To Sleep, Perchance To Scream: Cold Eternity, by S.A. Barnes

Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This author has carved out a specific, rather exotic niche for herself: sci-fi horror, and not of the supernatural type, either. This story owes a lot to the movie Alien, and also to the urban myth of ancient aliens that landed on our planet in millennia past and helped the Egyptians build the pyramids, or something (which is totally insulting to the Egyptians, insinuating that brown people couldn't have constructed those marvels all by their lonesome). This version of "ancient aliens" is far more terrifying.

Halley Zwick, our narrator, is a former high-class political operative, who saw something she shouldn't and is now on the run. Down to her last credits, she takes an under-the-table job working as a caretaker for the frozen people on board the Elysium Fields. More than a century ago, this ship launched carrying cryogenicaly preserved people, the dying and/or the powerful, gathered together under the aegis of the long-dead tech billionaire Zale Winfeld. Winfeld was a cult leader of sorts, promising immortality and a future cure for fatal diseases. But the reawakening process has never worked, and the ship is circling the solar system on an endless loop, carrying its forever-limbo ghost passengers.

However, working there is just the place for Halley to hide, to escape the scrutiny and pursuit of both her family and the politicians she ran from, with her insider knowledge of election tampering. No matter that the Elysian Fields is full of shadows and strange noises, and Halley is getting more sleep-deprived and stretched thin by the day (since she has to make rounds every three hours, and press a button on the bridge that confirms to the ship's governing board that its passengers are being watched and protected). The person who hired her, Karl, is doing maintenance and remodeling on the ship's lower levels, but that doesn't explain the strange skittering noises Halley hears at night, or the things she sees on the ship's cameras....things Karl insists aren't actually there.

Of course, they are, but the full horror of what is happening on the Elysian Fields takes its time being revealed, and is set up by the author beautifully. Suffice to say that we have alien parasites, a dead-alive tech trillionaire, and the trillionaire's three children who were supposed to be dead decades ago, but who have been uploaded into the ship's AI as a hellish artificial existence. This all comes together in a horrifying, gory, zombified stew in the book's explosive and action-packed final quarter.

Halley's voice very much carries the story. This book shares some similarities with Alien, none more so in the fact that Halley is a young, unassuming, everyday sort of character thrown into terrible circumstances who manages to step up and carry the day. Like Ripley, she does not think she has the strength or the smarts to cope with what is happening, but in this baptism of fire, she finds that she does. She is helped in her struggle by Aleyk, one of Zale Winfeld's uploaded children. There is even a romance of sorts between Halley and Aleyk, even though both know nothing can come of it. But Halley succeeds in freeing Aleyk, destroying the Elysian Fields and giving him the peace of true death.

The author has improved with every book, and in this one, the characterizations and the wonderfully creepy atmosphere of the story is her best yet.

View all my reviews

Review: Fable for the End of the World

Fable for the End of the World by Ava Reid
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the Acknowledgments, the author states that this book was inspired by Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. The parallels are obvious: like Panem, this is a post-apocalypse dystopia (post-climate-change in this case, although there was evidently some sort of nuclear exchange as well) where the downtrodden masses are kept under control by their addiction to a brutal "game." In this case it is the Gauntlet, where trained teenage assassins pursue people (sometimes children, offered up by their parents, as is the case with the protagonist Inesa) who are so far into debt to the ruling corporation Caerus that they will never get out. The Gauntlet, and its sacrificial Lambs--literally--is livestreamed every few months, to distract the general populace from the misery of their living conditions.

In this future, the United States is apparently no more, having broken up into smaller city-states. The two we are focusing on are New England and New Amsterdam. The former still has nuclear capacity, as evidenced by the irradiated border between the two , which has spawned numerous animal and human mutations. New Amsterdam is the poorer of the two, slowly drowning from sea level rise. This is where Inesa, her brother Luka, and their mother live, in a ramshackle shack perched on stilts to keep it out of the rising water. Luka is a hunter, and Inesa is a taxidermist, preserving the dwindling numbers of non-mutated animals. (Although that is a very ironic definition of "preserving," as she stuffs them after they're dead to serve as a record for when normal animals finally vanish.) Inesa's mother has many problems, including, it would seem, mental illness: she has "sold her soul to the company store" to the point when she reaches the red five-hundred-thousand-dollar credit limit of her debt to the evil corporation Caerus, she offers up her daughter to the Gauntlet to avoid having to run it herself.

(Which of course makes her a cartoon evil antagonist, even worse than Caerus. Fortunately, we don't see her beyond one or two scenes. The author tries to inject some nuance into her character, but that pretty much falls flat.)

