The Orphan Palace by Joseph S. Pulver Sr – reviewed by John Greenwood

What would be an effective method to convey a character’s emotion of overwhelming hatred, say for his parents? Here’s how Joseph S. Pulver Sr goes about it in The Orphan Palace (Chômu Press, pb, 376pp):

“The HATE…The HATE…grinding…The HATE…LARGER…LARGER…hatehatehatehatehate…”

These are techniques that Pulver uses throughout the novel: ellipses (more than in any other book I’ve read), sentence fragments or just single isolated words, words capitalised for emphasis, words run together, and of course repetition (of the fourteen words in this fragment, eight are just the word “hate”). It doesn’t express, it just reminds us what the author should have found some means of expressing.

To describe The Orphan Palace as experimental fiction doesn’t give much of an indication of how Pulver organises his material. “Stream-of-consciousness” isn’t a term that helps much either, because the chains of sentence fragments, strung along long threads of ellipses like a funky gothic necklace, are not merely an attempt to reproduce the inner monologue of the protagonist. This is fairly typical:

“The stiff wall of Nightblack frozen forever takes all of you into its disaster of old rage… 

The monster mask growls, hungry knife-thorn swallows dawn.

Smears ointments of blind worm seed and dead tongue curse on crouching hearts smashed on Null…

The blind moon-tempest mask ringing with translations of All Fall Down-rises, its seven torch-eyes writhe…shines as a shadow drinking the tear-miles of open blood veins…”

I suppose you could call it a prose-poem, or beat poetry, but what it brings to mind most readily is the lyric sheet of a heavy metal band. Like an extended rock opera, there are whole pages where no line reaches the other side of the page, and no sentence finds its full stop, on occasion even using the “/” character to break the line. Pulver quotes Springsteen before the book gets going, and lists his preferred soundtrack at the end. Since the advent of Spotify it would be possible for readers to listen to Pulver’s recommended tracks while working through the book, but the artists he cites (from Kronos Quartet to Steve Earle) have little in common with his unvarying vocabulary of blood, death, sexual predation and insanity, familiar to me from early eighties metal bands (Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Accept, Dio, early Metallica) but no doubt still the core business of contemporary metal and goth bands. When not staring into the Abyss, Pulver has us adrift in a small-town America of sleazy bars and cheap motels, whisky slugged from the bottle and cold coffee from paper cups, easy girls drawn to the mysterious drifter (morphing into the iconography of Hair Metal).

It’s not all improvised coda: there is a plot, and it concerns Cardigan, ex-inmate of an occult, abusive orphanage, hard-drinker, arsonist and serial killer, who is making his way East across the USA, shooting up lonely gas stations, burning down motels, picking up women in bars before murdering them and mutilating their bodies. He’s on a mission of revenge against the evil Dr Archer, whose obscure but depraved experiments on the kids in his charge have turned Cardigan into a monster. Along the way, Cardigan tries to penetrate the mystery of a series of pulp noirish novels he finds in every motel room he visits, and is advised along the way by a number of supernatural or perhaps hallucinatory mentors.

A lot of strange things happen: plot devices are introduced (such as a coin to magically detect lies, and a ghoulish impregnation) and are promptly forgotten about. Stranger still, Cardigan, who is seen casually slashing up women for fun in the first half of the book, is by the second half almost one of the good guys, at worst troubled, if rather more than misunderstood. An old friend from the orphanage urges him to give up his quest and settle down to run a beachside bar with him, as though we had switched channels from American Psycho and found ourselves in the closing scenes of The Shawshank Redemption. His violent outbursts start to take on a more moralising intent. He murders a man who tries to hit a dog in a park, and I got the impression that I was invited to applaud this vigilante justice. He confronts a violent pimp and sets the prostitutes free, imploring them to go and seek the light. Oddest of all, Cardigan shoots the pimp’s bodyguards, only to find them alive and well on the next page, and slays them again.

Over and above such slips, any reader without amnesia or psychopathy should be wondering how this is the same character who was driving around with a woman’s severed nipple in his pocket just a few days previously. And despite over three hundred and fifty pages of impulsive slaughter, theft and arson, the police only appear in the book once, and show no interest in Cardigan’s rampage. While I wasn’t expecting social realism, the complete lack of consequences in The Orphan Palace gives it the feel of somebody who has discovered a cheat to turn off the cops and gain powers of invincibility in Grand Theft Auto.

The best that can be said of The Orphan Palace is that it has a restless, grotesque fecundity, like the random strings of images and words that one is aware of just before sleep descends:

“…a face in the bridal chamber mirror…Baby…HER FACE…BABY…a serpent with seven eyes…I LOVE YOU…the skull of an angel kissed by the mysteries of the worm…she bellows…I will possess your demon art…I knit gloom with your October fables…fly back to the Stygian dew of my texture spread in regal luster…”

But the language sticks so closely to the clichés of Lovecraftian gothic horror that it becomes predictable. The slackness of the narrative, combined with these long stretches of formless ranting about the Hounds of Tindalos and other such touchstones of weird fiction, make The Orphan Palace a slog through well-trodden territory with little compensation other than the grim satisfaction of having made it to the last page.

Still, you have to hand it to Chômu Press. Since 2010 they have been publishing unclassifiable out-on-a-limb fiction on a punishing schedule (twenty books at my last count), in elegantly strange covers that ought to be the envy of mainstream publishers. Like specialist species of insect hiding away in their narrow ecological niches, small presses have traditionally thrived in very well-defined sub-genres where there is a limited but proven supply of readers. Chômu (Japanese for “dreaming butterfly”) is a different creature altogether, willing, one might even say anxious, to take chances on authors who are similarly drawn to such risky behaviour in their writing. Sometimes these risks pay off (see the review of Justin Isis’s collection of short stories from TQF35), but not here.

Doctor Who: Shada by Gareth Roberts – reviewed by Jacob Edwards

DNA, the Doctor, and another punt at Cambridge. Doctor Who: Shada by Gareth Roberts, based on the original scripts by Douglas Adams (BBC Books, hb, 407pp).

When Chris Parsons, in an attempt to impress a girl he’s serially failed to declare his love for, borrows some books on carbon dating from retired Cambridge don Professor Chronotis, he has no idea that the Professor is actually a Time Lord, that Chronotis’s college room is the inside of a TARDIS, or that one of the books Chris has borrowed is, in fact, the most dangerous book in the entire universe. As the coldly villainous Skagra appears on campus, armed with a mind-sucking sphere, and intent on unlocking the secret of Shada (the long-lost prison planet of the Time Lords), Chris finds himself embroiled in it all and, to his own enduring bafflement, hitchhiking through time and space with a long-scarfed eccentric known to all and sundry (even the college porter) as the Doctor.

Had Douglas Adams novelised his three Doctor Who scripts, it seems likely that readers could have traversed his Hitchhiker’s and Doctor Who books as if they were all part of the same, skewed Möbius strip. (Or, throw in Dirk Gently and one could lap them up as if drinking from a Klein bottle.) Adams’s first attempted involvement with Doctor Who was a rejected script, Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen, which he later novelised, sans the Doctor, as Life, the Universe and Everything. His first actual involvement came as the result of submitting his pilot Hitchhiker’s script to the Doctor Who production office, whereupon he was commissioned to write The Pirate Planet, and subsequently taken on as script editor. It was in this capacity that he wrote City of Death (notoriously in a single, coffee-fuelled weekend) and Shada, the infamous “lost” serial that was abandoned, partially made, after strikes at the BBC. And, of course, it was from City of Death and Shada that Adams drew much of the framework for Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Everything was interconnected. And still is.

The BBC, having launched Adams to stardom through the Hitchhiker’s radio serial, inexplicably turned down the rights to the novel, just as Target Books then declined to offer Adams more than £600 per story to novelise his Doctor Who scripts. The reasons behind these precipitate non-actions have always been something of a mystery … until now, when finally the probability has been calculated of the TARDIS materialising onboard the Heart of Gold, and Douglas Adams’s lost story thus has manifested, not on film or in a paltry Target offering, but instead, at last, between the solid covers and with the gilded lettering of a BBC hardcover. This, one cannot help but feel, is what was always meant to happen when Adams threw himself at Doctor Who but missed.

Of course, Douglas Adams hasn’t actually written this new book, but Adams/Hitchhiker’s/Who fans should rest assured that, in this instance, the act of not writing it has been carried out in rather a good way. To elucidate: when Terry Jones novelised Adams’s interactive computer game Starship Titanic, expectant fans were rightfully disappointed that the book, though true to what Adams had scripted in the game, and funny enough in a Jones-ey sort of way, nevertheless carried no obvious input from Adams himself (who was very much alive at this point); and more recently, when with Adams having passed away Eoin Colfer was bequeathed the task of penning a sixth Hitchhiker’s novel, And Another Thing . . ., he did so with Adams’s characters and overt Hitchhiker’s references yet very much in Colfer’s own—not Adams’s—style. The overarching response engendered by these pseudo-Adams offerings must necessarily be a somewhat muted joy, that Adams’s imagination continues at least in some sense—but not the most important one—to produce new works. Yet, this is not the case with Gareth Roberts’ novel. With Shada, there can be no misgivings or second guessings.

