Tag Archives: science fiction

The Fall of Reach

A few years back, a game was released for the X-Box. You may have heard of it. This guy in green armor who everyone thinks is the badass to end all badassery crash-lands onto a ring-looking device that has atmosphere and terrain on the inside surface, and then races against multiple alien species that are bent on the destruction of humanity to discover the device’s purpose. There was a sequel, too, and maybe another one coming out? Anyway, relatively popular.

Apparently, a tie-in prequel novel was written along about the time the game first came out, providing some valuable backstory on how this Master Chief guy and his cool armor came to be present on the Halo in the first place. And, okay, it’s a video-game novelization, so how good could it be, right? Answer: perfectly serviceable! There are some glaring editing problems wherein the numbers of Spartan students fluctuate unexpectedly and wherein the amount of time that passes between the start and finish of the story might be ten years off depending on which section you believe. But those aren’t actually bad, just dumb. The plot itself flows pretty smoothly, borrowing here from Ender’s Game and there from Starship Troopers (not the satirical movie version, though) and generally providing enough information to make the first game a lot more full of sense than it was when I initially played it. I’ll probably read the two game novelizations as well, though that will be a mistake: one of this book’s biggest strengths is that it has a much higher plot density than descriptions of fights against aliens density.

Girls: Conception

2 Replies

I may yet buy more individual comic collections, but I don’t have any big plans for new series for a while, now that I’ve started this one. Five at once is plenty, surely. So, Girls. In Conception, we’re introduced to wide-spot-in-the-highway Pennystown, population 65. It’s a nice little town, just ask anyone who lives there. Except, our hero- let me strike that and go with main character, Ethan, isn’t so happy with the shape of his life. He’s alone and feeling it, and in a drunken moment snaps and lashes out at all the women in the bar, which is pretty much to say all the women in town. It’s a Friday night, and did I mention population 65?

So, okay, this is not the most interesting premise in the world, I know. Except, just as this confrontation is coming to a head, Something Happens. And then, driving home to sleep off his mistake, Ethan finds a naked, attractive girl in the road. Over the next two days, things collapse for Pennystown in violent and unpredictable ways, all thanks to that fateful meeting. I gotta say, I liked it. Good pacing, slow unravelling of what eventually becomes downright creepy atmosphere, good characters made all out of grey. The only thing I can say against it is that the art is a little iffy compared to what I’ve gotten used to seeing lately. It’s not bad at all, but it’s a little generic. The people look too much alike is mostly what I mean. There are maybe five faces split up between the fair number of characters I’ve seen so far. The rest is fine, though.

Also: great cliffhanger.

Y: The Last Man – Unmanned

1 Reply

And now, the first of two new graphic novel series I’ll be in the middle of. Which, counting the Sandman reread, brings my total to five. I approve of this, inasmuch as so far they’ve all been really fun and I get to catch up on a completely new medium. And that doesn’t even count the forthcoming Buffy Season 8 or the three or four years of old X-Men comics I’ve read lately. In theory, this indicates that I am 31 going on 11. In practice, there’s not been anything yet that I’ve thought was beneath me, discrete instances of eye-rolling at the X-Men stuff notwithstanding.

In Y: The Last Man, we have this fellow named Yorick. He is an escape artist, has a pet monkey, a girlfriend in Australia and a mother in Congress. Suddenly, mankind is wiped out! Well, okay, malekind. Because it’s not just the people, it’s all of them. Or maybe just the mammals? I’m not sure. The point is, amoebae are probably going to have a field eon before very long. Unless the women start cloning themselves, I guess. Or Jeff Goldblum’s curse comes to fruition and some of the females spontaneously become male? They might just die when it happens, though, because there’s no way to tell what caused the insta-death in the first place, or if it might be reversible. Except, wait. That guy Yorick, he might be relevant to the story in some way despite being male. Else, why bother to explain his circumstances?

As it happens, Yorick (and his wholly non-euphemistic pet monkey!) survived the world’s being Unmanned after all. Which, come to think of it, makes the name of the series a lot more sensible as well. The problems that face him are numerous: his girlfriend is on the other side of a world in which much of the grid has collapsed; there are roving bands of women on motorcycles who are removing one of their breasts Amazon-style and who think this is pretty much the best thing that has ever happened, and are on a crusade to make sure that whatever caused it didn’t miss any stragglers; everyone who is not Yorick and who does not want him dead thinks he needs to be studied and/or studded, in the hopes of getting things back on track; and hell, the two-party political system isn’t even finished being a pain in the ass yet.