Our second protagonist is Melinoe (four syllables, like Chloe), the so-called Angel, or trained assassin, who pursues the Lambs to their deaths. Melinoe has been augmented by Caerus to the point where she's more cyborg than human, including an artificial eye with night vision. But as the story opens, she is suffering full-blown PTSD from her last Gauntlet, where she executed a young girl. She cannot get over this or forget it, despite repeated memory wipes from her handler. In a last-ditch attempt to redeem her, Mel is assigned to Inesa's Gauntlet, to serve as a hopefully audience-grabbing contrast: the ice-cold blond Angel pursuing another young girl her own age. Inesa, with the help of her brother Luka, has thirteen days to evade Melinoe and/or fight her and survive. The Gauntlet takes Inesa and Mel through the wilds of New Amsterdam, where they run into increasingly mutated animals--and mutated humans, called Wends, who attack them both. This forces the girls to work together, and of course the inevitable happens: after Mel is cut off from her handler, by virtue of Luka smashing the comm chip implanted in her temple, she and Inesa end up falling in love.

The romance is handled well enough, I suppose: it's a slow burn, and the sex takes place offstage. Still, it's a bit icky in a way, as Mel has killed how many people?--even though she has been manipulated and brainwashed by Caerus. This relationship takes center stage in the final half of the book, and your view of it will undoubtedly color your overall impression of the book. Mel and Inesa attempt to break free from Caerus, only to discover the cameras they thought were off have been following them all this time, laying bare what has been happening between them to a massive global audience. Another Angel is sent after them, and at the climax, Inesa "wins" by killing this second Angel, who seriously injures Mel. Mel is taken back to Caerus and given a final memory wipe, and then married off to one of the evil old Caerus executives (which is really icky. I could have done without that plot point, for sure). The book ends with Inesa, newly rich from her win, following Mel to New Amsterdam's capital city, where she is hoping to meet up with her love and make Mel remember.

I liked this well enough, but it's not as good as some other dystopian YA I've read. The relationship between Inesa and Luka is a high point, as well as Inesa's grittiness and determination to survive. The worldbuilding could have been better: this doesn't feel as real and lived-in as Panem. It all depends on how much you like Hunger Games knock-offs, I suppose.

View all my reviews

Of Music and Monsters: Sinners

 

The two movies I've seen so far this year have been just so-so. I won't name them--the second one was so mediocre I didn't even bother to write about it. This film, however, made me sit up and gasp. Short, non-spoilery recommendation: Sinners is a goddamn masterpiece, and you should go see it.

 

I'll get the obvious out of the way: yes, it is a vampire horror movie. Yes, the vampires stick to classic undead rules: they only come out at night, they can't stand garlic, and they have to be invited in. Yes, the third act does get violent and gory in all the standard vampire ways. 

But.

What writer/director Ryan Coogler does leading up to that third act is nothing short of remarkable. To begin with, the film is set in 1932 Mississippi and has a majority African-American cast. This setup makes the viewer think the characters are existing in a horror movie before the bloodsuckers even appear on the screen, and the film deals with how white people are worse than vampires. To be fair that context/commentary is certainly there, but it's not really what the film is about. It's not even about the vampires, for that matter. They're the monsters that our protagonists have to fight off until dawn, but they're not the central theme of the film.

Sinners is about music. 

This is made clear in the film's opening titles, which discuss two things: folklore about "haints" or the undead, focusing on Irish and Indian stories specifically, and the power of music to "tear open the veil between living and dead, and the past and future." All these things play vital roles in the plot, and in the fact the latter is the focus of the film's most jaw-dropping scene, which I will discuss later on. 

After those title cards, we open on a young black man driving a Model T to a church. He gets out carrying the snapped-off neck of an acoustic guitar, and we see he has four gory gashes--the claw marks of some nasty creature--across the right side of his face. He goes in to face the preacher, who is apparently his father, and the preacher breaks off his sermon and confronts his son, demanding he drop the guitar neck and give up what his father calls "the devil's music." The boy hesitates, unwilling to give up the remnants of his guitar, and another title flashes on the screen: "one day earlier." We then go back in time to discover what led up to that moment. 

This young man is Sammie Moore, an up-and-coming blues guitarist, who is meeting his cousins Smoke and Stack, identical twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan) just returned from Chicago (there's a throwaway line about them working for Al Capone) with a lot of possibly ill-gotten money, wanting to open a juke joint. They meet with a smarmy, condescending white guy to buy an abandoned mill for their juke joint--this is the kind of guy who denies that the KKK exists anymore, which you know right away is a damn lie--and then the two brothers split apart to recruit musical talent, food workers, and other volunteers from the community to open the juke joint that night. Along the way, Smoke meets up with the lover he left behind, a root worker living in the woods named Annie. 

