Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001)

What follows was prompted by this review of Christophe Gans's film Le Pacte des Loups¹ by the writer and man Mark Blackmore. Though it's kind of a response to that, it's certainly not an attempt to disagree with anything he says there (indeed, as I said in the comments to his review, in all conscience I think most of his points are entirely valid ones), but as the inexplicable enjoyer mentioned in that piece, I'd thought I'd try (after briefly pausing to shout "Spoilers!") to explain what I liked about it...

Firstly it's because I think bits of this are best serious Sword and Sorcery film, ever. Though bits of the opening feel rather like a western, and despite my fondness for John Milius, the opening narration and initial scenes of violence are better done than in, say, Conan the Barbarian. Equally, the scenes of Fronsac's despair and violent rage after the death of Mani are many times more emotionally affecting than anything following the death of Valeria in Conan. Of course, these sorts of things aren't specific to Sword and Sorcery, but the 'mythical beast', outsider hero with exotic sidekick etc. are all present here. (Parenthetically, the other best serious Sword and Sorcery film of recent times, I think, is the fourth Rambo film. Why is it that "actual" S&S films aren't usually as good as those that are ostensibly something else? Let's leave that aside for another time...)

And secondly it's because I think bits of this are the best 18th century intrigue and swashbuckler film ever (and you have to (well you don't, in fact, but I do) admire the demented panache of Monica Bellucci's prostitute character turning out to be a Vatican spy...)

I'll certainly grant m'colleague that it's a tad long, though. (And would be even if Gans had calmed down with the slow motion. His action scenes can be followed, for heaven's sake (rare enough, in today's ludicrous nano-second-edit world to be worth remarking on) so it's not even that this is necessary....)

Finally, and brilliantly, the guy playing the Duke of Moncan is actually called Jean-Loup Wolff.

¹ Literally, "The Pate of Lupus", a subplot happily missing from the finished film. ²

² Haha! Not really, of course...

David Langford, Different Kinds of Darkness (2004)

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Seeing as Dave Langford has won about a million Hugo Awards¹, it may be stretching it a bit to say he's underappreciated. However, most of those Hugos have been for his (excellent) fan writing and his (excellent) newsletter Ansible: only one (for the title story of this collection) is for fiction, and, it seems to me, if this ratio was reversed that would be entirely justified, since Langford is, I think, One Of The The Three Best SF Short Story Writers Ever, Along With J. G. Ballard and John Sladek.

Despite the colossally cumbersome formulation above, that still might be thought a bold statement, but, to nick a title from John Clute, "look at the evidence": in this case, the book above, which collects much of Langford's serious sf from 1975 to 2003.

That word "serious" is possibly relevant. Langford is (rightly) highly regarded for his comic writing, and the wit of his remarkably long-running (and free) newsletter Ansible; and although there is (at least) one laugh out loud moment² in the volume currently under advisement (in my case, his contribution to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discretited Diseases, "Logrolling Ephesus", the contributor's biography to which begins, "Dr. David Langford had the good fortune to commit his researches at a period when relevant legislation had yet to be urgently passed"), he is also, I'd aver, a more or less peerless exponent of the straight sf story.

I can feel the words "examples abound" creeping up on me, but they do, you know...

The most famous examples here are the tales that make up the influential BLIT sequence ("BLIT", "What Happened and Cambridge IV", "comp.basilisk FAQ", and the Hugo winning "Different Kinds of Darkness"), which, via maths, terrorism, genuinely haunting and disturbing images, and pertinent points about information and childhood, detail the implications of a scary sf idea in a combined length of (think on this, fatnasty fans!) 28 pages...

Equally, "Waiting for the Iron Age", in just 4 pages (think on this fatnasty fans! -- you've done this -- Ed) sorts out the Wandering Jew legend in double quick time, whilst, as Langford says in his afterword, giving, "our man a longer run for his money than anyone else..."

Another thing with reviewing Langford, of course, touched on above, is his encyclopaedic knowledge of the sf world: if one were to, as one might, try to comment on the "The Motivation", by 'cleverly' mentioning the Christopher Priest-like nature of the title, and then try and draw a parallel with Priest's (very different) story "The Watched", one would find, on reaching the end of Langford's (excellent) story, that he's already there in his (as is typical in this collection) informative and splendid afterword. Heigh ho...

And what great titles, though! ("In A Land of Sand and Ruin and Gold"; "Blossoms That Coil and Decay"; "The Lions in the Desert" etc.)

Seriously, everyone should have this....

¹ An exageration. Just!

² I mean here the genuine laugh-out-loud moments that render you actually unable to speak even when reading alone, rather than as a shorthand for "quite funny". For more of these, see He Do The Time Police In Different Voices.

