Canavan’s Comments (group member since May 15, 2018)

Canavan’s comments from the Spells, Space & Screams: Collections & Anthologies in Fantasy, Science Fiction, & Horror group.

Lena said:

I really want him to write that novel.

I’d certainly be interested.

“The Unblinking Eye”, Stephen Baxter

(view spoiler)[In Baxter’s alternate history a technologically superior Incan Empire makes contact during the 1960s with the Frankish Empire. There are a few interesting ideas here (particularly the one that gives the story its title), but the author seems to put on the brakes just when things start getting interesting. I had the feeling that I was I reading the opening scenes of an aborted novel. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭

“Dr. Lash Remembers”, Jeffrey Ford

(view spoiler)[“The Republic is willing to let the disease run its course, willing to sacrifice a few thousand citizens in order to not miss a day of commerce.”

Ford shows us an alternate timeline that in at least one respect is disturbingly similar to our own — the willingness of those who control the levers of power to dismiss the lives of the ordinary citizenry as inconsequential. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭½

I was reading an article on Tor.com over the weekend and belatedly learned that scifi writer Vonda N. McIntyre died this past April (pancreatic cancer). She was not an incredibly prolific, but I almost always enjoyed her writing (the bulk of her work was published in the 70s and 80s). She wrote one novel that I regard as truly great, Dreamsnake (1978). I’ve always taken a pretty dim view of Star Trek books — the majority impress me as slightly above average fanfic. McIntyre’s Star Trek books (three movie novelizations and two original novels) were a relatively rare exception to the rule — her stories were exciting and yet often managed to stretch and build on characterizations already established in TOS.

I noticed that the first (and only) season of The Dresden Files was available for a relative pittance on iTunes and so snapped it up and re-watched the episodes over the weekend. The 12 episodes (which first aired on the Sci Fi Channel) were not quite as good as I remembered them, but the re-watch was still fairly enjoyable. I thought Paul Blackthorne did a nice job playing the lead, the wizard Harry Dresden. Although based on the Jim Butcher books, the series departs from those books in some significant ways.

The Dresden Files, Season 1 (2007) ✭✭✭

“The Gernsback Continuum”, William Gibson

I thought this was a solid opening story. I concede that it’s not particularly exciting, but I appreciated the ideas under consideration. (view spoiler)[Part of the story’s appeal in my case no doubt stems from my own interest in the paleofuture (loosely defined as the study of the history of the future). I am, for example, a fan of those Frank R. Paul pulp illustrations that Gibson cites. Gibson juxtaposes a sort of unfettered admiration for what one character refers to as “raygun Gothic” with a horror of that same aesthetic sensibility. Part of the reason for this horror seems to stem from the ideology which Gibson sees as underlying “raygun Gothic”; he repeatedly links the architecture to racist, Nazi symbols and ideas. But perhaps more to the point, Gibson argues that the boundlessly optimistic view of the future that predominated in some quarters during the 1930s represented a fatally flawed perception of the world (“...a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuels, or foreign wars it was possible to lose”). The story seems to suggest that to the extent we refuse to abandon that vision of a techno-utopia, the worse our real-world problems will become. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭✭

“Alone on the Waves”, Eric S. Brown

Another really bad story — what there is of one at any rate. It’s more of a brief interlude with about as much plot and characterization as you’d get in a first-person shooter video game. And at the end of the day I was amused to realize I didn’t even know what these beasties looked like except that they had teeth and scales.

½

Lena said:

Three episodes of Fleabag and I’m done. It’s low trashy British comedy, I never even cracked a smile.

I’m kinda sorry to hear that, Lena. A few people that I know gave it an enthusiastic thumbs up, and I know it’s received fairly strong critical reviews. I opted out primarily because comedies such as this one are a bit outside my personal wheelhouse. Plus I’m not a big fan of shows that like to break the fourth wall.

“On Ullins Bank”, John Linwood Grant

Ah, a story I liked! (view spoiler)[It’s a conventional story of bargains gone awry, but it’s well constructed.

“A figure stood forward, eyes on the sea, not on us. A tall, thin figure, wrapped in oil-skins or a heavy cloak, with a sliver of his face visible from the side.”

Again, a bit prosaic, but I like that image. And a nice last line. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭½

I saw a couple of movies this weekend: Peter Jackson’s WW I documentary (which relies on restored archival footage of the conflict) and Annihilation, based on Jeff VanderMeer’s scifi novel of the same name.

They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson (2018) ✭✭✭✭½
Annihilation, Alex Garland (2018) ✭✭✭✭

“Canned Crab”, Nick Nafpliotis

(view spoiler)[This story is sort of an updated version of one of those old E.C.-type tales — some ne’er-do-well or group of ne’er-do-wells commits a grievous offense only to eventually get their comeuppance in some particularly grisly manner. Except that in the case of the Nafpliotis’ story, the victims aren’t the original perpetrators; they’re just random people (and dogs).

