Tom Strong: Book 5, Mark Schultz and Others

An all-star cast of writers fill in for Alan Moore in this one – Mark Schultz (of Xenozoic Tales), Brian K Vaughan (of Y: The Last Man and Lost), Ed Brubaker and Steve Aylett – and while the artwork and production values are up to the title’s usual superb standard, the stories aren’t quite as glittering as before. It’s no fault of the writers – they obviously worked hard (I seem to remember reading that one of them would throw up due to the self-imposed pressure that came from working on an Alan Moore title) and they’ve produced highly readable entertainments. But one of Alan Moore’s many incredible talents is to make the flimsiest of tales seem rich with significance. The stories in this volume remain whimsical, but lack a little magic. And there were things Alan Moore wanted to say and do with these characters – he had reasons for wanting to publish these comics – whereas the great talents working on this volume are reduced, if that’s at all the right word, to simply writing good stories about interesting characters.

Tom Strong: Book 5, Mark Schultz and Others, ABC Comics, tpb, 144pp.

The Terminator Omnibus, Vol. 1, James Robinson and Others

This book came out at just the right time – I finally watched T3 last year, and found out it wasn’t half as bad as I’d feared, and then this year watched and adored the Terminator tv series, which finished all too soon as a result of the writers’ strike.

Luckily this collection of Terminator comics from the early nineties is available to step into the breach. The weird thing is, almost everything that’s in the tv series turns up in here too, from human hit squads going after Cyberdyne people to cops slowly putting the pieces together to fleshless Terminators wearing motorcycle helmets.

Whether that’s a sign that story options are a bit limited in the Terminator universe, or whether it’s just comics, in their usual way, acting as pathfinders for other media, I don’t know. Either way, I had a terrible night of nightmares after starting to read this book. (You try protecting your family from a Terminator with nothing but a corkscrew…)

The book contains four lengthy stories. “Tempest”, “Secondary Objectives” and “The Enemy Within” form one continuous narrative, while “One Shot” is a side-story (with beautiful Matt Wagner artwork) of a Terminator going after a Sarah Connor who didn’t get into the phone book quick enough for Arnold to find her in the first film.

The Terminator Omnibus, Vol. 1, James Robinson and Others, Dark Horse, tpb, 352pp.

Showcase Presents Superman Family, Vol. 2, Otto Binder and Others

During the fifties the Superman comics were so successful that spin-offs were launched to meet demand. Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen and Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane went on to rack up over a hundred issues each, before the titles were merged into Superman Family, the title DC has used for these books collecting the two titles. The first volume was almost all Jimmy Olsen, his comic having launched earlier, but in this one Lois Lane issues enter the mix.

Reading this book, it’s surprising that Jimmy Olsen has never had his own tv series. The structure of the Jimmy Olsen stories in this huge collection is remarkably similar to that of programmes like Sabrina the Teenage Witch or The Wizards of Waverley Place: Jimmy wants to get ahead in some way (usually he’s after a scoop, or sometimes a pay rise), takes an unnecessary risk or makes an error of judgment, and then runs into trouble, often undergoing a startling transformation of some kind, before either learning his lesson, or finally making the right decision. One difference here, of course, is that while Sabrina or, say, Hannah Montana (someone who shares Superman’s secret identity woes and pleasures) are usually the authors of their own misfortune, here Lois and Jimmy are the ones causing trouble – for Superman – which often casts them in an interesting dual role, as both hero and villain in the same story.

(If my knowledge of current children’s television seems oddly extensive, put it down to how difficult it is to find anything for my little daughter to watch that doesn’t put me in danger of falling asleep at the childcare wheel! Undemanding tweenie sitcoms are better than the alternative!)

In Sabrina and Waverley Place magic tends to play a karmic role, punishing vanity and rewarding selflessness, providing the virtuous lessons deemed necessary for children’s entertainment. In Jimmy Olsen’s adventures, that role is taken on by Superman, who seems to spend as much time teaching Jimmy (and Lois) lessons as he does saving them from danger. He’s a kind of karmic avenger! (On the other hand, if he is as Grant Morrison has said, a typical dad from the 1950s, he could less charitably be seen as a patriarch just doing his best to keep everyone in their right and proper place!)

Anyway, if Krypto can get his own cartoon, I think Jimmy and his many alter-egos deserve a run on Nickolodeon. Almost any one of these stories would form the basis of a wonderful tv episode (see below for one horrifying exception). In many ways they are magnificent. There are few limits on the imagination of the writers – the status quo must be restored within eight pages, but on pages two to seven anything can happen, and often does, usually at the same time as something else that’s equally remarkable! Jimmy himself is cheerful and irrepressible, always ready to be the guinea pig in any scientific experiment, ready to try every strange potion he’s offered by his friend Professor Potter, and always looking for the upside of the disasters that regularly befall him.

One thing that’s very striking about these stories is the lack of supervillains (partly because Superman is so diligent in making sure that no one else can get any powers, or loses them quickly if they do). It’s refreshing to read stories about Superman that don’t just involve him trading mighty punches with flying alien trolls and the like. Most stories revolve around petty gangsters who attempt to kill Superman or disable him long enough to rob a bank or two. The tension almost always stems from the constant rule bounding Superman’s behaviour – he must save the day and restore the clockwork of his life without giving away his secret identity.

The downside of this is that as a result he can be rather a wriggling, shifty and devious Superman, always looking for a way to worm out of awkward situations through sophistry, semantics, technicalities and flat-out lies! Anything to avoid giving the game away.

This is particularly the case in the Lois Lane stories. (If I haven’t said as much about those so far, it’s because they can be a bit dull in comparison to the wild imagination on display in the Olsen tales.) Superman’s stubborn refusal to countenance marriage with Lois, while still wanting to keep her on the hook, always seems odd, despite his protestations that it’s for her own good, especially given the lengths to which he goes to avoid marriage, and the callousness with which he repeatedly ruins her dreams. Should we read him as closeted and gay, keeping Lois around as a beard? Or as an ageing playboy, with Lois as his respectable, chaste girlfriend? I don’t really think he’s either – he’s an eight-year-old boy. He doesn’t want to spend all day around girls, but he still wants them to think he’s the coolest boy in town.

When it comes to showing Superman at his worst, though, one Jimmy Olsen story here really stands out: “The Son of Superman”, by Otto Binder. In it, we learn that Jimmy is an orphan. Out of the blue (literally – he flies down from the sky to make the announcement), Superman offers to adopt Jimmy. The court approves the adoption, and the two of them begin to share a house. At this point Superman starts to be very unpleasant to his new son – for example he incinerates Jimmy’s father’s day gift with his x-ray vision. In the end, a sobbing, heartbroken Jimmy asks the judge to rescind the adoption order, to which Superman says, “If Jimmy wants to call it quits, that goes double for me.” Afterwards, Superman reveals that he was being deliberately rude to drive Jimmy away, because of a misunderstood prediction by his super-computer. Everything sorted out, Superman says he feels terrible that the judge won’t reinstate the adoption order, but they can still be pals…

It’s hard to imagine how anyone could at all admire the cold and cruel Superman of that story! He’s like someone who takes a puppy home at Christmas, finds the poop and hairs a bit inconvenient, and chucks the poor thing in the river!

Luckily the charmlessness of that tale is very much the exception to the rule. In general, Superman’s foibles in these stories are comical, more than anything else, and if they date the stories a bit, that only increases the period appeal. Taken as a whole, this is one of the most charming and delightful collections of comics it is possible to read.

Showcase Presents Superman Family, Vol. 2, Otto Binder and Others, DC, tpb, 520pp.

JLA: Ultramarine Corps, Grant Morrison and Ed McGuinness

It seems to me that the pace of many mainstream comics has dropped to the extent where an eight-page Jimmy Olsen story from 1958 will often have as much going on as an entire issue of a modern comic or even a trade paperback. An exception to that rule is the work of Grant Morrison. He writes modern day comics that have as much packed into each panel as those eight-page stories did. The effect is exponential, moment piling upon moment to spin the reader up in a whirlwind: in his superhero comics that creates action adventures with as many beats as the RZA (who has a lot of beats), while in his more leftfield adventures it can come as a dizzying flurry of blows to the mind.

