Interzone #267 - November-December 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  For me, the most interesting stories explore the human form. ‘Princess’ is one such example: an erotic, metafictional fairy tale of a celebrity taking control of her body and her sexuality. It is perhaps a little forced in places but overall the light, archaic language works a treat, held taut by the mythical structure. In contrast, ‘My Insect Skin’ is centred around loss of control. A homage to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, we follow a woman who feels unloved in her own skin. A fascinating plot ensues, leading to a shocking, one-punch ending. Unfortunately the ending is a real letdown as it reeks of the author trying for aplomb. That said, Beukes still manages to weave strangeness with normalcy, resulting in an intensely creepy feel. I dare you to read it without periodically checking yourself for gills, tentacles or something equally disturbing.

  The title story ‘Slipping’ is the strongest of the human-themed tales and possibly the whole collection. Pearl is a competing athlete who is physically half woman, half machine. When I first started reading, I worried it would descend into a one-dimensional discourse about which half wins, but I was pleasantly surprised. Right from the get go Pearl appears more human than those around her, challenging the dehumanising impact of technology enhancement. But to her custodians and the outside world she is an object for profit – nothing more than a running machine with occasional echoes of humanity. The prose is effortlessly unsettling: Tomislav […] unplugs her stomach and eases it out of her. He sets it in a sterile biobox and connects it to a blood flow. By the time he turns back, she is already spooling up the accordion twist of artificial intestine like a magician pulling ribbons from his palm. It smells of lab-mod bacteria, with the faintest whiff of feces.

  The story explores capitalism, our interactions with technology and – as you can probably imagine – the disgust we have for our bodies. I was left with far more interesting questions than answers, which for me is often a mark of strong science fiction.

  But it wasn’t all goosebumps. As is often the case with collections, few of the stories didn’t speak to me. One I liked less was ‘Smileys’, a tale of politics and survival with a simple plot and structure – so simple that even a partial explanation could spoil it. Although it is well crafted – Beukes could make instruction manuals edgy and imaginative – I felt deeply unsatisfied with how this story ended. At first I couldn’t figure out why, then I realised the driving elements are confused. I suspect this story was meant to be world or atmosphere driven, with a focus on unsettling backdrops rather than entertaining plots. But there were signals – twists and turns – indicating plot as important too. As such I paid too much attention to what was happening rather than messages within. ‘Adventures in Journalism’, one of the fantastic non-fiction pieces within the collection, helped elucidate this by exploring the same issues.

  So, with my feelings so mixed, would I recommend this book or not? This humming and hawing is why I’ve never been the biggest fan of collections. In contrast with strong novels, even strong collections like this one tend to be a mix of hit and miss, especially if they include earlier writing. While there will usually be gems, there are almost always duds. Then there are the well-crafted works that you just don’t like, even though you can admire their engineering. But overall, the pieces in Slipping are so delightfully surprising and diverse that I find myself liking collections a little more. I therefore recommend this book to even the staunchest of collection-haters amongst you. Just be prepared for weirdness, edginess or that feeling of someone walking over your grave.

  MUTANT POPCORN

  NICK LOWE

  DOCTOR STRANGE

  SWISS ARMY MAN

  TROLLS

  MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN

  KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS

  STORKS

  SAUSAGE PARTY

  MORGAN

  THE PURGE: ELECTION YEAR

  UNDER THE SHADOW

  SET THE THAMES ON FIRE

  In a DOCTOR STRANGE dense with Mighty Marvel shoutouts, the most eloquent comes when Wong tools up for the final showdown with an ambidextrous bull’s-head staff that is unmistakably and gloriously the Wand of Watoomb: a prop first introduced in 1965’s Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2, which featured the first, and on Ditko’s watch the only, encounter between his two greatest creations, less than a year before the falling-out with Stan Lee that would blow the whistle on the end of the silver age and consign Ditko to a fifty-year anchoritic twilight of hired-hand gigs and fierce Objectivist Atlas-shrugging. Page 12 of the 1965 story is dominated by Ditko’s greatest panel – perhaps the greatest Marvel ever printed – showing a bemused Spidey newly thrown into the deep Ditkoverse, while under his left heel a gas giant lies half-submerged in an ocean of something inconceivable, its ring system and moons poking out at an angle under vertiginous flying sky-islands. It’s a glimpse of what the silver-age Marvel universe was becoming, particularly in Ditko’s Dr. Strange and Jack Kirby’s Thor, as urban costumed heroes rooted in present-day NYC found themselves suddenly reframed in vistas of cosmic immensity and grandeur that needed a new visual grammar even to represent on the comics page; and it’s what Doctor Strange now represents for the entrenched timidities of the mostly earthbound, actorly, city-trashing instincts of the Cinematic Universe to date.

