The Speculative Scotsman

Video Game Review | The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, dev. Nintendo

2012-01-27T13:32:00.001Z

I can map out my entire life with reference to The Legend of Zelda. At two years old I dare say I was a little little to care about the first game when it was released in 1986, but I did find my way back to it after adoring A Link to the Past in the early 90s, on the Super Nintendo I shared with my younger brother. Then in 1998, Ocarina of Time - arguably the pinnacle of the entire franchise, and assuredly the game that sold me on the series forever after - was released for the N64. I haven't missed a Zelda game since.

Which isn't to say I've finished them all, or even enjoyed them, every one. The Wind Waker, yes... and each of the subsequent handheld installments, from The Minish Cap in 2004 on through 2009's Spirit Tracks, not because they were particularly brilliant, but because there honestly wasn't a lot else for me to do with my DS.

Sadly I couldn't stand the awkward emo wolf-whispering of the last major game in the series, not to mention its ill-advised early motion controls. Twilight Princess was the only reason I bought a Wii, way back when, and I hold it solely responsible for all the garbage I've played on the system since.

Perhaps that's unfair of me. I mean, it did have its upsides: for one thing, it was in widescreen. Yay for widescreen! But when the best thing you can think to say about a game is that its aspect ratio was acceptable, methinks there's a larger problem in play. A larger problem that - alas - also pervades the first Zelda game designed from the ground up for the Wii, because of course Twilight Princess was essentially an ever-so-slightly upscaled Gamecube port. And it showed.

Anyway, let me be quite clear here: as staunch a defender of The Wind Waker as I am, Skyward Sword is easily the best console Zelda since Ocarina of Time. In fact, I think it might be a better game than either of the aforementioned candidates. So considered in isolation, it's rather a masterpiece; gorgeous given the limitations of the system - which I can finally sell on, now that I've played its swan song - and incredibly deep when you recall the one-note nonsense the console has become infamous for. If Skyward Sword is your first or your second or even your third Zelda game, you're going to love it. You are. And don't go telling me you're too old for baby games! You aren't, and in any event, this isn't that, so there.

But I began this review with a run-down of my experience of the series for a reason. Two reasons, even. In the first, I did so to stress that these games are exceedingly important to me, and to many other players like me. They're touchstones of a sort... landmarks by which we may measure the passing of generations, and I don't merely mean in terms of hardware. A new Zelda - and they are not so commonplace as all that: this is only the 8th console iteration in 25 years - so a new Zelda is a potential treasure... to look forward to, to love when the time comes, and to love looking back on after the fact. Or not, as was the case with Twilight Princess.

Largely, though, I started in this manner because, at least as I see it, the problem with The Legend of Zelda - specifically the problem with the latest incarnations thereof - is its legacy. A legacy that has touched me and millions of other gamers, large and small, but also a legacy that means that the developers of Skyward Sword are beholden to certain gameplay elements, narrative developments and indeed, an old-fashioned attitude: whimsical bordering on the nonsensical. In short, because of this legacy, the series has hardly changed since its inception a quarter of a century ago, when the vast industry of today was but a single pixel of a thing, and nostalgia can only transport one so far.

It would be unfair of me to say that there are no innovations in the latest Zelda game. Sure enough, there are a few new twists to turn, including the prevalence of Monster Hunter-esque collectibles around the three broad environments players will navigate over the course of their epic quests: bugs to be caught with your butterfly net, and rare drops which explode out of the family-friendly smoke that envelops dead enemies. Collect enough of these components and a man in Skyloft will use them to improve your equipment.

And there's lots of new equipment: a mechanical golden beetle you guide around in order to cut ropes or sever stalks, a vacuum cleaner you use to suck up piles of dust, and several other additions. Meanwhile most of your old favourites are back, including but not limited to the whip, the slingshot, the bow and arrow and the bomb bag. New or old, pretty much every gadget in this Link's inventory is implemented in an interesting way, up to and including the master sword, which one can loft for massive damage, or use in conjunction with a shield to parry and counter-attack.

It's no mad flurry of waggle either. Skyward Sword takes full advantage of the Motion Plus add-on it requires, and though I'd have appreciate alternative control options for several of the more finicky gadgets, most if not all of the array on offer work as advertised. Thus a sense of novelty will see you the first few hours you spend with each new piece of equipment, but eventually - indeed repeatedly - you realise you're still playing the same old game, just now with working motion control... and however functional they may be - and it bears saying that they were still more functional before the Wii had its wicked way - new controls do not a new game make.

In its own right, Skyward Sword is or is near-as-damnit the equal of the most memorable Zelda games in the series' whole history. It may very well be the best game on the Wii - in my mind only Super Mario Galaxy comes close to touching it - but if you're anything like me, once the nostalgia and then the novelty has worn off, you'll realise you've played it before. And that's fine, as far as it goes, except that Zelda deserves better.

Next time Nintendo makes one of these games, something's got to give. Whether it's the players or what they'll be playing remains to be seen - it could go either way - but take heart, as I do, in the fact that the series' creators seem uncharacteristically aware that they're this close to alienating the very gamers who made The Legend of Zelda such a success almost 25 years ago to this day. I can't give Skyward Sword a pass, exactly, but with that in mind, I am optimistic enough to refrain from damning it entirely.

Press Release Your Luck | The Angry Robot and The Open Door

2012-01-26T12:20:00.000Z

Maybe we all have a novel in us - maybe, just maybe that's true - but there aren't many of us with agents, are there? And without an agent, our great works languish... unrepresented, unknown and unloved.

For fully two weeks a little later in 2012, all that is set to change. According to a press release I received yesterday, reproduced in full below, Angry Robot Books, in conjunction with their new YA-oriented imprint Strange Chemistry, is set to crack the floodgates a second time, after the success of its first Open Door Month. Read on:

During April last year, Angry Robot Books temporarily suspended its usual submission policy to run its first Open Door Month; accepting unsolicited, un-agented manuscripts from would-be genre fiction authors.

The scheme was a huge success: nearly 1,000 submissions resulted in publishing contracts for three authors - Cassandra Rose Clarke, Lee Collins, and Lee Battersby - and the commissioning of at least six brand new novels for publication for the Angry Robot lists in 2012 and 2013.

Today, Angry Robot are announcing that Open Door will return, with a second phase running from April 16th - April 30th 2012. During this frantic fortnight the floodgates will once more be opened to admit brand new work by hopeful (and, of course, hugely talented) writers from across the globe.

This time around, the rules are slightly different. Angry Robot will only be considering submissions that meet the following genre criteria:

a) Epic Fantasy - ideally with a bit of an edge or the sort of left-field twist the Angry Robot audience has come to expect.

b) YA - any subject welcome, but must be science fiction or fantasy, and intended for a Young Adult audience, for potential publication via Angry Robot's new Strange Chemistry imprint.

More details can be found at http://angryrobotbooks.com/opendoor

So consider yourself on notice, folks: if you've got a manuscript you want to dust off and polish up until it's positively a-glow, now would be the time.

This is of course a hell of an opportunity for the unagented among us, and three cheers to Angry Robot and our own Amanda Rutter's Strange Chemistry for giving peace, love and understanding a chance!

Book Review | Unclean Spirits by M. L. N. Hanover

2012-01-24T13:01:00.002Z

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Jayné Heller thinks of herself as a realist, until she discovers reality isn't quite what she thought it was. When her uncle Eric is murdered, Jayné travels to Denver to settle his estate, only to learn that it's all hers -- and vaster than she ever imagined. And along with properties across the world and an inexhaustible fortune, Eric left her a legacy of a different kind: his unfinished business with a cabal of wizards known as the Invisible College.

Led by the ruthless Randolph Coin, the Invisible College harnesses demon spirits for their own ends of power and domination. Jayné finds it difficult to believe magic and demons can even exist, let alone be responsible for the death of her uncle. But Coin sees Eric's heir as a threat to be eliminated by any means -- magical or mundane -- so Jayné had better start believing in something to save her own life.

Aided in her mission by a group of unlikely companions -- Aubrey, Eric's devastatingly attractive assistant; Ex, a former Jesuit with a lethal agenda; Midian, a two-hundred-year-old man who claims to be under a curse from Randolph Coin himself; and Chogyi Jake, a self-styled Buddhist with mystical abilities -- Jayné finds that her new reality is not only unexpected, but often unexplainable. And if she hopes to survive, she'll have to learn the new rules fast -- or break them completely....

***

If I had it in my power to mercy kill a single genre of fiction, I wouldn't hesitate. I'd put a bullet in paranormal romance, and dispose of its remains as rudely as possible.

Apropos of which: urban fantasy. Urban fantasy and paranormal romance are typically tarred with the same broad brush, not least by me... but slowly, but surely, I'm coming around. It helps not one whit that urban fantasies often feature, in a prominent role, some strain of the paranormal romance, meanwhile paranormal romances, for their pointed part, tend to take place in contemporary urban environments with a fantastical twist.

Confusing the two is an easy mistake to make; a lazy one, I dare say. They attract at least a superficially similar readership. Yet in the current climate, with these specific sub-genres on the ascent - arguably at the exponential expense of all others in speculative fiction - clarity is king, and an understanding of what sets the aforementioned pair apart is more vital now than it's ever been.

Let me begin this review in earnest, then, with an assurance: that Unclean Spirits by M. L. N. Hanover is not - I repeat not - a paranormal romance novel, and people like me, who would sooner suffer through water torture than read such a thing, need not fear.

That said, there's a love triangle. But, crucially I think, the love triangle isn't the point, the whole point, and nothing but the point, so help me God. Hanover handles this tryst - between our heroine Jayné Heller, Aubrey, the magical parasitologist she falls for, and Kim, Aubrey's not-quite-ex-wife - with almost none of the angst and melodrama that commonly characterise such situations in paranormal romance novels, and indeed, it isn't even remotely near the core of the story, neither narratively nor emotionally.

Unclean Spirits is about a disillusioned college dropout whose oddball uncle leaves her the keys to the proverbial kingdom upon his untimely passing. Admittedly, his (and now hers) is a kingdom scourged by Riders, loupine, and vârkolak -- which is to say demons, werewolves and vampires, but "don't let it bug you. Taxonomy's always a bitch," (p.152) isn't it?

In any event, Jayné inherits more than the discomfiting knowledge that these monsters are among us. She also comes into a substantial sum of money; an impressive property portfolio, with outposts around the world; a small team of specialists in all things otherworldly, including Aubrey, Midian, Chogyi Jake and Ex; oh, and the very vendetta that killed her uncle Eric. Jayné doesn't have time to take any of this in, alas, because evidently there's a high price on her head, and in short order she resolves to take the fight to her opponent's door.

"I looked at the window, and the darkness had made a mirror. Here was a woman on the trailing edge of twenty-two with no friends left. No family left. A shitload of money from nowhere, and the man who'd given it to her [...] had been murdered.

"I looked the same. Same dark eyes,. Same black hair. Same mole I'd always told myself I'd have taken off as soon as I had the tattoo removal done. But I wasn't the same. [...] Uncle Eric was dead. Someone had killed him. And I was going to find out who. Randolph Coin was the best lead I had. So that was the lead I'd follow." (p.50)

As evidenced above, there is a refreshing directness to Unclean Spirits, and a sense of inevitable momentum that rarely lets up. Hanover is a no nonsense author who doesn't pull his punches, condescend to his readers - whatever age or gender they may be - or overly romanticise his characters. Take Jayné: "My first kiss had been at the state qualifiers my sophomore year with a guy I'd met that night and never saw again. The next year, I'd arranged a plan with three of my friends that let me slip out to a movie with a guy from French class." (p.124)

Despite the title, then, this is not a book about purity, and to Hanover's great credit his almost disarming attitude holds true over the course of Unclean Spirits. Many moments come and go during which a less resolute author would have given in to temptation, the better to extract and exploit all the possible angst from any given encounter, but wisely, Hanover resists this impulse, so prevalent in the species of fiction we are currently considering.

No one sequence better exemplifies this restraint that the face-off between Jayné and Kim over Aubrey (see p.281), who hardly figures in to the bigger picture anyway. I'm sure you can imagine how indulgently a poor man's paranormal romance might render such a scenario, but in this smart urban fantasy it's no big thing. Jayné and Kim are just people being people, and there are other actual characters - actual characters as opposed to single-sided ciphers, you understand - amongst the cast of Unclean Spirits. Midian in particular is brilliant. He and his cohorts have real relationships rather than melodramatic arcs.

There is wit in this book. There is humour, and intelligence, and honesty, of all things. Truth be told I would expect no less from a pseudonym of Daniel Abraham, but I'm still somewhat surprised to find myself with so many nice things to say about this, the first novel in a series of four, as it stands. If there's a more versatile author than Daniel Abraham out there, excepting China Mieville, then I do not know his - or her - name.

So please: don't be put off by the bland cover art, or the uninspiring synopsis, and don't let the associations get to you. When approaching Unclean Spirits, think Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead of Twilight. And there are few higher recommendations in my book than that.

***

Unclean Spirits

by MLN Hanover

UK Publication: January 2011, Orbit

US Publication: July 2009, Pocket Books

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Recommended and Related Reading

We Interrupt This Broadcast | Back From Bratislava

2012-01-23T13:35:00.002Z

Hello again, boys and girls!

Feels like a lifetime has passed since we last chatted, doesn't it? Maybe that's just me. I have to remind myself that in reality it's only been two weeks. Two weeks during which I went to the ends of the earth, via Ryanair, and had a hell of a time to boot.

Bratislava was lovely, of course. Quite, quite lovely.

That is, for a city. You can only holiday in so many cities before they all start to look alike, but my fun-sized traveling companion and I made the best of it. We explored till our feet ached. We ate in all the vegetarian restaurants, and drank everywhere that sold Belgian beer. We saw the sights. We took a lot of terrible pictures. We got lost. We got our bearings again, and decided that the thing to do was to go to another city, in another country, and start the whole thing over.

So it was that we found ourselves in beautiful Vienna, in Austria...

But I won't go on. Long story short, a fine time was had by all involved. What with all the things there were to see and do and eat and drink, I didn't have as many opportunities to pull out a book as I had hoped.

Still, I got though a few. Three to be precise.

We'll talk more about those, in markedly more depth, in a bit. That's pretty much what I'm here for, after all... that and snark.

Sadly, I can't stop for long enough to do either thing justice today. More's the pity, instead of sitting here at home, blogging about my happy holidays, I've got to get right back into the thick of it. Paid employment and all that; the classes I teach have been on hold since shortly before Christmas, so it's past time for me to catch up with the wee ones.

Speaking of which, I've got lesson plans to get together, and I really just wanted to stop for a moment to say hey.

Hey! :)

Bear with me for another day or two, folks, and I'll get my head into the game again. Meantime, I've got one last ready-made review to share with you all, and lots of comments to catch up on in the interim, so stay tuned.

Comic Book Review | Stephen King's N.

2012-01-20T12:36:00.002Z

Even before it was published in its original nested text format, Marvel had bought the rights to adapt Stephen King's 'N.' and put the project to a dream-team of comic book and television talent, including Marc Guggenheim - co-creator of the sadly short-lived series Eli Stone - on script duties, with art by the notorious Brian Michael Bendis collaborator Alex Maleev, whose greatest claim to fame has to be his long run on Daredevil.

What resulted - a half-hour motion comic released in 25 miniscule installments to mobile phone owners and certain internet users - was one of the very first instances of a format that's come to some prominence in the years since. I do not say regrettably; I've never been able to see the appeal myself - to me, the motion comic feels like a halfway house between one medium and another, consistently cheap if only intermittently cheerful - but this form of faux-animation has its fans, and that's fine.

