Screen time

A catch-up of some TV series and films I've been watching recently: 

 TV – Roswell, New Mexico (2019-20) 

 I gather that this is the second TV series to be based on the Roswell High book series by Melinda Metz. I have neither seen the first series nor read the books, so I came to this one cold. Two seasons have been shown so far, totalling 26 episodes. The story follows the lives of three young adults who, it turns out, are aliens who survived the famous 1947 "incident" and spent decades mending in hibernation pods. They are now trying to survive without being detected by the humans they live among (helpfully, they look exactly like humans and can even breed with them...). Leaving aside the somewhat preposterous background to the story (even by SF standards!), it is actually better than I expected. The focus is on the psychological stresses and shifting relationships, and the actors are good. I have found myself becoming more interested as the story has progressed. My main complaint is that I only understood (at most) 75% of the dialogue, the rest was too fast/quiet/slurred to understand. The result is that I didn't always follow what was happening. Mumbling actors are a common complaint these days – it's not just me! I understand that a third season is in the works. 

  TV - Fort Salem (2020) 

 Also known as Motherland: Fort Salem, this is a supernatural tale set in an alternative USA in which, 300 years earlier, witches had reached agreement with the government to act as a magical arm of the military, in return for ending the witch persecutions and burnings. Witches are far more deadly than humans (particularly in their use of modulated sound to achieve dramatic effects) but not all witches approve of the government deal; there is a dangerous terrorist witch organisation called the Spree which launches sporadic attacks. The series follows the fortunes of three new recruits to the witch army, with very different personalities and from very different backgrounds. Initially, it is very much a coming-of-age military boot-camp kind of drama, exclusively for females. It did become a little confusing at the end with the introduction of a second group attacking the witches, but I still found the series absorbing and entertaining, and would happily have watched all ten episodes straight through if not prevented by tiredness. There was an occasional problem with understanding the dialogue, but I got about 90 percent of it. I am pleased to hear that a second series has been approved, and will be looking out for it. 

  TV - Batwoman (2020) 

 I saw the first couple of episodes and quite admired the approach to the subject, which is somewhat more realistic and mature than usual, but the story didn't appeal to me enough to want to keep watching for umpteen episodes so I bailed out. 

  TV - Good Omens (2019-20) 

 This series (only six episodes, which is a big plus-point for me: I do get put off by those seemingly never-ending US series) was based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. A comedy about the end of the world (yep!) this focuses on the relationship between between an angel (Michael Sheen) and a demon (David Tennant) at a time when the coming of the Antichrist is anticipated, leading to Armageddon. I did have the book on my reading list but won't be bothering now I know the story. The TV series is very good, hardly surprising given the acting and writing talent involved, and I greatly enjoyed it. 

  TV - Devs (2020) 

 A very classy near-future mystery series created, written, and directed by Alex Garland, concerning the efforts of an IT billionaire to develop a way to recreate the past. It is told mainly from the viewpoint of software engineer Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno), whose boyfriend dies shortly after being invited to join Devs, the advanced software project being funded by billionaire Forest, who owns Amaya, a huge information systems company. She soon finds that her boyfriend was not who she had imagined and gets steadily deeper into the mystery of what is going on, and why. Not always an easy one to watch, but one of the best SF TV series I can recall. The eight episodes provide just the right length of time for the story.

  Midnight Special (2016) 

 This film is set in the present day and concerns an 8-year-old boy with paranormal predictive powers who is being fought over by his parents, the church his parents used to belong to, and the government. Leaving aside the main plot element, the story was developed in a very realistic way, with excellent characterisation - the doubts and fears of the main characters being well-handled. I recommend it as SF for adults, as it is focused on the people rather than the powers of the boy (or any funny-looking aliens). On the other hand, the finale is spectacular enough to satisfy any SF fan. 

  Ad Astra (2019) 

 A late-21st century future in which Mars is permanently settled and travel to the outer planets is possible. Sixteen years before, the Lima Project – an expedition to search for extra-terrestrial civilisations – had gone to to Neptune to establish a base in orbit around the planet, but contact had been lost almost immediately. Now the Earth is being hit by a succession of massive power surges which threaten human life, and these are believed to originate in the Lima Project. Major Roy McBride, son of Clifford McBride the leader of the Lima Project, is depatched on a mission to Neptune, to discover what is happening and close the Project down. The film is well-made, serious, and with a strong emphasis on the psychology of the characters in general and the father and son protagonists in particular. Despite this, it was spoiled for me by a few improbabilities. First, how were "scavanger pirates" able to operate on the Moon? They only seemed to be in the film to provide an excuse for a novel form of car chase. Second, would a government really have ignored the fate of the Lima Project for sixteen years when, at any time, they could have sent a craft to find out what had happened? Finally, if "power surges" from the region of Neptune were so powerful they could threaten the existence of humanity, they would surely have a noticeable effect on Neptune not to mention instantly vaporise the Project Lima station. These improbabilities rather take the shine off a promising film which James Gray, the producer, director and co-author, wanted to be "the most realistic depiction of space travel that's been put in a movie". 