Because Shada—and Adams fans should brace themselves at this point, and promise not to snarl and come after the reviewer with Agrajagian intent—is better than what Adams would have written.

“Would” rather than “could”—an important distinction, representing not the obvious tragedy that Adams is no longer with us, but instead two rather telling features of Adams’s later output (and particularly his ongoing Hitchhiker’s saga): firstly, the fact that his books post-Restaurant at the End of the Universe did not feature the Doctor or any character of equivalent strength, and yet clearly were written anyway, in full and certain knowledge of this shortcoming; and secondly, that Adams clearly had no great desire to write these books at all. The job of crafting novels had become, for Adams, an onerous, unwanted task that was necessitated, to be sure, by having accepted the six-figure advances, but in all other respects was merely a distraction from life, lunches, and everything technological. What’s more, Shada wasn’t something that Adams had fully embraced even at the time of scripting it. He’d had a different idea in mind (vetoed, unfortunately, by producer Graham Williams), and in any case was working concurrently on the Restaurant at the End of the Universe novelisation, the second Hitchhiker’s radio series, and also a script for the Hitchhiker’s television adaptation. Shada, not surprisingly, was put off and put off some more, until inviolable deadlines necessitated that it be written—in just the sort of madcap frenzy that could be guaranteed to trip all the synapses of Adams’s unparalleled imagination—and then abandoned and wiped from his brow with a sigh of relief.

Whereas Adams’s interest in Shada, then, extended no further than delving back into it and reusing the character of Professor Chronotis, Gareth Roberts has approached the story with the reverence of an Adams fan, the professional background of a long-time Doctor Who novelist, and the investigative nous of a screenwriter turned private investigator. He’s tied up the loose ends left flapping by Adams’s hasty scripting and the abandoning of Shada’s production. He’s taken the mind-blowing glut of Adams’s ideas and, while staying true to everything that Adams actually wrote for Shada, has fleshed out and made perfect sense of it all, giving depth to characters that otherwise were there just to project a stream of zany inventiveness onto, and generally managing to make a rounded, humorous novel out of what would, had it been completed, have been a no-less-funny but probably quite shambolic television production.

Roberts channels Adams’s voice remarkably well; not, perhaps, the exquisitely droll prose of Adams at his finest, but certainly the satirical frivolity of the first Hitchhiker’s radio series. In essence, he presents us with another Hitchhiker’s novel (for Arthur Dent, read Chris Parsons), but he does so far more faithfully than did Jones or Colfer, and furthermore, succeeds in the task also while staying within the bounds of—indeed, while managing to enhance—the structured universe of Doctor Who in general and in particular the iconic, some would say sacred, era of Tom Baker. Perhaps this is not so surprising, given that Adams’s Doctor Who was basically Hitchhiker’s with a more established lead character; but even so, Gareth Roberts’ novelisation is a who/ptious achievement indeed, melding Hitchhiker’s to Doctor Who in a way that Adams clearly would have loved to do when writing Life, the Universe and Everything without recourse to that same bond. It remains to be seen whether Roberts will be invited back to novelise Pirate Planet and City of Death, but if Shada is anything to go by then one might certainly hope so. For what could be better, given the constraints of history yet unexpected access to the TARDIS, than another Hitchhiker’s trilogy?

Jacob’s review originally appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine 56. For his review of And Another Thing…, see “A Biro From the Blue” in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine 44.

The Moon Moth by Humayoun Ibrahim and Jack Vance – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Adapted by Humayoun Ibrahim from the short story by Jack Vance, The Moon Moth (hb, 128pp) is another interesting comic from First Second, who previously published the very decent Orcs: Forged for War and seem to be making a praiseworthy habit of looking beyond the obvious candidates for adaptation into graphic novels. An opening introduction to Vance’s work by Carlo Rotella is not uninteresting—especially insofar as he actually visited Vance to interview him—but like Brandon Flowers discussing the Pet Shop Boys in A Life in Pop he seems rather too embarrassed about his enthusiasm for his subject. Never mind, the main course is the actual comic, and that is excellent.

Edwer Thissell has a mere three days to prepare for his mission to Sirene, a world on which he will be at constant risk of death should he give offence: the previous representative of the home worlds having been instantly beheaded after approaching a woman in the street. There is no money on Sirene, the only currency being glory—strakh—and everyone must wear masks appropriate to their strakh. Despite being the representative of one hundred billion people, Thissell is discouraged from wearing too showy a mask: “If the home planets want their representative to wear a sea-dragon conqueror mask they’d better send out a sea-dragon conqueror type man!” He settles for the lowly, dowdy moon moth.

And not only must he wear the right mask, he must sing everything he says and accompany it with a musical instrument appropriate to the status of the person to whom he is talking! After three months of music lessons and slow adjustment a message arrives: Haxo Angmark—“assassin, agent provocateur, and ruthless criminal”—has landed on Sirene and must be captured—and if not, killed without hesitation. The problem for Thissell, of course, is that Angmark is now wearing a mask, just like everybody else. In a society where murder falls under the heading of “religious differences … of no importance”, but removing a mask has the gravest possible consequences, how can Thissell unmask—literally and metaphorically—the criminal?

This is a very fine adaptation of Jack Vance’s story. The pacing is excellent, the superbly clever conclusion played to fullest effect, the art bold, vigorous and exaggerated, but ornate and detailed where necessary. Right up until the end Thissell is portrayed in a manner that’s rather more skittish than you would normally imagine of a Vance hero, with flecks of sweat flying from his mask, but in the circumstances his fearfulness is hardly unreasonable. Hilary Sycamore’s colours are nothing short of wonderful, and the lettering manages superbly the difficult task of conveying the way in which words are being sung. I will certainly look out for further work from Humayoun Ibrahim.

The Avengers – reviewed by Douglas J. Ogurek

During the opening weekend of The Avengers (Avengers Assemble in the UK), directed by Joss Whedon, Americans plunked down $207.4 million to watch their beloved Marvel superheroes join forces. The earnings, to borrow a term from the Hulk’s lexicon, “smashed” the previous record-holder, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, by over $38 million. Worldwide, The Avengers brought in over $650 million in 12 days.

Frenetic, heavy on special effects, and one-dimensional, The Avengers achieves its success by giving easily-distracted contemporary moviegoers what they crave. And this film didn’t simply materialise through a portal in the sky; it is built on a foundation of several stand-alone films that show what each Avenger is capable of independently. “And now they’re coming together?” thinks the common man. “I’ve got to see that!” Brilliant marketing.

It is this reviewer’s belief that those who paid to see this film did so for three reasons: to laugh, to see mass destruction, and to watch heroes trounce villains (am I really spoiling anything?). With the force of Thor’s hammer, The Avengers pounds viewers over the head with these three elements. It even keeps the love interests to a minimum. Sorry, Pepper Potts and Jane Foster!

The standout character is “genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist” Tony Stark (i.e. Iron Man), who keeps the viewer wondering what he’s going to say next. A great deal of the film’s humour comes from Stark’s smart aleck comments. He refers to Thor as “Point Break”. He calls Captain America a “lab rat”. He addresses Hawkeye as “Legolas”. And unlike his cohorts, Stark wants to watch Dr David Banner go green: “Dr Banner, your [scientific] work is unparalleled. And I’m a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.”

As the Hulk’s third big-budget manifestation, after Eric Bana in Hulk (2003) and Ed Norton in The Incredible Hulk (2008), Mark Ruffalo portrays a more subdued, professorial Banner who has learned, for the most part, to control his powers. Banner repeatedly warns (e.g. “Don’t make him angry . . . ”) others about his alter ego. This builds anticipation for when he will transform.

As in their previous films, Thor and especially Captain America are less about character, and more about action, while Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow and Clint Barton/Hawkeye drift through the film like ice particles in a tropical drink.

Tom Hiddleston maintains his role from Thor (2011) as Loki, Thor’s adopted demi-god brother and the chief villain. With his elegant bearing, smooth tongue, and patience, Loki embodies what many filmgoers loathe and fear: intelligence. Sure, Stark and Banner are brilliant. But Stark wears a Black Sabbath shirt and drives cool cars, and Banner’s just a normal guy.

