Stephen Hunt's Blog, page 2

The Devil’s crackling.

A slightly shorter than normal update for this week. Mainly because my left hand is out of action following a culinary industrial disaster at Chez Hunt where a very sharp Japanese cooking implement bounced off a piece of crackling being removed from pork for our favourite tea-braised ramen noodle dish.

I wouldn’t mind, but a couple of weeks earlier I also lost a filling to an over-hard piece of crackling during the traditional family Sunday roast. Upon inspection by the dentist, the abscess-ridden tooth could not be saved and had to be yanked out leaving a portion of my gums looking like the Somme after a two-day artillery bombardment.

I think the Gods of Fate are trying to tell me something about avoiding pork in general and crackling, specifically.

What next? I try a hog roast in the first outdoor pub trip garden visit for a year and subsequently choke to death, or get a piece of crackling embedded in my brain-stem?

A song floats to mind.

Stupid Deaths, Stupid Deaths
They’re funny ’cause they’re true (Woo!)
Stupid Deaths, Stupid Deaths
Hope next time it’s not you! (He Hee!)

It’s enough to send a lazy carnivore vegetarian!

Blame of Thrones?

Since any observations I have about science fiction this week are more or less overshadowed in the UK by the Duke of Edinburgh’s passing, a fellow who’s been adjacent to the throne for as long as I have been alive, I figured I might as well throw my two pennies in as well.

I barely met the Duke once. In my first job, I was sent to a central London trade hall to act as a photographer. Given I’m not a trained photographer I wasn’t sure why I was asked. It transpired there was an Apple Computer stand with a couple of directors due to meet the Duke of Edinburgh on a whistle-stop tour of new inventions. Neither of the Apple brass wanted to not be in a selfie with the Duke, and this was a private invite-only event with the Duke pressing the flesh, sans Joe public. Never was a hall so well attended by high mucky-mucks, its stands manned solely by managing directors and chairmen.

I did not know any of this. I just wandered into the hall via a back entrance wondering why there were so many police with machine guns on patrol. I didn’t have a pass or much of a clue about anything. Nobody challenged me. Maybe because I was in a suit, and young, gormless, and harmless-looking? After roaming the back passages for a while, I discovered a curtain, pulled it, and found myself in the main hall. I located the Apple table, and got an old-style nondigital camera shoved into my clammy paws by a corporate titan just in time for the Duke to troll up, look interested, and shake hands while I was clicking away madly.

After Philip wandered off to talk to the next table after a few seconds, I thought to myself, you know, that bloke looks a lot like the fellow who is married to our Queen.

This was my sole 15-second-long brush with royalty (to date: I’m still hopeful about a knighthood – hint hint).

This was also long before our current heightened sensitivities concerning terrorism; but even so, given this was at the height of the IRA’s campaign, I’m surprised I wasn’t shot, or at least rugby tackled for blithely wandering into a high-security zone.

I only realized later that Philip held a deep interest in UFOs and was on the subscriber list of several printed UFOlogy publications. He also received regular briefings from the Royal Air Force on potential ET incursions into British airspace – most of which I suspect, were just American stealth tech, drones, and high altitude spy planes being field-tested on unsuspecting Brits.

Ah well. Thanks for not getting your bodyguards to shoot me, anyway, your Highness. Safe travels to whatever awaits on the other side of the rainbow bridge.

Your loyal and still mostly clueless servant.

Stephen

A good bit of evil.

I just finished watching the last episode of the second season for the post-apocalyptic ice age hell of a train set that is Snowpiercer.

I will try to keep this relatively spoiler-free for those of you who haven’t seen this series on Netflix yet.

The fundamental difference between the two seasons is the return of Mr. Wilfried in the form of Sean Bean. He is still the King of the North, but this time playing a manipulative billionaire sociopath with slight shades of grey – grey, as in Sixty Shades Of.

It is very worrying how well Sean Bean plays a devious psychopath perv, or perhaps this is a testament to their scriptwriters.

They get it down pat that the underlying pathology of being a psychopath is that you believe you are the only living sentient creature on the stage of life, and everything else is basically just a simulacrum created for your entertainment, sadistic, fatal, or otherwise.

It takes quite a lot to put across a decent villain in fiction or on the screen. It’s astonishingly easy to fail and merely create a cardboard cutout bad-because-they-are-bad type of character (or the even lazier current trend for evil because they are a stereotype – insert your cookie-cutter identity here: political view, religious outlook, immutable characteristics, money-loving corporate executive, et cetera).

What will the third season bring when it returns to Netflix? We shall have to wait and see!

Whatever happens, you probably won’t want ice cubes for your cocktail in first class. That is, if you survive the cull!

A good bit of evil.

Cover me!

I’m going to tell you something I don’t believe I have told you before. It’s a shocking secret about yours truly. Some of you may think of me as an author, but before I was a writer, before I was even an unpublished wannabe author, I was a failed comic-book artist.

That is to say, I neglected to get into art college when I left high school. It was my sole dream to be a comic-book illustrator. I wasted my tweenage/teenage years honing my craft, only to realise – when I saw the portfolios of everybody else I was up against who also wanted to study art – that in actuality, my comic-book art was a steaming pile of amateur brown stuff by comparison. I did later do a graphic design degree, but that was mostly to annoy my employer at the time – a stuffy investment bank. A story for another day.

These meagre creative credentials, however, allow me to look upon the art and style which graces the covers of fantasy and science fiction books with a certain jaded professionalism and understanding in the whats and whys-fores that might underlie their stylistic choices.

Take the new dystopian SF novel Klara and the Sun by the ever-trendy Kazuo Ishiguro – see https://amzn.to/3tVq8P1 for the cover pic – it sports a red background with a small grey box in the middle of the cover, and inside that tiny grey box is a narrow sliver of a yellow Sun. You could knock this up in Adobe Illustrator in three minutes.

However, remember this bloke is a bestseller with breakout novels so good they can’t possibly be science fiction, darling. Hence the lack of airbrushed muscled aliens snogging on the front cover. You know this minimalist piece of design wasn’t installed because Faber & Faber lacked the $300 to bung to a budding illustrator or even the $6000 to pay an established professional.

You are invited to gaze upon this work and see only art. Art in front, and art behind where the squiggly typeset wordage lies.

Cover me!

Now take a peek at my preorder for the sixth installment in my pulpy Sliding Void space opera series, said book entitled Voyage of the Void-Lost – https://amzn.to/3fk6yru – which features a sod-off-sized starship escaping a supernova.

To me, this is art. Not, perhaps, my words – I’m writing this for entertainment and fun, not posterity and a place in the literary canon – but the Chris Foss-like space scene gracing the dust jacket. Lovely. Lovely. Lovely.

But then, what do I know? Opinions on what makes an excellent design are like arseholes. Everybody has one – and I’m just a flipping failed comic book artist.

PS – there’s now an updated copy of Voyage of the Void-Lost as it currently stands for all you Patreon supporters out there to read many months before it hits the bookshelves. Get yourself over to https://www.patreon.com/stephenhunt

Voyage of the Void-Lost (Sliding Void #6).

Not my Capt’n?

The forces of Disney/Marvel are shuffling a new MCU live-action TV series onto the streams now WandaVision’s first season has hex-ited out of existence – so meet the Bucky and Falcon combo that is The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Spoilers lie ahead, if you haven’t watched this show, yet:

You might remember from the last Avengers movie how Captain America passes his shield, literally and figuratively, onto Sam (the Falcon).

We spent most of the first episode setting up the two principal characters, with lots of establishing-plot that can drag a little.

Sam is now working for the American military fighting terrorists at the start of the show – cue big-budget SFX punch-up

Meanwhile, Bucky (the Winter Soldier) is seeing a shrink as part of his government parole programme, and suffering from 80 years of brainwashed assassination memories coming back to haunt him, while trying to make amends by hunting Hydra sleeper agents.

The first episode moves onto Sam passing the shield to a museum as he decides he’d rather not be the new icon of the US of A, but try to save his family’s struggling fishing boat business, instead.

There’s a bunch of violent cultists/insurgents at work in the background called the ‘Flag Smashers’ who want a one-world government to stop anymore ‘blips’, alien invasions, and superhero-generated mass murder.

We also get to meet the new Captain America, John Walker, or US Agent if you are reading the paper strips, still.

Actor Wyatt Russell (Kurt Russell’s son) plays US Agent.

So, we now have all the main ingredients laid out on the chopping board – angst-ridden heroes, evil baddies, one maybe-good-or-Homerlander-style-bad-guy, but the two capes have yet to be thrown into the pot to team up and simmer.

No secret what the second episode will bring to the dinner party, then!

Not my Capt’n?

Thumping the Shark?

Well, I’ve now finished the WandaVision TV series, as hopefully have you, given the rest of this editorial will feature the odd spoiler or two.

