Theaker's Quarterly Fiction

Sunday, 4 October 2009

Deadgirl

Rickie and JT discover a naked woman (owner of the most revolting merkin this side of The League of Gentlemen) chained up in an abandoned hospital. JT says they should keep her, and Rickie leaves him to it. He thinks about ringing the police, but mum’s boyfriend interrupts so he doesn’t bother…

The girl is a zombie, not that it’s relevant to the plot. This is a rape film, about a rapist and the pal who doesn’t turn him in, and the other guys they invite to take a turn. Sex with a zombie, if not precisely consensual, you might say, is strictly speaking necrophilia rather than rape – the horror equivalent of a sci-fi sexbot! – but consider that before having sex with this zombie JT has to beat her to death because she’s fighting back too much. (That’s how he discovers her secret.)

Of course you can have good films about bad people – is this a good film? It’s atmospheric and sombre, and for those handy with the remote, it has two good pause-the-video moments, including a surprisingly vigorous bowel movement. JT develops into a very creepy villain, especially once he stops wearing trousers, and other than the sound editing – always important for a horror movie – Noah Segan’s performance is the best thing about the movie.

But no, for me this wasn’t a good film. It felt like a film written by sex-starved teenagers (it actually comes from the pen of Trent Haaga, previously responsible for Toxic Avenger IV), or at least to appeal to them. It doesn’t rise above the level of a teenage conversation: “Imagine if we had a zombie to shag?” “Yeah, but imagine all the problems keeping it clean.”

And the problem with the film isn’t just that the characters are immoral people doing terrible things, it’s that nothing they do makes sense. For example, one guy who knows just how dangerous the dead girl is decides to free her on his own, with predictable consequences – and then another guy does exactly the same thing later in the movie. Having said that, the movie’s second best moment does result from its very stupidest behaviour, though I’d be surprised if it makes it to the commercial release of the DVD, given the tumescent area out of which the dead girl takes an entirely justifiable bite.

Though Deadgirl has horror movie elements – such as characters with uniformly poor decision-making skills – at heart it’s an indie film about teenage power and powerlessness, with more in common with films like Brick or Bully than Dawn of the Dead. So don’t expect to be frightened – except by a rather scary dog – just revolted.

Deadgirl: the zombie rape film you haven’t been waiting for…

Deadgirl, Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel (dirs).

Dark Floors

During Sarah's brain scan the machine starts to smoke. Her dad throws her in a wheelchair and heads for the lift, a hot nurse in hot pursuit. Joined there by a security guard, a mysterious tramp and an angry businessman, they emerge into a strangely different hospital, where the clocks have stopped, the people have disappeared, and hulking monsters are on the prowl.

Dark Floors is a Finnish film, but British and American actors were imported to play the lead roles, showing a level of commercial canniness that's evident throughout the production. The budget is clearly small, but the hospital setting lets them stretch it a long way, with sets redressed as the protagonists descend from each level to the next. Like everything else about this film, the acting's generally rather better than you'd expect in a straight-to-DVD horror film.

The monsters are used sparingly to good effect. There are a fair few scares, and some surprisingly clever ideas. Huge chunks of Silent Hill and Hellraiser are appropriated, but put to good use. Anyone who got as far as Hellraiser V or VI will find plenty to enjoy here. The director should go on to better things.

So why was it a disappointment? Because this is the movie debut of Lordi, heavy metal winners of the Eurovision Song Contest. You remember: the guys (and one oddly attractive girl) dressed as orcs. This should have been an embarrassing turkey, prime MST3K fodder, but damn them, no: they had to go and make a decent movie. If you didn't know Lordi were a band going in, the film wouldn't have given it away.

Eurovision success may have earned the funding for this movie, but everyone involved deserves credit for putting it to such good use: making the first good (non-documentary) movie featuring a band since It Couldn't Happen Here.

Dark Floors, Pete Riski (dir.), Finland.

The Compleat Next Men, Vol. 1, by John Byrne

Interesting to read Byrne working on his own characters. There’s some wonderfully dynamic, rough-hewn art in here, but the story is very slow. Some pages (especially in the M4 backup strip) look a lot like Frank Miller, as if to say, I can do that style too, you know, but it only points up the crucial difference between them – Miller’s an artist in every sense of the word; much as I enjoy his work, Byrne is an artist in a much narrower sense: he creates the art for comics.

Unlike the other artists that worked under the Legend banner for Dark Horse (Mignola, Miller, Aragones), there’s no sense here of a vision being expressed; it feels workmanlike. That’s not to say it isn’t very entertaining, but it explains why Byrne returned to working on other people’s properties, rather than continuing to develop this one.

The Compleat Next Men, Vol. 1, by John Byrne, IDW Publishing, tpb, 432pp.

Hellblazer: Empathy is the Enemy, by Denise Mina

John Constantine makes his way to Glasgow, where something rather nasty is brewing. There’s sickness in the air, and it’s driving people mad: they’re being made to feel what others felt in the moments before their deaths. It’s the last thing Constantine needs: empathy really is a liability in his line of work.

Like a lot of Hellblazer collections, a flick through this book makes it look very unappetising: murky, dull and coloured in various shades of black and grey. Once you get into it, though, the artwork serves the story, and it’s a good one, one long saga that brings to mind Delano stories like The Fear Machine. The end of the book is a pause in the action rather than its end, so I’m looking forward to reading the next in the series, The Red Right Hand.

There’s certainly no sense here of a big-shot author coming in to show everyone how it’s done. Like Kevin Smith on Daredevil she’s respectful of what’s gone before, building nicely on one story from Mike Carey’s run. Just a shame her run was so short, though I’ve heard nice things about the Andy Diggle issues that come next.

Hellblazer: Empathy is the Enemy, by Denise Mina, Vertigo, tpb, 168pp.

Wild Robert, by Diana Wynne Jones

Not one of Diana Wynne Jones’s major works, but interesting nevertheless, and I was thrilled to find it on the shelves of Birmingham Central Library while the children were rolling around on giant cushions.