My main beef with this story has to do with the uneven tone. If you’re going to write something as outrageous as this, you should, I think, commit fully. By that I mean that some of the most effective parts of this story are pretty gruesome. But the story’s two main characters (particularly Clay) constantly undermine that effectiveness with their “witty” comments. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭½

“Wanderer”, Shane Lindemoen

Interesting idea here and, as with the previous story by Andrew Bell, the writing isn’t nearly as bad as in some of the other entries. But (and I think I’ve said this before) epistolary stories are really hard to do well and I don’t think Lindemoen gets it quite right. (view spoiler)[More importantly, the story’s big reveal is that the extended period of darkness led Rhodey to flip out and kill his two comrades in such an over-the-top fashion that it borders on the silly. Except that it wasn’t totally dark (they had at least some artificial light); and while the effects of prolonged total light deprivation are pretty profound, they’re not comparable to what we see in this story. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭

“Hallowed Point”, Andrew Bell

(view spoiler)[The premise for Bell’s story reminded me a bit of the set-up for the 1980 drama Ordinary People, in which a family tries to cope with the death of a son resulting from a boating accident. Of course, in the Bell story Emma’s method of dealing with her anger and grief are a bit more extreme than Mary Tyler Moore’s. The writing here is better than I’ve seen in some of the other stories to this point, but for me it falters at the most inopportune time — the climax during which Emma puts her plan into motion. As an example, I kept wondering how it was that she managed to simultaneously hold knives to the throats of both her husband and son. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭½

“Maelstrom”, Doug Rinaldi

“In that exact moment repulsion bled into his vision.”

“The world ignited in a blinding glow blinding Harkcombe.”

The story is littered with sentences like this, making it a pretty painful read. If I were an editor, one suggestion I would make to the author is to rein in his tendency to overwrite.

(view spoiler)[The story involves some idea about supernatural agencies causing insanity which in turn leads to cannibalism, but if the story provided the reader with any indication why this was happening, then I missed it. And what is worse, none of the scenes presumably meant to horrify the reader succeeds in doing so. (hide spoiler)]

½

“A Thousand Thick and Terrible Things”, David Mickolas

(view spoiler)[So Rational Canavan whined a bit about the tentacles main function as a rather clunky Deus ex machina and wondered why, given that they seemed awfully particular about who they snarfed up and when, Will seemed so sure that they would snap up his father. But Emotional Canavan pretty much bought into this narrative. The conversations Will has with both his mother and his father rang very true to me. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭½

Lena said (in part):

Limited Edition lovers, Subterranean is have a 50% off sale!

Along those same lines, for those with plenty of disposable income, I received yesterday a note from Sarob Press’ Robert Morgan that they have a new limited edition collection from author Michael Chislett scheduled to appear in July of this year. From the Sarob Press blog:

Sarob Press is delighted to announce the publication of Where Shadows Gather ~ a new collection of ghostly stories by Michael Chislett. Michael’s first Sarob Press collection, In the City of Ghosts, won the Dracula Society “Children of the Night” award and has long been out of print. This new bumper collection presents a further thirteen stories (five previously unpublished), again mostly set in or around the author’s fictional London borough of Milford, and the ghost-strewn suburb of Mabbs End – although a couple of stories do venture overseas.

I mention this in part because Chislett has long been one of my favorite authors. See here for details.

Ronald wrote (in part):

Running Dogs
Steve Duffy

It’s been a while since I’ve read The Night Comes On , but I do recall thinking that “Running Dogs” was one of the best in a pretty strong collection of stories.

J. said (in part):

Blockbusters look good on the ledger, but WB/DC keeps swinging for the bleachers and striking out. Their current expanded universe has known only three "good" movies, and two of those were programmers with modest budgets.

The DCEU movies have admittedly experienced a mixed critical reception, but what primarily concerns studio heads is “the ledger” and on that front these films have been doing very well indeed. The DCEU is the ninth highest-grossing film franchise of all time. And financially speaking, WB seems to be doing just fine at the moment, second only to Disney.

J. also said:

I looked up Matt Reeves on IMDB. I have a bad feeling that he is going to be to Chris Nolan what J.J. Abrams is to Spielberg. :(

I imagine WB would be thrilled if that analogy were to proven true. J. J. Abrams has a reputation of playing it safe and catering to fan expectations when it comes to his involvement in film franchises. As for Matt Reeves, I don’t really have a strong opinion one way or the other. I wasn’t a huge fan of Cloverfield, but thought the first Ape movie was pretty good. (I didn’t get around to seeing the second one.)

J. said:

There is one version of Batman that hasn't been really explored in a live action movie. Batman as the detective. They've shown him working out one or two easy clues, but they haven't had him full on following the bouncing gun like in Batman: The Long Halloween. I hope that WB goes down this route, but I suspect that what they want is another blockbuster or a campy family movie like Shazam.

Whatever the approach adopted, I assume the studio folks are hoping for a blockbuster. Why wouldn’t they? I don’t think I’d look for another Shazam. Reeves has indicated he wants to return to the vision of Batman that Christopher Nolan espoused in his Dark Knight trilogy.

Fiona said (in part):

I don't think Pattinson is a bad actor necessarily, but he wasn't capable of acting through his very clear disdain for the Twilight movies - at least after the first. I'm one who likes my Batman a little campy, so I'm hoping he doesn't take himself too seriously again and flub it.

I can’t speak very knowledgeably to the Twilight movies or to Pattinson’s performances in them; I only really remember the first one, which I thought was an okay popcorn film. The rest are a blur. I think I skipped the last one.

As for the Batman, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say the casting choice for the title role is meaningless, I would argue that the choice of director is far more important in setting the tone of the movie. I think Matt Reeves is attached to this project. Reeves is probably best known for directing the last two Planet of the Apes films. I don’t think of Reeves as being in the same league as Christopher Nolan, but he’s gotta be better than Zack Snyder.