  Right across their own multiverse of studios, the Marvel films have long been scared of cosmic: domesticating Dark Phoenix, depersonalising Galactus, whisking Ant-Man out of the nanoverse as soon as he’s inside, and even keeping the Guardians at arm’s length from the rest of the Universe. So it’s refreshing to see a film whose expositional flytipping includes lines like “This universe is only one of an infinite number”, and warns of “dark places where powers older than time lie ravenous and waiting”. Part of the push must come from the longstanding competition with Fox’s X-Men universe, whose proliferation of time-turning alternates has been way ahead of the main MCU in the race to multiversality, and stands in danger of hijacking a central pillar of the Marvel mythos in the way that they did with the brand “mutant”. But in a global cinematic ecosystem that relies on promiscuous reboots and reinventions to sustain its franchise-based IP farms, Marvel needs its multiverse to ensure a flow of renewables; and Marvel are clearly positioning Strange, the last of Marvel’s silver-age A-listers to make it to the IMAX screen, as a prospective successor to Tony Stark as the hub of the MCU, which is only his due. Marvel metaphysicians know that the Sorcerer Supreme (which Strange isn’t yet by the end of this film, all but one of whose events predate his first comics appearance) is the anchor role in the structure of the Marvel Multiverse, that larger metasystem of megatextual continuities in which the citizens of Earth-616 are one strand in an infinite web of alternates to which the magic of Strange and his fellow sorcerers channel access and flows of power.

  This is an important film for Marvel, and for the most part it does what it needs to do surprisingly well. It’s true that even untrained observers can hardly fail to note that the plot of Doctor Strange feels familiar, with its Iron Man origin arc of arrogant genius given a crash-course in humility through a taste of his own medicine, an education in his capacity for true goodness, and a stark choice between old life and new, culminating in a portal of very bad opening over a major world city and an act of sacrifice to redeem himself and the world. But the Iron Man origin had been only a few weeks on the stands when Ditko and Lee had to pull a backstory for Strange out of their back portals in time for his second appearance, so was fresh in mind and ready to hand as a template; while all the best stories in Ditko’s three-year run involved dimensional gates into Eternity-knows-what, long before they became instruments of resort across what he was unwittingly inventing as the transdimensional Mighty Marvel Multiverse. It does take a while to bed in, with a worryingly solemn prologue giving way to a training act which has had to throw everything it has at what is essentially a half-hour expositional flytip in which characters slam one another with weaponised infodumps delivered in headlocks and gag drops. (James Gunn�
�s script notes seem to have been of service here.) But Strange’s first facetime with Tilda Swinton’s blandly degeopoliticised Ancient One is a genuinely extraordinary moment of stargate wow, an explosive conceptual breakthrough into cognitive transcendence that puts a sceptical man of science through the most concentrated experience of science-fictional wonder yet detonated on screen.

  There’s no Clea, Nightmare, or Eternity yet, but the uncredited final boss is who you were hoping, upstaging even the bravura final set piece in a time-reversed Hong Kong. (As usual, they never think of taking this stuff to Luton.) Benedict Cumberbatch acts his fingers off in the many hand scenes, which rather upstage the rest of his generally deft and engaging performance of one of Marvel’s trickiest characters, and the script does an ingenious job of integrating Strange’s surgical training and mind with his new role as trauma surgeon to the fabric of reality. It’s true that the support cast are rather underfed; Swinton eventually redeems herself with a strong final payoff of science-fictional emotion, but Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a Mordo charged with fan foreknowledge that the ending(s) tell us will be paid off in a sequel, while leaving him for this film rather locked in sidekick mode. Rachel McAdams’ character, part of the Night Nurse roster from the comics but a stranger to this particular franchise, serves her purpose adequately as a link to Strange’s former lives, and earns her otherwise rather thankless screentime with her reaction to the mop gag; but we know she’s only keeping the seat warm for a hotter date on the other side of time.

