Ever since Colin Wilson and John Grant's Directory of Possibilities, such guidebooks to the fantastic have fascinated me. Chambers dictionary of the unexplained is a comprehensive, illustrated A-Z reference about strange phenomena, supernatural entities, cults, hoaxes, and extraordinary things from our apparent reality, presented here with clarity, intelligence, and good humour. My recent non-fiction reading also included Paul Sammon's updated future Noir: the Making of Blade runner, which remains an intriguing film study, second time around (especially if considered alongside Ridley Scott's Final Cut).
Postsingular by Rudy Rucker delivers a torrent of darkest whim-sy and speculative physics. A nanotech plague quietly demolishes planet Earth, but a saviour scientist's psychic virus quickly reverses the effects, so everything and everyone just turned into VR simul-acra are made corporeal again. And that's merely the initial chapter! Hidden in the expected avalanche of cutting-edge utopian ideas, and off-kilter yet enjoyably spirited web-soap episodes, we find neo-colloquial gems ("It was awesome to kiq it with the Prav"), coined by the twisty sensibilities of Rucker's viewpoint characters. Repeatedly, I was reminded of the welcome originality in early Jeff Noon (from Vurt, Pollen, Nymphomation, to Pixel Juice), that's how truly great the startling affect of this SF ‘book of the year’ is!
Copyright © 2008 Tony Lee
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IAIN EMSLEY
Last year harboured a few outstanding books, some of which—like Ian MacDonald's Brasyl—have raised an army of fans. Brasyl extends MacDonald's exploration of SF from the edges, from cul-tures which we often ignore.
China Miéville's un lun dun was, to me, a great return to story-telling form and is a homage to Lewis Carroll and E. Nesbit. Set in an alternative London, Miéville plays with the ‘looking-glass world’ trope but manages to reign in the politics so that they don't swamp the story. Zanna and Deeba are fantastic characters who exist in the madcap-type world we first saw in New Crobuzon, and they introduce us to a world made of books. Drawn into a looking-glass world, they find themselves needing to discover what their roles are, let alone how the world operates and what the challenge is. Like the fantasy world of Bas Lag, Un Lun Dun riffs off Miéville's reading but it never gets in the way, and in some ways it opens up a game for the reader. It's reminiscent of Christopher Fowler's Roofworld or Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.
Gordon Dahlquist's the glassbooks of the dream eaters was one of those books—it took me a while to read, but it was gratifying to do so. Sonorous and grandiose, it harks back to 19th Century detective novels and tells a slightly stilted story of a daring plan to take over the world. Originally delivered in ten parts, its episodic nature shows through, but it's a great experiment nonetheless. Dahl-quist's characters draw the reader in through their initial lack of definition and then invite the reader to follow them as they discover the narrative—and the world—for themselves. What begins as a slow burn turns into a barnstorming ending, as all the plots come together in the crashing finale.
Elizabeth Hand's generation loss is a strange book, mimetic yet truly fantastic. A romp from the late 1970s through until the 1990s, it follows the fortunes of a photographer who has lost her fame but is asked to do a one-off shoot with a recluse. As she comes to Maine, the true meaning of the assignment comes into view. The book left me with the lasting image of a black and white photograph stained by bourbon.
Finally, the interfictions collection by Theodora Goss and Delia Sherman is a really worthwhile collection that will alter the way that you look at genre fiction—not to mention introduce you to some fabulous new writers.
Copyright © 2008 Iain Emsley
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PAUL KINCAID
The book of the year for me, without a shadow of a doubt, has to be endless things by John Crowley, if only because we've been waiting twenty years for it, and after all that time it doesn't disap-point. After Daemonomania I thought he had already brought the sequence to a close and couldn't imagine what he might do with the fourth volume. The surprising, and surprisingly effective, thing he does is open the whole sequence up again, as if Endless Things gives it a fresh start; it is freer, lighter, faster moving than any of the previous volumes, and turns nearly every one of our expectations on their heads.
