THE PREPOSTEROUS BOLLOX OF THE SITUATION
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She has such an interestingly beautiful face
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Rose Leslie by Rebecca Miller for Bust
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Carice van Houten by Janey van Ierland
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Drew Barrymore
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Léa Seydoux
“Well, we live in a technological age. Time has passed, and we have stepped over the ruins of our own societies, and our own civilisations, and we come now to the fruition of those things about which the human race has dreamed. We have flight and we have electronic assistants. The entertainment media – which are always very timorous and step very carefully out of fear and loathing – don’t know what they’re doing so much. So they go back, and they are catching up on the kind of science fiction – and they call it, in that ugly, ugly phrase, “sci-fi,” which those who have worked in speculative fiction despise, it’s like calling a woman a “broad” – they are catching up on ideas that were covered with hoarfrost 60 years ago. That’s why you have an overabundance of zombies and walking dead, and world war and asteroids from space. They have not yet tackled any of the truly interesting discussions of humanity that are treated in speculative fiction. But they are a break from standard 19th, early 20th-century fiction, and so they seem fresh to an audience that is essentially ignorant…”
Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve never read any Harry Harrison outside of the first few Stainless Steel Rat books decades ago - and I think some part of me considered them juvenilia, for some reason - but I was intrigued to pick this up based on the news that Alex (Repo Man) Cox is making a low budget movie version.
And this book was incredibly good. Not perfect - it’s rather too episodic and ramshackle to be perfect - but as a riposte to the gung-ho Starship Troopers of the time it’s a sharp and insightful, not to say honestly and actually funny in places, adventure which makes you laugh and think in just the right measure.
View all my reviews
“Music and the visual arts are central to the way he approaches his literary craft. It was while touring nightclubs (“a ridiculous concept now of course, but at the time it was something that people did”) with authors from the rave-lit anthology Disco Biscuits, for instance, that he hit on his future direction. Listening to a reader before him, while he waited to go on stage, he became aware that techno music from the next room was “pumping away – doosh doosh doosh doosh, four-to-the-floor – and it was interfering with the reading in quite an interesting way. It suddenly came to my head and I turned to Sarah Champion [the anthology’s editor] and I said: ‘I wonder if you could do a dub version of a story.’ I couldn’t get that idea out of my head…”
Booktalk Nation w/Joe Hill & John Scalzi (by BookTalk Nation)
It’s like this…
You’re fourteen and you’re reading Larry Niven’s “The Protector” because it’s your father’s favorite book and you like your father and you think he has good taste and the creature on the cover of the book looks interesting and you want to know what it’s about. And in it the female character does something better than the male character - because she’s been doing it her whole life and he’s only just learned - and he gets mad that she’s better at it than him. And you don’t understand why he would be mad about that, because, logically, she’d be better at it than him. She’s done it more. And he’s got a picture of a woman painted on the inside of his spacesuit, like a pinup girl, and it bothers you.
But you’re fourteen and you don’t know how to put this into words.
And then you’re fifteen and you’re reading “Orphans of the Sky” because it’s by a famous sci-fi author and it’s about a lost generation ship and how cool is that?!? but the women on the ship aren’t given a name until they’re married and you spend more time wondering what people call those women up until their marriage than you do focusing on the rest of the story. Even though this tidbit of information has nothing to do with the plot line of the story and is only brought up once in passing.
But it’s a random thing to get worked up about in an otherwise all right book.
Then you’re sixteen and you read “Dune” because your brother gave it to you for Christmas and it’s one of those books you have to read to earn your geek card. You spend an entire afternoon arguing over who is the main character - Paul or Jessica. And the more you contend Jessica, the more he says Paul, and you can’t make him see how the real hero is her. And you love Chani cause she’s tough and good with a knife, but at the end of the day, her killing Paul’s challengers is just a way to degrade them because those weenies lost to a girl.
Then you’re seventeen and you don’t want to read “Stranger in a Strange Land” after the first seventy pages because something about it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. All of this talk of water-brothers. You can’t even pin it down.
And then you’re eighteen and you’ve given up on classic sci-fi, but that doesn’t stop your brother or your father from trying to get you to read more.
Even when you bring them the books and bring them the passages and show them how the authors didn’t treat women like people.
Your brother says, “Well, that was because of the time it was written in.”
You get all worked up because these men couldn’t imagine a world in which women were equal, in which women were empowered and intelligent and literate and capable.
You tell him - this, this is science fiction. This is all about imagining the world that could be and they couldn’t stand back long enough and dare to imagine how, not only technology would grow in time, but society would grow.
