you can pick out the stuff to review that you're actually enthusiastic about, and leave the rest without any guilt, the whole process becomes much more enjoyable.

As I commented on Colin’s blog, I’ve just taken a break from reviewing for the BFS – their reviews are going online-only, and while that’s a valid life choice type of thing, if I'm going to write anything for them, it might as well be the kind of thing they think is worth sending out to members. This week I've had the almost forgotten experience of watching stuff like Fringe without making notes on the laptop, and it's been very nice. It also means I just have one hobby-time deadline to think about: December 25, when the next issue of TQF is due out.

So I understand where Colin’s coming from. But would I make the same decision? I dunno! Part of his original purpose was “to show people that the horror books [he] read were among the best writing anywhere regardless of genre”, which got me thinking about my own.

My purpose, I guess, is firstly to write enough reviews to create a review section for the magazine; my goal, as ever, is to keep the magazine going!

Secondly, to encourage publishers to keep supplying me with free stuff; I read a lot and, to be frank, it saves me a lot of money!

Thirdly, and I think crucially, it’s to tell people what I think about stuff. If I read a book, I want to develop a theory and share my opinion with someone, and Mrs Theaker has heard enough of my opinions to last her a lifetime. Writing reviews lets me get that out of my system!

If those things change, I suppose I might well stop writing reviews. I can see myself writing fewer reviews in certain areas; I find films quite hard to write about, for some reason; and reviewing small press books feels sometimes like walking through a minefield – you never know which one is going to go off. But that desire to pontificate is a powerful one. It's a key, if often unfortunate part of my personality, and writing reviews provides a reasonably healthy outlet for it. I imagine that’ll keep me writing reviews of some kind even when the other reasons have gone…

Murky Depths sinks beneath the waves…

2011-10-26T21:37:00.000+01:00

Sad to read that the last issue of Murky Depths has been published, as announced here by the editor, Terry Martin. Previous entries on the blog had tended to paint a pretty bleak and sometimes angry picture, so it doesn’t come as much of a shock, but it’s still a shame.

It was an interesting attempt to merge comics and fiction, one of its most attractive features being double page art spreads to introduce stories. We had quite a few contributors in common with them, including David Tallerman, Alison Littlewood, Zachary Jernigan and Jeff Crook.

I get asked sometimes whether we might try to turn TQF into a semi-pro market at some point, but the reason we probably won't is fairly well summed up by Terry Martin's reason for closing down:

"Optimism has, eventually, to be checked by common sense and a business model that, at the very least, gives a return that covers the full costs of production and distribution."

That's the tricky bit – the more you spend, the bigger the hill you have to climb to get it back. We use POD for our print issues, which keeps our costs very low, but limits our sales. A middle ground is hard to find. I think the route to growth for us is likely to be in our line of ebooks rather than the magazine.

The final issue of Murky Depths is on sale here, and back issues are still available.

Major Bummer Super Slacktacular! by John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-10-24T06:00:00.013+01:00

Lou Martin (he doesn’t actually call himself Major Bummer, sadly) got his super-strength, invulnerability and super-smarts thanks to a mailing mix-up, and he doesn’t really appreciate the effect they’re having on his life, especially since they came bundled with a magnetic attraction for similarly blessed/cursed individuals. That brings him friends he doesn’t want, like a time-travelling pensioner, the wall-climbing Gecko, a theatrical sonic screamer and a flying girl with a crush on him and a handy viewing panel in her costume’s midriff. Worse, it brings him enemies like an English guy with an inflated skull and an intelligent [spoiler!], Nazi dinosaur Tyrannosaurus Reich, and a bunch of gang-members too dumb to do anything interesting with their powers. The aliens who handed out the powers have parked their invisible spaceship in a nearby junkyard, and provide a plot prod every issue or two.

This book collects all fifteen issues of the original DC series. In tone it resembles contemporary Hitman’s wackier episodes; these guys would get on well with Section 8. Unlike Hitman it doesn’t take place in the DC universe, which can’t have helped sales, but it does give the book a self-sufficiency unusual in DC’s main line. There are light soap opera elements, and the characters trot from one story to the next without any of it seeming all that important. It’s all very amiable, but when a series is this short-lived, it’s difficult to read it (or watch it, with TV programmes) without that niggle at the back of your mind: what was the problem with this? Sometimes it’s easy to figure out: Extreme Justice! Sometimes it’s utterly baffling: Firefly! Major Bummer is amusing, rather than laugh-out loud funny, but its bigger problem was perhaps that its least interesting character was its protagonist. That’s kind of the idea of the book - a slacker superhero - but it leaves a gap at its centre where the person you want to read about should be.

Still, I had a lot of fun reading it. Admittedly, put a fifteen-issue run of almost any comic in a book and I’ll enjoy it, but this one had some funny ideas (the size-changing, expressionless cat was always good value) and it explores them well, particularly towards the end as Lou starts to time travel and dimension hop. The artwork is much easier on the eye than the slightly cluttered cover to issue one made me expect, back when it was first published. By the end of the book, I kind of wish I’d collected it back then, because with time this could have developed into something special, and maybe an extra reader or two would have given it that time.

Major Bummer Super Slacktacular! John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke. Dark Horse, tpb, 384pp.

Reality 36, by Guy Haley - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-10-21T06:00:00.000+01:00

In 2067 the Greenlandic ice sheet tipped, leading to calamitous environmental and social change; 2104 saw the creation of class five artificial intelligences, most of whom promptly went insane; by 2129, the year of this novel’s events, the population of Earth has fallen to five billion. In this novel Otto Klein, a retired cyborg soldier with a dodgy shoulder, and Richards, his friend and colleague, a class five AI with an odd sense of humour, investigate the many deaths of Zhang Qifang, a leading sentient rights campaigner. The investigation leads to Reality 36, one of a series of virtual worlds from which humans were expelled back in 2114, when their AI inhabitants were granted full rights. Harvesting orcs for XP is a lot less fun when it sees you tried in The Hague for genocide! A parallel thread sees Qifang’s assistant Veronique Valdaire following her own leads on Qifang’s deaths, illegally entering Reality 36 while plugged into an amateur life-support system. There she meets its defenders, Sir Jagadith Veyadeep and his talking steed Tarquinius. Someone is using Reality 36 to set themselves up as a god, and the knight is on a quest to bring them down.

The future of this novel feels a bit old-fashioned in some ways (especially when Richards is swimming around in cyberspace), but it's not as if ecological disaster and artificial intelligence seem less likely to affect our world than they did at the height of cyberpunk. Why not exploit that setting when, as this book shows, there are still good stories to be told in it? Guy Haley - for whom I must admit a certain affection, having subscribed to SFX for many years after it began - has created a world rich with potential stories, and characters with powerful reasons to get involved in anything that’s happening, and enough skills to survive, just about, the worst the world can throw at them. The action sequences are exciting, the mysteries intriguing, the characters people whose conversations I enjoy, people I’d like to read more about. Which is fortunate, since I won’t know how the story ends unless I do. Approaching the last 10% of the book, one realises with a sinking feeling (as with The Damned Busters, from the same publisher) that quite a bit of the plot is unlikely to be resolved by the end, and so it proves. Would Star Wars have been a better film had it finished halfway through the assault on the Death Star? Probably not, but it would have been pretty good wherever it ended, and I’d say the same about Reality 36.

Reality 36, by Guy Haley. Angry Robot, ebook, 5127ll.

Girl Genius, Omnibus Edition, Vol. 1, by Phil and Kaja Foglio - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-10-17T06:00:00.000+01:00

Fun bit of Final Fantasy-esque steampunk about Agatha Clay, who has been wearing a brooch that inhibited her natural spark - a kind of magic science-sense. When Moloch von Zinzer and his brother steal the brooch her powers begin to surface, at first by way of all-night engineering sessions in her long underwear, of which she wakes with no memory. After the robotic product of one such night causes havoc searching the town for her parents she attracts the attention of Baron Wulfenbach, autocratic ruler of the land, who whisks her off to his flying airship fortress. There she becomes assistant to the Baron's son Gilgamesh - or is it vice versa? - and meets other people with powers like hers, collected from all over the world to keep their families in check.

For a three-time Hugo-winner (albeit for later volumes), Girl Genius is a bit fluffy and derivative, but it’s carefully planned, well-paced and charming: I read it in a single day. There are many hints about the past, a steady drip-feed of revelations, and a promise of lots more to come. The Baron in particular proves to be a character with a fascinating history, a man both better and worse than expected, and I became quite fond of murderous pirate queen Bangladesh Dupree. The art is unusual but expressive - the female characters have gigantic thighs and tiny heads! - and the steam-driven machinery is detailed and nicely designed. Presenting the colour pages in murky greyscale means it's a book best read in a well-lit room, and I’d be inclined to get future volumes in colour. Not Hugo-worthy, perhaps, but rewarding nevertheless.

Girl Genius, Omnibus Edition, Vol. 1, by Phil and Kaja Foglio. Airship Entertainment, pb, 320pp.

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-10-14T06:00:00.000+01:00

The long awaited sequel to one of my favourite games, Earth Defence Force 2017. Once again aliens are attacking Earth with augmented insects and giant robots. Graphics are slightly improved, and there isn't quite as much slowdown, perhaps because the number of attacking insects has been reduced. A wide selection of novel weapons is once again available, while four character types allow for slightly more variety in play. Jet armour can scoot up and around the play area, while tactical armour has a handy turret; previously turrets took up one of your two weapon slots. Voice work and dialogue is again very funny: an intelligence officer asked for help on dealing with a new type of cybernetic ant suggests you shoot them with your guns, while avoiding their attacks - good advice! It's a little easier than the previous game in that allies are able to revive you; only when all three of you are dead is it game over. One gameplay flaw is that the active reload, borrowed from Gears of War, is far too finicky; too much early play is spent running in circles while botched reloads complete.

As a full-price, big-budget game you'd be disappointed with the limited gameplay, but for a budget title it’s fun. There’s one big problem: this game is ridiculously short in comparison to the previous one. Fifteen levels compared to fifty-three, and all the levels are in a single environment, the city, whereas the previous game took you to the beach, the countryside and even underground in the enemy hives. This game feels like little more than a shell for downloadable content, i.e. all the levels that presumably weren't finished in time for the game's release. That came as a huge disappointment to me, and it’s one deliberately engendered by the publishers, who have promoted it as having three campaigns. This isn't a game of three campaigns - it's a game of one short campaign divided into three chapters. When you finish the fifteenth level you are astonished to earn the achievement for beating the game, and, as if to rub your nose in how short the game has been, that achievement is called Lemon Squeezy!

It’s a good game to play online, one that’s easy to dip into, and in a game with so many weapons it’s interesting to see what combinations other players are using. But that can’t make up for the lack of a decent single player game. I played the previous game for months, this one for barely more than a week. Rent, don't buy, unless it’s going very, very cheap.

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon, Vicious Cycle Software (devs.), Xbox 360.

The British Fantasy Society

2011-10-10T19:09:00.000+01:00

The British Fantasy Society is going through a rough patch at the moment, which has prompted me to get out this piece I wrote for the FantasyCon 2010 souvenir booklet; perhaps it might encourage people to get involved with the society. The publications and people have changed, as has my own level of involvement, but my feelings about the society haven't.

Thanks for coming to FantasyCon, the annual convention of the British Fantasy Society. If you’re not a member of the Society, no worries, you’re more than welcome – like Radio 4, we judge ourselves by our reach as much as our ratings! But if this weekend you enjoy the camaraderie of FantasyCon, note that being a member of the Society means you get that happy feeling all year round – or at least in four quarterly mailings.

We’re a really ambitious little society. For our size we really try to do a little too much at times: ten or so publications a year, fourteen awards, a three-day annual conference, a short story competition that’s doubled in size two years running, and other events through the year and around the country, not to mention a website and forum. This past year we’ve been stretched quite thin, but I hope you’ll agree that this convention was worth a few hiccups in other areas.

For our promotional postcard for the World Horror Convention this year I picked out a quote from Stephen Jones, from our anniversary book, The British Fantasy Society: a Celebration. “Whenever a fledgling horror or fantasy writer comes up to me, at a convention or somewhere else,” he wrote, “and asks me how they can get their work published, I invariably advise them that their first step should be to join the British Fantasy Society.”