  Otherwise, there’s not much not to like. We could perhaps have done with a little less obsession with the visually whizzy but limply-conceived “mirror dimension” and its extended homages to Inception; while the climax recycles screenwriter Jon Spaihts’ unproduced Shadow 19 in yet another unacknowledged remake of Budrys’ Rogue Moon, which is surely up there with Ubik as the most filmed sf novel never to be actually credited. But this is a film that gets much more right about its heavily booby-trapped property than anyone would have reasonably expected, and is sincerely trying to figure out a live-action cinematic counterpart to the reinvention of the comics panel that Ditko’s Strange brought to the visual language of the sixties, while at the same time cleansing the doors of perception to reveal the MCU itself as just no. 199,999 in an infinite diverging series. No wonder Stan the Man is chortling in his cameo. Good luck collecting them all.

  In this age of global superhero fatigue we’ve seen heroes from all walks of life, but Daniel Radcliffe’s Manny in SWISS ARMY MAN is the first superhero who’s a corpse. Washed up on a desert island just in time to awaken suicidal castaway Paul Dano’s curiosity, Manny reveals a series of powers that begin with the harnessing of his waste gases to turn his body into a fart-propelled jetski, and subsequently demonstrating a compass stiffy, airgun breath, and skin you can strike sparks off to make fire, alongside the power to speak while still remaining stone dead, and some persistent human erotic reflexes that will turn out to lead our castaway hero circuitously back to civilisation. By the opening credits we’re already off the desert island and heading for a more American kind of survival ordeal in what seems to be a coastal wilderness of the Pacific northwest, as the story behind Manny’s powers begins to take shape. “Maybe you fell into radioactive waste, or maybe you’re a cryogenically frozen supersoldier sent back in time to save all of us.” But is he real, or a projection of Dano’s hallucinated, perhaps dying or already dead, fantasy? How much of what we’re watching is actually happening, and what uncomfortable secrets are hiding in the gaps like the repressed wind of a life unlived in front of others? There isn’t much that can be said without spoilers, except that the reveal and finale involve a scene with Mary Elizabeth Winstead and a mostly out-of-focus Shane Carruth, which would probably be reason enough to watch anything. Radcliffe is genuinely the best he’s ever been, and Dano at least does impressively with the often pretty dreadful dialogue he’s forced to work with. It’s not going to be for everyone, but it definitely blows something out of the water.

  The most Ditkoesque imagery of the year is actually to be found in DreamWorks’ jukebox animation TROLLS, the culmination of a sustained campaign to put together an integrated franchise package for Dam’s venerable character-doll property around a refreshed media brand tied to the international licensing rights (which DreamWorks have now acquired under the terms of the deal). To perform its duties, the film needs not only to work as a promotional platform for toys and related merchandise in the upcoming gifting season, but to support the kind of spin-off episodic series that have played well for the How to Train your Dragon and Puss in Boots franchises as a way to farm the brand for harvest in the spaces between feature releases. In the DreamWorks iteration the trolls are a refugee people, displaced from their homeland by the monstrous and ogrish Bergen, cousins of Shrek and Fungus who seek to feed on live trolls for their seasonal festival because of the buzz of happiness they deliver. This doesn’t deter “the happiest creatures the world has ever known” from spending their days in a dayglo rainbow video jukebox of permanent autotune under the insufferably perky Princess Poppy, with only the prepper dissident Branch issuing Cassandra warnings of the Bergen threat and fortifying his bunker in Cloverfield Lane. But when the most collectible characters are indeed abducted to be the main dish in a Bergen feast, Branch and Poppy are forced into a reluctant alliance to launch a rescue mission and redeem everyone with the healing power of really strange but catchy-as-flu musical numbers, including a genuinely extraordinary sequence in Poppy’s journey where she sings her way through a forest of Ditko imagery and (rather appropriately, in light of Ditko’s memorable work with spiders) gets Shelobbed up in a web for her pains. We’ve already seen this plot in Angry Birds, and the worthy off-the-shelf moral that “Happiness is inside of all of us; sometimes you just need someone to help you find it” is a bit of an undernourishing takeaway after an hour and a half of scorched-earth assault on your retinal cones. But there’s clearly a franchise in the works with or without our resistance.