Tully Zetford, Hook: Star City (1974)

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I have an unquenchable fondness for the sort of unpretentious (and short!) adventure sf and fantasy that used to be published, to coin that ghastly phrase, "back in the day." This means I also have an unquenchable fondness for the works of the late Kenneth Bulmer, who wrote more or less a million such yarns, most famously of course the Burroughs-influenced Kregen/Dray Prescott sword-and-planet series.¹

For the Hook series², of which Star City is volume three, Bulmer is hidden behind the "Tully Zetford" pseudonym. The hero of these books, the splendidly sweary ("By Dirty Bertie Bashti!" [100]) Ryder Hook³, is not a fellow to be messed with:

If a man tried to kill Ryder Hook, that man went in peril of his own life. [7]

Although he's not without his nicer qualities:

Like any civilised man, Hook drank tea whenever he could. [12]

It would be terribly ill-advised of us to let this fondness for tea fool us into thinking Hook is basically a gentleman, though; in many other ways he is a cad of the most unscrupulous kidney:

Apart from her legs, which Hook - being the ungraceful galactic adventurer he was would call short and fat if called upon to describe them - the lady Terifa was seemingly a most nicely fitted-together representative of the female section of Homo sapiens. [34]

Most importantly, though, the proximity of a Boosted Man confers on Ryder Hook special powers, which, for example, mean that when a homicidal maniac smashes him over the head with a giant steel bar, this happens:

The steel bar bounced. For any normal man that steel bar powered by all the dark ferocity of a homicidal maniac would have shattered his skull into bloody fragments. Blood and brains would have spurted past the splintered bones. But, then, Ryder Hook was not a normal man. [16]

Bet he still had a headache, mind.

My favourite bit in this book, though, is when Hook realises what spending time on Star City, which, as the blurb puts it, is a "mighty complex housing many thousands of humanoids devoted entirely to the pursuit of pleasure", has done to his ungraceful, hard-man space-adventurer demeanor:

Hook knew he'd been growing spineless and weak and a great ninny in star city. [100]

Great ninny! Ah, they don't write them like this any more, alas....

¹ I was once surprised and delighted to come across a positive notice of this sequence ("this jewel of a series") in, of all things, a set of wargames rules. The Wargames Research Group's 1991 set Hordes of the Things, by legendary Phil Barker, Sue Laflin Barker, and Richard Bodley Scott, also, marvellously, includes relevant Army Lists ["IMPERIAL VALLIA: Hero General (Dray Prescott - typically in red loin cloth and loaded down with assorted swords and longbow, mounted on a nickvove or zorca.) @ 4 A.P"] I love it that I live in a world where that sentence exists.

² For more Hookery, not to mention Lynan Synkery, see Dave Langford's sfx magazine column on Bulmer and Robert Sheckley here.

³ For more of Hook swearing, see Dave Langford, again. (Scroll down to "God's Hooks")

The Ship of a Billion Years (2006)

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Well, this what we know....

That I really should stop saying I'm going to do stuff "next" or "soon", as I always forget: galactic cycles ago, in February, I said some things about Coming to Dust, the first part of Lawrence Miles's The True History of Faction Paradox audio series, as released by the stout fellows at Magic Bullet, and said that "soon" I would say things about this. Oh well.

Ship of a Billion Years picks up the story, straight from where Coming to Dust left off. Cousin Justine of the Faction Paradox has passed through the space-time tunnel to the titular Ship, while Cousin Eliza and the Society of Sigismondo try to find out more from their captives Jala and Merytra. Meanwhile, Sutekh is planning a coup....

There are many great things about this.

First, the dialogue, an aspect which is perhaps even more important than usual in a non-visual medium. Examples, as the cliche goes, abound, but to pick a few: when asked if Jala, their captive great ape is dangerous, Eliza replies, "Not now I've broken its legs." (This is actually a prelude to a genuinely rather harrowing torture scene [which in typical Miles fashion, begins nevertheless with John Pemberton feebly saying to the captive Merytra, "Believe me, we can be quite firm when we want to be!"] The switching from dark humour to genuine emotion in brief brush-strokes is splendidly done throughout.)

Julian Glover as the Osiran Lord Upuat gets the best lines, however. Justine has become his chamber slave, and at one point Upuat points out various other Osirans to her: "That's Bast. She's worshipped as a goddess of not following orders on some worlds. You'd probably like her. I think I had sex with her once. Left scratches on my pelt for days..." Later, after Sutekh, arch-villain that he is, has told him he must "submit or be destroyed", Upuat replies, "Hmm. I'm not keen on either, to be honest. Couldn't I just sit back and not interfere?"