  Guardians 2 (2017) 

 I was unimpressed by the first Guardians film so had low expectations of this one, and wasn't surprised. The first scene is a protracted close-combat battle between the guardians and a suitably revolting alien monster. After a brief pause for breath, the second major scene is a protracted space battle. I don't know what happened next, as I stopped watching. Unlike Midnight Surprise and Ad Astra (see above), this is definitely not SF for adults!

Some films plus the BFS

I'm slowly catching up with recent SFF films, and saw a couple of them last week. One is The Day After Tomorrow, about the sudden onset of a new ice age. An average-quality disaster movie requiring a high-than-average suspension of disbelief. This is due to the plot making no sense climatologically, especially because of the improbability (to put it mildly) of the suddenness and severity of the cooling effect (ambient temperature falling to minus 150 degrees in a few seconds?). Climate change is obviously a difficult subject for Hollywood. Unlike major earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions, which are catastrophic short-term events, climate change takes – at least – years, and usually decades, to produce dramatic results. Rather too long a timeframe for an exciting film, so they decided to exaggerate everything by a few orders of magnitude. And, as is commonplace with Hollywood products, there is a strong focus on the family in the centre of the storm (although not to the same ridiculous extent as the remake of The War of the Worlds which I've written about previously). As is usual with modern disaster movies, the real star of the show is the CGI of the disaster itself, with a massive storm surge crashing into New York.

The other film I've seen is King Kong – the recent version. A good film, with well-played characters and a most impressive, and expressive, Kong. This one is about relationships too, but then it's meant to be. Naomi Watts provides a credibly appealing focus for the beast's affections, and their story is handled well. The only complaint I have is that the film is too long, partly because the director seems to have overindulged himself in playing for ages with an array of CGI monsters on Kong's island chasing and devouring sundry members of the cast. I kept wanting to cut these peripheral scenes short as I watched them.
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Also time to catch up with some of the material from the British Fantasy Society
which has been disgorged by my letterbox over the past few months – they are an industrious lot! Regular offerings include Prism, which is mostly reviews with a few comment columns. As usual, the coverage is wide, including fantasy, horror, science fiction and graphical fiction (or comics, as I used to call them in my youth). I read (as well as write) a lot more reviews than novels these days, as I find this a useful way of discovering new authors to try.

Then there is Dark Horizons, a mix of short stories, poetry, interviews, news and chat, sprinkled with illustrations. The current issue (#53) offers a remarkably varied selection of tales, including dark fantasy, horror and comedy. My pick of the bunch is Paul Campbell's Timeless, about a middle-aged woman who is given the opportunity to review one of the key turning points of her life; a relationship which failed to work. This might sound unpromising but it is an original tale, beautifully told.

I'm still working through a couple of BFS booklets. One is A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults, a very strange and intriguing collection of stories all written on the theme (and mostly in the style) of the children's series but with an adult – and sometimes nightmarish – perspective. The other is Fantasy & SF: the Roots of Genre, which consists of extracts from two books of criticism: Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn and What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid, with an introduction by Niall Harrison [edit to add: ooops, this last one is from the British Science Fiction Association - with apologies to them!].

Finally, a book arrived in the mail the other day, Houses on the Borderland, a substantial 300-pager with six novellas; "unsettling tales of the macabre", according to the blurb. I was a bit puzzled because I hadn't ordered it, until it dawned on me that it was another publication of the BFS that was included in my subscription. As I said, they really are busy people. All I can add is "keep up the good work!"

Flood: and a few bits and pieces

A two-part four-hour drama shown on UK ITV in early May, 'Flood' explored what might happen if a huge storm surge funnelled down the North Sea and arrived at the Thames estuary at the same time as the highest tide of the year. This was, of course, more or less what happened in 1953, causing widespread flooding and hundreds of deaths in England, and thousands in the Netherlands. I even have a vague childhood memory of that, as at the time my family were living in an East Coast town which suffered considerable damage from the storm.