Joining the BFS isn’t enough on its own to make you a great writer, of course (at least it hasn’t worked for me!), or to get you published, but that isn’t what he means. What it will do is give you the opportunity to talk (or at least listen, which is perhaps the better option at first) to experienced writers, editors, publishers and artists, and learn from them. People like Jo Fletcher, Peter Crowther, Les Edwards, and our glorious President-for-Life Ramsey Campbell.

And those are the professionals: the BFS is also rich with people doing all the same things for fun in their spare time. You couldn’t spill a pint of beer at FantasyCon or a BFS Open Night without drenching someone who’s up to something creative! Writers, actors, jewellers, sculptors: the BFS is a social network – a creative network – that began to bring interesting people together thirty years before Facebook opened for business.

One other great thing about the BFS: it’s a really easy society to get involved with. I’d been a member for just a year before being offered the editorship of Dark Horizons in March 2008, and a member less than three years when I became chair (albeit temporarily), after Guy Adams stepped down to concentrate on this year’s convention. It’s a cliché that working on a committee like this is thankless, but that’s not been my experience at all: there’s the odd complaint here and there, many of them perfectly justified, but I’ve had bucketfuls of gratitude as well.

(And when the complaints you get are from people like Robert Silverberg (he was chasing up a book), bring them on! Though perhaps that’s a bad example: he could have been emailing to insult my children and I’d still have been delighted.)

And if all of that sounds far too much like hard work, just sit back and appreciate the results of our hard work: we’ll send you a bundle of varied reading materials every three months. Prism contains dozens of reviews every issue, often of unusual books and films that don’t attract the attention of other magazines. Dark Horizons and New Horizons leapfrog through the year, the former bringing poetry, fiction, articles and art across all the fantastic genres, the latter focusing on slipstream, new writers and new approaches. And once or twice a year we produce special publications to stop things getting too routine. Recent years have brought chapbooks, calendars, literary criticism, original fiction, and all sorts of unusual, collectable items.

But that’s what we do, rather than what we’re about. Ours is a society built very much on love. Stop laughing. It is. It may seem like we argue quite a lot for people in love (though as Brian Keene recently observed, we argue very politely!) but that’s because we’re all in love with slightly different things, and have very strong ideas about them. Science fantasy like Moorcock and Vance, weird fantasy like Machen or Lovecraft, heroic or high fantasy like Howard or Tolkien: this is a society that was founded to celebrate all of them. Even more, it’s here to help people discover new books and new writers in a similar vein.

In the age of the internet, is there a need for a fantasy society – can we not just congregate on websites? Well, we can, and we do, but a society feels so much grander! Once upon a time, Conan and Cthulhu appeared in the same magazine, Weird Tales. As bookshops and publishers push us apart, slotting authors and books into ever-narrower, more easily marketable categories, the BFS is needed more than ever, to bring us back together again, to celebrate the fantastic genres as a whole, and, sometimes, to celebrate those writers who don’t fit neatly into boxes.

Stephen Theaker
September 2010

www.britishfantasysociety.org
www.facebook.com/britishfantasysociety
twitter.com/britfantasysoc

Booster Gold, Vol. 2: Blue and Gold, by Geoff Johns and friends – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-10-10T06:00:00.000+01:00

I'm very fond of Blue Beetle and Booster Gold. I think the first time I heard of them was when they got beaten up in The Death of Superman trade paperback, but it wasn't long after that I read their adventures in Justice League (International). Later I read Ted Kord's original series, and more recently Booster's too, collected in Showcase Presents Booster Gold, both of which were solid but not spectacular. It was brilliant to see them teamed up again in Formerly Known as the Justice League and I Can't Believe It's Not the Justice League, but immensely disappointing to see what happened to Blue Beetle during one of the innumerable crises to beset the DC universe.

Booster Gold, now a defender of the time stream - the poacher turned gamekeeper - working for Rip Hunter was even more unhappy about it, and rescued Ted from the fatal moment. He returns to the present. The ramifications? Wonder Woman didn't get angry enough to snap Maxwell Lord's neck, the OMAC project was a success, and most superheroes are now dead. Even set against Booster and Gold's past screw-ups, that qualifies as a bad day.

It's wonderful to see Booster and the Beetle together again, even if we know it can't last. Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz write them as more or less capable heroes who use humour to cope with their dangerous lives, rather than complete jokes. I've always enjoyed the unfussiness and clarity of Dan Jurgens' art, and under modern colouring and printing it looks very fine indeed - although one wonders, given that Jurgens created Booster Gold, whether it was a little odd for him to cede the writing duties to other people. It's odd in general to think of people losing all control over their own creations, but I guess that's how it goes at the big two: it's easy to see why Erik Larsen didn't hand the Savage Dragon over to Marvel.

Returning to the story, it's not stunning, basically a What If?/Days of Future Past type thing, but I enjoyed it. Affection and nostalgia count for an awful lot in comics.

Booster Gold, Vol. 2: Blue and Gold, by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz, Dan Jurgens and Norm Rapmund. DC Comics, tpb, 160pp.

Angel Omnibus, by Christopher Golden, Christian Zanier and friends – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-10-07T06:00:00.004+01:00

Having recently left Buffy, Sunnydale and the Hellmouth to star in his own TV series – and comic, of which all but two issues are here collected – Angel now lives in Los Angeles. Interesting characters like (dark) Wesley, Fred and the Host are far off in his future; most of these stories are set in the period before they showed up. Cordelia was working at Angel Investigations from the beginning, but Irish half-demon Doyle is the one with the visions – for a while, at least – and hard-knock detective Kate Lockley turns up more often than anyone would have hoped.

There's a certain pleasure to be had from revisiting a brief period of a favourite programme, and for comics based on a show that had still to find its feet, these are okay: pedestrian, but readable. The Christian Zanier art featured in most issues was not really to my taste, but didn't get in the way of telling the story. The stories – mostly by or co-written by Christopher Golden – feature the usual round of demons and monsters, and don't add up to much, but I was more than happy to spend a few nights reading them. Not classic comics, nor classic Angel, but not too bad.

Angel Omnibus, by Christopher Golden, Christian Zanier and friends. Dark Horse, tpb, 478pp.

Memories of the Future, Vol. 1, by Wil Wheaton - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-10-03T06:00:00.000+01:00

When Star Trek: the Next Generation began, I was a schoolboy watching it at home; by the time it finished (on UK television, at least) I had been to university, met my future wife and spent a year living in France. And yet that was nothing compared to the changes in Wil Wheaton's life during that period. In this book he discusses the first half of the first season of TNG, both as a viewer, watching the episodes for the first time in a decade, and as a cast member, revealing the behind-the-scenes difficulties of the production as a whole and of him in particular.

Wil's character Wesley Crusher was notoriously unpopular - a teenager with a snotty attitude and a penchant for showing up the rest of the crew - and here we see the actor putting a bit of clear blue space between himself and the American Adric. But he's not as if he's siding with the bullies against Wesley and his younger self; he's just really disappointed that Wesley was handled so badly in the early episodes.

The irony, of course, is that Wil Wheaton is now firmly established as a geek god, thanks to his blog and appearances in The Big Bang Theory, The Guild and Eureka; his brief appearance in Star Trek: Nemesis was pretty much the only thing anyone liked about that film. An announcement that Captain Wesley Crusher was about to star in Star Trek: the Third Generation would be immensely popular, something that would have been utterly unthinkable at the time these episodes were broadcast.

The book is always enjoyable, and often very funny, even if it sometimes feels like Wheaton is trying to cram in as many references to other people's jokes as he can. If Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese is the Enterprise, this is the shuttlecraft. But I read it all within a day or two of buying it, and I was disappointed the book ended on "Datalore" with so much of the first season still to go; if volume 2 had been available on Kindle when I finished this one I'd have bought it right away.

Memories of the Future, Vol. 1, by Wil Wheaton. Monolith Press, ebook, 1999ll.

British Fantasy Awards 2011: Winners

2011-10-02T17:22:00.001+01:00

The winners of the British Fantasy Awards 2011 have just been announced. (Thanks to Maura McHugh for live tweeting them.)

BEST ANTHOLOGY: Back from the Dead: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories, Johnny Mains (ed.) (Noose & Gibbet)

BEST COLLECTION: Full Dark, No Stars, Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton)

BEST ARTIST: Vincent Chong

BEST COMIC/GRAPHIC NOVEL: At the Mountains of Madness: a Graphic Novel, Ian Culbard (Selfmadehero)

BEST MAGAZINE/PERIODICAL: Black Static, Andy Cox (ed.) (TTA Press)

BEST NON-FICTION: Altered Visions: The Art of Vincent Chong (Telos)

BEST SMALL PRESS: Telos Publishing

BEST SHORT STORY: "Fool’s Gold", Sam Stone, from The Bitten Word, ed. Ian Whates (NewCon Press)

BEST NOVELLA: Humpty’s Bones, Simon Clark (Telos)

BEST NOVEL (THE AUGUST DERLETH AWARD): Demon Dance, Sam Stone (House of Murky Depths)

BEST FILM: Inception

BEST TELEVISION: Sherlock

KARL EDWARD WAGNER SPECIAL AWARD: Terry Pratchett

SYDNEY J. BOUNDS AWARD FOR BEST NEWCOMER: Robert Jackson Bennet, for Mr Shivers (Orbit)

Wowser. Five awards for stuff published by the BFS chair and his partner… You can read the very best fantasy short story of 2010 here. And which dummies voted for Sherlock..?

Can't help thinking this may lead to renewed calls for the awards system to be revamped, although I don't know what system would be better. Perhaps a panel to read the shortlisted works?

Glad to see Black Static winning. Well deserved! But bear in mind that TQF is eligible again for 2012, so its reign may be short-lived!

Videos of the awards are now available on YouTube. Thanks to Vincent Holland-Keen for letting those of us who didn't make it to the event share the embarrassment…

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #38 – now available for free download!

2011-10-02T16:35:00.000+01:00

Wow! I love the artwork for this issue of TQF! Once again it's by Howard Watts, although fans of Rhys Hughes won't be surprised to learn that it doesn't actually reflect the contents of “The Lives and Spacetimes of Thornton Excelsior”! That's because I decided on the artwork before I had the story!

The issue features four other magnificent stories. “The Daylight Witch” is by Jim Steel, one of my very favourite contributors to Dark Horizons, each of his stories being completely unique.

Alison Littlewood, another Dark Horizons regular, is off to the major leagues now, having sold a novel to Jo Fletcher Books! “Off and On Again” is an odd one, in that it was previously used by dodgy geezer David Boyer without her permission, so she was keen to see it published somewhere respectable. She settled for us!

“Better than Llandudno, eh?” is an extract from Michael W. Thomas's forthcoming novel, Pilgrims of the White Horizon, a sequel to The Mercury Annual. We'll be publishing it!

“Old Preach’s Gods” is by Z.J. Woods, the one writer in this issue who is new to me, but I hope this won't be the last time his work appears in our pages.

On the editorial front, after the controversy of last issue we're back on frothy territory with “Taking a Break with TQF!”, where I discuss the profound effect that taking a break from posting on Facebook has had on my life. (I've read a lot more comics, basically.)

There are reviews of books from Paul Magrs, Reggie Oliver, Anne and Todd McCaffrey, Nathalie Henneberg, Glen Duncan, Vendela Vida, Wil Wheaton, Johnny Mains, Guy Haley, Ian Cameron Esslemont, and Catherynne M. Valente, plus seven comics, six audio adventures, five films and one game. Contributing reviewers this time include Jacob Edwards, Regina Edwards, Michael W. Thomas and Douglas J. Ogurek.

This 108pp issue is available in all the usual formats, all free except the print edition, which we’ve priced as cheaply as possible:

Paperback from Lulu
PDF of the paperback version (ideal for iPad – click on File and then Download Original)
Kindle (free)
Epub (ideal for Sony Reader)
TQF38 on Feedbooks

More about the merry folk who have let us sow the teeth of their literary dragons…

Alison Littlewood lives in West Yorkshire, England, where she hoards books, dreams dreams and writes fiction – mainly in the dark fantasy and horror genres. Alison has contributed to Black Static, Dark Horizons, Not One Of Us and the charity anthology Never Again. Her debut novel, A Cold Season, will be out early in 2012 from Jo Fletcher Books, an imprint of Quercus. Visit her at www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk.