One of the things that it's hard not to do with the Faction Paradox audios, which generally pre-date the current return of Doctor Who, is to list ideas that first appeared here and are done rather better than they were in the more famous TV behemoth that followed. To pick a trivial example, the formal tongue of the Osiran Court is like a more spooky version of Judoon-speak, and, much more importantly, there is the idea of a Time War. In the RTD-era Doctor Who, it seemed to me, there was no real sense that the Time War actually happened in four dimesions: often the images made it just seem like a space battle between the Daleks and the Time Lords. Here, after Justine has travelled through the tunnel to the Ship, her companions back on Earth try and find out what's happening to her now by reading ancient texts and legends -- one of the non "history-proofed" members of the Society reads a line from an ancient Greek text, then reads it again and doesn't notice that he reads something completely different on the second occasion. (Yes, I know that there is more sense of Time being a factor in the current series of Who, in the arc about Amy's crack [if you'll pardon the expression] but even so...)

Which leads to the other great thing about this -- the characterisation. In an interview he did years before these plays appeared, Miles said that (admittedly in the context of TV drama rather than audio plays) that the idea of "character-driven" TV was overrated, and that "great television runs on iconography, not on giving characters stock emotional problems and letting them drone on about them for hours on end." Certainly the Egyptian Gods of the Osiran Court are icons, here, but the other characters generate genuine emotion in the listener in a series of completely non-droney, excellently written touches, the prime example of which is the story of Corwyn and Astarte (a great performance from Patricia Merrick) Marne's eight-month old daughter. Rescued from the poisoned Faction Paradox race bank discovered in Coming to Dust, her adoptive parents find that she slips out of their memories, that her room sometimes briefly appears unfurnished and empty when they enter, and that, when they remember things they have done, their daughter is not present....

This is genuinely emotional and affecting, and so much more effective for being sketched in brief moments rather than dolloped about like (as it seemed to this ageing cynical fellow on his first viewing anyway) the rather over-done and shallow cry-now-dammitry of, say, that Van Gogh episode of the new Doctor Who....

Anyway, marvellous stuff, and we haven't even considered the hints and reversals in the latter stages. Not soon or next, but when I remember, then: Part 3: Body Politic...

The Fat Cyberman Is Bigger Than The Houses

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Some houses (left) and a fat cyberman [actual scale]

My daughter is now, just, old enough to appreciate Doctor Who. In other words, she loves all the different monsters and aliens ("I wonder how that monster attacks?"), and the idea of the Doctor and his friends saving the day, but the actual stories themselves don't yet mean a huge amount to her.

A good example of this is the 2008 Christmas special, The Next Doctor. When we watched this again together recently, despite the good things about it (those bits that involved Dervla Kirwan mostly) I was afterwards moved to deliver a lecture about the disappointing nature of the conclusion, where the Doctor, faced with a, well, rather odd sort of Cyberman plan, sorts things out with a magic wand. I'd barely even got into my stride when I was cut down by my daughter's observation: "Yes, Daddy, but the fat cyberman was bigger than the houses!"

She meant this as a compliment, of course, rather than to bemoan the way the CGI excesses and general bombastery can get in the way of actual good drama and stuff, but, especially perhaps with a Christmas special, who's to say she's wrong? Doctor Who plays to a vast stadium, not just the geeks in the front few rows now (as I think Paul Cornell once said, more or less) and whenever ageing fanboys like me say something about the new series that starts, "Yes, but hang on..." the young kids of today will riposte, "But the fat cyberman was bigger than the houses!" and crush us.

Still, as a friend of mine pointed out to me, this is actually a very useful phrase when it comes to describing something whose position on the quality spectrum may lie somewhere between meh and actively poor, but which, nevertheless, does at least deliver exactly what it says on the tin.

For example, the next time you're asked what you thought of Transformers 2, you can just say, "Well, the fat cyberman was bigger than the houses..."

Lionel Fanthorpe, Galaxy 666 (1968)

Last Thursday was World Book Day.  I learned of this via the medium of a note from my daughter’s school asking if she could bring in a couple of her favourite books.  (We searched through her shelves and found a soon-to-be-topical-again book about animals searching for Easter eggs, and an old favourite about a bovine heribove with an acute upper respiratory tract infection.)

Later, I decided to enter into the spirit of the day myself, and picked something from the days when sf paperbacks would not only think a suitably blurred picture of something looking suspiciously like The USS Enterprise would do for a cover, but also have a full-colour piece of card stuck in half way through the book advertising cigarettes. (Kent Deluxe in this case, with “the famous micronite filter”.  If you have a taste for quality, you’ll like the taste of Kent, apparently.)

Yes, Galaxy 666 by the legendary and prolifically splendid Lionel Fanthorpe.