But he blows you off because he can’t understand how it feels to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and desperately wanting to like the books your father likes, because your father has good taste, and being unable to, because most of those books tell you that you’re not a full person in ways that are too subtle to put into words. It’s all cognitive dissonance: a little like a song played a bit out of tempo - enough that you recognize it’s off, but not enough to pin down what exactly is wrong.
And then one day you’re twenty-two and studying sociology and some kind teacher finally gives you the words to explain all those little feelings that built and penned around inside of you for years.
It’s like the world clicking into place.
And that’s something your brother never had to struggle with.
(via earlgreyjoys)
“The Natural
“Elbert Ventura on Primer
“Would we ever hear from Shane Carruth again? The question has floated like a thought balloon over many movie-lovers’ heads since 2004. Word of aborted projects and the occasional wisp of a credit (a “special thanks” in Looper) would occasionally bring Carruth—the director of arguably the best American sci-fi flick of the last 20 years—back into view. But as Primer, his still staggering debut, receded further into the distance, we had to entertain the possibility that it might also end up the greatest one-off of our moviegoing lives….
“Years and multiple viewings later, the movie seems an inexhaustible resource—and, watched again today, even more miraculous than I remembered…”
“The regrettable reasons for the decline in SF by women this year don’t change the fact that the best books were by men.
“As a feminist, I am opposed to including women writers in shortlists just because they are female: the work has got to hold its own in its field: we can discuss whether that field is a level one or not, but when you’re judging a work, you’re obliged to deal with what you’ve got, and to me, that means regardless of any ideological criteria…”
“Author Iain Banks has revealed that he has late stage cancer and is unlikely to live for more than a year.
“The Scottish writer posted a message on his official website saying his next novel The Quarry, due to be published later this year, would be his last…”
“After years of effort and many thousands of free man-hours, and ahead of the launch of the film for free online, the team behind the not-for-profit Judge Dredd fan film ‘Judge Minty’ have released a new trailer.
“The short film starring Edmund Dehn and Dredd artist Greg Staples has been touring festivals since its debut last year.
“Produced by fans in their own time and for free, the film is based on a character from the early days of Judge Dredd and follows Judge Minty as he takes the ‘Long Walk’ into the irradiated wastelands of the Cursed Earth.”
New trailer for not-for-profit ‘Judge Minty’ fan film (by 2000ADonline)
“VURT: The 20th Anniversary Edition, with a foreword by Lauren Beukes and three fantastic new short stories, all set in the extraordinary world of Vurt. Take a trip in a stranger’s head. Travel rain-shot streets with a gang of hip malcontents, hooked on the most powerful drug you can imagine. Yet Vurt feathers are not for the weak. As the mysterious Game Cat says, ‘Be careful, be very careful’. But Scribble isn’t listening. He has to find his lost love. His journey is a mission to find Curious Yellow, the ultimate, perhaps even mythical Vurt feather. As the most powerful narcotic of all, Scribble must be prepared to leave his current reality behind.”
“The creator of Repo Man and Sid & Nancy directs a feature comedy based on Harry Harrison’s classic anti-war science fiction novel
“BILL, THE GALACTIC HERO is a feature-length science fiction comedy set in the far reaches of our galaxy, as humans wage war against a reptilian alien species, known as Chingers. It is extremely low budget, and relatively high concept. How is a story of space warfare between two high-technology civilizations to be achieved, doing justice to its original, on a super-low budget?”
“In the near future the society of a megalopolis is divided into two fractions: on one side a super-rich minority, led by the ruthless dictator Lucius (Werner Daehn), living a life of debauchery and decadence. On the other side the vast majority, dwelling in different degrees of nearly unbearable poverty.
“When the young Frederick (Nikolai Kinski) comes in possession of the partial copy of a long forbidden Stanley Kubrick movie, it sparks a growing movement amongst the city’s formerly aimless youths, developing fast into serious opposition to the ruling system, which retaliates with rapidly increasing brutality.
“Frederick becomes Alex, his friends the new droogs. But are they even aware of the consequences of their actions?”
ALEX Teaser / Trailer Sci-Fi Action-Film Nikolai Kinski, Werner Daehn, Agron Krasniqi, Genta Ismajli (by Florian Frerichs)
Douglas Adams Google Doodle.
“Douglas Adams – one of the most celebrated and beloved humorists of the 20th century – had an imagination that defied gravity and soared past Earth’s atmosphere. As a young man, he famously got the first inkling of an idea for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy while hitchhiking across Europe, pausing to contemplate the starry night sky...
“Douglas Adams has entertained and inspired so many generations of people around the world with his warm humor and courageously curious intellect. Happy birthday, you hoopy frood!”
Lunchtime reading.