Heather lives in a stately home which her parents manage for the National Trust. When she idly wishes for Wild Robert to wake up and deal with Mr McManus, the unpleasant gardener, and the tourists who bother her, he does. He plays magical tricks on everyone, but everything’s fine by the end of the day.

What’s interesting to me is that essentially this is a book about sex, about the way the introduction of sex – or at least boys – into a young girl’s life changes everything. I don’t mean to say it is a sordid book – nothing very saucy actually happens. Rather, it is all about the confusion and excitement of a girl’s first love.

Robert is the archetypal romantic idol, a typical first crush with his shoulder length hair and good looks. When his hand touches Heather “it somehow fizzed against Heather’s bare arm so that all the hairs stood up round the place he touched”. That his wildness is sexual is flagged by his very first bit of magic – turning a group of teenagers into nymphs and fauns and sending them to rut in the woods (they “will romp until sundown”).

Robert changes everything for Heather. From feeling like little more than an annoyance to everyone in her life, she becomes the most important person in the world to him. And, of course, from the moment he enters her life her main concern is to keep him away from her father. “She knew she had to make him believe when he did meet Robert, and there were a lot of things she wanted to think about first.”

I found the strawberry scene very interesting too. Until now Mr McManus has always stopped her from eating them, but Robert waves his hand around and McManus is frozen, leaving her free to eat her fill. Is McManus representative of adult, male, threatening sexuality, something to be afraid of, kept at a distance? Once he’s immobilised she is free – and barely hesitates – to eat as many strawberries as she would like. But maybe that’s pushing the analysis too far.

So although it’s a short book, taking little more than an hour to read, its themes make it an interesting complement to Fire and Hemlock, perhaps Diana Wynne Jones’s most powerful work, making it well worth reading for that reason alone.

Wild Robert, by Diana Wynne Jones, Collins, hb, 96pp.

Monday, 24 August 2009

Dark Horizons #55

Twelve short stories, from blood-soaked battlefields to drowning futures! Three articles, on the most beloved of writers and the utterly unknown! Twelve poems! Seven contributing artists! One hundred and sixty exciting pages! Seventy thousand thrilling words! Yes, the editor got a bit carried away when putting together Dark Horizons 55… but it looks like it’s turned out all right in the end. His wife is still speaking to him (just) and the issue has gone to the printers, wrapped in its marvellous cover by Arthur Wang, to be despatched with the British Fantasy Society's September mailing.

Fiction:

Dead Gods, Richard Ford
The Sunflower at Dusk, Naoko Awa (tr. Toshiya Kamei)
Despoina’s Sorrow, Alex Davis
Escape from the Shadow Moon, Mike Phillips
Sarkless Kitty, Alison J. Littlewood
The Beating Heart, Jim Steel
The Circle, Ian Hunter
Sailors of the Skies, Mike Chinn
In the Tunnels of the Agogs, Ralph Robert Moore
The Skeleton in the Cupboard, Astrid Klemz
Bugs, Shaun Jeffrey
Vivienne’s Garden, Douglas Thompson

Articles:

Two Forgotten Disciples: C. Hall Thompson and Clifford Ball, Mike Barrett
A Loud Whisper: in Appreciation of Charles L. Grant, Paul Campbell
Dumarest: the Coming Event? Craig Herbertson

Poetry:

Ten Poems, Michael Fantina
Dreams in the Nebula of Ghosts, Wade German
After the End of the World, Victor D. Infante

BFSQ&A:

Lev Grossman and the Magicians

With artwork from Arthur Wang, David Bezzina, Jackie Burns, Mark Pexton, Dominic Harman, John Shanks and Ally Thompson.

Contributors

Naoko Awa (1943–1993) was an award-winning writer of modern fairy tales. As a child, she read fairy tales by Grimm, Andersen, and Hauff, as well as The Arabian Nights. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Japanese literature from Japan Women’s University.

Mike Barrett first contributed to Dark Horizons in the 1970s. Recently he has taken to writing again, and is a member of the SSWFT amateur press association. He is also a regular contributor to The New York Review of Science Fiction and has had pieces published in Wormwood, Fantasy Commentator and Studies in Fantasy Literature. He lives in Kent and works in the pensions industry in London.

David Bezzina’s favourite artists are Alan Lee, Barry Windsor-Smith, Chris Foss and Frank Frazetta… “Getting my second wind (artistically) and really enjoying my painting at the moment,” he says. He is online at www.myspace.com/davidbezzina.

Jackie E. Burns. Astronomical and SF&F artist living and working in Essex. Semi-regular EasterCon and WorldCon art exhibitor. Work shown at Kennedy Space Center and Massachusetts University, USA. Fellow and past European Vice President of the International Association for Astronomical Artists (www.iaaa.org). Accredited member of the Guild of Essex Craftsmen.

Paul Campbell was born in the early seventies and lives in Lanarkshire. He writes book reviews for Prism, our news magazine.

Mike Chinn’s short fiction has been published in Birmingham Noir, The Black Book of Horror and The Mammoth Book of Dracula, with new material forthcoming in Postscripts and Raw Terror. His books include Writing and Illustrating the Graphic Novel, Create Your Own Graphic Novel, The Paladin Mandates and Swords Against the Millennium, and he is helping expand the fantasy world he created in Starblazer for the Starblazer Adventures RPG supplement, Legends of Anglerre.

Alex Davis is a horror writer and gothic poet based in Derby, with several pieces currently published in magazines, webzines and anthologies. He is currently working on two novellas, “Ceriano” and “Dead Meat”, as well as a number of short stories. He has also read and performed at a number of venues in Derby and beyond.

Michael Fantina has been writing for many years and has had scores of poems published in North America (Romantics Quarterly, The Lyric) and in the UK (Candelabrum Poetry Magazine, Harlequin). He has also had fantasy and horror tales published in the US and several through Rainfall Books in the UK.