For comparison, try boiling each issue of, say, the Revenge of the Green Lanterns book down to 8pp – it’s pretty easy. Try doing it with this book and you’d be left with an incoherent jumble. Morrison tells his stories with incredible economy, often skating absolutely on the line of the minimum information that the reader needs to be told, and flattering the reader with faith in his or her intelligence. Remarkably, too, for such a writerly writer, and one who reportedly has very little direct contact with his artists, he always gives his collaborators plenty of space to shine – or to fall on their face, as has happened from time to time, though not here. Ed McGuiness’s art is a bit inconsistent (the Flash always looks a bit weird), but has many spectacular moments.

Morrison writes the members of the JLA with a surefootedness that must be the envy of every other writer working in comics right now. For example, his Batman has all the moodiness you would expect of the Dark Knight, and yet Morrison gives him hilarious dialogue without it seeming at all out of character. What’s more, this is a Batman who clearly lives in and could survive in the DC universe. He has access to DC super-science, and uses it when necessary to meet the threats that the JLA faces. He just doesn’t use this stuff in his day to day work – doubtlessly because criminals are more afraid of bats than they are of boom tubes.

It’s a shame that we’re back here with a cleanshaven Aquaman – with what appears to be a hand made of water (crazy – the harpoon on his wrist was both practical and unbelievably cool) – and that Kyle Rayner, Green Lantern during Morrison’s classic JLA run, is AWOL, but as always Morrison makes the best of what he has.

What’s remarkable about Morrison’s JLA is that he has clearly put a lot of thought into the role each character plays in the team. When he was on the main title (this collects issues from the JLA: Classified spinoff series), he talked about (in Wizard’s JLA Special, for example) building a pantheon similar to that of the Greek gods, something that could be seen most clearly in his brilliant recasting (sorry…) of Steel as Hephaestus. He thought very carefully about how each hero slots into the whole to create a unit, whether that’s the Martian Manhunter as a telepathic switchboard, or the Flash on crowd control, and that thought shows through in every JLA story he writes.

Finally getting onto this story in particular: although I enjoyed it very much, my feelings were mixed. It deals with the fate of Superbia, a city founded by the Ultramarines in the story beginning in Morrison’s JLA #24. Now, I’m not as widely read in the DC universe as I used to be, but I can’t help having the feeling that Morrison, having created this cool super-city, and then seen no one use it, felt a bit embarrassed about it hanging around in the air over Montevideo and decided to clear it up. For all I know that could be a totally erroneous conclusion, but either way it seems a shame to have created this place and then… well, no spoilers in this review.

This book also includes the JLA/WildCATs crossover, which was okay, but not as much fun as I remembered it being at the time. It is of interest for one thing, though, and that’s the way Morrison said at the time of its publication that in his mind he had had to work out a way for the two teams to meet, despite their living in different universes, and that in theory his idea could be used to link the DC universe with other worlds of superheroes – presumably he was talking about what came to be called Hypertime. So you could call this story the “Flash of Two Worlds” of the modern age.

JLA: Ultramarine Corps, Grant Morrison and Ed McGuinness, DC, tpb, 144pp.

Heroes: Volume One

Despite what it says on the cover, this is not really a graphic novel – though the sections about Hana Gitelman might just about add up to one, taken apart from the rest. It’s a series of slices-of-life from the unusual lives of the Heroes (and villains), which won’t make very much sense to anyone who hasn’t watched the TV show.

But for anyone who has watched the programme this will be an entertaining read. As well as giving us the chance to see a bit more of little-seen characters (such as Claude, ho-ho), the creators have been pretty generous in letting the comic have a few big reveals, ones that they would have been fully justified in reserving for the programme itself.

Heroes, Various Writers/Artists, DC/Wildstorm, hb, 240pp.

Green Lantern: Revenge of the Green Lanterns, Geoff Johns et al

I received this book as a birthday present, and I was very grateful for it, so it seems a bit churlish to give it a less than enthusiastic review. I guess I’m a churl!

It’s not a terrible book, by any means. It’s well-written, the art is pretty good, and the production values are excellent. It just all seems a bit pointless and slightly dull, and it lacks pace and wit. Its constant focus on the past is reminiscent of John Nathan Turner’s tenure as producer on Doctor Who, where endless stories depended for their interest upon the programme’s history, rather than pulling it forward in new directions.

It gives every indication of being written to squeeze into the gap between various company events rather than being a story in itself, especially given that it has a one year break in the middle for the Infinite Crisis and its aftermath to take place. Why on Earth would you bring a character back from the dead and then skip over his first year of being alive again? The creative integrity of this title clearly wasn’t the first thing on anyone’s mind.

The title makes the book sound very dramatic, but in fact is totally misleading – there are only two occasions and ten pages in total on which Green Lanterns (other than the title character himself) could be said to be out for revenge, and in both cases they are quickly mopped up or reasoned with and largely irrelevant to the storyline.

The principle preoccupation of the stories here is to undo the consequences of issues 46 to 50 of the previous Green Lantern series, in which Hal Jordan, Green Lantern, went mad with grief after the destruction of his home city (as part of the Return of Superman storyline) and went on the rampage, fighting other Green Lanterns, taking their rings, and trying to recreate Coast City. After that he went full-on evil, calling himself Parallax and trying to recreate the entire universe in Zero Hour. Eventually, he died saving the Earth in The Final Night, and his ghost became the new Spectre (DC’s spirit of vengeance), of all things.

Now, while I might agree that the character took a couple of wrong turns there (Parallax’s costume in particular was pretty lame), and I can understand why some fans would want all that undone, it’s worth bearing in mind that the initial story of Hal Jordan’s descent into madness came after 45 of the dullest comics ever created.

So for this series they seem (I haven’t read the previous two volumes of new Hal Jordan stories) to have undone or explained away all of the interesting things that have happened to him, and now, instead of Kyle Rayner, artist, wisecracker, heartthrob and amusing irritant to the older members of the JLA, we’re back with steady, stubborn fifties throwback Hal Jordan. That is to say: your dad is the new Green Lantern.

(Are they planning on casting Kevin Costner as Green Lantern in an upcoming movie or something?)

He’s a totally empty character, who never had anything to him. He did appear in some marvellous Silver Age stories, of course, and his powers were some of the most imaginative ever given to a superhero, but the man himself was a typically blank pre-Marvel fuddy-duddy.

Now he has nothing to him other than a vague regret at having murdered loads of people (though half the comic is spent on people telling him it’s alright, it wasn’t really his fault), and a constant look of irritation at the world not playing to his rules. It’s ironic that while his transgressions have been retconned, they now seem less out of character than ever!

One final note: if I ever read another DC comic where someone is forced into a dream of their perfect life, I think I’ll scream. I’ve got a feeling that I’ll be doing a lot of screaming!

Green Lantern: Revenge of the Green Lanterns, Geoff Johns et al, DC, hb, 164pp.

Essential Godzilla, Doug Moench et al

The first series of Godzilla films ended in 1975 (with Terror of Mechagodzilla) and the second began in 1984 with the Godzilla remake. This Marvel series fits neatly into the gap, being published between 1977 and 1979.

The story itself was ever so slightly dull, for me; the main interest comes from the unusual decision to integrate Godzilla into the Marvel Universe. (Imagine if Marvel had done the same thing with Star Wars? They did it with Doctor Who, though not to the same extent as this.) There are no dimension-hopping hijinks here – Godzilla has always been part of the Marvel Universe, and the heroes are vaguely aware of his existence, but until now he has confined his activities to Japan.

Unfortunately, though, given the opportunities available, for most of the comic’s run the only sign that this is the Marvel universe comes from the presence of Nick Fury’s supporting cast, who chase Godzilla around in a helicarrier, filling in for similiar monster hunters in the original films. That’s a shame.

For example, the most interesting part of the comic comes when Ant-Man’s shrinking gas is used to shrink Godzilla down to the size of a rat (this sequence seemed interestingly prescient of Masashi Tanaka’s Gon, a fierce little dinosaur). (It beggars belief that SHIELD don’t destroy him at that point, while they have the chance.)

The Avengers and Fantastic Four turn up for an ineffective brawl towards the end, but I would have liked to have seen more of the ways in which existing in the Marvel universe would have affected Godzilla. Professor X could have taken us on a trip inside Godzilla’s psyche. We could have seen Namor’s reaction to Godzilla swimming through his territory. Godzilla could have gone to the Savage Land.

Maybe Doug Moench made the right decision for the time, avoiding such gimmicks on the whole and just telling a straightforward Godzilla story (especially since no movies were being made at the time), but it doesn’t really give us what we want to see now! Still, it’s a decent, if undemanding, read. It was obviously pitched at a very young audience, but it’s still worth the time of any Godzilla fan.

Essential Godzilla, Doug Moench et al, Marvel, tpb, 440pp.

Doctor Who: Voyager, Steve Parkhouse, John Ridgway and Others

Previous volumes in this series – the Tom Baker and Peter Davison ones – hit me like hammer blows from the past, but this first Colin Baker collection is even better: like the Paul McGann volumes this was all brand new to me.

Before I get onto saying why it was brilliant, I should cover the two things that are slightly annoying about it. Like all of these Doctor Who books from Panini it has the words “Graphic Novel” on the front cover, when it patently isn’t. A graphic novel is a lengthy comic book conceived as a single piece of fiction. At a push it might cover a single storyline pulled out of an ongoing series, but this is a collection of short serials.

The other thing is that on the back it says “The Complete Sixth Doctor Comic Strips”, when the Colin Baker-penned special, “The Age of Chaos”, doesn’t appear in this volume and isn’t scheduled for the next either (maybe they’d argue that as a graphic novel itself it doesn’t qualify as a comic strip).

Those minor issues aside, this is a glorious book. John Ridgway’s art is magnificent (and reproduced beautifully) – pages 26 and 51 being particular examples of his talents being given free rein – and the storytelling retains the cosmic scope of the Fifth Doctor stories while reining in the more confusing elements. None of the television stories in which the Sixth Doctor appeared could stand even the slightest comparison to these stories, and it isn’t often you can say that about a tie-in.

Doctor Who: Voyager, Steve Parkhouse, John Ridgway and Others, Panini, tpb, 172p.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home, Joss Whedon, Georges Jeanty and Others

For the seven years that it was on television Buffy the Vampire Slayer was my absolute favourite programme. Apart from loving the writing, the fighting and the biting, I think I really, truly fell in love with Buffy herself. (I think it was her incredibly sad eyes that did it.) Whenever I see Sarah Michelle Gellar in other roles now I’m filled with a huge sadness, as if I’d actually had a romantic relationship with Buffy, one that ended amicably, maybe because we moved to different cities. And now I see a doppelganger of her appearing in Scooby Doo and The Grudge. It’s a bizarre feeling!

I’d heard about the Season Eight comic being published by Dark Horse, and that it was being written by Joss Whedon, the creator of the original show. I’d held off from buying it, partly because I’ve given up on collecting individual comics, but also from a reluctance to spoil the old memories. So I waited for the trade paperback, put that on my wishlist when it came out, and waited for someone to buy it for me. I was easing myself back into it.

I should have pre-ordered it myself! This is a fabulous book, continuing the story from season seven and moving it forward. Things can happen! Things can change! Tie-ins are nearly always much more exciting when the programme is off the air or when they aren’t forced to maintain a strict continuity – see the Doctor Who New Adventures or the Star Trek New Frontier books, for example, and compare them to the stultifying dullness of most Star Trek comics (at least those with which Peter David is not involved) – but with the original creator on board this takes that principle to a new level. Everything really counts. It seems stupid that that makes a difference – after all, like Alan Moore wrote in Whatever Happened to the Man of Steel?, they are all imaginary stories – but it does.

And the stories are great. It’s quite easy to imagine these stories as they might have looked on television, but here they are portrayed with the budget of a movie – while still being paced perfectly for a comic book. It’s wonderful to see Buffy, Xander and Willow interacting again, in a way that was often quite rarely seen in later seasons of the programme, and it’s fascinating to see the reactions of those in power to the multitude of female heroes now in their midst. It’s also nice to see some payoff on Xander losing his eye, which seemed a bit random onscreen.

Huge credit must also go to the artist, Georges Jeanty, who achieves the remarkable and rare feat of capturing the likenesses of the cast members while sacrificing nothing in expression, movement or character.

Highly recommended!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home, Joss Whedon, Georges Jeanty and Others, Dark Horse, tpb, 136pp.

World War Z, Max Brooks

Subtitled “An oral history of the zombie war”, World War Z tells the story from the initial outbreaks to the ongoing aftermath. Brooks wastes no time trying to reimagine or justify the existence of zombies. There’s no scientific analysis of why their bite conveys the infection, or how their dead bodies can move. They are the zombies from Night of the Living Dead, plain and simple, with just the one difference. Here, only the infected rise from the dead; the previously dead stay where they are. The book is not about how a real world zombie apocalypse might happen, but instead about how the real world would respond to Romero’s zombies.

Having said that, Brooks does come up with a number of new (to me, at least) twists on the way the zombie plague spreads, none of which I’ll mention here for fear of spoiling someone else’s enjoyment of the book. I’ll just say that the best such story, for me, is told in Brazil.

World War Z has a lot in common with James Herbert’s Rats trilogy, though where Herbert has an onmiscient narrator floating around to take us to the most interesting bits, everything here is reported first hand by the survivors. That might be thought to lessen the suspense, since we know they survive, but that’s far from the truth – there’s a very real sense that surviving this war was much harder than dying in it. Hearing the stories straight from the survivors is what gives the book its power and purpose, dragging us right in amongst the moaning hordes.

I had a few small issues with it. For one thing, it’s a bit irksome to have the old nonsense about “no atheists in foxholes” getting trotted out, even in a first person narrative. The American soldiers in the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, for example, get very angry when people say things like that. It’s also amusing to see how often people from around the world say things along the lines of “As your great American writer once said…”, which often makes it seem as if the quotes were in place first and the character saying them came later.

And I’m not convinced by how safe any safe zones could possibly have been, especially early in the war. I enjoy the odd zombie movie here and there, but I find them very depressing, because there’s no way anyone would survive (unless, as in 28 Days Later, the zombies would eventually run out of steam). Given the horrifying way that things play out in the early sections of this book, I’m not convinced that anyone at all would have made it out alive.

But those are minor quibbles with regard to a powerful book. It’s so full of fascinating and terrifying episodes that everyone reading it will have their own favourite moment – for me it was the fleeting mention of the Queen and her castle. I’m far from being a monarchist, but that was cool. Also, Brooks is to be commended for fitting the whole saga into a mere 340 pages. I’ve no doubt that the resulting insensity has contributed to the book’s success.

I’m definitely looking forward to the movie.

World War Z, Max Brooks, Duckworth, pb, 344pp.

Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman

I enjoyed The Sandman, though I wasn’t the world’s biggest fan of it. Since then, though, I’ve appreciated everything Neil Gaiman has been involved with more and more, from the Neverwhere tv series to his children’s books and his adult novel American Gods. He reminds me a bit of Damon Albarn, in that he seems to move from a brilliant success in one area to a brilliant success in another over and over again, through hard work and a lot of talent. This book continues the trend. It was specially written for World Book Day 2008, and, since I couldn’t persuade my daughter to spend her World Book Day voucher on it I had to buy it myself… It was well worth the pound, being a sweet little story about a half-Scottish Viking boy and his encounter with the gods.

Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman, Bloomsbury, pb, 80pp.

Bug-Eyed Monsters, ed. Anthony Cheetham

I hope readers will indulge me in reviewing a rather older book than we would normally discuss here, because this was one of the best anthologies of science fiction I’ve ever read. To be honest it’s been far too long since I read such an anthology at all. I thought I’d run out of new worlds to discover; to realise how short-sighted I had been was a pleasure.

If there’s a movie producer in your life, you could do a lot worse than pressing a copy of this book into her hands!

Some of the stories, like Fredric Brown’s “Arena” and The War of the Worlds (represented here by the script of Orson Welles’ radio version) have already made it to the large or small screens, while William Tenn’s “The Deserter” seems to be the missing link between the Starship Troopers (the hawkish book) and Starship Troopers (the satirical film) (complete with brain-sucking alien bugs). Frank Herbert’s “Greenslaves” perhaps has too much in common with Mimic to make adapting it worthwhile. Others, though, as far as I know, are still pristine, unspoilt, and ready for exploitation!

AE van Vogt’s “Not Only Dead Men”, in which a World War II-era whaling ship encounters alien life at sea, would make a stunning movie – preferably starring Tom Hanks as the captain. In fact, it would almost certainly be one of the best films of all time! Sadly I can also easily imagine it as a cheap direct-to-DVD movie, which would be a shocking waste of its potential. I can only dream of how good it would have been as a black and white film made in the 1950s.

Pixar and Brad Bird could do much worse than adapt “Surface Tension” by James Blish. I say that because the premise, of tiny people living in a puddle, although brilliant, might be a hard sell to adults, as I’ve found when trying to explain to my wife and friends why it was such a superb story. Children would love it, though.

When reading “Stranger Station” by Damon Knight I couldn’t help mentally repurposing shots from films like Solaris and Sunshine – it might make quite a short film, but like James H Schmitz’s “Balanced Ecology”, Terry Carr’s “The Dance of the Changer and the Three” and Philip Jose Farmer’s “Mother” it would make for an amazing episode of The Outer Limits, if some version of that programme ever gains the budget to match its ideas.

Of course, even if no one ever makes a movie out of any of these stories, it won’t lessen them one bit. That I’ve taken that angle in this review is just an illustration of how exciting I found the concepts. That’s what really marks this out as an exceptional collection of science fiction – every story has an utterly different and astonishing premise. And of course, no film could ever be as perfectly executed as these stories are – on screen there’s always some flaw, however tiny, something that doesn’t quite work. That’s not the case here. Antony Cheetham did a marvellous job of bringing together a superb range of stories, by an immensely talented group of writers. The book’s only arguable flaw is its title, which makes it sound rather sillier than it really is, but even that can be excused, given that it was what made me buy the book in the first place.

Bug-Eyed Monsters, Anthony Cheetham (ed.), Panther (1970), pb, 256pp.

Ælnäthän, Ryan Robledo

I’m not going to pretend that I’ve read this novel (a fantasy, self-published by a young man of seventeen) all the way through. I’ve done nothing but skim the pdf, and read passages here and there that caught my eye. So I shouldn’t really write a review, and indeed I haven’t.

If I were to write a review, my focus would inevitably be drawn to the disclaimer at the beginning of the book where the author carefully advises the reader that his book is not seeking “to supplant the true Creator of the universe”. I’m fairly sure that the author didn’t mean it as a joke, but I found it hilarious nevertheless.

It’s funny however you look at it. If you believe that a god of some kind created the universe, how could it be supplanted from that position by someone writing a book about an alternative theory of creation? All such a book could supplant (at best) is a theory of that god’s existence, not the fact of it. And there’s part of the humour – implicit in the disclaimer is the idea that his true Creator is just a theory, and one that could easily be supplanted if the author of Ælnäthän forgot to add a disclaimer!

It also raises the question: if the author is a Christian (it’s not spelled out in the foreword, so I shouldn’t jump to conclusions – he could just as easily be a Muslim, or a Hindu, or so on), why create alternative gods at all to create his fantasy world? Surely it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which whatever all-powerful Creator he believes in decided to create an Earth that’s different from our own? (After all, as everyone knows, on the seventh day, God created Narnia…)

And if you don’t believe that a god of some kind created the universe, the disclaimer seems presumptuous and laughably pompous (and I know all about being laughably pompous – just read a few of my editorials).

I have nothing against self-publishing – as this magazine demonstrates all too incapably! – but if I were writing a review I’d go on to say that the book’s self-published nature gives itself away in the way the author explains in the foreword that the beginning of the book (a condensed history of his world) is boring but it gets better. If he knows it’s boring he should really have taken it out – an editor would have removed it without a second’s thought, or at least relegated it to an appendix.

But when we publish our own stuff we don’t want to throw away any of our work, however much it might benefit the finished product. (There are many similar passages in my own self-published work – not necessarily into which I have put a lot of work, since I haven’t put a significant amount of work into anything I’ve ever written, but certainly my writing is rife with indulgences that an editor would not hesitate to excise.) To be honest, I found those early pages totally unreadable, though I imagine the author put a lot of work into them.

Finally, in my hypothetical review, I’d say that if the author continues to put as much work into his writing as he obviously has here, who knows where he might end up. But the important thing is to keep working at the writing. I’d say to bear in mind that, for a writer, writing is much more important than publishing.

Publishing oneself can easily be a distraction to a writer, a dangerously easy way to dissipate creative energy. The important thing is to keep writing, and see how it goes.

And then, at the end of the review which I have not written, I would wish the author good luck with his book and sign off!

Ælnäthän, Ryan Robledo, Trafford, pb, 256pp. Not-reviewed from a pdf supplied by the author.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #23

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Editors, Writers and Money: in Defence of Amateurs

I recently read a thoughtful blog entry, 4theLuv Markets and the Reader, by the editor of Horror Literature Quarterly, Paul Puglisi.

HLQ is free to read online, and it’s short enough (16pp) to make reading it a nice way to spend a lunchtime. The first three issues of the magazine were published during 2007, with the fourth slipping to 2008. It publishes professional writers and pays professional rates of at least five cents per word.

I doubt if the editor has ever heard of TQF, but the blog entry skewers us pretty well. Poor choice of colours on the website, non-paying, free to read and hosted on a free web hosting platform – that’s TQF through and through! Our copy-editing and proofreading aren’t too bad (rather better than HLQ’s in fact, going on the state of issue four’s editorial at the time of writing) but in all other respects his argument felt very much like an accidental shot across the virtual bows of the good ship Theaker’s.

The main thrust of his argument is that readers shouldn’t read stories in non-paying magazines when instead they can read the much better stories for which he has paid the writers good money. Non-paying magazines, he argues, are bad for writers, bad for readers, and bad for themselves.

It’s good to have your ideas challenged, and, as longtime readers know, I’m always ready, at the drop of a hat, to examine and reconsider and bluster about the philosophy behind our mag. I want to believe that we’re doing this for good reasons, and that no one is getting exploited or hustled by us.

As I’ve said lots of times, TQF doesn’t pay because I want it to keep going for a long time. If I did pay our contributors, the money would have to come out of my own pocket, and I’d be extremely unlikely to ever see any of it back. How long would the magazine last if it cost me loads of money to publish? There’s always going to be something else that I need to spend my money on, whether it’s the children, the house or most importantly the Xbox 360 (the PS3, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to demand much in the way of financial attention, being mostly happy with a supply of DVDs and Blu-rays from Lovefilm).

I know myself, and I know that the magazine wouldn’t last long if I had to make a choice between TQF#24 and Fallout 3…

See inside this issue for the rest of what I had to say on this subject. I really got my knickers in a twist about this one!! – SWT

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Contents

Editorial

• Editors, Writers and Money: in Defence of Amateurs by Stephen Theaker
• Contributors

Science Fiction

• The Orphans of Time by Wayne Summers
• Newton Braddell and His Inconclusive Researches into the Unknown: At the Mountains of Madness by John Greenwood

Fantasy

• Devil on My Stomach: a Tale of Tiana’s World by Richard K Lyon & Andrew J Offutt

Horror

• When a Baby Laughs by Anna M Lowther
• Shaggai by John Hall

The Quarterly Review

Book Reviews

• Ælnäthän
• Bug-Eyed Monsters
• Hive
• Odd and the Frost Giants
• World War Z

Comics Reviews

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home
• Clubbing
• Doctor Who: Voyager
• Essential Godzilla
• Green Lantern: Revenge of the Green Lanterns
• Heroes
• JLA: Ultramarine Corps
• Showcase Presents Superman Family: Volume 2
• The Terminator Omnibus: Volume 1
• Tom Strong: Book 5

Magazine Reviews

• Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest #12
• GUD #2 (Greatest Uncommon Denominator)

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Contributors

Let’s see who has been hoodwinked by our evil elves into submitting stories for publication in this issue…

Wayne Summers, this issue’s cover artist, first appeared in TQF thanks to his story of a mysterious garden surrounded by a wall, “The Walled Garden”, which appeared in TQF#19. At that time he was about to be published in On The Night Highways, Art&Prose Magazine and Creative Island. He grew up in rural Kojonup, Western Australia, where his writing career began. While in high school he’d write small articles and stories for the local newspaper. He now lives in Perth, Western Australia. Wayne is an English language teacher and is studying to be a counsellor. His focus remains writing and during 2007 he had more than 17 horror and fantasy stories accepted for publication. A second story by Wayne, “The Exile from Naktah”, an epic horror fantasy, appeared in TQF#21.

Richard K Lyon is a semi-retired research scientist/inventor whose hobbies include collecting pulp SF magazines and writing. He has also published numerous short stories and novelettes. A collection of the latter, Tales From The Lyonheart, is available from Barnes and Noble, etc. In collaboration with Andrew J Offutt, famed author of My Lord Barbarian, he wrote the Tiana trilogy (Demon in the Mirror, The Eyes of Sarsis and Web of the Spider), and Rails Across the Galaxy for Analog. To our magazine they have contributed “The Iron Mercenary” (TQF#19), “Arachnis” (TQF#22), and, in this issue, “Devil on My Stomach”, in which we meet a new player in Tiana’s world. This story was originally published in Dragonfields (Summer 1980), and was reprinted more recently in Flashing Swords #2.

Anna M Lowther provides “When a Baby Laughs” for this issue. If this unsettling (especially for anyone who has been present at a child’s birth) little story makes you want to search out more of Anna’s work, a short story of hers, “Miss Magnolia’s Secret”, opens the horror anthology Damned in Dixie. Also, her voodoo tale “Gris Gris” appeared in the special Halloween 2007 issue of Sinister Tales Magazine. And her short pirate story “The Black Butcher” will appear in the anthology Black Dragon, White Dragon, currently in production at Ricasso Press.

John Hall is best known as a Sherlockian scholar, and a member of the International Pipe Smokers’ Hall of Fame. His numerous literary interests include Raffles, Sexton Blake, and the stories of HP Lovecraft and MR James. He is the author of Special Commission, a medieval murder mystery.

John Greenwood has made contributions to most issues of TQF following his return from a round-the-world trip, and was ultimately made co-editor in recognition of his efforts. (It was either that or rename the publication Greenwood's Quarterly Fiction!) To this issue he contributes a further episode in the life of the universe’s least favourite peripathetic astronaut, Newton Braddell.

Stephen Theaker is the eponymous editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. The earliest dream he can remember is of eating Weetabix, only to find it full of worms and woodlice, all because he had applied sugar and milk in the wrong order. A month or so ago he had an equally nasty dream about a Terminator (see this issue’s huge review section, swollen due to the editor’s bout of Goodreads fever, for the details). His most recent dream was rather nicer: his baby had learned to crawl and was following him around. [By the time this issue went to press this dream had actually come true.] He has written six novels to date, but spent no more than a month on any of them (and it showed). He was recently made editor of Dark Horizons, the journal of the British Fantasy Society.

Triangulation: End of Time, ed. Pete Butler

It’s often said that there are no new ideas left for science fiction writers to explore. It’s a problem raised by D.K. Latta in his story “Conversation in an English Pub”. The solution he offers is oddly brutal: travel back in time and murder pioneers like Wells and Shelley so that later aspiring authors can discover time travel and reanimated corpses for themselves.

Certainly the time travel concept is a well-trodden path for speculative writers, but that has not stopped the authors of the anthology Triangulation: End of Time from setting out along its muddied ruts in search of original conceits.

Beneath a slightly over-cooked cover (it resembles the inelegant design of a scientific textbook – from a distance you might mistake it for a exam revision guide aimed at students enrolled on a BSc in Time Travel), we find repeated attempts to wring some original speculative thrills from the well-squeezed notion of time travel.

A man conducts an affair with his wife when she was a younger, more attractive woman. There are extravagant, baffling worlds where jumping backwards and forwards in time has become as convenient as setting your iPod to shuffle, and which are in danger of collapsing under the weight of their own time-paradoxes. The contradictions inherent in the notion of time-travelling are dealt with lightly or exuberantly dismissed.

Not all the stories plump for time-travel. The stated theme is “End of Time”, so there are millenarian stories too, with apocalypses to suit all tastes, the most memorable being “America is Coming!”, in which the entire continent of North America breaks loose from its moorings and careers around the globe, destroying all in its path. Two Italian chancers attempt to hitch a ride on the errant landmass, only to discover that the US population have entered suspended animation for reasons that are never made clear.

If this is a metaphor for US Foreign Policy disasters (a blindly destructive nation populated by the somnolent), it’s a weak one, but perhaps I’m reading too much into this. What really makes the story stand out is the genuine sense of drama in the protagonists’ struggle to ground their boat on a moving shoreline. I’d be very surprised if author Dario Ciriello had not navigated some rough seas himself. What surprises me more is that I found the account genuinely gripping: I usually abhor tales of seafaring derring-do. For some reason the moment an author mentions jibs and yardarms, my eyelids grow heavy. Patrick O’Brian will never find a place on my bookshelf. Is that such a terrible shame? Possibly.

Then again, nor can I ever normally bring myself to read novels by authors who are still alive, or abridged versions, or books with movie tie-in covers, or books with notes scrawled in the margins, although books with the names of previous owners written inside the front cover are good. Once I found an invitation to a cocktail party in a second-hand copy of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. The party had taken place in Brighton in 1965. I think that if I could go back in time, I would attend that cocktail party, and find out whose book that was, and what they thought of it. I wonder what they would say if I told them that in the future, the same Colin Wilson would pen a series of novels about giant spiders taking over the world. Perhaps that would make a good short story.

Triangulation: End of Time, ed. Pete Butler, PARSEC Ink, pb, 155pp, ISBN 978-0-6151-5280-6.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #22

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Ten Years of Silver Age Books!

Looking back through the news archives on our website last month, and sprucing them up a bit, I realised that I had let the tenth anniversary of Silver Age Books pass without comment last issue, so let’s put that right!

Back in 1997, after years of writing nothing and feeling pretty bad about it, I spent a couple of weeks writing Professor Challenger in Space, a short and silly novel about everyone’s favourite character called Professor Challenger. It had been fun to write but obviously no one would be interested in publishing it (if it was even legal to do so).

In 1998 I went into a copy shop (Alphagraphics, who much, much later would print the first dozen or so issues of TQF) and found that it wouldn’t be terribly expensive to photocopy a few sets of the book for my friends. I was a bit stuck on how to bind them, so I bought some A5 folders and a hole punch, and thus was born the folderback edition! I tried to make it look like a real book (despite putting it together without access to a computer), so it needed a publisher. The name Silver Age Books was inspired by my love of comics. I wanted to publish books with a similar ethos to the wonderful, wild and silly comics of the Silver Age (roughly the late 1950s to the late 1960s): Superman and Kandor, the Fantastic Four and the Negative Zone, Green Lantern and the Guardians.

I called it Silver Age Books #1 so that it would qualify for a listing in SFX’s fanzine section, and it was nice to see it listed there, even if nobody was interested in buying a copy!

The slogan of this new company, noted on the copyright page, was “Publishing novels retrofitted for the new millenium”. Readers were advised to look out for two forthcoming releases: Mad Rolnikov and the Space Warriors (due spring/summer 1998) and Don Coyote’s Spacesuit (due autumn/winter 1998). Sadly neither of these were published.

In 2000, a couple of years later, I was working for a publisher, and noted with interest the invoices for book printing passing over my desk – the prices weren’t as expensive as I had expected. Before long I was quite an experienced typesetter, and a few lunchtimes was all it took to prepare Professor Challenger in Space for paperback publication. I gave many of the copies away as Christmas presents, sent some others to libraries, and even sold a couple of dozen.

Round about August of the same year I bought myself a Rocket eBook, something that seemed rather cool and futuristic at the time (reading about Amazon’s Kindle e-reader this year has given me a strong dose of deja vu). The most excellent thing about it was that you could download software for creating your own ebooks, and there was a website, the Rocket Library, to which you could upload them. So I uploaded a version of Professor Challenger in Space, and was heartened by the healthy download numbers. In December I made plans to write a book a month for the Rocket Library for the next year…

Well, I finished one of them, at least. That was Quiet, the Tin Can Brains Are Hunting! and if I remember correctly it was online within an hour or so of being written, on 22 January 2001.

It must have been around this time that the ever-magnificent Silver Age Books website first appeared. (Of which one recent correspondent wrote, “I was disappointed that when I clicked the link to check out the actual Silver Age Books website, my eyes started bleeding.”)

Disaster struck only two months later: in March 2001 the Rocket Library was shut down, due to corporate changes and the utter disregard of many users for copyright law. (I think Professor Challenger was out of copyright by that point…) It was a real shame, because it was a pretty cool place.

In December of that year, Silver Age Books published Quiet, the Tin Can Brains Are Hunting! as a paperback (with a black and white cover to make the printing as cheap as possible) and then 2002 was the high point to date of our book publishing, as further books followed: Elephant by Harsh Grewal (May 2002), Elsewhere by Steven Gilligan (round about June 2002), and, finally, printed in secret as a surprise present for the author, There Are Now a Billion Flowers, by John Greenwood (June 2002).

We got a bit carried away at this point, because many further titles were quickly announced, none of which ever saw publication: Aardvark Attack (volumes one to three!), by Alec Abernathy, Rolnikov, Mad Knight of Uttar Pradesh, by me, and Alpha.one, by Steven Gilligan, not to mention multiple unwritten titles by Howard Phillips that never got beyond the point of having a proposal and a page on the website.

Stung by our abject failure, nothing much happened with Silver Age Books for a while then. We published nothing, and wrote less. The cost of printing (this was pre-Lulu) was prohibitively high anyway, even if we had actually written any new books.  There was very little chance of making money, and every likelihood of losing quite a lot! So 2003 and the beginning of 2004 were very quiet, very sad times for us.

Then at the end of 2004 we wrote some new novels, launched Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction to put them in, and three and a bit years later here we are, on top of the world!

And that’s the history of Silver Age Books. No imaginary publishing house has done so much or sailed so high!

But why be so proud of a history of such mediocrity and failure? Well, I’m not proud so much as happy to have had the fun of doing it.

Also, the purpose of Silver Age Books has always been to indulge myself – and everyone will agree that in that regard it’s been a raging success!

One other bit of business: last year I began to feel it was about time Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction had a new look. Our last revamp was back in TQF#11. I liked the old look, but just had a feeling that there was a little too much white space on the page. So for this issue we’ve made the text a bit smaller, switched to three columns, and cut back on the funky fonts. It’s quite a formal look. We’ll see if it sticks!

The cover of this issue uses the brilliant Battlelines font from Blambot. – SWT

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Contributors

Mike Schultheiss contributes “Darwin’s Corridor” to this issue, bringing adventure, ecology, colonialism, evolution and religion together in one steaming teapot of a tale. Though we have published many, many wonderful contributions over the last year of TQF, this kind of intelligent adventure is so exactly what we’re after that we are tempted to post it in full on our submission guidelines page. And it comes with a scientific note. How wicked is that? Notably, the story contains the word erectus 91 times. If you laugh, it’s only because you’re immature. (Like me.) It is also notable for being one of two stories from American friends this issue with curious connections to our home city of Birmingham: Buffalo Bill, mentioned in the story, once brought his travelling show here. Mike lives in Davis, California, and attends the university of the same name. He is currently awaiting his graduation from this same university in June of this year with great anticipation. He plans to pursue a career as a high school teacher of Social Studies and English through the UC Davis credentialing program in the fall. Having grown up in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevadas, Mike is a long-time nature and animal enthusiast and is particularly fond of reptiles. He is currently at work on a novel-length version of “Darwin’s Corridor” as well as a vampire novel, Blood Moon Queen. You can befriend (or just secretly spy on) him at www.myspace.com/mikeschultheiss.

Richard K Lyon is a semi-retired research scientist/inventor whose hobbies include collecting pulp SF magazines and writing. He has also published numerous short stories and novelettes. A collection of the latter, Tales From The Lyonheart, is available from Barnes and Noble, etc. In collaboration with Andrew J Offutt, famed author of My Lord Barbarian, he wrote the Tiana trilogy (Demon in the Mirror, The Eyes of Sarsis and Web of the Spider), Rails Across the Galaxy for Analog, and “The Iron Mercenary”, a tale of Tiana which appeared in TQF#19. To this issue they have  contributed “Arachnis”, an adventure of Tiana’s youth.

Sam Leng lives in Yorkshire, England. She has had fiction published in various print and online magazines, including Skive, Delivered and Steelcaves. A previous story by Sam – “When the Sun and the Moon Did Not Shine” – appeared in TQF#19.  This issue’s tale, “A Matter of Taste”, is short, sweet and impossible to discuss without spoiling it entirely. She produces her own webzine: see www.neonbeam.org.

Robert Laughlin lives in Chico, California, in a Craftsman bungalow destined for restoration by some well-heeled future owner. Mr. Laughlin’s short stories have appeared in several American magazines since mid-2006; “The Spirits of ’26”, is his first publication in a British magazine. It’s in our science fiction section, but to explain why that isn’t really an accurate categorisation (none of them ever are!) would spoil some of its surprises. He offers a note to put this issue’s story in context: “I conceived this story in its present form approximately five years before events of September 11, 2001. I decided against writing it at that time out of the belief no one would consider it the least bit germane.” As well as sharing the interest of “Darwin’s Corridor” in the issues surrounding colonialism, this is the second of our American stories with a Birmingham connection. Avoiding spoilers, I’ll just say that the story mentions Birmingham bricks at one point, which made the acquisition of an illustration no more difficult than stepping outside to photograph our crumbling garden wall. (If only we'd had a spooky castle, an evil mutant hound and a buxom lady available to photograph when producing the cover of TQF#21...) Mr Laughlin’s story, “In the Evening Made”, published in Atomjack Magazine, was voted a Notable Story of 2006 by the judging panel of the story South Million Writers Award. He is the creator and administrator of the Micro Award, an award for previously published short fiction not over 1,000 words in length.

John Greenwood has made contributions to most issues of TQF following his return from a round-the-world trip, and was eventually made co-editor in recognition of his efforts. To his camera we owe the photography that accompanies “Darwin’s Corridor” in this issue. To his pen we owe the ongoing genius of Newton Braddell’s inconclusive researches into the unknown. This issue sees no improvement in Newton’s situation. I would feel sorry for him if his travails weren’t so entertaining! Six months have passed since the appearance of our last Newton Braddell episode, six of the longest months of my life!

Steven Gilligan was a mercurial, interesting and funny person to be around. Unfortunately he produced just twelve episodes of Helen and Her Magic Cat, the last of which appears on the back cover of this issue. Most of his unpublished work was destroyed before his death, an action which left some tantalising hints in the recent files list on his laptop, but a few bits survived. So I do still have a few unpublished fragments of his writing. We’ll do something with them at some point, so it’s not quite the end of his contribution to the magazine. Still, it’s a bummer to have reached the last Helen. What can or should we read into its strange conclusion? Did Steven just lose interest in producing the comic, or was it his intention for it to end so oddly?

Stephen Theaker is the eponymous editor of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, and the cack-handed publisher behind Silver Age Books. He has written six novels to date, but spent no more than thirty days on any, and much less on most. He recently became the editor of Dark Horizons, the journal of the British Fantasy Society, a publication launched in 1971.

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This issue features reviews of the following titles: Triangulation: End of Time, The Game, Spider-Girl Presents: The Buzz and Darkdevil, Deep Secret, John Constantine: Hellblazer, Reasons to be Cheerful and The Gift. Our review section has traditionally been a bit weedy – it was rather embarrassing in particular to realise that until this issue I had never reviewed a book for TQF that I had actually read – but starting a Goodreads account has unlocked my inner reviewer!