  Essentially the same plot drives MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN, which brings the felicitous pairing of Jane Goldman and Tim Burton to Ransom Riggs’ ingenious YA narrative riffing around his collection of historic novelty photographs, and centring on a children’s home for mutants in a timelooped 1943, whose inmates are sought by a rogue sect of Peculiars who sustain themselves by feeding on the eyes of kidnapped children. Into this fantasy encoding of the refugee experience stumbles seeming non-Peculiar Asa Butterfield, who finds his peculiarity and his place in their world as their darkest hour approaches. Burton has responded strongly to the material, which Goldman has delicately reshaped to tease out some classic Burtonian themes of persecuted gothic outsiders, suspended childhood, and creepy stop-mo, in a plot (most of which is in the trailer) that largely abandons the book for its final act in, of all places, Blackpool. The most inventive element, a genuinely novel time-twisting device involving hopping between loops frozen at different dates, is rendered all but incomprehensible in film form, in part because it doesn’t really make sense. But this is still Burton’s strongest live-action film in years, with some terrific visuals, a franchise-worthy cast, and a sustained edge of strangeness and darkness that captures some of the power of Riggs’ originating photos.

  Children’s eyeballs are on the menu again in stop-motion wonder KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS, Laika CEO Travis Knight’s visually stunning and narratively baffling fantasy about a shamisen-wielding kid storyteller with the power to animate origami figures with his music, who goes on a quest to defeat the moon king’s eye-thieving daughters in the company of a monkey and a beetle warrior who bear some kind of enigmatically Howlish relationship to his lost dad and his brain-damaged mum. A kind of stop-motion sequel to Princess Kaguya, it has the seductive strangeness of a fairy tale from an alien culture just outside the threshold of comprehension, before it all rather unravels in the final act and sense blows away like paper on the wind. But there are sequences here so ext
raordinary that you can’t imagine how they were even possible, and like all Laika’s films it self-deconstructs in the end credits with a making-of sequence at least as astonishing as anything in the body of the illusion.

  As the animation houses roll out their seasonal hopes, by some distance the weirdest is Warners’ STORKS, a side-move into animation by Jason Segel’s regular writer-director teammate Nicholas Stoller. The premise, which feels like a studio boss’s really stupid idea passed through an entire digestive tract of development insanity, is that in the far distant past of 1998 storks stopped delivering babies and reinvented their historic business as an Amazon-like fulfilment operation; but when a series of whoopsies prompts an unsolicited order for a real-life baby, it’s up to heir apparent Junior and klutzy human orphan Tulip to make the delivery before the boss finds out. So far, so Monsters, Inc., in a predictably nostalgic reflection on the transition from manufacturing to post-industrial service economies and the loss of generational memory of a world in which the American employee was an individual with societal purpose. But the film is, intentionally, a lot stranger than that, with sharp plot zigzags into sudden weirdness every five to ten minutes, and jokes whose sheer disruptive oddness take the film several notches deeper into the bizarre than most four-quadrant family animations feel safe to play. Much of it is startlingly funny, particularly the scene-stealing wolfpack whose running gags include the power to form themselves into increasingly absurd vehicles of pursuit, though it never quite breaks free of the fundamental fakeness of its made-up background mythology under which prospective parents supposedly used to post handwritten letters to the storks to order babies for delivery. Perhaps the idea is that the target audience has no real notion of what it’s supposed to be nostalgic for, because they weren’t around to experience it when it was imaginary the first time.