For me, 2007 was an excellent year and there were half a dozen or more titles that would have topped this list another time, but two other books ran Crowley particularly close. Neither was published or promoted as science fiction, but both use the tropes of alternate history to startling effect. the yiddish Policemen's union by Michael Chabon was, as we have come to expect, beautifully written, extraordinarily funny and astoundingly powerful. A brilliantly judged combination of noir thriller and alternate history, it saves its greatest shock for the end when his segregated and disaffected Jews carry out an attack that is every bit as huge and world-changing in this timeline as 9/11 was in ours.
Every bit as good was resistance, a first novel by the poet Owen Sheers. The situation is familiar: Germany is victorious in World War II; but what he does with it is moving and original. All the men in a remote Welsh valley disappear in the very first sentence of the novel; we presume they have joined the resistance but we never see them again. Instead we follow the women as they struggle to cope with the harsh implacability of the landscape and the reality of German soldiers who themselves are trying to escape the war. It is a book that has, I think, gone unnoticed by most of the sf community, which is the saddest thing about the year.
But this choice leaves no room to discuss Ken MacLeod's the execution Channel, or Christopher Barzak's one for sorrow, or Cowboy angels by Paul McAuley, or harM which is the best novel for years from Brian Aldiss, or ... let's just say it was a rare year when we were spoiled with riches.
Copyright © 2008 Paul Kincaid
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RICK KLEFFEL
Three novels from last year stood as exemplars of both historical fiction and speculative fiction. The surreal literary horror of Erika Mailman's the Witch's trinity, the serene polar vistas of Dan Sim-mons’ the terror, and the graceful, joyous family saga of Kathleen Ann Goonan's in War times all demonstrated the depth and power of historical fiction unlatched from the limits of mimetic realism.
Dan Simmons’ The Terror is based on the true story of HMS Terror which, along with HMS Erebus, disappeared while trying to discover the Northwest in 1845. Ambitiously architected, this long and complex novel immerses the reader in a world that is both hyperreal in detail and yet surreal in effect. Simmons takes readers on the journey of HMS Terror, following Captain Crozier and his crew to a fate both foreseen and unexpected. It's rich with realistically rendered characters, superb set-pieces and a hint of the supernatural that is truly awesome. By focusing on the historical details, Simmons escapes the bounds of history and engages the imagination.
You'll have to sidle over to the Fiction aisles to find The Witch's Trinity by Erika Mailman, which is being marketed as mainstream literature. The writing is indeed quite fine, but Mailman's novel, told from the perspective of an aging woman in a 16th Century German village slowly succumbing to starvation is a powerful and gripping fairy tale, realistically rendered, with implications for the twenty-first century that cannot be ignored. Güde Muller has lived beyond her years, and her daughter-in-law Irmeltrude is resentful. When the well-fed travelling representative of the Catholic Church arrives, armed with the ‘knowledge’ from the latest in witchfinding technology, the Malleus Maleficarum, a book that gives detailed instructions on how to identify the enemy within, hope springs forth. Mailman's visions of witch's Sabbaths and ritual fires are sear-ing and intense acts of imaginative fiction, based on but freed from reality.
Kathleen Ann Goonan also deals in history, but In War Times balances tragedy and reality with a powerfully poignant vision of what could be. Sam Dance is an enlisted soldier smart and lucky enough to have been shuffled into an academic fast-track, where he meets physicist Eliana Hadntz, who g
ives him the plan for a device and a working model. With it, Sam can step through varying time-lines and live in alternate pasts, presents and futures. Including actual passages from the journals of Goonan's father, In War Times is a full-blown, multi-generational family saga that uses the tools of science fiction to evoke not just wonder but emotions. Concise, gripping and inventive, In War Times is a vision of hope, wonder and tragedy.
All three novels mentioned here share one trait: they are set in the recognisable, documented historical past, yet explore the terrain with the tools and techniques of speculative fiction. Novels of science fiction are not limited to futuristic settings; the past can be as effectively explored with the imagination as the future.
Copyright © 2008 Rick Kleffel
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PAUL F. COCKBURN
At the risk of being confused with some inadequate literary groupie, hanging onto the coat-tails of successfully published authors, I can say that 2007 was a good year for new books written by my friends, acquaintances and other people that I nod to in passing at conven-tions.