Douglas J. Ogurek’s work appears in or is forthcoming in the BFS Journal, The Literary Review, Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, and Dark Things V (Pill Hill Press). Ogurek has also written over 50 articles about architectural planning and design. To this issue he contributes reviews of Cowboys & Aliens and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. He contributed “NON” to TQF33. He lives in Gurnee, Illinois with his wife and their six pets.

Howard Watts is an artist from Brighton who provides the marvellous cover to this issue. He has previously provided covers for Pantechnicon, Dark Horizons and TQF. His story “Totem” appeared in TQF36.

Jacob Edwards is currently indentured to Australia’s speculative fiction flagship Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, as Jack of all Necessities (Deckchairs and Bendy Straws). To this issue he contributes a review of Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Jim Steel grew up in the countryside where, apparently, a witch had lived at one of the neighbouring farms in the sixteenth century. To get to her house you had to cross the railway where a previous occupant had committed suicide, go past the ruined church with its crypt and gravestones, skirt around the pool where yet another occupant had drowned himself, and then go through the woods where a madman had murdered a small child. So he wasn’t really worried about the witch when he was a young boy. No; Jim was much more worried about her lover who had lived in the ruined castle next to his own house. He had been a warlock.

Michael Wyndham Thomas’s work is regularly published in the UK, the US and Europe. His latest poetry collection, Port Winston Mulberry, is published by Littlejohn and Bray; a new collection is forthcoming in 2012. His most recent novel is The Mercury Annual, published in Theaker’s Paperback Library (2009). The sequel, Pilgrims at the White Horizon, is also forthcoming. Michael also reviews for TQF, The American Journal of Haiku, Other Poetry and Under the Radar. He is poet-in-residence at the annual Robert Frost Festival in Key West, Florida. His website can be found at: www.michaelwthomas.co.uk.

Regina Edwards wandered into a bookstore, during a brief stint in London, thinking idly how serendipitous it would be if she were to run into Glen Duncan signing his latest book, I Lucifer. As it happened, he was there… up until five minutes before she arrived. When not lamenting fate’s bungled intervention, Regina writes short stories and teaches maths and physics. She lives in Brisbane with her husband and son.

Rhys Hughes has been a published writer for almost twenty years and in that time he has written six hundred stories, published twenty books and been translated into ten different languages. “The Lives and Spacetimes of Thornton Excelsior” is exactly the sort of fiction he most enjoys writing; but the market for this kind of absurdist fantasy seems to be rather limited these days. If you enjoyed it, why not consider purchasing his latest ebook, a bumper collection of one hundred stories called The Tellmenow Isitsöornot, available from Smashwords here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/88734.

Stephen Theaker is the eponymous co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, and writes many of its reviews. His reviews have also appeared in otherwise respectable publications such as Prism, Black Static and the BFS Journal. He has used the word “whom” twice in this issue but isn’t entirely confident that he used it correctly.

Z.J. Woods writes and otherwise wastes time in Virginia. His strange little digressions can be found in several ezines and at his website, http://zjwoods.com.

All thirty-seven previous previous issues of our magazine are available for free download, and in print, from here.

And they were all wearing eyepatches!

2011-10-02T08:29:00.000+01:00

What a fantastic episode of Doctor Who that was last night! And the question that mustn't be answered? Quite proud of myself for guessing it right ages ago (the evidence is on a Facebook comment thread somewhere!). My guesses are usually way off.

It's taken a little while for it to sink in that we saw the Doctor get m*****d! Imagine if that had happened in the TV movie on Fox! The writers have inched us into a place where it was what we expected, and now there it is. It happened, and we didn't flinch. Wow.

And my four-year-old daughter pointed out this morning that a certain young lady now has a stepmum.

One of the many things that knocked me out about this brilliant episode was that it can be seen as the ultimate in-joke, a tribute to the Brigadier, whose quiet death we learned about through a phone call to a nursing home, just as the Doctor wanted him to saddle up for another adventure.

Because in this episode, as in Nicholas Courtney's famous anecdote about Inferno, they were all wearing eyepatches.

Genius! And very, very sweet.

I hope that by the end of the day Steven Moffat has won a British Fantasy Award. It would be well deserved.

A few thoughts on BFS Journal #4

2011-10-01T17:52:00.000+01:00

The new issue of the BFS Journal arrived in the post this week, looking very handsome in its Clive Barker cover art. I haven’t read any of the fiction yet (it generally takes me ages to get around to reading it all), so I won't review it properly, but here are my thoughts so far...

I’ve enjoyed David Riley’s seven Prisms (although I’m very pleased that his replacement will be Lou Morgan). For one thing, he’s published an awful lot of my writing! This issue’s Prism section, his last, has a solid seven pages by me (pages 57 to 63), all written at speed over a weekend thanks to a last minute deadline change.

Reading them now, they didn’t turn out too badly, although in my Game of Thrones review a reference to “the elegant tedium of a Carnivale” has been changed to “the elegant tedium of Carnivale”. A tiny change, but one that affected the sense of what I was saying a little bit (i.e. that I find most HBO dramas elegant but dull, not just Carnivale).

As usual a handful of mistakes caught my eye in the Prism reviews - “lead” for “led”, “Tolkein”, stuff like that. One or two reviewers seem to be pulling their punches, and some reviews spend a bit too long summarising the plot, but I enjoyed reading them all.

The highlight of Prism for me was Mark Morris’s account of writing a professional novel NaNoWriMo-style - I'd love to see more of this kind of thing in Prism. The ironic thing about the article is that Mark's adaptation of the game Dead Island, though written in a month, is likely to be better than the game, which took six years or so. (From the 3/10 review in Edge it sounds like a complete duffer.) John Probert’s column on retitling of movies is also an interesting one.

There are quite a lot of reprints in the Dark Horizons section (34 pages out of 60, I think), but it’s all new to me. I enjoyed the comic by Jay Eales and mpMANN (originally from The Girly Comic), but haven’t read the rest yet. Peter Coleborn, editor of the Dark Horizons section, has also stepped down - the Christmas issue of the Journal will be his last.

New Horizons editor Andrew Hook is also leaving, and the section is being allowed to fade into history. The material spread across the four issues of the BFS Journal so far would have been #6 and #7 of the standalone magazine, I think, which Andrew had been planning as his last for some time. I’ll miss his work with the BFS; I liked the fiction he published; but I understand why he’d want to spend more time on his own writing.

It’s not hard to see why New Horizons has been discontinued in the context of the journal - it made little sense having two separate fiction sections in the same magazine. On the other hand, New Horizons was originally introduced to spread the workload, so that each journal editor had six months between issues. I suspect the BFS might find it difficult to find a reliable editor to produce a decent-sized journal every three months.

I couldn’t have done it, not without putting TQF on hold. Although I produce TQF every three months, that’s my main hobby. The thing with the BFS is that almost everyone who volunteers is already doing something creative with their hobby time (writing, a zine, a small press, a blog, making films, etc), and then they have to find time for their BFS duties on top of that.

The BFS has also sent out this week Full Fathom Forty, a 500pp collection of fiction from BFS members and friends. Like Dark Horizons, it’s mostly reprint (27 or so out of 40 stories) but all are new to me. There are some very good contributors - e.g. Conrad Williams, Nina Allan, Robert Shearman, Cate Gardner, Christopher Fowler and Alison Littlewood - so I bet the anthology as a whole will be excellent.

On missing FantasyCon 2011...

2011-10-01T08:23:00.001+01:00

I'm trying to convince myself that missing FantasyCon - going on this weekend in Brighton - is a good thing. You know, even though pretty much everyone I know in the writing world will be there. Mrs Theaker didn't want to go this time, and didn't fancy me going away for up to four days, and in a moment of "niceness" earlier in the year I said I wouldn't go. I don't know what I was thinking! So here's what I'm telling myself:

By staying at home, there's no chance of me getting drunk and acting silly. I'm still cringing about asking horror impressario Johnny Mains to high five me last year! I don't even enjoy drinking; I only drink at FantasyCon to get over my nervousness.
There's no chance of me going to the Annual General Meeting, at which there would be a danger of (a) getting into an argument (the BFS AGM can be very frisky) or (b) signing up for the time-consuming drudgery of a BFS committee post.
I can spend the weekend finishing off Theaker's 38. It's going to be a good one!
I won't catch any con crud. Or rather, since I'm already a bit poorly, I won't pass it on.
There's no chance of me being caught on camera rolling my eyes if a British Fantasy Award goes to a less than deserving winner!
I would have felt a bit out of it this year; at last year's convention I was right at the centre of things, doing admin for the event and umpteen BFS committee jobs, including chair. Maybe having a year's break is good because I can go back as a fan.
Mrs Theaker really owes me one and has to be really nice to me all weekend. Unfortunately she has the same poorliness as me, only worse, so it's not as if she's going to be heading to the bakery for doughnuts or anything. I'll be lucky to get a cup of tea out of her...
If I had been going, I would probably have had to cancel anyway, because of Mrs Theaker's poorliness, so I guess this way I've kept my hotel deposit.
I get to watch the last episode of Doctor Who with an audience of appreciative fans (i.e. Mrs Theaker and the little Theakers) rather than those guys who spend every Sunday morning moaning about it on Facebook!

That last one is actually pretty convincing!

I hope everyone at the convention is having a super time. I'm watching enviously on Twitter. The line-up is brilliant - Brian Aldiss, for crying out loud! - and it all seems to be very well organised. Really wish I was going. Next year it's going to be much closer to home, so I'll be able to nip over on Saturday morning, come back on Sunday evening. Already looking forward to it - hope to see you there!

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, by Vendela Vida – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-09-30T06:00:00.001+01:00

After the death of Clarissa's father she finds her birth certificate in his desk, and reads it for the first time. Realising her father wasn't the man she thought he was, and as a byblow finding out her fiance hasn’t been entirely honest either, she travels to northern Finland, and then other parts of Lapland, in one hundred and thirty short, fraught and careful chapters.

In reminiscence we learn about her emotionally distant mother, who disappeared without a word fourteen years before, and see a child desperate for her mother's love. Grown up, she's behaving the way her mother did: leaving her devoted fiance Pankaj without a word.

Halfway in further discoveries and memories make the novel almost unbearably sad, and though the conclusion is heartbreaking, Clarissa sees it as a kind of success – making it sadder still.

Although this novel from the editor of The Believer takes us to an ice palace of sorts, it isn’t a fantasy. Or rather, it’s not part of the fantasy genre: it’s about the fantasy of leaving everything behind, escaping oneself, all responsibilities and obligations, and beginning anew.

Vida explains in her afterword that she was “curious about the kind of person who would see their past as unconnected to their present”, and I read the novel as an attempt to imagine the psychology of someone who could make such a break successfully, if that’s the right word, although the first person narrator’s quiet pleasure in the quirks of those she meets is perhaps a little at odds with her behaviour.

It pains me to agree with the Daily Telegraph, but, as they are quoted as saying on the cover, this is indeed “beautifully written”, and though it’s a book about someone who is recently bereaved and profoundly unhappy, it’s full of gentle humour, particularly in Clarissa’s interactions with the English-speaking people of northern Europe.

This was a book I loved reading, not least because, in its portrayal of a daughter missing her parents, it reminded me of something it’s so easy to forget in the course of the daily routine: how lucky I am to have two daughters of my own – and, you know what, how lucky they are to have me…

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, by Vendela Vida. Atlantic Books, ebook, 2917ll.

Kindle Fire - but not in the UK

2011-09-28T20:12:00.001+01:00

Bit disappointed that the new Kindle Fire isn't launching in the UK yet - although I imagine Amazon's recent investment in LoveFilm (and hence getting its hands on LoveFilm's streaming deals) means it'll be out here eventually.

Although I love my iPad, it mainly gets used for reading, listening to music and the radio, idle browsing and playing the odd game. The only serious work I do on it is proofreading. I do all my writing on our Samsung Chromebook nowadays: it has a proper keyboard, for one thing, and doesn't get annoyed when I try to use Google Docs.

The Kindle Fire looks to me like it can do almost everything I still use the iPad for, but is much, much cheaper. If it was available here, I'd have pre-ordered one already for Mrs Theaker's birthday. (Last year I got her a third generation Kindle, and she's used it pretty much every day since.)