The juke joint does open that night, but we know all is not going to be well because of an interlude scene: a white guy running across a field as the sun is setting, with suspicious puffs of smoke rising from his back and shoulders. He runs up to a cabin, says he is being pursued by Indians, and asks the homeowners to take him in. They agree, and the husband hustles the man upstairs while the wife stands guard at the door with a gun. Three Indians--Choctaws, if I remember correctly--do indeed show up, asking if the woman has seen or is harboring this man. The Indigenous monster hunter (and how cool is that? They deserve a story of their own) starts to press the matter, but as the sun has now set completely the Indians back off and leave. The woman then goes upstairs to find just who they have let into their home--a vampire, who has just turned her husband. 

Meanwhile, the juke joint has its grand opening, and the black community in the town comes to celebrate. We are introduced to several more characters, including Hailee Steinfeld's Mary, the lover Stack left behind. (Mary is no morose pushover grieving the man who left her; in fact, she proceeds to read Stack the riot act about his abandonment.) This middle section of the film concentrates on the juke joint and its music, celebrating the blues and giving a few hints of early rock and roll--and then Sammie gets up to play an original song. This sets the stage for the film's most astonishing scene, which illustrates the title card: "music so powerful it tears open the veil between the living and the dead, the past and the future."
 

Because as Sammie plays, this is exactly what happens. As the camera weaves between the people on the floor, an African drummer and dancer, in full native regalia, appear. Next is a black man holding an electric guitar, obviously meant to represent Jimi Hendrix. Then we see a deejay spinning an LP, and a rapper holding a microphone. All the while the camera moves around the room and illuminates these representations of black music, past and future, in a seemingly one-take shot which must have been stitched together but certainly doesn't look it. It is one of the most incredible scenes I have witnessed in any film. 

But Sammie's magic also draws the vampire seen earlier, named Remmick, and the two people he just turned. The bloodsucking trio shows up at the juke joint's door, asking to be let in. Smoke and Annie are summoned, and they refuse to let Remmick in (they don't know he's a vampire just yet, but he's setting off all sorts of alarm bells, particularly for Annie). The three retreat into the woods, and Mary makes a fateful decision: she offers to go talk to them, as she says they're bound to tell her more about who they are and why they're here than Stack. 

Well, you can guess what happens. Mary is turned and comes back to the juke joint, getting in without much trouble. She seeks out Stack and takes him to one of the upstairs rooms to fuck, which of course turns into her ripping his throat open and sucking his blood. Sammie, hunting for Stack, opens the door and sees them going at it. Then Smoke charges in, too late to save his brother, and shoots Mary. The bullets don't bother her, of course, and after proclaiming "We're going to kill y'all" she runs out the door, leaving Stack to die in his brother's arms. 

That breaks up the party, and the vast majority of the attendees leave to go home, marching right into the clutches of the waiting vamps. After a bit Stack wakes up, leading to a harrowing scene where he confronts Smoke on the other side of the closet he has been locked into, taunting him. He crashes through the door and nearly kills poor Sammie, but Annie, who has finally realized just what they're dealing with, douses him with her version of holy water, and he runs away into the night. 

This leaves a core group of characters inside the building: Smoke, Sammie, Annie, and a few others. Now the challenge is to simply survive the night inside the juke joint and resist the temptations and manipulations of the vampires outside to invite them in. This takes various forms, including one Chinese woman's husband saying he will leave to visit their daughter in town, implying he will turn and/or kill her if his wife doesn't come to him; and Remmick's urging Smoke to step out and join them, claiming that becoming a part of their vampire "community" will free him from the bigoted society he currently lives in. 

(Really, this would be quite a temptation for a black man in Jim Crow Mississippi. To have a chance to live forever, free and powerful, and likely taking revenge on the white people who have so tormented you? Smoke eventually refuses, but you can see him thinking about it.)

(This also leads to another music scene, as Remmick has his newly-turned group dancing to Irish step music. The sight of a bunch of bloodied vampires having a little party of their own in the woods, cheering and stepping to a fiddle, a banjo and a guitar, would seem incongruous to say the least. But it's all a part of the theme of music, how powerful it can be and what it can do for you, that runs through this entire movie.)

 

Inside the juke joint, the tension rises as the characters argue about what to do. In particular the Chinese woman, Grace, is reeling with grief and horror from her husband's being made a monster, and worry for her daughter. She insists they should fight the vampires, despite everyone's efforts to talk her down. In the end she is the one who breaks the logjam, screaming, "Come on in, motherfuckers!"

 

Of course, they do. 

