Some nice looking scifi on the horizon

Amazon has a page of summer fiction treats up. It includes the new Mieville called Kraken, which looks great. This one is set in a version of our London, but with plenty of Mieville madness. If you haven't read him, definately give Perdido Street Station a try. Just hold your nose if the bug sex bothers you.

On the Kraken page, I see that Charlie Stross has a new Laundry book coming out. This one is called the Fuller Memorandum and I will be reading it for sure. The books read like a cross between the Sandbaggers and the Office and Stross brings it of perfectly.

William Gibson has a new one. I go hot and cold on Gibson, but I will keep my eye on it.

Now here is a book I want. Neil Gaiman gathered some of his story making friends to create an anthology called Stories. Writers the likes of Chuck Palahniuk, Joyce Carol Oates and Lawrence Block serve up some new tales. Two catch my eye. One is a tale by Joe Hill called "Devil on the Staircase" and Gaiman's is a skeery sounding one called " The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains."

Well that should set us up for most of the summer.

Steampunk zombies in Seattle

Well, I am slowly emerging from my reading funk. I had an opportunity to focus on reading yesterday. I managed a charity golf tournament, which mostly means waiting for the people to come back, so you can hand out prizes. Anyway, there was a lot of reading time. One of the books I read was Cherie Priest's Boneshaker. Her prior work has mostly been in Southern gothic horror. Here she takes a different tack with a steampunk science fiction tale.

If you don't know steampunk, it is a style of science fiction usually set in the 19th century that uses high technology based on the tech of the day. So there are dirigibles, babbage engines, and various steam powered mechanisms. Priest's tale is set in a Seattle devastated by a steam powered drill machine meant to explore for gold in the Klondike. The machine went wild one day and wrecked much of the city. Even worse, it released a gas, called the blight, that killed many and turned others in zombies. The outside world protected itself by throwing a wall around Seattle.

15 years later the son of the man whose Boneshaker wrecked the town heads back in to clear his name. His mom, with whom he has a tenuous relationship, chases after him. The two quests give Priest the chance to show off her creative world building, with Confederate (the war has been going on for nearly two decades) airships, cyborgs, hellish factories designed to bring clean air into the Blight-infected Seattle and all manner of odd characters.

In the end, I liked the world more than the story itself. I liked the plot of the mother seeking our her son, but thought the son's wanderings were less interesting. Priest is working on another book in this world, which I will most likely try.

By the way, the book had one very nice design element I appreciated. To give the book a nice steampunk patina, the text is printed in a sepia color. It is quite attractive and subtle.

Another unfinished book

Man, I am having the hardest time getting into a read these days. I started a science fiction novel earlier this week and ended up putting it down. Allen Steele's Coyote is the first of (at least) seven of novels about interstellar colonization. The opening is fun. It starts in the late 21st century when an authoritarian government rules what is left of the United States (New England and the West Coast have split off.) The government is a spoof of the angry white male forces that were growing in strength in the early Bush years. Said nasty government plans to colonize the stars but a rebellion steals the star ship, even sneaking on some dissidents to start anew.

This was all well and good, but there was a bit too much bloat in the writing for my taste. Many reviewers compare the book to Heinlein and Pournelle, which is apt. In that era of scifi, ideas counted more than writing, and that seems to be the case here. To be fair, this book is actually a collection of short stories, rather than a single work.

Reaction to these endless series is hard to judge. I love the overly wordy Malazan novels of Steven Erikson, but I completely understand why the books might put off some people. I might have been better served starting this book somewhere where I could give it more attention.

A little old school scifi

The other day Harris wrote about books you are supposed to like but just don't. He was talking about literary fiction, but the same holds for science fiction. Two books (and series) I just could not get into were Zelazny's Amber books and Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle. The thing is, I love the giant multi volume fantasy novels, but I can rarely stick with multivolume scifi and these two didn't work at all.

Thanks to a Powells display, I did pick up a Silverberg book that I did like. The Book of Skulls is dated but reasonably well written and engaging. Set in the early 70s and populated by earnest philosophically minded college students, the book nearly collapses under the weight of bullshit. The short length and the tensions between the characters keeps it going.

The premise is that one of the four mismatched college roommates (one neurotic Jew, one mincing gay, one bronzed Midwesterner and one aloof aristocrat ---stereotype much?) discover the possibility that a cult can teach them how to live forever. The catch is that four men (and note the emphasis on men) can enter, but only two leave. One has to commit suicide and another must be murdered by the other two. Therein lies the book's tension.

While I think male readers will like the book, I think female readers will not. Most scifi of the period was male centric, but this one is is almost anti-female. Not because of the extensive focus on gay relationships, but because all of the women in the book are portrayed negatively or anti-humanely. The women serve only to hinder our heroes from gaining wisdom or as objects for their learning. Come to think of it, this might really put off male readers too.

Trying out Fringe

One of the weightiest decisions of our era is in which TV on DVD sets to watch. The time suck is tremendous, but the payout can be excellent. Some shows are obvious. I would include Band of Brothers, the Wire, and Lost. Depending on taste, you can add Deadwood and Battlestar.

Thanks to my love for the late lamented X-Files (the early years at least) I decided to try out Fringe. I just finished episode six and I can tentatively vouch for it. If you are not familiar with the show, it is about a team employed by a shadowy arm of the Department of Homeland Security, that investigates "fringe science" which is part of something mysterious called the Pattern. Like the X-Files, each week there is mysterious activity, which the team investigates. Unlike the X-Files, so far at least, EVERY case is tied back to the Pattern. That irritates me a little.

JJ Abrams is the producer so he has brought some Lost formula to the show. Like Lost, it keeps piling on more questions, with nary an answer in sight. You can tell they are going to drag out just what this Pattern is forever. It has Lance Reddick (yay!) For the fantasy nerds, you get Denethor (AKA John Noble) On the whole, we don't get the character standouts we got with Lost.

It also differs from the X-Files. While that show's boogieman was a government-led conspiracy, this show's, appears at least, to be corporate, which fits the times of course. Much of the fun of the X-Files was in the way that it used urban legends. I was so happy when they based an episode on La Chupacabra. Lost gains much of its power from its teasing ties back to mythology. With this show, you get a bunch of ideas that sound like weed induced brainstorms.

All that said, I enjoy it. The stories are peculiar, but I like them. The characters aren't great, but they work. The show is set in Boston, which means we aren't looking at New York, Vancouver or LA yet again.

Too much horror business, flying deep in space

Pandorum is a surprisingly not bad sci-fi movie experience. I am always leery of deep space missions gone wrong scifi/horror movies, thanks to Event Horizon. Renting that movie is the cinematic equivalent of letting someone sleep over at your house and finding out they shat the bed. What's more, same dude directed both movies!

Anyway, this one is fun. A couple dudes wake up on a ship with the last humans in the galaxy only to find the ship is overrun by evil bipeds with a taste for human flesh. It's basically a chase film for the first 3/4 as one of the survivors works his way to the reactor to get the ship moving on to its destination.

The baddies are well used. You see them mostly via strobe like effects and they act like a combination of the wicked monkey of Indiana Jones and Jet Li. The pace of the movie, with its constant running and fighting, does a nice job of spacing out the question of what really happened.

This got me thinking about science fiction books about generation ships. These are the great arks that some think humanity will use to colonize other worlds, or to escape a dying Earth. My absolute favorite of the genre is Ship of Fools, a book, like those of Maria Doria Russell that manages to blend questions of faith into a science fiction base. The genre is fun as you get the paranoia of noir, the science of hard scifi and usually a bit of the old ass kicking. The movie gives you a little of each.

NYRB does scifi

The New York Review of Books Classics line is so good that I will often pick up a book just because they published it. I'll do the same with few others ( Black Lizard and the Library of America come to mind, but the LOA books require a significant time investment.) So, on the rare occasion that the NYRB puts out a scifi book, I get pretty excited. It's such a joy to get my nerd on, while also basking in the glow of the annointed. Inverted World is an early (1970s) novel from Christopher Priest, best known for the Prestige.

The story is set in a bizarre city that rolls down a set of rails on a bizarre planet. The rails are limited, so one set of people takes up the old ones and another sets them down as the old ones come up. The residents of the city do this thanks to a peculiar geophysical effect on their planet. The city is ruled by guilds of engineers that manage the cumbersome process of moving the city. The story is told from the perspective of Helward, a young guildsman. Using a coming of age scifi storyline, Helward, and the reader, slowly comes to understand what is happening to this world and he eventually faces two great crises that threaten to destroy the city.

It's a great adventure tale and it is well told, but this is Christopher Priest, who likes to play with narrative and the ideas of reality, so you know something odd is afoot. As the afterword by John Clute notes, Priest was critiquing the prevailing style of American science fiction at the time. I am happy this was included as an afterword, rather than as a forward, as it is spoiler rich. I don't want to spoil it either, but I do say pay attention to the changes in narrative mode and keep the peculiar introductory chapter in mind. You can enjoy this as a straight scifi novel, but I suspect you will appreciate it more after you read Clute's piece.

If you are looking for an Ian Fleming/HP Lovecraft mashup

I recall someone, I think it was Bob Baer describing the new hire experience at the CIA. He said new recruits go expecting James Bond and find Dilbert. Charlie Stross has a series of novels and short stories that start with Dilbert and end up in Lovecraft. His spies are IT workers and mathematicians who use their craft to battle other spy agencies as well as dark horrors from deep space and other dimensions. The most recent book is the Jennifer Morgue. It is a somewhat unfortunate title since it refers to one of those meaningless code names governments and corporations use to hide the true nature of their activities.

This particular novel is a send up of a Bond story, and Stross's characters are explicit about it. At one point, his hero, Bob Howard, muses whether his demon possessed American counterpart is a "good" Bond girl or a "bad" Bond girl. Which way she falls will determine her fate, he tells her with a hint of sadness. He is also to given to all sorts of jokes like naming a government agency TLA. If this sort of self aware meta humor is your thing, you will get a kick out of this book. Most of the fun is with Stross playing with many genres, from the spy novel to the horror tale.

If you come looking for actual horror, there isn't any, really. The cosmic baddies are here, but the emphasis is one humor. The same goes for the action. Howard is thrust into situations for which he is unprepared and is saved by luck, friends, and his smarts.

The book goes on a bit too long for my tastes. It's light entertainment, so the brain won't be too taxed as you giggle through the pages.

Last Winter

Despite initial interest, I read some bad reviews about The Last Winter which gave me pause. My reaction to director Larry Fessenden's The Wendigo, which I thought was OK, reduced my interest further. Then I saw this list of top ten wintry horror movies and decided to give it a try. It's actually pretty good!

It's a horror/science fiction hybrid. The pacing, acting and narrative are low key and subdued, but there is an undercurrent of disquiet and tension that kept me watching. It is set in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge at a potential site for drilling. The oil company who has the lease has hired some environmental experts to review the site and give it the OK. Strange warming in the area makes it difficult or impossible to bring in the gear and the experts advise against proceeding. This sets up a conflict with the roughnecks.

The movie sets has a pair of conflicts that slowly escalate. One is between the red and blue staters (much more subtle than in the Wendigo) and the other is the conflict between the environment and the humans. The Arctic Circle is a dangerous place and it might be even more dangerous than we suspect. Fessenden keeps both conflicts going and it is hard to tell which is going to be the bigger problem.

The end will be a problem for some. I loved it, but it may come as a disappointing surprise to some. This is the first bit of science fiction about global warming that I have really enjoyed.

Searching for a distant star, heading off to Iskandar

Are you ready for some live action Star Blazers? I'm not I am either. Still, the video below (via Techland) gives us hope with the BSG looking space battles. This made me think of Battle of the Planets, the show I watched when I couldn't get any Star Blazers, which was most of the time. Wow, does it have a terrible intro.

A re-read I enjoyed

I generally don't re-read books. Although I enjoy a good passage as much as anyone else, I don't often go back to savor them. Unless the writing is stellar, I focus on the fact that I know what is coming and wonder why I am reading the book again. Sometimes though, a book will call me once again. I re-read Dune this year and loved it. I just finished re-reading World War Z by Max Brooks.

The book is a speculative oral history set 10 years after a worldwide zombie plague has reduced humanity to a tiny remnant. This format eliminates any sense of character development, but it does allow Brooks to cram in an amazing range of ideas, from how the government would re-organize, how geopolitics would shift and the role of dogs. In a relatively short book, Brooks creates a richer world that is found in the thickest of fantasy novels. A dark and terrible world to be sure, but a fascinating one.

Anyway, it makes me think there are other books I could re-read and enjoy. I didn't find anything new by reading it again, but I did marvel at what he accomplished.

Finally back to scifi

Seems like forever since I have picked up a good mass market paperback scifi novel. I had been looking at Kay Kenyon's The Braided World for years and have owned for nearly that long. It was a great read and a nice return to science fiction. It is an anthropological/first contact scifi novel in the vein of Mary Doria Russell or Orson Scott Card in which a mission sent from a dying Earth hopes to find a means to restart the human race on a distant planet.

A rich former opera singer funds a mission to the planet based on a message which says that the planet has what they have what Earth has lost. The captain dies just as the expedition arrives (wouldn't you know it?), putting the whole thing in the hands of two junior officers. The planet is inhabitated by what looks like humans who call themselves the Dassa. Unfortunately, they have some peculiar habits including slavery for women capable of breeding in the human way. The political system is confusing enough to lead to miscalculation by the novice diplomats.

Kenyon is great at creating peculiar societies and here she has made a world in which the strange biology of the Dassa leads to a odd political system. The plot revolves around the attempts by humans and Dassa to use each other to get what they want. There are a few cliches here and there, but I really liked it.

Finishing the Prisoner

Oh man, the Prisoner has to be the most singular, peculiar TV show ever made. It is part spy drama, part science fiction, part late 60s head trip, part political statement and all around entertainment. How odd is the show? Well for one, there is great disagreement about the order in which to watch them. The main character is never named, but keeps only his number 6. 6 is played by Patrick McGoohan who had a great amount of creative input into the show. He was at least partially responsible for the heavy use of symbolism. For example, the use of the antique penny farthing bike supposedly is there to represent McGoohan's concern that technology is outpacing man's ability to use it. The tension between the individual and society is played out in many different ways, including the whacked out finale.

Speaking of the finale, fans apparently came to McGoohan's house to yell at him after it was made. It is really quite something and is not easily digested. Lock your doors if the Lost people try something this off the wall. There may be riots.

The show itself starts out in a conventional serial method but becomes increasingly odd. 6 resigned from the British secret service and a series of wardens, known as 2 try to figure out why he did it. Their methods grow increasingly bizarre and serve to comment on the oppressive sense of entitlement of the state. The last few shows are just crazy. One starts off in the old West and it is not clear where the hell it is going until the end. The Girl Called Death is a send up of spy shows and is quite funny.

AMC will shortly be presenting an updated Prisoner miniseries. Jim Caviezel is 6 and Ian McKellan, surely the god of all scifi movies now, is 2. There are only six episodes, but before you shout LAME!!, recall that McGoohan originally only wanted the Prisoner to be seven episodes, so it could very well be in keeping with the original.

AMC has all the original shows available to watch online. So what are you waiting for?

Ia ia Cthulhu fhtagn!

One of my eldest son's favorite board games is Arkham Horror. In what other game do you get to fight eldritch terrors at the risk of going insane, or worse, being devoured? Not every child is ready for the terrible weight of knowledge of the Great Old Ones, so make it easy for them with this handy video.



(via io9)

A Tale of Two Schreibers

There are two horror novelists whose books I avidly await. The first is Sarah Langan and the second is Joe Schreiber. Both write spooky stories that disturb not by creating revolting images, but by creating moods and suggesting terrible things. They are young and have just a few (solid) books to their credit, but Schreiber has two new books out. The books are in different genres, so I expected some variation, but I found the differences between them to be startling.

One book, Death Troopers, has a immediately engaging concept, but a weak payoff. The other, No Doors, No Windows, has one of the most hackneyed of concepts, but is riveting throughout. In Death Troopers, an Imperial prison barge investigates and abandoned Star Destroyer and finds it occupied by space zombies. Sounds cool, but doesn't go anywhere. No Doors, No Windows is a haunted house story about a hard luck family and the gothic horrors of small towns. It's been done a million times, but Schreiber's characters, plot peculiarities, pacing and writing rise to the top.

Death Troopers has weak characterization, relies on the Star Wars universe to carry much of the background and is marred by far too much exposition. No Doors, No Windows has a number of interesting characters, some cliched to be sure, but symphatheically and often surprisingly handled. The difference in the writing is just shocking. It feels lifeless in Death Troopers, while vigorous in No Doors, No Windows. Sadly, I think that Death Troopers might be the future of Schreiber's books (he already has a prequel in the works.)

Death Troopers has a sales rank of 430, while No Doors No Windows has a rank of 89,965 (as of this writing). I can't blame him if he churns out more of these Star Wars books. My only hope is that the people who find him thanks to Star Wars move on (and buy) his much better horror books.

Iain M Banks on the big screen! But.....

It's a short story, not a novel. Since much of the joy of his work is his profusion of creativity and spectacle, most of which is found in his novels, not his short stories, I am not all that excited. Our best hope is that the movie makes insane cash and producers fall all over themselves trying to make the next one.

Adventure books are not for me

Robert Masello got a fair amount of buzz for his recent Blood and Ice, which I read. It was pretty good although twice as long as it needed to be. I decided it was good enough to give him another try so I picked up his earlier Bestiary. This one involves a family of Iraqis who guard an bestiary of ancient and mythical beasts. Thanks to a crack down by Saddam and the invasion of Iraq, the bestiary is now located in the US, but the animals are dying. A restorer of ancient texts, her paleontologist husband, an Army vet and a bunch of right wing whackos clash amid the threat of the beasts escaping.

Its not a bad book by any means. There is plenty of action and inventive situations. It is overly long with action and character scenes that don't really add to the overall experience. This one avoids the general pitfall of making a tight plot that could be cut and pasted into a movie script, but falls into the other problem of more text means more story. The subplots felt like they were bogging down the narrative. I didn't get that have-to-find-out-whats happening feeling, as it was evident where the story was going. I suppose what I really look from these books is being surprised and they so rarely deliver.

Truth be told, I don't think I like adventure novels. Movies do a better job creating the scares and pace, at least in most cases. I loved Jurassic Park and Relic, but those books created a sense of suspense and excitement that I haven't found in many other adventure books. I think I will avoid these in the future unless I get a spectacular recommendation.

Beautiful books are waiting for me

Yesterday featured my finest visit to the library in weeks, nay, months! I had four excellent holds awaiting. The only question is whether I can burn through them in the next few weeks (in one case I will probably eat the fine.)

Here they are:

The Dead Hand by David Hoffman. This one is about the end of the Cold War, the legacy of WMD and DOOMSDAY MACHINES!!!! Check out this article by Hoffman about the Soviet doomsday machine that may still kill us some day. PD Smith, who covered this topic in his own book, Doomsday Men, has another good piece on the subject.

The Hawk and the Dove by Nicholas Thompson. This book looks at the Cold War through the lens of the great realist George Kennan and the creator of the national security system, Paul Nitze. The reviews are gushing on this one and the subject matter is perfect for me.

Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber. If you want to bum out your lit fic friends at the bookstore, make them come into the scifi section with you. There will be plenty of eye rolling and mockery of book covers. Sci fi fans themselves will do the same to the little section of Star Wars and Star Trek novels tucked away at the back of the sci fi section. I am often one of those eyerollers.

I make an exception for this book because of the author. He is one of the few horror writers, Sarah Langan also comes to mind, that I think are fabulous writers in a debased genre. Anyway the story is about zombies attacking a Star Destroyer and a prison barge. We shall see.

Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy. This is the one I am most excited about. No one writes quite like Ellroy, but he require some concentrated reading time. I need to go hide somewhere with this one. If you don't know him, his hard bitten style has morphed into a speed freak translating jazz numbers in words approach. He is all dark underbelly, all the time. It has been a long, long wait for the novel and maybe you have worried that perhaps he has gone soft, fear not. Part one of the book is titled Cluster fuck. In all caps mind you. So excited to read this one.

The remake that will probably be more fun than Attack of the Clones

People love some Star Wars, despite George Lucas neglectful parenting. Is there any other cultural phenomenon that could produce the Flickr group Growing Up Star Wars 1977-1985, where over 1,200 people have uploaded their images from before the dark times (here is one I really like)?

You can't keep the fans down and now there is Star Wars Uncut, an effort at collective film making. Fans claim 15 seconds of the movie and reshoot it anyway they like. Here is the trailer. The selections range from cartoon to live action to surreal madness like this one where all the characters have been replaced by babies:

Star Wars Uncut - Scene 328 from M. Schramm on Vimeo.

Death in the ice

I am all for a little mindless monster fiction every once and again. Or every week if it is any good. Lincoln Child co-created one of the great modern monsters with Relic and his latest Terminal Freeze is good fun as well.

This one will immediately remind you of Who Goes There/ The Thing with a far North scientific expedition uncovering what seems to be a saber tooth tiger in the ice. Not long after that a Discovery Channel-like documentary crew helicopters in and takes over the exhibition. They are such total bastards that you wonder if Mr. Child has had some run-ins with Hollywood in the past. A couple are so eggregious that they may as well be wearing I Am Going to Die....Badly shirts.

So it isn't exactly original and it telegraphs some of the bodycount, but it is still a good read. Child knows how to build and sustain tension and he gives just enough detail and background to enrich the story without weighing it down. Some times he moves a little too fast, there is one sub-plot that he seems to have felt needed extra tension, but it felt like a throwaway.

The monster is cool, especially in his gruesome attacks. For most of the book, when asked to describe it, survivors just started gibbering and going mad. I thought he was going to go down the too-terrible-to-describe Lovecraft path, but worry not, he eventually reveals and I think it works well.