Theaker's Kindle

The US is also getting the Kindle Touch, which has no keyboard, but does have speakers, and unlike the Kindle Fire still uses e-ink, which is great: I was worried by rumours that Amazon were planning to ditch e-ink screens altogether, and that would have been nuts. The iPad screen is great for reading comics or watching movies, but I wouldn't choose to read a long novel on one, and I imagine it'll be the same for the Kindle Fire. Bit worried by the touchscreen – the Sony Reader Touch was horrid – I spent more time cleaning the blasted thing than reading it – but I can't imagine Amazon would put out something quite that hopeless.

All the UK is getting for now is the new, ultra-cheap Kindle, which lacks speakers (so no audiobooks) and lacks a keyboard. For most readers, the trade-off in weight and cost will probably be worth it. It's down to 6oz now, apparently, which is old-timey talk for... checks with Google ...170g. About the weight of a small 200pp paperback. I think it'd be a downgrade from the Kindle I've already got (which is now renamed the Kindle Keyboard) – I love being able to make annotations with the keyboard – so I won't be getting one, but I imagine it'll do very well for them, especially at £89.

How Kevin Keller inspired me to come out of the closet... as an Archie fan!

2011-09-28T19:00:00.000+01:00

I have an admission to make. I’ve been keeping a secret.

Over the last month or so, on the iPad, I've been reading a lot of Archie comics.

There, I’ve said it!

Reading an issue of Archie at bedtime is a great way to clear my head of whatever horrors populate the latest book I’ve been reading. Plus, they’re cheap, back issues are plentiful, and they look fantastic on there. My favourite character is Jughead. He’s hilarious. The way he eats. The way he talks with his eyes closed. His daft cut-up fedora. The way he alone is aware that they are comic book characters.

I was a bit embarrassed to mention my burgeoning love for Archie and his pals, given that they’re mainly for kids, and they have kind of an uncool reputation. At least that’s my impression of how they’re seen in the States - here in the UK I doubt many people have even heard of them, and when they have, it’ll usually be secondhand, via a reference in an American sitcom.

But reading a couple of issues of Veronica this week, #207 and #208 (published in June and July this year), I was thoroughly impressed by the gang’s first openly gay character, Kevin Keller, and so I wanted to step out of the comics snob closet and give Archie – and writer/artist Dan Parent – some props.

Kevin's sexuality was dealt with in a matter-of-fact way that I loved; he likes guys rather than girls, and that’s all there is to it. My wife and I take the same approach when we talk about these issues with our children. Some boys like girls, some boys like boys, that’s just the way it is. Why not just tell the kids that, rather than filling their head with nonsense? It's not like it's a big deal. Or rather, it shouldn't be.

The cherry on the cake was that that Kevin gets to say “It gets better” to a little kid who is getting bullied.

I feel like the world just got a tiny bit better. (And look at those colours!)

I’m kind of glad they took the approach of introducing a new character. If Jughead, who famously hates girls, suddenly came out of the closet, it would have made every bit of sense, but it would have brought the worst out of character conservatives.

By that I don’t mean people who are politically conservative, though there might be some overlap, but fans who don’t want characters to change. Think of the fuss about the Rawhide Kid a few years ago, or the people who go nuts at the idea of a brown-skinned actor playing the Doctor...

This way, if people want to complain about there being a gay character in the Archie gang (and I do hope he becomes a regular), they have to put their biases on display, rather than hiding them behind the uniform of a continuity cop.

So if you have an iPad, and you want to see it at its very best, treat yourself to a couple of issues of Archie, Jughead, Betty or Veronica.

I won't judge you..!

By the way, there are something like 200 comics appearing each week in the Comics by Comixology app on the iPad, and I've been reading a heck of a lot of them. I'll write full reviews for the magazine of the more substantial or important ones, but expect an irregular round-up of the others here on the blog, starting soon...

Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction, by Nigel Robinson – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-09-26T06:00:00.000+01:00

This audiobook begins with an explanation of how a history teacher and a science teacher came to be travelling through time and space with a grumpy old scientist and his fifteen-year-old granddaughter. Once listeners are up to date, we join the travellers as one by one they wake from unconsciousness, memories jumbled and lost, inside their time/space ship. Doors open and close, clocks melt, control panels give electric shocks. Before the mysteries can be solved the quartet must surmount their mutual distrust, but that won’t be easy. Ian and Barbara, the teachers, have been tricked by the Doctor before, on the planet Skaro, while young Susan explains that the Doctor too has been betrayed by friends in the past.

There have been many moments in the Doctor’s long life of which he would be less than proud: running dalek experiments on Jamie, ditching Sarah Jane Smith, quipping while a man died in an acid vat, and multiple dalek genocides. But this story set a bar for bad behaviour that wouldn’t be raised until the sixth Doctor tried to strangle Perpugilliam Brown. The Doctor here is quite the mad scientist. In the Sartrean play of argument and recrimination he behaves abominably from start to finish, curtly dismissing sensible suggestions, lying, being very rude about humans, and even drugging Ian and Barbara at one point. At the end, even an apology to Barbara turns into a bit of a lecture.

Nigel Robinson’s novelisation captures the eerie, fractious tone of the original episodes very well, and William Russell’s reading is, as with The Dalek Invasion of Earth audiobook, quite wonderful, his Doctor just as irascible as the narration describes him, his Ian, Barbara and Susan capturing their shifting moods. His introduction to CD3 is delightfully jaunty: “Disk threeee!” The music is well-judged, the soundtrack missing only a sprinkling of authentic Tardis sound effects. Overall, a sometimes gruelling but always gripping three-and-a-half hours for the listener. After all the theories and arguments, the solution when it comes is brilliantly bathetic. For Doctor Who fans this is an almost pure pleasure.

Doctor Who: The Edge of Destruction, by Nigel Robinson, read by William Russell. Audiogo, 4xCD, 3hr20. Amazon UK. Amazon US. This review originally appeared in BFS Journal #3.

Shock Labyrinth 3D, directed by Takashi Shimizu – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-09-23T06:00:00.000+01:00

Five small children enter a deserted haunted house, but only four emerge. Years later, a grown up Yuki, the one they left behind, turns up at the door of blind Rin, and the friends gather to take her to hospital. The hospital is deserted, time stands still, and they are back in the shock labyrinth – a huge ghost house – to be haunted by their guilty secrets.

Scary for them, less so for the viewer; the film achieves its most alarming moments by putting young children in danger as the timelines (apparently) cross. Kids in trouble aside, it’s mainly four young adults wandering round a haunted house without much going on. The film tries to conceal this with flashbacks and flashforwards, but the core of the film is not terribly interesting.

The 3D aspect does it no favours – the 3D version is a red-green mess, while the 2D version is full of embarrassing would-be 3D set-ups that puncture the film’s seriousness. Not a film I can recommend. Lordi’s Dark Floors, previously reviewed in these pages, is remarkably similar but much more fun. Coming from the director of The Grudge, this was a huge disappointment.

Shock Labyrinth 3D, Takashi Shimizu (dir.). Chelsea Films. Amazon UK. This review originally appeared in BFS Journal #3.

Theaker’s Fab Five #1

2011-09-21T06:00:00.019+01:00

The return of a beloved feature from our old website! I like listening to music while I work, but have tended to find PC music players too distracting (too much temptation to skip to a favourite track, or to another album, or to read their built-in music encyclopaedias...), so I rely on a five-CD changer stereo which I load up and leave to play. And every so often on our old website I used to run through the CDs that were currently at home in there.

I’d like to review more music on the blog; one reason I don’t is because it’s so hard to choose the right moment in my relationship with an album. I considered many of my favourite albums washouts after the first time I heard them: Mogwai’s Go On Die Young, Tricky’s Maxinquaye, M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts, and so on. Having a regular round-up prompts me to write a bit about music without worrying about that too much.

Since cancelling Spotify premium (it seemed silly to pay for it since I was only using it to listen to albums I already owned) I’ve been making an effort to buy a couple of new CDs each month with the money saved, so there’s more new stuff here than is normal.

CD1: Volume Two – She & Him

She & Him are Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward. She writes the songs and plays piano, he produces and plays guitar. I loved their first album, and this one’s just as good, if not a bit better. Sweet but smart. Here’s an example. I just adore her voice – if you haven’t heard either of these albums, perhaps you remember her singing Baby It’s Cold Outside with Will Ferrell in Elf? Her sitcom The New Girl is supposed to be very good; her geeky character apparently breaks into silly songs all the time. We're really looking forward to it.

CD2: Welcome Reality - Nero

Probably going to review this one for the media section of the next BFS Journal, so I won’t say too much here. One of those albums that I like a little bit more than I want to, but not as much as I thought I might. I doubt it’ll last long in the five.

CD3: You Make Me Real - Brandt Brauer Frick

I bought this after reading this Guardian article about them. It’s techno music, essentially, quite similar to an instrumental Underworld, but played on traditional musical instruments rather than computers and synths. The description reminded me of one of my old favourites, Possessed, The Balanescu Quartet's superb album of Kraftwerk covers. You Make Me Real is definitely a good album, and makes a brilliant soundtrack to the working day, but too early yet to say whether it'll be a long-term favourite. It makes you want to go on a long train journey alone so that you can listen to it while staring mournfully out of the window. Track 2 Bop is quite typical and has an excellent video.

CD4: Saturdays=Youth - M83

The newest - to me - album on here - I bought this a couple of days ago, and it’s way too early to have an opinion about it. Listening to Dead Cities for, what, the fiftieth time this year? and reading an article about M83’s forthcoming new album, I wondered why I hadn’t kept up with their releases, and got this one. Seems good so far...

CD5: Tron Legacy: Reconfigured – Daft Punk

Remixes of Daft Punk’s soundtrack by people like Moby, Photek and the Japanese Popstars. Have to admit, I bought this because I’ve lost the CD of the original soundtrack and it seemed silly to buy the same CD again. I hadn’t even ripped it to the PC! I’m sure it’ll turn up eventually (still got the case). There are a few tracks on here that I really love - M83’s take on Delta Fall, The Crystal Method’s The Grid, and Teddybears’ Adagio for Tron, for example - but after a strong start it tails off a bit. I saw Tron: Legacy for the first time this month on Sky and loved it, to the extent that I bought the Blu-ray the very next day. As a film maybe it’s flawed, but I reckon it’s the best music video of all time.

Altitude, directed by Kaare Andrews – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-09-19T06:00:00.000+01:00

In this Twilight Zonish thriller from first-time director Kaare Andrews a quintet of attractive young Canadians take a small plane up for a short hop to a campsite. Mechanical malfunctions and what's-your-malfunctions accumulate until they find themselves stuck on an upward trajectory, at each other's throats and pursued through a black storm by a tentacled monstrosity.

Much like Pontypool, this movie does a lot with very little. Dialogue-driven, but not afraid to give us a really good look at the monster before it's all over, it's a very satisfying movie. Andrews is a comic artist, and has an artist's eye for the faces of his actors, holding firm in his study of them - even when there is snot dribbling out of their noses, unfortunately! Despite that, a really nice little movie.

Altitude, Kaare Andrews (dir.). Amazon UK. Amazon US. This review originally appeared in BFS Journal #3.

SF Gateway republishing the complete Dumarest saga – and lots more besides

2011-09-18T21:16:00.001+01:00

Although my collection of books is pretty big, there are gaps, even when it comes to my very favourite authors. Not for much longer! The SF Gateway plans to have 5,000 backlist titles back on sale as ebooks by the end of 2014 (press release here), and wherever possible they will be republishing the complete backlists of authors. Complete backlists!

This isn't new news, but the significance of it is only just starting to strike me. For example, a few weeks back I discovered a bunch of John Brunner books in the Kindle store I hadn't read before (e.g. The Super Barbarians, Manshape), and pre-ordered them – incidentally, the first Brunner books I've ever bought new instead of secondhand – and today I noticed that they're also reissuing all the Dumarest books (they're listed here on Amazon UK).

Fantastic news, especially since there are lots of gaps between the dozen or so in the series I bought on eBay a couple of years ago, after hearing of the series for the first time in a Craig Herbertson article for Dark Horizons. If they're all as good as the one I've read, I think they'll do very well on Kindle. They're ideally suited to the format.

I suspect other publishers may see the SF Gateway as a huge and rather worrying landgrab, but as a reader I love them for doing it. And so must the writers. I loved collecting secondhand books, but none of the money I spent on them ever went to the authors. I seem to remember reading that when John Brunner died, all his books were out of print. That shouldn't ever happen again to an author of that calibre.

