Reboots, Remakes and Nostalgia

Summer blockbusters this year seem to all be about nostalgia. First there was "Mad Max: Fury Road", bringing the road warrior back to the big screen for the first time since 1985. Then we had "Jurassic World", to enormous blockbuster success. Now we have "Terminator: Genisys", living up to the eternal promise of 'I'll be back'. Like a lot of people my age (let's say, thirty-ish) I remember the original films from the first time around (except for Mad Max, which I watched in the Nineties) and have a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings about them. I was too young to see Terminator until about a decade after its release but I watched T:2 when it came out on VHS and absolutely loved it. Of the three franchises, it was Jurassic Park that held a very special place in my heart; I saw it four times in the cinema when it came out in 1993 and loved every minute of it.

I'll admit, I'm still a little sad that movies aren't all that original anymore and rely on glories of the past to get bums on seats. If it's not superhero movies getting a reboot every two years, it's sequels to franchises that have been out of the limelight for two decades. Saying that, I have been thoroughly enjoying the current wave of sequels. Watching the latest Terminator addition got me thinking about this; I should probably hate all these films, for not living up to my memories of their founders, for trying to ruthlessly cash-in on established franchises with a strong fan-base. But I don't. All have been entertaining, all have made going to the cinema something I wanted to do (it's rare for any film to make me want to spend the cash for the big screen anymore) and most of all, I've felt that all have respected their origins. Some have done it better than others but none have made me feel like they're shitting all over their roots. In fact one of the things I like best about Terminator: Genisys is that it removes films 3 and 4 entirely from the timeline, two films that did not respect the original at all. Still hate the title though.

Tanith Lee - Strange, Magical and Irreplaceable

It was a shock to hear that Tanith Lee died Sunday 24th May at the age of 67. To say she's influenced my reading and writing habits would be a massive understatement. It was her book, The Birthgrave, that was the very first fantasy novel I ever read that was intended for adults. I was eleven and in desperate need of MORE STORIES, particularly anything with a girl as the main character and having magical adventures. There weren't a lot of those kind of books when I was a kid in the early Nineties so my mum gave me a book with a semi-naked woman on the cover:

Written entirely in first-person, it tells the story of a woman who wakes up in a cavern under a volcano that is erupting. Barely escaping with her life she's rescued by some locals, who worship her as a god. Oh, and did I mention she takes one look at herself in some water and is confronted with a hideous deformed visage, so she covers her face for the rest of the book? That happens too. I adored the story, the characters and the epic yet personal themes. I read my way through it and the two follow ups in a matter of weeks. Then promptly read them again. From that point on I became a firm fantasy and science-fiction fan for life.

Lee's books are a wonderful mixture of high-fantasy, urban fantasy, horror and magic; with a large dose of weirdness. And through all of her stories was the ever present female point of view. Her stories were genuinely unique, beautifully written but so strange at times they could be hard to get into. With more than 90 books to her name I haven't come close to reading them all but to honour this great writer, who was sadly much under appreciated in her lifetime, I've listed below some of her works I have read and would highly recommend for all speculative fiction fans. Her high-fantasy books always reminded me of the Conan worlds, but with women as the focus, and there's a strong current of horror running through most of her stories. Her science fiction stories by comparison brought unusual takes on sci-fi tropes to create truly unique stories that I haven't yet found from other writers.

Black Unicorn

Sabella

Silver Metal Lover

When the Lights Go Out

The Castle of Dark

Vivia

I'm genuinely saddened that there will be no new Tanith Lee stories ever again, so will be making the effort to read those books of hers I haven't got to yet. For a personal and touching post about the loss of this great writer to the world, I highly recommend this post from her editor and friend.

And in the words of Tanith Lee herself: 

"Though we come and go, and pass into the shadows, where we leave behind us stories told -- on paper, on the wings of butterflies, on the wind, on the hearts of others -- there we are remembered, there we work magic and great change -- passing on the fire like a torch -- forever and forever. Till the sky falls, and all things are flawless and need no words at all."

How to Blow Your Mind in One Easy Step

I read a thing about artificial intelligence here and here. And I can't recommend enough for you all to do the same. It took me about 40 minutes to get through it all, mostly with this facial expression:

It's seriously terrifying shit. If you can't be arsed to read it all, it boils down to this:

1. Scientific advancement increases exponentially (the more you know, the easier it is to work shit out). So what we did in the whole of the 20th Century will probably take us, ooh, ten years to do now.

2. AI comes in three types: stupid, human level, and super. So far we only have the stupid kind, that can be really good at one thing and one thing only (think Siri, Google Cars, anything where computers do the thinking for you). But we are in the process of creating human level AI. But...

3. The rules of 'exponentiality' means that as soon as we do, that human AI is likely to turn into Super AI in about an hour, real-time.

4. Super AI is going to make us like ants looking at the Hadron Collider and being totally unable to comprehend what it is, let alone how it was built or what it does.

The smartest people on the planet seem to be in two camps; one side see super AI as the saviour of not just humanity but of the Universe. It will be able to manipulate matter at an atomic (or even sub-atomic) level. It will be able to solve all of the puzzles of physics and the universe, even the ones we don't know about yet. It will be able to make us immortal. And all this in less than fifty years from now (at optimistic estimates).

The other group of super smart people... well, they're not so happy-flappy and ready to welcome the computer deity we'd be creating. They point out that while humans have mushy things like feelings, empathy, morals, ethics, etc, a computer wouldn't. This could be the extinction event for humanity. Maybe all life on earth.

Now, while a part of me is all like "Oh, shit!" another, bigger bit of me is thinking of all the stories I could make out of this. Which probably says a lot about my tendency to retreat into fantasy rather than deal with reality, but is also a demonstration of something I think may be the key to stopping the AI destruction of the world. Make the thing love stories, particularly stories about people and then it will have a good reason to keep us around.

Unless we all end up having to reenact Game of Thrones for the computerised overlord's amusement...

Someone Needs to Call the Doctor

When the news broke that Peter Capaldi was to be the next Doctor Who I was thrilled; he's a great actor, he has the crazy eyed look and he's Scottish. All of these things made me really look forward to seeing him in full Who mode; confusing silly humans while saving them and just generally being incredibly cool. Sadly this is not what I have got so far from the eighth season of the Doctor. So far I've found the stories to be largely dull and predictable; Doctor Who by numbers. There hasn't really been any cool new creatures for the Doctor to face off against. And worst of all the companion, Clara Oswald, has continued to annoy me; seriously, what does she actually do now that her "puzzle" was solved by the last Doctor?

I should say at this point that if you haven't seen any of Season 8 that there are spoilers ahead. Read on at your own risk.

Book Review: The Martian Chronicles

The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury
1950
Paperback, 2013 edition

Ray Bradbury is one of the old guard of Science Fiction that I had never got around to reading. Deciding to remedy this situation I thought I'd give The Martian Chronicles a go, as it is consistently mentioned as a must-read of the science fiction genre. I was expecting an old fashioned science fiction story, considering it's from 1950. It turns out I massively underestimated how incredibly old fashioned it would be.

Book Review: The Many Coloured Land

The Many-Coloured Land by Julian May
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Julian May's works were introduced to me by my science fiction/fantasy loving mum when I was 14-years-old, after I'd grown bored of "kids books" and had already worked my way through her Tanith Lee collection and a scattering of Stephen Donaldson/Sherri Tepper/Anne McCaffrey books. The Many Coloured Land was the first of May's works I was given and I quickly devoured the whole series it belonged to, as well as the subsequent quadrilogy. Once I finished them, I immediately started the whole series again from the beginning - with a new perspective on the story and my mind blown that a writer could weave such a detailed and clever tale. Now sixteen years on I was given my very own copies from the republished versions and plunged myself into a book that has been such a huge influence on me (more detail on that later). I wondered though: would they be as powerful, magical and immersive this time around?

Pacific Rim Surprised Me

I watched Pacific Rim a few weeks ago and it's still lurking around in my head like a shadowy figure under a street lamp. It probably doesn't help that my tumblr feed is full of fan art, reviews and general ravings about the movie. The most surprising part of all this is; I was not expecting much at all from the film itself. Even after leaving the cinema I thought "hey, that was a cool aliens being clobbered by machines movie". But I was wrong folks. It's much more than that.

Keeping spoilers to a minimum, the premise of Pacific Rim is that a dimensional vortex has opened deep under the ocean, and humongous creatures are coming through, wreaking havoc and generally going all godzilla as soon as they come across a city. After much destruction and the realisation that these beasts are not going to stop appearing, humanity unites and creates the Jaegar programme, building equally humongous humanoid mecha's, which require two humans to mentally merge and control from within. So far so almost every anime series ever. But again, it is so much more:

- Affirmative message: so, so, so many films go for the dark, tortured soul tale. The Dark Knight Rises, Man of Steel, even Spider-man. Don't get me wrong, I love a dark tortured tale as much as the next homosapien, but there are times when it all gets a bit... dull. Pacific Rim is a wonderful antidote to this; its message is one of hope, or human decency and loyalty, of victory in the face of terrible odds.

- Subverting the male gaze: The amount of female ass and side boob I have had to witness in one visual medium or another... It can get to the point of not even noticing it anymore because it's so common. Pacific Rim is the first film I can remember in a long time that not only doesn't have this trope in clear evidence but actually turns it on its head; instead of the camera admiring the form of women it's the male protagonist who is admired/objectified by the female protagonist in a brief moment that is only noticeable because of how unusual it it.*

- No love story: The male and female protagonists go through a lot together, they fight together and they both lose a lot before they can even think of victory. Though Mako has a moment in which she clearly approves of her colleague's body, there is no suggestion that she's in love with him and at no point do they fall into each other's arms and do the dirty. Instead there is a deep friendship between them, an understanding that is made all the more meaningful with the absence of a romantic sub-plot.