In many fantasy/science fiction TV series that have run a long time, there is a noble tradition of featuring the occasional bat-shit crazy ‘trick’ episode which diverts from their run-of-the-mill staple fare.

This can be a curse in Buffy, which turns the whole affair into a musical for a single ep; or that classic Trek episode where Kirk, Bones and Spock land on a world which is basically a spare set from Bonanza and they have to replay a Wild West-themed plot.

The greater mass of WandaVision is a series of ‘trick’ episodes, each one taking the Mickey out of a particular decade’s soap opera until we reach the end of the cycle and a small dose of reality intrudes.

I can see where Marvel/Disney was going with the narrative arc, but the conversion from I Love Lucy to meaningful MCU action in such a short time felt a little rushed, leaving me feeling, ‘Oh, I should be a lot more emotional about now. I wonder why I am not?’

Also, there are too many character threads left unresolved and dangling, from the brother who should have been an X-man, to that FBI agent and his cheeky scientist chum.

I’m guessing a portion of its disjointedness had much to do with the intrusion of the pandemic into the real-world business of filming superhero television, leaving as many holes in the shooting as there were in the wrap-up.

But, as I never cease pointing out when commenting on matters of media, your good plot costs as much as a bad one. SFX not included!

Thumping the Shark?

 

Why do the Martians glow above, don’t they know it’s the end of the world?

So, I have just finished watching Tribes of Europa. I went into this new Netflix science fiction TV series with low expectations for some reason. Maybe it was because it is made in Germany with mainly German language spoken? Or perhaps it was the trailer that made it seem like a knockoff of teen sci-fi fluff like The 100?

As it happens, I was pleasantly surprised. The plot is pretty good, the characterization excellent, and to my surprise, the German actors in it are not Hollywood hunks and babes, but resemble real people (which is one of my predispositions against The 100 – would nuclear apocalypse leave everyone alive supermodel good looking?). 

It’s Game of Thrones-violent and dirty, so probably not one for your 13-year-old kids.

Spoilers ahead if you are planning to watch this for yourself.

Why do the Martians glow above, don’t they know it’s the end of the world?

The six episodes-long first series is set in Europe after a collapse of technological society has led to most people dying, and the few survivors buddying up in tribes. 

So far, so Walking Dead. Most of our good guys and gals hail from a single family who have been hiding in the forest as technology shaming greens. Their nearest neighbours are a bunch of monks in a home-made fortress. 

But there also some real psychopaths out in the world, which include the Crimsons – so named after the red badge of the old nascent Euroforce EU army. The regiment spawned military warlords who treat the memory of the failed EU like the Federation from Star Trek.

The other big bad are the Crows, who are more or less every evil raider tribe from Mad Max, but with a semi-Nazi German Goth kink vibe going on. They also have a samurai warrior code of honour, to accompany the Nietzschean nihilism. Oh, and their leader is more or less the Kurgan from Highlander.

A mysterious crashed starship – my money is on human Martian settlers – also known by the locals as the tribe of the Atlanteans – plops an advanced nanotechnology cube into the family’s hands, and they have to go on a quest to reunite it with its owners, as well as escaping from slavery or death at the hands of the various nutters surviving across Europe.

Tribes of Europa features actual meaningful character development, occasional splashes of English – this still being used as the lingua franca between the various nationalities, and its subtitles/ European tongues just add to the feel of the mid-future strangeness.

There are also incoming Chinese refugees fleeing from the east in the face of some mysterious threat, which we presume is linked to the Atlanteans. Aliens? Maybe behind the odd loss of technology (blamed on a cyberwar, although that’s guesswork on the part of the survivors).

Do be warned, there is no news of a second season, and the finale is more or less the definition of cliffhangers all around. So I will be very annoyed if there is no closure with further episodes! And so will you, undoubtedly.

There can be only one?

It is becoming increasingly obvious to those following the story that there is more to the so-called retirement of Jeff Bezos from Amazon than meets the eye.

The smart money is on the fact that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are now seriously competing on the legacy project of who gets bragging rights in the history books over making humanity a multi-planet species, and Jeff got tired of Elon handing him his arse on a plate.

Jeff’s firm, Blue Origin, has a Latin motto which basically means slow but steady with an added pinch of perseverance and not giving up,

I’m not sure if SpaceX has a motto, but if it does, it would have to be the Latin for, “Let’s blow some shit up and iterate pragmatically along the way.”

