Stephen Hunt's Blog, page 4

I shall watch you, now. I have spoken.

So, with the psychic weight of a second lockdown here in the UK settling upon our collective shoulders, I finally decided to liven up the family’s viewing during the monotony, and purchase a Disney+ subscription.

Now I know there are lots of less than reputable viewing options to nab the Mandalorian online, but I think I’ve reached the point in my life where I’d rather see the first live-action Star Wars TV series on a decent screen in its full 4K glory, rather than a locked-down tablet where I have to play click-tennis with dodgy pop-ups advertising distinctly un-Disney material every couple of minutes, while my anti-virus software has a general breakdown over all the attack warnings it is fielding.

This will be a one-off annual purchase as matters stand because the only other content is a load of Disney/Pixar movies we’re all too old for at Chez Hunt, Star Wars and Marvel flicks we already have on DVD, and the musical for Hamilton (my wife thanks you, Lin-Manuel Miranda).

Should the Mouse machine start to make with some of those long-promised Marvel TV series such as the likes of WandaVision, The Falcon and Winter Soldier, etc. I may – perish the thought – become slightly more ‘sticky’ as a subscriber.

But at the moment, Mando notwithstanding, your original content is thinner than the atmosphere of the gas giant Kol-Iben’s estuary moon, Trask.

Shaken, and stirred.

So, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for a couple of days, you have probably heard the sad news that actor Sean Connery passed away of old age at the ripe innings of ninety years.

Some of these deaths of people you’ve never met hit you harder than others. The David Bowie effect. How much you felt you knew them, or admired them, for their body of work. How pivotal they were to the imagination and creative landscape of your growing-up years. I must admit, Roger Moore was Bond when I started watching movies, but I quickly caught up with the prior cannon via television – rather surprised to find there was an earlier actor in the same role. A concept I quickly grew familiar with when Doctor Who started playing the old actor switcheroo on me.

Sean Connery was a familiar face from plenty of 60s movies, along with one of his best friends, Michael Caine (still with us, I had to check). And then there were more mature roles such as Time Bandits, and his star turn in the Untouchables as the wily old street cop who teaches Eliot Ness the Chicago way. For science fiction films, there was Outland … Or High Noon in space.

There probably weren’t many clueless teenagers of that generation who didn’t want to be the laconic Connery Bond, always ready with a slurred quip and irresistible to members of the opposite sex, able to dispatch evil enemies with a careless tap of a plugged-in electric fan into a bath. We were shocking. 

Sean also appeared in a few films that didn’t do so well towards the end of his career (as well as turning down roles such as Obi-Wan Kenobi which could, in hindsight, have made him a lot richer). 

There was the Avengers TV series remade as the 1998 film where he played an insane weather-obsessed villain. And the cherry on the cake was his role as Allan Quatermain in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie based on the steampunk comic of the same name by Alan Moore. This did so badly it was the film that convinced him to retire, famously remarking, ‘I have had enough of this shit. I’m not working with these arseholes anymore.’ 

Sean died peacefully in his sleep in his expensive Bahamas villa, warm and loved by his family, having lived one heck of a life.

May I go out in such style in my dotage. I’ll even take the island villa in the Bahamas.

To Discovery and Beyond?

So, we are only two episodes into the new third season of Star Trek Discovery – but already it is feeling a little like a rehash of the old Andromeda TV series.

On one hand, this shouldn’t be too surprising as both Trek and Andromeda were products of Gene Roddenberry’s fertile imagination. A starship thrown into the far future only to discover that the political body and standards they once represented have been destroyed and long forgotten in the mists of history. Their mission, to resurrect those lost ideals and bring peace and harmony back to the universe.

There is also a rather Firefly-like cowboy vibe to the whole thing. Or perhaps these days that should be The Mandalorian. We have evil local sheriffs and merchant couriers looking to strong-arm poor innocent mining colonies, and cheat people out of their hard-earned gold nuggets. Or should that be antique phasers and tricorders?

And for once, although warp travel seems to have been rendered difficult because dilithium crystals are now rarer than a tank of oil in Mad Max, there’s been progress in new technologies in the far future, such as personal teleporters and energy weapons that need to be worn like a glove around your hand. Okay, maybe the latter is more of an aesthetic choice and probably copied from Blake’s Seven.

The trailer for episode three shows our time-lost heroes travelling back to earth and the ruins of the Federation, and also seems to feature some nasty-looking mech race that might be a physical manifestation of the badly hammered Control A.I. the USS Discovery beat in season two.

What little critical faculties I now possess to evaluate such science fiction television series may have been as severely eroded as an exploding dilithium crystal mine by the pandemic and its harrowing of new content to watch, so I shall pass judgement to a future me – one far wiser and more handsome, but not, I suspect, much wealthier at all.

On the work front, I’ve now started the sixth book in the Sliding Void space opera series, which features the misfit crew of my very own starship, the Gravity Rose. A lot of you have been asking after this novel, and I’m happy to report even though I am only just starting, it is going to be a goody!

To Discovery and Beyond?