Mass Effect

Star Trek games always seem to disappoint. Bafflingly, they nearly always seem to be based around huge ponderous spaceships blasting chunks out of each other (though I seem to remember a first person shooter based on Voyager a while back). That stuff used to be great fun when it appeared in the programmes and the early movies, at least until it started to be shown up by the more epic, frantic and exciting space battles of Babylon 5, but it was far from the crux of Star Trek’s success. The true appeal of Star Trek lies in the human – and alien – interactions: emotion, drama, punch-ups, moral dilemmas, romance, conflict, humour, and, last but not least (and the one that seemed all too often forgotten in recent iterations of the franchise) sex appeal. Mass Effect is a game that relegates the huge spaceships to cut scenes and concentrates on the stuff that really made Star Trek great, adding to it huge lashes of the good stuff from Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5 and Star Wars, not to mention a big dollop of prime David Brin. It’s the most “sci-fi” game I’ve ever played, and I think many science fiction fans would get a great deal of pleasure from simply watching the cut scenes edited together into a movie, never mind actually playing the game.

But let’s move onto the game anyway, because it is worth playing! However, it says much about it that after 80 hours of playing it I feel barely qualified to comment. I’ve gained about 840 of its 1000 achievement points and yet, without mastering the sniper rifle, using the full range of biotic attacks, or partnering up for the game with Liara the lovely Asari or Wrex the unlovely Krogan, I feel that there’s a lot left for me to do.

Reactions to the game (leaving aside the hilarious “porn simulator” nonsense brewed up by idiotic American conservatives) have tended to follow a certain pattern. Initially most people tend to be underwhelmed – you can see that in Edge magazine’s disappointed seven out of ten review in issue 183, in reactions from gamers on Digital Spy, and in the negative review from distinguished Xbox writer Dean Takahashi. I felt the same way.

At first to me the fighting felt uncontrolled, the weapons unbalanced, the graphics a bit too choppy. I don’t like to play stategy games that don’t give you time to make decisions – I’ll always prefer turn-based to real-time strategy games. I didn’t feel like I was ever in control of events during Mass Effect’s combat.

Then, a mission or two into the game, I realised that while selecting my weapons and powers the game was paused, and I could move the cursor around with the joystick to pick out different targets for my attacks, and the attacks of my team. Suddenly, from being a bunch of buffoons chasing robots round and round crates, we became a crack tactical squad, knocking enemies flying with our telekinetic powers, lifting them into the air, blowing up their guns, and knocking them down with our shotguns. From that moment the game got better and better. There’s a sheer glee to unleashing one powerful attack after another (balanced with the tension of anticipating the equally powerful attacks of your enemies) that makes Mass Effect a wonderful and addictive game to play.

That pretty much seems to have happened to everyone. In the latest issue of Edge the game is described as “the absolute best flawed game of the year”. A poster on Digital Spy who started a thread by the name of “Mass Effect – Yawn-o-Rama” in December returned in January to say he now loved it. And Dean Takahashi posted a follow-up review explaining how wrong he had got it the first time around.

One reason for such changing views is the process I mentioned above – simply getting to grips with the mechanics of the game. Another reason is that the game gets more and more enjoyable the stronger your powers get.

This adds immensely to the game’s replayability. If you choose, you can start a new game with the character and equipment with which you ended the previous one. So if you built up the appropriate abilities in the previous game, you can start smashing robots into walls like marbles from your very first encounter with them. Hence my second play-through was when I began to really love the game.

It’s a fairly short game, by RPG standards, which at first I thought was a bad thing. My first play-through, checking out every anomaly, scanning every planet, chasing down every mission, only took about thirty hours; and I tend to play games quite slowly. My second, a sprint through the main missions on a higher skill level, skipping through the conversations I’d already heard, took just twelve hours.

At that point, what had seemed a failing in the game, became a plus point: it’s a game that’s designed to be replayed, to be played through and through as different characters, with different powers, and in different ways.

It’s hard to say why I think that’s a good thing, because I don’t like watching movies I’ve seen before, and I don’t like reading books I’ve already read. So let me give you an example of a game that takes a different approach: Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I love the Elder Scrolls series of games, and I’ve put over a hundred hours into this one, but if there’s one thing I’m not massively keen on, as a former player of traditional paper and pencils role-playing games, it is that you can do absolutely everything the game has to offer in a single play-through. You can play as a warrior, rise to the top of the fighter’s guild, and then join the mage’s guild too and rise to the top of that, often bludgeoning your way through the tasks assigned because your magic won’t be up to it. That’s great fun, of course, such free-spiritedness is integral to the game’s design, but it bothers me because with every additional career ladder you scale in Oblivion, the less sense you have of yourself playing a role, the more you’re just playing a game. (Of course, that was partly my fault for choosing to play Oblivion that way: I could easily have started a new magic-based character to play the mages guild missions.)

The converse is true of Mass Effect. If you’re playing as a soldier, you don’t get telekinetic powers of your own. You have to choose team-mates whose abilities will complement your own. Next time around, you could have your own telekinetic powers, or you could specialise in technical attacks, or you could continue to build the talents of your existing character. The length of the game means that it isn’t a chore to start over, but rather something to relish. It’s more akin to starting a new game of Civilization IV than it is to restarting a Final Fantasy game.

All in all, Mass Effect has been a fitting end to three or four of the best months of gaming I can ever remember: Halo 3, Bioshock, The Orange Box and Mass Effect, not to mention a couple of brief dalliances with Pixeljunk Monsters and Pro Evolution Soccer 6. The last time I enjoyed gaming so thoroughly and unreservedly for such a long period was probably back in the 1980s, after my Dad brought home a ZX Spectrum and two C90s full of copied games.

Originally published in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #21.

Mass Effect, Bioware (dev.). US, Xbox 360.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #21

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Theaker's House of Horror!

Issue 21! It seems funny to think now that being 21 used to be a big deal in Britain. When I was a youngster, everyone talked about their 21st birthday as the big one, the one for which a massive party would be planned. Now it seems to be barely worthy of note. It’s easy to see why – laws have changed, and reaching 21 is no longer the last barrier to adulthood. You can do mostly anything at 18 nowadays, and a good few things at 16 besides. In the US, it’s quite different – you still have to be 21 to drink, which always seems funny to us, as university studients played by actors in their thirties perpetually struggle to buy beer in the movies, even if it probably makes sense in a country in which so many teenagers drive.

I didn’t expect to get all political in this editorial, but while we’re here let me expound one of the ridiculous ideas I once came up with: the minimum legal age for smoking should go up by one year, every year. That done, everyone who can legally smoke now could continue up until their doubtlessly painful demises, while those who can’t legally smoke now would never be able to start. Okay, so like most of my ideas maybe it's a bit impractical!

My other, more practical, idea with regard to smoking is this: if someone stands near you at a bus stop, or sits on a bench beside you, and starts to smoke, you should feel free to trump as much as you like. This should be a general policy, endorsed by government, perhaps even given its own advertising campaign. I think it’s only fair that if your air is being polluted that you should respond in turn. The only foreseeable problem with this is the risk of blowing yourself up once your post-digestive fumes make contact with the cigarette’s lit end.

Where on Earth am I going with this editorial? That’s the problem with setting aside space for one of these things – you get to the end of the production process and there the space is, waiting to be filled. In an issue like TQF#19, that isn’t a problem, because that one had lots of different stories, and so I only had to write a little bit about each of them to fill the space up.

This time, I’ve only got two stories to talk about, and so there I go, wandering into areas that would be embarrassing if I talked about them in the pub, let alone in the pages of an august and serious journal like the one in your hands (or on your screen, if you are reading this online). And now, what’s worse, I realise I’ve used up almost all the space available without even getting onto the stories! Never mind, this may be the worst editorial of all time, but this issue contents two superb stories that more than make up for it! So, onward you go, to read the thrilling horrors!

First there’s "The Exile From Naktah", by Wayne Summers, by whom we previously published "The Walled Garden" in the aforementioned TQF#19. When reading this story I imagined it as being filmed by Hammer.

Then there’s "The Hatchling: Ante-Natal Anxiety" by my pal John Greenwood, following on from "Post-Natal Paranoia" in TQF#20. I like to think of this as Tintin scripted by Lovecraft and filmed by Guillermo del Toro. I hope you enjoy them both.

By the way, sorry for the cover painting! It may be rubbish, but I had fun painting it! – SWT

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Editorial

Theaker’s House of Horror!