Learning from recent successes like Transformers and Chronicle, The Avengers culminates in an urban blitzkrieg. This time, the streets and skies of Manhattan swarm with superheroes, aliens, and a fleet of gigantic ships that seem to move through water rather than air. The number of explosions would make Monty Python’s Tim the Enchanter proud. In a particularly impressive filming technique, the camera follows one Avenger’s flight path or weapon trajectory, then switches to another Avenger.

And what’s all this fighting about? A glowing cube called the Tesseract. If Loki gets it, the Chitauri, his alien friends, conquer the galaxy and he takes over Earth. So the Avengers must stop him. Despite all the technological progress in movies, it’s still about the treasure hunt.

Yes, The Avengers is a masterpiece of customisation to the masses’ cinematic preferences. Like Transformers, it even offers longer stretches of explanatory dialogue (about the Tesseract, about technology) so that attendees can check their urgent texts (e.g., “Johnny’s soccer team’s winning!!”) and make critical Facebook entries: “watching avengers OMG this is so awesome!!! And johnny’s team’s winning!!”

Is The Avengers an entertaining movie? Absolutely. Is it a phenomenal film? No. Titanic. Gangs of New York. Signs. Those are phenomenal. However, although my fellow moviegoers did not clap after those films, they did after The Avengers. Hmmm.

Shelflings #2 - NOT available for free download from the British Fantasy Society!

The British Fantasy Society has made issue two of its reviews ezine available for free [accidentally, as it turns out - see below] to the general public. That means you!

SHELFLINGS #2 has been compiled by Stephen Theaker (me!) from reviews edited by Craig Lockley, Phil Lunt and Jay Eales for the British Fantasy Society website. It features almost 30,000 words of reviews by Carl Barker, Chris Limb, Craig Knight, David A. Riley, David Brzeski, David Rudden, Elloise Hopkins, Glen Mehn, Jacob Howard, Jay Eales, Katy O’Dowd, M.P. Ericson, Mario Guslandi, Matthew Johns, Mike Chinn, Pauline Morgan, Phil Lunt, R.A. Bardy, Rebekah Lunt, Selina Lock, Steve Dean and Stewart Horn.

Creators and editors whose work is reviewed include (deep breath!) Adrian L. Youseman, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, Alex Miles, Alison Littlewood, Andy Chambers, Anne Lyle, Anthony Reynolds, Armand Rosamilia, Ben Counter, Bev Allen, Brian-Joseph Baker, Joshua D. Brice, Dillon Langlands and John Bromley, Charlaine Harris, Chris F. Holm, Chris Wraight, Christopher Priest, Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Jim Rugg, Dan Abnett, David A. Sutton, David Elroy Goldweber, David Rix, Deborah Harkness, Frances Hardinge, Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows, Gary Fry, Graham McNeill, Howard Hopkins, James Brogden, Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee, Jilly Paddock, Jim Beard, John Charles Scott, John Dorney, Jonathan Morris, Joseph Nassise, Justin Gustainis, Kim Lakin-Smith, Lee Batters, Madeline Ash, Magnus Aspli, Dave Acosta, Jeremy P Roberts, Goran Kostadinoski and Alex De-Gruchy, Mark C. Scioneaux, R.J. Cavender, Robert S. Wilson, Matthew Clements, Maynard Sims, Michael Croteau, Nancy Kilpatrick, Nick Kyme and Gav Thorpe, Paul Dini, Carlos D’Anda and others, Paul Magrs, Paul S. Kemp, Peter Bell, Phil and Kaja Foglio, Reggie Oliver, Richard Davis, Richard Ford, Richard Morgan, Rob Sanders, Sarah Newton, Scott Sigler, Shaun Jeffrey, Simon D. Smith, Simon Yates, Terrance Dicks, Trevor Jones and Liz Williams, and William King.

Shelflings #2 is available to download from these links: in epub format and in mobi format. [Links removed! Turned out the issue had been made publicly available by mistake rather than design.]

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller - reviewed by John Greenwood

In the world of The Dog Stars, humanity has been decimated by a combination of killer flu and a HIV-like blood disease, with only zero point something of the population surviving the apocalypse. The survivors, at least in the USA where the novel is set, can be divided into isolated homesteaders and marauding bands of scavengers. Amateur Cessna pilot Hig is one of the former, and together with his gun-obsessive friend Bangley, he defends a tiny rural airport against any feral remnants of humanity who make it over the mountain. Together they make an effective, if inharmonious team. Hig can't stomach the killing, and Bangley the ruthless tactician cannot secure their perimeter without regular flights to check for intruders approaching their borders. But after nine years of this successful strategy, Hig suffers a shock that leads him to follow a faint transmission from another airport situated beyond his fuel supply's point of no return.

The Dog Stars isn't as big a book as it first appears. There's an unusually large amount of white space spread across its pages. A whole line between each short paragraph and between each line of dialogue means that many pages contain less than 100 words. At first this led me to wonder whether it was a deliberate attempt to express the silence and emptiness of the post-human American wilderness, the way Aaron Copland removed the middle notes from his chords to evoke the wide open spaces of the frontier years. More prosaically, it might simply be that readers in the era of Twitter are growing more intolerant of large, dense blocks of text, combined with the cheapness of paper, and steadily growing expectations of what is a normal novel length.

The other stylistic quirk that jumps out is Heller's tendency to truncate and de-punctuate, so that we get sentences such as "My memory serves but not stellar ha", or simply "And" or "Then" followed by a full stop. Once I clicked with the vernacular rhythm, it felt like listening to a good raconteur who is speaking between swigs of beer at a bar, or more likely trying to concentrate on doing something else (like flying a Cessna airplane) while breaking off every now and then to continue the narrative. Hig's is a very engaging voice, and only in the final third of the book, when he and the female lead character reveal something of their back stories to one another, does the tone lose its tautness and drive, and begins to sound like the sort of monologue delivered onscreen as Oscar-bait.

The pace shifts gears efficiently between meditations on Hig's past during his hunting and fishing trips into the mountain, and grisly skirmishes in which Hig and Bangley fight off poorly-armed but well-motivated desperadoes, Bangley's tactical perfectionism means that the author can ratchet up the tension in these fight sequences, as they are first rehearsed in exquisite technical detail, then enacted in far more chaotic and nerve-jangling fire fights.

Bangley is a fascinating character in his own right - a humourless, merciless survivalist whose day has finally come. His motto is the Hank Williams Jr. song title "A Country Boy Can Survive", and it is his ilk who inherit the earth once the plague has swept the last vestiges of civilisation away. Hig's reflective, impulsive, almost flaky character is a liability for them both. Although far from preachy, The Dog Stars is a novel which opposes two world views. Bangley will always prevail, but as he litters the airport perimeter with corpses, he can ultimately only grow more alone. Hig is not a competent survivor: he loses concentration and hankers after the old days. But it takes a foolish mistake on his part and an admission of his own vulnerability to establish the possibility that communities might again develop between the few atomised individuals left alive.

In the last third of the novel, I began to see the plot rolling out ahead of me according to the standard Hollywood model of redemption, but for the most part this is a well-written, highly entertaining and serious-minded take on the end of the world, and it deserves to do well.

 The Dog Stars by Peter Heller is published by Headline Review on 7th August 2012. ISBN 978-0755392599. Hardback, 320pp.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #41 – plus two free books!

I bet you're going on holiday soon, aren't you? And you probably haven't got anything to read. And if you have, I bet you'll read the first page and immediately get bored of it! Why take the chance! Download issue forty-one of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction – or buy a print copy if you're so inclined! – and you'll be assured of a brilliant holiday! And if you don't get a copy I'm going to keep using exclamation marks until you do!

This issue features two long stories – "Milo Don't Count Coup", by Ross Gresham, and Notes on the Bone" by Charles Wilkinson – a shorter one by our old friend Douglas Thompson – "DogBot™" – and fifty (FIFTY!) pages of reviews by Stephen Theaker (and his daughter Lorelei), Howard Watts, Jacob Edwards, John Greenwood and Douglas J. Ogurek. The ace cover art is by Howard Watts.

This 130pp 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)
TQF41 on Feedbooks (direct links here, but they do take a little while to start up sometimes: Kindle / Epub)

Here are the dashing athletes who have been kind enough to run around our stadium…

CHARLES WILKINSON’S short stories have appeared in Best Short Stories 1990, Best English Short Stories 2, Midwinter Mysteries and London Magazine. A collection, The Pain Tree and Other Stories, appeared from London Magazine Editions. “Notes on the Bone” is from a series of loosely linked short stories, another of which is to appear in Supernatural Tales.

DOUGLAS J. OGUREK’S Christian faith and love of animals strongly influence his fiction. His work has appeared in such publications as the BFS Journal, Dark Things V, Daughters of Icarus, The Literary Review, Morpheus Tales and WTF?! He lives in Gurnee, Illinois with the woman whose husband he is and their five pets.