Richard Ford’s work has appeared in The Cold Hand of Betrayal and Heroes of the Space Marines, Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 anthologies respectively. His first novel, The Dragons of Lencia, is now available through Mongoose Publishing.

Wade German’s speculative poems can be found in Space and Time, Dreams and Nightmares, Black Petals, Star*Line, Scifaikuest, Moonlit Path, Moonset and Strange Sorcery, among others.

Craig Herbertson’s novel, School: The Seventh Silence, was published by Immanion Press. His work has appeared in The 29th Pan Book of Horror Stories and in three volumes of the Black Book of Horror.

Dominic Harman has worked for major publishers around the world, producing art for books by Clive Barker, H.G. Wells, Philip Pullman, Naomi Novak and George R.R. Martin.

Ian Hunter has moved into the 20th century with his website, www.ian-hunter.co.uk. From issue fifty-six he will be the poetry editor of this very journal.

Victor D. Infante is a poet, editor and journalist living in Worcester, Mass., USA. His first full-length collection of poetry, City of Insomnia, was released in 2008 from Write Bloody Publishing, and he is also the editor in chief of The November 3rd Club, an online literary journal of political writing.

Shaun Jeffrey has had one horror novel published, Evilution, over forty short stories in both amateur and professional markets, and a collection, Voyeurs of Death. His latest short story sale was to Cemetery Dance, and his second novel, The Kult, was published by Leucrota Press.

Toshiya Kamei, with the permission of Naoko Awa’s family, is translating her work into English. The translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Crow Toes Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Kyoto Journal, Marginalia, Metamorphoses, and elsewhere.

Astrid Klemz’s story, “The Skeleton in the Cupboard”, was the runner-up in the British Fantasy Society Short Story Competition 2008. The winner of the 2009 competition will be announced at the British Fantasy Awards at FantasyCon.

Alison J. Littlewood has contributed to Read by Dawn Vol. 3, Black Static, Dark Horizons, Aoife’s Kiss and the Midnight Lullabies anthology. She lives in West Yorkshire, England, where she spends far too much time dreaming and writing strange notes to herself on scraps of paper. Her website is at www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk.

Ralph Robert Moore’s fiction has been anthologised in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 19, Revelation III, Dark Distortions and Read By Dawn, and has appeared in Collages and Bricolages, Lullaby Hearse, Lunatic Chameleon, Midnight Street, and many more. His new collection is now available: Remove the Eyes. See his website Sentence at www.ralphrobertmoore.com.

Mark Pexton recently provided the cover art for Peckinpah by D. Harlan Wilson; a deviant monster truck racer and cardboard box fiddler, he likes physics, comics and Brussel sprouts. His work is online at http://superego-necropolis.deviantart.com/journal.

Mike Phillips grew up on a small farm in West Michigan. Each year during summer vacation, the television was turned off. This meant much of summer was spent reading. Mike hopes that through his writing he can, in some small way, share this gift with others.

John Shanks has previously provided covers for TQF16 and TQF26. He has his own website – Homegrown Goodness – from which you can request bespoke cartooning, or purchase his hilarious animal encyclopedias.

Jim Steel has had stories in recent issues of Cutting Teeth, Polluto, Premonitions, Twisted Tongue, Dark Horizons and Beeswax. More should turn up soon in Supernatural Tales and Arkham Tales. He’s the reviews editor for Interzone, and he also reviews for Vector, The Fix, The Zone, VideoVista, Soundchecks and formerly Whispers of Wickedness.

Stephen Theaker didn’t leave himself room for an editorial in this issue, but he hopes you still enjoy this special marriage-threatening double-length issue. He was responsible for the blurry photograph of a mushroom that slightly spoils this issue, and conducted the BFSQ&A interview with Lev Grossman..

Ally Thompson is a prolific neo-surrealist artist whose work has graced many galleries and homes and private collections in America and Europe since he graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1980.

Douglas Thompson’s stories have appeared most recently in Ambit, New Writing Scotland, Subtle Edens, Dark Horizons and TQF. “Vivienne’s Garden” is from his second novel, Sylvow. His first, Ultrameta, is due to be published this month by Eibonvale (see www.glasgowsurrealist.com/douglas).

Arthur Wang is an art major in college. He loves all things imaginary, wondrous and grand or dark and disgusting. He loves ideas, “what-if’s” and the way that being an illustrator puts him in contact with other people who share his passion. Visit http://arthurwangart.com/projects.html.

Sunday, 7 June 2009

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #29

So here is TQF29, seven stories high. Douglas Thompson takes the lead, with the eerie and poetic "Madame Mortadore & the Clouds". "Foundling" by Nick Sansone follows a painter through a troubled life. "Imaginary Prisons" by David Tallerman has a good deal to say on the subject of prophecies. John Hall delivers the last of his forgotten stories to our horror section, "The Feaster from the Stars". Its final image is unforgettable. John Greenwood then lets us have it three times in the third eye, as Newton Braddell wends his hopeless way across the world. The review section contains the usual batch from me, as well as ones by John Greenwood, Rafe McGregor and Steve Redwood, who consider Morpheus Tales #3, a Hound of the Baskervilles graphic novel, and Midnight Street #12 respectively.

No Essays This Time

There’s only room for the tiniest of editorials [or at least there was on the page this editorial originally appeared on!] – we’re trying to keep each issue down to eighty pages for the rest of the year and we’ve got seven fantastic stories and lots of reviews to fit in. Have a great time in here!

Editorial

No Essays This Time, Stephen Theaker

Fantasy

Madame Mortadore & the Clouds, by Douglas Thompson
Foundling, by Nick Sansone
Imaginary Prisons, by David Tallerman

Horror

The Feaster from the Stars, by John Hall

Science Fiction

Newton Braddell: An Exile in Loungewear, The Man in the Tree, In the Valley of the Speakers; all by John Greenwood

The Quarterly Review

Books

One
Peckinpah: an Ultraviolent Romance
On Basilisk Station
The Wailing Asteroid
Halo
Tom Swift and the Visitor From Planet X

Comics

100 Bullets, Vol. 1: First Shot, Last Call
100 Bullets, Vol. 2: Split Second Chance
The Hound of the Baskervilles: a Sherlock Holmes Graphic Novel
Be a Nose!