Good art, fun and somewhat breezy storyline despite a fair amount of violence, a couple of good twists already. My favorite theme so far is the idea that men are not to blame for the patriarchal system in which we live. That is, they are, of course; they did it. But the point in the book is that it was inevitable. Nature abhors a vacuum, and once the horrible men in control of everything are gone, you can rest assured that some horrible women will come along and recreate the same system, never recognizing their culpability or the irony of their desires. I trust more themes will spring forth as the series progresses.

Gears of War

7 Replies

The day is coming when I’ll feel obliged to cross-reference some games with the movies section. The last couple of Zeldas fall into that evolving category, as does Halo 2. As, also, does Gears of War. On a class M somewhere out in the galaxy, humans are living out a reasonably Utopian existence. (Utopia looks like a sidewalk cafe in Paris in the springtime, apparently. If you remove the Parisians, then, fair enough.) The problem with Utopia, in this case, is all the humanoids and beasts living below the surface of the planet who decided one day to erupt onto the surface and smash human civilization. Now, some years or decades later, the military remnants continue their struggle against, um… the bad guys. No, seriously, I can’t remember. Ah, okay, it’s the Locust Horde. (I can only assume they call themselves something else.)

The actual in-game story is quite a bit more awesome than the, for now at least, cardboard premise. A squad of marines is tasked with penetrating Locust defenses to retrieve a potential doomsday weapon that has been lost behind enemy lines when the helicopter transporting it was shot down. Although only two are playable, all of the six or so characters has sufficient depth to be in a video game; that is, you care what happens to them and hope they don’t die. The story being about as grim and post-apocalyptic as it sounds, don’t count on that hope winning out, though.

As far as gameplay? It’s really pretty cool. I felt more present than I have in the majority of first-person shooters, despite it being a third-person. The maps being open enough for true flanking and the easy-to-use cover system make the repetitive parts of the game (where you repel this or that wave of enemy attackers before proceeding to the next such wave) not only tolerable but genuinely fun again, and the non-standard parts of the game where you’re dealing with the things that come out after dark, the unkillable aliens, or the ginormous spider all have sufficient tension and uniqueness of play to rival anything I’ve hooked a controller up to. Plus, yay, it’s a current-gen game, so you don’t have to hook up controllers anymore. And not a moment too soon.

Children of Men

I don’t have time to tell a story about the circumstances surrounding my viewing of Children of Men, because that would delay you from reaching the sentence wherein I tell you to go see it, immediately. Which, conveniently, I’ve put right here at the front, so that I can now relax and go about my review at my normal, not-as-frantic pace.

So, then. Liked it, did you? …what do you mean you haven’t seen it yet? I just said… Oh, nevermind. Fine, we’ll do it your way. In the not at all distant future, the world is rocked by the death of its youngest person. Which sounds crazy, right, because people are born on a constant basis, so how would you even know? That’s just it, though. People have stopped being born. For reasons unknown to any world government, women have become completely infertile. Even test tube materials aren’t viable. At the same time, current dystopic tropes about immigration and terrorism have been amplified by the passing years and the new situation, such that Britain is the only marginally strong country left in the world (or so they claim to their citizens), and that only by virtue of iron-fisted control over the freedoms of its people. For example, providing food to a non-citizen is a punishable crime.

Clive Owens wanders through this bleak future with only a bottle and hippified Michael Caine for companionship. And it’s likely that he would have lived out his remaining days in the same manner, except that his estranged wife reveals herself to be the leader of an immigrant-rights based terrorist group and asks him to help a young illegal to get the proper papers to allow her to reach the coast, a waiting ship, and escape from Britain. Which is not a particularly compelling story to tell, one is forced to admit, except for one exceptional factor: the girl is pregnant.

It’s hard for me to say enough good about this movie. It has a little something for everyone. Great acting all around; a compelling political statement; a perfect balance of humor; the Operative; explosions; and above all else, a fleeting glimpse of the miraculous. I’ve gotten to where I take a lot of things in film for granted, and it’s rare that a scene will leave me holding my breath and in need of emotional recovery when it has ended. So, seriously. Go see it.

Cowboys & Aliens

4 Replies

I have a local comics-y friend who acquired a copy of Cowboys & Aliens and immediately thought of me. Of course, I had just started a reasonably large book, so there has been delay. But that’s alright, as I’m here now. Apparently, you can get this slim graphic novel at your local store just by buying something else, and they slip it into your bag as a promotional item, I guess? Or maybe vast quantities of overstock.