DOUGLAS THOMPSON’S short stories have appeared in Albedo One, Ambit and Catastrophia. His first book, Ultrameta, was nominated for the Edge Hill Prize and unofficially shortlisted for the BFS Best Newcomer Award. His second novel Sylvow was published in autumn 2010, and a third, Mechagnosis, is to follow from Dog Horn.

HOWARD WATTS is an artist from Brighton who provides the cover to this issue, as well as extremely in-depth reviews of Alcatraz and Prometheus.

JACOB EDWARDS is currently indentured to Australia’s speculative fiction flagship Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, as Jack of all Necessities (Deckchairs and Bendy Straws). The website of this writer, poet and recovering lexiphanicist: www.jacobedwards.id.au.

JOHN GREENWOOD is patiently waiting for Theaker to take in the amendments to his novel The Hatchling.

LORELEI THEAKER is a keen fan of the Rainbow Magic series and working hard at school. In this issue she provides her thoughts on the Cosmic Horror Colouring and Activity Book (on sale here). The last time one of her reviews appeared in our pages was back in TQF12 (September 2006), when she was just two years old.

ROSS GRESHAM teaches at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Other installments of the Milo/Marmite saga have appeared in TQF34 and M-Brane SF (August 2011).

STEPHEN THEAKER is the eponymous co-editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, and writes many of its reviews. He has also reviewed for Interzone, Black Static, Prism and the BFS Journal.

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

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FREE BOOKS: From now on, with each announcement of Theaker's Quarterly Fiction we hope to offer one or more of our books free of charge on Kindle. These books will be free from now until Thursday:

The Mercury Annual, by Michael Wyndham Thomas
Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk

Howard Phillips in His Nerves Extruded by Stephen Theaker
Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk

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Super Dinosaur, Vol. 1, by Robert Kirkman and Jason Howard – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Super Dinosaur, Vol. 1, by Robert Kirkman and Jason Howard (Image Comics, tpb, 128pp). Derek Dynamo is a cocky kid genius whose best friend is Super Dinosaur, a genetically-modified Tyrannosaurus Rex. As Rexes go, he’s quite small—only about 300 cm—but he’s intelligent, tough and wears cybernetic harnesses that provide him with weapons, wings and best of all a decent pair of fists, for punching the dino-men minions of Max Maximus, monsters like Terrordactyl, Dreadasaurus and Breakeosaurus. Derek’s dad, Doctor Dynamo, has been a bit fuzzy-minded since the first great battle with his arch-nemesis, but the boy genius has secretly been taking up the slack.

In this book the status quo is disturbed. First by Bruce and Sarah, mom and pop technicians sent by the army who might discover Derek’s little-cover-up once they arrive at the Dynamo Dome. And how will their two cute daughters affect the relationship between Derek and Super Dinosaur? There aren’t any cute Tyrannosaurus Reginas out there, as far as he knows. And secondly, some of the dino-men (and dino-women) are no longer satisfied to hench for Maximus, and led by The Exile and Tricerachops they are making plans to exterminate humanity.

This neat little comic is perfectly pitched at nine-year-old children, full of the exuberance of kicking butt, a Saturday morning cartoon or toy line from the eighties done right. I’m three decades past my ninth year, but even I appreciated the tight, bright, action-packed art, the intriguing little mysteries, the pure-hearted heroes, the evil-hearted villains, the friendly, joyful atmosphere. Adults will find it disposable but pleasant, kids will love it. Buy it as a birthday present for the Ben 10 fan in your life and they won’t be disappointed.

Monkey vs. Robot by James Kochalka – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Originally published in 2000, Monkey vs. Robot (Top Shelf, digital graphic novel, 150pp), written and drawn by James Kochalka, sees a group of monkeys react angrily to the pollution being caused by a factory and the robots who work for it. The pages are square with one to four panels each. There is very little dialogue—a robot declaring “The future is now” early on, and the factory computer begging for its life towards the end, for example—and that makes it a very quick read (so much so that one feels almost guilty to see it took a year to create). It’s a sad tale: imagine the stormtroopers of Return of the Jedi mounting a comeback against the ewoks, drawn with heartbreaking cuteness. The monkeys are essentially murderous eco-terrorists, but one does want them to win. It looks smashing on the iPad, and is available on Comixology at a remarkably cheap price. Good stuff. I could see myself becoming quite a fan of James Kochalka.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Wolves at the Gate – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

One of my very favourite television programmes continues in comics form in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Eight, Vol. 3: Wolves at the Gate (Dark Horse, tpb, 136pp), collecting issues eleven to fifteen of the comic. Most of this book is written by Drew Goddard, but it opens with a single issue story by Buffy creator Joss Whedon, “A Beautiful Sunset”, in which Buffy encounters the Big Bad for this season, Twilight. He’s a dangerous fellow—he throws a steeple at her!—whose plan is to take away Buffy’s invincible armour: “her moral certainty”. (It would certainly slow her down a bit if she didn’t just assume all vampires were naughty by nature.) There’s a tease of his identity that would have been cleverly tantalising had I not learnt it already from the Amazon description of volume eight.

The four issues written by Drew Goddard give the collection its title. In “Wolves at the Gate” the slayer castle is attacked by vampires sharing the powers of Dracula, who made a brief, bathetic appearance in the TV series. Investigating takes the slayers and the gang—plus Dracula—from Scotland to Japan, where a vampire clan has plans to undo Buffy’s gift of slayerhood. It’s a story with many highlights—actually, scratch that, it’s a story entirely made up of highlights. Xander’s hilarious and oddly touching relationship with Dracula. Everyone bursting in on Buffy’s latest romantic tryst. Giant dawn fighting a giant mechadawn.

The pleasures of the Buffy season eight comic are essentially those of the original series: stories with consequences, well-planned plots, laugh-out loud dialogue, relationships that develop naturally in unexpected directions. Pencils throughout are by Georges Jeanty, with inks by Andy Owens, and they prove extremely adept at depicting each of those elements. Panels like those where Willow and Buffy discuss the latter’s latest romance display the comic skills of Kevin Maguire, while the action is always clear and powerful. They manage the tough trick of capturing the actors’ likenesses perfectly without the stiffness that afflicts many licensed comics. They draw a very pretty Buffy, and if she sometimes looks very petite, that’s because she really is; that’s what makes it so impressive when she fights the big monsters.

Interzone and Black Static on Kindle (ft. Theaker)

Three Theaker-tastic magazines from TTA Press are now available on Kindle: Interzone 239, Interzone 240 and Black Static 27. Theaker-less issues are also available!

I joke, as usual, but you cannot imagine how proud I am to have written for these magazines. I first read Interzone when I was at school, long, long decades ago. Having my first review appear in there was the greatest writing achievement of my life so far.

In issue 239 I review Andy Remic's Theme Planet, and in issue 240 there's a Theaker double-bill, reviewing Jane Carver of Waar and The Not Yet by Nathan Long and Moira Crone respectively. In issue 27 of Black Static I review Alison Littlewood's A Cold Season.

The issues also feature fiction, reviews, interviews and columns from Lavie Tidhar, Elizabeth Bourne, Stephen Volk, Jim Steel, Suzanne Palmer, Peter Tennant, Stephen Bacon, Nick Lowe, Ray Cluley, Tony Lee and many more brilliant people.

Cobra Gamble (Cobra War, Book 3) by Timothy Zahn – reviewed by Jacob Edwards

Cobra Gamble (Cobra War, Book 3), by Timothy Zahn (Baen Books, 308pp). The second labour of a latter day Hercules—third head, twice removed.

Timothy Zahn first introduced the concept of Cobras—cybernetically enhanced warriors with built-in weaponry—through the novelette, “When Jonny Comes Marching Home”, in the January 1982 edition of Analog. A trilogy of novels soon followed—Cobra (1985), Cobra Strike (1986), Cobra Bargain (1988)—in which Zahn further explored not only the military but also the social and political implications of mankind’s having created soldiers who are permanently armed; in effect, living weapons. Although Zahn then moved on to other projects—most famously, perhaps, his Thrawn trilogy, which relaunched the Star Wars franchise in written form—he has returned twenty years later with a second Cobra trilogy (Cobra War) and has even set the stage for a third (Cobra Rebellion). With his country (the USA) continuing to embroil itself in a series of political/cultural/military conflicts, Zahn (and his readers) might well regard the Cobras as being even more relevant now to society than they were thirty years ago.