The Exile From Naktah

Wayne Summers

Lily * Klune

The Hatchling: Ante-Natal Anxiety

John Greenwood

The Ancient Mariner * Escaping Naseby * Reliving the Past * The Life of Scherlasky * Visiting Family * Old Haunts * Emergence * A Homing Instinct

The Quarterly Review

Mass Effect * Back to You

Helen and Her Magic Cat

Steven Gilligan

Halo 3

I fell in love with this game when browsing a replay movie. As Master Chief, the last hope for humanity, I had fought my way down a bog-standard corridor on my way to more exciting stuff. Watching the replay, I paused the game and zipped the camera down to the other end of the corridor to watch my death-dealing approach from the point of view of my enemies. That was cool enough in itself, but then I noticed one of the pint-sized grunts running off down a corridor. What was he doing? I took the camera down that same corridor, and watched him hide in the darkness as I ran past. Once I was gone, the grunt said with relief (words to the effect of), “I’m glad he’s gone!” Genius! I’ve rarely seen such attention to detail in a game – or perhaps it’s better to say that the attention to detail has never been highlighted in such an effective way. Like the achievements you can gain in this and other Xbox 360 games, the features of Halo 3 encourage you to play and explore the game to its fullest.

I haven’t talked yet about the gameplay itself. I wasn’t a huge fan of Halo and Halo 2, perhaps as a result of picking them up a few years after their release, by which time I’d already played other games incorporating their innovations. I’ve always found online gaming a bit of a chore, which killed part of their appeal for me. I also, to be honest, found them a bit hard!

I’m enjoying Halo 3 much more. For one thing, I’m finding it easier, thanks to your health (at least on the Easy level) being a single shield, which fully recharges in cover, avoiding the death by attrition which always did for me in the previous two games. For another, it’s currently the state of the art in videogames, and so its ideas are as yet unsullied by imitators.

The gameplay options it offers are endless, both in terms of online options, but also in every individual moment – every weapon has its uses in every situation, and every situation responds to a dozen different approaches.

Finally, we are always starved of proper, full-on, big-budget science fiction in the cinema. So it’s a joy to watch a science fiction story as epic as Halo 3’s unfurl, even if it’s on the small screen.

There’s a lot more to be said about this game; the game itself is a conversation that will continue for years to come. Despite playing it all the way through I’ve barely scratched its surface. In terms of Hollywood blockbusters, Halo 3 would be The Matrix or the Lord of the Rings, movies that satisfy on a visceral level, but also repay and stand up to sustained scrutiny.

Originally published in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #20.

Halo 3, Bungie (dev.). US, Xbox 360.

Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #20

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The Big Two-Oh: Celebrations and Apologies!

So this is it for another year – our fourth year of issues (even if it’s only been three and a bit years since the first came out). I’d love to say that this has been a great year for Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, because in many ways it has. Our downloads have increased immensely and even our print sales have gone up a bit. People are starting to hear about what we’re doing. Listings on places like www.duotrope.com, www.ralan.com and the AA Independent Press Guide have brought dozens of submissions to our inbox, and the stories which we have accepted have enriched the magazine in every way. But I can’t bring myself to say it’s been a great year when it was the year our best friend died, leaving us utterly shaken. He’d spent Christmas with my family for something like the last six years, and while that sadly reflects the fact that he never managed to find someone special to create his own Christmases with, they were always good times, and it’s hard to face this one without him around. Apart from anything else, he nearly always bought superb presents for me. (Last year it was The Lurker in the Lobby, a fascinating overview of Lovecraftian cinema.)

I won’t spend the whole editorial being sad, though. It is Christmas, after all, and however much I miss my friend, I’m in ecstatic anticipation of the new Doctor Who Christmas special, and the Marks & Spencers pre-cooked turkey crown in the fridge looks as delicious as it does every year!

In this issue we have the first portion of a new novel by my co-editor, John Greenwood. I made him co-editor in recognition of the fact that he was writing half the magazine at the time – it would be unfair to reject his work now to avoid accusations of bias! And why avoid those accusations? I am biased, no doubt about it. I have a sneaking suspicion that with this novel, as perhaps with his Newton Braddell series, John is pandering to me somewhat, since he packs into each of them everything I want to read whenever I pick up a book (rare as that tends to be nowadays). It’s as if he has made a careful study of my literary tastes and preferences and custom-written a novel to entertain me. The Hatchling is his paciest, most thrilling and most atmospheric piece of writing to date, and if I could get away with reprinting it in every issue from now to eternity I would.

Next, Bruce Hesselbach regales us with a Tale of Yxning, "Contrarieties". Like The Hatchling, this is a story that hits the nail of my tastes so squarely on the head that it is almost uncanny. And the last story of the issue is the concluding part of Michael Wyndham Thomas’s serial, After All, "A River. It Had to Be." It’s been a privilege to publish this fine serial in these unworthy pages.

To both authors I owe an apology (in addition to the one I owe Bruce for the appalling illustration of a plant pot falling on Yren Higbe’s head that marred the publication of his story in TQF#19). Michael Thomas’s serial appeared in all six issues this year, while Bruce Hesselbach’s Tales of Yxning appeared in three, and yet neither author has had the cover devoted to them. The first cover was a portmanteau covering all the stories in the issue (just one postage stamp-sized illustration related to After All), and the next two were devoted to Howard Phillips’ The Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta. The fourth cover of the year featured a creature from the fabulous "Ananke" by Jeff Crook, and the fifth concerned "The Walled Garden", by Wayne Summers, not that anyone would have been able to tell, thanks to my lack of drawing ability. Then this sixth issue has a cover relating to The Hatchling. So that’s four out of six covers given over to our in-house writers, and that’s not at all fair.

The reason is that we knew way in advance what in-house material we had in hand, and once draft covers were drawn up, even though other material came in, I didn’t want to start over on the covers, out of sheer laziness!

In 2008 I’ll make much more of an effort in this regard: I’ve made a vow that none of the covers will be devoted to anything written by myself, John Greenwood or Howard Phillips (unless there is nothing else in the issue).

That brings me to something else that I don’t feel we’ve done particularly well this year: reviews of the books people have sent us. If you look at page 72 of this issue you’ll see my review of Test Drive by DJ Burnham, a book I did not finish reading. As a one-off that wouldn’t be too bad, but it follows similar non-reviews of DF Lewis’s Weirdmonger and Nemonymous #7 (aka Zencore!) in previous issues. For that matter I didn’t get very far through Apex #10 before writing a short review, and Apex #11 stands on my desk now, just as an interesting book by the name of Triangulations stands on my co-editor’s desk. It’s a bit of an embarrassing pattern. We just don’t get around to reading them. In the case of some books that are sent to us on spec, or that we’ve bought ourselves, I don’t feel too guilty, but in the case of something like Apex or Nemonymous where the author has offered review copies and we have specifically requested them, it’s very poor of us.

I can’t promise that we’ll do better next year. For one thing, what really interests me about other small press publications is their methods, philosophies and goals, rather than the stories within. I’m fascinated to see what people are doing, and love to think about the reasons they are doing it. But (and I doubt anyone will disagree) a reviewer should really read the book too! Another issue is that reading an entire book for review takes about as much work as proofreading an entire issue of TQF, and for me it often comes down to doing one or the other.

So while I can’t promise to write better reviews, I won’t ask people specifically to send us review copies, and I apologise to anyone I’ve asked to send us a review copy in the past. If you do send us review copies of your work, I think you’ve had fair warning of the poor quality reviewing you can expect! (For really good reviewing, visit the website of the excellent Whispers of Wickedness.)

So here’s to the end of a very exciting year for this flawed but good-hearted and tenacious magazine! Twenty issues down, but the next will be the best yet – because every issue is! – SWT

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Editorial

The Big Two-Oh: Celebrations and Apologies!

The Hatchling: Post-Natal Paranoia

John Greenwood

An Inconvenient Inheritance * Tangling with Grunewald * The Subterranean Ministry * Abroad, Unarmed and Incommunicado * Another Road to Juliaca * An Audience with El Alcalde * The Prison Under the Lake * Night of the Lakemother

Tales of Yxning

Contrarieties

Bruce Hesselbach

After All

A River. It Had to Be.

Michael Wyndham Thomas

The Quarterly Review

Halo 3 * Test Drive

Helen and Her Magic Cat

Steven Gilligan