- An original story: With a huge swathe of remakes and sequels flooding the cineplex Pacific Rim was a welcome change. Guillermo del Toro was inspired by Japanese kaiju films like Godzilla and ramped it up x1000 for his take on robots vs aliens. But he didn't forget the characters, making their personal struggles as big a part of the story as the smashy, crashy moments.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a deep and meaningful film - it is still essentially a larger than life action/sci-fi movie that includes a lot of punching. But it has something films of that type normally lack: a heart. Highly recommended.


*I am not saying here that the male gaze shots are wrong - only that there's too many of them in too many films. I don't want it to go too far the other way, where every film has a male character being represented purely by their abs and buttocks, but it's nice to have a balance. Pacific Rim is the first film I recall in recent times that seems to be reaching for that balance.

How Not To Do A Sci-Fi Story; After Earth Review

Something a bit different to my usual film reviews; I've decided to do an examination of things you should not to do when you're creating a science-fiction story, through the focus of the film "After Earth". As you may have guessed I wasn't impressed; though it had a few moments that were visually stunning or interesting, overall the film falls completely flat, thanks in large part to the humongous problems with the science bit of the science-fiction setting. If you have nothing better to watch it's a reasonably diverting 100 minutes, but it isn't worth the price of a cinema ticket.

I will be talking about major plot points in the below, so if you do want to see the film I suggest you stop reading here. *Spoilers ahead*

"Nooooooooo!"

An impromptu post about news I've just heard: Disney has bought Lucasfilm and all its subsidiaries (Industrial Light and Magic as well as Skywalker Sound). I felt a tremor in the force when I read that (and listened to the accompanying announcement video). It turned into an "Alderaan has blown up" moment, when I read the following lines from the announcement: "Fans can expect a new feature film, Star Wars - Episode 7, in theatres worldwide in 2015". Oh, Obi-Wan, no...

If there were ever any doubt that Lucas sold his soul, here's the proof.

I love the original Star Wars trilogy. They were an adventure, and a moral guide for me growing up, something that made me aspire. Okay it made me aspire to become a Jedi Knight, but there are worst things to dream of as a kid. In fact I'd even say one of the greatest things I learnt about storytelling came from those films; start in the middle of something. I read a huge amount of the spin off books, and in fact still have them all sitting on my book shelf behind me. I played the games (even the bad ones) and thought no game would ever be better than Knights of the Old Republic. I was, and still am in some ways, a die-hard Star Wars fan, with a cacophony of useless information about the extended universe in my head. In other words, a total geek.

Sour Grapes or Solid Points?

Last week I came across author Christopher Priest's blog, specifically his post about the recent Clark awards nominations. He's a novelist and Science-Fiction writer, probably best known in the mainstream for his book The Prestige, which was turned into a very successful film staring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. I'll admit I'm only familiar with that latter work of his, but I know he is a well respected and admired author. Unfortunately this only confused me more when I read his comments on the Clarke awards; you see, he's not best pleased.

Anne McCaffrey Goes Beyond the Between - RIP

The sad news reached me Wednesday this week that science-fiction/fantasy writer Anne McCraffrey had passed away on Monday, at 85 years of age.

The news was a shock; I've long admired and enjoyed a number of her stories, but more importantly she was one of the female sci-fi/fantasy writers my Mum introduced me to from the age of ten, creating my long love of the genre. She was also in the group of female fantasy writers who I felt wrote stories that I, a girl keen on having adventures of her own, could enjoy from a female point of view. Though I wouldn't go so far as to say she was an outright feminist writer, in the way Sheri Tepper was for instance, she nonetheless put women in the centre of things, just as Andre Norton, and Tanith Lee did. Women weren't just add-ons or passively experiencing events; they did things, right and wrong, and were as much a part of the story as any male character (or in her own words, as reported by one of her sons, "I was so tired of all the weak women screaming in the corner while their boyfriends were beating off the aliens. I wouldn't have been—I'd've been in there swinging with something or kicking them as hard as I could"). This may not seem like a big deal nowadays but a number of stories, even by writers I admired and enjoyed, had female characters not doing a lot or just being victims (i.e. Isaac Asimov and his Foundation series. Brilliant, but women don't feature all that much. And they still make the tea, even that far in the future). It felt sometimes like the boys got all the adventures while the girls waited for them to come and rescue them. McCaffrey, among others, showed me it didn't have to be that way, and I will love her for that for the rest of my life.

Take Cover, Skynet Is Coming

Yesterday Skynet went live (according to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) but so far things are looking kind of quiet. Well, apart from the problems on the London Underground today, but it's hard to tell if that's the beginning of an A.I. takeover or just service as usual. So in honour of the beginning of the apocalypse here are some of my favourite moments from the Terminator franchise. Maybe it will be enough to placate our robotic overlords...