Zahn often narrates his stories from multiple points of view, moving from one to the next with each chapter and effectively weaving together three or four plot lines. The technique is particularly well suited to Cobra Gamble, which follows the exploits of the original Cobra Jonny Moreau’s granddaughter Jin Moreau and great grandchildren Merrick, Lorne and Jody Broom—third and fourth generation Cobras (except for Jody)—as they struggle to fight off one race of aliens (the militarily dominant Trofts) while simultaneously upholding an alliance forged recently with a second (humankind’s longstanding enemies, the downtrodden Qasamans). Zahn’s focus is on action and ingenuity, but the real strength of Cobra Gamble (and other Cobra books) is the pervading xenotopical backdrop, which both defines the conflicts and conspires against the protagonists.

Although neither alien race is described physically—the Qasamans have sacred leaders and are male dominated; [the Trofts, they come from feudal demesnes and their speech is translated in square brackets; the Trofts, they seem archaic and slightly ponderous]—their cultural differences are manifest and are the source of much bigotry on both sides. To be sure, those who go looking for analogous real-world diplomatic relations will have no difficulty finding them in Cobra Gamble, but if they make such a comparison with patriotic fervour in mind, or with a view to pointing the finger, then they may well be setting themselves up for disappointment. Zahn’s Cobras have their own ethos, their own morals, and are confounded rather than driven by prejudice. Indeed, it is seemingly inevitable in Cobra history that the bravery and triumphs of the individual be subsumed into a dishearteningly Machiavellian big picture that stands guard over the plot and so prevents it from turning, however inventively (or even righteously), to escapism.

Plenty of Timothy Zahn fans from the early days will maintain that his best writing comes in the form of those truly stand-alone pieces that focus more on scientific (or at least speculative) ideas than upon action. Zahn won the 1984 Hugo Award for his novella “Cascade Point”, and subsequently crafted many shorter works and several novels—Spinneret (1985/1987); Triplet (1987); Deadman Switch (1988)—that are more in the vein of scientific intrigue and suspense than the faster moving military science fiction of his Blackcollar or Cobra books. There have been fewer of these ideas-driven works in recent years, and even those that started out that way—Dragon and Thief (2003); Night Train to Rigel (2005)—have tended to become drawn out into overly long series. This being said, Zahn has remained eminently readable and has well and truly mastered the art of creating, hooking the reader on, and then cleverly solving problems that derive their sting from the interaction of humans and aliens through all their (at times allegorical) differences.

One unfortunate facet of the Cobra War trilogy—Cobra Alliance (2009), Cobra Guardian (2011), Cobra Gamble (2012)—is that it carries on a tradition of titular (and cover design) homogeneousness that may befuddle the unwary so far as to have them reading Zahn’s books out of order.[1] And yet, just as the Battle of Waterloo can be studied either as part of or independent from the Napoleonic Wars that it brought to a close, and likewise the Napoleonic Wars as either an extension of or independent from the French Revolutionary battles that preceded them, so too does Zahn present an unfolding series of conflicts with sufficient individual merit to negate any overarching need for chronological fidelity. By focusing very much on the “now” of Cobra history, by acknowledging the past yet always seeking to pull the reader into the urgent flow of current events, Zahn imbues his writing with a certain vitality in both thought and action, ensuring that each Cobra undertaking can stand independent of its fellows.

Wookieepedia shows Zahn as having written nine Star Wars novels to date,[2] and the proposed Cobra Rebellion trilogy will likewise take his Cobra output to nine books—not quite Mills & Boon in quantity (Moreau & Broom?) but enough of a series to leave prospective readers wary of its becoming overly familiar. People who already have acquainted themselves with Timothy Zahn through his Star Wars and Cobra offerings will indeed find Cobra Gamble to contain variations on a theme, but there is a progression, too, and Zahn pays sufficient attention to new scenarios that those who have only belatedly arrived at his writing—should they opt to check in at Cobra War Book 3 rather than somewhere further back along a road that now spans 30+ years—will experience in Cobra Gamble at least some of Zahn’s distinctive alien world-building and narrative pull.

Cobra Gamble ends Zahn’s second labour—for now, at least—but with a pinkie promise of arcthrowers and fingertip lasers (and antiarmour lasers to boot) it seems the Cobras are destined to fight on. Zahn is certainly prolific enough to launch a third Cobra trilogy (and sooner rather than later, too) but as to what comes next from his pen: only the Delphic Oracle—and perhaps a few Baen Bigwigs—can say.

1. Further complicating the increasingly confusing range of Cobra books is that, subsequent to their original publishing but prior to the release of the Cobra War trilogy, Cobra and Cobra Strike were published as a single volume entitled Cobras Two (1992), and then again with Cobra Bargain as the Cobra Trilogy (2004).

2. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Timothy_Zahn

Amazon reviews – even more corrupt than you thought, thanks to Fiverr?!

First, introductions! This reviewer on Amazon and Goodreads seems to be this user on Fiverr, who offers reviews of books at five dollars a pop. And this reviewer on Amazon is, I reckon, this guy on Fiverr, who will for his five dollars produce a video review, for another five add your book to Listmania lists, and, for five dollars more, buy your book so that he shows up as a verified purchaser. Sneaky!

I had an email chat today with someone who seems to have been a client of both people. The writer acknowledged that they had made a mistake, being desperate to draw attention to a rewritten, re-edited version of their book following an extremely critical review, and so I asked if they would let me interview them about it, there being a lot of interest in – and bafflement concerning – the business of paid-for reviews at the moment. (We've just had the big flap about SFcrowsnest offering to review for a £300 fee, for example.)

Unfortunately the writer in question declined to be interviewed, and seemed quite distraught (and, I think, naive) about the whole thing, so I won't name names here, but these are the questions I wanted to ask:

• How did you hear about the review services being offered?
• What made you want to hire this reviewer?
• Had you tried to find reviewers in the usual ways, submitting to magazines, blogs, etc? Did you try Goodreads giveaways or anything similar?
• Why are you so desperate to get reviews?
• Did you understand, when placing your order, that hiring people to write reviews of your book is unethical? Did you know that for a reviewer to post such reviews on Amazon was against Amazon’s rules?
• Were you happy with the reviews that the reviewer produced for you?
• When I read the reviews of your book, two things struck me. Firstly, that the reviewer said (on Goodreads) that she’d read your 600pp book in a couple of hours. And secondly that there is very little detail in her review. Do you think she actually read it? How much review do you think five dollars would buy?
• Have you bought other reviews? And have you paid for other services on Fiverr?
• Are you happier with the five-star reviews that you paid for, or the one-star review you got for free from a real reader? Which do you think you should trust?
• Did you realise that if these shenanigans came to light you would look like a complete fraud?
• You seem to admit fairly readily that you struggle with grammar and spelling, and so on. You hired an editor to work on your book, and then hired a second editor when the bad reviews came in. If you aren’t very good at it, why do you want to be a writer? What are your goals?

So I'm still waiting on the answers, but I can guess at most of them. The moral of all this: don't trust anything you read on Amazon, especially about self-published books. Assume it's all bollocks that someone's been paid to write and you won't go far wrong.

I spoke briefly to one of the reviewers too: she suggested I might want to start accepting money for reviews too. Hmm. I'll have to think about that.

And she explained that the review she was paid for was the one on her blog, not the one on Amazon. That one was just for free! I guess that's how they wriggle around Amazon's rules against this kind of thing.

(Why the picture of Superman super-smoking? Because this post is all about bad habits!)

Giant Thief by David Tallerman – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Stories by the author of Giant Thief (Angry Robot, ebook, 4314ll), David Tallerman, have appeared twice in our magazine, and twice more in my issues of Dark Horizons, so of course you must bear my potential bias in mind when reading this review. That said, on to the book. Easie Damasco is the thief of the title, who finds himself dragooned into the army of ruthless warlord Moaradred, who’s on his way to capture the crown of Castoval. Key to Moaradred’s plans are his contingent of giants, kept under his evil thumb by his possession of an object just small enough to be accidentally stolen by a thief hustling his way into the tent. Riding Saltlick, the giant to which he has been assigned, straight off the battlefield and into the hills, Easie is somewhat surprised by the persistence with which he is pursued—and subsequently, the keenness with which he and his huge new friend are courted by the resistance, particularly Estrada, female mayor of Muena Palaiya.

Easie Damasco is not a particularly nice guy. He’s a thief, of course, and he’s selfish—for example in abandoning friends to delay his own capture—and something of a sexist, as revealed by his having assumed Estrada’s appointment as mayor to be a prank of some kind. He assumes Saltlick to be an idiot and exploits him with barely a wince of conscience. Where he has to choose between himself and others, or between virtue and wealth, he’ll make the selfish, greedy choice. The book doesn’t apologise for that. One of its most admirable, likeable characters, Alvantes, brave captain of the Altapasaedan City Guard, utterly detests him, and you can see his point of view. But Easie isn’t too bad: where the chances of survival and financial gain are equal either way, he’ll choose good over evil. As the book goes on, the question is whether the good influences in his life—Estrada, Saltlick, Alvantes—will rub off on him; can he be encouraged to consider his self-interest in more than just the short term. Can this rascal be socialised by contact with upright citizens?