My top 100 most unread authors!

2011-09-17T12:48:00.004+01:00

Following my previous post analysing the list of books I’ve read, for some daft reason I thought it made sense to go on to look at those that I own, but haven’t read. My Goodreads list produces 1326 unread and unfinished books, not including those listed as to-read-for-review.

Those books are by 628 different authors and editors, from A. Susan Williams (editor of The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women) to Zenna Henderson (author of The Anything Box).

So, allowing again for the list being built only on the first-named author in the Goodreads database, here’s my list of top unread authors:

1. Brian W. Aldiss (32 books)
2. Harry Harrison (19)
3. Robert Silverberg (19)
4. Patrick O'Brian (17)
5. Clifford D. Simak (15)
= Michael Moorcock (15)
7. Poul Anderson (14)
8. Dave Eggers (13)
= E.C. Tubb (13)
10. Arthur C. Clarke (12)

That Aldiss and Moorcock can show up in both my most read and most unread lists shows how amazingly productive they have been. You have to marvel at writers who can produce so much, of such consistently high quality. Patrick O’Brian is on there because I went nuts in a 3 for 2 sale and bought the complete Aubrey-Maturin, despite having read not a word of his fiction. Aside from The Wild Things, the Dave Eggers ones are all back issues of McSweeney’s. E.C. Tubb's presence is down to a bundle of Dumarest books on eBay a couple of years ago, although it turns out I still haven’t got around to reading Space 1999: Breakaway either.

So what are all the Aldiss books I haven't read? Glad you asked! Here’s a full list (some of them overlap a bit):

The Airs of Earth, A Rude Awakening, This World and Nearer Ones, The Year's Best SF 9, The Year's Best Science Fiction 1, Best Science Fiction Stories, Supertoys Last All Summer Long & Other Stories of Future Time, Perilous Planets, Life in the West, Cryptozoic!, The Primal Urge, Space, Time and Nathaniel, Last Orders and Other Stories, Intangibles Inc. and Other Stories, Cracken at Critical, Forgotten Life, The Dark Light Years , The Canopy of Time, Nebula Award Stories 2, The Year's Best Science Fiction 8, Comic Inferno, The Year's Best Science Fiction 7, A Soldier Erect, Starswarm, The Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths, Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, The Malacia Tapestry, Hothouse, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter, Non-Stop and Helliconia Spring.

Must get stuck into those!

If you haven’t yet lost the will to live, the rest of my top 100 unread and unfinished authors are below the jump break!

11. Frederik Pohl (11)
= Graham Greene (11)
= Philip Jose Farmer (11)
14. Brian M. Stableford (10)
= C.J. Cherryh (10)
= Robert E. Howard (10)
17. Arthur Conan Doyle (9)
= Gardner R. Dozois (9)
= John Brunner (9)
= Stephen King (9)
21. Fritz Leiber (8)
= Justin Richards (8)
= Stephen Baxter (8)
24. Aldous Huxley (7)
= Ben Bova (7)
= Bob Shaw (7)
= Dan Simmons (7)
= Frank Herbert (7)
= Gore Vidal (7)
= Gregory Benford (7)
= Philip K. Dick (7)
= Roger Zelazny (7)
33. Daniel Pennac (6)
= David Wingrove (6)
= Gene Wolfe (6)
= M. John Harrison (6)
= Samuel R. Delany (6)
38. Andre Norton (5)
= Cao Xueqin (5)
= Christopher Bulis (5)
= Clive Barker (5)
= David A. McIntee (5)
= Edgar Rice Burroughs (5)
= Honore de Balzac (5)
= Isaac Asimov (5)
= J.G. Ballard (5)
= Keith Roberts (5)
= Marion Zimmer Bradley (5)
= Richard Laymon (5)
= Roy Thomas (5)
= Steve Lyons (5)
= Theodore Sturgeon (5)
= Various (5)
= W. Somerset Maugham (5)
55. A.E. van Vogt (4)
= Alan Garner (4)
= Albert Camus (4)
= Brian Lumley (4)
= C.S. Forester (4)
= Carl Hiaasen (4)
= D.H. Lawrence (4)
= Diana Wynne Jones (4)
= E.E. Smith (4)
= Gardner F. Fox (4)
= Georges-Jean Arnaud (4)
= Greg Bear (4)
= Iain M. Banks (4)
= Ian Watson (4)
= Jean-Paul Sartre (4)
= John Buchan (4)
= John Wyndham (4)
= Kim Stanley Robinson (4)
= Lin Carter (4)
= Michael Chabon (4)
= Olaf Stapledon (4)
= Patrick Tilley (4)
= Peter Haining (4)
= Robert Graves (4)
= Robert Jordan (4)
= Rudyard Kipling (4)
= Sax Rohmer (4)
= Shaun Hutson (4)
= Simon Messingham (4)
= Stephen Jones (4)
= Thomas M. Disch (4)
= Virginia Woolf (4)
87. Alasdair Gray (3)
= Alexandre Dumas (3)
= Alistair MacLean (3)
= Anne McCaffrey (3)
= August Derleth (3)
= Captain W.E. Johns (3)
= China Mieville (3)
= Chris Boucher (3)
= Christopher Priest (3)
= David Brin (3)
= E. Powys Mathers (3)
= Frances Burney (3)
= Frances Gies (3)
= Fred Hoyle and many, many others (3)

I own a truly ridiculous number of books!

Justice Society of America: Thy Kingdom Come, Vol. 2, by Geoff Johns and friends - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-09-16T06:00:00.002+01:00

The brilliant thing about the JSA is that there always seems to be progression and continuity; this volume acts as a sequel and sort of a prequel to Kingdom Come. The Kingdom Come Superman has fled his world, the remaining superheroes having been killed in a nuclear blast, and is keen to prevent the events of Kingdom Come from happening in the current DC universe. (An incidental pleasure of the story is seeing an older Superman with the JSA again.) He knows that Gog was the progenitor of Magog, the anti-hero who caused so many problems in his reality, but the story has more twists than he expected.

Kingdom Come artist Alex Ross is on board as co-writer, and provides some typically brilliant covers and flashback pages, but Geoff Johns writes, rather than Mark Waid. It's not a surprise that there's interest in mining the rich seam of Kingdom Come for further stories, and Waid produced his own sequel in The Kingdom, but this can't help but normalise its inspiration. It takes a myth and turns it into just another story. Would we want to see the Batman of The Dark Knight Returns time-travelling like this to the current DC Universe? This is a good story, but it lessens the original; whether the trade-off was worth it I won't know until reading the conclusion in the next book.

Justice Society of America: Thy Kingdom Come, Vol. 2, by Geoff Johns, Alex Ross, Dale Eaglesham, Fernando Pasarin, and Jerry Ordway. DC Comics, tpb, 192pp.

Moorcock, Dicks, women - and statistics! A thrilling look through my Goodreads list.

2011-09-15T13:00:00.002+01:00

One thing I love about using Goodreads is that you can download your list of books as a spreadsheet. (Yes, this is going to get excitingly dull!) I’ve tried to make my Goodreads list as complete as possible; every so often I’ll turn up a few forgotten books, or notice some odd anomaly, but in general it gives a good picture of my reading. It includes fiction, non-fiction and books of comics (i.e. trade paperbacks and graphic novels), but not individual comic books.

Anyway, I downloaded a copy of my booklist and had a play around with it... I seem to have read about 2439 books so far, so my average has been about 64 a year since birth. I own 1261 that I haven’t read, I’ve left 100 unfinished (mostly anthologies and omnibuses), and I’m currently reading 6.

Narrowing the list down to the books I’ve read, I used the brilliant =UNIQUE function of Google Docs to produce a list of authors I’ve read. That information isn’t entirely reliable, in that the spreadsheet column I took the info from just lists the first listed author of each book. Also, using =COUNTIF to count how many books I’ve read by each of those authors, gives a total of 2302 books, so 137 books are getting mislaid somewhere. But never mind!

Those 2302 books are by 755 different authors, so my average is about 3.05 books per author. 665 of the authors I've read are male, 84 are female, 6 are unknown. Of those 2302 books, 2146 are by male authors, 143 by women, 13 by unknown.

So about 6.2% of the books I’ve read have been by women (very low, but actually a bit better than I’d expected), and 93% of the books I've read were by male authors. And on average I’ve read 3.23 books per male author (2146/665), but only 1.7 books per female author (143/84).

My top ten authors read are:

1. Michael Moorcock 61
2. Terrance Dicks 57
3. Grant Morrison 47
4. Alan Moore 44
= Jack Vance 44
6. Isaac Asimov 38
= Garth Ennis 38
8. Piers Anthony 36
9. Philip K. Dick 31
10. Robert A. Heinlein 27

Altogether I’ve read an amazing 423 books by those ten writers, accounting for a whopping 18.4% of my lifetime's reading. In fact, I've read more books by Moorcock, Dicks and Morrison (165) than by all the female writers of the world combined (143).

Comics writers are going to end up dominating that list, because they produce so many books: a year’s output for a comics writer can often produce half a dozen trade paperbacks. Excluding comics writers from the top ten gives:

1. Michael Moorcock 61
2. Terrance Dicks 57
3. Jack Vance 44
4. Isaac Asimov 38
5. Piers Anthony 36
6. Philip K. Dick 31
7. Robert A. Heinlein 27
8. Brian W. Aldiss 20
9. Philip José Farmer 19
10. Terry Pratchett 18

That’s a list which hasn’t changed much, except in the order of the names, for 15 or 20 years. The first female writer to appear on the list would be Diana Wynne Jones, currently at 11th.

No need to do a separate top ten for male writers, for obvious reasons. But here’s a top ten of female writers:

1. Diana Wynne Jones 17
2. Enid Blyton 12
3. J.K. Rowling 6
4. Andre Norton 5
= Barbara Kesel 5
6. Wendy Pini 4
7. Virginia Woolf 3
= Kate Orman 3
9. Colette 2
= Rumiko Takahashi (and ten other writers) 2

There must be some books missing - I’m sure I’ve read more than two books by Marion Zimmer Bradley, and where is Vera Southgate? - but that’s the sorry picture as it stands. As you can see I’ve yet to finish the seventh Harry Potter book!

A few other things I noticed from playing with the list...

The longest book I’ve read is Europe: a History by Norman Davies (1392pp), although I have to admit to browsing that one more than reading it from start to finish. The next longest was a comic, Bone: the One-Volume Edition (1332pp). The longest novel was Executive Decision by Tom Clancy (1296pp).

Looking at the list by character, I’ve read about 189 Doctor Who titles, 52 about Superman, 48 Batman, 28 John Constantine, 23 Judge Dredd, 13 Star Wars, 11 Star Trek, 9 Conan.

Sorting the list by publication date suggests that the oldest book I’ve read is The Epic of Gilgamesh, dated at -1300. Surprisingly, the data suggests that Andre Norton’s Plague Ship (one my favourite ever books) was published in the year 2. Maybe the Time Traders books were inspired by her own time travelling...

Doctor Who: The Paradise of Death, by Barry Letts – reviewed

2011-09-12T06:00:00.001+01:00

It’s odd to hear the Doctor talking about capitalism, TV addicts, unemployment and the dole, but then the third Doctor, star of this five-part story, always stood out from the rest. He’s joined here by the Brigadier and Sarah Jane Smith, and given that we lost both actors so recently it was lovely to hear Nicholas Courtney and Elisabeth Sladen performing with Jon Pertwee in what was to me a brand new adventure (it was originally broadcast on Radio 5 in 1993). The Doctor and UNIT, soon after the affair of the dinosaur invasion, investigate a new tourist attraction, Space World, which features alien animals and ER – not just virtual reality, but experienced reality (think the tapes in Strange Days). The action soon follows space stowaway Sarah Jane to Parakon, a world where hoity-toity types live the high life thanks to the miracle plant rapine. A kindly President (played by Maurice Denham!) is being manipulated, revolution is brewing, and of course the Doctor and his friends get stuck in.