In any case, I lost interest in the webisodes quickly. Not because they weren't winningly written, or brilliantly illustrated - to the best of my recollection they were indeed all that - but because I have a moth's memory, and these things were so brief and broken-up I kept forgetting what in God's name was going on. I never revisited the aforementioned motion comic thereafter, but I did see this deliciously twisted tale through eventually -- by way of the originating short story, which was one of the highlights of Stephen King's terrific 2008 collection Just After Sunset.

Whether rendered in words or pictures, or some eldrich accumulation of the pair, 'N.' concerns a journalist, Charlie, who hears from a long-lost friend about the strange suicide of her husband, the psychoanalyst John Bonsaint. Bonsaint, we soon learn, was driven to despair and inevitably death in the selfsame way as his last patient: a man with debilitating OCD, known only as N. as per the doctor's notes. For his part, N. had become obsessed with a circle of standing stones in Ackerman's Field, in rural Motton, Maine, which he was convinced acted as a doorway to another world, from where something wicked - namely the helmet-headed Lovecraftian creature Cthun - will this way come.

Unless someone takes it upon themselves to stop it, that is.

N. does, and dies, and I need not add that his terrible obsession does not end with him. Far from it. Like a virus, it spreads to Bonsaint. Then the doctor's wife catches the bug from her husband, and she, in turn, passes it on to a reporter who becomes fixated on investigating these curious claims. That'd be Charlie, in whose company 'N.' both begins and ends.

Several years later, however, I'd forgotten almost all of the story beats above - a blessing and a curse if ever there was one - so when I heard Marvel had pulled the team behind the webisodes together again, to adapt their own adaptation into a proper comic book, at long last, well... I got my wallet out.

Now I've made some terrible decisions in my time. Once, I voted for Tony Blair, and on another occasion, I bet against Apple, because I couldn't begin to imagine a world without the Walkman. More fool me.

On the other hand, buying into N. again may be one of the best decisions I've made in recent memory, because readers... it's incredible. Without a doubt, Stephen King's N. is the most discomfiting graphic narrative I've encountered since coming back to comic books; it's a real creepshow, chilling and sinister in equal measure.

In the first, that's thanks to Marc Guggenheim: a very fine writer indeed. There's little room in this story for the light touch he's become known for - Stephen King's N. is not sweet but sour - yet herein Guggenheim demonstrates himself equally adept at the darker half of the author's art. Admittedly, some of his script is lifted verbatim from King's short story, but the larger part of it is original, and I would go so far as to say the changes Guggenheim makes add far more to the narrative than they subtract. The pacing is certainly better; the plot, so literal before, comes across more naturally; and the characters - more than names on pages in the originating fiction, but not much more - seem alive at long last.

Nested texts often come across as exercises in look-at-me literary trickery - more about the performance than the performed - and though 'N.' in its first form is an excellent example of said mode of storytelling, I think the beats of its harrowing narrative are rather better served herein than anywhere else. By expanding on the strictly epistolary short with naturalistic flashbacks and a focus on showing instead of telling, Guggenheim fleshes out the bare bones of the original story more to my satisfaction than Stephen King could.

Meanwhile, Alex Maleev. I've never been the biggest fan of his sketchy pencils, but they serve the story so incredibly well in Stephen King's N. that it'd be mean-spirited of me to do anything less than champion Maleev's contribution to this collection's manifest success. Specifically I should applaud his impeccable sense of composition, and his striking use of colour, as illustrated in the images above: of rich reds and warm oranges receding before a palette of clinical blues and greens and greys. It's exemplary stuff.

Though the narrative of 'N.' has gone from nested text to motion comic to graphic novel, Stephen King's N. as adapted by Marc Guggenheim and Alex Maleev is not some admission of defeat. Rather, it is a pitch perfect sequential rendering of a story which remains every bit as thrilling, gripping and magnificently sinister as it was four years ago. In short, I'd still recommend the original short... but I'd recommend this comic book more.

Book Review | The Kingdom of Gods by N. K. Jemisin

2012-01-18T14:00:00.001Z

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For two thousand years the Arameri family has ruled the world by enslaving the very gods that created mortalkind. Now the gods are free, and the Arameri's ruthless grip is slipping. Yet they are all that stands between peace and world-spanning, unending war.

Shahar, last scion of the family, must choose her loyalties. She yearns to trust Sieh, the godling she loves. Yet her duty as Arameri heir is to uphold the family's interests, even if that means using and destroying everyone she cares for.

As long-suppressed rage and terrible new magics consume the world, the Maelstrom - which even gods fear - is summoned forth. Shahar and Sieh: mortal and god, lovers and enemies. Can they stand together against the chaos that threatens the kingdom of gods?

***

The end is the beginning is the end in the vast concluding volume of N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy, and how perfectly lovely it is to see this ambitious, if uneven romantic fantasy series come full circle.

But if a single shape could be said to define this story, it wouldn't, I assure you, be a circle. It'd be a triangle, with the requisite three points. One for each of The Three... remember them? Namely Nahadoth, the god of darkness and disorder; Bright Itempas, the god of light and law; and our own baby deity Yeine, which is to say the narrator of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, born again at the end of that celebrated debut as - you will recall - the embodiment of the dead god Enefna.

This otherworldly holy trinity are not quite reunited at the outset of The Kingdom of Gods, which occurs some hundred years after the events chronicled in The Broken Kingdoms - in short the penance of the traitor Itempas, who walks now among men, disabused of his heavenly powers except insofar as he chooses to use them in service of some greater good - but they are closer to becoming one than they have been in millennia. Good news for all involved... except the Arameri: the ruling class of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms who came to power centuries hence by binding Nahadoth - and his children - to their blood.

Of course now that Enefna has been restored, and Itempas cast out of Sky, the white city on the seat of the world tree, noble blood means nothing; or nothing good. "I was so used to thinking of the Arameri as powerful and numerous, but in fact they were dwindling. Dying." (p.145) With this fall from favour in mind, enter Sieh, the first child of the gods. The first child, full stop, so it is fitting that Sieh, the god of mischief, has taken on the form of a child since time immemorial, and also adopted the appropriate attitudes. He was the highlight of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and though his role in The Broken Kingdoms was regrettably reduced, in The Kingdom of Gods Sieh returns - and returns and returns! - as no less than our sole narrator.

It's a brave choice on the author's part, this foregrounding of a character you would think best served in small measures - and were he the same character, you'd be bang on - but then N. K. Jemisin has never seemed lacking in narrative ambition, and the Sieh she has us spend these 600-some pages with is both irrevocably changed in the early-going and altered little by little as time and The Kingdom of Gods toils on. Firstly he is made mortal, by some quirk of fate, and later rendered still more relatable, more like us, by love, the great leveller that has been both the bane of and a boon to this series.

The romantic aspects of this final volume function similarly. Sometimes they seem central to the emotional core of the story, indeed the series entire, but as often as not these preoccupations have felt superfluous; sex for the sake of some sex, and however exciting such scenes can be - though they can be excruciating, too - all the according angst errs on the truly tiresome. Particularly coming from a god, as in this case. But then "adolescence is all about making mistakes," (p.200) isn't it? And Sieh is finally growing up.

Thankfully The Kingdom of Gods has a lot of loose ends left to tie off, particularly after the leisurely interlude - the calm before the storm - that was The Broken Kingdoms. Thus there are many more meaningful threads in terms of character and narrative for Jemisin to address than the love life of a child older than time in the midst of a tryst of his own making. Indeed it's a testament to Jemisin's knack for storysmithing that this novel is as ordered and intelligible as it is, given all it must - and largely does - resolve.

Which is not to say the story's entirely over, as of this volume. In fact, after the last chapter, a coda seems to suggest a new beginning, and hot on the heels of the coda which concludes The Kingdom of Gods, lo and behold a deleted scene of sorts: a short story tellingly titled "Not the End."

And though I struggled with this series at the outset, with The Kingdom of Gods behind me now - a fitting, if familiar end to this award-winning trilogy - I kinda sorta hope it's not.

***

The Kingdom of Gods

by N. K. Jemisin

UK & US Publication: October 2011, Orbit

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Recommended and Related Reading

Film Review | Super 8, dir. J. J. Abrams

2012-01-16T13:39:00.003Z

I don't know what his actual involvement was behind the scenes - producer credits are about as anomalous as credits get - but Steven Spielberg's name features prominently in the marketing materials for Super 8, and even if he had nothing to do with it, this film owes such an incalculable debt to his definitive early efforts that had there not been some such tip of the 80s baseball cap, J. J. Abrams would probably have been looking at a lawsuit instead.

As Alasdair Harkness wrote in his review for The Scotsman - that is to say the actual newspaper - Super 8 is "the most authentic Spielberg film Spielberg never directed," which is one of those snappy summations I wish I'd come up with first. But I don't know that I'd agree with the rest of his write-up... particularly with the dismissive attitude Harkness adopts as regards Abrams' latest, the better to dovetail with the anecdote he seems determined to describe, of how J. J. Abrams met and emulated his hero You-Know-Who.

I would add, though I need not, that Harkness was far from the only critic to speak out against Super 8. In fact, though the reviews were almost uniformly glowing, at least on paper - the Tomatometer has it at 82% fresh at the time of this writing - looking through them, a worrying trend emerges: of tonally negative articles pared with positive scores. Positive, indeed near-perfect scores, because you'd have to be a completely off your rocker to conclude that Super 8 is anything less that pretty gosh-darned great.

So why the downturned tone? Because Super 8 is like a Steven Spielberg film? Well... sure, yes, absolutely. But so what if it is? How is that such a bad thing? Didn't the man make some great films, back in the day? And pray tell me: who's making them now? For the most part, Spielberg himself has long since graduated onto less commercial endeavours. There is thus a great gaping hole in the field of family-friendly films, and if anyone's up to filling it, it's J. J. Abrams. Super 8 is the proof of that pudding.

Leading a large and largely delightful cast, two young actors: newcomer Joel Courtney as Joe Lamb and Elle Fanning - Dakota's little sister, coming into her own after playing so many helpless children - as Alice Dainard. Joe is still coming to terms with the death of his mother, meanwhile his father Kyle has that to deal with, his job in the police force, and the responsibilities of being a single parent to boot. Needless to say, it's not been going great for either of the Lambs, but Joe at least finds a happy distraction in Alice, who he meets while helping his friend Charles Kaznyk (Riley Griffiths; a fine find) make an amateur zombie movie, in which Joe's kindred spirits - an unaccountably sad lass - is to star.

While they film a scene one evening, things take an unexpected turn when a train packed full of strange metal cubes - and TNT, apparently - crashes into a car parked on the tracks, and derails to the tune of ten thousand explosions. Thankfully the kids escape with hardly a scratch on 'em, and as luck would have it, they manage to capture the calamity on super 8. Little do they know their camera has also captured something else. Something... wicked?

Well, no. Not so much. Something misunderstood is more like it. But remember: it's the 70s. It's going to take three days and nights to develop their shocking home movie, and a lot can change in three days and nights, during which time the gang are as in the dark as anyone as to why the military have moved into Lillian, Ohio, or why people - people including one of their number - are suddenly going missing. Meanwhile a wildfire has caught, and it could burn their little town down to the ground.

There's conspiracy afoot in Super 8, impressive spectacle on a regular basis, a few cartoonish villains for us to love to hate, and, eventually, an extra-terrestrial too. Abrams direction is excellent, stylish but not so stylised as to take one out of the experience; the script - also by Abrams - is sound, if somewhat obvious on occasion, most egregiously in the movie's lastmost moments; and the effects, from the train derailment on out, look exceedingly expensive... which is to say good. The story is engaging, the characters are endearing, and the pacing is perfect. In short, Super 8 is classic family filmmaking.

It's also The Goonies meets Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with lens flare everywhere. The debt it owes to Steven Spielberg, not to mention Superman man Richard Donner, is felt in almost every frame, but I won't agree that that's an issue in and of itself. We are not, as an audience, somehow better than such things these days, or better at such things, and if that misguided notion isn't the cause of all the mean-spiritedness surrounding Super 8, then I don't know what is.

So Super 8 isn't particularly profound - specifically the subtext about learning to let go is a superficial sham - and it isn't any sense original, either, but nor is it dumb, or dull, or insultingly derivative. In fact I dare say it's a good movie. A very good movie, actually. But if it's one of the best films of 2011, and at a push, I think it probably is, then that's primarily because 2011 was such a stinker of a year at the cinema.

Book Review | The Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin

2012-01-13T14:00:00.002Z

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In the city of Shadow, beneath the World Tree, alleyways shimmer with magic and godlings live hidden among mortalkind.

Oree Shoth, a blind artist, takes in a homeless man who glows like a living sun to her strange sight. However, this act of kindness is to engulf Oree in a nightmarish conspiracy. Someone, somehow, is murdering godlings, leaving their desecrated bodies all over the city.

Oree's peculiar guest is at the heart of it, his presence putting her in mortal danger - but is it him the killers want, or Oree? And is the earthly power of the Arameri king their ultimate goal, or have they set their sights on the Lord of Night himself?

***

I did not adore The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms in the manner many critics did. As a first novel, yes, it impressed in some respects, and I still stand in admiration of N. K. Jemisin's very elegant voice, but beyond that her award-winning debut was such a slight thing that I came away from it deeply uncertain of the sequel.

The Broken Kingdoms, thank the Gods, is no mere retread of its highly-held predecessor. In fact it turns on its head the equation that so surprised me about book one of The Inheritance Trilogy: where The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was fantastical romance, up to and including the most cringe-worthy sex scene I've encountered in some time, The Broken Kingdoms is romantic fantasy, with a wider focus on the world, and a perspective that actively earns our empathy, rather than expects it.

It's better, all told; much better. But it's not perfect.

Ten years on from the events of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the Arameri - the ruling class of this sprawling continent, oriented around a vast tree whose branches crack the skies - still cling perilously to power, despite the source of their power having fallen, quite literally, from grace. Where once the Gods lived under sufferance, at the beck and call of Arameri fullbloods by dint of a falling-out between order and chaos - as embodied by Itempas and Nahadoth - Yeine's climactic ascendancy, to share body and soul with the dead God Enefna, has tipped the balance in the Darklord's favour.

So it is that Itempas, bringer of the Bright, around whom the predominant religion in the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was ordered, was cast out of Sky, and the heavens entire. As the godling Madding explains: "Nahadoth wanted to kill him... after what he'd done. But the Three created this universe; if any one of them dies, it all ends. So he was sent here [to Shadow], where he can do the least damage... Maybe, somehow, he can get better. See the error of his ways. I don't know." (p.139)

Shadow is the shanty city built around the roots of the world tree, on which Sky sits. A decade ago, it was the closest most folks ever got to the Gods, but now, with Itempas made a mere man of, and Nahadoth and Yeine watching over the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - and beyond! - godlings like Madding are everywhere. Some live like mortals, and take mortal lovers, reveling in the wonders of the world denied them for millennia. On Madding's arm - on it and off it, that is - we come, at last, to Oree Shoth, The Broken Kingdoms' substitute protagonist.

Oree is "a woman plagued by gods," (p.15) and she doesn't just mean Madding. Blind since birth, but able to see magic, some years ago she came to Shadow from Maroneh, a far-flung kingdom on its last legs, the better to see what magic there was to be seen. Of course it's everywhere, now, so Oree - an artist who makes ends meet selling trinkets to tourists - is not entirely surprised when she comes across a godling in a muckbin:

At first I saw only delicate lines of gold limn the shape of a man. Dewdrops of glimmering silver beaded along his flesh and then ran down it in rivulets, illuminating the texture of skin in smooth relief. I saw some of those rivulets move impossibly upward, igniting the filaments of his hair, the stern-carved lines of his face.

As I stood there, my hands damp with paint and my door standing open behind me, forgotten, I saw this glowing man draw a deep breath - which made him shimmer even more beautifully - and open eyes whose colour I would never be able to fully describe, even if I someday learn the words. The best I can do is compare it to things I do know: the heavy thickness of red gold, the smell of brass on a hot day, desire and pride.

