Science Fiction & Fantasy

I appear to be operating by way of superhero movies at the moment, even though I am not a fan of the genre and scarcely looked at any comics even in my youth, allow by yourself because. However, great ones do make for anxiety-cost-free undemanding enjoyment and there have been some critically acclaimed examples lately, between them the Iron man movies.

Robert Downey plays Tony Stark, the  engineer/genius inventor head of a key armaments firm, who is injured and captured by terrorists in Afghanistan and held for a few months, supposedly operating on a weapon for them. In truth, he is creating a prototype powered armoured match with which he escapes, but he has been modified by his ordeal and decides to end producing armaments.

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The current Christmas fantasy blockbuster, this is based on Northern Lights (known as The Golden Compass outside the UK), the first volume of Philip Pullman’s highly successful His Dark Materials trilogy. I read the trilogy a few years ago and, while I wouldn’t call myself a fan, thought it worth the fairly considerable time involved (there is a total of nearly 1,300 pages). Although marketed for children, Pullman did not write for this audience – the marketing decision was based on the fact that the principal characters are children – and in fact the tale is rather grim for the young.

For those unfamiliar with the story, a brief background: this is an unusual and complex fantasy, involving a parallel world (of approximately late-Victorian technical development) with people whose souls are housed outside the body, in talking animals called daemons. The story focuses on a 12-year old English girl – Lyra Bellaqua (very well played in the film by 13-year old novice Dakota Blue Richards) – who becomes the focus of interest of the powerful religious Magisterium and its ally, the formidable Mrs Coulter (an excellent performance by Nicole Kidman, with just the right blend of beauty, charm and reasonableness covering evil intent). In this first part, young children keep disappearing and Lyra, with the aid of a truth-divining pocket-watch like device known as the alethiometer (the Golden Compass of the film title), becomes involved in trying to discover what has happened to them. Lyra’s journey takes her to an experimental station in the far north, and encounters with giant talking polar bears, who wear armour and live for fighting.

When making a film of a long and complex book (six or seven hours of reading, condensed into a couple of cinematic hours), the film-makers can either cut out many characters and large chunks of the plot, or can try to include all of the key elements but treat them rather briefly. In the case of The Golden Compass, the later course has been selected. The film starts with a long, voice-over infodump to try to get the audience up and running, then (as far as I can recall) remains more or less faithful to the book thereafter, but with each scene cropped in a way which keeps the story moving quickly. This works well enough for those familiar with the plot, for whom it acts as a kind of visual refresher, but may I suspect prove confusing and even irritating to the uninitiated. On the credit side, there are many visually spectacular scenes and the CGI is as good as we have come to expect. The acting is also very good from a strong cast, including the Casino Royale pairing of the rugged Daniel Craig as Lyra’s “uncle” Lord Asriel and the beautiful Eva Green as the witch-queen Serafina Pekkala.

The trilogy has attracted controversy because of its anti-religious content, which becomes stronger in the later books. Not surprisingly, the Christian churches have reacted rather badly to the success of the series, although this aspect has been played down in this first film. I presume that films of the other volumes will follow if this one is successful (which so far it seems to be, although less so in the USA).

Overall, a good effort and I will certainly be watching the sequels, if they appear.

An fascinating preview of Iain M Banks’ new Tradition novel Issue (due out in hardback in February), inside an entertaining job interview with the author, is the initial characteristic in the newest issue of the SFF mag. One to seem out for when it comes in paperback (not that I am a skinflint, I am just short of bookshelf space…).

There are less stories this time, since they contain a novella Far Horizon by Jason Stoddard, illustrated by Paul Drummond (an engagingly retro wheel-shaped space station capabilities, repeated on the cover). A single of the richest adult males on a fairly dystopian, corporation-ruled near-long run Earth, has options for terraforming Venus which would not bear fruit for millennia. He decides that the immediate potential is also uninteresting to hang around for, so he cheats time by going into cold sleep right up until his new planet is prepared, only to uncover a huge surprise.

In Pseudo Tokyo by Jennifer Linnaea, a future tourist, eagerly anticipating teleporting into Japan, finds himself not quite wherever he anticipated.

The Trace of Him by Christopher Priest is a quick glimpse of a handful of several hours in the daily life of a lady returning for the funeral of a lover she had left 20 a long time prior to.

