Theakerly thoughts: what's making me happy?

This time I’m going to concentrate on what’s been making me happy this week, in honour of the segment at the end of Pop Culture Happy Hour, one of my favourite podcasts. Please just take it as read that my adorable little family is, as ever, making me happy, and that I am thoroughly enjoying my day-to-day work. I just don’t tend to talk about that kind of stuff in detail on here. Because you’re all vultures who would steal my life if I let you.

So, what’s been making me happy?

Expanding my daily to-do lists from ten to twenty items. At the core of it is still the ten big things I need to get done each day, but the other ten give me credit for all the daily stuff that needs doing – dealing with email, my morning pomodoro of writing, taking the kids to school, collecting the kids, and, erm, weighing myself. It’s good. Instead of the morning run being a frustrating obstacle to my tasklist, it’s now a nice simple job to tick off. Best of all, my weekday scores now produce a percentage. (91% last week!)

The Logitech k480 keyboard. Admittedly it’s a bit plasticky, and the T and Y keys on mine don’t work very well (a replacement is on its way), but this is going to be my best friend during November. A groove along the top lets it hold a tablet, and a dial lets you pick between three Bluetooth devices – which might not sound that amazing till you realise that to achieve the same thing with the Apple keyboard you have to power off all the other devices with which it has previously been paired. Really looking forward to taking this out and about for my November novelling sessions, and writing away on my iPod.

The backlog of reviews is finally starting to melt away. Well, it’s down to twenty. Twelve if you only count things I was given for review, and not things I read and began to write about. My goal for issue 50 is to completely clear the backlog, even if it means re-reading some of the books. A pomodoro (25 minutes) of writing each morning isn’t a lot, but it’s a lot more than nothing, and applied to short stuff like reviews it moves things along quite nicely, without getting in the way of anything else.

The new Aphex Twin album, Syro. It’s a lot like the Analord records, and those come very close to my idea of ideal music, so I’m very happy with it.

The youngest of our family gave me some sparkly dinosaur stickers to stick on the side of my PC.

Using my old Kindle again. Reading about the Kindle Voyage make me realise I’m kind of sick of the Kindle Paperwhite, and its damnable lack of buttons. I’m leaning towards the view that touchscreen ereaders are an abomination. The Paperwhite works better than any other I’ve tried (a Sony and a Kobo), but still, it’s a relief to get back to reading on a device that switches pages with a button press.

Nanowrimo is coming and I have an idea! This usually doesn’t happen until October 30. And I learnt a lot from taking part last year, which is going to help a lot in shaping my plans. Even though it was my umpteenth time taking part, it was my first serious attempt in a while, and my first finished novel in a good few years. I wrote a bunch of blog posts about my experiences last year (here, here and here), so I’ll be studying those carefully in the next few weeks. One thing I remember very clearly: don’t start a novel with someone flying through the air over the ocean alone with no way to talk to anyone, because what the heck are you going to write about? This year’s Nanowrimo starts on a Saturday, which is pretty much ideal for getting off to a good start.

If something’s been making you happy, let us know in the comments!

Game of Thrones, Season 4 / review by Stephen Theaker

Game of Thrones, Season 4 (Sky Atlantic/HBO) feels for a while as if it has hardly moved on from the beginning of the previous season. Jon Snow is still bumbling around beyond the wall, Sansa still wandering with the Hound, Daenarys is marching around Slavers’ Bay with her army, and Joffrey is still doing bad things like the bad little king he is. The weird army we saw marching at the end of season two has yet to arrive anywhere. In television we’re used to things moving rather more quickly, arcs concluding at the end of a season and new arcs beginning the season after. That doesn’t really happen with Game of Thrones, but season three came to a famously cataclysmic conclusion, and the ripples of that final episode become tidal waves in season four. It’s the aftermath of some things, the beginning of others, and there’s a great big battle by the end featuring the programme’s best special effects yet.

Return to Armageddon / review by Stephen Theaker

In Return to Armageddon (2000 AD, pb, 148pp) spacers find the frozen corpse of the devil on the other side of a deep space anomaly. As you’d expect of any mad scientist worth his salt, the on-board doctor extracts cells to create a clone. Or was it two clones? Two babies are found with his dead body, one cute as a button, the other with black wings and cloven hooves – the Destroyer! The dead are soon walking the spaceship’s corridors, and that’s just the beginning of a story that ends up with Earth under the devil’s rule, humanity nothing but the squealing meat of Satan’s servants.

From Dusk Till Dawn, Season 1 / review by Stephen Theaker

From Dusk Till Dawn is a television series produced and developed by Robert Rodriguez for his own El Rey network, and shown on Netflix in the UK. Unlike Blade: The Series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles or Stargate SG-1, this isn’t a sequel, it’s a remake and an expansion. The outline of the plot is mostly unchanged. The Gecko brothers (nephews of Nice Guy Eddie from Reservoir Dogs) are bank robbers on the run, trying to cross the border into Mexico. They take hostages, a widowed clergyman and his two unhappy children. They end up at a biker bar, a strip club where the star performer is several hundred years older than she looks. The one big difference is that supernatural elements kick in sooner, as Richie’s visions of a mysterious woman inspire him to kill.

Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork / review by Stephen Theaker

I had read in the later volumes of American Elf that James Kochalka was working on a video game, but I’d sort of assumed it was going to be a flash game for his publisher’s website or something like that. A big surprise then to find that Kochalka and PixelJam’s Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork (Pixeljam, played on iPod Touch 5; available to buy here) is a fully-fledged app store game, and an excellent one at that. It takes the Glorkian Warrior (whose first book The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza was reviewed in TQF#47) and his trusty backpack and gives them room to run and jump around at the bottom of the screen while waves of invaders attack from above. The backpack constantly shoots, leaving the Glorkian Warrior to worry about dodging bullets, completing missions set by little girl aliens in space armour, and collecting crackers and power-ups. They’re the usual type of thing: fireballs, missiles, wiggly bullets, a tennis ball gun. It’s all a play on Space Invaders, but Kochalka’s designs are so appealing and the gameplay so enjoyable that this became that rarest of things: a mobile game I played out of love rather than boredom or dogged determination. It’s funny, but fair, death always feeling like it’s your own fault, even when the immediate cause is a Magic Robot who throws exploding birthday cakes your way. Points and crackers earn upgrades. The last one, for collecting twenty thousand credits: ennui. The Glorkian Warrior begins to look bored if you stand still.  ****

Ernest et Célestine (aka Ernest & Celestine) / review by Jacob Edwards

A one-bear band and a winter’s dream for two.

Ernest et Célestine is the story of a bear and a mouse, who through the shared bond of imagination and creativity forge the most unlikely of friendships at odds with the proscriptive bigotry of their aboveground and belowground societies. Ernest is a musician, hungry and busking; Célestine an artist, orphaned and reluctantly indentured to the clinic of tooth collection and restoration. When Célestine dissuades Ernest from eating her, and instead leads him to the storeroom of a lolly shop, the sweet-toothed bear and the dreamy mouse end up on the run from their respective police. These implacable forces – lawful and righteous upholders of the great prejudice – in one poignantly damning scene find themselves to have accidentally mingled while in pursuit, and must each beat a wary retreat. They are suspiciously alike in their antipathy towards the two fugitives, just as Ernest and Célestine are alike in repudiating the conventional wisdom. It is a simple parable, guilelessly enacted.

As Above, So Below / review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Scooby Doo gone wild: no-frills subterranean archeological horror offers deep scares despite shallow characters/storyline
   
A group gets lost in a maze-like expanse and the threats escalate. Maybe some make it out, maybe none do. The Blair Witch Project (1999) employed the technique masterfully in a wooded setting. The Descent (2005) took the concept to an underground cave system inhabited by violent creatures. The less well-known but still impressive Grave Encounters (2011) used an abandoned asylum.

Edge of Tomorrow / review by Jacob Edwards

Henceforth, the deceitful must roll a giant jaffa up Hollywood Hill.

Most of Europe has fallen to an alien invasion. Humanity faces extinction. And yet, a new high-tech battle armour brings hope, this being symbolised by Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt) who, thus kitted out as a new recruit, was able to kill hundreds of alien “Mimics” in a single day. On the back of this, mankind’s first victory, the combat gear goes into mass production and the army into recruitment overdrive, massing for a counteroffensive. As Major William Cage (Tom Cruise), glib spokesman for the powers that be, sitting safe at HQ, is pressganged into the front line as insurance against an anticipated public relations backlash post-war, so the scenario is set for Edge of Tomorrow (dir. Doug Liman), an action SF film based on Japanese writer Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s illustrated novella All You Need is Kill. Cage dies within the first few minutes of fighting, doused in the acidic blood of an alien he’s managed to take down. Face dissolving, he screams… and regains consciousness the day before battle.

Spoilers, inevitably, but then again the movie’s tagline is: LIVE. DIE. REPEAT. So, not too hard to figure out.

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett / review by Stephen Theaker

In City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett (Broadway Books (US); Jo Fletcher Books (UK), ebook, 9396ll) the cruel, capricious gods have been killed by the people they oppressed and all the miracles they performed have been undone, leaving a world that no longer quite makes sense, and is ruled by their former slaves, the Saypuri. Bulikov, former capital of the gods’ empire, has been left in a particularly curious state, with transparent walls, staircases that lead nowhere, and other weird anomalies. It is the year 1719 and a Saypuri investigator has taken it upon herself to look into the murder of a friend. Like Columbo, her plain appearance conceals a sharp mind. Dangerously sharp: it’s going to get her into a lot of trouble. Bulikov is rife with conspiracies and secrets.

Accessing the Future: interview with Kathryn Allan and Djibril al-Ayad

Kathryn Allan and Djibril al-Ayad are currently raising funds to publish a special anthology of disability-themed speculative fiction, Accessing the Future, to be published by Futurefire.net Publishing, and here is an interview with them. It sounds like it's going to be very interesting.

Hi Djibril, Kathryn. What made you decide to produce this anthology? What are your goals for it?

Djibril: Thanks, Stephen. This anthology will be the third produced under the aegis of Futurefire.net Publishing (after Outlaw Bodies and We See a Different Frontier), and all three are concerned with social-political speculative fiction from the perspective of under-represented viewpoints. The vast majority of the stories we have published reflect the understanding that oppressions are intersectional: so stories about imperialism recognize the fact that colonial oppression is closely tied in with gender oppression, with racism, homophobia and ableism. An anthology that takes as a starting point the marginalization of people with disabilities (both in reality and in literature), also from an intersectional angle, is a close fit to our aims as a press. We hope to raise enough money to produce a full-size, professional rate-paying, properly distributed anthology on this theme, with authors from a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives.