Book Review | Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

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Humanity has colonized the solar system - Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond - but the stars are still out of our reach.

Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, The Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for - and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to The Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations - and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.

***

You know what the first thing I wanted to do was, when I finished reading book one of The Expanse? Read book two of The Expanse. And mayhap the third after that. You set 'em up, Orbit, and I'll knock 'em down!

Truly, I could not get enough of Leviathan Wakes. To be perfectly frank, I'm not the biggest SF fan - though equally I suppose I am far from the smallest - yet this masterful collaboration checked off every one of my marks, before proceeding to tear right through the census. Were it not for Embassytown, and the months of new genre releases still stretched out before me, I'd declare it the best science fiction novel of 2011 right now and call it a day. Furthermore, much as I love my Mieville - and I love my Mieville - in terms of pure, unadulterated fun, Leviathan Wakes would handily take the cake come that particular cage match.

But apples and oranges: after all, Leviathan Wakes is sprung from a very different oeuvre of SF than Embassytown, with its towering intelligence and its inextricably literary smarts, might be said to signify. It is, as per George R. R. Martin's bang-on three word blurb, "Kickass space opera." Well, quite. Consider my ass kicked black and blue.

The first thing you need to know about Leviathan Wakes - that is to say the first thing after it's awesome - is that it is very much a book of twos. That it comes from the pseudonymous pen of two distinct writers - namely Daniel Abraham, author of The Long Price quartet and of late The Dragon's Path, and Ty Franck, assistant to the man and the mind behind A Song of Ice and Fire - two distinct writers working together for the first time, no less, is only the beginning of its duality. Yet it factors.

Rather more notable, and I would assert not unrelated to that precursory split, is the twofold division in its narration, for through its slightly bloated course Leviathan Wakes alternates between chapters told from the perspective of two men, worlds apart in space and purpose. For years, XO Jim Holden has been doing laps around the solar system, which humanity has long since colonised as of the start of The Expanse. But his half-cocked career hauling glaciers from asteroid to planet and back comes to a shocking conclusion when his ship, the Canterbury, is killed. Whether Holden and his close-knit skeleton crew survived the devastation by accident or design remains to be seen, but determined to do The Right Thing, he broadcasts evidence of the unprovoked attack on the hauler far and wide.

So begins the First Solar War.

In fairness to Holden, the self-righteous so-and-so, it's been a long time coming. Practically since mankind took to the stars, there has been a certain tension between those folks who call Earth and its immediate surroundings home, and the Belters, who hail from the Outer Planets, where life is nasty, brutish and short. On Ceres Station, through which flows "a river of wealth and power unrivalled in human history," doggone Detective Joe Miller provides a perspective in ideological opposition to Holden's; he's a glass half empty sort of guy, while the XO's cup is always full. Miller is too well placed to see the effects of Holden's unwitting declaration of war, because from the moment of his address, tensions between the Earthers and Belters on Ceres - already near boiling point - suddenly erupt.

It's all Miller can do to keep the fragile peace as "the great, implacable clockwork of war ticked one step closer to open fighting," so when his chief dumps a kidnap job on the bitter old detective, he thinks little of it. Yet through it all, it is the disappearance of Julie Mao - the rebellious daughter of one of Ceres Station's security force's biggest financial backers - that plays uppermost on Miller's mind. Then, when open conflict ultimately comes, and the detective is promptly divested of his position, it is her trail he follows... and it leads him all the way to Holden, and his merry band of intergalactic idealists.

So it is that two become one, and Leviathan Wakes at last takes to the stars. I'll admit I had my reservations about this collaboration beforehand - the self-same trepidatiousness with which I approach all such works - and though a truly gripping pre-credits tease did a great deal to dissuade them, as the first book of The Expanse wore on, the narrative's stark duality began to jar. Clearly one perspective was written by one author, my head said, and the other by another; as fine a way as any to divide collaborations, so far as it goes, but initially it felt as if I were reading a pair of discrete tales spliced into one peculiar-looking entity.

That's as may be, but rest assured: when Leviathan Wakes finally comes together, by the dead does it come together. In fact I dare say it's a moment made all the more powerful because of the time it takes for Franck and Abraham to enmesh as authors.

When the season to celebrate the year's most singular literary feats arrives, I very much doubt Leviathan Wakes will be deemed a contender. More's the pity, for short a slight sag in the middle and the air of disparity inherent in most collaborative works, it makes for terrific science fiction. That is to say terrific "working man's science fiction," as Corey notes in the incisive interview supplementing the value-packed e-book edition - and snobbery is as snobbery does, so do not expect the Nebulas to take note.

Doesn't mean you and I shouldn't sit up straight in our chairs and devote our collective attention, because the first book of The Expanse boasts some of the most thrilling action in recent memory, and a world - nay, a universe! - brilliantly built yet not overdesigned, courtesy a minimalist aesthetic which rings all too true. It features a cast of characters which, however archetypal, make for fine, fun company; a pace that rarely flags; and moments of excruciating tension, and skin-crawling horror to boot.

If Leviathan Wakes is not particularly thoughtful SF, then it is the perfect reminder that sometimes... sometimes it's nice to turn down the power, and let someone else do the heavy lifting for you. In that regard, I put to you that the entity James S. A. Corey could hold the very universe on its shoulders.

***

Leviathan Wakes

by James S. A. Corey

UK & US Publication: June 2011, Orbit

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Book Review | Cowboys and Aliens by Joan D. Vinge

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1875, New Mexico Territory.

A stranger with no memory of his past stumbles into the hard desert town of Absolution. The only hint to his history is a mysterious shackle that encircles one wrist. What he discovers is that the people of Absolution don't welcome strangers, and nobody makes a move on its streets unless ordered to do so by the iron-fisted Colonel Dolarhyde. It's a town that lives in fear.

But Absolution is about to experience fear it can scarcely comprehend as the desolate city is attacked by marauders from the sky. Screaming down with breath-taking velocity and blinding lights to abduct the helpless one by one, these monsters challenge everything the residents have ever known.

Now, the stranger they rejected is their only hope for salvation. As this gunslinger slowly starts to remember who he is and where he's been, he realizes he holds a secret that could give the town a fighting chance against the alien force. With the help of the elusive traveller Ella, he pulls together a posse comprised of former opponents - townsfolk, Dolarhyde and his boys, outlaws and Apache warriors - all in danger of annihilation. United against a common enemy, they will prepare for an epic showdown for survival.

***

I don't tend to read terribly many novelisations.

In my admittedly limited experience, those novelisations I have read have been tolerable at best, and at worst... well, there's no need to be rude. But something about Joan D. Vinge's adaptation of the script for Cowboys & Aliens - originally written by far too many people to list here, but numbering among them Fringe show-runners Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, as well as Damon Lindelof of Lost fame - something about the Cowboys & Aliens novelisation spoke to me of promise. Vinge, after all, though absent the genre and in fact the fiction industry entire since Tangled Up In Blue came out in the year 2000, because of an horrific accident, is a Hugo award-winning novelist, and fondly remembered by many for The Snow Queen, her take on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale which took the trophy home twenty years before the new millennium.

Passing strange, then, that Vinge would opt to tie her return to an adaptation of a speculative Summer blockbuster; passing strange, but only that, thankfully, because though I haven't as yet caught the movie proper, having been with Jake and Ella all the way through to their last hurrah courtesy this very graceful novelisation, it's easy enough to see the attraction of what is in short a rollicking good example of action-oriented sf.

Do I really need to tell you what Cowboys & Aliens is about? Well, no, probably not. But having followed the film's development from the early stages on through its recent release, it still took half of Vinge's novel for the penny to finally drop -- that Cowboys & Aliens isn't just a random pairing of things, a la Snakes on a Plane or some other such silliness, but a play on cowboys and Indians, the children's game... of course!

Cowboys & Aliens stands thus as a neat inversion of the balance of power, a reversal of roles which casts the cowboys are prey rather than predator. As Jake - he isn't a mysterious stranger for long - puts it: "The whole damned United States had nearly killed itself over the right to own someone else's life, back in the War. And now demons were trying to claim this piece of Hell. It made as much sense to him as anything else. Maybe more." (p.173)

Jake is the lone ranger of the piece; a gunslinger wanted dead or alive, but for what? Well he can't rightly recall, and in point of fact we're as in the dark as he, because the book opens on him waking up from some untold trauma on the road to Absolution, whereupon his talents are immediately taken advantage of. Poor Jake can't seem to remember anything other than how to shoot his six-gun -- though he sure can shoot that thing. Which comes in darned handy when - would you credit it? - aliens arrive.

In the Old West.

So it is that he becomes "a running man, fleeing demons... or a wanted man, riding straight toward them." (p.104) And for all that this novelisation seems sometimes beholden to the strictly straightforward structure of the film, as I understand it, to a linear series of set-pieces strung end to end like scalps on a rope, Cowboys & Aliens really is a great read, particularly on those rare occasions when the roaring action subsides for a while, and Vinge can indulge in measured descriptions of the sights and sounds of "this land only an Apache could love." (p.47) She remains, needless to say, an excellent storyteller, squeezing real feeling and meaning out of even the simplest encounters, and offering up such spare but beautiful prose in each and every quiet moment as to leave one lusting after the next lull.

Of course there's a bit of melodrama, here and there, and some inexplicable exposition, and I would've been happier if the narrative's breckneck pace had come part and parcel with a few more moments for the author to work out her wonderful wordsmithing -- but these are really no more than niggles. Cowboys & Aliens by Joan D. Vinge is not then a perfect novel, nor do I expect the film proper to be such a specimen; what it is is easily one of the very best novelisations I've ever read. A very elegant adaptation, in short, marking the return of a talent too long gone from our beloved genre.

***

Cowboys & Aliens

by Joan D. Vinge

UK Publication: August 2011, Tor

US Publication: August 2011, Tor

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Book Review | Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell

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An Antarctic research camp discovers and thaws the ancient, frozen body of a crash-landed alien. The creature revives with terrifying results, shape-shifting to assume the exact form of animal and man, alike. Paranoia ensues as a band of frightened men work to discern friend from foe, and destroy the menace before it challenges all of humanity! 

***

Was The Thing the first movie I ever bought on Blu-ray? I think it might just have been...


I'm an unabashed fan - what can I say? I must have seen John Carpenter's adaptation of Who Goes There? twenty times or more, all told - any excuse is a good excuse - and without fail, whenever in recent memory the credits have scrolled I've made a mental note to hunt out the tale upon which The Thing is based. Oh, and Howard Hawks' 1950s monstrosity The Thing From Another World. That too.


Yet till now, I never did...


...and I'm kind of wishing I never had, at all.


Because it's a pretty tepid novella. Even having made the usual allowances one must for fiction from another era, Who Goes There? seemed to me forgettable pulp - certainly not the "timeless genre classic" (p.10) Logan's Run author William F. Nolan describes in his punchy introduction. Its characters, of which there's something of an over-abundance, are to a one so thin as to appear transparent; and though the notional concept at its core, of an alien desperate to see its species survive after untold millennia frozen in a glacier, still hits home - particularly the shape-shifting and the subsequent paranoia Carpenter made so much of - Campbell seems leagues more interested in exploiting every last drop of the melodrama the premise entails, and haplessly documenting some talking heads talking nonsense.


Perhaps it wasn't always nonsense they were talking... perhaps it's dreadfully crass of me to assert as much. But even allowing for the foibles of such fiction in the late thirties, Who Goes There? is unequal to any variety of comparison with Carpenter's masterful adaptation. The bare bones of the story are there, at least, but the film fashions a body around those bones - developing the potential of certain threads of character and narrative Campbell seems profoundly uninterested in, and abandoning those others than simply do not work - where the author of the original novella is content to present a picked-clean corpse.


Rocket Ride Books, however, have gone above and beyond with this edition of Who Goes There? Let's give the small press start-up credit where credit's been duly earned, because Campbell's novella is but one part of the classy package they've put together - and were it that alone, I might still recommend it, whatever its failings, as a curiosity to fans of either film version.


But the Rocket Ride reissue of Who Goes There? goes the extra mile, coming complete with the informative introduction aforementioned, and a whole other thing: the spec script William F. Nolan wrote for Universal Studios' consideration in the late 70s, when they were sniffing around the idea of another adaptation. So not the screen treatment John Carpenter used a few years later - that was from the pen of the late and lamented Bill Lancaster - but a third distinct take on Campbell's tale; an iteration more straightforwardly science fictional than either of the others, and wreathed in Americana. I'm glad, ultimately, that Nolan's script wasn't the basis of The Thing, but assuredly it makes for a fascinating what if?


For collectors, then, the value-packed Rocket Ride edition of Who Goes There? should make for a no-brainer of a buy. It'll be a harder sell to those with less interest in the cinematic lineage of John W. Campell's original story - poised to continue, against all odds, in a very promising prequel slated for later in 2011 - though those potential readers too would be well advised to look beyond the pulpy melodrama of Who Goes There? itself to the pitch-perfect extra features and deleted scenes of this bounteous re-release.

***

Who Goes There?

by John W. Campbell

UK and US Publication: April 2009, Rocket Ride Books


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Book Review | The Lost Fleet: Dauntless by Jack Campbell

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The Alliance has been fighting the Syndic for a century-and losing badly. Now its fleet is crippled and stranded in enemy territory. Their only hope is Captain John "Black Jack" Geary - a man who's emerged from a century-long hibernation to find he has been heroically idealized beyond belief.


Now, he must live up to his own legend...

***

It's military science-fiction, Jim, but not as we know it!


Wait, no, scratch that. The Lost Fleet: Dauntless - book the first of a series of six and still counting - is military science-fiction exactly as we know it. And that's no slight, in itself... though Jack Campbell's genre debut certainly has its drawbacks. There's a [certain] carelessness to the prose, a sense of redundancy about some of the action, and characterisation is simplistic throughout; the ingredients of a terrible tale, all told. Yet Dauntless is actually pretty decent. Somehow or other, the author - which is to say the pseudonym of retired Naval officer John G. Hemry - hurls all those things in a pot, and comes up with roses. Space-posies.


Speaking of flowers... what thoroughly masculine science-fantasy this is. This is thin ice to tread upon, I understand, but at the risk of mildly slighting the ladies among us - I mean you no harm! - let me take a moment to clarify that assertion: Dauntless is about conquest, survival, and the glory of sacrifice. It's Starship Troopers the first-person shooter, the book, with little in the way of ornamentation. There are explosive space battles, nail-biting near-misses. Imagine Battlestar Galactica without the bleeding heart. And though of course there will be exceptions, that, I think, is rather the preserve of geeky dudes.


Of which I am one - reporting for duty, Sir, and proud as punch to serve! I began the first novel of The Lost Fleet with no expectations at all, and came away in much the same state, albeit having had a flurry of an evening with Captain John Geary and his crew, who find themselves fleeing en masse through the universe carrying a key that could mean the end of a centuries-old intergalactic war. They are "a fleet decimated in battle and trapped, facing overwhelmingly superior numbers," (p.21) and pursued at every turn by relentless Syndic forces who will stop at nothing to show Geary's battered ships a good time by way of their grapeshot cannons.


Thematically, Dauntless is concerned with heroism; with what it means to be a hero, above all else. Everyone seems to think John Geary is a hero, for instance - long thought dead after a glorious space battle which went down in history, but in truth only sleeping (in stasis on an emergent shuttle). That is to say, everyone... except John Geary. When he's rudely awakened to find his reputation preceding him a hundred years after his last command, the century having passed by in the blink of an eye, "Black Jack" - so-called - cannot believe himself equal to the legend the books have him as. An early loss - of one of his own descendants, no less - shows him the true measure of heroism, and Geary finds himself sorely lacking.


