Game of Cages (2010)

To commemorate the release of the third Twenty Palaces novel, here a slightly negative review of the second book which I only recently finished. In it Raymond Lily goes to another small town where an auction for another supernatural predator is being held. As expected, things go from bad to worse to hellish in a short amount of time.

My biggest beef with the novel is that it feels too often like Lily is running from place to place all over town for most of the novel with not much happening. Now, following the conventions of the whole urban fantasy genre and the first novel, this might seem like an odd sort of criticism, since this is what most of the characters do plotwise in these novels. So, I try to be more specific. The book starts with the auction and the supernatural predator getting away from his buyer later on, ready to terrorize the normal population. For the rest of the novel Lily tries to kill the predator, following him all over town. Since it’s not a big town, it feels like he is just moving from place A to B to C to A again and then everything just repeat ad nauseam.

He’s always a second too late to catch the predator and when he isn’t, doesn’t really have way to kill it. The only thing that changes over the course of the book is how the situation in the town gets worse with each moment, until all the town’s people are either death or have become slaves of the predator. Sure, this is simplifying everything to a degree, but I was so bored halfway through that I stopped reading the book for a few months. The book still has the raw energy that I loved about the first part and we learn some knew factoids about the setting, but on the whole the book felt weaker than the first part.

Also, the events in the first part, and the predator there, had a more horrifying and repulsive nature than the predator here. The things the second predator does are still pretty awful, but subjectively speaking they just doesn’t pack the same kind of punch as in the first book.

The Girl With No Hands And Other Tales (2010)

The second short story collection by Angela Slatter mostly contains reworked fairy tales or at least stories that feature motives from fairy tales. Most authors, when trying this, go for some twist ending or for role inversion (the evil step-mother is actually good or something like this). Slatter’s approach is not completely different, but she’s a bit more subtle and her stories don’t rely on twists as much. Instead she focuses on the female characters, who in fairy tales are often nothing more than a McGuffing for the male hero, be it as a victim to infuse tragedy or someone to save, or as a trophy to win.

Slatter shifts the focus from the males to the females: daughters, mothers and sisters, trying to survive the usual grimness that often accompanies fairy tales. Sometimes they get their revenge on those who harmed them, sometimes they get their happy ending and sometimes all they get is to chose their own end. But what they get above all is to tell their own side of the story. Slatter deftly looks into their minds and gives all of them a voice of their own, that is all so often absent. And sometimes, she manages to surprise you with a, yes, a sort of twist, but one that doesn’t feel gimmicky, like the evil stepmother who comes to regret her act of murder or the Baba Yaga who is more than just an evil crone.

A Place So Foreign and Eight More (2003)

Doctorow’s fist short story collection. The themes that would later become synonymous with his entire career are only present in a major way in the last story 0wnz0red (thought arguably All Day Sucker and To Market, to Market incorporate typical Doctorow interests), which is definitely one of the high points of the entire collection, together with Craphound, the very first. The rest of the stories cover typical SF territory: time travel, aliens and the likes (only one fantasy story, and this is IMHO the weakest story in the entire collection). Doctorow always manages to give each of the stories a unique spin (e.g. time travel is slowly spreading advanced technology backwards in time), yet all of them sport good plots, often excellent ideas and most of all, well realized characters.

Actually that is one of his strengths as a writer, he starts with building instantly likable and compelling characters, and only along the way explores the setting and the ideas he’s interested in. It’s a good way to hook a reader, but it also demands a certain skill to establish a memorable character with only a few sentences from the get go. Thought, sometimes his hooks worked too good. Even after the story was over I wanted to know what happened next and I left the story with the feeling that there was much more to tell.