Yet, as I stood there, transfixed by those eyes, I saw something else: pain. So much sorrow and grief and anger and guilt, and other emotions I could not name because when all was said and done, my life up to then had been relatively happy. There are some things one can understand only by experience, and there are some experiences no one wants to share. (pp.16-17)

Oree takes this heaven-sent creature into her home, calls him Shiny in lieu of a proper introduction - he doesn't speak at all, you see - and in so doing becomes embroiled in a conflict as old as time that will change her life forever after... that is if she still has a life left to live, by the end of The Broken Kingdoms.

Meanwhile, someone, or something, is murdering godlings, one by one. Which should be impossible. But then, what about this world is as it should be?

By now you're probably confused. That's all right; so was I. The problem wasn't just my misunderstanding - though that was part of it - but also history. Politics. The Arameri, and maybe the more powerful nobles and priests, probably know all this. I'm just an ordinary woman with no connections or status, and no power beyond a walking stick that makes an excellent club in a pinch. I had to figure everything out the hard way. (p.59)

The single greatest issue I raised with regards to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was its cipher of a central character, Yeine, and though she and Oree may seem of a similar sort, on the surface, certain crucial differences exist to differentiate The Broken Kingdoms' narrator from last time's lady-in-waiting. Whereas Yeine was summoned to the world tree, Oree comes of her own free will; and while Yeine took up in Sky upon her arrival, among the privileged and the decision-makers, Oree makes her humble home in Shadow, with the common man.

Both characters have an inheritance to come into, of course, but though Oree's eventual destiny is not so shattering as Yeine's, The Broken Kingdoms is in sum a better book than the first of this trilogy for its modesty, for its restraint in that respect... not least because the careful reader will have an easier time believing in Oree than Yeine, who seemed utterly unaffected by this strange new world, as new to her at the outset of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms as it was to us.

So too is the fact of gods walking among us much more meaningful in The Broken Kingdoms, particularly given the ease with which Yeine fell into bed with Nahadoth in book one of The Inheritance Trilogy. Here, however, the reader inherits Oree's reverence for these mysterious, magical creatures, whose actions feel all the more extraordinary for her particular perspective.

And the world feels fuller, finally. You will recall that almost the entirety of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms took place among the Arameri in Sky; an interesting enough setting in itself, if rather simplistic. Similarly, the events of The Broken Kingdoms occur almost exclusively in Shadow... the yin to Sky's yang, or vice versa. Thus Shadow gives welcome context to Sky, placing it - and us - more firmly in the world.

In The Broken Kingdoms, by upping the fantasy quotient of the larger narrative and simultaneously scaling back its more romantic aspects, and giving readers a less convenient, but more appropriate central character to invest in, N. K. Jemisin addresses many of the issues I had with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. It follows, then, that I appreciated this sequel a great deal more comprehensively than I did her debut.

But The Broken Kingdoms introduces a new problem to the tally, and it is a problem related to the thing I most admired about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: namely the beauty of Jemisin's voice. Which is to say, word for word, The Broken Kingdoms seems a less considered narrative than its predecessor... imprecise and occasionally clumsy where the author seemed so assured before. Still more damningly, though Oree is - as discussed - a character distinct from Yeine, their witty, flippant, passionate, first-person narrations are almost identical in form and tone, with little to distinguish one from the other.

The Broken Kingdoms is a solid, if stylistically indistinct sequel which improves on The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms in every other sense. Truth be told I came to it expecting more of the same, and though there's absolutely an element of that, it's the same but better; improved in every which way but the one. To wit, bring on The Kingdom of the Gods... which I'll be approaching with far higher hopes than I bore to The Broken Kingdoms.

***

The Broken Kingdoms

by N. K. Jemisin

UK Publication: November 2010, Orbit

US Publication: September 2011, Orbit

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Quoth the Scotsman | Chris Beckett on Being the Change

2012-01-12T13:28:00.004Z

A couple of caveats to bear in mind before we start. Unless otherwise indicated, none of the quotes quoted in the following post are representative of the beliefs of the person in question quoted nor those of the person quoting the person in question. Additionally, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

In short, Quoth the Scotsman is just a space here on TSS for me to post neat quotes as and when I come across them. Simple. As. That.

***

A year and a half ago, I came away from Chris Beckett's Bacigalupi-esque dystopian debut very impressed. Curious newcomers can read my review of The Holy Machine in full here.

Tweren't perfect, but it certainly did the trick, and at the time I said I'd be on the lookout for whatever Chris Beckett did next. Dark Eden is what.

Isn't it pretty?

Inside as well as out.

As of the time of this writing, I'm only halfway through Dark Eden, but it's been quite simply stunning. It's about the rise and fall of a small colony left to its own devices on a distant world without a sun to warm it, and the main character, John Redlantern, is a sort of revolutionary, determined to break with tradition for the sake of the greater good, though everyone and everything's against him.

The following excerpt occurs immediately after John, who is all of twenty wombtimes old - a newhair, as they say (use your imagination) - has taken on a leopard with just a thorn stuck to a stick. Incredibly, he lives to tell the tale... or rather to hear his friend Gerry tell it, again and again and again. The leopard wasn't so lucky, alas, and John is disgusted by the way everyone treats him like a hero of the ages simply for outsmarting an animal:

"You're all of you hiding up in trees like Gerry did, I said in my head to all those friendly smiling people, and that's the trouble with bloody Family. You eat and you drink and you slip and you quarrel and you have a laugh, but you don't really think about where you're trying to get to or what you want to become. And when trouble comes, you just scramble up trees and wait for the leopard to go away and then afterwards giggle and prattle on for wakings and wakings about how big and scary it was and how it nearly bit off your toes, and how so-and-so chucked a bit of bark at it and whatshisname called out a rude name. Gela's tits! Just look at you!

"And the thing was, the meat was starting to run out in Circle Valley. It was no good just hiding up a tree and giggling. Something was going to have to happen or a waking would come in the end when people in Family would starve. That's assuming that there wasn't another rock fall down by Exit Falls, in which case we might all drown instead.

"Never mind drowning or starving from lack of food, though. I was going to starve inside my head long before that, or drown in boredom, if I couldn't make something happen in the world, something different, something more than just this." (pp.32-33)

Dark Eden is certainly the best book I've read this month, and if it keeps on as darkly fantastic as it's begun, I wouldn't be surprised to see it place in Top of the Scots 2012. Stay tuned to TSS for the full review, which should be ready just as soon as I get back from Bratislava.

Sadly I don't see a release date for our friends across the pond, but here in the UK, Dark Eden is out right now from the good folks at Corvus, and The Book Depository ships overseas for free.

What are you waiting for? :)

Book Review | The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin

2012-01-10T14:00:00.003Z

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Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky - a palace above the clouds where gods' and mortals' lives are intertwined.

There, to her shock, Yeine is named one of the potential heirs to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with a pair of cousins she never knew she had.

As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history. But it's not just mortals who have secrets worth hiding and Yeine will learn how perilous the world can be when love and hate - and gods and mortals - are bound inseparably.

***

Our loved ones never truly leave us.

Even when they are lost to us, the memory of them remains; the memory above all else. And we inherit from our mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers more than memories: often they bequeath to us a bauble or a trinket or a sum of money. Sometimes more and sometimes less, but be it a lot or a little, invariably something is left.

Yeine's parents left her a legacy. A legacy that will rend the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms apart, from the heavens above to the darkest depths of this dying earth, as surely as it will set Yeine on a path pockmarked with revelations of love, and loss.

Following the death of her mother - a fullblood Arameri cast out of the capital because of her love for a man from Darr, a distant barbarian domain where two decades and one daughter later someone finally killed Kinneth - Yeine is obliged to travel to Sky, a city sunk into the firmament of the heavens where the Gods are said to walk. There, for the first time in her life, she meets her grandfather: Lord Dekarta, the ailing ruler of all that the eye can see, not to mention all that it cannot.

Dekarta is not kind to Yeine, nor does it seem he is in the least happy to see her, despite his storybook love for her mother, yet he bids the girl compete with her two cousins, Scimina and Relad, in a game of thrones: the winner of which brutal maneuvering will inherit not just a chair, but the whole of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. And to lose is to die - a fact that preoccupies Yeine for almost the entirety of N. K. Jemisin's award-winning debut, with very little variance.

..all I could think of was death. I was not yet twenty years old, I had never been in love. I had not mastered the nine forms of the knife. I had never - gods. I had never really lived, beyond the legacies left to me by my parents: ennu, and Arameri. It seemed almost incomprehensible that I was doomed, and yet I was. (p.209)

Needless to say Yeine has no taste for the transparent politics of the Arameri, a noble race - a single bloodline - which has all the world under its thumb; all the world, and all but one of the deities who had a hand in its creation... because it is true that Gods walk among men along the pearlescent streets of Sky. They, too, are slaves to the Arameri. And they take a particular interest in Yeine.

Of the three pet Gods the Arameri keep, Sieh, who appears as a boy and scoots about Sky on a small sun, is easily the most interesting. Yeine's feelings for Sieh are almost maternal, so it follows, I suppose, that her feelings for Sieh's father, Nahadoth - such a straightforward tortured soul archetype as to surprise a reader - are like those of a woman in lust, or love.

Make no mistake, as I did: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is primarily paranormal romance, but set against an alluring high fantasy backdrop rather than the urban environs of most such fiction. Nor is N. K. Jemisin's first novel - volume one of the Inheritance trilogy, aptly titled - nearly so complex as I imagine it must sound. Indeed, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is in real need of nuance.

Sieh alone rises above the tiresome angst of the entire: a trickster God, born of an impossible commingling of order and chaos, older than the world, and yet he chooses to be as a child in every aspect. Why? Out of love, or obedience? Well, that'd be telling, and there's really precious little else to be told besides, so let's leave it at that.

Yeine, alas, lacks intrigue, and agency. New to Sky and the Arameri, but for her murdered mother, she is a made-to-order conduit through which the author is able to first construct and latterly explore, if only tentatively, the Kay Kenyon-esque setting of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. As a simple cipher Yeine serves her purpose perfectly; as a girl on the cusp of adulthood with a history or opinions of her own, however, I had a hard time believing in her. She comes from a faraway land where women have dominance over men, where the Gods are but a whispered rumour, where she has been respected, and feared, and admired... yet though we spend the entirety of this admittedly modest narrative in her company, and hers alone, she hardly remarks on the differences between one life and another.

In terms of character, then, I fear The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is something of a disappointment: hollow, uncomplicated, and once-removed from the real meat of these people, in this pristine place.

But you know what? It's not all bad. Actually, otherwise, the first book of the Inheritance trilogy is surprisingly engaging. Its world "of whispered myth and half-forgotten legend" (p.253) is neat, though somewhat derivative - namely of The Entire and the Rose, as aforementioned - and very nicely put together, if a little too easy-does-it... but there's two more books to take care of that, and I'd expect no less. The politicking, meanwhile, is entertaining, and not remotely overbearing; in this case the linearity of Jemisin's debut works in its favour.

Above all else, however, I was in awe of the effortless elegance of the author's prose. Particularly for a debut, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is very well written indeed, reminding this reader of Daniel Abraham's marvelous first flush, and just as I can overlook bad writing if there's a good story to be had, I can forgive a beautiful wordsmith an absence of character, as in this case. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms would have been a markedly more remarkable experience had its narrative not been robbed of meaning by Yeine's tepid perspective, but nevertheless, with this debut - an uncomplicated hybrid of high fantasy and paranormal romance - N. K. Jemisin has certainly made her voice heard.

And it's a voice I'd hear more of, whatever my qualms.

***

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

by N. K. Jemisin

UK Publication: February 2010, Orbit

US Publication: October 2010, Orbit

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But I Digress | Horror Lives Again! But When Was It Dead?

2012-01-09T15:06:00.001Z

It's been a while since I went off on one in a public forum, and I don't know that that's quite what I aim to do here today, but a couple of comments about a certain genre of fiction - one particularly near and dear to my heart - have rubbed me the wrong way in recent weeks, and I thought the sensible thing to do before I disappear off to Bratislava the day after tomorrow was to have a good old fashioned moan.

The first insult came by way of The Guardian's Alison Flood, whose articles I usually admire. It begins:

"Helen Dunmore, Jeanette Winterson and Melvin Burgess: not the first people you'd imagine signing up to write for publishing imprint Hammer Horror, home to bloodcurdling shrieks and helpless virgins. But sign up they have, and Dunmore, whose ghost story The Greatcoat is out in February, couldn't be prouder. Horror, it seems, is going literary."

I can't very well excerpt the entire article, but take twenty seconds and read it yourself. It's mercifully short... a puff piece, really, about this new fiction imprint. As to that, what gives, The Guardian?

In any event, that's not what really rankled. And that single quote, though it starts us down the right track, doesn't completely communicate the laziness of Flood's commentary. The overpowering stink of snobbery about it. Because if horror is going literary - whatever that might mean - it couldn't very well have been literary before, now could it?

What absolute poppycock.

Meanwhile, the folks at SFX interviewed Jo Fletcher out of Jo Fletcher Books, the new genre fiction imprint which just put out A Cold Season by Alison Littlewood, which is to say a horror novel, and a good 'un, too. Now Jo's comments are a lot less injurious than Flood's - essentially all she's saying is that "horror is making a bit of a comeback," and perhaps it is - but her words got me wondering: what exactly is horror coming back from? What low had it sunk to, and in whose eyes, that it's in need of such renewal?

Perhaps I'm simply too close to this thing to see it clearly, but I've been paying close attention to horror fiction in recent years - specifically since I launched The Speculative Scotsman - and it hadn't occurred to me that we were in the midst of some sinister slump, in either critical or commercial terms. Clearly it hadn't occurred to any of Joe Hill, Alden Bell, Adam Neville, Justin Cronin, Tom Fletcher, Robert Jackson Bennett or Gary McMahon either, and at the moment I'm blanking on I don't know how many novel new voices that have helped make the case for horror's continuing popularity and relevancy.

Pray tell me, then: when exactly was this watershed? When was horror in such dire straits that it needed Jo Fletcher to declare a renaissance, or Hammer goddamn Horror to endeavour to make the genre more literary, of all things? It doesn't take an acute observer to intuit the the underlying subtext of all this opinion... that there is, or there was, some fundamental problem with horror.

For my part, predictably, I think the genre has being getting along just fine, please and thank you. But I couldn't possibly pretend to be objective about this, so I turn to you fine folks.

Am I very much mistaken? Am I barking up the wrong tree entirely here?

Or is there something rotten going on in the industry, or the establishment, in terms of this professed negative perception?

Short Fiction Corner | The Grinding House by Kaaron Warren

2012-01-06T13:46:00.001Z

Do you remember the Good Old Days?

"They were good. People cared about each other. Wealthy governments gave money to poor countries. You could go to the doctor even if you didn't have money to pay. The government would pay. And they'd help you if you couldn't find a job. Not throw you in jail."

Not so much nowadays. Nowadays, the sad fact is that "no one gives a shit about anyone. [..] People are dying of hunger and deprivations," and all anyone seems to care about - according to the gospel of The Grinding House - is Slenderize, "the complete weight-loss-mental-health programme. It's even got an anti-cancer agent in there."

Why wouldn't you want some of that action?

As it happens, there's at least one good reason - one very good reason - but I'll leave that for you folks to find out in your own time. As well you should: Kaaron Warren is such a powerful purveyor of the weird and the wonderful as to practically alarm, and her 2005 novella The Grinding House is, I think, among her very finest fictions.

Disturbing and disarming in equal parts, The Grinding House is the twisted tale of four friends - the brothers Nick and Rab; Sasha, the woman everyone wants; and Bevan, the odd man out - four friends and sometime lovers who escape to an abandoned almond grove in the countryside when an apocalyptic plague sweeps through the city.

I'll say they don't all make it.