 

This is the climactic, bloody fight scene of the third act, with the vampires overwhelming the people inside. Smoke ends up fighting his undead brother, and while we don't directly see him killing Stack (this will be important later) we assume that's what happens. Meanwhile, Sammie crawls out a window, carrying his guitar and pursued by Remmick. The master vampire wants to use Sammie's power to return to Ireland (it sounds like he was banished to this country centuries ago), and he corners the kid in a pond out back. Sammie busts up his guitar and stabs Remmick with a piece of the wooden body (hence why he is carrying the broken-off neck later on), but he doesn't quite hit the heart. But Smoke, appearing in the nick of time, does. This fight happens just before dawn (and you would think vampires would have a built-in sunrise detector, since after all the sun, y'know, kills them, but maybe they were just overwhelmed by the hunt), and the sun rises over the battlefield, burning all the vamps to ash and leaving Smoke and Sammie alone with the blood and guts and the few remaining human bodies. 

Said body count is going to rise a lot higher, however, because just after dawn the smarmy white guy who sold the brothers the property in the beginning (remember him?) shows up with his KKK bros, intending on burning the place. Needless to say, after the night he had, Smoke is in no mood for this bullshit. (In fact, Remmick had warned him this would happen.) Apparently Smoke fought in World War I, and he kept a couple of machine guns from the war--and when the white lynchers show up, he proceeds to lay waste to them, mowing them down in a hail of bullets. The sight of Michael B. Jordan just massacring the bigots seeking to murder his friends provides the biggest catharsis of the entire movie (with the possible exception of the final scene). Unfortunately, Smoke is shot by the head Klanster and dies there as well, with his last sight the ghost of Annie and their baby, who had apparently died years before. 

So this leaves Sammie the only survivor, and as we circle back around to the opening scene, we see Sammie driving his Model T Ford out of town, still clutching the neck of his guitar. This would be a fine ending by itself, but wait! we're not done! A few credits run, and a post-credits scene starts playing: exactly sixty years later, with an aged Sammie (played by real-life blues guitarist Buddy Guy) playing a show in Chicago. After the show, he is told two people want to see him, and the bouncer says, "I told them to come on in." And who should show up but Stack and Mary, still undead and unchanged. 

 

As we find out, Stack survived because Smoke could not bring himself to kill his brother, even knowing what he was. Smoke extracted a promise from Stack to leave Sammie alone. The vampire, knowing Sammie does not have long to live, offers to turn him, but Sammie refuses. He takes out the guitar he had painstakingly rebuilt on the broken neck he carried away, and plays the same song he played before. Then as the two vamps turn to leave, Sammie asks Stack if he ever thinks about that night. Sammie says he remembers it at least once a week in his dreams, and wakes up soaked in sweat. Stack replies that even though it was the last day he was alive, and the last time he saw the sun, "for those few hours, I was free."

 

Now that, my friends, is a post-credit scene done right. It ties everything together: characters, theme, and music. (Obviously, this film's soundtrack is incredible. It was done by Ludwig Goransson, who among other things composed the music for The Mandalorian.) This is, by far, the best movie I have seen this year, and it will be up for a slew of Oscars if there's any justice.

Review: The Last Hour Between Worlds

The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've read several of Melissa Caruso's books, and in each case what has impressed me most is her worldbuilding. She creates well-thought-out fantasy worlds and cultures that feel lived-in and real, with a multitude of small details that add up to a fantasy universe you can believe in.

This book is no exception, but I think in this story she takes a welcome step forward in her characterizations. Just the fact of her making her protagonist, Kembral Thorne, a new mother with all the attendant issues (sleep deprivation, leaking breasts, and a body that is still recovering from the stresses of pregnancy and labor) is a breath of fresh air. As the story opens, Kembral is at a year's turning party, this world's equivalent of New Year's Eve, and the first time she has been away from her baby for two months. Strange things start happening, and before Kembral knows it, the house where the party is being held slips into an Echo--alternate reflections of the Prime world that get weirder and more dangerous with each layer. Kembral and the rest of the characters come to know this well, as over the course of the book they slip into the deep and deadly unknown Echoes, eleven layers down.

This is obviously the author's spin on Fae and Faerie, although in this book they are called Echoes and Empyreans. The turning of the year is a big deal for the all-powerful Empyreans, as whoever names the new year as the clock strikes midnight is set to gain a great deal of power. Because of this, various Echo factions are playing a dangerous game to see who can win the right to name the year-turning, and Kembral and the partygoers are dragged into this deadly game. Most of them end up dying over and over again as the house sinks deeper into the Echoes, and Kembral has to ally with her nemesis, professional thief and con artist Rika Nonesuch, to save the party attendees and her city. And she has to do it by midnight.