Magazines

Midnight Street #12
Morpheus Tales #3
Phobia #1

Movies

Star Trek

Also Received

But Not Yet Reviewed

Here are the people who made it all worthwhile…

John Hall’s collection of Lovecraftian tales, probably to be called Five Forgotten Stories, will be published by Theaker’s Paperback Library later this year. He is best known as a Sherlockian scholar, and a member of the International Pipe Smokers’ Hall of Fame. His numerous literary interests include Raffles, Sexton Blake, H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James. He is the author of Special Commission, a medieval murder mystery. Previous stories by John appeared in TQF23 (TQF#23) (“Shaggai”), TQF25 (TQF#25) (“In the Vale of Pnath”), TQF26 (TQF#26) (“The Burrower Beneath”) and TQF28 ("The Stairs in the Crypt").

Steve Redwood’s short story collection, Broken Symmetries, will be published in August by Doghorn Press. His review of Midnight Street 12 appears in this issue.

Nick Sansone has worked as a wildland firefighter and environmental do-gooder in the National Forests of the western United States. He typically spends his summers in the UK, working as an academic administrator for a theater program at Oxford College.

John Singer Sargent was the painter of Madame X, a detail from which appears on this issue’s cover.

David Tallerman can be found online at http://davidtallerman.net. His fiction has appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Pseudopod, Hub and Dark Horizons.

Douglas Thompson’s stories have previously appeared in TQF28 and Dark Horizons 54, with another to appear in Dark Horizons 55. He won the Grolsch/Herald New Writing Award in 1989, and second prize in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition in 2007. His stories have been widely published in magazines and anthologies, most recently Ambit, New Writing Scotland, Subtle Edens and Dark Horizons. “Madame Mortadore & the Clouds” is from his first novel/collection Ultrameta which will be published in August 2009 by Eibonvale.

Rafe McGregor recently celebrated the publication of his historical thriller, The Architect of Murder. He contributes a fine review to this issue.

John Greenwood is everything you wish you were, and a tiny bit more!

Stephen Theaker is smaller than the garden of your uncle, but larger than the pen of your aunt. He wrote many of this issue’s reviews.

Thursday, 4 June 2009

Thieving Fear, by Ramsey Campbell

Four friends camped at the coast as youngsters, and had a very bad night’s sleep. Years later, returning to the spot as adults, something is triggered, and things rapidly decline for them, in very subtle ways. They can’t seem to communicate properly with each other. Their lives
are turning to crap, and there doesn’t seem to be anything they can do about it.

One of the most common complaints about horror films is that if people just told each what’s going on, most of their problems could be solved (Lost has always been notorious for the same thing). That could easily have provided the inspiration for this book. Why don’t they talk to each other? What if they can’t? What if something is stopping them? So it’s all about characters who talk at cross-purposes, mishear and misconstrue words, and run everything through the filter of their own misery. In short, it’s extremely realistic!

That makes this a profoundly miserable and often frustrating reading experience, but a brilliant one. I haven’t read anything so determined to make (and unafraid of making) the reader miserable since Dostoevskys’s Notes from the Underground. For example, it begins with one lead being unfairly accused of racism in an employment tribunal… The weak point of human society and relationships (or maybe the thing that makes society possible!) is the imperfection of communication between us, and this book hammered away at that until it gave. It was very ambitious and difficult – you’d have thought it the work of a angry young man, if it wasn’t for the absolute confidence of every word. I loved it.

Except for one thing, that is: the absence of commas before speech. I read an afterword by Campbell to one of his books where he had a little rant about small-minded proofreaders adding commas to his work. It’s easy to overdo them, but they’re generally useful and their absence in some circumstances causes confusion. The problem here is that if someone’s talking, it says something like: he said “Goodbye to the world”. The comma that should appear after “said” tells you something, it tells you to break what follows off from the descriptive text, it’s a separate utterance by a different person, the character instead of the narrator. Its total absence in this book means the reader must constantly back up after realising some speech is being reported. Yes, it’s a little thing, but it isn’t half infuriating, and in at least one place here it is difficult to be sure whether the text within the quote marks has even been said. Maybe it’s a small thing, but those conventions are there to help the reader, and omitting them is like leaving marbles on the stairs of a story.

Somehow, though, I survived the absence of commas to finish Thieving Fear just an hour before the close of voting. This was the first Ramsey Campbell book I’ve read, and a BFS member told me it wasn’t his best. Well, if that’s not his best, I’ve got some good reading ahead of me! I suppose I was hit with all his good qualities at once, whereas an existing fan would compare it as much to his previous works as to the other nominees. For me this was in a different league to the other books (though I think the best individual scene of any of the novels was in Rain Dogs, in the flooded estate, with the creatures coming up out of the water to tear people apart), and it had to get my vote.

Thieving Fear, Ramsey Campbell, Virgin Books, pb, 320pp

Star Trek

Let’s not be too harsh on recent generations of Star Trek. Sure, after Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica it’s difficult to sit through an entire episode. The pacing is glacial, the humour damn gentle and sex is concealed behind head-to-toe grey jumpsuits. There are way too many scenes of people chatting at desks, and the productions are as set-bound as Tim Burton. But let’s not forget that The Next Generation was brilliant for its time. Its competition wasn’t BSG or new Who, or even Farscape or B5 – in 1987 it was up against crud like ALF and Airwolf, and in comparison it shone.

Later series like Voyager and Enterprise failed to move with the times, and stuck to the same old formula – dreary office chats, a small primary crew whose safety was assured, and story arcs that were half-hearted at best and hopelessly disorganised at worst. Season three of Enterprise upped the ante with a 24-style terrorist hunt, but it was too late, and with death on the horizon a bargain-basement season four devoted itself to out-and-out fan service, leading to some of the most entertaining, Trekky Trek in years – the place to look if you’ve ever wondered why Klingons once had smooth foreheads.