Some of the books were new twists from assured hands: Ken MacLeod as the futuristic thriller writer brave enough, with the execution Channel,toactuallyfollowthroughontheconsequences of his ideas; Richard Morgan pushing his own personal envelope with Black Man; and Charles Stross exploring new realms with wit and complex originality. Others were the work of so-called newcomers: Alan Campbell, whose scar Night held my attention throughout the kind of fantasy I'd normally avoid; Gavin Inglis, a master of amusing and chilling prose, with his delightful Crap ghosts; and, at last, a long overdue edition of Andrew J. Wilson's poignant, heartfelt tribute to Rod Serling, the terminal zone.
Two books in particular, though, acted as bookends of my per-sonal reading during 2007: Hal Duncan's ink and Gary Gibson's stealing light.
Ink, of course, is the massive continuation and conclusion of Duncan's equally considerable Vellum. As the second half of The Book of All Hours, it was no surprise that Ink featured an abundance of mythical and pop-cultural allusions amid a clashing of parallel and palimpsestic histories. As with Vellum, I willingly submerged myself into the language and action of the book, trusting the author to take me on a meaningful journey through the following 600-plus pages. Nor was I disappointed by its simple message: people die.
Though Ink seems more linear in its overall narrative than its pre-decessor—necessarily collecting together narrative strands laid down in Vellum—the overall Book of All Hours is far more structured than it might at first seem—its narrative hanging on a framework built up from chapter to section to book. Equally carefully structured, though operating only in one timeline, is Gibson's Stealing Light—his third novel and the first of a new trilogy. Here, carefully placed flashbacks reveal more than just basic plot information; they help shape how the reader views the main characters and the events they are experiencing.
Gibson's skill is the economic creation of convincing characters and plausible futures; his particular talent, though, is defining character and imparting information through dialogue. And, it must be said, racking up the tension around what is one of the largest loaded pistols in recent SF.
Gibson's prose may not be as flamboyant as Duncan's, but what they both share is an innate scepticism about clear-cut heroes and villains. Gibson successfully ensures that his main protagonist is as much a danger to other people as they are to her. The Book of All Hours, meantime, underlines precisely why Duncan believes it is “the heroes—men who would be gods—who tear this world apart with those blind, brutal certainties, and it's the rest of us who're left to stumble through the ruins, gathering our dead."
Copyright © 2008 Paul F. Cockburn
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[Back to Table of Contents]
MUTANT POPCORN—Nick Lowe's Regular Review of Film Releases
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Cloverfield is a date movie, like 9/11 and its too many siblings to count, here documenting the story of the “Saturday May 23rd” (so apparently 2009) in which Cthulhu comes calling in downtown Manhattan, with all his little Cthulhettes to scamper around the bits he can't fit into and spread the gift of jeopardy through any dark passages the camera's wielders may choose to wander down.
Obviously, not everyone will feel that we should be celebrating 11 September 2001 as The Day That Monster Movies Changed Forever. But Cloverfield has given itself the noble mission of redeeming Hollywood from the conundrum of how it can ever again make audiences feel threatened by beasts from 20,000 fathoms. Now that moviemakers have helpful reference footage of what trashing Manhattan actually looks like, never again will it be possible to show Gojira knocking down skyscrapers without an iconic dust cloud filling the streets; and never again will it be possible to detonate an apocalyptic scenario downtown without meretricious and frankly tasteless recollection of America's favourite nightmare. How can anything survive such changes in the world we knew?
Cloverfield's solution, and its undeniably big idea, is nothing less than to write the first textbook for the narrative grammar of Film 2.0, drawing on the disparate threads of “reality” entertainment, amateur video, surveillance footage, user-generated web-clip entertainment, embedded documentary, and 24-style pseudo-realtime to assemble a new syntax of cinema in which the narrative camera is placed in the world and hands of the characters. But where its closest film ancestor The Blair Witch Project was genuinely cheap, amateurish, improvised, and left-field, Cloverfield is an extremely professional and expensive mainstream blockbuster in carefully tailored tatty street clothes. Even aside from the cg effects, the dialogue is a lot more scripted than it affects, the handheld camera more storyboarded, the sound mix intricately assembled, and the setups constructed and blocked as rigorously as in any other nonsense action spectacular.