"This is what happens. First the feet feel stiff and the heels sore. You can't bend your toes. Then your ankles feel stiff. It is worse overnight. You wake up in pain. As you walk you feel the bones crackle. Like walking on eggshells. Your fingers, too. You can't move your fingers. [...] You know then that you don't have long. [...] Your neck stiffens. Your groin feels painful. When you walk, it is like your pelvis is mortar and your spine a pestle, grinding, grinding."

It's harrowing stuff, this. Mercifully short, but bitterly, brilliantly beautiful; a fusion of intensity and intimacy so gnarled together as to appear inseparable. Warren wends effortlessly from moments of churning, repulsive horror to episodes abbreviated from some lyrical escapist fable. In quick succession The Grinding House put me in mind of The Pesthouse by Jim Crace, the work of Sam Taylor - specifically The Republic of Trees - and of course Warren's own Walking the Tree.

In the erstwhile Warren builds her characters cannily - not necessarily pleasant characters, but they are no less authentic for that - without seeming for a single solitary second to do so, and ultimately delivers deathblows so sudden and shocking as to appall. I was, for my part, quite beside myself by the end.

The Grinding House is experimental horror of highest order: a harrowing vegetarian fable - and what of it? - more affecting in just a few thousand words than most full length novels aspire to be in their entirely.

But I expect the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Thus, dear readers, I bid you: eat, and be well!

Or unwell, as the case may be...

***

The Grinding House is available now as a Kindle Single, priced to move, from the folks at 40k Books, or as part of Dead Sea Fruit, Ticondera Publishing's 2010 collection of this alarmingly talented Aussie author's sterling short fiction.

Go now, and gorge. :)

Book Review | A Cold Season by Alison Littlewood

2012-01-04T13:29:00.000Z

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Cass is trying to rebuild her life after the loss of her soldier husband, and a renovated mill in the picture-perfect village of Darnshaw looks to be the idyllic spot to bring up her traumatised son, Ben.

But the locals aren't as friendly as Cass had hoped, and Ben is beginning to display a hostility she can't understand. Then the blizzards blow in, and Darnshaw is marooned in a sea of snow.

Now, threatened on all sides, Cass finds herself pitted against forces she can barely comprehend. The cold season has begun.

***

Can you imagine anything more awful than your own flesh and blood turning against you?

Cass can't. And she's been to hell and back already. Reeling from the horrible loss of her husband - the spoils of a cruel and unusual war - Cass wants nothing more than the chance to wipe the slate clean... to start afresh. So she goes back to square one; specifically to the little village where she and her father - a man of the cloth she's long since stopped talking to, for reasons that will become clear over the course of A Cold Season - spent the very beginning of her life. She takes an apartment in an old mill away from the main thoroughfare, recently renovated, and as yet eerily empty... excepting the rats that scratch at the walls when night falls.

But Darnshaw is different - disturbingly different - from the peaceful place Cass remembers. Or perhaps Darnshaw is as Darnshaw always was, and it is this suddenly single mother's memories that are at fault. In any case, Cass's young son Ben, at least, seems to be settling in nicely. He's made a few friends, and taken to sharing -- though exactly what he's been sharing, he won't say. Cass doesn't much approve of the crowd he's fallen in with, and soon she's having second thoughts about this move herself.

There's not a lot she can do about any of the above till the snow lets up, though. The weather has been relentlessly wintry since she and her son arrived: the phones are down, access to the internet with them, and all the roads in and out of Darnshaw are rendered inaccessible. It's almost as if the village has closed in around her...

A Cold Season is Yorkshire author Alison Littlewood's first novel, and one of the first books to bear the name of the new imprint publishing it; that is to say Jo Fletcher Books, fresh out of Quercus. It's a dark fantasy with dark designs on our hearts, and I dare say it sets a high watermark for both Alison Littlewood and the genre fiction division her impressive debut heralds. Cass and Ben are very well realised characters - as are the parents and teachers and pupils whose paths cross theirs - and the harrowing trials they are put through serve to bring us closer to them, even as mother and son are driven further and further apart. But the real scene-stealer, I think, is Darnshaw.

Per the stark cover art, and the flash of angry red left by Ben, running away again, Darnshaw is a village of vacuum black and icy white... a manifestly monochrome landscape broken only occasionally by "bright splashes of colour emerging from the dim light." (p.26) Usually, yes, they are red, recalling Don't Look Now and a hundred other scary stories, in film and in literature -- and indeed, in video games. In fact, from the impenetrable mist at the outset to the broken roads (see p.177) which prevent Cass and Ben's escape on through the creepy, culty church where the last act culminates, A Cold Season recalls one video game franchise in particular: Silent Hill, a favourite of mine.

Knowing homage or not, Littlewood does rather hammer these images home in the early-going, but cannily - once the scene is set - she leaves Darnshaw to take on a life of its own in our imaginations, and I assure you, it's a place you'll not soon forget.

That said, as is so often the way with narratives concerned with the dead spaces between the horizontal and the vertical, A Cold Season is at its best in the exquisitely deliberate beginning, when the unknown and the inexplicable are presented on their own terms, as opposed to being overburdened by the combined weight of expectation and explanation, as is the case come the sadly harried and somewhat preachy conclusion.

For the larger part, though, A Cold Season is a powerful story about motherhood... about family, and the ties that bind us. Excepting a few missteps that it bears saying plague all and sundry authors in this genre - not merely newcomers, and in any case Alison Littlewood is hardly an amateur - A Cold Season is a terrifically chilling tale. A sterling debut which bodes unspeakably well for its author and beyond.

Highly recommended seasonal reading, in short. And it is the season!

***

A Cold Season

by Alison Littlewood

UK Publication: January 2012, Jo Fickling Books

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Film Review | A Lonely Place to Die, dir. Julian Gilbey

2012-01-03T12:54:00.000Z

I had high hopes for A Lonely Place to Die. I don't know why. Perhaps I'll die?

In all likelihood it was the spectre of several other, far better films that did it. Almost every review I'd read of A Lonely Place to Die made reference to The Wicker Man, that bastion of creepy Scottish cinema - though it was made by an Englishman, funnily enough - and the opening moments reminded me a great deal of Scotch director Kevin Macdonald's majestic Touching the Void.

Fitting, then, that this is another film involving Scotland. Sadly it's a bad one; ambitious, but ultimately utter rubbish.

For a few moments at the very outset - before the credits have even rolled - A Lonely Place to Die seems like it might be worth the film it was shot on. Melissa George out of 30 Days of Night, which I didn't actually despise, and a couple of her mates - never mind their names - are rock-climbing up a sheer cliff somewhere in the nightmarish highlands of my great nation. They're getting Away From It All... including any real hope of help, should things go poorly.

Then, as if on cue, there's a near miss.

All the major players come away from it unscathed, but even so, it's quite thrilling. I'll give the film this: for nearly an entire minute, it does make you think... that halfway up a windswept mountain in the middle of nowhere would indeed be a dodgy place to bite the proverbial bullet.

It's hardly a claim to fame, nor indeed is it a reason to watch this nonsense, but I'm sorry to say A Lonely Place to Die doesn't get any better. In fact, immediately after the titles, things take a turn for the worse: our characters reveal themselves to be useless city-mouse idiots, to a one, and incredibly unpleasant people to boot.

Thankfully someone starts knocking them off in quick succession after they come across a Serbian girl buried in a chipboard box in the midst of the wilderness the next day, whilst eating Mackerel and egg sandwiches. They dig her up like good tourists and formulate a daring plan of action. Melissa George and one of her associates will throw themselves head-first off the nearest rocky outcropping, the better to raise the alarm a little quicker, meanwhile all the other folks will run about like ninnies until someone shoots them too.

I mean... really. Mackerel and egg sandwiches!

Melissa George is singularly dreadful in the lead role - mawkish, moody, and thoroughly unconvincing as someone with the slightest clue what they're doing - but she's still amongst the best of a bad, bad lot. A couple of supporting players manage to come out of A Lonely Place to Die largely unscathed: The Borgias' Sean Harris makes for a suitably cold-blooded killer, and Eamonn Walker from Oz is decent as mercenary muscle on the other end of the spectrum, but unless there was a huge wad of cash on the table, and I can't see how that could have been the case, I don't even want to know what drove them to this new low.

That's just a taste of all that A Lonely Place to Die has to offer. On the bright side, I suppose there are some bleakly beautiful establishing shots of Scotland... director and co-writer Julian Gilbey stages a few reasonably interesting scenes... and there's certainly some small promise in the premise. But it's every inch of it squandered by bad acting, an obscenely obvious script, and in general an overwhelming sense that no-one, whether behind the camera or before it, has a notion as to what they - or this film - is about.

One other thing: there are far too many characters in service of what is essentially a story that's been told a hundred times a hundred times better before. Think Hostel in Scotland meets Dog Soldiers without the dogs, or better yet: don't bother. To be fair, by the point at which this particularly pitiful attempt to make a uniformly miserable movie interesting had become altogether unwieldy, I could have cared less; I just wanted A Lonely Place to Die to be over.

Eventually, it was. So it could have been worse!

The Scotsman Abroad | Holmes for the Holidays

2012-01-01T14:24:00.001Z

As much to my surprise as anyone else's, I enjoyed the new Sherlock Holmes novel by Alex Rider writer Anthony Horowitz... well, immensely. You can read my review of The House of Silk in full here, but suffice it to say Horowitz's novel so endeared the great detective to me that I immediately laid waste to my little library, the better to see what other contemporary pastiches I could read to tide me over till the imminent second season of the exemplary BBC series.

Fast-forward to the present - though 2012 still sounds like the far-flung future to me - and I may have read more Sherlock Holmes stories in the last month than ever before -- not just to satisfy my own appetites, either, because a while ago I heard how the overlords in charge of Tor.com were intending to keep the site ticking on over through Christmas and New Year.

The result - Holmes for the Holidays - has been running since a bit before the big day, and it's been brilliant. Lots of fun, and indubitably interesting. If you aren't following along already, I'd wholeheartedly recommend you pop on over to the index and catch up if you can.

For my part, I contributed two short articles, both of which have now had their official unveiling. In the first, I looked at an old one-shot Caliber Comics put out in the mid-90s: namely The Sussex Vampire, a short graphic adaptation of the original Conan Doyle story masterminded by none other than Warren effing Ellis.

'The Sussex Vampire' is an excellent adaptation of a sterling Sherlock Holmes story, fittingly illustrated and ably scripted by an author since risen to renown, whose early work – up to and including this superb single issue – deserves a great deal more attention than it gets. Warren Ellis and Craig Gilmour make for fine co-conspirators, and while 'The Sussex Vampire' isn’t as easy to find these days as it was for me, way back when – at least, not by legal means – if you can: do.

(read more)

And I couldn't very well let a celebration of all things Sherlock Holmes pass by without a tip of the trilby - ahem - to Neil Gaiman, whose stunning 'A Study In Emerald' entangled the mythos of everyone's favourite consulting detective together with that - of all things - of H. P. Lovecraft.

Then, in the process of researching 'A Study In Emerald,' I realised Gaiman had recently written a second Sherlock Holmes story, so I got myself a copy of the new anthology out of Titan Books - that is to say A Study in Sherlock - and endeavoured to write about these two weird tales together.

'The Case of Death and Honey' occurs in the mysterious twilight years of the great detective's career, but is also alludes to what might have happened to our man after his retirement. Given that 'A Study In Emerald' so evoked 'A Study in Scarlet' - which is to say the very first Sherlock Holmes story - this, I think, is particularly fitting. A sort of closing of the circle; though it isn't giving the game away to stress, a second time, that appearances can be... deceiving.

(read more)

Never mind the various other stories it contains, A Study in Sherlock is worth the price of admission for 'The Case of Death and Honey' alone. It's the sort of short story that reminds you what short stories are for.

Anyway, I will of course be glued to the telly tonight, when the first feature-length episode of the second season of the BBC's Sherlock series premieres. If there's a better way to ring in 2012, no-one's mentioned it to me!

I'm almost afraid to ask, but you guys are as psyched as I am, right?

As to A Game of Shadows, in case you were wondering: no, I haven't seen it yet... but I am hoping to make it to the movies in the imminent. For this, do you think? Or should I wait to rent it on Blu-ray, and see something better?

Dear Everyone | Old Year, New Year

2011-12-31T14:44:00.000Z

So: 2011.

I think it's been A Good Year, all told.

First, if not foremost, I've read more than I ever have before - more than 100 books, which is a big deal for me - and I've chosen said books better. That is to say, in 2011 I found a tolerable balance between those books I've read solely to review, and those books I've read simply to read, because I love reading.

And there have been some great books.

I still haven't watched as many movies as I usually would, but I've seen a fair few, and a few more since I put together this list of my favourite films of the year, including Conan, Attack the Block, Another Earth, A Lonely Place to Die and Super 8. Reviews will follow shortly.

In video games, meanwhile, 2011 was great. Portal 2 was my game of the year, of course, with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim hot on its heels, and I'm still playing that. Well... truth be told I'm taking a short break, because last week I finally got my hands on a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. It's the first game I've played on my Wii in at least a year, and realistically it's probably the last game I'll ever play on the thing.

Even so, it's been brilliant. A fitting send off for rather an ill-fitting console, if I'm honest.

In 2011, I also started reading comic books again. I didn't put together a Top of the Scots about them largely because even now, I'm up to my ears in collections and recommendations to catch up on. It'll be an almighty long time before I'm anywhere approaching current, but maybe... just maybe... comic books will get theirs in 2012.

In the interim, I'd very much recommend Daryl Gregory's Planet of the Apes ongoing, anything by Jeff Lemire or Scott Snyder, and Stephen King's N., which I'll be posting about shortly.

What else?

Gosh, only everything!

I can't hope to hit on all my personal or professional highlights here in this li'l baby blog, but I do want to say one last thing, to all the people I've met in 2011, whether thanks to The Speculative Scotsman or thanks to things that have come to pass because of The Speculative Scotsman, like having my reviews published in Strange Horizons and Starburst Magazine, or on Tor.com, SF Signal, The Zone and so on.

So to all the lovely folks I've met through the community - to the bloggers, the authors, the publicists, the editors, the agents - to each and every one of you, a tip of the hat, and a hearty thank you for sticking with me in 2011.

We'll talk again next year, alright?

Which is to say... tomorrow.

Because in a bit, we'll be putting this year out to pasture -- and who knows what 2012 will bring?

The end of the world? I'm going to say no.

New books, new movies? New video games and new comic books? I should think so!

Not only, but also: I'll be making some serious changes to The Speculative Scotsman in the weeks and months to come. I have a good few new features on and off the drawing board, a whole new look and feel in the offing, and maybe, just maybe, something... more.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. There are still a few hours of 2011 to go, and if you'd care to spend some small portion of them telling me about the highlights - even the lowlights - of your year... why I'd be much obliged! Because that's kind of what this whole thing is about. You know: The Conversation.

And The Conversation will continue in 2012.

Before that, though, brace yourselves... I'm going to say it.

In the words of Neil Gaiman, international treasure:

Meanwhile, in the rather less inspiring words of me, to each and every one of you, and all of yours: Happy New Year! :D

Book Review | Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

2011-12-30T13:53:00.000Z

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The song. That’s what London constable and sorcerer’s apprentice Peter Grant first notices when he examines the corpse of Cyrus Wilkins, part-time jazz drummer and full-time accountant, who dropped dead of a heart attack while playing a gig at Soho’s 606 Club. The notes of the old jazz standard are rising from the body — a sure sign that something about the man’s death was not at all natural but instead supernatural.

Peter will risk body and soul as he investigates a pattern of similar deaths in and around Soho. With the help of his superior officer, Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, the last registered wizard in England, and the assistance of beautiful jazz aficionado Simone Fitzwilliam, Peter will uncover a deadly magical menace — one that leads right to his own doorstep and to the squandered promise of a young jazz musician: a talented trumpet player named Richard "Lord" Grant — otherwise known as Peter’s dear old dad.