Overall, this feels like a collection where a writer at the begin of his career is trying out every toy in the toy box, before he has settled on the ones with whom he is really comfortable and before he even starts adding his own toys to the box. Yet even at this journeyman level do Doctorow’s stories show a craftsmanship that was beyond that of most of his peers.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011)

The fourth incarnation of the franchise sees various parties going for the Fountain of Youth, a MacGuffin that is exactly what it says it is. From the old guard there is Captain Hector Barbossa, Joshamee Gibbs and naturally Captain Sparrow. Newcomers on the set are Captain Blackbeard and his daughter Angelica, with whom Sparrow once had a thing going, and some nameless Spaniards.

After the bombastic, but meandering two-parter that preceded it, On Stranger Tides is a much less exhausting experience. Sure, the bombast is scaled back, but this only makes for a better paced and thus more enjoyable movie. I nearly didn’t watch it after all the lukewarm reviews I read, but IMHO this is a return to form. All characters are fun, the few old-timers and the newcomers as well, the plot is a natural consequence of Sparrow having lifted a map at the end of the last movie and the MacGuffin they all are searching for is entirely fitting with the whole setting.

They also integrated a love-story between a mermaid and another secondary character, that I found at first perplexing, but which made much sense in the end and was entirely in line with the previous three movies. All Pirates of the Caribbean movies had a duality of character archetypes going, an old-school conventional hero and the con man. I always find it amusing how people love Jack Sparrow, as he’s objectively the guy who screws everyone over. And to do that, he needs a real hero, someone who believes in good, honesty and all that stuff. And Jack uses that character as a foil to get where he want, and then the real hero gets screwed over. Sure, it wasn’t as pronounced here with missionary Philip Swift as with would-be pirate and daddy-pining Will Turner, but in the end the hero goes toward his Greek fate while Sparrow manages to escape tragedy entirely.

Thought with all good con man, you have to wonder if the life Sparrow is living is really worth it: estranged from everyone around them, always on the run, with many admirers but no real friends, trusting no one.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

The sequel to Planet of the Apes emulates the surface plot structure of the first movie far too closely. We have another stranded human starship from the past with only one survivor, who gets to ape city, gets caught, flees and . . . okay, from here on the plot moves in a different direction. But still, the first half feels likes it’s taken nearly wholly from the first movie. Beneath the Planet of the Apes has a few problems beside that. First, why sent a rescue mission for a starship that was on the way to another star system and would have arrived there thousands of years in the future. How could those on Earth even know there was a problem (okay, you can explain that away by saying that whatever brought the first crew into the future happened near Earth space, still seems a bit wonky).

A bigger problem is how the characters were painted in the sequel. The first movie had complex characters, who were neither entirely good nor evil. Like the chimpanzee Dr. Cornelius, who knows that the system is corrupt, but is practical enough to go with the flow instead of trying to be a hero like his finance. In BtPotA, there are either good characters or bad ones, no shades in between. The main character, Brent, is the typical, bland, dashing hero, everything that Heston’s character in the original was not. The military apes were as cardboard evil as you can get. So were the atom bomb worshiping human mutants in the underground (hence the Beneath in the title), who imprisoned Taylor. I also thought it problematic that on the whole the movie was merely about finding Taylor, that Brent never thought about what to do next. I can understand it on a human level, he tried to find the only being who shared his cultural reference and history, but I wished the sequel had a more ambitious goal than merely the Quest for Taylor.

Despite all my complains, I found it very satisfying that the movie adopted the pessimistic tone of the original and developed the overall theme further. In the first movie, Dr. Zaius explained that all the atrocities done to humans were necessary, because humans had nearly destroyed the Earth once, and only a more restrained race, like the apes, could safe the planet in the long run. The second movie showed, that the apes were shaping up to be just as bad the humans once were. As were the telepathic human mutants. In a certain sense, it seemed to imply that all intelligent beings would fall prey to the sins that brought the original humans down and nearly destroyed the world. Pretty awesome for a such simplistic sequel. And the ending really is . . . sure, bombastic too, but also entirely fitting for the overall tone of the first two movies of the franchise.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

So, it’s a classic movie whose plot most people know even when they never saw it. Four astronauts from the present travel to another star system, their ship crashes while they are in hibernation and they try to find out where they are. It’s a world wheres humans have evolved to dumb creatures (in both senses of the word) and various kind of apes evolved into intelligent, humanoid creatures who still resemble their ancestors. So, basically, it’s our world (warning, spoiler, oh, too late, but fear not, everyone with half a brain who didn’t already knew this takes place on Earth would have guessed so anyway), but with evil apes oppressing humans.