So far, Elon’s way seems to be the winning formula in terms of getting to space faster. But is this one of those tortoise and the hare stories, where Jeff will now catch up with his hand firmly on the rudder of his starship, less distracted by affairs at Amazon?

The two men who have been vying with each other for the title of the world’s richest man, now have something else to compete over.

Will it be Elon’s vision of a Mars that could have come straight out of the Expanse TV series and books? Or could it be Jeff’s vision which looks a lot more like the big floating habitats out of Interstellar?

Whichever of them wins the space race, it’s going to be a fascinating few years either way. And, dare I suggest, that whoever takes the prize, is the rest of us who will all eventually be the winners.

I just need a little space?

As the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel glimmers concerning our lockdown – thanks, scientists and vaccine team – my mind turns to what the future may bring us, and what role I may play in this dream.

It appears I am not the only one. The world’s richest science fiction fan, and indeed the world’s richest bod, one Jeff Bezos, is pulling back from his role at Amazon to devote his time to his space exploration company, Blue Origin.

If you want to know why Jeff is doing this and what he has planned for humanity, there’s an illuminating Blue Origin video which details his plans for our future over at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ98hGUe6FM.

Basically, it’s getting to the Moon, using the incredibly low gravity there to push out mineral resources for starships and orbital habitats, while treating the Moon as a refuelling station (converting the water trapped in the lunar ice into oxygen and rocket fuel).

I think there comes a time in every person’s life, normally when you push past 50, and you’re seeing your parents, aunts, and uncles shuffle off this mortal coil, that the Demon spectre of your mortality arrives and twerks its evil arse in your face, reminding you that your own time here is increasingly limited and there is more behind you than there is in front.

This is when you wonder what your legacy to the world might be. Your children? Your work? Your art? All your acts of kindness and contributions to society, such as they may be might? You imagine what your obituary will read.

In my Jackelian fantasy-scifi books there is an atheist religion without a god called ‘Circlism’. The basic premise is that there’s a Sea of Sentience, and each soul is cupped from this sea and poured into a body at birth. After death, your energy is returned to that sea, co-mingled, and poured out once more. The basic premise is that should be nice to everybody else… because you are everybody else.

It’s not that far from the hard scientific truth, given that in your body you contain a few atoms of Julius Caesar, Mitochondrial Eve, and statistically, almost everybody else who has ever lived before you. And you know what, so do I.

What goes around comes around.

Catch you next week (hopefully). And if not, don’t worry, we’ll be together soon enough.

Extra sugar needed?

He is an interesting new psychological trend, which I am now wondering whether it’s confined to myself? The comet-striking-the-Earth movie Greenland recently popped up “for free” to Amazon Prime subscribers and I started watching it, but then needed to abandon the film after a short while.

Not because it’s rubbish, but because the movie is all too grimly realistic and unrelenting on the intensity stakes. Forget films like Armageddon where NASA and its nuclear-armed space shuttles are always on hand to save the day along with a few key wildcat miners. This is the real deal.

A comet appears from beyond the solar system – actually, it’s a comet cloud with thousands of pieces – and is due to make a very close scrape to our planet. Except, it transpires the global leadership and elites knew all the time the comet was on a direct impact vector, and took the time to not inform the public to avoid global panic, but constructed a series of remote bunkers stocked with enough water, oxygen, and canned supplies to outlast the two-year nuclear winter, and deep enough to survive an atomic bomb-level shockwave which will sweep across the entire Earth, no exceptions.

Normally for these kinds of movies, you take a mixed high-level view of the government officials making decisions, the astronauts whose job it is to save everybody, and the plucky astronomers who make the discovery. Forget about that. This is all from the viewpoint of a single-family, a construction worker and his wife and kid, who are selected for a rare seat in a bunker because of the dad’s ability to lay down some concrete foundations for the eventual recovery.

The family is then plunged across various adventures as they have to make their way to shelter through a society that just went mental and had a breakdown as everybody realises they’re going to die. Basically, this is a realistic scenario where 99.9% of humanity gets to perish, either in the initial fire burst, or the years-long attempt to breathe radioactive ash while slaughtering any fellow survivors for the last remaining can of baked beans.

Having just reached the tail end of a one to two-year long fire drill for an Ebola level extinction-level event, I find myself too fragile to suffer this kind of thriller anymore. I need fluff. I need silly space opera material such as Space Sweepers on Netflix, or, heck, the sci-fi pulp I write myself for you readers out there.

I suspect I’m not alone. And I’m left wondering if I’ll ever be psychologically durable enough to watch this kind of film again?

Watching from behind the sofa?