Fire and gunpowder do not sleep well together.

It appears we’ve had a few problems for a few days over on the SFcrowsnest web site recently – and having tracked down the culprit, it seems that the rolling power cuts afflicting California are the issue.

Most of our hosting is done from Europe, but there are portions of the various clusters that are either based in California or depends on hordes of USA-based engineers actually being able to log into their working-from-home living rooms, which oddly, itself relies on being able to plug something in and drawing an electric current. Who’da thunk it?

I am praying that whoever wins in the upcoming U.S. elections does so in a decisive way with a very clear margin – no 50/50 electoral split that has people reaching for their lawyers and then their shooting irons.

When a person doesn’t know what harbour they are making for, no wind is the right wind.

If we do toss something akin to the low-level troubles of The Troubles in Northern Ireland into the already plague-ridden landscape of the USA, balkanization of the Union and a broken internet may be just the beginning of our problems.

Come on, Earth people, the Great Filter is a hurdle to leap, and we need to run the human race together, rather than against each other.

Let’s get our collective &&^^ together, and rapidly.

Fire and gunpowder do not sleep well together.

Life versus art versus life?

I’ve recently found another interesting series to stream on Prime – something called Utopia. It’s based on an old UK TV series from Channel Four that must have passed me by, now remade for Amazon with the big bucks (originally for HBO, but there was a falling out apparently).

The premise is that a bunch of comic-book fans believe that a mysterious graphic novel was loaded with hints about a conspiracy planning to eliminate most of humanity with a pandemic, and it accurately predicted Ebola, Sars, etc, so must be true.

Then a real deadly pandemic breaks out and the geeks must get to the bottom of this mystery before humanity becomes extinct.

As one critic said of it – and I rather agree – the cast and mystery plot at times transcend its overtly cynical and overly violent tendencies, but even those willing to look past the nastiness may find the whole thing too timely—in a bad way.

I know what they mean. But then, I also note that the film Contagion, which was basically a documentary about COVID shot 19 years before the actual pandemic, quickly became the most-watched film on Netflix when the brown stuff hit the fan earlier in the year. Go figure.

Maybe if we get invaded by aliens, Independence Day will briefly become the most downloaded film, before we’re over-run?

Utopia is a little grim, but maybe worth a watch if you can get past the fact they’ve got it far worse than us in their fictional universe.

By the way, my kids keep on changing my name and profile picture on Netflix to silly things like ‘Waddle Waddle’ with an avatar image of a chicken. If I change it back, I find it’s reverted to something truly ‘fowl’ again thirty minutes later.

This is certainly fowl play, but I don’t know how to stop it?

Feel free to drop me a line if you have any ideas.

Life versus art versus life?

 

A Shortfall of Gravitas?

So, Elon Musk has just tweeted me (and, to be fair, about a few billion other people at the same time), that his new SpaceX droneship will be called “A Shortfall of Gravitas”.

I think I can spot a fellow Iain M. Banks ‘Culture‘ SF books fan out there!

It makes me wonder if I shouldn’t come up with some Culture-style names for my car. At the moment, I call it Yoda the Skoda, because it’s, well, a beaten-up old Skoda.

But, to honour Iain, who was always very kind to me whenever we met up in person, maybe I could rename the car to the “Are You Sure You Want a Diesel?”, or the “Four Wheels Good, Two Wheels Bad”, or the “Mostly Rusty”?

The car is the most obvious thing I own that I could name, not being a billionaire and not maintaining my own private space-fleet, and all. Apart from my cat, the house, and the toaster, that is.

What names could I come up with for them? Maybe, “Do I Look Like I’ve Been Fed?”, “Little Small For A Mansion”, and “I Asked For Bloody Scones And You Give Me This?”.

Anyway, a large parting thanks to my brave band of Patreon readers over at https://www.patreon.com/stephenhunt who have been spotting typos in the beta manuscript for my new science fiction novel, The Pashtun Boy’s Paradise – it should be going live soon, and you’re all getting a name-check in the credits at the start of the book.

Catch you next week.

Netflix and… Chill?

So, just caught up with the new Netflix movie that is Enola Holmes, in which a young teen Enola Holmes is searching for her missing mother, and using her home-schooled sleuthing skills and Jujitsu talents to outsmart/outfight big brothers Sherlock and Mycroft while helping a runaway lord targetted for death.

I haven’t read any of the Young Adult novel series by Nancy Springer upon which the film is based, but I have read that the progressive spirit on display here isn’t just an invention of the film-makers – it was in the books, too (suffragettes, the Representation of the People Act of 1884 etc).

It was a fairly enjoyable romp with great cinematography. I liked the animations which reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python cartoons, and the fourth-wall breaks put me in mind of the Python TV series, too.

Actress Millie Bobby Brown seems ridiculously talented and together as Enola. At that age, I could barely find my arse, let alone hope to do something like this.

Henry Cavill did a nice turn as Sherlock, too, playing it as a kind of semi-amused Byronic hero.