The plot of 'Flood' assumes that the resultant surge from storm and tide combined would be high enough to overwhelm the Thames Barrier and inundate much of central London, with heavy casualties. There was a cast of stock characters: the hapless Meterological Office man who got the forecast wrong, delaying evacuation plans; the professor who had always argued that the Barrier was in the wrong place leaving London vulnerable to just such a threat; the divorced couple forced to work together because of their expert knowledge of the Barrier; the Metropolitan Police Commissioner trying to co-ordinate the response to the threat and subsequent disaster while worrying about her own daughters trapped in central London; the Deputy Prime Minister saddled with the responsibility of making very tough decisions in the absence abroad of the Prime Minister; and for contrast, the two workmen on the Underground system who found themselves trapped in the tunnels.

There was some interesting material in this. The CGI of the great wave travelling up the Thames and flooding one famous landmark after another was gripping. The operations of the government COBRA Committee, the difficult issues they grappled with, and the response to the disaster were all fairly convincingly, if somewhat patchily, portrayed (although I can't comment on their authenticity). However, for my taste the programme was over-dramatised and over-long: too much hysterical screaming and panicking, too much time spent on the various "human interest" sub-plots.

A pity really, because this is a genuine threat which needs to be treated seriously. When first built 25 years ago the Thames Barrier, which rises up to block the Thames when sea water levels threaten to flood London, was used only once or twice a year. As SE England continues to sink by a few mm a year (isostatic recovery from the last Ice Age still going on) and sea levels gradually rise, so the threat is increasing and the Barrier is deployed more often – 14 times in 2003. Furthermore, we seem to be on the receiving end of more frequent violent storms. The plot of the drama came too close to reality for comfort on 9 November 2007, when the Barrier was raised twice due to a storm surge and high tide combination, but fortunately they didn't quite coincide.

I would have welcomed a shorter, calmer and more realistic drama-documentary. In fact this subject has quite enough drama on its own, so I'd be happy with just a "what-if?" documentary, examining the growing probability of the threat, the likely consequences if it happened, how the authorities would respond, and what we should be doing to minimise this risk, since the Barrier will eventually become inadequate. They could retain that CGI of the floods, though – definitely worth seeing!
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Something of a disappointment on the reading front this week. I had read lots of high praise for Geoff Ryman's 'Air', concerning the impact on a small and remote Asian village of a test to beam the internet right into people's heads. So I bought a copy and got stuck in. However, I stopped reading after four chapters. Nothing wrong with the author's writing style or ability, it was just that the story wasn't to my taste. And I have so many books lined up waiting to be read that I don't persevere for long with one which I'm not enjoying.
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A curious trend in the sales of my alternate World War 2 novel, 'The Foresight War'. Up to the end of last year, after three years of sales, more than twice as many copies had been ordered from the UK printers as from the US ones (it's Print On Demand, so copies are only printed as they are purchased). This didn't surprise me, as the principal character is British and the plot is very much focused on Britain and Germany. Since January, however, sales in the UK have declined while those in the USA have increased, to the extent that in this year so far US sales are 2.5 times higher than UK ones. Perhaps I've just run out of Brits interested in alternate WW2 stories!

Film 'V for Vendetta' and TV series 'The Last Enemy'

V for Vendetta (2006) is set in a future dystopian England in which security fears have led to the imposition of a police state, with tight controls on public behaviour and suppression of dissent. A girl (Natalie Portman) becomes caught up in the plans of a vengeful and resourceful man, known only as "V", who is planning the violent overthrow of the government. He always wears a mask and costume to represent Guy Fawkes, and it is suggested that he was badly disfigured by an official experiment which went wrong.

I'm not a fan of comics, and when I sat down to watch the film I didn't realise that it was based on a graphic novel. The comic-strip elements are clear enough: not only the man in a mask, but his improbable resources and apparently superhuman abilities with knives. What is slightly confusing is that the rest of the film appears to be a lot more serious in intent, using well-known actors and sending clear messages about the authoritarian direction in which the UK seems to be gradually but inexorably heading, and the dangers which lie down that path. I'm not sure that the serious and comic-strip elements work all that well together, but it was an interesting attempt and worth watching.

The theme of 'V for Vendetta' reminded me of the recent BBC TV series The Last Enemy (shown in five episodes, totalling 330 minutes, in February and March). This was much more realistic, concerning a near-future British government plan to introduce a national "total surveillance" system, linking CCTVs, ID cards and other databases so that anyone can be immediately located and tracked, and comprehensive information about them obtained. A famous but unworldly mathematician is roped in to help sell the idea to the public, and also becomes involved in a parallel plot line concerning a mysterious and lethal ailment apparently caused by secret genetic experiments. Together with a few resourceful friends he tries to expose what is going on but, unlike 'V', the story does not have a happy ending.