***

I don't have an iPod, but if I did, there'd be all sorts of funny business on it. Folk, metal, industrial, orchestral, electronica, alt. rock, dubstep... I could go on - some of the music I love most does - but let's just say I'm not particularly particular about what I shake my tush to. I'll give most every genre of music a fair shake, and in my experience, however outwardly unappealing a certain sound might seem, there's usually something about it I can learn to love.

But not jazz.

And I've tried! Hand on heart I have, because I really rather like the idea of liking jazz. That probably says a whole lot about me that I'd sooner not say, but there's something intensely appealing about the prospect of whiling away a Friday night in a bar somewhere in the city, sharing a bottle of red with the other half while the music soars and swings and ripples around us.

Sadly, jazz is a genre I just can't get my head around. I struggle to pick out the rhythms, the melodies all a-muddle. In fact, the free-form, find your own fun of jazz leaves me feeling ignorant, exhausted and utterly uncultured.

Odd, then, that I adored Moon Over Soho so. After all, the second book of The Folly by Ben Aaronovitch is all about jazz: its plot revolves around the serial slaying - perhaps I need not add by magical means, but I shall - of several jazz icons and up-and-comers in an assortment of dingy London pubs and clubs, meanwhile it features a number of lengthy digressions into the history and heritage of jazz, as well as its place in our era. Moon Over Soho is, finally, something of a musical fusion in and of itself; it is equal parts police procedural - in other words, it's all about "maintaining the Queen's Peace," (p.23) - and magical mystery tour, a la Harry Potter.

Most distinctively, it's as funny as it is fantastic. See here:

"Murder investigations start with the victim, because usually in the first instance that's all you've got. The study of the victim is called victimology because everything sounds better with an 'ology' tacked on the end. To make sure you make a proper fist of this, the police have developed the world's most useless mnemonic - 5 x W H & H - otherwise known as Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? Next time you watch a real murder investigation on the TV, and you see a group of serious-looking detectives standing around talking, remember what they're actually doing is trying to work out what sodding order the mnemonic is supposed to go in. Once they've sorted that out, the exhausted officers will retire to the nearest watering hole for a drink and a bit of a breather." (p.108)

Aaronovitch's sly, dry, sharply satiristic sense of humour is in full effect in Moon Over Soho, at least as much as it was in predecessor -- if not more, because this sequel occurs in a world in solid working order already: namely the magical kingdom of London. Mayhap you've heard of it?

Add to that the fact that the author spends precious little time explaining what happened last time in Rivers of London... to Constable Peter Grant and his partner and sometime love interest Lesley May, both rather the worse for wear after the magical calamity with which the previous volume concluded; nor to the gang-gods of the Thames, never mind their many, various and nefarious wains. A quick reference here and there is the extent of it, and while some readers are likely to find this a bit baffling, I was alright with the oversight, because Moon Over Soho wastes so little energy recapping and worldbuilding that Aaaronovitch can hone in on what made our last visit to The Folly such a treat: on the fun, and the funny, which comes thick and fast. Rarely does a page of Aaaronovitch's neat sequel pass without there being something to elicit a grin, or a knowing eyebrow.

The narrative's not to be sniffed at either. It's perhaps a notch less substantial, and certainly a lot less surprising, than the whimsical watery warfare of Rivers of London, but it hops along happily to a toe-tapping time signature, with a sweet solo here and an awesome cacophony of noise there. In the erstwhile, the underground jazz scene makes for a fascinating and fittingly multicultural motif to set this somewhat throwaway story against -- plus it serves to bring Peter's family into the picture again, and it was great to meet the Grants again.

Moon Over Soho's characters are wonderful to a one, come to that. Invariably warm and witty, smart and sensible, there are only a few new additions - most return, disfigured or merely disheartened, from the events of book one of The Folly - but of these, Stephanopolis specifically is terrific. "She was a short, terrifying woman whose legendary capacity for revenge had earned her the title of the lesbian officer least likely to have a flippant remark made about her sexual orientation," (p.76) and I dearly hope to see more of her in Whispers Under Ground.

If one absolutely must append a single category to Moon Over Soho, I suppose it'd be urban fantasy - like jazz, a genre I'm not terribly interested in, I'll be the first to admit - but any number of things put Aaronovitch's fiction ahead of the pack, not least its fearless engagement with the now, and our generation - which is to say both mine and yours, given where and how you're reading this review - above all others.

And Moon Over Soho is both superficially modern - as above, so below - and engaged more meaningfully with the contemporary climate: on the one hand Aaronovitch easily strikes a similar chord as Ernest Cline did in Ready Player One - name-checking Street Fighter II and Logan's Run in a single paragraph, say (see. p.284) - while on the other the author applies a relatable and revealing perspective to the content of his novel, what with our worldly-wise-but-somewhat-bumbling hero's attempts to explain the inexplicable that is the bread and butter of this book. Which is to say magic... with science. You can imagine how that works out.

London is a bit much for a country mouse like me, but Moon Over Soho paints such a frantic, fantastic picture of the place and the people who call it home that I'm suddenly itching to visit. As aforementioned, it's not at all standalone, and the story is somewhat on the slight side, but all that jazz - up to and including all the jazz - be damned: I had vast amounts of fun reading Moon Over Soho, and if you're in the least inclined towards the light side of genre fiction, you surely will too.

***

Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

UK Publication: April 2011, Gollancz

US Publication: March 2011, Del Rey

Buy this book from

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Recommended and Related Reading

Video Game Review | Assassin's Creed: Revelations, dev. Ubisoft Everywhere

2011-12-28T14:04:00.000Z

You want revelations?

Well, that's too bad: there aren't any in this tepid second sequel to Assassin's Creed 2.

When the first sprung out of a conveniently-placed haystack late last year, it came fully-formed out of almost nowhere. The pre-release publicity had pitched Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood primarily as a multiplayer game, and in part it was that... but in the same breath, to the shock and awe of game critics far and wide, it was so much more than that.

As a single-player game, Brotherhood was an experience which built smartly and expansively upon the already-solid foundation of the last installment in this secret sci-fi franchise. The introduction of a marvelous managerial metagame whereby the player could recruit, train and then call upon an entire battalion of junior assassins proved to its biggest, bestest - but not its only - innovation. This worked both to add depth and texture to the world of Renaissance-era anti-hero Ezio Auditore, fleshing out the eternal conflict between his hidden guild and the wicked Templars to great effect, as well as to spice up the play mechanics of a series already looking a little long in the tooth.

Alas, like a wagon without wheels, the incremental betterment of the Assassin's Creed franchise shudders to a halt here, because there is no such masterstroke in Revelations. Saying that, there are a few new mechanics, most notable amongst them a tower defense mini-game which is every bit as awkward as it sounds, and dull as day-old dishwater to boot. More successful than Den Defense - though similarly derivative - are several heavily-scripted set-piece sequences likely to put players very much in mind of the Uncharted series.

There are a handful of further new features, too, but by and large, those embellishments Revelations makes on the tried-and-tested formula of the essential Assassin's Creed experience are... uninspiring, to put it politely. Insipid, if we aren't minding our manners.

Revelations is still an incredibly competent game, all things considered - particularly given the sordid story of its development in such a tight time-frame (one year) by no less than six different studios - but fatigue sets in early on, such that the end, when it comes, is a real relief.

Needless to say, that's a great shame, because Revelations is a game all about endings, and Ezio Auditore's story is not the only narrative to clatter to a conclusion in this scattershot annual installment: we also spend some time - rather too much time, in point of fact - with the protagonist of the ill-considered original Assassin's Creed, Altair.

As it happens, the conclusion of Altair's story is markedly more satisfying than the end Ezio meets, which is to say no end at all since - in their infinite wisdom - Ubisoft have deemed to tell that tale in the short animated feature Assassin's Creed: Embers... and unless you invest in the limited edition of Revelations, you'll have to buy Embers separately, or track it down on YouTube, as I did.

Leave it to the purveyors of all things Tom Clancy to spin off the spin-off of a spin-off...

Revelations is assuredly not the last hurrah Ezio has earned. It's not even the send-off Altair deserved, and I didn't like that dude in the least. What it is is a bit of a kick in the teeth... an elaborate insult which does a disservice to so many of the stories this series has told better before. It looks the part and, insofar as it has such a firm foundation in its predecessor, it actually plays pretty well, too, but Revelations is ultimately no more and no less than a stopgap between Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed 3, and with it, Ubisoft run the risk of putting people off the franchise entirely.

A dangerous game, that...

...not at all like this one!

Book Review | The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

2011-12-27T11:42:00.002Z

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In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall.

Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, this handsome Georgian house, once grand and elaborate, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine.

But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.

***

There are only a few things in life I love more than a good ghost story, especially once the chill of winter's set in.

Well it has - and how - so I went to work.

I'd be hard pressed now to think of a greater ghost story than The Little Stranger. Certainly nothing else written this century can hold a candle to it.

Speaking of candles, the surviving Ayreses have precious little else with which to light their way around Hundreds Hall - so hard-up have they become in the years since the war, and the untimely expiration of the former master of this once-great estate - so when night falls, life in this country house simply... stops.

Except there's something, isn't there? It beggars belief, but there must be. Something, or someone, that is in fact quite at home creaking around in the pitch dark and the thick damp of Hundreds' closed-off upper floors, when everyone else has taken to bed. And it's becoming bolder; more daring; more dangerous by the day.

Into this outwardly forbidding and inwardly escalating environment comes, on a seemingly routine call, bachelor-about-town Dr. Faraday.

"It was the purest chance that took me out there, for the Ayreses were registered with my partner, David Graham; but he was busy with an emergency case that day, so when the family sent out for a doctor the request was passed on to me. My heart began to sink almost the moment I let myself into the park. I remembered a long approach to the house through neat rhododendron and laurel, but the park was no so overgrown and untended, my small car had to fight its way down the drive. When I broke free of the bushes at last and found myself on a sweep of lumpy gravel with the Hall directly ahead of me, I put on the brake, and gaped in dismay. [...] What horrified me were the signs of decay. Sections of the lovely weathered edgings seemed to have fallen completely away, so that the house's uncertain Georgian outline was even more tentative than before. Ivy had spread, then patchily died, and hung like tangled rat's-tail hair. The steps leading up to the broad front door were cracked, with weeds growing lushly up through the seams." (p.5)

A working class fellow come good, if not as good as he might like, Dr. Faraday has thought fondly of Hundreds Hall his entire adult life, ever since attending a prize-giving ceremony at the estate where Faraday's dear departed mother was once a serving girl. Decades later, he returns to give aid to the Ayreses' own maid, but poor young Betty isn't ill, only spooked. You see, something in Hundreds has scared her half to death.

Whether it is real or merely imagined, our man will become intimately familiar with this ghastly phantasm the more time he spends attending the various Ayreses, and to Faraday's surprise, Caroline, Roderick, and their ailing mother are in need of a great deal of help -- help he's happy to give, initially. Ashamed of their fallen stature, not least their dilapidated estate, the Ayreses have lived in near-complete isolation for years, and in Faraday they finally find a line out into the town, and an audience for their stories, as old as time and as fine as antique wine. Helping them through the hard winter, he becomes quite the family friend... and ultimately, maybe more.

But all the while, there's something afoot. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something - invariably - blue. Something, in short, that seems to mean the family harm. As a supporting player suggests:

"Is that so surprising, with thing for that family so bleak? The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let's call it a -- a germ. And let's say the conditions prove right for that germ to develop -- to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr. Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the consicous mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy, and malice, and frustration." (p.380)

The Little Stranger is Sarah Waters' fifth novel, after Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith and The Night Watch, and it is, I think, by a large margin her finest. That said, I do have rather a fondness for speculative fiction - had you heard? - and though there have been certain dalliances in the past, this is the only of Waters' novels which could feasibly be described in such a way.

Note, though, that The Little Stranger did not begin as a ghost story - not according to the author, and to a certain extent I think this shows - and it does not necessarily end as one, either. Rather, the horrid goings-on at Hundreds Hall emerge from almost nowhere, from out of the woodwormed woodwork of this ruinous mansion as if they'd merely been biding their time, waiting for the right moment to strike.

And when the penny does drop, it does not feel forced, or at all false. The atmosphere of Hundreds Hall is such that if there hadn't been something secreted within its rotten reaches, I would have been sorely disappointed.

I was not.

There will be some who say The Little Stranger takes a long time to get where we know, or where we think we know it's going... but no. I'm sorry... but no. Because in advance of all that, there's cruel and unusual class conflict, excruciating romantic entanglement and occasional comedy. There's tension and suspense; meanwhile moments of unadulterated terror and terrible tragedy. Waters writes dialogue which peels clean off the page, and deposits it into the mouths and minds of such original, outspoken characters that they seem as alive (until they are not) as you or I.

Sarah Waters is an uncannily talented author, and whether or not this is her finest work, as I assert, it is in every sense - in terms of setting, character, narrative, and nuance - the equal of the very best ghost stories of yore.

These are not things I say lightly, but in this case I must say them, for I found The Little Stranger perfectly impossible to put down. It is the very definition of gripping... an absolute masterclass in ghostie goings-on. And marvelously, the author leaves the door open for multiple readings, and contradicting interpretations of what exactly has gone on in Hundreds Hall.

The Little Stranger is The Turn of the Screw of our generation, and it is every bit as haunting, and as harrowing. With the festive season in full swing, and the hopeless cold to come, there is, I think, no better time to catch up on this creepy contemporary classic than now.

***

The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

UK Publication: May 2009, Virago Press

US Publication: April 2009, Riverhead Books

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Recommended and Related Reading

Dear Everyone | Christmas Wishes

2011-12-23T10:49:00.007Z

Is it just me, or have the holidays come upon us awfully quickly this year?

I suppose I must just be getting old, because I hear time does that, the more used to it you get. To keep you on your toes, you know?

But no matter how old I am, I love Christmas. I grant you that I may very well seem the type to humbug all over this, the season of giving, and receiving, and wonderful one-off television specials - I'm holding out for the Top Gear team's misadventures in India myself - but appearances can of course be deceiving. And me? I'm all about deceiving. :)

Anyway, from today on, things will - as you'd expect - be a little slower-going here on The Speculative Scotsman than is usual. I'll write a few reviews over the break, I don't doubt, and I'm certainly hoping to get a huge amount of reading done, but in my experience, time is always on the short side around the new year period, so I wouldn't expect a huge amount of anything other than tofurkey talk on Twitter.

Somewhat to my surprise, I gather I'm also going on holiday in early January - to spend a week in bonnie Bratislava - but your regularly scheduled programming should resume on the 16th of the first month of 2012, and it's hardly going to be a wasteland hereabouts between now and then, I pinky swears it!

In fact, I have a certain something I've been working on for altogether too long already; a certain somewhat surprising something that might be the perfect thing to entertain you all in my absence. No spoilers... except to say: Skyrim.

But we'll talk again before then. For the very moment, it's tofurkey time!

It only remains for me to say, to all the publishers and the publicists, and to all the bloggers and authors and the editors who helped me make The Speculative Scotsman what it was in 2011 - and what it will be again in 2012, but better, all things being equal - thank you! From the bottom of my heart, I really do appreciate your efforts.

Most of all, though, to each and every one of you folks - yes, you folks - merry early Christmas!

And a hippity hoppety happy New Year to all of you, and all of yours too. :)

Film Review | Sucker Punch, dir. Zack Snyder

2011-12-21T14:11:00.001Z

Have you ever wondered just how much stuff you could fit into a single film?

Evidently Zack Snyder has. Sucker Punch is like the entirety of The Lord of the Rings trilogy - the Extended Editions, of course - meets The Matrix, by way of Devil May Cry, Onimusha, and Alice: The Madness Returns, with Hermione from Harry Potter running about in a close-fitting miniskirt the whole time, shooting dudes and gyrating to show tunes, presumably because Baz Luhrman is behind the scenes somewhere, and since she's dressed to impress... well, why not?