That last one fits pretty well. The art is fine, but the plot is uninspired at best: when aliens crash-land in somewhere in the Old West, cowboys, Apaches, and settlers drop their petty feud over land theft and genocide in the face of a common foe who, sheerly by coincidence and I’m sure with no thought to parallelism, hopes to steal land and commit genocide. Then they have a fight, in which people die and things explode. My favorite part (and I refer here to my least favorite part) is the opening screencrawl segment in which all of the parallels that I earlier lied were coincidental are spelled out in excruciating detail before the book proceeds to unsubtly (but much more forgivably) present them via the plot. Explicitly, at one point.

In case you’ve missed it, though, I’ll go ahead and mention it a fourth time, now. Whitey rampaged through North America during the 19th Century, not for the first time, but the most aggressively and rapidly of any post-Columbus period. It’s possible there was something morally questionable about that, as presented by the Golden Rule, aka alien invasion. There. Now you’re probably prepared to read this, in the manner the authors were hoping for you to be. To end on a positive note, though, the cowboy hero’s name is Zeke. Which you must admit is a pretty awesome name. (I mean that. Don’t make me get a court order.)

Carrie

Something I’ve wanted to do for a while is a chronological re-read of the Stephen King oeuvre, now that it is complete. (Admittedly, it’s not complete, what with him still publishing a book or two per year. But he claimed it was complete with the finale of the Dark Tower series, and I have no problem with that. Like, before he was working on a decades-long masterpiece, and now that he’s finished it he considers himself a hobbyist with a good publisher, or something. Whatever works for the guy, I guess.) For various reasons that I don’t feel like getting into, this will probably not be that re-read. But it will do for a stand-in until the real thing comes along.

So, I read Carrie. Perhaps that’s insufficiently purist of me, and I ought to have been snagging them in order of the short story publication prior to them being put in collections, or some such thing. I’ll see if I can’t find a way to sleep at night. Anyhow, Carrie, for people who have been unaware of popular literature or film for the past thirty years, is the story of the unexpected rise and subsequent terrifying plummet of a previously unpopular high school girl, with collateral damage including the graduating senior class and most of a town. Because what her tormentors failed to take into account was her latent telekinesis.

It’s really not hard to see how King became so popular so fast. The themes might be a little trite (the difficulty of adolescence for everyone involved, the dangers of unchecked fanaticism, revenge fantasies brought to lurid life) and the symbolism might be a little heavy-handed (the girl who everyone made fun of for making it to sixteen without ever having had, or even heard of, her first period is brought low by pouring a bucket of pig blood on her? For God’s sake!), but they’re also vivid and timeless. Unless you had the perfect high school experience, it’s impossible not to feel some sympathy for Carrie’s plight, and unless you’re clinically insane, it’s impossible not to feel true horror for her family situation. (And if you did have the perfect high school experience or are clinically insane, then you still have a couple of the good guy high school students or Carrie’s mother, respectively, to identify with.)

My favorite theme, though, is one that echoes throughout almost all of King’s work, from the microcosm of a small Maine town like Chamberlain to the macrocosms of our entire planet or even the cosmology upon which it lies. Everything eventually fails and fades. Sometimes violently, via an angry telekinetic girl experiencing a psychotic break who sets off a series of explosions that are sufficient to physically destroy a high school and an entire downtown area, and sometimes gradually over time like a winding down clock. But it always happens sooner or later, and you can find hints of it in almost everything the man has written.

But all of that aside, I think the most amusing surprise was discovering that Stephen King’s first novel owes quite a bit more to science fiction than horror. Who knew?

Minerva: Metastasis 2

To my substantial surprise, the Minerva project released another level. On the bright side, this means I got to play a little more Half-Life thingy, with the lovely headcrabs and all. On the less bright side, I’m reduced to recording fleeting thoughts on someone’s homebuilt game level. It’s like if I owned a Vespa. Sure, it’s well made and intriguing and all, but I still feel kind of ridiculous, you know?

It picks up right where the last level left off: exploring the unlikelily large underground Combine facility. Learning about the nasty headcrab soldier experimentation that’s been going on is plenty enough reason to annihilate the place, if only it was possible to discover a reactor or a spare nuclear device or something. Oh, well, maybe next level. (I had the impression that Metastasis as title implied ongoing title changes following a cancerous theme. The simple numbering instead has me split between maintaining this guess and expecting a very large game and revising the guess to expect that the title will ultimately be unsatisfying, just an authorial choice of cool word. It remains to be seen!)