Enterprise’s biggest flaw, though, was its safety. It was about the first Enterprise sent out into a hostile universe – and even though Kirk and Spock, years later, would find themselves encountering the unknown on a weekly basis, Archer’s crew did nothing but visit planets already discovered by the Vulcans. And hardly anyone ever died.

On the big screen, the last two films were crippled (just like The X-Files: I Want to Believe) by the palpable need to give its stars “scenes” at the expense of story. The last Star Trek film, Nemesis, was diabolically dull, essentially two hours of two spaceships floating in space and pointing at each other.

This movie puts right everything that had gone wrong with Star Trek. It’s beautiful, sexy, cool and dangerous. Sex, spaceships, fist-fights and death are restored to their proper places at the heart of the franchise: the girls are wearing mini-skirts, the men have permanently bruised knuckles, the spaceships smash each other to pieces, and redshirts regularly bite the dust.

For the first forty minutes or so I was convinced it was the best movie I’d ever seen, that I’d be sending my wife and child home on their own so that I could watch it again. It didn’t quite live up to that early promise, dropping off slightly somewhere around the point that Kirk runs around with big rubber hands, but was nevertheless extremely entertaining, and easily my favourite film of the year so far.

There are flaws. Nero’s big scary spaceship looks pretty much the same as the big scary spaceship in Nemesis, and while its industrial interior makes sense for a mining ship, it’s nothing we haven’t seen dozens of times before during Voyager’s journey across the Delta Quadrant. It would have benefited from the same level of invention and TLC evidently lavished on the Enterprise. Also, time-travelling Nero’s attempt to destroy the nascent Federation is an unwelcome reminder of Enterprise’s abysmal Temporal Cold War storyline. But those are minor issues, and after all there have been hundreds of episodes of the various programmes – the film couldn’t have been entirely original without jettisoning everything that makes it Star Trek.

The cast is excellent: Chris Pine as Kirk gets everything right. At 29 I think he’s the first Star Trek captain (except maybe Kate Mulgrew) under 40 since Shatner himself (both character and actor are about six years younger than the originals). Zachary Quinto as Spock was note-perfect, though it was hard to forget how sick I am of seeing his face in Heroes. Zoe Saldana as Uhura (now the most important character after Kirk and Spock) is convincingly smart and capable. Karl Urban is fantastic as Bones. Bruce Greenwood is a brilliant, brave Captain Pike. Simon Pegg makes a great engineer, while John Cho makes me wish they’d found room on the bridge for Kal Penn too. The only actor to come out of the film less than well is Eric Bana – he struggles to make any kind of impact, with little screen time and little to do.

This is the Star Trek film for anyone who saw Galaxy Quest and wondered why they couldn’t do it for real.

Now, what happens next? In the original continuity, this film would take place between Captain Pike’s two five year missions. This time around, Kirk’s got his hands on the ship a good six years early, but he’s got six years’ less experience. He hasn’t served on the Farragut, he hasn’t had time to make mistakes, and by the end of the film, the galaxy is a much less hospitable place. The measure of this film’s success isn’t just its box office receipts (gratifyingly huge though they are), but also how much everyone will be looking forward to the next one.

Star Trek, JJ Abrams (dir.), Paramount

On Basilisk Station, by David Weber

Honor Harrington is given a new ship and assigned to Basilisk Station. It’s a poisoned chalice, but she’s going to do her duty, whatever it costs her.

Anyone who enjoyed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, especially the cat-and-mouse battle at its conclusion – and who didn’t? – will thoroughly enjoy this; it’s very much more of the same. Later Trek series were probably influenced in turn by this book.

This is old-fashioned stuff in some ways. The idea of villains being motivated by a desire to pay unemployment benefits is almost charming in its 1980s-style silliness. The set-up is rather like Thatcherite Britain at threat from a European Union gone bad. Or are the aggressors more like Argentina, trying to relieve internal pressures with expansionist policies, making a quick grab for territory? Basilisk Station is as distant from its owners as the Falklands, but much more strategically important.

Less charming is the unreconstructed colonialism that sees the heroes threatened by a native uprising… The conclusion of that storyline is especially stomach-churning, and not quite in the way the author intended. It’s notable that not one of the natives gets a speaking role in the book (unless I missed it), but by gum we get to see their blood.

But though it can be criticised for being old-fashioned in that way, it can also be praised for its progressive feminism. Here we have a female captain who can hold her own with the best of them, and what’s more a crew evenly divided between men and women. To a degree critics could argue that this isn’t true feminism: being a woman is to some extent still a handicap she has to surmount. It’s not something that simply goes unmentioned, or that’s considered irrelevant to the performance of her duties, it’s a problem that’s there to create drama. But I think in the end such considerations are outweighed by her repeated demonstrations of utmost competence.

The influence of Hornblower is acknowledged by the author in an afterword, and readers of C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian may see this as a shallow, clumsily-written imitation. However, I only got through those books by pretending the ships were flying around in space, so that was fine by me. Weber shows particular ingenuity in finding ways to make naval-style tactics relevant to space battles. And where the battles here score above any iteration of Star Trek, for example, is that anything can happen: nobody, except Honor herself, is safe. None of the actors have got a contract in hand for series two…

One of the other pleasures of the book is a simple one: someone doing their job really well. Watching how Honor manages to handle everything thrown at her is very enjoyable, and you can’t help but root for her to come through. She’s an expert in man-management: she displays exceptional tact and understanding to gain the trust of her crew. The way she slowly wins them over is nothing we haven’t seen before, but it never gets old. (Season one of The Closer, for example, featured an almost identical plotline.)

So: highly recommended for anyone who ever wished Patrick O’Brian was a science fiction writer. Note that On Basilisk Station (what a great title, by the way) is available to read for free in a variety of formats from the Baen Books free library, which has definitely done its job here: there’s no doubt that I’ll be reading further volumes in the series.