I wish I could say the story was as good as these beloved actors deserved. It wasn’t, quite, but that didn’t affect my enjoyment of it too much. Barry Letts’ script is notably waspish, seemingly full of bourgeois spite for both the effete upper classes – embarrassing new companion Jeremy Fitzoliver, for one – and the “lower lower class morons”. Episode two features one of the silliest resolutions to a cliffhanger this side of King of the Rocket Men: the Doctor simply jumps up from the autopsy table after being killed by a 200 foot fall. “Dead? Oh was I?” he asks. “Yes, well clearly I’m not now.” (Funny that the third and tenth Doctors could survive such falls, but not the fourth – put it down to entropy.) The sound effect that introduces the ER tapes is intensely irritating. But I can forgive a story a great deal if it puts the Doctor in a gladiatorial arena and the Brigadier at the head of a revolution. The overall effect is of a typical late Pertwee-era story given a Flash Gordon budget.

This story comes in an excellent box set, Doctor Who: The BBC Radio Episodes, which contains another three Sarah Jane stories – The Pescatons, The Ghosts of N-Space and Exploration Earth – as well as Slipback, starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, and Whatever Happened to... Susan? starring Jane Asher as the Doctor’s granddaughter.

Doctor Who: The Paradise of Death, by Barry Letts, starring Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney. AudioGo, 2xCD, 2hrs25. Amazon UK. Amazon US. This review first appeared in the BFS Journal #3.

Juliet McKenna: "Everyone can promote equality in genre writing"

2011-09-09T09:06:00.010+01:00

Juliet McKenna has blogged (here) for SFX - the gender balance of whose reviews she's been tracking on her blog (e.g. here) - about the disparity between the proportion of genre books written by women and the proportion of books reviewed that are written by women. She suggests:

"Every reviewer can check their personal choices of books, to make sure there’s balance. Each reviews editor can do the same; monthly, quarterly, annually. If balance is lacking, we can ask why without necessarily accusing anyone of sexism."

I couldn't agree more. A month or two ago I started tracking the gender balance of books we were receiving - if it's working there should be a pie chart here to show where we currently stand:

At the time of writing (9 September 2011) the figure stands at 20.5%, so in theory at least 20.5% of my reviews would be of books by female writers and editors. I want to do a bit better than that, not least, as I've mentioned previously, because I'm unhappy with how few female writers have been appearing in the pages of our magazine.

So far the Even Stephens approach I've adopted - alternating my reviews between books by men, books by women (excluding comics for now) - seems to be working well. Apart from anything else, it makes choosing my next book that little bit easier.

It's interesting to note how it works against publishers who haven't published any books by women at all, and there are a few out there (for example...) - they're not in the running for half of my review slots.

Obverse Quarterly 1: Bite-Sized Horror, ed. by Johnny Mains – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-09-09T06:00:00.004+01:00

The title of this book might lead you to expect a collection of flash fiction or vampire stories, but it's neither, simply a collection of six short stories of average length. The introduction explains that there is no intentional theme, but there is perhaps an accidental one: the stories all seem to feature children, or parent-child relationships, in prominent roles; Pint-Sized Horror, you might say.

The two best stories bookend the collection, smartly ensuring that the book gives a good first impression, and sends the reader away happy. They were also, for me, the two stories in which one sensed most strongly a character to the writing; one could almost imagine the rest being written by a single author, but not these.

Reggie Oliver's "The Brighton Redemption" concerns the efforts to free from prison and reform a child murderer. Like the other stories I've read (and seen performed) by this author, it is told in a very traditional style, but that's not a bad thing: the narrative is controlled, patient and politely horrific. With "The Carbon Heart" Conrad Williams ends the collection with style and purpose, the main character searching for a girl whose mother had died giving birth to her.

In between is more of a mixed bag, although David Riley's zombie tale "His Pale Blue Eyes" is also good; as gripping - though also as solidly generic - as a typical episode of The Walking Dead. It features a little girl who is willing to make sacrifices to keep her parents alive. If one wonders why she doesn't take slightly less drastic measures to save them, that only adds to the horror of the story. Severely damaged people don't always behave in reasonable ways.

“The Unquiet Bones” by Marie O'Regan was also unnerving, both for the strangeness of its best ideas - tiny bones or teeth sticking out from the walls to catch the unwary - and for a reason peculiar to this reader: the opening pages - in which a young couple take refuge in a spooky house - was almost precisely the same as a submission I’d once read for TQF. That says nothing about the story, and quite a bit about how reading submissions by the dozen can spoil you for short stories. This wasn't my favourite story from the collection, but I enjoyed it.

In Paul Kane’s “The Between" a handful of people are trapped in a lift, and open it to find themselves suspended in darkness, and attacked by a flying shark monster. The lift lights continue to work, because it suits the story. The protagonist is an aggressive father struggling to get access to his son. Also in the lift is the lawyer for the other side, described as "the female lawyer". Though he followed her into the lift with the intention of harassing her, by the end she realises what a great guy he is, and earns herself a patronising kiss on the forehead.

Johnny Mains also includes a story of his own, a risk for an editor; if the story isn't up to scratch, it brings the editor's judgment into question. However, the benefit for readers can be a bonus story, sometimes one which the editor has been able to acquire a little more easily than the others. "The Rookery", about a father and son who encounter a demonic crow-god-type-thing, isn't the strongest story here, but it certainly doesn't embarrass the others by its presence.

I've given Obverse a rather rough time over proofreading in earlier reviews of their books, and this book is a bit better in that regard. There are a couple of clangers - including a character whose name changes from Sean to Shaun part-way through a story - and a handful of smaller mistakes, but nothing to put off potential subscribers to the quarterly.

The three forthcoming titles in the series sound very interesting: Senor 105 and the Elements of Danger, The Diamond Lens and Other Stories, and Zenith Lives! Monsieur Zenith was one of the inspirations for Elric, and a contribution from Moorcock is apparently in hand! Subscribe here.

Obverse Quarterly 1: Bite-Sized Horror, ed. by Johnny Mains. Obverse Books, pb, 92pp.

Beware of possible bias: the reviewer worked with three of the contributors to this book on the British Fantasy Society committee.

Doctor Who: The Perpetual Bond, by Simon Guerrier – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-09-05T06:00:00.008+01:00

Having lost many friends in the battle to foil the daleks’ master plan, the first Doctor and Steven are rather pleased to find the Tardis has taken them to 1960s London. Plans to look up Ian and Barbara are interrupted by the sight of a mushroom-headed alien walking down the street. The trail leads to the City, where humans and disguised aliens are trading in a truly shocking commodity.

Like the other Companion Chronicles CDs, The Perpetual Bond falls midway between an audiobook and a play. Peter Purves narrates most of the story, and reads the dialogue of Steven and the Doctor, while Tom Allen narrates other sections and plays Oliver Harper, a shady sort with a good heart who seems likely to appear in future stories. Both acquit themselves well, but the story suffers from Doctor Who’s peculiar problem: a programme for children whose spin-offs are often aimed at adults. In this story that manifests itself in a setting and plot that’s rather dull for children, read in a way that seems patronising to an adult.

That aside, I did enjoy it. It feels very true to that period of the show, and the first Doctor is very much in character, a twinkle in his eye, a naive sort of craftiness to his dealings with the villains. Its reflections on the relationship between a government and its people are very pertinent to the present day, while more positively it offers a time traveller’s view of how progress might be measured from one era to the next: more spectacles, more teeth, and so on. We tend to expect the future to be worse, but I think we’re all glad to not live in a time when diabetic children would simply die upon the disease’s onset.

The two-episode structure works well. It avoids the need for too much superfluous action and lets the idea take centre stage. A very pleasant way to spend an hour.

Doctor Who, The Companion Chronicles: The Perpetual Bond, by Simon Guerrier, read by Peter Purves and Tom Allen, Big Finish, 1xCD. This review originally appeared in BFS Journal #3.

The book I never wrote - on sale for $321.73!

2011-09-02T14:42:00.000+01:00

Anyone who has had a book out knows that Amazon throws up interesting oddities - copies on sale in Japan for thousands of pounds, that kind of thing.

Today, I was pleasantly surprised to see a paperback copy of Professor Challenger in Space, a book I self-published years ago, going for $321.73 here on Amazon! How pleasing for my vanity that someone thought it was worth that much, even if they were, sadly, quite mistaken.

But what's this? The third in that series, Rolnikov, Mad Knight of Uttar Pradesh, also on sale, from the same vendor, for the same price! To say that was a surprise would be an understatement, given that I never actually wrote the book - it is a bibliographic ghost, registered with the ISBN Agency, but never published.

So two things are clear. I need to write that book, else it'll haunt me for the rest of my life. Secondly, Mygrandmasgoodies is listing books for sale that he or she doesn't actually possess.

I confess, I was half-tempted to order it. I bet it would have been by far the best of my novels.

By the way, Professor Challenger in Space is available on Kindle for much less than $321.73 - $1.39 in the US, and 86p in the UK. Still overpriced, though!

Ventriloquism by Catherynne M. Valente, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-09-02T06:00:00.003+01:00

Envying your children doesn’t look good on a parent. My daughter has given five-star ratings to 37 books so far this year, while I've only done it once, with The Art of McSweeney's. I’ve slightly begrudged her the thrill of finding something new and wonderful in almost every single book she reads. At one point I began to wonder, was I losing the ability to be impressed to that extent by a book? Thank goodness for Ventriloquism, which makes it clear that if I want to be impressed, I’ve been reading the wrong books! All thirty-two of the stories in this collection surprised and challenged me with language, allusion and form, and gave me the unmistakable pleasure that comes from reading something I had never read before.

The quality of the writing was extraordinary – for example, a demon’s “eyes do not burn, but in them are long staircases without end, turning and turning in blackness” – but I’m always attracted to ideas, and this book was bursting with them: a snowbound colony on the moon (“Oh, the Snow-Bound Earth, the Radiant Moon!”); a damned monk who has come to relish the visits of his tormentor (“Proverbs of Hell”); and the practical issues involved in unconventional solar expeditions (“How to Build a Ladder to the Sun in Six Simple Steps”), to pick a few. There are stories told by way of strips of film from an unfinished documentary (“The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew”), in the course of a wine tasting (“Golubash (Wine-Blood-War-Elegy)”) and an auctioneer’s guide for bidders on a series of maps (“A Buyer's Guide to Maps of Antarctica”).

It’s a book of which a reviewer might well be wary – a reviewer, in judging a book, is judged in return, and in the face of this book’s complexity and artistry I hardly felt up to scratch. I didn’t always understand the stories. “La Serenissima”, in which a nun discovers hidden messages; the strange city of “Palimpsest”; the “sea snail skull” of “Mother Is a Machine”: all left this reviewer baffled. Perhaps the review is slightly compromised by that failure on my part, but one day I will read a book, hear a story, see an episode of University Challenge that contains the vital clue, and the full pleasure of those stories will be unlocked – it was twenty-five years after reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader that I clicked to its echoes of the Odyssey.

Other readers, though, those who don’t need to write a review, certainly have nothing to fear. As with MST3K, if you miss one reference you’ll probably get the next one, and even if you don’t – if you are as ignorant as this reviewer of ancient myth and modern science – your enjoyment of the stories will hardly be lessened. For example, one can appreciate “A Delicate Architecture” – which tells of a confectioner’s greatest achievement and his hopes that it might return him to the Emperor’s favour, and the consequences for his daughter – without noticing the light it reflects upon the story of Hansel and Gretel. Or in “Thread: A Triptych”, one can feel for the plight of immigrant wife Ariadne, trapped in an asylum for the insane, without grasping the significance of her description of her new-born son: “his cow-eyes blinked limpid up at me, and his hair was coarse as my dress, coarse as the tail of a bull”.

Some of the collection’s highlights reinterpret stories with which most readers will be familiar. In “Milk and Apples” we see Snow White’s stepmother, locked away to nursemaid the King’s pale baby daughter, fresh from her own tragedy: “I had borne a dead daughter, I had squeezed a little pale corpse from my body as if I were nothing but a fat coffin.” In “The Maiden-Tree” the spindle tells Briar Rose what to expect from her rescue: “He will be almost too revolted to enter; the smell of twelve hundred months of menses will wash the hall in red ... and then the smell of bed-sweat and bed-sores gone to fester ... He will hardly be able to open the door for the press of your grotesquely spiralling toenails.”

And although there are several such reinterpretations of old stories, many stories are entirely new (so far as I know), such as “The City of Blind Delight”, where a railway station is made of interlinked human bodies; “The Anachronist's Cookbook”, in which a fifteen-year-old pickpocket plants revolutionary pamphlets in a steampunk Manchester; or “Killswitch”, about a computer game that deletes itself upon completion.