The plot of The Last Enemy is really getting close to the truth now, because our government does indeed want to introduce a comprehensive system linking everything about everyone that is recorded on official electronic databases, and providing access to such data via the planned ID cards. There's a lot of debate about the introduction of the ID cards (which is going to be voluntary for most people: at least, at first…). In my view, too much of the discussion misses the point. I see no harm in ID cards. I carry one now – a driving licence with my name and address, date of birth and photo on it – and occasionally find it useful in confirming my identity. The main issue is the vast database which the government wants to put behind it, way beyond anything attempted anywhere else, and that's a problem for various reasons. The loss of privacy, the certainty of error in inputting the data, and the horrifying prospect of a really comprehensive identity theft if it's ever hacked (or a civil servant with input access is bribed or coerced). The catastrophic record of government failures in introducing computer-based systems far less sophisticated and complex than this is another reason to regard this idea as misconceived. As is the fact that the excuse for introducing the system is international terrorism, but all such recent attacks in the UK have been by British citizens in good standing who would have been perfectly entitled to be issued ID cards, so where's the benefit there? Oh well, rant over - for now.

Film: Déjà Vu (2006)

The time is the present, the location New Orleans. A massive car bomb destroys a ferry packed with families, and ATF agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) is assigned to the team to investigate it. Be warned: I try to avoid spoilers in my reviews, but it really isn't possible with this one, so if you plan to watch the film and want the plot to be a surprise, stop reading NOW!

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Carlin discovers that the FBI are using a "time machine" based on wormhole technology which allows them to look at any point within a radius of a few miles of the machine, but with a fixed timelag of four days and six hours. As the team look back into the past to discover clues to the identity of the bomber, they focus on a young woman, Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton) from whom the bomber obtained the vehicle used in the attack – and whose body had been found in the water near the explosion. Over days of observation, Carlin falls in love with her and, after the bomber has been identified and arrested and the case is closed down, goes back into the past to try to rescue her and to prevent the bombing from happening.

So far so good: it seems to be a straightforward alternate time-line story, with the branch point being Carlin's attempts to alter the past, from which moment the "future" divides into the original time-line in the first part of the film (lets call it TL1) and the new one caused by Carlin's actions, which runs in parallel (TL2). This division into two time-lines is specifically acknowledged in the film, when one of the characters considers the implications of altering the past. Unfortunately, there are some massive plot holes which make a nonsense of the story, which is a shame because it is otherwise an intriguing and entertaining film with some neat touches. If you don't want to know what the problems are, stop reading NOW!

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The problem is that the film-makers get terribly confused between the time-lines. This first becomes obvious during a dramatic and original car chase in TL1, in which Carlin is driving a vehicle while trying to follow, through a portable viewer linked to the time machine, the bomber who is driving the same route 4+ days in the past. He is so distracted that he causes a series of accidents, and when he has to double back he drives past some blazing wrecks – but these also appear in the view of the past. That's just carelessness, but a more fundamental problem is that a whole series of events is misplaced: starting with the murder of his partner (due to a message Carlin had sent into the past) and going through the destruction of the bomber's property as Carlin rescues the girl, and then his subsequent visit to her flat to clean up his injuries (leaving bloodstained dressings), during which the girl rings up the ATF office to check on his identity. These events only occur because of Carlin's efforts to alter the past, and therefore belong in TL2, but they are all observed in TL1, in which the girl died before most of the events which "involve" her. That makes no sense at all.

Yes, I know that the whole premise of the story is impossible anyway, but that isn't the point. I am willing to suspend disbelief and go along with all sorts of impossible plot lines provided that they are internally consistent (I wouldn't otherwise be able to read SFF at all). It's when they lack internal consistency that I lose patience. I am frankly amazed that an entire team of people spent months working on this film and didn't notice, or decided to ignore, these inconsistencies. Either they suffered from collective stupidity, or they assumed that their audience would be too stupid to notice. Not the way to give SF films a good name.

Interzone 214 and Contact (1997 film)

An interesting preview of Iain M Banks' new Culture novel Matter (due out in hardback in February), within an entertaining interview with the author, is the first feature in the latest issue of the SFF mag. One to look out for when it arrives in paperback (not that I'm a skinflint, I'm just short of bookshelf space…).

There are fewer stories this time, because they include a novella; Far Horizon by Jason Stoddard, illustrated by Paul Drummond (an engagingly retro wheel-shaped space station features, repeated on the cover). One of the richest men on a rather dystopian, corporation-ruled near-future Earth, has plans for terraforming Venus which won't bear fruit for millennia. He decides that the immediate future is too uninteresting to hang around for, so he cheats time by going into cold sleep until his new planet is ready, only to discover a vast surprise.