On Basilisk Station, by David Weber, Baen, pb, 464pp

Phobia #1, ed. Darren Randle

In some ways reviewing this is unfair to everyone involved. It’s a magazine that’s been put together for fun but without any real talent. As a writing group’s internal magazine it would be fine, but thanks to the internet it’s been published in full view of the world, and it doesn’t stand up to such scrutiny.

The stories range from the more or less passable, such as “The Piece” by William J. Piovano, to the Vogonically awful.

For example, “Monday” by Mary C. White is probably the worst story I’ve ever read. I can’t help but feel guilty for criticising it, since it’s really the editor’s fault for putting it out there for people to read – the poor writer should have been left in unhumiliated obscurity – but on the other hand it would be dishonest to let something so appalling pass without comment in a review. Here’s an example of the prose:

“The usual Monday morning call took to the tape on the answering machine, the voice giving birth to the last words quivering in pain. Another bridged pass day, and another last Monday of the month absence would never be removed from a personal file.”

Mary’s bio says that she has several novels set for publication in 2009.

The magazine is filled with mistakes from start to finish. It’s hard to believe anyone has even read this material before publication, let alone edited or proofread it. Story titles include “The Mostquito Woman” and “Echos”, and typesetting errors abound (paragraphs mistakenly centred, tab spaces in the middle of sentences, etc). The writers involved seem to share a complete ignorance regarding the use of apostrophes. Some dispense with them entirely, others add them in the strangest places. For example in “The Lake” Stuart Twyman writes: “The creature cocks its’ head … opens its’ mouth & its’ slavering lips engulf the mans’ face.” Note that he uses ampersands instead of “and” throughout the story.

Overall, despite some moody artwork from Bob Veon, and a striking cover design, Phobia #1 is a mess. It’s a shame, since Darren Randle is a really nice guy. He’s just, on this evidence, a totally hopeless editor.

Phobia #1, Darren Randle (ed.).

One, by Conrad Williams

The superb movie-style cover of this book tells you all you need to know about the plot going in: a man walks to London through a devastated Britain. Despite the tagline – This is you. This is now. And your number is up. – the book isn’t written in the second person, which was a relief.

In the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Peter Nicholls notes in the entry “Holocaust and After” that: “Many of the authors cited have not been closely associated with Genre SF. The post-holocaust theme, particularly in the UK, has had a strong attraction for mainstream writers…” Like those cosy catastrophes of the 1950s, One presents a very literary apocalypse. It’s not a novel concerned with investigating the problems and solving them – answers are thin on the ground – it’s about the feelings they engender and the relationships they rupture.

It’s written in fine style, with expressive touches of flair throughout, but at times this felt rather like a literary author doing his level best to write the most commercial novel possible – a widescreen horror novel – but partially thwarted by his own sensibilities. And so the novel is packed with interesting character moments and striking images, but frustratingly skips past much of the action. We’re never in any doubt as to exactly how Richard Jane feels, but we’re often left rather foggy about what’s actually going on. That makes sense, since Jane himself is often in that same situation, but it’s frustrating for the reader.

But then this isn’t really a book about the apocalypse – it’s a book about a father’s love for his son. Though that side of it had a lasting impact on me – I find myself saying no to my children much less since reading One – it did get a little bit dull. The author shows how difficult Jane’s obsession with his lost son is for other people to cope with, but he may have underestimated how tiresome it would become for readers: by the end of the book the reader comes to fear the mention of Stanley as much as any of the horrors of this nightmarish world.

As usual I’m complaining about minor problems rather than focusing on what was good. This was on the whole a thrilling book, and one I found hard to put down (not that I tried): I read the last 250 pages in more or less one go. I was at all times desperate to find out what would happen next (which probably explains my frustration when the novel slowed for an emotional bit). The apocalyptic opening was nothing short of brilliant, and if the subsequent long walk went on a bit, things really picked up in the second half, in ways I wouldn’t want to reveal in a review.

Overall, a fine novel, but just a bit too ruminatory and elliptical to be the effective mainstream entertainment I was hoping for. In post-apocalyptic movie terms I’d place it just ahead of Neil Marshall’s Doomsday, but just behind 28 Days Later.

One, Conrad Williams, Virgin Books, pb, 364pp.

Friday, 24 April 2009

Showcase Presents: Supergirl, Vol. 1, Jerry Siegel, Curt Swan and others

An enjoyable book but not really a remarkable one. Some elements quickly became very repetitive (the robot who fills in as Linda Lee while Supergirl is on adventures, the would-be adoptive parents who must be put off, and so on), but the stories improved as they went on. A few things struck me as interesting…

For one, it seems strange that Supergirl wears a black wig all day long, then takes it off when in costume, even though no one ever sees her (during this period Superman insists on her acting secretly, so that he can keep her in reserve as a secret weapon). For that matter, why does she even wear a bright costume if she doesn’t want to be seen?

The silliest wig-wearing is in the imaginary story “Ma and Pa Kent Adopt Supergirl”, in which the Kents make the poor girl wear a black wig from the age of five (or so), just to lay the groundwork for an adult secret identity! Maybe wigs don’t bother Supergirl: her head is invulnerable, so perhaps it doesn’t get all hot and itchy. But then that would imply that she can’t feel any sensations of hot or cold at all, and I’m pretty sure that she can.

Another story of interest was “Supergirl’s Busiest Day”, in which, just to protect her secret identity, she sucks all the air out of a room to render her fellow orphans unconscious. She exits at super-speed, thinking to herself, “I opened and shut the door so quickly, more oxygen didn’t have time to enter the room! I’ll be back in a flash!” Good job she didn’t get delayed… It’s just another example of the way that rules are above all the most important things in Super-stories of this period.