This structure of an hour steadily advancing with each successive Echo the characters fall into ratchets up the tension and suspense (which is cleverly marked by succeeding chapter headings advancing five minutes for each new Echo). Kembral and Rika become unwitting players in the Empyreans' game, and they have to prevent the factions from slaughtering the partygoers in each Echo and reaching the bottom layer with a winning blood sacrifice that will enable them to name the year. They succeed in knocking some factions out, but others still remain, down to the last and eleventh Echo. Along the way, Kembral and Rika, who have a complicated history that is gradually revealed, come to terms with what happened between them in the past and set the stage for a new, possibly romantic relationship going forward.

This is a very well paced book with some nearly unbearable tension in the later chapters. The worldbuilding is wonderful, and the characters have depth. I think this is the author's best book yet.

View all my reviews

Review: The Fourth Consort

The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Edward Ashton writes fast-paced science fiction thrillers that tend to have a fair amount of psychological depth, and this book follows that pattern. We have what might be a bog-standard first contact story gone wrong, but then the author gets into themes of alien/human culture shock and a culture clash built around opposing concepts of honor and loyalty. It all serves to lift the story above what might have been cliches in another writer's hands.

Dalton Greaves is a bit similar to Ashton's breakout character, Mickey Barnes of Mickey 7, in that he is the designated "ground-pounder"--the muscle, in other words, protecting the two other crewmembers, one human, one alien, of the combination explorer/science vessel/first contact scout the Good Tidings. The Good Tidings is representing the Unity, an interstellar federation that is working to bring any sentient species it encounters into its fold. Unfortunately, the Unity has a rival, the Assembly, doing much the same thing (if with quite a bit more of almost religious fervor). On the newly discovered planet of the minarchs, the Unity and the Assembly clash, and Dalton is dragged into a mess of galactic and local politics.

Set in a near-future where representatives of the Unity have contacted Earth and take some specific people off-planet, signing them to contracts of exploration for a certain number of years in exchange for returning home very rich (if they survive) Dalton is a perfectly ordinary (if a bit unsettled and drifting) protagonist. He's very practical and pragmatic, and adapt himself to the increasingly weird situations he finds himself in. Just after contact is made with the minarchs, a ship of the Assembly arrives to try to steal the Unity's thunder. Boreau, the alien commanding the Good Tidings, attacks the Assembly warship, cripples and destroys it, and is himself vaporized, leaving behind Dalton Greaves, his crewmate Neera, and a "stickman," an alien warrior of the Assembly, seemingly abandoned on the planet. Dalton and the stickman, who later names himself Breaker, must band together to survive in a situation which escalates to scheming and murder. Dalton is pulled hither and thither between several conflicting sides, and must walk quite a tightrope to make it out alive.

Along the way, we explore the psychology and culture of both Breaker and the minarchs, and follow Dalton's sometimes deft, sometimes clumsy, and mostly desperate attempts to thread the needle. He is forced into becoming the titular "Fourth Consort" of a minarch queen, First-Among-Equals. Needless to say, he has no idea exactly what this entails, and gets ever more embroiled in court politics. Along the way, Breaker (who is a bit of a philosopher) has repeated discussions with Dalton to try to understand humans (Breaker calls humans "prey animals," and thinks Dalton does not have the slightest understanding of how a sapient apex predator--the minarchs--think, and he's right). The book's climax comes down to a fight to the death between Dalton and a minarch he names Scarface, and Dalton saves himself by hurling a spear through said minarch's throat.

(I think this is the first book I've ever read which asserts that what sets humans apart is not their warlike tendencies, or opposable thumbs, but their shoulder joints:

"You see that?" Stonebreaker said, and swung his shoulder around in an easy circle. "That is why we own this world, my friends. That is what we have that no other animal on this planet has. Your shoulder is the most complex large joint that evolution has ever produced, and it allows us to do something that no other creature we have yet encountered has figured out how to do: throw, with power and accuracy. When a lion decides to take down a wildebeest, she has to do it with teeth and claws, and she has to brave the horns. Do that enough times, and you're likely to wind up dead. Us, though? Ever since we figured out how an atlatl works, we've been able to kill at a distance. That means we can kill literally anything, from a rabbit to a mastodon, with minimal risk to ourselves. If you're looking for the one thing that sets us apart from everything else, well, that's it.")

This book doesn't give the aliens the depth and complexity of, say, an Adrian Tchaikovsky, and it's written in a lightweight, breezy style. Still, it has a plucky narrator and enough of a philosophical edge to hold the reader's interest.

View all my reviews

Review: The Martian Contingency

The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The first book in this series, The Calculating Stars, won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel. I loved it, and thought it was one of the best books I read that year. There have been two more books since, The Fated Sky and The Relentless Moon, and I rated both of them highly. Now this fourth book in the series focuses on the Second Mars Expedition, twenty years after the events of the first book.