I read that the Arthur Conan Doyle estate is now suing Netflix for giving Sherlock Holmes too many feelings – said feelings covered only in the later books still within their copyright. Hmmm. I suspect the estate is going to lose on this one.

Oh, and a little bird tells me that Henry Cavill is still in the running as the next James Bond, too. Superman, Napoleon Solo, The Witcher, Sherlock, is this guy collecting for the full Royal Flush, or what?

Netflix and… Chill?

Dying to go to the cinema?

Back in 2019, I used to classify my potential cinema trips by genre … science fiction, superhero, thriller, spy-fi, film noir, comedies, movies that my children wanted to see, and because I was paying, I also had to attend, stuff that my wife wanted to see and so my attendance was mandatory… chick-flicks, rom-coms, and sophisticated foreign flicks.

Now, at the backend of 2020, I have a far simpler two-lane method of classifying film types.

There are movies I will catch COVID to see, and there are movies that I will wait to filter around to Netflix in a few years.

By the way, Netflix, if you are listening and you ever consider going to a similar model of immediate direct film release to Disney Plus and Mulan, don’t charge an additional $30 for the pleasure of watching said new films. I can think of very few films that I would willingly spend 30 bucks to watch on a TV screen inside my house.

Which neatly brings me to the second category of film types, films I will perish to watch inside a cinema. Prime among these is the new version of Dune, which the recent trailers promise at the very least to be a stunning visual spectacular, a la the rebooted Blade Runner, also by Denis Villeneuve.

Of course, the plot is fixed against the Frank Herbert books, for better or worse. I always considered them unfilmable, but I must admit I have a steampunk’s fondness for the original Dune film of my teenage youth, not least for the visuals and the bizarre way David Lynch interpreted it.

It launched a thousand memes, including Dune-cat and the Coffee Must Flow.

The family tried to entice me recently for a cinema visit to see the tangled spy thriller Tenent, but alas, I was not willing to risk my health for that one. Sorry, Mr. Nolan.

I hope one-day post herd immunity, post-vaccine, post elaborate treatments, and whatever else it might take to get back to the old normal, to return to my original ‘genre classification method’ of categorising potential cinema trips.

Until that day arrives, I shall have to rely on Ix. Many machines on Ix, new machines. Not as good as those on Richese.

PS – there’s a bumper package of sixty free genre books available at the moment – science fiction, fantasy, and horror – one of my titles among them. Grab said works from https://books.bookfunnel.com/scififantasysamplefair/f5i16c754t

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul?

So, upon returning to the UK from visiting some elderly relatives abroad in a UK-designated ‘hot zone’, I phoned the doctor and said, “Will I live to be a hundred-years-old if I rigidly adhere to my private fourteen-day lock-day and stay locked inside every second of the day?”

“No,” the doctor told me. “But after those 14 days, it will feel like you do.”

The second season of Amazon’s dark superhero satire The Boys starts in much the same way, with Hughie, Mother’s Milk, Frenchie, and Kimiko in a very harsh private lock-down as they cower in a basement after being framed for murdering evil superhero Homelander’s handler, Madelyn Stillwell.

I will give you my review of The Boys after it finishes, but we’re only up to three episodes pre-loaded for a binge, with the remainder to be drip-fed weekly, so no spoilers, yet, for you, until you get a chance to watch it in its entirety.

I’m good like that. I spoil you. Or in this instance, I don’t.

Well, dear reader, today I’m finally free of my house-bound lockdown and intend to celebrate shortly by stretching my under-utilized leg muscles by tackling the Barnt Green Waterways Circular Walk in the British countryside.

Unlike Hughie and his boys, I probably won’t be in danger of getting my head ripped off my spine by nasty god-like superheroes who regard normal members of humanity as bugs to be flattened on the soles of their super-boots.

And that’s a good thing!

Don’t accept free flying lessons from this man!

Your chance to appear in my novels!

All new books published by me will now contain a page in the ebook/print novel thanking my Patreons by name.

If you are super-shy or in a witness protection program and would rather not be thanked, please let me know!

The first book that will get this treatment is the ‘The Pashtun Boy’s Paradise’ up for pre-order on Amazon… and free download for my Patreons.

Update your preferences over at patreon.com/stephenhunt

USA pre-order: https://amzn.to/34IinCK (October 2020 launch).

UK pre-order: https://amzn.to/3lrsly7 (October 2020 launch).

PS – a print paperback edition will join the e-book on the product page shortly before launch

>>>>> THE PASHTUN BOY’S PARADISE >>>>>

The future is beautiful … just not for everyone!

Ash must escape from his broken war-torn country, fleeing towards mythical Europe, or face murder at the hands of a brutish local warlord.

The one slight problem is, few ever survive the horrifying packs of ravenous hunting machines roaming across the depopulated border zone!

But his perilous odyssey might be worth it. For in this future Europe, nobody goes hungry or poor. Crime has been as good as abolished, and everyone can pursue their dreams, whatever their passions may be.

But when you have the perfect utopia, just how far do the clock’s hands need to sweep to strike dystopia?

The Pashtun Boy’s Paradise