“Supergirl in Smallville” raised some interesting questions. She travels back to the Smallville of Superman’s youth, in a bid to show him that she could successfully conceal her secret identity while living with a family. So she stays with the Kents, introducing herself to the teenage Clark as an out-of-town cousin. But she is still wearing her Supergirl costume under her clothes… So the whole plot depends upon Clark not using his x-ray vision to look under girls’ clothes. Now I’m not casting aspersions upon Clark’s morality; if there’s one teenage boy in the world who wouldn’t, it’s him (though he did check out Lois’s underwear in the first movie). But it’s sort of funny for the whole story to rely on it.

But how many of the writers of these stories would have expected anyone to still be reading them and picking them apart forty years later? They were designed to be read once by an eager child…

Showcase Presents: Supergirl, Vol. 1, Jerry Siegel, Curt Swan and others, DC Comics, tpb, 528pp.

Showcase Presents: Legion of Super-Heroes, Vol. 2, Jerry Siegel et al

The last time I checked in with the Legion it seemed to be in a complete mess. Towards the end of the original Legion saga things went wrong with the introduction of the Legionnaires (teenage versions of the adult heroes, who were either clones or the original heroes rescued from suspended animation), and things went pretty badly for Earth. Following Zero Hour the whole story was rebooted, and since then I get the impression that it’s been rebooted one or two times more, though I haven’t kept up to date. Reading these stories makes you wonder how DC got into such a mess.

Of all super-hero stories, the Legion is the easiest to keep perpetually new – rotate the older heroes out, and bring in new members to replace them. It’s been part of the premise from the very beginning. Why on Earth anyone thought introducing a bunch of clones or rebooting the entire saga was a better idea is beyond me. So while the ongoing saga of the JSA grows ever weightier, the Legion has become nothing more than a series of fuzzier and fuzzier photocopies of itself. Would Doctor Who have been better off if both the TV movie and the new series had kicked off with Ian and Barbara wondering why one of their pupils is so preternaturally clever? Clearly not.

Never mind: at some point I’m sure someone who cares enough will reveal the years since Zero Hour to have been a plot of the Time Trapper, the Legion will find a way to put the broken pieces of Earth back together, and a bunch of brand new teenagers will be invited to join the team. Don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not one of the people who always want the originals reinstated. What I want is for stories to continue and develop.

In this book, though, you see everything going right, everything that was so good about the Legion. The stories follow on from one issue to the next. Towards the end there is a series of multi-part sagas, but even before that decisions in one issue will have ramifications explored in future stories. Characters die, lose limbs, leave and join the team, and, best of all, start to develop personalities. When reading “Computo the Conqueror” I gave a little cheer to see Brainiac 5 getting grumpy for the first time. “What is this–” he shouted via the tele-monitor, “a private lab or Grand Central Spaceport? Can’t you read, Chameleon Boy? Shove off!”

Lots of notable issues here, but for now the most memorable is “The Legionnaire Who Killed”, mainly for the panel where Invisible Kid yells to Star Boy, “Come on and join us, Star Boy… We’re having the big computer decide who’d have the most fun kissing whom! It’s a riot!” Chameleon Boy can be seen snogging away with Light Lass. Star Boy declines, leading Invisible Kid to note, “Funny… Star Boy never seems to have time for romance!” Seems like Invisible Kid is carrying a torch!

There’s lots of similarly enjoyable daffiness in these pages, and if the actual enemies tend too often to lameness, that’s forgivable when the heroes are so interesting and varied.

Showcase Presents: Legion of Super-Heroes, Vol. 2, Jerry Siegel et al, DC Comics, tpb, 528pp.

The Time Traders, Andre Norton

There are two novels in this volume. In the first, The Time Traders, time travellers go back to ancient Britain and find aliens there – or are they future humans? Exciting at times, but a little uninspired.

In the second, Galactic Derelict, the time travellers recover a spaceship from ten thousand years in the past, only for its pre-programmed flight to be launched once they return to the present day. It’s a fascinating idea – the worlds the ship takes them to are now long-abandoned, the buildings in ruins, the people reduced to living like animals.

It’s odd, though, that the time travellers say things like “We may never know the reason or answer to any questions about them”, clearly forgetting that they possess time travel technology that could be brought out to these abandoned worlds one day. But there are more books in the series – maybe that thought occurs to them later.

Like the first novel, Galactic Derelict has exciting moments, but suffers at times from a slight dullness.

Note that this entire book is available to download from the Baen Books free library.

The Time Traders, Andre Norton, Baen, pb, 448pp.

Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale, Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook

An absolutely brilliant book. Doctor Who’s been blessed with a wonderful range of non-fiction works over the years, not least among them Benjamin Cook’s book on the audio adventures, but this tops them all.

You get to see what goes through the mind of the man presiding over what’s arguably the greatest triumph of modern British television. There are dozens of surprises in here. Sometimes it’s how early some things happened (Steven Moffat had written the first pages of episode 5.1 – to be broadcast in 2010 – by 13 January 2008), and sometimes how late they were left (Russell Davies is still writing 4.13 on 18 February 2008 – only a few months before broadcast).

You learn about scenes that weren’t filmed, scenes that were but went unused, companions who missed their chance, and all sorts of other things. Don’t show your face on the Outpost Gallifrey forums without having read this from cover to cover: you’ll seem hopelessly uninformed.

And once you’ve read it, hopefully you won’t post on there without considering the effect that a needlessly cruel comment can have on the people putting in sixteen-hour days to make this programme…

Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale, Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook, Random House, hb, 512pp.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #28

This is one of our most interesting and varied issues yet. It starts in the best possible way with "Quadrant Five" – a bunch of people on a spaceship going who knows where. That's followed by the next riveting instalment of Newton Braddell and a short-short from Josie Gowler, "Soldier", before things get rather literary with the double-barrelled strangeness of "Breaking Out of Sleep" and "Anatomy of a Wounded House", from Barry Pomeroy and Douglas Thompson respectively. Then John Hall wonders whether you dare descend "The Stairs in the Crypt", and Jason Hinchcliffe tells the saga of the "Bloodbegotten". I round out the issue with a bunch of my famously perspicacious reviews – what have I decreed to be "well-written", "brilliant" and "superb" this time around?