Lev Grossman (whose The Magicians - reviewed here - is one of those odd books that has continued to grow on me since I read it) notes in his useful introduction, “If I had the stylistic range and the richness of invention Valente shows off in this one book, I would publish it in half a dozen slim volumes, over the course of 40 years, and call it a career.” These are the kind of stories many writers would sell a wicked stepmother to write, a brilliant blend of fine writing, super ideas and formal experimentation.

It’s tempting to say that Valente makes it look easy, as she jumps from the science fiction of “How to Become a Mars Overlord” to the biblical fantasy of “A Dirge for Prester John”, from the zombies of “The Days of Flaming Motorcycles” to the pirate parrot horror of “The Ballad of the Sinister Mr. Mouth”, without ever touching the floor, but stories this rich in language and detail must surely be the product of a sustained creative effort, a great deal of work and thought – you really do have the sense that these are “six years of stories”, as she calls them in the acknowledgments.

So, this time, I’m not envious of my daughter, I feel a bit sorry for her. She would love this book, its generous selection of female protagonists, heroes and villains, and its imaginative reinterpretations of fairy tales, legends, myths and monsters, but it’ll be ten years at least before she is old enough to enjoy it. As a reviewer, I somewhat regretted choosing such a challenging book, but as a reader I couldn’t have picked anything better. Playful experimentation with serious intent: what could be better?

Ventriloquism, by Catherynne M. Valente. PS Publishing, hb, 352pp. Available direct from PS Publishing.

Stonewielder, Volume I, by Ian Cameron Esslemont - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-08-29T06:00:00.021+01:00

I read quite a lot of heroic fantasy as a youngster: Tolkien, Eddings, Brooks, Conan (mostly spin-offs rather than the Howard originals, I’m afraid), Donaldson, Leiber and lots and lots of Moorcock. I kind of fell away from it as the books got longer and longer, and I went through a long period of reading barely anything but comics and Doctor Who novels. But in recent years I’ve started to enjoy my fantasy a lot more, reading and getting quite excited about books by Joe Abercrombie, William King and Steven Erikson - and Game of Thrones is my favourite new television programme of the year.

This novel, of which I’m currently reviewing only volume one (the PS Publishing edition is divided into two luxurious hardbacks) seems to share the setting of the Erikson novellas I’ve read, such as Crack’d Pot Trail, and shares those novellas’ knack of seeming self-contained enough to be enjoyable in isolation, even if those who have read Esslemont’s two previous novels in the series will get more from it. The story concerns the subcontinent of Fist, isolated for twenty years from the Malazan Empire, yet still being ruled in its name. The Empire has decided to set matters straight and despatches a fleet of reconquest. Meanwhile, the Chosen of the Stormwall (and their prisoners) prepare for another assault by the frost-wielding Stormriders, who have been coming from the ocean to throw themselves against the wall for centuries.

We meet a huge cast of characters on both sides of the conflict, and those likely to get stuck in the middle. Each character is clearly and effectively defined, each has their own voice, and is surrounded by figures who help to define them in relief. Ivanr, the farmer with a bloody gladiatorial past who joins an army of peasants. Hiam, Lord Protector of the slowly crumbling Stormwall. Greymane, the Stonewielder of the title, recruited from obscurity to lead the expeditionary force. Bakune, Chief Assessor of Banith, doggedly investigating a series of murders. This rich selection of characters contrasts with, say, Dragon’s Time by Todd and Anne McCaffrey, in which, presented with a paragraph of names two hundred pages in, I had no idea who most of them were.

Stonewielder isn’t as artsy and literary as the Erikson novellas, and it’s a world away from most PS Publishing books, but it is a well-polished, confident and commercial novel that repeatedly made me stay up just a little too late to get to the end of a chapter. And among all the fighting there’s a good deal of wisdom and humanity. “It takes an unusually philosophic mind to accept that all one’s suffering might be to no end, really, in the larger scheme of things,” Ivanr thinks at one point. This volume builds up to a clever and tactical sea battle, as the Malazan fleet tries to break through the Mare war galleys to land its armies on Fist, but the reader is left in no doubt that there is an awful lot more to come. I’m glad of the break between volumes - reading the whole thing at once might have been too much of a good thing - but I won’t leave it too long before returning to see how this campaign concludes.

In the eARC under review there were a handful of typographical issues - mostly missing spaces and quote marks. All were probably fixed before the book went to press, but since we’re talking about a collector's edition that costs £99, I mention them just in case!

Stonewielder, Volume I, by Ian Cameron Esslemont. PS Publishing, hb, 264pp (part of a two-volume slipcase set). Buy direct from PS here.

Journey into Space: The Red Planet, by Charles Chilton – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

2011-08-26T06:00:00.000+01:00

The Red Planet was the second series of Charles Chilton’s Journey into Space; twenty episodes, here spread over ten CDs with notes researched and written by Andrew Pixley, that were originally broadcast weekly from August 1954 to January 1955 on the BBC Light Programme. Though for this listener the adventure took a single week rather than twenty, its epic qualities seemed undiminished.

The first eight episodes detail the journey from Earth to Mars, a trip punctuated by much eerier incidents than expected; this is science fiction in the vein of The Quatermass Experiment rather than Flash Gordon. "Orders must be obeyed without question at all times" is the refrain of James Whitaker, who gives everyone the willies, but from where do his orders come? By the time Jet Morgan (played by Andrew Faulds) and the surviving members of the expedition reach their destination they've been well and truly frightened, even if it barely shows behind their stiff upper lips. On Mars it gets stranger yet, with hallucinations and... humans? Yes, the people we meet on this ancient, worn-out Mars in the latter half of the serial are humans, snatched from Earth whenever the two planets were at their closest. Most are in trances, believing themselves still on Earth at the time they were snatched. The mysterious flying doctor, however, seems to know just where he is. But who is behind it all? And will the surviving astronauts really have to settle down to life on Mars?

Though the mission is led by Jet Morgan, the most notable character is perhaps Lemmy (David Kossoff), the resourceful radio operator and engineer which the liner notes say was based on writer Charles Chilton (in a short interview with Chilton on the tenth CD you hear strong echoes of Lemmy’s voice). The same notes reproduce a letter to the Radio Times where K. Camm of Stevenage describes Lemmy as "an improbable space traveller, not to mention electronic engineer", but so far as I could tell the only reason for thinking that is his London accent. Lemmy shows himself time and again to be capable, intelligent and an exceptionally useful member of the expedition. It's easy to see why he was popular with listeners. It’s a shame the other characters sometimes sound a bit patronising when they talk to him - and sometimes completely ignore him! - but well done to Charles Chilton for getting a working class man on board. (Even in the mid-sixties there was resistance in the BBC to having characters with regional accents in Doctor Who.)

Listening to The Red Planet was a total delight. Tense, dramatic and detailed, it's grown no less riveting with the passage of time (at least I’m guessing it hasn’t - if I’d heard it in the fifties I suppose I might have enjoyed it even more!). Like the humans Jet Morgan finds on Mars, it doesn’t seem to have aged, though the credit should go to Ted Kendall, who has restored and remastered the episodes for CD, rather than ancient Martian science! Thanks to an accidental membership of Audible, I also have Journey into Space: Operation Luna tucked away somewhere, so I'll be on my way to the Moon just as soon as I find a spare week. Readers are recommended to join Jet and Lemmy on their trip to Mars at the earliest opportunity.

Journey into Space: The Red Planet, by Charles Chilton. AudioGo, 10xCD, 10 hrs 10 mins.

Cowboys & Aliens – reviewed by Douglas J. Ogurek

2011-08-22T06:00:00.004+01:00

When I first saw a poster advertising Cowboys & Aliens, I anticipated a film that, in the vein of Grease 2 (1982) or Ghost Rider (2007), points fun at its own ridiculousness. I looked forward to dialogue and characterization as preposterous as the film’s concept. However, the western/sci-fi crossover, inspired by a 2006 graphic novel created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg and written by Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley, did not give me what I anticipated. What I did get was something much better: an engaging film that convincingly mixes the atmosphere of the spaghetti western with the intensity of Independence Day.

A mangy-looking man (Daniel Craig) awakens in a setting typical of the early American Southwest. A strange metallic device is stuck on his wrist, and he remembers nothing. He makes his way to the dusty streets of Absolution, where locals recognize him as the outlaw Jake Lonergan, wanted for theft and murder. But there is something more threatening to the town (and to all of mankind) than Jake Lonergan.

The huge piece of bling-bling clamped onto Lonergan turns out to be a weapon capable of taking down human-snatching aliens. Lonergan’s memories begin to return, and the links between the aliens and a mysterious woman grow clearer.

More than once, director Jon Favreau (Iron Man, Iron Man 2) gives the aliens a delightfully flamboyant entrance: Just when the action of the conventional western peaks, the aliens invade the scene in their insect-like jets!

Despite this being a big-budget action film targeted toward the inattentive modern day viewer, Favreau lovingly portrays some of the finer details: the gulping of whiskey, a thumb testing the sharpness of a blade, the crunching on an apple, the wood of an imperfect fence. These details, coupled with some beautiful vistas of New Mexico, help establish authenticity and plunge the viewer deeper into the fictional dream.

Daniel Craig sheds his Bondian sophistication (and his British accent) to portray Lonergan, the gritty outsider reminiscent of Stephen King’s gunslinger Roland Deschain or the typical Clint Eastwood western protagonist. Craig’s chiseled good looks, ectomorphic frame, and stripped down dialogue complement his stoic character, and his saunter would give John Wayne a run for his money.

As Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde – don’t you just love the names? – Harrison Ford plays a money-hungry rancher whose power the people of Absolution fear, yet whose true character isn’t nearly as rough as his exterior. Dolarhyde’s attempts to mask his compassion in sarcasm and overt masculinity add humor. Be sure to look for one of Ford’s trademark half-grins.

Those who appreciate strong acting get a healthy dose of it in the beginning of the film. Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood) offers a nuanced and humorous sideshow as Percy, the ne’er-do-well son of Dolarhyde. However, Favreau chose just the right amount of screen time for Percy, who would have grown annoying. Percy’s absence for the majority of the film proves an eccentric character does not a sci-fi/western make. No insult to Dano intended.

Some reviews chastised this film as uninspired or stale. Perhaps they missed the film’s title, and the overall concept. Hey, this is Cowboys… and Aliens! The challenge was not to come up with an original western, nor was it to come up with unique aliens. The challenge was to effectively bridge two very familiar genres, and in this Cowboys & Aliens succeeds masterfully.

Cowboys & Aliens, directed by Jon Favreau. Universal, 118 mins.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes - reviewed by Jacob Edwards

2011-08-19T06:00:00.022+01:00

Shakespeare’s Caesar shakes spear – tossed by Hollywood, eloquent as a lovelorn salad.

A film that is produced by its writers is a bit like a self-published novel. It dispenses with those pesky editors and allows the authors an unusual, at times unhealthy amount of creative control. Theoretically, this could be wonderful (god complex knows how many movies have been scuppered by interfering bigwigs) but equally it can facilitate a merry, unrestrained hurling of plot confetti – a self-congratulatory, naive celebration in which the storyline is well and truly shredded.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes sees Will Rodman (James Franco) testing an experimental Alzheimer’s drug on chimpanzees. His commitment to the research stems from the deteriorating condition of his father (John Lithgow) and leads Rodman to carry on even after the project loses backing. He secretly adopts Caesar (Gollum’s Andy Serkis), an orphaned chimp genius whose mother was part of the programme, and discovers that the Alzheimer’s drug, which Rodman is driven to test on his father, not only repairs but also enhances brain function. Rodmans Senior and Junior, along with Caesar, live happily... but not ever after.

At time of writing (one day after the film’s release), Rise of the Planet of the Apes has notched 1,000+ votes at 7.6 on IMDB. Splitting the amalgamative, we might assign seven to the first half of the film, and point-six to the second, but in both cases that might be over-charitable. As Caesar grows and love interest Freida Pinto (Rodman’s, not Caesar’s – this isn’t King Kong) is thrown into the mix, Rodman Senior develops antibodies to the virus that facilitates delivery of the Alzheimer’s drug, thus allowing the disease itself to return. Rodman senior regresses, and while the audience takes a moment to ponder the medical feasibility of a genetically inheritable virus, Caesar is bundled off to a sanctuary-cum-concentration camp for errant primates, and so the CGI high jinks begin.