All of which makes for a fairly diverting conflict: a character arc that, though predictable, grants Dauntless a modicum of import where otherwise it would go in want.


Anyway, when you get right down to it, Dauntless has precious few aspirations in that regard. It's a bit of military SF fluff for the boys, a harmless escapade of the old guard perfectly content to putter about in its own modest corner of the genre. If I were to recommend you read the first book of The Lost Fleet, it would be with all that in mind...


...but then, we all have our guilty pleasures. And I dare say The Lost Fleet might now number among mine. Dauntless is quick, competent, and utterly undemanding: you'll know if it's for you within a few sentences, and if it's not, well, so what?

***

The Lost Fleet: Dauntless

by Jack Campbell

UK Publication: February 2011, Titan Books
US Publication: June 2006, Ace Books


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Film Review | Limitless

So there's this pill.

NZT, they call it. It's not FDA approved or anything, but it's not quite a street drug, either: NZT will run you about $800 a pop, after all, and what it does - one of its various effects, I should say - is to give you access to the 80% of your brain you aren't otherwise able to take advantage of. Swallow one down and your memory improves a hundredfold, your processing power skyrockets, and colours seem that much brighter. Pretty cool, right?

Well, it is until you start losing great whacks of time. And God forbid you ever run out of pills! That way lies all the aches and pains of withdrawal, up to and including an untimely full stop on the ass-end of your existence. And though the prohibitive expense of the drug might discriminate, its effects are the same whether you're from the corners or Wall Street proper...

...which just so happens to be where one yuppie user, Bradley Cooper off of Alias as Eddie Morra, ends up when in a series of unfortunate events he comes into quite the quantity of NZT: flying high with the high-flyers, including Robert DeNiro as moneyman Carl Van Loon.

Don't see this movie for the performances. Don't not see this movie for the performances, either - the leads are able enough, and their support, in the shape of Abbie Cornish and a dowdy Anna Friel, is fine. But only that.

I went into Limitless not at all sure about Bradley Cooper as a leading man, and I've come out of it with my opinion unscathed. Though he equips himself well enough as a superior sneerer in the Wall Street scenes - which would put me in mind of The Social Network if The Social Network hadn't been brilliant, or Limitless had been more than the fluff it is - he's significantly less convincing as the greasy no-luck novelist pre-NZT, and one thing cancels the other out.

Nor can technological trickery save the day. The technique on display in the opening titles, and on several other occasions throughout Limitless, whereby director Neil Burger employs a sort of "endless zoom" in the mode of experimental French filmmaker Gaspar Noe, proves nauseating rather than neat; a fancy trick better left to those who can do it justice, or else on the cutting room floor.

Equally as successful - which is to say not terribly, in truth - are those very David Fincher moments where text and numbers are overlaid upon the world, presumably to represent Cooper's new and much improved perception of the world. This isn't even a new trick, yet still it sticks out like a sore thumb.

But on balance, I'd say... see this movie. Fluff or not, it rolls with a interesting idea ripped right out of the work of one Philip K. Dick - though the credits insist Limitless is based on a book by Alan Glynn, and perhaps it is. And while it goes in all the directions you imagine it will, and the destination is a tacked-on epilogue so pat as to seem an insult to our intelligence, so too does the ride have its exhilarating moments scattered here and there throughout its hundred minutes; moments when you can see past Limitless' lukewarm script and tepid direction, and the liquid crystal purity of the pill-popping premise stops you dead in your tracks.

Would that those moments were higher on director Neil Burger's list of priorities. As is, your patience need not be limitless to take some passing pleasure in this popcorn-friendly and surprisingly prescient irrelevance... but it sure wouldn't hurt.

Book Review | Man Plus by Frederik Pohl

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In the not-too-distant future, a desperate war for natural resources threatens to bring civilization to a crashing halt. Nuclear warships from around the globe begin positioning themselves as the American government works feverishly to complete a massive project to colonize Mars.


Former astronaut Roger Torraway has agreed to be transformed by the latest advances in biological and cybernetic science into something new, a being that can survive the rigors of Mars before it is terraformed. Becoming Man Plus will allow him to be the linchpin in opening the new Martian frontier... but not without challenging his humanity as no man has ever been challenged before.

***

How thin the line between monster and man...


Roger Torroway is a man, at the outset of Man Plus. A man with a man's problems. He worries about why his wife, Dorrie, doesn't seem to want intercourse with him any more; his career, after an early high when he saved some Russians from certain death on re-entry, appears to have hit a brick wall - though a dead-end job as an astronaut is still something, he supposes; overall, Roger feels as if time is slipping away from him, and there's precious little he can do to coax the beast that ambles ever-onward back.


But Earth's troubles are more serious still. Tensions between the world's most powerful nations are at an all time high... nuclear war is all but a forgone conclusion at this stage, and with the apocalypse knock-knocking at the door, the President has invested all America's hopes and dreams of a better tomorrow - a tomorrow at all - in a mission to Mars.


Enter the Man Plus project. NASA understand that they can't in the time allotted change Mars to suit man, but maybe, just maybe, they can change man to suit Mars.


As the third of three backup subjects, Roger Torroway had good reason to believe the Man Plus would never come a-calling. But when it comes to the punch, all the other candidates start dropping like flies, and Roger finds himself in an unenviable position, with the stakes in play no less than the fate of the human race. Reluctantly, he volunteers to be the man in Man Plus.


Roger Torroway is a man for only moments of Man Plus, however. A few chapters in, he is made a monster of: given a new skin, cameras for eyes, cybernetic joints and a battery-powered brain. Pohl effects his transformation day by excruciating day, culminating in the deeply discomfiting moment when the mad NASA scientists lop off Roger's todger. But alas, the obstacles this courageous man must overcome are not discarded with his manhood; even then, Mars - and so the deliverance of Earth - are a long way off.


I'll confess to taking pleasure in being able to say what I'm about to - that from first to last, Pohl gets right under the skin of this Real American Hero - but there's truth in some wordplay, to wit: while Torroway is not a particularly complex protagonist, nor of a sort set to surprise anyone with even elementary experience of classic SF, Pohl's characterisation makes it ineffably easy to invest in this man to the slaughter. Lonely and conflicted, confused and uncertain and afraid, Torroway is not immediately Man Plus - he is but a man, the same as any other.


Man Plus is a short enough novel to read in an evening, by dint of which its pace seems more solid than perhaps it is - nevertheless, on occasion some readers will wonder whether this mission is ever to get off the ground. But Pohl is smart, I think, to spend most of his time describing the journey than documenting the inevitable destination, for it is the metamorphosis of one man into a Martian-friendly monster that truly sells this Nebula award-winning narrative. And with every surgery... with every irreversible snip, Pohl evokes a deepening sense of dread in a hermetically sealed environment wherein a stray thought or the sound of a pin drop could mean the end of everything.


Man Plus is a fantastically taut tale from "one of the grand old men of SF," quick and easy to digest, yet shot through with such moral and marital dilemmas that you'll likely find your thoughts returning to it well after you've turned the last page. And for all that it was written some 40 years ago - hence its modicum of political incorrectness - Man Plus yet bears a startling sort of relevance to contemporary events, and begs in the erstwhile a timeless question: what would you, yes you, give up to save the world? What lengths would you go to to safeguard a loved one?


In sum, could you be Man Plus too?

***

Man Plus

by Frederik Pohl

UK Publication: May 2000, Gollancz (SF Masterworks)
US Publication: April 2011, Tor (Reissue)


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The Scotsman Abroad | Robopocalyptic Tidings

Doesn't it seem like only yesterday I was telling you all how proud I was to have sold a review to Strange Horizons? To be a part of that great institution?

Well, in actual fact it was more than six months ago. Six months in which I've written six reviews for the site. And so as not to seem like I'm taking over - though in such sterling company I expect that'd be a very hard sell - I thought it might be time to ply my trade elsewhere.

But where?

One of the very first genre review resources I thought of was The Zone, which publishes the work of Jonathon McCalmont and David Hebblethwaite - an incredible pair of reviewers to whom I often look, for inspiration and for recommendations - among, of course, a myriad illustrious others. 

Needless to say, then, it gives me tremendous pleasure to be able to tell you today: I'm officially a contributor. For my first trick - my first of many, if I have my way - I've reviewed Robopocalypse, by Daniel H. Wilson; a book which came to me by way of a good friend of The Speculative Scotsman, blog and blogger alike.

Here's the article, in any event...

...the article in which I somehow manage to accuse my internet connection of criminal conspiracy, take Hollywood to task, and generally have a bit of harmless, sci-fi inspired fun.

Perfectly appropriate behaviour given the text in question - which isn't to speak ill of it at all! Actually, I really rather enjoyed Robopocalypse, which, for its part, looks to be a pretty big deal in the offing. None other than Steven Spielberg bought the film rights pre-publication, to direct himself for release sometime in 2013. And that's something.

So if you hadn't heard of Robopocalypse before now, or if your interest in Daniel H. Wilson's first proper novel is otherwise piqued, well, what better time than now?

And what better place than here?

Indeed. :)

The Scotsman Abroad | Casting Out The Outcasts

It's been a little while since my last contribution to Strange Horizons - well, a couple months - so I'm pleased to report that this week marked my (triumphant?) return to the esteemed reviews section. And you'll be seeing me on the site again shortly, by way of an extensive take on the second Subterranean Tales of Dark Fantasy anthology, published on a date TBD.

For the moment, however, it gives me great pleasure to direct your attentions toward this review of Outcasts, in which I make arguably dubious comparisons between the war on terror and the Beeb's woeful attempts at genre television, and generally speaking tear Britain a bit of a new one. To wit, the introduction:

"Shit having gone suddenly sideways on Earth, a handful of humanity's best and brightest - all British folks, of course - have made a home away from home for themselves on Carpathia, a so-called Goldilocks planet named in honour of the ship which rescued a scant few survivors from the wreckage of the Titanic. It's a neat nod; one that Outcasts, the BBC's recently canned science fiction series, no sooner makes than moves to force down your throat. 

"So it begins."

Needless to say it's a pretty negative piece.

Well, here's to fighting fire with fire, because watching Outcasts was a pretty negative experience for me. Any of you folks seen it yet? Care to share?

Video Game Review | Crysis 2, dev. Crytek

Four years ago, Crysis changed the face of gaming.


Which it to say, it tried to. And in some respects, I suppose the boffins behind Crytek succeeded: for a precious moment in time - perhaps the last such one - they energised a once-ubiquitous playerbase which had seemed dormant a dreadfully long time. They gave lapsed PC gamers who hadn't updated their rigs in years a reason to get back on the bus. For my part, I tried to join in on the fun, I truly did: I upgraded my graphics card from a mid-range last-gen chipset to a mid-range current-gen chipset, as per my limited budget. Sadly, my machine still couldn't handle Crysis.


In early 2009, I built a new machine, and one of the first things I did was give Crysis a second chance. This time it ran, which was nice, but that was about all it did; on moderate graphics settings it rarely saw the upper end of 20 frames per second. I couldn't bear it, so for a second time, I put poor Crysis away. I expect when next I upgrade my computer, Crysis the first will play just fine. The third time's the charm, after all, and perhaps middle of the road tech from 2012 will at last match up against the bleeding edge of 2007. One can only hope.