In Love Again

When I first saw the Sony Reader in Waterstones I was really impressed by the e-paper screen, the way the text looked as if it was printed on the surface – it looked really easy to read. But I wasn’t impressed by how sluggish it was – it took ages to move from one option to another. And I made myself look a bit stupid by trying to choose options by touching them with my finger (the Rocket eBook has a touchscreen).

I decided to wait for the Kindle. And wait… And wait…

Eventually my patience ran out and I spent some money I don’t really have on a Sony Reader. It’s turned out to be the best money I shouldn’t have spent since I got a TiVo!

I absolutely love it. What makes all the difference is that where the Rocket eBook was heavier and more cumbersome than most books, the Sony Reader is lighter and less cumbersome than most of them.

The bundled software from Sony is pretty much unusable, and gave me a few early jitters of buyer’s remorse, but once I downloaded Calibre the love affair was on. It’s now stuffed to the gills with classics from the free CD from Sony, creative commons and out-of-copyright sf from Feedbooks, newspapers created from The Guardian and BBC websites via Feedbooks, epub files from Project Gutenberg, submissions and proofs for TQF and Dark Horizons, pdf review copies from PS Publishing and Eibonvale, ebooks from Fictionwise, not to mention a bunch of music and photos.

I’m stunned at how brilliantly it handles pdf files – I wouldn’t have thought it possible. At the smallest magnification setting it shows the pdf as is, and then at medium and large it blows up the main text, doing a marvellous job of ignoring white space and page numbers. It even manages to deal pretty well with a multi-column layout like the one in Dark Horizons.

One of the other brilliant features is the ability to have collections, dividing up the files by keywords so you can quickly find any of them. The Sony software doesn’t work well with them, but with Calibre you can just edit the keywords of the files on the Reader itself to sort them out directly.

Very happy with it indeed…

And then I found the Baen Books free library! Well over a hundred books (many of them omnibuses and gigantic collections) for free download. It left me in tears of joy. I ended up downloading half a dozen books I already own, just because it’ll be so much easier reading them this way.

If I’d found those same books going cheap in a bookshop, I admit that I would still have bought them. But I would have had a problem finding somewhere for them to go. I long ago reached the point where I had no more room for books in the house. I’ve got (checks Goodreads) 1,131 paper books to read, and another thousand or two that I’ve already read. There’s nowhere to put any new books, and any time I do put a book down, chances are I’ll lose it. For example, I’ve got a review copy of Conrad Williams’ One to read, but I’ve lost it half a dozen times already… On the other hand, I can find any ebooks on the Sony Reader in about ten seconds, and store unlimited numbers of books on the computer.

I’m now free to buy and collect books again without worrying about where to put them. I can donate a lot of the classics I own to charity shops, since they’re all on Gutenberg. It’s really nice, too, to be able to request review copies and not worry about what it costs someone.

I wrote a bit about this in my editorial for the new Dark Horizons – before I got my Reader – and I do still agree with what I said there, that for most people this’ll be a solution to a problem they don’t have. But for me personally, it’s a huge improvement in my life – a lifehack as big as getting TiVo or buying my first PC.

The other day I went over to my wife’s parents’ house with it, and started reading a book. Then two kids jumped in my lap and I switched to Little Wizard Tales of Oz from Gutenberg and read that to them. Then my father-in-law came in, so I let him read the BBC news on it. Eventually the room was empty apart from me so I could concentrate properly and I got started on reading some submissions. It’s every book I need it to be…

I’ve even got the perfect bag to put it in – the Bagbase mini reporter. It’s like I’m wearing a tricorder…

Some people talk about the feel and smell of paper books. I can understand that to some extent, but that isn’t a love of the literature within those pages: it’s fetishism for the way they are presented. The story counts more than the format. The question about the format is how much of a barrier it puts between me and the story, how much it gets in the way, how it holds up my reading. We’re used to the inconveniences associated with paper books, but, really, they are anything but comfortable and relaxing. Think of all that bother holding the thing open, for starters, especially when reading in bed… Trying to find the right angle to catch the light properly… Keeping your place in the book… Peering at the words sinking into the spine…

After using ebooks for a while even turning the page seems like a time-consuming chore! Reading an ebook (on the right device) can be much more immersive and quite a bit quicker than reading it on paper – it’s just you and the story, with no hassle. I’ve found I read things about 20% faster on the Sony Reader, and it’s not because I’m rushing, it’s because there are fewer distractions from the actual reading.

I doubt anyone would really find reading a 500pp+ paperback, let alone hardback, more comfortable than reading the same thing on a Sony Reader. Look at it this way: anytime you find yourself needing two hands to read a book, that’s a hand more than you need for the Sony Reader!

Another point is that books, just like music, tv, films and photographs, are so much more accessible as files. Then think about the ease of actually buying the books that you want to read. Within a year or two buying any book ever published could take just minutes, instead of years spending trawling second-hand bookshops and eBay.

As far as cost goes, taking into account things like Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg and Google Books – plus initiatives like the Baen Books free library – the average cost of an ebook is much lower than paper books, since anything published more than a hundred years ago is totally free.

The one thing I miss is being able to add notes to what I’m reading (which I could do on the Rocket eBook), but apparently you can get some special accessories for the Sony Reader – a “pen” and “paper”. I’ll report back on these novelties in a future editorial, though at first glance they seem much more awkward than using a keyboard…

Editorial

In Love Again, by Stephen Theaker

News & Comment

China Mieville at Forbidden Planet
The Very Best of Gene Wolfe
The Tombs of Telos Are Opened Once More
Iris Wildthyme to the Rescue!

Science Fiction

Quadrant Five, by Anne Marie Gomez
Newton Braddell: a Constant, Gnawing Hunger, by John Greenwood
Soldier, by Josie Gowler
Breaking Out of Sleep, by Barry Pomeroy

Horror

Anatomy of a Wounded House, by Douglas Thompson
The Stairs in the Crypt, by John Hall

Fantasy

Bloodbegotten, by Jason Hinchcliffe