Okay, they aren’t really evil. I’ve avoided watching the movie for years because I thought the premise is pretty stupid, but while some aspects of the movie are wonky (just how do you happen to get to the future of Earth when traveling to another star system, a wormhole on the way that just happens to connect to the future?), the movie is actually good. Much of it has to do with it’s ambiguous tone. For most of the time we see the evolved apes doing horrible things to humans. One of the astronauts is killed on a hunt for humans and the stuffed for a museum exhibit, one is lobotomized and the main character, Taylor, is planned for castration at one point. So evil apes is an assumption that comes easily.

But, and that’s a big but, a few of the higher ups in the science caste of the ape society knew all along that humans could speak once. They also knew that humans destroyed part of the Earths with the atom bomb, that they ravaged the Earth till near exhaustion and only their own destruction stopped this cycle of madness. Those higher ups, or at least the one we see, Dr. Zaius, says he will do everything possible to stop humans from ever rising again, as they are a plague on Earth and bring only ruin. It’s a pretty pessimistic reading of human nature, but future history seems to back up Dr. Zaius conviction to some extend.

Beside the ambiguous tone of the movie concerning human nature, there’s Charlton Heston’s performance as Taylor. He’s not the dashing space hero you expect him to be, this was the one who got lobotomized, he’s a man deeply disillusioned by human nature himself, who went to the stars to find something better. Instead, in cruel twist of fate, he lands in the future and has to see all his fears confirmed. Humans have destroyed themselves exactly as he expected them to do (thought that realization hits him only in the last seconds of the movie). But worse, instead of finding something better than humanity, he finds that the apes, who have taken up the reins, are doing pretty fine in the atrocity department themselves. There is nothing better out there.

Lightspeed Transmission to Tau (1986)

If I say my first love are books, that would only be partly right. I do not remember the first prose book I read, but I still remember my first SF book. I knew there were other books before, but nothing that had made enough of an impression to survive the ravages of time and faulty human memory. But my first SF book did. My father, always believing in tangible things, gave it to me because he had no idea what to do with it. Despite being heavily interested in technology, he really didn’t get the appeal and gave it to me (I must have been somewhere between 8 or 10 years).

It wasn’t an instant moment of transcendence, with my whole being transformed into the science fiction reader I’m today to the exclusion of so many other things. But the book had enough traction that I remember most of the stories, at least in fragments, to this day. At that time, I didn’t even knew the word science fiction. I grew up in the endgame years of the GDR, but there still seemed no unifying term for what is essentially called science fiction these days. They had futuristic fiction, Utopian fiction, scientific speculation or combinations of similar terms (often using the word Phantastik, that has no exact translation in English). I read mostly GDR authors or translations from other countries behind the Iron Curtain.

In terms of style, the two major modes of science fiction (thought obviously I’m simplifying here to some extend) where either heavily encrypted criticism of the system or a sort of campellian science fiction with a socialistic spin and of course the intersection between those two modes where things got a little bit strange. My first science fiction book – see cover (title roughly translated as Lightspeed Transmission to Tau) – was an anthology that worked mostly with the socialist campellian mode: optimistic, technophil, solution-oriented (or maybe that’s what I remember).

Like I said above, I had no major epiphany, but I was impressed enough to search out more stuff like that. Over time, this accumulated into a live-long habit of reading science fiction, thinking about science fiction and in the end, seeing it a the major defining element of my life. Even in years where only a small portion of the stuff I read is science fiction, it tends to be the stuff I remember in the long run and the stuff I think most about.