Franco and Lithgow portray a very genuine, very tender father/son relationship, and there are some heartbreaking familial scenes also between chimps (plus orang-utan and gorilla) at the primate facility. This element, however, falls very much by the wayside as Silver and Jaffa belatedly remember the title of the film, and scramble to pull it into line as some sort of "origin" movie to the 60s and 70s Planet of the Apes franchise. This ad hoc change of direction, which is evident in several write-as-you-go script revisions (this is where I work; here is a zoo where other chimps live) and at least one ham-fisted contrivance (look, an Alzheimer’s drug canister that nobody’s noticed lying around; oh, and there’s a spaceship lost out near Mars somewhere) is not only galling in its own right; it is part of a deliberately ambiguous ‘setting up of sequels’ wherein whetting the audience’s appetite is clearly seen as more important than presenting a satisfying or in any way self-contained film. Rise of the Planet of the Apes ends on a ludicrous note; or, as director Rupert Wyatt would put it, ‘with certain questions’,1 not least of which are How are Caesar and Co. going to avoid retaliation (or indeed eat; just survive) long enough for the slow-acting events of the (rather smug) closing credits to play out? and, perhaps more pressingly, If the sole purpose of this film was to set up its sequel, will my cinema ticket be valid for that one as well?

Not that you’d go, even if it were. "Evolution", as the promotional poster so deftly puts it, "becomes revolution". (And many are the people who wish they’d seen that before delving into their wallets for the price of admission.)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes suffers from, and so inflicts upon the viewer, two hallmarks of modern day Hollywood. Firstly, an irredeemable caricaturing that would have even the ancient Greek playwrights cringing at its lack of subtlety. There’s the dollar-obsessed businessman; the too-angry next door neighbour; even Tom Felton as a transplanted Draco Malfoy reprise. This reliance on stock, one dimensional characters, undermines anything that the movie might hope to achieve dramatically. Secondly – and this is more of an explosive, building-dropping demolition than a mere undermining – there is the now rampant "We’ve got CGI, look what we can do with it" mentality that spurns the bona fide approach of, say, Project X (dir. Jonathan Kaplan, 1987) and instead sees Caesar and his fellow chimpanzees emerge from the phone booth not only as super intelligent but also as super fast, super strong and, frankly, super ludicrous. Why the preponderance for crashing (unscathed) through glass panels? What ape worth half its newfound IQ in bananas would make a three-storey jump (again, unscathed) rather than taking the stairs? And while we’re about it, why do chimps liberated from the zoo become just like their smartened fellows? Could it be that the brain sharpening drug is transmitted also through osmosis?

Perhaps the biggest question – spoiler, if such a movie can be spoiled by external factors – is why the Alzheimer’s drug, in more highly concentrated form, suddenly becomes a human killer. Notwithstanding the writers’ implicit need to spell things out for those who are hard of understanding, wouldn’t it be more in keeping with the original Planet of the Apes premise for the drug merely to lessen human intelligence? (Yes, a bit of a stretch, but the bar hasn’t exactly been raised all that high. One could artificially stimulate production of neurotransmitters, perhaps, but make the resulting synaptic connections recursive, lessening the memory loss of Alzheimer’s but stultifying the development of new thoughts. No? Well, that’s just two minutes’ worth of opposable thumb-twiddling.) The sad truth is that such a drug already exists, widely distributed and taking approximately 1¾ hours to deliver.

As the box office will attest, people are queuing up for it.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, directed by Rupert Wyatt. 20th Century Fox, 105 mins

1. Giroux, Jack, “Interview: Director Rupert Wyatt on ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ and The End of Cinema”, Film School Rejects, 15 April 2011 [http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/interview-director-rupert-wyatt-rise-of-the-planet-of-the-apes.php/2]

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 – reviewed by Douglas J. Ogurek

2011-08-15T06:00:00.006+01:00

Ten years ago, an orphan with circle framed glasses and a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead found his way into the hearts of film-goers the world over. The young man discovered a school for wizards, where he made two new friends: an awkward red-headed boy, and a rather determined little girl.

This summer, Harry, Ron, and Hermione finish the saga that has ushered millions of children into adulthood, and bonded generations. This film, the eighth in the series, broke international box office records, raking in $476 million worldwide during its opening weekend.

In HP7 Part 1, the friends had to overcome some conflicts amongst themselves. This time, the reconciled trio and their Hogwarts schoolmates set out to vanquish Harry’s nemesis Voldemort, who, armed with the all-powerful Elder wand, has his sights set on the destruction of Potter. For those who prefer non-physical conflict and the subtleties of individual relationships, Part 2 falls short of its immediate predecessor. For those who prefer a good old-fashioned good guys versus bad guys rivalry, Part 2 is the film to watch.

The once-vibrant halls of Hogwarts, now controlled by Voldemort and his clan, have deteriorated into dreariness and despondency. Severus Snape, the Voldemort ally responsible for the death of the beloved [spoiler removed!], has taken over as headmaster.

Harry and friends must penetrate the dementor-guarded walls of Hogwarts, then find and destroy the remaining Horcruxes, which house parts of Voldemort’s soul and safeguard his immortality. The challenge is clear-cut: if Harry and friends succeed, Voldemort dies and evil is vanquished. If they fail, Voldemort attains ultimate power and the world rots.

Most of the film takes place at Hogwarts, where the oppressed student body and faculty reclaim the campus and strive to resist an impending onslaught by Voldemort’s Death Eaters. Potter must also find a Horcrux. There are two things known about this Horcrux: it is small, and it is somewhere within the mammoth school. Not very promising.

Though the action and special effects were in line with what one would expect of a big budget film, one of the most enjoyable aspects of HP7 Part 2 was Ralph Fiennes’ portrayal of Voldemort. Fiennes gets more screen time to show his skills than in other Potter films. With his gyrating movements, exaggerated facial expressions, and emotional instability – he whispers, he screams, he laughs – Voldemort earns a spot among cinema’s most memorable super-villains.

The film is far from perfect: It begins with two lengthy expository conversations with minor characters. The most disappointing shortcoming involves the key battle scene. One would expect the inhabitants of a wizardly world to fight in a wizardly way. Such was the case with previous Potter films. However, the climactic battle of HP7 Part 2 resorts to Lord of the Rings-style hand-to-hand combat, replete with ogres hacking away at knight-like figures. But because of their high emotional investment in the series, viewers will likely forgive these flaws.

As a stand-alone film, HP7 Part 2 does not merit the record-breaking figures it has achieved. However, when viewed through the lens of the Potter franchise, the records begin to make sense. Video games. LEGO figurines. Even a theme park in Orlando, Florida. Harry Potter is nothing less than a worldwide culture juggernaut. What a thrill it must have been for those who grew into adulthood with Potter over the last decade. Undoubtedly, many of them will step onto Platform 9¾ and board the Hogwarts Express with their own children to relive the journey.

Despite its magical foundation, the Potter series reveals many real-life lessons. It shows that there will be cowards, and there will be heroes. There will be those who give up, and there will be those who, despite many naysayers and seemingly insurmountable odds, will continue to pursue their goals. It teaches us about the power of friendship.

The Harry Potter story and the phenomenon our world has made it suggest a hopeful thought: that there is a human longing to connect, and to do good. All aboard! – Douglas J. Ogurek

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, directed by David Yates. Warner Bros, 130 mins.

The eight Harry Potter films total nearly 20 hours. What is your favorite Potter scene in the series? This reviewer's came in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Potter tricks Lucius Malfoy into freeing the house-elf Dobby. Enraged, Malfoy raises his sword extravagantly, curls back his lips, and says “Potter” in a cross between a hiss and a growl. It is the most hilarious cinematic moment I’ve ever experienced.

Are novels about to get shorter?

2011-08-14T06:00:00.021+01:00

Changes in the book market have always had a big effect on the length of novels: compare the novels in your collection from the 1850s, the 1950s and the 2010s to see what I mean. We're now well on the way to ebooks becoming the lead format for commercial fiction, and I think that's going to lead to another big change: shorter commercial novels. Here are a few reasons why:

People shopping for Kindle books don't seem to compare books by length the way bookshop buyers do.
Economies of scale in printing stop being an issue.
Low pricing of ebooks - if a 200,000 word novel sells at the same price as a 30,000 word novella (e.g. I paid more or less the same price for UR and The Colorado Kid that I paid for Under the Dome), it makes sense for the author to produce shorter, more frequent books.
Ebooks don't disappear from the shelves as quickly; you don't need to snap them up just in case it goes out of print. So it's in the interest of writers to write books that readers finish, rather than just collect, so that when your next book comes out they're ready to read it.
Shorter books are less work for everyone involved, so if people can make the same money selling short books that they make selling long ones, they will.

That doesn't mean every book will be shorter, any more than every book is now long - the small press will carry on doing its own thing, as will authors who can set their own terms - but I think these factors will exert a powerful downward pressure on the length of commercial novels over the years to come.

But I could be wrong - we'll see!

Received for review in early August 2011

2011-08-13T06:00:00.009+01:00

Books received for review in recent days…

666 Charing Cross Road, by Paul Magrs (Headline Review, pb, 390pp). "From the creator of Brenda and Effie, Dr Who and Strange Boy comes an astonishing stand alone novel..." I don't think Paul Magrs actually created Doctor Who, but he's certainly given it a shot in the arm from time to time!

Creepy Presents: Bernie Wrightson, by Bernie Wrightson and others (Dark Horse, hb, 144pp). A collection of Swamp Thing artist Bernie Wrightson's artwork for Creepy and Eerie. Looks, erm, creepy!

Darkness Falling (Forever Twilight, Book 1), by Pete Crowther (Angry Robot, ebook, 9097ll). I'm a bit confused by this one, having previously reviewed another Forever Twilight Book One, Darkness, Darkness, which had some fantastic moments, but a bit too much slapping of hysterical women for my taste (i.e. any). A Kindle search of this one suggests it's an expansion of the novella (with slapping intact).

Dead Bad Things, by Gary McMahon (Angry Robot, ebook, 5313ll). A Thomas Usher novel. I've enjoyed everything I've read so far by Gary McMahon: Rain Dogs, Different Skins and What They Hear in the Dark. The previous book in the series, BFA nominee Pretty Little Dead Things, is currently available on Kindle for just 99p.

Debris, by Jo Anderton (Angry Robot, pb, 6999ll). Book One of the Veiled World Trilogy.

King's War, by Maurice Broaddus (Angry Robot, ebook, 5988ll). Volume III of the Knights of Breton Court.

Master of the House of Darts, by Aliette de Bodard (Angry Robot, ebook, 8083ll). Book 3 of the Obsidian and Blood series. Jenny Barber interviewed Aliette for Dark Horizons #57, and I liked the sound of her books. (The first half of the interview can be read on the BFS's website.)

Nowhere Hall, by Cate Gardner (Spectral Press, chapbook, 26pp). The third chapbook in the Spectral Press series. The super cover painting is by Daniele Serra.

Reign of the Nightmare Prince, by Mike Phillips (Journalstone, pb, ebook, 262pp). I've published some smashing stories by Mike in the past, including "The Free Dynamos and the Lone Island in the Sky" in TQF34.

Roil, by Trent Jamieson (Angry Robot, ebook, 5791ll). Book 1 of the Nightbound Land.

The Best American Comics 2011, by Alison Bechdel (ed.) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, pb, 342pp). Includes comics by Gabrielle Bell, Joe Sacco, Jaime Hernandez, Kate Beaton, Jeff Smith, Angie Wang and many more.

The Complete Major Bummer Super Slacktacular! by John Arcudi, Doug Mahnke and others (Dark Horse, tpb, 384pp). I missed this series when it first came out from DC, although I was reading a lot of comics in those days (at one point I read pretty much nothing but comics and Doctor Who novels for two years). I don't know whether this is supposed to be any good, but I've always fancied reading it.

If you have anything to send us for review, the info you need is here. Thanks in advance!

If you fancy reviewing books for us, do get in touch. Most of the titles we receive are in electronic formats (all but one of the books listed above, for example), and so we're unable to pass them on, but we usually have a dozen or so print books in hand from which you could choose.