Here [p56] is the famous passage regarding the over-all impression of the colour of a bit of rock:

Between their own position and those two hillocks, there was an expanse of flat smooth rock, so flat and smooth that it was difficult to walk on.  There were pink-ish streaks among the rock, and it seemed that some of the chromatic tint from the atmosphere owed its origin to these.  There were a number of white veins in the rock, which bore some kind of resemblance to marble, but the majority of it was grey.  It gave an over-all impression of greyness streaked with pink and white, rather than an over-all impression of whiteness tinged with grey and pink, or an over-all impression of pink streaked with grey and white.

Greyness was the dominant background shade; neither black nor white, but something midway between the two.  It was a light rather than a dark grey, yet it could never have been so light that it might have been mistaken for an off white...

Later [pp 132-133] a character delivers a lengthy speech about cosmology, only part of which goes:

The whole universe is order; it’s a gestalt; it’s a pattern.  This galaxy is non-gestalt, an anti pattern.  This universe is the back of the tapestry, the discord in the music, the vortex of chaos at the bottom of the plug hole which allows the bath water to run peacefully away in an orderly fashion.  Without this the bath water would not be able to run...

After his lecture, the speaker, brilliantly, sums up with:

Do I make myself clear?

(Nicely, one of the other characters volunteers: “I think so.”)

Then there’s the enigmatic ending [p138]:

...but the strange enigmatical nexus between Korzaak and Ischklah remained as enigmatical as ever...

The Oxford Companion To Sports And Games (1976)

This is the only book I own that I’ve literally read until it fell to pieces (three pieces, in fact, and the cover’s completely detached now, as well...)

Why? Well, it’s perhaps (actually it’s ‘almost certainly’, let’s be honest) hopeless and dewy-eyed and pathetically romantic to get all nostalgic about sport, but, damn it, I love sport, and this book gives off such a strong sense of sport as sport (as opposed to what tends, all too often, to fill the sports pages of (UK at any rate) newspapers: stuff about which football club currently has a winding-up order on it, or exactly which soccer players, who earn as much in a week as some people do in a decade, have unedifyingly been up to off the field...)

Even the Olympics aren’t immune: leaving aside for the moment any questions about awarding the 2008 games to China, there’s even been controversy about Canada’s “Own the Podium” philosophy in the current Winter Olympics, one of the last bastions, I’d aver, of “proper” sport left...The Summer Olympics are on a downward curve too, I think.

(To pick just one example, the cretins at the IOC, rather than sensibly add events to the women’s Olympic track cycling programme, so that there is gender equality in a sport where an Olympic medal still means something, are instead “equalizing” things by cutting both programmes, whilst simultaneously clogging the schedule up with nonsenses like tennis and golf, where the pinnacles of the sport are grand slam and major events, not the Olympics. It may keep the advertisers happy, but something vital has been lost, I think, and I tend, in my (hopeless) romantic way, to despair. [Aside: a brilliant post about the Olympics, and how they are, despite everything, still special, is, well, over there, on Sharon's blog.

Anyway. The Oxford Companion To Sports and Games.

What I love about this is:

a] its eccentric (and peculiarly British) comprehensiveness. The entry on FOOTBALL includes not only details of Association Soccerball, American Football, Australian Rules Football, Gaelic Football, and the various Rugby codes, but also Winchester College and Harrow Football, which are played nowhere else but at those English public schools...

b] it’s impossible to imagine now, as was the case when legendary John Arlott wrote his introduction in 1974, an editor of a companion or encyclopedia on sport saying, in his introduction, as Arlott does here, that the “first, and most important” editorial decision was to exclude blood sports. (And even then, they managed not only to include BULLFIGHTING [114 et seq] and COURSING [163 et seq], but mention in the entry for UNDERWATER SWIMMING pioneer COLIN McLEOD [561], that he was "captain of the British spearfishing team" between 1968 and 1971.) I mention this not because, in the real word, I'm in favour of such ‘sports’, or that, when I’ve finished typing this, I shall be donning my hunting pinks and charging across the countryside atop my trusty steed, but, it does, to some extent (maybe), hark back, again (and I can’t help myself, however unacceptable it is), to a more “sporting” age...(And yes, I'll accept it's not clear what I'm on about here. Something rubbishly vague about the Corinthian spirit and/or Hemmingway, possibly...)

c] Apart from entries on nineteenth century race-horses (and (really!) BLIND MAN’S BLUFF [71]), there are entries like this:

JOUTES LYONNAISSES is a traditional and localized French form of JOUSTING on water. The competitors are armed with wooden lances and carry wooden shields on their left arms. They are mounted on platforms raised above the stern of boats which are propelled towards one another and pass at close quarters…[481]

I want to do that!