Sucker Punch is a mouthful of a movie, make no mistake, and a lot of it falls flat on its ass; enough to ruin any other single film. But at the same time, I think the latest from the writer/director who made his most lasting mark with 300 has been quite unfairly maligned. It's certainly not all bad, and not a minute of it is terrible. You might say some moments are even entertaining. And from first to last, it sure does look good.

Sounds alright, too. Boy can Baby Doll sing!

But Baby Doll: there's as good a place as any to start. Before Baby Doll was Baby Doll, see, she was an older sister, and an alluring prospect for the abusive monster of a man she has for a stepfather. This she tolerates, because what other choice is there for an orphan girl like her? But one night Baby Doll-to be watches her stepfather sneak into to her little sister's room. She uses her imagination... and snaps. Or does she finally see sense?

In any event, the result is the same: her stepfather has her locked up in an exclusive asylum for virginal young women, which just so happens to double as a harem for high rollers like Don Draper from Mad Men. He's coming to do what he will with this beautiful new blood in five days, incidentally, but Baby Doll doesn't mean to take this latest cruel twist of fate lying down either. Rather, she resolves to escape this utterly corrupt institute whatever the cost, and so sets out to enlist the assistance of some other pretty young things, namely Rocket, Sweet Pea, Blondie and Amber, in exactly that order.

Which is all perfectly sensible, give or take some early incoherency. Sucker Punch only goes off the deep end when Baby Doll and her attractive associates take to shared hallucinations in order to recover five MacGuffins which will somehow enable their happily-ever-after exit to stage left: fire, a map, a knife, a key, and one other thing; a sacrifice sure to cost these dancing queens dearly.

It's all very video-gamey, needless to say. The search for mostly meaningless objects to move the plot along is rarely so thinly-veiled in film, and it's strange to see it foregrounded in this fashion. Yet I could see past that. I even reached deep and found it in myself to not gawp for altogether too long at all the skimpy fetish gear Zack Snyder's deemed it appropriate to dress up his barely post-pubescent cast in, which I gather has been quite the issue amongst many of Sucker Punch's most vociferous critics.

Leaving aside the fact that there's quite a bit of skin on show here, and there is - apologies if you came expecting some impassioned argument about the propriety of such titillation in cinema; I've seen a lot worse done a great deal less professionally - if you ask me, Sucker Punch's greatest obstacle is its own boundless ambition. Because it's not enough that it wholesales borrows all the most distinctive tropes of steampunk, science fiction and fantasy - never mind gun porn, hellish Nazi horror and the superhero movie - it also feels the need to be a bit of a musical, too; also an extravaganza of apparent girl power, a pseudo-Shakespearian tragedy, a visceral visual feast, and I could go on. That's maybe a third of all that Sucker Punch is, or aspires to be.

The thing of it is, even if fully two thirds of everything in Sucker Punch ultimately comes to nothing - and there is so much to take into account here that it would be beyond tedious were I to endeavour to do so; these broad strokes are I think in everyone's best interests - even then, there is enough left that does work, that does thrill and excite and amuse, to fill five lesser films than this, the biggest, brashest, ballsiest movie I've seen all year.

On the one hand, I couldn't wait for Sucker Punch to be over. It's absolutely exhausting, and it does go on... oh yes. On the other hand, however, I wouldn't take back the experience of seeing it, and hearing it - it's worth mentioning that the soundtrack is one of the most memorable since Underworld - for a single, solitary moment. It looks, then, fantastic; it sounds simply superb; the ensemble cast put on a solid song and dance - certainly everyone seems game for a bit of fun; Sucker Punch feels, finally... just fine.

For good or for ill, it is truly a movie like no other. Too much of one, if anything. But I wholeheartedly applaud Zack Snyder's grandiose ambition; his inimitable and impeccably rendered vision. Even if you never want to see another hint of it henceforth.

Comic Book Review | Shenzhen and Pyongyang by Guy Delisle

2011-12-20T14:10:00.005Z

This will be old news to many of you, I expect, but in my other life, I'm a teacher.

Actually, no. That's not exactly true... and thank the lord for that! Strictly speaking I'm an English tutor - I chair courses on reading and writing at a private education centre here in central Scotland - and one of the things I'm often heard to say to the high-school students in my care is that there are stories everywhere. Wherever you look, and you needn't look far, or wide, there are narratives unfolding, complete with characters, conflicts, climaxes -- really the whole kit and caboodle.

They might not be good stories by any meaningful measure, but they are true stories, and often, I find, that's enough. If in a piece of writing one of my students can capture some fleeting fragmentary truth - some glimmer of insight into how we work, or the way the world works around us - then never mind all the elementary spelling mistakes and so on and so forth; no amount of misplaced punctuation marks can take away from an honest, relatable portrayal of some feeling, or facet of our lives.

Now whether I have my teaching hat on or not, that's a sentiment I stand by whole-heartedly, so it's an odd thing - but no less a true thing - that I don't, in my spare time, consume a great deal of non-fiction. Not in any form that I can think of: not in film, not in literature, and - excepting Persepolis - certainly not in comic books. At least, not till now.

I picked up Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea almost on a whim while out looking for a couple of last-minute Christmas gifts. I read the first few pages right there in the store, and immediately found myself hungry - like one of those hippos - for more. Home again, home again, jiggety jig, I polished off Pyongyang and its successor, Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, in a wonderful, whimsical week of evenings. I'd urge anyone with an interest in comics books, or culture, to do likewise.

Guy Delisle is - or was, when he put together these "graphic memoirs" (as the blurb would have it) - a jobbing French-Candian animator. His trips to Pyongyang and then Shenzhen were for business rather than pleasure, to oversee the work of various outsourcing studios, and it's just as well, because as he illustrates, there's precious little pleasure to be taken from either of these depressing places.

Saying that, there's not a dull moment in these travelogues, and that's no mean feat, because at around 150 pages each, they're certainly not short, and Delisle spends almost his entire time abroad in complete and utter isolation. He can't speak the required languages, he's restricted to certain areas, and he's made to stay in the most appalling, anonymous hotels. Weeks go by without him talking to anyone at all, or doing anything particularly interesting, so he has to amuse himself somehow -- and us.

To that end, Delisle doesn't spend too long documenting any one thing. Both Pyongyang and Shenzhen are broken up into easily-digestible episodes, about the length of a single issue each, and though he spends the vast majority of them pontificating about what it is to exist in these cities, under their respective regimes, whether as a citizen or a visitor - riffing on this thing he heard or that incident he saw - there are also several sequences wherein he talks about his job, offering insight into and anecdotal evidence of the increasingly bleak business of animation.

These recollections are perfectly fascinating in their own right, but they also work to punctuate the more troubling aspects of life in China and the so-called axis of evil, and there are, shall we say, some very troubling aspects. In any event, Delisle has a real knack for teasing out stories wherever he goes.

Admittedly I've never read anything remotely resembling either Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea or Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, but I adored both of these books. Guy Delisle is a disarmingly frank author, and an astute cartoonist, too; these graphic novels are replete with such wit and insight, such good humour and clear-eyed observational engagement - even from afar - that I can't recommend them highly enough, whether to fans of the comic form or simply people with a passing interest in what life is (or was) like in these little-seen cities, particularly in light of the recent reports of Kim Jong-Il's death.

I've holidayed in some strange and dangerous places in my time, and though I know better than to ever say never, realistically I'm not likely to spend several months in China or North Korea myself. Guy Delisle's marvelous, Hergé-esque graphic memoirs are thus as close as I expect to get, and that's quite close enough, thank you very much.

Now, to lay hands on a copy of The Burma Chronicles as soon as humanly possible...

Book Review | The Recollection by Gareth L. Powell

2011-12-19T13:29:00.000Z

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

When his brother disappears into a bizarre gateway on a London Underground escalator, failed artist Ed Rico and his brother's wife Alice have to put aside their feelings for each other to go and find him. Their quest through the 'arches' will send them hurtling through time, to new and terrifying alien worlds.

Four hundred years in the future, Katherine Abdulov must travel to a remote planet in order to regain the trust of her influential family. The only person standing in her way is her former lover, Victor Luciano, the ruthless employee of a rival trading firm.

Hard choices lie ahead as lives and centuries clash and, in the unforgiving depths of space, an ancient evil stirs...

***

I've often bemoaned a certain lack in contemporary sf: a confusion, as I see it, of the precedence given to each of science fiction's component parts, namely the science, and the fiction. In the genre today, so far removed from the scientific romances with which it began - stories of love and adventure and discovery with just a whiff of tomorrow's world about them - the tech, nine times out of ten, takes top billing; the science overrides, or undermines, the fiction, obscuring character and narrative in favour of worldbuilding, speculation and so on.

The Recollection is the exception that proves the rule. Gareth L. Powell's second novel to see print - not including The Last Reef, his award-winning short story collection - The Recollection is fiction, first and foremost: good, old fashioned, character-driven fiction, with a neat narrative to boot... and yes, some fascinating science.

As it should be, then. As so rarely it is!

On his blog, Powell relates an encounter he had with an agent when this novel was still just a twinkle in his eye; an agent who advised Powell to give up The Recollection's ghost in order to "concentrate instead on writing something that would give him" - and this is the messed-up part - "a 'hard-on.'" This sort of perspective - not at all uncommon today, I'd add - is anecdotally symptomatic of the very problem I've been banging on about: of how the big ideas modern sf orbits have come to repel rather than attract the plight of the little guys that is at the heart of fiction as the masses understand it. The Recollection is in that sense part of the solution... though I doubt it will result in a great many erections.

Which isn't to say it's simple, or dull. In the first of the two timeframes The Recollection concerns itself with, Ed, a struggling artist, is riddled with guilt over the extra-maritals he's been having with his brother Verne's wife. Verne mightn't know the particulars of Alice's affair, but he has his suspicions, and confronts Ed about them in a cafe. The resulting squabble spills out into the street, then the subway... when out of nowhere, a great, glowing gate phases into existence, sucking poor Verne into the beckoning silence beyond.

This gate is only the first to appear of what soon seems a complex network, sprouting up the world over. "China's closed its borders," Ed explains. "Germany's gone for martial law. Everyone's scared. I even saw some troops on the streets of Hackney yesterday." (p.28) But though Ed and Alice are as terrified as anyone else, anywhere else, they're also plagued by an almighty sense of business unfinished, so when a new gate appears in Alice's back yard, practically, the guilt-ridden lovers pack a bag and venture through it... only to find they can never, ever go back. Only forward; in time, and in space.

Speaking of which, several centuries into the future, the gates are the least of anyone's worries. Humanity has long since inherited the galaxy: more people - many more people - now live off Earth than on, and our species has made friends at least one other. The Dho keep themselves to themselves, mostly, except to stress that, from the deepest, darkest reaches of the void, something is coming... something that will change everything. The Recollection is "darkness and hunger. It is a cancer gnawing at the bones of this galaxy," (p.145) which no-one and nothing can stand against.

Among those with pivotal parts to play in the conflict on the cards, Powell proffers Victor Luciano and Katherine Abdulov, star-cross'd former lovers from powerful rival families each with their own reputation to maintain. Embroiled in a bitter race with one another to the planet Djatt, where a valuable plant which only flowers every hundred years is about to bloom, Victor and Katherine are about to discover that they have unfinished business of their own to attend. That, and The Recollection, which seems to take a particular interest in Katherine.

I came to The Recollection primarily on the advice of Eric Brown, The Guardian's genre fiction reviewer and of course a prolific and much-admired author in his own right. And you know what? If I hadn't known any better - though I did and I do - I'd have believed The Recollection was his doing, too. It put me in mind of Engineman in one moment, and The Kings of Eternity - Brown's strongest novel to date - in the next. The best of both worlds, then!

But never mind me. These are - but of course they are - worlds entirely of Powell's devising. And The Recollection really is a terrific romp: fast-paced, laser-focused, and steadfastly accessible when so many of the genre's foremost proponents seem to have plotted a course in exactly the opposite direction. Bravo, Gareth L. Powell, for going against the grain!

That is not to say The Recollection is without a few minor missteps. In particular, the last act is something of an anti-climax, I'm afraid: resolution is arrived at all too conveniently, both in terms of the characters, who simply put aside their differences and pair off, and in terms of the world, which there seems much more to be said about. Come to that, the whole thing is somewhat on the slight side; more novella than novel.

But I can forgive a good book a great deal, and The Recollection is absolutely that, however modest it may be. More a space ballet than a proper opera, Powell's second is fun, energetic and emotionally very relevant... for it is a tale, above all else, of those things we leave behind. And we are always doing that, are we not? In the erstwhile, resolutely unperturbed as it is by the hard line the genre has for all intents and purposes drawn around itself, The Recollection stands as a sort of bastion of classic sf: gone... but not forgotten.

***

The Recollection

by Gareth L. Powell

UK and US Publication: September 2011, Solaris

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com

IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Show and Tell | To Me, From You

2011-12-16T13:39:00.001Z

The thing of it is, I get so many books in the mail for potential review either here on TSS or elsewhere that, truth be told, I don't need to buy very many myself... which is a shame; I used to love book browsing.

As is, there's almost always something pressing, some buzz-worthy new thing I really should review, and when on rare occasion there isn't, I look to the tower of books To Be Read. Failing even that, there's the library in the spare room. I could comfortably spend the rest of my life reading all the overlooked delights secreted in my seven no-expense-spared Billy bookcases.

To be perfectly honest, I don't know that I need ever buy a book again. But needs are slippery things at the best of times, and wants belong in a whole different department. Make no mistake: I want to go mad on Amazon, on an almost daily basis. In my experience, keeping up with the blogosphere - as I attempt to - will do that to a dude. And try as I might to stop myself, every now and again... I slip.

And sometimes you folks make it real easy for me fall off the wagon.

Take the other day, for instance. Must have been the end of the financial quarter or something, because I woke up one morning to see emails from both Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com alerting me to gift certificates to the value of about £50. Payment for purchases made in the last year through the Amazon Associate links I run under my book reviews - more, in truth, for your convenience than my possible profit.

So these monies came as something of a surprise. And what do you do with surprise money? You spend it! As I did... in all of about a half-hour after realising it existed. :)

I thought the thing to do would be to buy some of the books that I've spent 2011 ogling from afar; books I'd have loved to cover on the blog had review copies of each and every one come, and saved me from the decision to spend pennies on things I really don't need, as established.

From Amazon.com, then, I came home with these pretties:

And from Amazon.co.uk, these beauties were your surprise presents to me:

Plus postage, of course, and part of an awesome Christmas present I couldn't possibly mention here in case the other half sees it.

So I bought some books. That's the long and short of it. But rather than let this little indulgence go unmentioned, I wanted to post something here on the blog, basically to say thanks - sincerely, thank you - to everyone who's ever bought anything from either of the Amazons using the affiliate links I embed here on TSS.

Methinks Aurorarama's first up - it is such a gorgeous book - but hereabouts Guy Gavriel Kay has gotten to be a bit of a festive reading tradition, so the two parts of The Sarantine Mosaic are a sure thing, I should think, come the holidays.

Oh, it is the season to be jolly, isn't it? :)

Thank you all!

Comic Book Review | Planet of the Apes Vol. 1: The Long War

2011-12-15T14:05:00.000Z

When he's not writing tragicomic novels about the second coming of an undead messiah, or having his short story collection Unpossible described as one the year's best books, Daryl Gregory writes comic books. Damn fine comic books.

Among them, this one: the Planet of the Apes ongoing series from BOOM! Studies, which launched a little in advance of the latest film in the franchise, starring go-to dude in a suit Andy Serkis.