This alternate history takes place in a world where an asteroid strike in 1952 wipes out much of the east coast of the U.S. and sets the world on a path of accelerated climate change (although many of the little news stories at the beginning of each chapter, with their various natural disasters, sound like they were ripped from today's headlines, which is a horribly depressing thought). After a brief change of protagonists in the last book--The Relentless Moon focused on Nicole Wargin, one of the best friends of Elma York, the hero of the first two books; Nicole is now the US President--we are back with Elma and her husband Nathaniel, twenty years older. They are on Mars, trying to build the settlement that will allow as many people as possible to live offworld, and having to solve a nasty mystery that strikes at the heart of the racism and sexism still prevalent in this alternate timeline, as it is in our own.

Elma and Nathaniel's mature relationship takes center stage here, as it did in the first two books featuring them. They are older and perhaps more fragile than they once were, attempting to reconcile themselves to making Mars their home. For a time, Elma becomes the commander of the Goddard, the spaceship orbiting Mars, and has to wrestle with her own feelings of inadequacy regarding leadership, even as she makes a momentous decision to allow one of the Martian crewmembers to obtain an abortion after an unplanned pregnancy. (The idea of Earth, hundreds of millions of miles away, trying to control this woman's body and life, is even more enraging, if possible, than our current US politicians doing it.) She also has to face the fact of Nathaniel's health problems, which causes a strain on their relationship that has to be worked through.

As always, the amount of research the author puts into these stories is incredible (just wait till you get to the "fruit pull-up repair"). The contrasts between the Earth and Martian calendars, and the Earth day and Martian sol, also play a big part in the plot. At the end, both Elma and Nathaniel realize Mars is their home.

This series brings back the "sensawunda" of classic science fiction, while providing a stark warning of what we're doing to our planet in this timeline. It is one of the best ongoing series of recent years and well worth reading.

View all my reviews

Ten More Bodies Than You Actually Need--Mickey 17

 

I've read the book this film is based on, and while I realize print and film are two very different mediums and what works in the former won't necessarily translate to the latter, there is something to be said for trying to preserve the coherence of the original book if possible. That didn't happen with this film, I don't think. 

That may have something to do with the director, Bong Joon-Ho, and his instincts for social satire, which were ramped waaaaaaayyyy up in this movie. Well, he did pay for the rights, and he can write his film however he wishes. The question is, is this a good movie in and of itself, or in comparison with the book? 

I'm not sure it is, by either metric. 

First, to enumerate the good things: Robert Pattinson is excellent in this film. He plays against himself in portraying both characters--the sweet, earnest, dimbulb Mickey 17 and the murderous, assholish Mickey 18--and pulls off both characterizations. (The director added ten more clone-deaths to the total, for no reason that I could see, given the book is called Mickey 7.) Steven Yeun is also good as Mickey's "best friend" Berto--Timo here (although I wish Mickey's punching Berto out at the end had been kept from the book). Naomi Ackles was okay as Nasha, even if she wasn't given all that much to do, and the director definitely pulled his punches with the three-way sex scene.

And then there's Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette. 

Look, those are two fine actors, especially Toni Collette. The problem, for me at least, is why they're there. Kenneth Marshall was the commander in the book, but he definitely wasn't this failed former Senator and thinly disguised Trump clone (which maybe isn't fair, as this movie was obviously filmed long before the election). Their whole over-the-top storyline of husband-and-wife cult leaders colonizing a "pure white" planet (which made me wonder how the African Nasha and the Asian Timo even made it on board the ship in the first place) was a very ill-fitting and clumsy slather over a straightforward sci-fi first contact story. 

Which would be fine if the satire was worth the extra slather. However, I don't think it was. Toni Colette's character is obsessed with making "sauce" for her dinners, and ends up chopping an alien appendage to do so. This is not only disgusting, it's dangerous--I mean, let's chow down some alien DNA without investigating what it's going to do to the human body, why don't we! Meanwhile, Senator Marshall is trying to con sweet-talk his colonists into starving themselves and practicing abstinence to make the colony work (a bit of business that had way more play in the book, but which is pretty much glossed over here). In the final confrontation with the alien pillbugs called the Creepers, Marshall leaves the colony ship to meet the leader and gets blown to smithereens by Mickey 18, attempting to stop the imminent war between the species. Again, this is not what happened in the book--Marshall is alive at the end of the novel, and Mickey pulled off the con of making him think the Creepers had taken the nuclear bomb that was supposed to end them, to force a detente between humans and Creepers. And in the book, there was nary a chopped-off Creeper tentacle to be found. 