Beneath the unpolished veneer, in fact, is a radically conventional film, entirely compliant with the protocols of act structure and the conventions of the classical monster genre, for all its show of stomping round smushing the monoliths of traditional Hollywood storytelling. There's the obligatory deadline-scheduled airlift from the centre of ground zero; the cast segregated into three circles of designated survivors, supporting players available for shock dispatch, and casual expendables; the climactic money shot of the monster (here a rather disappointing Fin Fang Foom without the underpants); and defiantly old-school lines like “Whatever it is, it's winning!", “Maybe our government made this thing!", and “Initiating hammerdown!” A mainstream film score and merchandisable soundtrack album have been more of a challenge, but the former is taken care of by admitting big-orchestrated end credits, and the latter ingeniously boosted by devoting the whole first act to an extended party scene. In fact, it's impossible not to admire the technical ingenuity and verve with which Cloverfield's script and direction find workarounds for all the familiar things that shooting in YouTubesque realité should make it impossible to finesse, and tricks to play with the new narrative toys. In particular, the “footage found” device lifted from Blair Witch enables a form of first-person narration in which the actual characters don't have to survive; and though throughout you expect and dread a closing shot from the abandoned camera of the rescue copter lifting off from Central Park, what you get is a much cleverer, neater, and more satisfying use of the conceit. It's still not as scary or as haunting as Blair Witch, or even as Small Porgies out of Just So Stories; but then not much is, even in what passes for reality.
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It's particularly instructive, if not exactly pleasurable, to watch Cloverfield back-to-back with Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, which is essentially the same film but made in the style of an ultra-traditional old-school monster B-movie. When a Predator ship infected by Aliens crashes in backwoods Colorado and a lone Predator pursuer rides into town to clean up the trash, it's the cue for a collection of variously expendable twentysomethings plus Reiko Aylesworth in a vest to try to make th
eir way to the escape copter on the roof of the Alien nest before the military sterilise the town with a friendly nuke. This House of Frankenstein of two once-mighty franchises is a sad elegy for the Alien series in particular, which even in the first
AvP was sufficiently confident of its mythic muscle to feel no need to open up its traditional claustrophobic settings, let alone to stoop to the banalities of smalltown invasion and stalking a blonde played by someone called Kristen who proposes a midnight swim solely so that she can spend her remaining screentime in a swimsuit. It's also debatable whether the old Alien would stoop to facehugging kids in the prologue or infecting an entire neonatal ward of helpless crying infants. The strength of the first AvP film, which I thought like many Paul W.S. Anderson films rather underappreciated, was its maker's trademark grasp of the cutting edge of narrative poetics where film meets games and comics. But Requiem has no such sense of cross-medium form, and slips back instead into bynumbers smalltown survival-horror; while its meaningless title, apparently chosen solely because it sounds good on a spinoff game, is a particularly unfortunately tag for this (please God) last restingplace of Hollywood's once-favourite sesquiquadrilogy.
An entirely different breed of monster movie is The Water-Horse: Legend of the Deep, latest of Walden Media's earnest adaptations of quality schoolroom classics. These are increasingly diverging into two species: those like Narnia and Bridge to Terabithia where the source text is a heavily assigned US primary-school favourite whose lineaments must be faithfully preserved, and those like The Dark is Rising where the fanbase is an ocean away and the source can be cheerfully torn up and rewritten. Dick King-Smith's 1990 novella is very much in the second category: a characteristically gentle, affirmative period tale of family and wildlife bonding together in mutual affection and support, with two children finding and hatch-ing a kelpie that becomes a family pet until it grows too big and has to be regretfully released into the wild in a deepwater loch whose name it will then make famous. Though King-Smith's vast output has an extraordinary virtual monopoly on its underserved age-group in the UK, penetration into the US market remains limited for all but a handful of titles, and so the Walden team has thought nothing of turning the plot into Free Nessie, and the family, as in Dark is Rising, from a warm and close-knit unit (which was the point) to a fractured, dysfunctional, and headless household riven with father-son issues. It scarcely needs saying that the sister, joint lead in the book, is thanklessly demoted; while the setting has been moved up a decade into 1942, with the war bringing violence, be-reavement, and crudely-wrought class issues into the centre of the story in ways utterly at odds with the spirit of the book.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #215 Page 17