To be perfectly frank, I could give a monkey's uncle about the Planet of the Apes. I've seen a few of the original films, and both of the attempts in the last decade to reboot the feature series, but none of the above - excepting Andy Serkis' bravura performance as Caesar in this year's Rise of the Planet of the Apes - have managed to make me care about the mythos, such as they are. My interest in this future world, where apes either have or will one day overthrow humanity, is nominal at best.

Enter Daryl Gregory. The man's such a talent, and so unspeakably overlooked, that I've resolved to read whatever he writes from here on out, or until such a time as he releases something rubbish. On the basis of Planet of the Apes Vol. 1: The Long War, I don't see that happening anytime soon. Because where so many creators have tried and failed to convince me of the value of this to-my-mind one-note franchise, Daryl Gregory has gone and done it, be damned my disinclination.

The Long War collects the first four issues of the ongoing: a complete single story set, or so I gather, ten years after Battle for the Planet of the Apes, but before the events of the first film, which I see now was based on a book. I didn't realise! In any case, Gregory introduces us to a society somewhere between two more familiar extremes, of man versus animal in the last days or man, finally, as animal. In The Long War, the lunatics are already running the asylum, yet humans still have a place - albeit a small one - in Skintown, which is essentially a ghetto in the great ape city-state of Mak.

But when a masked assassin kills Lawgiver, one of the few remaining supporters of our lately endangered species, man and monkey stand poised on the brink of a conflict that could take away even that last refuge. Some people, like Sully - a pregnant women who the people of Skintown look to for leadership - think that everything that can be done to avoid a war and so safeguard the remains of our race should be done.

Others want the exact opposite: namely an end to the apes, or else an end to all the indignities of life not on top of the food chain, via certain death. Among this latter camp, the most vigilant are those who attend ceremonies at the Church of the Bomb - from the movies, remember? - where the investigation which Sully leads into Lawgiver's guerrilla killer begins.

The Long War is a short trade by all but the most generous of measures, yet it contains such a wealth of wonderful world-building and narrative know-how that you'd be forgiven for thinking it twice the length it stands at, which is to say a scant 112 pages. Gregory pulls no punches, either; the mysterious monkey-murderer is unmasked in the approach to the last act, and the plot moves on substantially thereafter. Dense, descriptive language gives the text a real sense of momentum, and a clarity that is altogether too rare in comics. Last but not least, a second (somewhat shocking) death quite suffices to get one's blood pumping for volume two, due from BOOM! Studios in May of 2012.

And there's can be no understating the part artist Carlos Magno plays in the success of this this initial collection. His pencils are perhaps a touch too grainy for my tastes, all fine lines and minute detail, leaving little for the imagination to play with, but they set the scene sumptuously - building the world as much as any amount of words would work to - and many of Magno's spreads are quite simply magnificent.

Somewhat to my surprise, then, The Long War gets this latest take on the Planet of the Apes off to an excellent start. For the first time in my life, thanks in equal part to Daryl Gregory and former Transformers artist Carlos Magno, I can't wait to see what's next from this franchise.

That is to say, this comic book franchise. The movies... meh.

Film Review | The Thing, dir. Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.

2011-12-13T14:44:00.001Z

What an odd thing The Thing is.

All year long - further back than even that, in fact - I've been hoping that The Thing would be worth the wait, and the weight of my anticipation, as opposed to being some dreadful pretender to the throne I like to think the original film sits upon. It's personal preference in part, but I'm of the mind that the 1982 adaptation of John W. Campbell's Who Goes There? chronicled John Carpenter at the utmost peak of his powers, Halloween be damned; it is certainly the film of his that I've returned to most often, and if it doesn't all hold up today, then it's a testament to its essential greatness that so very much of it still does, thirty-odd years on.

So when news of this remake first broke, rather an age ago now, I was in two minds. Of all the classics that could do with a good updating, I could conceive of few worthier candidates than The Thing. On the other hand, how many of these modern-day takes on the good old horror movies of yore have truly had any business existing? Would The Thing be another in the long line of cold-blooded cash-grabs Hollywood is responsible for, or something more meaningful?

Well, as it happens, it's kind of both of those things. Both... and neither.

The Thing begins with Mary Elizabeth Winstead's new character, Kate Lloyd, a scientist specialising in the recovery of ancient remains. At the outset she's approached by the man in charge of an Antarctic research facility where, as Dr. Sander Halvorson explains, both a specimen and a structure have been found deep beneath the ice, many centuries old and largely intact. He senses a discovery that could change the way we see the world forever after, and asks Kate for her help.

She goes. Of course she goes! But things take a dark turn almost immediately after her arrival. There's an almighty storm coming in, and the Norwegian base is about to be completely cut off from the rest of the world. And then the specimen, safely extracted and awaiting a proper postmortem, goes missing. The only witness to its inexplicable disappearance claims to have seen a monster erupt from the ice... but that cannot be, can it?

We know what comes next: an alien that can replicate the shape of anyone it absorbs, in hiding amongst the scientists at this increasingly isolated camp. Paranoia follows. Tension rattling like a pot too long on the stove. There will be blood, more bodies than you can keep track of, and uncertainty on the fringes of every decision.

Oddly, what follows on from this new beginning to The Thing is a middle third lifted practically like-for-like from Carpenter's revered film; almost an hour of the same situations and the very same scares that fans of the original will be intimately familiar with. For the longest time there are no surprises at all, except for the thing itself, which the director recasts as - of all things - a spaghetti monster.

And then The Thing takes another turn, because its ending is original too, and very well done indeed. In fact it ties in wonderfully with the premise of Carpenter's masterful film, paying homage to both old and new in the same moment.

The thing about The Thing is, it can't seem to decide whether it's one thing or the other: a remake, or a prequel. It can't very well be both - there's really not so much to this story, at the end of the day - but god love it, it tries ever so hard to do just that... to serve two or more masters, and in the attempt, it only disappoints both.

Saying that, it fails neither entirely. The Thing inherits a great many of the original film's most potent moments, and short the spaghetti monster's all too frequent appearances, they are as effective now as they ever were. The Thing also serves to embellish the preexisting mythos with a few neat new kinks; it takes some unexpected turns here and there, smart twists that dovetail nicely with what we imagine may or may not have happened to the Norwegian crew. We learn more about how the thing got here, how it was awoken, and what it wants.

However absorbing all this is - and at times it absolutely is absorbing, particularly when it diverges from Carpenter's narrative - there's no getting away from the fact that if you're in the least familiar with the original film, you'll find the larger part of this iteration of The Thing a needless retread.

Sadly, sandwiched squarely between the old and the new, the fresh and the over-familiar, The Thing seems second-hand at best. But it's been well kept, I'll give it that. Newcomer Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. equips himself remarkably given the limitations of the script, and in the lead role Mary Elizabeth Winstead is suitably serious. The Thing isn't all it could have been, then, but it's enough - just - to warrant a watch.

The Scotsman Abroad | Twelve for 2012

2011-12-12T14:17:00.116Z

So do you folks read The Book Smugglers' blog?

If not, why not?

Ana and Thea are just such lovely sorts that I've found it impossible not to follow their regular adventures in the land of literature. Truth be told, half of what they cover over there is a little outside of my usual ball-park, but that's half the fun! Were it not for Ana and Thea's perceptive and refreshingly frank perspectives, I'd have missed out on any number of novels I wouldn't otherwise have looked twice at.

Now Top of the Scots is all well and good - I put a lot of work into it, yet I am, alas, only one man - but I'll gladly go on record and say no-one does the whole year-end celebration like The Book Smugglers do. Their Smugglivus runs all month long, and it sees contributions from almost every corner of the book blogging community.

I only say almost because before now, there was no me!

Well now there's me. :D

It was an incredible pleasure to be invited to take part in Smugglivus - an honour and a privilege, hand on heart - so I put my thinking cap on and considered what the most awesome thing I could contribute would be.

Given that I've announced my favourite books of the year already, I thought: why not talk some about what's to come? Then, coincidentally - or not - The Book Smugglers slotted me in for today, the twelfth day of the twelfth month. Things came together from there.

But enough of my burbling. It gives me tremendous pleasure to point you in the general direction of my contribution to Smugglivus, wherein I look at twelve of the books set to be published in the year 2012 that I'm most excited to see.

Some of the highlights include Sharps, Railsea and A Red Country... though I realise now that I totally neglected to mention The Twelve by Justin Cronin - that is to say the sequel to The Passage - which would have been a perfect fit, wouldn't it?

Ah well. You'll just have to make do!

All told, though, it's looking like it'll be a fine year, don't you think?

As ever, I'm sure I'm missing approximately a million things, so please do fill me in, folks: what books are you most eagerly anticipating?

Top of the Scots 2011 | The Best of the Best of the Best

2011-12-10T14:00:00.001Z

So there you have it, everyone.

The best books... the best movies... and the best games.

Of the year. According to me. And you know me, don't you?

It's been a bit surreal, doing this for the second time. When I first sat down to write a review of Tigana, almost two years ago to the day now - for you newcomers, that's here, by the by - I did not think blogging would come to be such a huge part of my life. I certainly wouldn't have believed you if you had told me I'd be doing this two years on, and doing it more than ever.

I'm still not entirely convinced that I am.

But here we are, hey?

And it's been fun! Indeed, it continues to be fun. And I ain't going anyplace just yet -- though there will be some changes to TSS in 2012. Better formatting for one thing, whether that means I move the site over to another service or see if Live Writer can solve all my problems in one fell swoop. We can only hope.

Anyway, with that ever-so-slight digression, Top of the Scots is almost over, till next year.

Almost... but not quite!

See, this is the part where I troop out the best of The Best of the Best for one last hurrah, or in case you missed 'em the first time out. Our three overall winners, then - in books, movies and video games - are as follows.

The Best Book of 2011

The Best Movie of 2011

The Best Game of 2011

Though you couldn't go wrong with the runners-up, either, or any of my selections, come to that... except perhaps a few of the movies I had to make do with. But let's not get into that again.

So if you play one video game this year, let it be Portal 2. For PotatOS! In space!

If you watch one movie, meanwhile, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 marked the end of an era, and it marked it, if I may say so, very well indeed.

As to books? Well that's what I'm here for, first and foremost - let's not beat around the burning bush as to my priorities - and if you take just one of the many, many recommendations I've made in 2011 to heart, let it be this: K. J. Parker is amazing.

Read The Hammer. Weep, if you must. Then come back to me and let me know how you found it. It's an incredible piece of standalone fantasy fiction, to my mind, and the more folks I can turn on to K. J. Parker, the better.

Right then. That's it.

Or -- wait, is it?

Actually, no. Not even now, because now that I've shown you mine, you have to show me yours, folks! It's the law around these here parts... or so the policeman told me. :/

And now that we're done talking about 2011, or we near-as-dammit are, next on the agenda: 2012!

For a taste of what's to come, please do pop back on Monday, when I'll be pointing you in the general direction of a long blog about my most anticipated books of the year ahead.

Gosh, it never stops, does it?

Well, I wouldn't have it any other way!

Top of the Scots 2011 | The Best Books

2011-12-09T14:30:00.001Z

You know, I love me my video games. And my movies too... if a little less this year than I have in the past, as I was saying on Wednesday.

But I'm first and foremost a reader. I read every night, and most days, too, if I can nab 10 minutes here or a half-hour there; in fact - fancy that! - for the first time in my entire life, I broke the 100 books barrier this year, and that isn't even counting comics.

Now I haven't reviewed every last one of the books I've read, but I've gone on record with my thoughts on more of them than not. So that's something to be proud of.

In any event, if I have a reputation around the blogosphere - and I like to think I've a wee one - it's as a book reviewer. And at this stage, before Hurricane Bawbag comes around for another pass, I've probably kept you in suspense as to my favourite reads of the read quite long enough.

Without any further ado, then, I give you...

The Best of the Best

5. Little Star
by John Ajvide Lindqvist

I was as surprised as anyone when it was pointed out that horror novels rather ruled the roost in my selection of The Best Books of 2010, so I had it in my head to decide on a more diverse representation of the year's foremost fictions in this second edition of Top of the Scots.

Turns out I needn't have worried. I read at least as much horror in 2011 as I did in 2010, if not substantially more, and though there were many highlights, only Little Star, I think, by John Ajvide Lindqvist, can stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the year's best.

It's incredibly powerful stuff.

And you know, it's pretty hard going. Harrowing and horrifying in the purest sense of the word. I wouldn't recommend Little Star to everyone, not even to all those folks who've read Lindqvist before - probably by way of his incredible debut Let the Right One In - but if you're willing to be disturbed, this tale of two sisters of sorts who finally find themselves in one another is utterly unforgettable, and ultimately as beautiful as it is twisted.

No other horror novel released in 2011 can hold a damn candle to it.

For more on Little Star, read the full review here.

4. Embassytown
by China Mieville

Did you think I'd pick this as my favourite book of 2011?

Well for a minute there, I did too.

Never mind that the man's hard to read on a good day - in a good way, needless to say - Embassytown is surely the most demanding tale award-gobbler China Mieville has told to date. But once you get into the swing of it, it's simply magnificent: a rumination on the power of language by one of our generations most persuasive wordsmiths, via the stuff of hard sf.

Here's some of what someone wrote in some review somewhere:

"For a book about the Word, whatever the word is, or was, or will be, it is ineffably apposite that Embassytown leaves one quite without the words to describe it, far less do this stupendous thing justice. Certainly, lovers of lovely language will love the languid language of Mieville's loveliest text to date, and though in the beginning the narrative is difficult to grasp, far less to parse, there is such light at the end of Embassytown's darkness: pools of pure illumination, brilliant and utterly unfettered."

Couldn't have put it better myself! :P

Anyway, that's why Embassytown is my favourite science-fiction book of the year.

But it's only my fourth favourite novel of 2011 overall. What could have possibly dethroned it?

Well, for one thing...

3. Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti
by Genevieve Valentine

Here I was beginning to think - after The Bookman and Camera Obscura by Lavie Tidhar, Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century novels, and a handful of others I can't even remember - that for all its apparent outward appeal, steampunk simply wasn't for me.

Then along came Mechanique, a book about a traveling troupe of steam-powered people - by an author I'd never read before, no less - to show me just how wrong I was.

Excerpted from the full review:

"Whether Mechanique is a collection of loosely connected episodes in the life and times of a traveling circus and its oddment of performers, or a single story with a fistful of distinct threads enmeshed together, I would argue it matters little. And there can be no disputing that the ringside seats Valentine arranges for us around this unforgettable parade of 'clockwork coquettes' and strongman machines are a marvel. We are so close to the action as to scent the mingled stink of sweat and sawdust and sweet treats in the air; to hear 'the sound of feathers singing' as every bone in the wings sewn to the spine of Alec the flying man arrives at an impossible harmony; to gape up at and around and through every last incredible act, as if we were ourselves a part of them.

"Truly, madly, deeply, readers: this first full-length Tale of the Circus Tresaulti moved me immeasurably. Here's to many more where it came from -- which is to say, from the mind of one of the most promising new voices in all genre fiction. I haven't been so excited about a second novel since discovering Catherynne M. Valente; that for her first Genevieve Valentine has conjured such a masterpiece of measure and imagination as this - the performance of a lifetime! - speaks volumes as to why I may finally have fallen for steampunk."

Saying that, I haven't loved any steampunk since I read Mechanique, almost half a year ago, so perhaps I only fell for Genevieve Valentine. Hmm.

Whatever the case: read this, readers.

2. The Tiger's Wife

by Tea Obreht

I very nearly missed out on The Tiger's Wife entirely.

I remember hearing some lovely, lovely things about it around its release window in the spring, but for one reason or another - I was probably just swamped at the time - I didn't seek it out, and then I basically forgot it existed. More fool me.

Then last month, when I began the great catch-up, I asked you all for recommendations, and a couple of commenters mentioned The Tiger's Wife.

To those folks - you know who you are! - I say, sincerely: thank you.