So it sounds like I'm saying "read the book, don't bother with the movie."  Well, from a science-fiction viewpoint I am saying that. I think this would have been a far better film if the original plot points of the two Mickeys struggling to hide themselves and both suffering from starvation, and the escalating tensions between humans and Creepers, had been more closely adhered to. At the same time, I know many people love Boon Jong-ho's commentary on classism and capitalism in his films and his instinct for social satire. 

In this case, this makes the book and movie Mickey 7 (and again, the extra 10 Mickey deaths were simply unnecessary) two very different animals. Overall, this is probably something that Snowpiercer did better (while spawning a very good TV series to boot). Robert Pattinson's excellence in the title role notwithstanding, this film fell a little flat for me. But if you like black comedy and your satire very over-the-top, you probably will enjoy this.

Review: Future's Edge

Future's Edge by Gareth L. Powell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've read quite a few of Gareth Powell's books over the years, including the excellent Embers of War trilogy. This book is a standalone, and a satisfying one at that--everything is wrapped up quite nicely. Not that I have anything against series as long as the author can sustain the worldbuilding and characters, but there's also something to be said for a book that makes its point and brings the story to a natural, concise end. POwell's books tend to run on the lean side; this one is only three hundred pages. But it has his typical grand canvas of a space opera, reaching billions of years into the past and hundreds into the future, with an ordinary protagonist--an archaeology student--who finds she is holding the future of the human race in her hands.

This is Ursula Morrow, and the book opens two years after the near-extinction of humans, caused by a extradimensional alien species called the Cutters who appeared on Earth two years before and laid waste to the planet. The Cutters, for unknown reasons, hunt down sentient spacefaring species and wipe them out (thus providing a nasty answer to Fermi's paradox). Ursula, along with other surviving humans, have taken refuge on a planet called Void's Edge, at the furthest end of the "tramline network," the pathways through underspace that this universe uses to travel faster than light. But everyone knows this is only temporary, as the Cutters are coming. New tramline ships are being constructed and sent out, loaded with refugees, to traverse the massive interstellar void close to the system and hopefully out of the Cutters' reach. But those ships are only available to those who can afford them, and Ursula, running a makeshift bar in the refugee camp, cannot.

As we find out in the very first chapter, just before the Cutters decimated Earth Ursula was on a xenoarchaelogical dig with her boyfriend, Jack. This was a new relationship, and Ursula being young (she was somewhere in her mid-twenties), she was distracted by thoughts of Jack at a crucial moment. The dig had found an alien artifact, and Ursula took off her glove and touched it--and was infected with an alien parasite. This parasite didn't seem to harm her; in fact, it gave her superstrength and made her well-nigh invulnerable. After weeks of tests, she was released from isolation--just as the Cutters came to Earth. Jack got her on one of the last transports out and joined the Interstellar Navy. For the past two years he has been conducting a guerrilla war in Earth's solar system against the Cutters, on his sentient warship the Crisis Actor.

Now, two years later, Jack has come in search of Ursula, because he believes the object she touched is a weapon and might hold the key to saving humanity. In a very Gareth L. Powell twist (he does love his sentient AIs) the Crisis Actor has a humanlike avatar to interact with the rest of the crew, known as Cris, and Jack has married her.

These three characters spend a not-inconsiderable amount of time working out their relationships and how they feel about each other. However, this does not overwhelm the overarching plot, as Ursula and Jack return to the dig where the object was found, and Ursula discovers exactly what it is and why the Cutters have destroyed every species that advances to the technological point of using the undervoid tramlines. (Short version: the Precursors, an ancient extinct alien species, believes there are entities in the undervoid, Lovecraftian-style monsters from the sound of it, and they want to avoid disturbing them at all costs. That this made the Cutters, which the Precursors created, every bit as monstrous as those entities no one has seen is glossed over a bit, but there's no time to delve further into it. Also, the Cutters apparently caused the asteroid extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs? That's a fascinating tidbit that is sadly not explored, as it implies that some dinosaurs were intelligent and had created a spacefaring civilization.)

At the end, Ursula uses Precursor tech to ferry the refugees of many species across the interstellar void from Void's Edge, where they will build a new society of cooperation and using the tramlines as little as possible.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, although I wish it had been a little longer, so what the Precursors did could have been further discussed. Nevertheless, this is a satisfying standalone story.

View all my reviews

Review: Among Serpents

Among Serpents by Marc J. Gregson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Trilogies are very much a YA thing (although a bit of a recent trend has been a move to duologies--a two-book series--which is most likely a move to reduce costs). Since I am definitely a completist reader, if I enjoy the first of a series I will almost always buy the succeeding books. Even so, a good part of the time second books in a series suffer by comparision, as they have to keep the momentum going without giving too much of the game away for the concluding book.