Ghost Story (2011)

If you believe the tone of many reviews of the 13th part of the Harry Dresden series, you could get the impression the series has jumped the shark. I think there’s a different reason. The end of the last book ended on a cliffhanger (despite what Butcher himself says, killing your character at the end of a book constitutes a cliffhanger, even if you’ve resolved the whole plot that went on before) and expectations were high. But instead Ghost Story is exactly what is says it is, Harry as ghost with only the smallest ability to interfere in the real world. Over the course of the series we’ve seen Harry grow from a low-key detective to world class player, but not everyone was satisfied with that development. But there’s a big difference between a low-key player with little power and a ghost who can’t even touch the real world (only whisper into the ears of the emphatic). One can make at least a gesture of defiance, even with little power at your disposal, but as a ghost not even that is possible.

I admit, after the end of Changes I was expecting Harry to have some adventures in some sort of afterlife, but while Ghost Story did not meet these expectations, it was still a good book. Like a much needed break from all the world-saving and power games, Harry was forced to adapt to a new situation and change his usual tactics. It made for a slower book, surely, but not the filler many people say it was. Just a small change of the formula. Thought the next book seems to be back on track with high level power play at the faerie courts, which is okay too.

Gon 1-7 (1992-2002)

Gon is a 7-volume manga by Masashi Tanaka about a little, indestructible dinosaur having adventures on a prehistoric Earth (probably, it’s never clearly defined). The manga is pretty unusual in that it uses no text, everything is conveyed through Gon’s and all the other animals expressions. Which ties into the second unusual aspect of Gon. Usually the world around Gon and the animals he meets are depicted in an impressive, hyperrealistic style with an insane amount of detail, and yet, while all the animals look like real animals, Tanaka manages to show what’s going on by giving them anthropomorphic expressions. Which really shouldn’t work, considering his hyperrealistic approach, but yet it does. Sometimes, only with the subtlest touches, he manages to convey all that is needed to understand what the animals are thinking, feeling, wanting. It just adds another layer of pure awesomeness.

As for the stories, after some time they feel a bit formulaic (probably the reason Tanaka stopped after 7 volumes), but great art and narrative strength pulls you along for the ride most of the time. Typical plot elements are Gon being oblivious, Gon in conflict with another animal, Gon playing the hero and saving other animals. He shows a wide range of reactions, from compassion to annoyance to pure joy. This being a comic about animals, there’s a certain amount of violence, and death is always near, but it’s tempered by never being gratuitous and mixed with a good dose of humor. It’s like Tanaka is saying, you can’t hide death and pain in the real world, but it’s not all there is. There is the pure joy of living: eating, seeing a sunset, swimming in the water, climbing a tree, exploring a jungle or deep caves full of mysterious creatures. It’s all part of the big picture, of being alive.

Sinfest: Viva La Resistance (2011)

In 2009 Dark Horse published Sinfest Volume 1, so you expect the next would be volume 2. So why the lack of volume and number in the title? Because it’s actually, sort of, volume 3. Once upon a time Ishida self-published three volumes through Cafepress, which covered all the material in Dark Horse’s volume 1 and would have covered the material in the not published volume 2. Instead of doing material that had already been covered before, Dark Horse decided to gallop ahead and start at volume 3, but knowing that the lack of volume 2 would upset byers (really, who would have thought, in an industry full of compulsive collectors), the killed the numbering and just gave it a funny title.

Beside all the publishing shenanigans, it’s actually a very well rounded volume. We get the superb plotline with the Devil abandoning his post, which at times reminded me strongly of Mike Carey’s Lucifer series. We see Slick and Monique doing their usual dance, thought it felt less formulaic and at times much more honest than it has been in years, with some excellent introspective bits and many LOL-moments. Overall a good melange of the rawness and energy that any comic possesses in its early years mixed with the much slicker art of the later years.