I haven't reviewed The Tiger's Wife yet, so let me ad-lib a little here: not since Life of Pi have I been so in awe of a new purveyor of literary fiction as I am by Tea Obreht. Incredibly, she's only in her mid-20s... and perhaps that's one of the reasons why The Tiger's Wife is so stunning. But it's very far from the only reason.

If, like I, you overlooked The Tiger's Wife at the time of its publication, don't feel too terrible. But do take my advice, and give it a chance. This is that rarest of things: a book that not only meets but exceeds the hype.

Stay tuned to The Speculative Scotsman over the holidays for a proper review of Tea Obreht's award-winning debut in the fullness of time.

But first, behold: my book of the year...

1. The Hammer

by K. J. Parker

Have I said before how criminal it is that K. J. Parker isn't more widely appreciated?

I tend to think I have... time and again at that. But maybe I haven't quite gotten across just how much I appreciate - no, adore - his or her work.

This is how much.

No other novel has held me, thrilled me, kissed me or killed me in quite the way The Hammer did, way back when I read it at the beginning of 2011.

The review I wrote at the time says it better than I could now, nearly a year out:

"I expected The Hammer to be a pleasant diversion: smart and fun and unfussy... you know the like. And it is all those things, indeed it is - par for the K. J. Parker course - but what the secretive author has proffered up here is so much more satisfying, so much more profound, than that and that alone. From least to most, then, this stunning standalone fantasy is a chronicle of the re-invention of industry - the particulars of which are fascination themselves; it's a many-faceted rumination on the point and the price of justice (a subject presumably so close to Parker's literary heart because of her and her partner's profession in the pursuit of said); and it is a provocative portrait, last and not least, of a character so complex and conflicted, so dark and somehow endearing, few are likely to rival Gignomai Met'Oc until Parker tops him herself, whenever the next of her novels rolls around."

That is to say Sharps, due in July. The wait for it has already been horrendous, and I aim to remedy that over the holidays by digging into Parker's back-catalogue a bit.

In the interim, if you haven't already read The Hammer, well... you have your marching orders. It is, in my humble opinion, the single best book of the year.

On the other hand, one of my favourite book reviewers just slated it. K. J. Parker is an acquired taste, make no mistake, and perhaps the more of his or her work you read, the less surprising it is; there's absolutely something to that argument.

But this is neither the time nor the place to start second-guessing myself, and if you ask me, there's no better place to start reading K. J. Parker than here. Period.

Runners-Up

I was lucky enough to lay hands on an ARC of The Heroes a good few months before it came out in January, so I actually read Joe Abercrombie's latest in 2010 rather than this year. It's a testament to its greatness, then, that more than a year later I remember it as well - and as fondly - as if I'd been reading it yesterday. This guy gets better with every book. Roll on A Red Country!

Also narrowly missing out on a place amongst the final five discussed above, my first - but assuredly not my last - Daryl Gregory novel: Raising Stony Mayhall, a terrific and touching coming-of-age comedy set in the wake of a stymied zombie apocalypse. Probably the most pure, unadulterated fun I've had with any narrative in 2011.

I also adored The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow, but that got a shout-out in Top of the Scots 2010, and it feels a little cheeky to feature it again, so I've opted not to, other than this. But it's brilliant.

For more on The Heroes, read the full review here. Meanwhile, here's what I wrote about Raising Stony Mayhall.

Honourable Mentions

Have you ever accidentally read a whole book before?

As I recall it was late one night. Dark and quiet; well after midnight, knowing me. I'd just finished the book I'd been reading for the last little while... but I wasn't quite ready for lights out just yet. So there I was, browsing quite exitedly through all the ebooks I have on my tablet, thinking What am I going to read next? when all of a sudden, I was reading Room.

Five or six hours later, the sun was coming up, and I was getting dressed to go get milk for the coffee that had been keeping me going!

Room is not a perfect novel - the second half is a bit preachy, and many leagues less powerful then the first - but still. What a concept. And what execution! Tremendous. If it had only come out in 2011!

Meanwhile The Weird. I'm hoping to put some sort of review of The Weird together over Christmas. Which isn't to say I'm finished with it. Far from it, truth be told, but there comes a time when one can safely say yes, this monolithic thing is magnificent - with enough weird within to last you a lifetime - and it is, and it has. Every genre fiction fan should have a copy of this compendium.

For more on Room, read the full review here. And keep your peepers pointed at The Speculative Scotsman over the holidays for a... a something about The Weird.

Biggest Disappointment

If there's one book from the last year that's emerged as something of an awards favourite, it's got to be Blackout. Or rather, Blackout and All Clear, Connie Willis' celebrated speculative account of the Second World War. But I've only read the first vast volume so far... and - I'm sorry - but no.

In its own right, Blackout is not a good book. Never mind that it doesn't end - it doesn't, though in certain sense that's to be expected - my issue with Blackout is that it's simply a lot of faffing. Of Blackout's 600 pages, maybe 400 are devoted to setting the scene in minute, excruciating detail, even. Then there's the meaningless dialogue, the characters who aren't very interesting to begin with...

I could go on, as Connie Willis seems determined to. But for all that Blackout is an almighty disappointment, it's worth remembering that it's only the first half of a much larger narrative, and presumably the good stuff is coming in All Clear. Or else what were all those awards committees thinking?

As is my curse, I've started this story, so now I'll have to finish it - thus, you can expect reviews of Blackout and All Clear in early 2012 - but I'm in no huge hurry to do so. Nor, I dare say, is the author.

Glaring Oversights

For all that I have read in 2011, the mind boggles at the thought of everything I haven't.

These two books are just the tip of the iceberg, of course. I don't feel so awful about The Wise Man's Fear, but Swamplandia! sounded simply terrific, and I wish I had had the time to get to it before putting this list together.

But such is life! And I suppose books don't suddenly cease to exist if you miss them the year they come out... though if you follow the blogosphere, you'd be forgiven, I think, for thinking that's the case.

Final Thoughts

And with that bit of seasonal snark, Top of the Scots is over! For another year! Almost!

It's been a pretty good year, all told. I mean, in books, absolutely - and in video games too... though good movies have been few and far between, that I've seen. Maybe they're all coming out after Christmas, the better to be timely when the Oscars roll around?

Well whatever. Otherwise, 2011 has been pretty swell - and in life, as in literature. With my making regular contributions to Tor.com, Strange Horizons and Starburst Magazine, and actually earning a little for my efforts, I've never been busier, or happier to be doing what I do.

But what about you guys and gals? What have some of your favourite - and your least favourite - books of 2011 been?

And besides the books, how has the year treated you?

Top of the Scots 2011 | The Best Movies

2011-12-07T14:00:00.460Z

Maybe I'll find myself in the minority, admitting this, but for me at least, 2011 has been kind of a lean year in terms of good movies.

One of two things is happening here, I think: either I've managed to miss most of the good stuff, which is entirely possible, or the year in film has just been a bit shit.

I'd plump for the latter as an explanation for the moderately disappointing selection on show below... but then, I would, wouldn't I?

See for yourself!

The Best of the Best

5. Paranormal Activity 3
dir. Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!

Now I didn't love Paranormal Activity 2, but I certainly didn't despise it like so many cynical movie critics did either. My expectations for Paranormal Activity 3, then, were mild to moderate. Neither massive nor marginal: I imagined it would be perfectly serviceable, and that would have suited me just fine, in much the same way as the SAW movies did.

Colour me the colour of surprise when it turned out Paranormal Activity 3 was actually pretty damned terrifying. It's far from the smartest film on the block - narratively there's not a whole lot to it, and it ends, I'm sorry, terribly - but for all the thrills and chills of the fan camera, and the excruciating Bloody Mary moment in the bathroom a little later on, Paranormal Activity 3 deserves its place on the lower end of this list. In every sense.

For more on Paranormal Activity 3, read the full review here.

4. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

dir. Rupert Wyatt

I only sat down with Rise of the Planet of the Apes over the weekend there, and I'm somewhat wary of awarding it a place in The Best of the Best today, because while my thoughts on it have yet to completely coalesce, even now I'm not convinced that it is, all things considered, a particularly terrific film.

So why's it here?

Andy Serkis is why.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes may have its fair share of silliness, bad acting, poor pacing, and plot holes big enough for entire other narratives to fall through, but even if it's not great genre cinema in the final summation, what it is is a film oriented around a single great performance. And what a performance it is!

Somebody needs to give Andy Serkis an Oscar already. The man has almost single-handedly made the case for motion-capture in the movies today, and never has his work been better, or better rendered, than in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

That's right: I'm saying Caesar is more awesome than Gollum. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is well worth seeing for Andy Serkis' affecting central role alone. There are other reasons to watch this movie too, but never mind them for the moment.

As established, Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a last-minute addition to this list, so there's no review for me to link you to -- but I will be writing about it here on TSS in the not too distant, so do stay tuned.

3. The Woman
dir. Lucky McKee

As established - never more clearly than in the best books bit of Top of the Scots last year - I have a bit of a fondness for horror, in film at least as much as in literature. Hence, I guess, the presence of Paranormal Activity 3 on this list, which I expect will earn me a few raised eyebrows... maybe even a proper sneer or two!

But while you may argue I'm giving Paranormal Activity 3 more credit than it's due - what can I say? The pickings have been pretty slim this year - let me say in no uncertain terms that The Woman is a great deal better... and a great deal harder to watch. It's a deeply disturbing portrait of a family living in fear of a husband and father with fire in his eyes, and evil in his heart. It's about what becomes of them when dear Daddy captures a wild woman from the forest, and decides, in his infinite, awful wisdom, to "civilise" her.

The Woman isn't perfect, but it is - and it is easily - the best horror movie I've seen in 2011. With Lucky McGee at long last unleashed, by gum, he's only gone and come good!

For more on The Woman, read the full review here.

2. Drive
dir. Nicholas Winding Refn

Though I have been known to, uh... to digress from time to time, we shall say, Drive isn't the sort of film I have any business banging on about here on TSS, where by and large I try to talk about speculative fiction. Hence the complete and total lack of a review of this film to date. Doesn't matter how hard I stretch the definition, Drive isn't in the least speculative.

Saying that, I did review director Nicholas Winding Refn's last film before this: Valhalla Rising, a stunning, shocking, superlative piece of work. You can read that piece here, but in short, I was blown away by it.

Well, Drive is miles better than Valhalla Rising.

Never mind the best horror film, or the best superhero movie: Drive is the best film, full stop, of 2011. It's about a wheelman on the run from a job gone wrong who falls in love with Carey Mulligan, because it's hard not to, and it is, quite simply, brilliant.

So you must be wondering: why's it in second place?

Why indeed. Well, it's complicated. This was one of the harder decisions I had to make, in putting together a list like this. But though Drive is assuredly a purer, more impactful, more artistic vision than our grand-prize winner, the latter's larger legacy is such that I couldn't stand to see it in second place, not with everything that it's meant to me, through the years.

What am I talking about?

Well, there's no sense keeping you in suspense...

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
dir. David Yates

"It all ends."

So goes the poster for the second part of the adaptation Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows I've posted. And indeed, it does.

I don't know that I completely believe we'll never hear from Harry Potter again - though more likely it'll be his kids we learn about rather than old man Harry - but say we never did: I'd be great with that. Really, great.

Earlier this year, my other half and I spent a couple of months re-watching all the Harry Potter movies, from the very first film on though the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which neither of us had managed to see at the cinema. When it was over, and it took us a while, I'll admit - a few of those movies are pretty darned tiresome the first time, never mind the third - I was well and truly ready to put this franchise to bed. For once and for all.

So off to the movies we went; not on opening night, but near enough that I had no idea what sort of critical consensus had emerged.

Perhaps Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 has its detractors, now more than ever I would wager, but for my part, I don't believe the story of Harry Potter, of Hogwarts and Hermione and Hagrid and so on - and there are so many things I could go on about - I don't believe it could have ended any better.

Now it's not quite the artistic marvel that is Drive, or the sort of cerebral cinematic sucker punch that The Woman was, but to be perfectly honest, it's not far off either of those things, and for what is when you cut through all the bullshit a bit of a kids' film, that's a hell of a thing in and of itself. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 marked the most meaningful experience I had at the movies in 2011, and that's why I'm declaring it my favourite film of the year.

Runners-Up

Whereas "mild to moderate" was the most exciting way I could think to describe my expectations of Paranormal Activity 3, at least I could put them into words. X-Men: First Class, however, had me at loggerheads with myself.

On the one hand, the thought of yet another X-Men movie after Brett Ratner's predictably empty-headed turn in the director's chair did not sit well with me, because this was a franchise I gave a crap about, and to see it despoiled yet again would have broken my heart a bit. The flip-side of the coin was: Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn, together again - as a writer and director duo - as they should be.

In the end, I think X-Men: First Class turned out pretty well. Certainly it was the strongest superhero movie of the year, and if it's a ways away from a place in my Hall of Fame - alongside The Dark Knight and Spider-man 2 of course - and still somewhat removed from the heights Goldman and Vaughn have hit before, which is to say by way of Stardust, then nevertheless, it's easily the best thing to have happened to the X-Men since Bryan Singer.

I can't wait to see what's next for my favourite mutants.

Honourable Mentions

Had I seen Black Swan when it was released in theaters in late 2010, it'd have come near-as-damn-it to knocking Shutter Island off of the top spot the last time we did this thing. As is, though I only saw it this year, I can't quite justify slapping Black Swan in with this year's crop proper, so it'll have to make do with an honourable mention.

A very honourable mention. After all, it is a thing a black and bitter beauty. I don't know that either Darren Aronofsky or Natalie Portman has ever been better, and they are a man and a woman of many talents.

Before you ask: no, I'm not being dirty.

Oh, and Never Let Me Go was pretty good too. But again, it came out in 2010.

Better late than never, however!

For more on Black Swan, read the full review here. And here's what I wrote about Never Let Me Go.

Biggest Disappointments

Here we have two movies that disappointed me in quite different ways. Red State was more of a personal disappointment than Thor; I don't know that anyone except me had high hopes for the latest from the filmmaker that brought us such cinematic marvels as Cop Out and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, but I've been a Kevin Smith fan for a long time, and not till this abysmal mess did I learn my lesson.

Thor, on the other hand, is actually a pretty decent movie. Which is to say, I had a decent time with it. For one thing: Natalie Portman. For another: fun. It's only here in the Biggest Disappointments section of Top of the Scots 2011 because so many critics insisted it was the second coming of the sort of superhero movie Iron Man exemplified, and it most certainly was not.

For more on Thor, I'd invite you to read the full review here. Meanwhile, here's what I thought about Red State.

Glaring Oversights

Here are just two of the movies I've managed to miss this year!

Or rather: here are two of the movies I had high enough hopes for that they might have played some part in Top of the Scots 2011 if I'd only seen them before sitting down to put this thing together.

And... breathe.

Super 8 I full well expect to be tremendous. I've rarely come away from a J. J. Abrahms movie anything less than satisfied, up to and including Mission: Impossible III, and this one in particular sounded lovely. Nor does the Steven Spielberg connection hurt. I aim to watch Super 8 shortly.

As to The Tree of Life... truth be told, who knows? Terrence Malick is of course a masterful filmmaker. I understand that, but his films have left me completely cold as often as they've bowled me over. I like Brad Pitt. I kind of despise Sean Penn. So we'll see.

Again, I mean to watch The Tree of Life at some point over the holidays, so keep your eyes peeled for reviews of it and Super 8 if and when I do.

Final Thoughts

Though there have been a few highlights - a gem here and a shiny surprise there - other than the films I've listed, and perhaps a couple of new releases that I've contrived to forget about altogether, meh all over this year at the movies.

To say it's been a quiet one is putting it politely, don't you think?

Please do correct me if I'm wrong. It's happened before!

So what have your favourite movies of the year been, folks? And what about your biggest disappointments?

Remember, sharing is caring. :)