Minerva: Metastasis 1

Busy lately, me. As promised, I’ve been digging through the Half-Life 2 products on Steam, and I’ve found part one of what I hope will be an ongoing release called Minerva. In the initial sequence, dear old Gordon Freeman has been called to a Combine island by an unknown entity that wishes him to discover what these people are up to on an uninhabited rock containing a 70-year old and thought to be unused World War II facility. In addition to all the being shot at by soldiers and assaulted by unusually fast headcrabs, there’s the insult of that voice in your head seeming to equate you with the enemy.

I expect my problem with these downloads, in general, to be that they’re too short. Well, what else is new? On the plus side, though, the story part was highly intriguing, with a lot of literal and figurative delving left to go into Gordon’s mysterious…. benefactor? and into the Combine plans for the facility. Ultimately, though, I kind of expect the project to fall apart before I learn what the whole story really is. Still, maybe not!

Serenity

8 Replies

mv5bmti0nty1mzy4nv5bml5banbnxkftztcwntczodazmq-_v1_sy317_cr0 Some time ago, there was a new Star Wars movie coming out. I’d been burned by the series a bit, if not as badly as some, so I was looking forward to it still, but guardedly. Meanwhile, the Joss Whedon movie, Serenity, was pushed back from before Star Wars until months after it, here at the end of September. So I hatched a plan, made a promise with myself if you will. Star Wars was over, whereas Serenity might spawn new films or even a return to television for its show of origin, Firefly. So, however many times I felt compelled to see the Sith get their revenge, I would see Serenity twice as often. The problem is I no longer have a job with its pesky reliable income, and that the Star Wars movie was really quite good. Good enough that I kind of saw it four times, and only didn’t see it more because I was in the midst of moving, and ran out of time to see it before it vanished.

So, now I need to spend some reasonably large amount of money to see Serenity seven more times. (Or possibly eight; previews don’t make money and so don’t count toward totals, and emptying my pockets to them was kind of the point of this exercise.) So, that’s the bad news. The good news is this: except for having to sell my body on the cold, cold streets for ticket cash, I will not find this task in any way burdensome.

I had a couple of problems with the movie, although at this particular moment I’ll be damned if I can remember what they were. Instead, my head is flooded with individual scenes, some funny, some gripping, one that left my mouth open for at least a full minute, not a few technically amazing pieces of work that would have, well, if not left Lucas jealous of the skill, at least left him acknowledging that it’s not only him can make these things happen on a screen, these days. So, I’m a geek for Joss Whedon and especially for this show, and no denying it. Perhaps that makes me easier to please, perhaps it makes me harder to. I know this, though. I’m going to wander around in a happy daze for the next few weeks.

Will it work for new people? I think yes, if they can be talked through the door. The introduction scenes were rapid, because Joss doesn’t assume his viewers are stupid. I’m pretty sure the average Hollywood consumer is in fact not nearly as stupid as most movies take them to be, so having rapid-fire intros shouldn’t be a problem. A couple of the characters were introduced less well, but I think still well enough. He created the sense of history without deigning to explain it, but it was there solidly enough that you should be willing to allow it to be true and wait for the payoff. The plot should be plenty easy to follow, though, and the characters and dialogue should make up for any unfamiliarity by the end of the second sequence.

As far as the plot: River Tam, a government experiment in mind-reading and enhanced military capability, and her brother Simon are on the run from the government that created her. They have fallen in with the crew of Serenity, a group of people who don’t much cotton to the way the Alliance of Planets keeps its nose in the affairs of people who would just as soon be independent, and who make their living on whatever side of the law is most convenient. The problem is, River has a secret buried in her brain, and very important people want it back. At any cost.

Lastly, the part where I snagged it early. It was a bit of an event last night. I got to see it in an Old West ghost town (well, okay, a movie set, but done up well enough), at sunset, with a Chinese box lunch and a fortune cookie that included an actual fortune if you can believe it, not just a compliment. Also, Kaylee and River were there. I would have a hard time imagining a better way to get to take it all in. Here’s my point, though. Go see it. This weekend if possible. If I’m wrong, tell me about it and I’ll make amends. But I’m pretty sure that won’t happen. (Even if I did have a couple of complaints.)

Shards of Delirium

Fragments of Delight