This novel isn’t a startling reinvention of heroic fantasy (although its portrayal of principled civil servants is somewhat novel), and the plot—mostly a long chase seen from a single character’s point of view—isn’t terribly complex, but the book is as much fun as you’d expect the story of a thief who steals a giant to be. It’s a pleasure to read, the author always at pains to give the reader a clear idea of what’s going on and where people are in relation to the action. If I say the book reminded me of an RPG scenario in that sense, I mean it as a compliment. It reminded me of one of the other fun things about playing pen and paper games: if you can do anything, you might as well do the most entertaining thing, and that’s the route this book takes. David Tallerman will almost certainly go on to write more complex, substantial novels, but I hope he gives us a few more like this first.

Doctor Who: The Invasion of E-Space – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

In Doctor Who: The Invasion of E-Space (Big Finish, 60 mins plus extras) Romana tells a story that happened somewhere between Full Circle (where the Tardis acquired an Adric) and Warriors’ Gate (where the Doctor and Adric escaped E-Space, leaving Romana and a K-9 to fight for Tharil liberation). Lalla Ward is helped in her narrative duties by Suanne Brown, playing Marni Tellis, who has been investigating a series of murders on her home planet Ballustra. Those deaths were the prelude to an attack by Farrian raiders, who are invading from our universe by way of an artificial charged vaccum emboitment.

Both performances are good, although the similarity of the actresses’ voices sometimes makes for a moment or two of confusion when the narrative switches between them. Both are entertaining in the nine minutes of extras at the end, Lalla Ward obviously having not the slightest idea which stories she’s done in the past, or what she has signed up to do in the future.

The story is a decent enough invasion tale, but I can’t find a great deal to say about it. It’s not complete rubbish, but it’s nowhere near brilliant, coming and going without making much of an impression. Andrew Smith, writer of the aforementioned television adventure Full Circle, packs quite a lot into his two episodes, but there isn’t much to think about, nor much to care about. Eight billion people may live on Ballustra, but it’s hard to worry about them when you’ve only ever heard one of them speaking; the story doesn’t do enough to make them feel real.

Overall, not really recommended except to super-fans of Lalla Ward.

Reasons why we will review your self-published book (maybe)

Inspired by a post on Gav Reads, giving his reasons why “Reviewers Won’t Read Your Self-Published Book”, here are a few (sometimes overlapping) reasons why we might well review your self-published (or self-published by proxy) book:

1. It’s not too long.
2. It’s the kind of thing we like.
3. It’s the kind of thing our readers might like.
4. The concept is interesting.
5. The approach seems novel.
6. It doesn’t look like a knock-off of something else.
7. The first few pages weren’t boring.
8. Your prose isn’t utterly pedestrian.
9. We read something else you wrote and it was good.
10. It looks rubbish, but in an interesting or amusing way.
11. We haven’t had to deal with a nutter lately and we’ve begun to forget what a minefield reviewing self-published authors can be.
12. You haven’t had a public meltdown over previous reviews.
13. You, your publisher and your friends don’t harass reviewers on Goodreads and Amazon.
14. The reviews on Amazon and Goodreads aren’t by your publisher, friends and family pretending they don’t know you.
15. You know how to use punctuation.
16. The first few pages of your book are not so full of errors that reading the book would clearly be something of a trial.
17. We’re not in the right mood for any of the hundreds of books we’ve previously been sent (or the thousands that we own).
18. Your Twitter, Facebook or blog posts are funny, intelligent or engaging, and that made us wonder what your books are like.
19. You don’t use a pseudonym on forums to recommend your own books, or generally get up to scuzzy, underhand behaviour.
20. We haven’t seen you swearing on Facebook every time you get a bad (or even mildly critical) review.
21. You’re not pretending that the book was “traditionally published”, when your “publisher” is simply a paid provider of publishing services.
22. Your email was polite, well-written and not full of daft claims about your book.
23. It’s not book 5 in a series of 13.
24. You’re not just in it for the money.
25. You haven’t made a huge financial investment in the book that you're desperate to recoup.
26. You sent us a proper ebook or a pdf of the typeset book, not just a pdf printed out from a Word file.
27. You supplied the version of the book that is actually on sale, not an early draft.
28. You didn't send us the book at all, but we bought it. 
29. Having read it, we thought of something to say about it.

Pretty much the same reasons we decide to review (or read) anything… The chances of us reviewing any particular self-published book are pretty low, given the number of books we receive, but I think there tends to be at least one reviewed in each issue. If your book looks interesting, and you're not a complete jerk, we don't care who published it. Give us a try.

Empowered, Deluxe Edition, Volume I – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Empowered, Deluxe Edition, Volume I (Dark Horse, hb, 712pp), written and drawn by Adam Warren, collects three previously released paperbacks together with a selection of bonus materials. Empowered—or Emp for short—is a novice hero whose tendency to get captured by villains—and tied up, usually with a ball gag in her mouth—has made her a laughing stock in the superhero community. Not to mention the subject of many, many embarrassing photos and internet videos. She’s not completely useless, it’s just that her figure-clinging suit’s power declines sharply as it gets damaged, and it is a very, very delicate suit. Early strips have little more than that to them, but Emp soon makes two good friends and one good enemy who improve the book immensely. Thugboy is a professional henchman with a dangerous history of ripping off super-villains—he falls for Emp and vice versa while he’s tying her up. Ninjette is a sexy bad girl with her name on the bum of her shorts. The fourth member of their little gang is the funniest, Emp’s one great conquest, the Caged Demonwolf, captured in an alien bondage belt and now given to issuing dire threats from the coffee table, frustrated by the reluctance of the dirty mammals to let him watch their filthy coupling. While the addition of these characters doesn’t lessen the saucy elements of the book, it does create a much nicer vibe and introduces some slow-burning plots. One of the book’s sweetest moments is when Thugboy says to Emp, following one of her many humiliations, that she’s the bravest of superheroes, because she goes out to fight despite knowing how vulnerable she is.

The book does rather have its cheesecake and eat it by commenting on its own sauciness, most obviously on the chapter heading pages, where Emp addresses the reader directly, even explaining that the earlier stories grew out of “special commissions” for customers with particular tastes. For me the discomfort I might have felt at reading a book so dedicated to tied-up, semi-naked women was lessened by the absence of any sexual threat. The thugs, villains and super-villains all know the “unwritten code” of the capes: any impropriety and they die, which makes much of what goes on here almost as innocent as a game of kiss-catch. Emp’s anxieties relate to how poor she is at her job, how big her bum looks in that outfit, why her work colleagues (the Superhomeys) show her so little respect, and whether she can believe her boyfriend when he says she’s fantastic.

Empowered presents the reviewer with a dilemma, similar to that involved in reviewing Conan comics: how to approach a book whose main appeal stems from its saucy pictures of sexy ladies, when one doesn’t want to be thought a complete sexist? I can’t deny that my favourite thing about the book was that Empowered and Ninjette are extraordinarily attractive and sexy, but it is also funny, very knowing about its sauciness, and Adam Warren’s manga-style art is very appealing. It looked to me as if the pages were pencilled but not fully inked; that might be my ignorance showing, but whatever technique was used it gave the comic a very casual, warm, friendly feel. The last hundred pages were absent from my review pdf, so I can’t comment on all of the bonus materials, or indeed on whether the ongoing plots reach any kind of resolution, but the first six hundred pages were smashing.

Roger Waters: The Wall Live – reviewed by Jacob Edwards

Roger Waters: The Wall Live, Brisbane Entertainment Centre, 2 February 2012. “I’ve got a big black pig with my poems on.”

Few lovers of speculative fiction would hold anything but affection for progressive rock band Pink Floyd (or, as they were billed in their psychedelic early days, The Pink Floyd). From Syd Barrett’s typically edgy brainchild “Astronomy Domine” through warp-driven and ethereal juggernauts “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”, the Floyd were like a hippie’s conception of spaceflight.

(Mind you, one doesn’t have to be stoned to hear echoes of Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme materialising in and out across the background of “One of These Days”. Just listen closely. It’s particularly evident in the Delicate Sound of Thunder live recording.)

Moving slightly more towards the mainstream—and very much into the big time—Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon in 1973, and while this album, with its iconic, dispersive prism cover art, encapsulated much of the band’s cosmic otherworldliness, subsequent releases saw the Floyd drawn slowly yet ever-increasingly towards Roger Waters’ solo compositions and the war-torn diatribes of The Final Cut. Post-Waters Pink Floyd may have upped the ante on fantastic cover art and afforded more compositional room to David Gilmour’s eerie, cavernous guitar (“Sorrow” a notable example), but the split could do nothing to regain or hide what was lost. Occasional solo performances notwithstanding—“Astronomy Domine” and “Set the Controls”, by Gilmour and Waters respectively—the early Floyd spacey-ness can now only just be seen, spinning further and further out of orbit, soon never to be recaptured.