Because Crysis, I gather, was quite the game. A solid shooter with a few innovative twists on the usual run and gun action thanks to the powersuit players were outfitted with, which allowed for stealth, super-strength, and the ability to leap buildings in a single bound, among other things. The massive open world of Lingshang Island was beautifully composed and incredibly rendered, and allowed for playstyles of all shapes and sizes; whether you wanted to sneak your way through or go guns blazing, Crysis went out of its way to enable.

Again, I should reiterate: all this knowledge comes second-hand, since I never played it - not properly. Nor, I imagine, will the majority of those who think to pick up Crysis 2 for PS3 or Xbox 360. And you know what? I wouldn't worry about it. The continuing narrative, such as it is, is at best a gloss of certain familiar sci-fi tropes, and at its worst, quite incomprehensible whether you're up to speed on the original Crysis or not. This I know because I spent a good long while catching up with the Wiki before sitting down to play through Crysis 2. Neither a very enlightening pursuit, nor a necessary one, as it transpires.


That the story of this shiny new sequel proved such a nonsense came as something of a surprise to me. Because the talent is certainly there. Crysis 2 is written by Richard Morgan, of Altered Carbon fame, in consultation with another noted genre author, Hugo Award-winner Peter Watts, yet the narrative boils down to nothing much: aliens attack, decimating New York City block by broken block, and it's down to one man in an experimental nanotech-enhanced supersuit to save Central Park and thus the world. Beyond a bit of genrefied gibberish there's really not much more to it than that. The pace reaches fever pitch a few missions in and rarely relents thereafter; characterisation, meanwhile, is practically non-existent. I mean, as video game stories go, Crysis 2's is fine, and perfectly functional. It sets the scene for the incredible apocalyptic spectacles to come, and gives you as good a reason as any to shoot some baddies in the neck or the head. But coming from such esteemed imaginations, it's difficult not to be disappointed in the undercooked narrative of this otherwise thoroughly thought-out sequel.


So don't come for the story. Come for the game wrapped all around the mediocre cutscenes, like slimy squid-alien innards. But do come, for Crysis 2 is truly a superb shooter: relatively long by today's standards, and thrilling throughout; so perfectly balanced as to strike a happy medium between challenge and frustration; and open to such individual playstyles as to accommodate most any gamer's ideal of the experience at hand. If you want to play it like Call of Duty, you can, and Crysis 2 can stand the comparison. If you'd rather crawl around in the shadows, stealth stabbing in close quarters rather than headshotting your way to victory, well, by all means. That was how I went about beating off the evil invading aliens who mean to level America's most singular city: via a certain upgrade path and close attention to the contextual sit-reps my HUD alerted me to each time I entered a new area. Though I had my fair share of Rambo moments too, I'll admit - Solid Snake would wipe the floor with me on stealth terms.

And of course, Crysis 2 is so beautiful as to oftentimes evoke wonder and awe at the whistle-stop tour of devastating spectacles the single-player campaign showcases. Perhaps that's no great surprise, with this sequel coming from the makers of a four year-old game I still can't play, but that they've pulled it off, and with such stunning aplomb, on console hardware even older than the original Crysis is... astonishing. The multiplayer's pretty interesting too - if inherently less attractive. I haven't spent as long as I'd like to have done with it, and in all likelihood I won't, what with the slate of games ahead, but I've ranked up enough, I think, to be able to deem it a very worthy diversion between rounds of Team Slayer and Call of Duty zombies. Trouble is, I don't know that many folks are looking for such diversions; the last time I booted this baby's online up its servers were already depopulating. A lamentable fate for such a strong multiplayer offering, however predictable.


But do not judge Crysis 2 on its strict best before date of a multiplayer, or on the basis of its decidedly mediocre story, nor even as it relates to its impossible predecessor. On the strength of its thrilling single-player alone, Crysis 2 is a very worthy way to waste a long weekend.


Oh, and did I mention: giant squid mechs from outer space?


Well, I have done now. So muster up for the good of mankind, folks. Go forth, and shoot them in their evil alien faces! I don't imagine you'll regret it.