The Faces of my Close friends by Jennifer Harwood-Smith is the winner of the James White Award. The previous remnant of a outcast group is persecuted toward extinction in an intolerant potential world but what they are being persecuted for is an unpleasant shock.

Ultimately, The Scent of their Arrival by Mercurio D. Riviera explores the earth of planet-bound but intelligent beings who communicate by scent, struggling to recognize the message sent by the vast spaceship which had arrived in orbit around their planet. All is not what it seems…

A very good crop, as common first, inventive and absorbing. I have noticed that it is some time given that I examine a story in Interzone which I did not take pleasure in. Both the normal is increasing or I’m becoming acclimatised. Or perhaps I have turn out to be far more tolerant of a fiction form which, even if it doesn’t usually work, at least isn’t going to entail a large expense in time to uncover that out. Or perhaps it’s all of these points.

The last part in the mag is, as usual, the pages of in depth and often challenging-hitting critiques of films, Tv programmes and books. Best of my “may well acquire” listing from this batch is Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson, which seems like a tale I might enjoy acquiring my teeth into.

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I have just lately witnessed Speak to, the 1997 film of Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel about the first make contact with from an intelligent alien species. By some means I have managed to miss the two the ebook and the film right up until now, so I came to it completely clean, knowing absolutely nothing other than the fundamental premise. I must admit that I was hugely impressed. The movie normally requires an intelligent, adult technique to the concerns which would be raised by these an function and gripped my interest all through. I would have awarded it an Oscar, and given another to Jodie Foster for a excellent central efficiency as the obsessed astronomer. If only all SF movies have been this great!

The time is the present, the location New Orleans. A massive car bomb destroys a ferry packed with families, and ATF agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) is assigned to the team to investigate it. Be warned: I try to avoid spoilers in my reviews, but it really isn’t possible with this one, so if you plan to watch the film and want the plot to be a surprise, stop reading NOW!

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Carlin discovers that the FBI are using a “time machine” based on wormhole technology which allows them to look at any point within a radius of a few miles of the machine, but with a fixed timelag of four days and six hours. As the team look back into the past to discover clues to the identity of the bomber, they focus on a young woman, Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton) from whom the bomber obtained the vehicle used in the attack – and whose body had been found in the water near the explosion. Over days of observation, Carlin falls in love with her and, after the bomber has been identified and arrested and the case is closed down, goes back into the past to try to rescue her and to prevent the bombing from happening.

So far so good: it seems to be a straightforward alternate time-line story, with the branch point being Carlin’s attempts to alter the past, from which moment the “future” divides into the original time-line in the first part of the film (lets call it TL1) and the new one caused by Carlin’s actions, which runs in parallel (TL2). This division into two time-lines is specifically acknowledged in the film, when one of the characters considers the implications of altering the past. Unfortunately, there are some massive plot holes which make a nonsense of the story, which is a shame because it is otherwise an intriguing and entertaining film with some neat touches. If you don’t want to know what the problems are, stop reading NOW!

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The problem is that the film-makers get terribly confused between the time-lines. This first becomes obvious during a dramatic and original car chase in TL1, in which Carlin is driving a vehicle while trying to follow, through a portable viewer linked to the time machine, the bomber who is driving the same route 4+ days in the past. He is so distracted that he causes a series of accidents, and when he has to double back he drives past some blazing wrecks – but these also appear in the view of the past. That’s just carelessness, but a more fundamental problem is that a whole series of events is misplaced: starting with the murder of his partner (due to a message Carlin had sent into the past) and going through the destruction of the bomber’s property as Carlin rescues the girl, and then his subsequent visit to her flat to clean up his injuries (leaving bloodstained dressings), during which the girl rings up the ATF office to check on his identity. These events only occur because of Carlin’s efforts to alter the past, and therefore belong in TL2, but they are all observed in TL1, in which the girl died before most of the events which “involve” her. That makes no sense at all.

Yes, I know that the whole premise of the story is impossible anyway, but that isn’t the point. I am willing to suspend disbelief and go along with all sorts of impossible plot lines provided that they are internally consistent (I wouldn’t otherwise be able to read SFF at all). It’s when they lack internal consistency that I lose patience. I am frankly amazed that an entire team of people spent months working on this film and didn’t notice, or decided to ignore, these inconsistencies. Either they suffered from collective stupidity, or they assumed that their audience would be too stupid to notice. Not the way to give SF films a good name.