In Pseudo Tokyo by Jennifer Linnaea, a future tourist, eagerly anticipating teleporting into Japan, finds himself not quite where he expected.

The Trace of Him by Christopher Priest is a brief glimpse of a few hours in the life of a woman returning for the funeral of a lover she had left twenty years before.

The Faces of my Friends by Jennifer Harwood-Smith is the winner of the James White Award. The last remnant of a outcast group is persecuted towards extinction in an intolerant future world; but what they are being persecuted for is an uncomfortable surprise.

Finally, The Scent of their Arrival by Mercurio D. Riviera explores the world of planet-bound but intelligent beings who communicate by scent, struggling to understand the message sent by the vast spaceship which had arrived in orbit around their world. All is not what it seems…

A good crop, as usual; original, inventive and absorbing. I've noticed that it's some time since I read a story in Interzone which I didn't enjoy. Either the standard is rising or I'm becoming acclimatised. Or perhaps I've become more tolerant of a fiction form which, even if it doesn't always work, at least doesn't involve a large investment in time to find that out. Or maybe it's all of those things.

The final section in the mag is, as usual, the pages of detailed and sometimes hard-hitting reviews of films, TV programmes and books. Top of my "might buy" list from this batch is Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson, which sounds like a story I might enjoy getting my teeth into.

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I've recently seen Contact, the 1997 film of Carl Sagan's 1985 novel about the first contact from an intelligent alien species. Somehow I've managed to miss both the book and the film until now, so I came to it entirely fresh, knowing nothing except the basic premise. I must admit that I was highly impressed. The film takes an intelligent, adult approach to the issues which would be raised by such an event and gripped my attention throughout. I would have awarded it an Oscar, and given another to Jodie Foster for a brilliant central performance as the obsessed astronomer. If only all SF films were this good!

Film review: The Golden Compass

The current Christmas fantasy blockbuster, this is based on Northern Lights (known as The Golden Compass outside the UK), the first volume of Philip Pullman's highly successful His Dark Materials trilogy. I read the trilogy a few years ago and, while I wouldn't call myself a fan, thought it worth the fairly considerable time involved (there is a total of nearly 1,300 pages). Although marketed for children, Pullman did not write for this audience - the marketing decision was based on the fact that the principal characters are children - and in fact the tale is rather grim for the young.

For those unfamiliar with the story, a brief background: this is an unusual and complex fantasy, involving a parallel world (of approximately late-Victorian technical development) with people whose souls are housed outside the body, in talking animals called daemons. The story focuses on a 12-year old English girl – Lyra Bellaqua (very well played in the film by 13-year old novice Dakota Blue Richards) – who becomes the focus of interest of the powerful religious Magisterium and its ally, the formidable Mrs Coulter (an excellent performance by Nicole Kidman, with just the right blend of beauty, charm and reasonableness covering evil intent). In this first part, young children keep disappearing and Lyra, with the aid of a truth-divining pocket-watch like device known as the alethiometer (the Golden Compass of the film title), becomes involved in trying to discover what has happened to them. Lyra's journey takes her to an experimental station in the far north, and encounters with giant talking polar bears, who wear armour and live for fighting.

When making a film of a long and complex book (six or seven hours of reading, condensed into a couple of cinematic hours), the film-makers can either cut out many characters and large chunks of the plot, or can try to include all of the key elements but treat them rather briefly. In the case of The Golden Compass, the later course has been selected. The film starts with a long, voice-over infodump to try to get the audience up and running, then (as far as I can recall) remains more or less faithful to the book thereafter, but with each scene cropped in a way which keeps the story moving quickly. This works well enough for those familiar with the plot, for whom it acts as a kind of visual refresher, but may I suspect prove confusing and even irritating to the uninitiated. On the credit side, there are many visually spectacular scenes and the CGI is as good as we have come to expect. The acting is also very good from a strong cast, including the Casino Royale pairing of the rugged Daniel Craig as Lyra's "uncle" Lord Asriel and the beautiful Eva Green as the witch-queen Serafina Pekkala.

The trilogy has attracted controversy because of its anti-religious content, which becomes stronger in the later books. Not surprisingly, the Christian churches have reacted rather badly to the success of the series, although this aspect has been played down in this first film. I presume that films of the other volumes will follow if this one is successful (which so far it seems to be, although less so in the USA).

Overall, a good effort and I will certainly be watching the sequels, if they appear.