But as time goes on and visual media soars to new and greater heights, Roger Waters has chosen to revisit the other (perhaps even more famous) speculative aspect of the Pink Floyd legacy: his militant and nightmarish, at times Kafkaesque conceptual rock opera (then film and concert stage extravaganza), The Wall.

Of those who discovered Pink Floyd through their epic double LP (and although Pink Floyd did not release many singles during their concept album phase, there are three from The Wall—“Another Brick (Part 2)”; “Comfortably Numb”; “Run Like Hell”—that crop up regularly on radio), many will have thought to themselves, Surely this is part of something bigger? Isn’t there more to this than just music? In equal measure, there will have been those who watched the film of The Wall and thought, Fuck, this is awful! If only it were just music. But as much as fans may love the songs while loathing the relentlessly grinding imagery of the film, The Wall’s most satisfying manifestation probably does lie somewhere in-between. In the 1980–1981 concert productions of The Wall, Roger Waters’ former descent into self-isolation (or lead character Pink’s, to maintain the pretence of fiction) and his subsequent re-emergence through delusion and hallucination, were allowed to play out against a backdrop of Gerald Scarfe’s grotesque animations and marionettes. The animations were projected onto an actual wall, which roadies would construct onstage during the performance, gradually blocking out Waters and the rest of the band from the audience (or vice versa), and at the end of the concert this wall would come crashing down—Phantom of the Opera, eat your heart out—exposing Waters to begin the cycle again.

Which, fast-forwarding to the present day (and with due deference to his one-off performance in Berlin, 1990) Roger Waters is now doing. Five years since previously appearing Down Under—his Dark Side of the Moon tour, which thankfully dispelled any fears raised by a rasping Live 8 outing alongside Dave Gilmour in 2005—Waters revisited the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on 1 February 2012, tickets ranging in price from $100 (binoculars not included) to $400 (proverbial spitting distance). Despite the venue’s reputation for making all music sound like the hammering crash of a thousand sadistic basketballs, Waters’ return was all but sold out to a clamouring throng of Brisbanites. People handed over their bags for inspection on the way in; queued for (pricey) merchandise; consumed alcohol in lieu of watching a non-existent (not even a surrogate) support act…

Then warning chimes; the crowd inching its way forward, like worms; lights down in the auditorium; a half-built wall on stage; a fascist-looking jacket hung in bleak isolation from the coat stand mid-set; faint refrains from the olden day bridging music that links the end of The Wall back to its beginning; then—

With a jolting guitar strike, each chord accompanied by a geysering fire-hydrant burst of sparks, “In the Flesh?” crashes through the quaint almost-silence. The audience gasps. This is The Wall—

“So ya / thought ya / might like to / go to the show”

—its opening number a bombastic parody of the performer/audience relationship, rendered even more ironic by the gusto with which it is embraced. A flamboyance of Brisbanite Floydies strain forward in their seats, enraptured to the point of ummagumma’d befuddlement by the two acts of Roger Waters’ magnum opus. (During intermission, at least one person tries to fire up a cigarette using a USB stick instead of a lighter.) And as Waters asks, “Tell me, is something eluding you, sunshine? Is this not what you expected to see?”, the most objective answer must surely be a combination of “yes” and “no”.

The first half of The Wall concert is nothing short of masterful, reflecting not only its greater cohesion—musically, lyrically, conceptually—compared to the second instalment, but also the more astute use of accompanying visual elements. While Roger Waters sings “Mother” in duet with a recording of his younger self, legendary guitarist Snowy White reinvents Dave Gilmour’s solos and the onstage assembly of the giant, eponymous wall proceeds with great finesse, serving both as a counterpoint to the unfolding story and as a screen upon which to project a choreographed maelstrom of images. The music and its multimedia aspect are perfectly integrated throughout the wall’s construction, and as the non-LP overture “The Last Few Bricks” plays (a stirring, sometimes adlibbed fusion of earlier motifs) and Waters gradually disappears from view, eventually bidding the audience “goodbye” (cruel world) and slotting the final brick into place, one cannot help but feel that the show has reached its perfect, natural endpoint. Gerald Scarfe’s giant marionettes of the schoolmaster and wife have been unveiled to great effect. “Empty Spaces” has been restored to its original, unexpurgated form (“What Shall We Do Now?”) as written in the LP’s liner notes and performed for The Wall Live in Berlin. Waters has even taken “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” and added to Snowy White’s closing guitar solo a new, rather sombre verse—call it “Part 2¾”—concerning the 2005 shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in London. Some might dispute this coda’s relevance to The Wall’s original premise, but such a quibble is nothing when measured against the overall effect—“to feel the warm thrill of confusion / that space cadet glow.” Simply put, the show has reached its zenith by intermission. The audience can go home happy.

Only they don’t, of course. There’s half a concert to go, and although this includes “The Show Must Go On” (with original opening verse restored) and familiar hits “Comfortably Numb” and “Run Like Hell”, sadly these (and others) make for little more than a protracted dénouement. By the time the bricks crumble down and Waters and Company take their bow in a revamped, more upbeat rendition of “Outside the Wall”, much of the early magic has been frittered away.

The second half of The Wall concert fails on several levels, stemming in large part from a dearth of musical structure. For all its highpoints—and there are plenty—part two of The Wall has always been something of a hodgepodge, lacking the progressive continuity of the song cycle that preceded it (only “Mother” sticks out in part one, and with the belated advent of “Another Brick Part 2¾”, Waters has now smoothed over some of those cracks). Ipso facto, the disjointed nature of Waters’ (or Pink’s) re-emergence from behind the wall is exacerbated by the first two songs (“Hey You” and “Is There Anybody Out There?”) being performed almost entirely from behind the wall. With none of its musicians in sight, the show becomes (as doubtlessly intended) little more than a film viewed from far away; and even when Waters returns to stage, there follows a tricky, quiet/loud medley where his voice—which at age 68 carries remarkably well, though more so when required to project powerfully—first struggles with the heartfelt, downbeat quiet of “Nobody Home” and “Vera”, then has its strident entreaties drowned out almost entirely by the triumphant military fanfare of “Bring the Boys Back Home”. When Waters, true to script, then swaps his normal stage attire (black jeans and short-sleeve shirt, white sneakers) for the fascist jacket and sunglasses of “General” Waters, the show loses most of its concert aspect, and puffs up instead with empty dramatics. “Waiting for the Worms” is particularly disappointing in this regard, while “The Trial”, which is a highlight of the studio recording, has its many voices performed pseudo-in-character by Waters, and relies heavily on screened images from the film version of The Wall. In fact, by this point it has become manifest that the visual aspect of The Wall concert is no longer there just to complement the performance. With the completion of the on-stage wall, it has become the performance, and although this, too, must in some way be the point that Waters wanted to make, nevertheless the music has been lost.

Part of Roger Waters’ original conception of The Wall was for it “to make comparisons between rock and roll concerts and war”[1]—a somewhat tenuous link, one might think, but one that is realised when Pink’s psychoses—all of which stem (in one way or another) from Waters, as a five month old, growing up having lost his father to World War Two—are twisted like narrative barbed wire around Waters’ real-life estrangement from audience members on Pink Floyd’s In The Flesh tour of 1977. The overt link from concerts to war is made through Pink’s hallucinogenic transformation across “In the Flesh”, “Run Like Hell” and “Waiting For the Worms”, yet one cannot help but feel that Waters has built his new Wall concert across slightly different terrain.

In calling on fans to submit photographs of family members killed during war,[2] and in projecting these images onto his wall, Waters seems, if anything, to be advancing the rock and roll concert as a unifying vehicle through which to decry and protest against—intrinsically, to distance oneself from—war. Indeed, if one may draw inference from the multimedia bombardment that assails the audience throughout the course of The Wall Live, Waters’ position appears to be that religious differences constitute a wall that separates and isolates people, and that, really, everyone is united by the shared abuse of having their Machiavellian and profit-driven governments send loved ones off to die in senseless fighting. The Brisbane crowd embraces his stance, but such is their love and nostalgia for Waters, Pink Floyd and The Wall, it is unclear whether they do so through sincere belief, or merely through suggestibility or even just the faint, naughty thrill of subversion.