Thankfully, that isn't a problem with this second book in the Above the Black series, which advances the plot in breathtaking fashion, with some truly magnificent battle scenes that had me clutching the book in fear, racing through the final chapters to see what would happen and who would live.

This is a secondary fantasy world with a strong SF feel--there isn't any "magic" as such, or wizards and/or sorcerers. Indeed, the implication is that many of the huge beasts that inhabit the Skylands are genetically engineered. There is a clash of societies and philosophies, the Skylands with their brutal Meritocracy system and their insistence on gaining power by "rising," which pretty much means stomping on everyone else; and the Below, with their demands for sacrifices for the "greater good" (although the Below Council, what little we see of them, seems as corrupt as any Archduke of the Skylands). The worldbuilding sometimes stretches credulity--the monster our protagonist Conrad of Elise has to kill is called a "gigataun," which is a mile-long sky-floating dragon without wings, and we also have "gorgantauns," which are hundreds of feet long in their own right, and various other kaiju-like beasties that end in "-lon"--but for the most part it is internally consistent. We also find out more about how the Skylands were created, hundreds of years ago when the "Eagle Empire" broke away and used their antigrav crystals to literally lift cities and tear huge hunks of the countryside right out of the ground and float them into the sky, creating islands that the people of the Skylands now live on. Then the black acid clouds were created to keep the Lantians of the Below confined to a wrecked planet and forcing them to live underground in deprivation and poverty, while those of the Skylands hoard all the resources.

Our protagonist Conrad is now captain of his own skyship, the Gladian, and is struggling to balance the brutal way he was raised by his father and the compassion his mother tried to teach him. He is forced into the war with the Below by his uncle, King Ulrich, who had his father murdered and banished Conrad and his mother to the "Lows," the poverty-ridden and downtrodden section of the Skylands. The first book, Sky's End, was a good character study of Conrad, as he found a family in his crew aboard the Gladian and began learning to love and trust others.

With the world and characters established, this book has the opportunity to ramp up the plot and raise the stakes--and wow, does the author deliver. The battle scenes in this book are absolutely stunning, and the pacing is excellent. There aren't quite as many character moments in this book, but Conrad does manage to repair his relationship with his estranged sister Ella and even has a bit of romance (although that element isn't foregrounded, thank goodness--Fourth Wing this is not) with one of his crewmembers, Bryce. Conrad hates his Uncle Ulrich but is forced to work with him to save the Skylands. In the end, the monstrous gigataun is defeated, but Ulrich works a bit of treachery and kills nearly all of his rival Archdukes and Highs--the leaders of the various aristocratic families of the Skylands--thus setting himself up as perhaps a worse monster than the just-defeated gigataun.

This is a breathtaking rocket ride of a book that will definitely whet your appetite for the concluding volume. I for one am not going to miss it.

View all my reviews

Review: Into the Sunken City

Into the Sunken City by Dinesh Thiru
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There's one strike against this book that you should be aware of before going in--most likely people who are strict about the "science" in their science fiction won't like this book at all. That is the initial premise: five hundred years from now, in a post-climate-change environmental-disaster scenario, the Earth is shrouded in permanent cloud cover that dumps constant rain on the world, to the tune of thirty feet a year, with concomitant sea level rise (the climax comes with the characters making a deepwater dive into "Vegas-Drowned," twenty-five-hundred feet down). When you logically ask how a weather pattern could hold like that, the only vague handwaved answer is that the clouds were somehow "fused," in an event called the Stitching.

To put it bluntly, this is ridiculous. I'm sure when some readers hit this so-called "explanation," they threw the book against the wall. I didn't, and I think the reason why is that this story reminded me of the Kevin Costner movie Waterworld, which is equally ridiculous but one of my guilty pleasures. Also, the characters--our narrator Jin Haldar, her sister Thara, and her ex-boyfriend Taim Mazatlan--were much better written than the worldbuilding, and succeeded in holding my interest. Jin in particular works through a lot of grief in this story, over her father's death in a diving accident, and her coming out from under this shadow was sensitively done. Jin's love for her sister, and her willingness to do almost anything to keep Thara safe, made her a moving character to root for.

The dangers and terrors of deepwater diving, and the often-monstrous sea creatures encountered at those depths, were also well depicted. I'm certainly not an expert in that area, and real experts may have considerable bones to pick, but the author seemed to have done enough research to make that part of the story sound believable. I just wish he had put more thought into his worldbuilding and had come up with a scenario that felt halfway plausible. Still, if you can get past that initial hurdle, this is an engrossing story.

View all my reviews