Having secluded himself for most of the 1990s (to compose his opera, Ça Ira), Roger Waters emerged in the new millennium as something of an activist—particularly with regard to the Middle East—and has since aired (or otherwise presented) his views throughout three world tours. Nobody can criticise Waters for having and sharing his beliefs, or even for backing them with the currency of his rock star renown (after all, John Lennon did it), but it does seem a little sad—tawdry, almost—that Waters has chosen to give peace a chance while sitting astride his canon of early works. A musician and lyricist of his calibre, one feels, should be performing a new concept album; a new concert; he should be gathering up the occasional, cast-adrift compositions of the last decade (“To Kill the Child”, “Hello (I Love You)”, the sublime “Each Small Candle”) and uniting them with new material to genuinely put across his point of view, untainted by the decomposition of older songs. Would the crowd still respond with unbridled fervour? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But at least there would be a frankness to the new creation, rather than the Frankensteinishness inherent in Waters having sewn together his message from the disinterred and dusted-off corpus of The Wall.

These misgivings aside—and they should not be blown out of proportion—it must still be recognised that The Wall Live is an audacious and innovative, wholly immersive, spectacularly revamped exemplar of rock and roll theatre, and whereas the original Pink Floyd production was limited (to 31 performances) by the sheer expense of putting it together and taking it on the road,[3] Waters seemingly has brushed aside these difficulties, embarking on an epic, world-spanning tour that opened in September 2010 and is currently scheduled to continue until July 2012.[4] To the many Pink Floyd fans who missed The Wall tour of 1980/1981, Waters’ re-launching of the concert is an unexpected godsend, and even for those who hark back to the early days of The Pink Floyd, the ghostly rendition of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)”, with spectral, red waves rolling across the wall, above and around, even below the stage, making it seem like Waters and Company are standing aboard an open spaceship in flight, well, this feels like the culmination of a journey—a trip, even, sans Syd Barrett’s LSD—that started out with a dawning sense of wonder but clouded over and was broken off those many years ago.

1. Roger Waters, interviewed by Mick Brown and Kurt Loder, “Behind Pink Floyd’s Wall”, Rolling Stone 16 (September 1982), quoted in Nicholas Schaffner, Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1992), p. 10.

2. http://www.roger-waters.com/fallen.php

3. Roger Waters and Nick Mason, interviewed by Charlie Kendall, “Shades of Pink—the Definitive Pink Floyd Profile”, The Source (1984). [http://www.pinkfloydfan.net/t1483–gilmour-waters-mason-wright-shades.html]

4. http://tour.rogerwaters.com/

Supernatural, Season 6 – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

It took Sky Living a long time to get around to showing Supernatural, Season 6, and once they had it took me a little while to get around to watching it. The conclusion to season five felt like such a natural place to end the programme—series creator Eric Kripke left at that point, after tying up many long-running storylines—that I wasn’t in a hurry to see it start up again. But this season hasn’t been the pale imitation I expected, nor has it unpicked old storylines to rehash them, it’s done what almost every season of Supernatural so far has done, providing a significant new chapter in its heroes’ lives, while never letting the story arc get in the way of a good scare or a funny joke.

The series kicks off with Dean in in cohabitational bliss with his off-on-off girlfriend and the boy who might well be his son. But he wasn’t made for that kind of life, not while there are still monsters out there, and once Sam turns up again the two of them are soon back on the road. The first twist that keeps this season fresh is that Sam’s not the nice guy he used to be. He’s been pulled out of the cage in which they trapped the villains of season five, but something important was left behind. Now he’s sleeping with prostitutes, letting people get bitten by vampires and willing to sacrifice his best friends to achieve his goals.

Lacking a soul has its advantages. He’s fearless and heartless, and that often gives him the upper hand in negotiations; we see him facing down a goddess at one point. In episode nine, the old Sam would have worried about his missing brother; this Sam relaxes with a pretty hippy. But it inevitably leads to conflict between the brothers—not least because this Sam doesn’t want to make way for the old Sam. When he does get his soul back, a bit sooner than you might have expected, that adds a new wrinkle to the season, in that the brothers now find themselves running into trouble kicked up by Sam during his lost year (in the company of their resurrected grandad, played by Mitch Pileggi, who Dean previously met while time-travelling in season four).

The background to all of this is the aftermath of season five: a war in heaven between those who’d still like to get the apocalypse rolling and those, led by Castiel, who are rather happy with the way things turned out. The situation down below is equally in flux, with Eve, ancestral mother of all demons, returning to our world, and the new lord of hell (an old friend of the boys) looking for purgatory in a bid to get his hands on all those lost souls.

One of Supernatural’s strengths is its rich cast of supporting characters—as well as its tendency to kill them off. Episode eleven, for example, pulls in Bobby, Tessa the reaper, Death (his previous appearance was so good it was only a matter of time before he returned), and Balthazar the rogue angel. Conversely, its tiny core cast means no one is ever in a story unless they are needed—contrast with Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, an often excellent programme whose second and final season was hamstrung by the need to check in with dull characters whose storylines advanced more slowly than a glacier.

Supernatural remains as imaginative as ever—for example episode fifteen, “The French Mistake”, brings the brothers into our world, taking the place and the lives of the actors who play them (I appreciated that the episode established that there are no gods, demons or magic in our world), or episode twenty’s vision of hell as an endless queue. There was the occasional let-down. “Let It Bleed”, the H.P. Lovecraft episode, did very little to capitalise on the story possibilities that name conjures. And the final episode of the season, spent largely in Sam’s head as he tries to re-absorb the pieces of his fractured psyche, frustrates when we’ve seen such stories so often before, and there are such massive events occurring in the world outside. The finale also felt pressed for money: the approaching stamps of huge feet turn out to herald just another flock of flying demons. However, the last five minutes of that episode redeem it utterly, as a good friend takes a bad, bad step.

I hope Sky Living don’t take too long to start showing season seven, because I’ve rarely been so keen to find out what happens next in Supernatural. It’s a good programme with many excellent moments, reliably enjoyable, and still the closest thing we have to a Hellblazer television series.

Chronicle – reviewed by Douglas J. Ogurek

Chronicle, Josh Trank (dir.). Suppressed rage + newly acquired super powers = compelling story.

The found footage technique has emerged as a highly effective strategy for genre films. The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007) were masterpieces of minimalism that broke new ground in horror. Cloverfield (2008) brought the technique to science fiction by creating a disturbingly realistic alien invasion. Chronicle continues the found footage winning streak as a psychologically rich and culturally relevant urban fantasy.

Protagonist Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan) wants to get “all of it” (i.e. his troubled life) on film. Burdened by an alcoholic father and a dying mother, Andrew submits to the verbal and physical abuse that streams from his father, his classmates, and seemingly anyone who crosses his path.

Then Andrew, his philosopher-quoting cousin Matt, and his charismatic classmate Steve happen upon telekinetic powers. Whereas Matt and Steve are content with using the power for pranks and harmless fun, Andrew, whose calm exterior belies his suppressed rage, feels the need to transcend the games. Conflict broils between the three friends. Andrew, unable to balance his newly acquired powers with the dysfunction of his home life, develops a fixation on the “apex predator”. “You do not feel guilty when you squash a fly,” he tells the camera. “And I think that means something.” What starts as levitating Lego pieces escalates until it culminates in full-scale destruction on the streets of Seattle.

Unlike the standard shallow superhero film, Chronicle dares to explore the impact of a troubled childhood on one’s development. It is also a commentary on the potentially catastrophic effects of contemporary technology and its tendency to impede social development. One might even argue that the mysterious source of the kids’ power symbolizes technology. The film shows the spectrum of technological possibilities, ranging from humour (e.g., making a teddy bear float down from a store shelf to frighten a girl) to violence (e.g., forcing a vehicle off the road). Note that when Andrew does this latter example, he maintains a calm demeanour, and simply swipes his hand, as if exploring an iPad.

The film offers much more than special effects. In one goofy, yet charming scene, Matt (Alex Russell) captures the aloofness toward which today’s teen strives. Avoiding eye contact with the girl he likes, Matt repeatedly checks his phone, and pretends to be interested in something across the street, all while attempting to tell her his feelings.

The found footage strategy always begs a question: is it realistic that the character(s) would film all of this? In the case of Andrew, the answer is “yes”. At one point, Matt questions Andrew’s use of the camera, calling it a “barrier”. Andrew responds, “Maybe I want a barrier.” Moreover, Andrew uses his power to break free of found footage restrictions by levitating the camera and filming himself. The fluctuating camera angle reflects Andrew’s sometimes elevated, sometimes denigrating self-perception.

Although a couple of its scenes could be cut, Chronicle offers something for those who like “talk movies” and for those who prefer mayhem and destruction. There is no ticking time bomb (unless you count Andrew) or treasure hunt, but the characters are developed enough to keep the viewer engaged. Toward the film’s end, there is an image of Andrew that rivals in timelessness the iconic image of a blood-covered Carrie White shrouded in flames.