Interzone 245

The interview in this issue of the magazine is with Paul Cornell, previously noted for writing Doctor Who novels. This is accompanied by a review of his new novel, London Falling, concerning detectives operating in an alternative London in which the supernatural exists. I love alternative London stories and have a range of them already: Christopher Fowler's Roofworld, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, China Miéville's Un Lun Dun, and also Miéville's Kraken which is on my reading pile. So I have ordered Cornell's book and also Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch, which was mentioned in the review. Lots to look forward to.

The film and DVD reviews feature Cloud Atlas which I am still in two minds about adding to my rental list (general conclusion: strange and difficult, but worth it), and also include generally favourable reviews of Skyfall, Neverland and Looper among others.

Five stories this time, but no fewer than three of them are novelettes:

The Animator by Chris Butler, novelette illustrated by Ben Baldwin. This is the second story set in his strange alternative Earth to be published in Interzone (the first being in issue 233). It is a world in which everyone constantly emits clouds of spores which can be detected by other people nearby and allows them to assess each other's status and mood; effectively not unlike telepathy.  In this story, a young man is trying to make his fortune by developing a light projector for entertainment - but there are risks in introducing a new technology in a restrictive society with a vaguely steampunk feel.

Hypermnemonic by Melanie Tem, illustrated by David Gentry. A strange tale about a woman whose brain has been modified to give her an intense recall of events, sent to confront a man she once had an affair with. Atmospheric, but confusing and with a rather gothic conclusion.

The International Studbook of the Giant Panda by Carlos Hernandez, novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner. We all know that giant pandas have problems with mating, so in this story there's a hi-tech but controversial solution; remotely-controlled animatronic pandas to help things along. Put like that it sounds bizarre, but I found it intriguing and entertaining.

Paskutinis Iliuzija (The Last Illusion) by Damien Walters Grintalis, illustrated by Dave Senecal. The last magician in Lithuania is under constant threat after the invasion by the Soviet Union, but needs to help his sick daughter. A sad, bittersweet tale.

The Face Tree by Anthony Mann, novelette illustrated by Martin Hanford. What appear to be carved wooden faces are found protruding from tree-trunks around present day Oxford. A man who lives a pointless, drifting existence meets a mysterious woman who seems to have some connection with them.

A good selection this time, all of them worth reading. My favourite is Hernandez' story about the giant pandas.

Finally, I was sad to read in the R.I.P. section that Charles Chilton has died. I wrote about him in my review of Interzone 235 in July 2011, as follows:

"A blast from the past in David Langford's Ansible Link column in the July/August issue of this magazine: at the British Library's Out of This World SF exhibition he met 93-year-old Charles Chilton. I well remember listening to his exciting Journey into Space radio drama series in the 1950s - probably my first introduction to SF - and I still have an ancient copy of his novel The World in Peril on my shelf. I see from Wiki (which has a very informative entry) that Journey into Space was the last radio programme in the UK to attract a bigger audience than television and was translated into seventeen languages. It is apparently available on CD and internet download. It will have very little merit by modern SF standards but the sheer nostalgia value is huge!"

Hull Zero Three, by Greg Bear

I read several books by Bear in the 1980s and 90s, but the only ones I kept on my shelf were the Songs of Earth and Power duology:  The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage. This is rather curious as these are fantasies, rather than the SF which I normally read and which Bear normally writes, but I do have a soft spot for original contemporary fantasies like these and really must read them again before long.

Hull Zero Three, an SF book published in 2010, was chosen as a read of the month by the Classic Science Fiction discussion group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClassicScienceFiction/ ), so I decided to give it a try. The time is the distant future, the setting a huge sub-light speed colony ship on its way to find a new home for humanity; a journey of many centuries. This is not a conventional story, however.

The protagonist, simply known as Teacher, wakes from a pleasant dream of colonising a new planet into a nightmare. He is in an almost empty, freezing cold ship, populated mainly by strange and often deadly creatures, with his only ally a young girl who constantly urges him on to some unknown destination. This is a dark, downbeat and gloomy start, the bewildered and helpless Teacher having lost much of his memory and only recalling snatches of information from time to time. The air of confusion was exacerbated in my mind by the fact that Bear's descriptions of the places his characters pass through are frequently too unclear to form a mental picture of them.  Teacher meets up with other companions of the girl, strange humanoids with whom it is difficult to communicate, but they are all constantly trying to keep warm, to find food and drink, and to avoid danger. I found this a tough part of the story to get through and it goes on for almost half the book. I can't say any more about the plot without posting spoilers, so if you don't want to know what happens next, read no further - but I can reassure you that in the second half of the book both the pace and the interest pick up, and there is an intriguing conclusion.

WARNING - some spoilers follow

The first glimmers of optimism come just before the half-way point of the story, when Teacher meets up with an even more disparate group of beings who are in a more secure position and who between them (and with the aid of Teacher's returning memories) manage to piece together a picture of their circumstances. The vessel actually consists of three separate, kilometres-long ships linked to a vast central snowball which provides their reaction mass; Teacher's group are in Hull Zero One. It is clear that something has gone badly wrong with the journey and that the ship is seriously damaged.

They realise that the colonists and other creatures are not carried in corporeal form but as genetic potential, able to be artificially conceived and grown in various different physical forms to suit whatever environment is provided by the planet they arrive at, and given artificial memories. For some reason, the ship has started producing a wide range of different humans and animals even though they have not arrived at a planet. Teacher's group realise that there has been a major and still on-going conflict between Ship Control and the mysterious Destination Guidance which is based on the snowball. They travel to Hull Zero Three, the only one still in good condition, to try to discover more about what is happening and why. What they find there divides loyalties and leads to a final showdown between Ship Control and Destination Guidance, with all being revealed and resolved only at the very end of the story.

The key question: was it worth reading? That's a tough one to answer; it certainly isn't an easy read and I nearly gave up at one point, but I was just sufficiently intrigued to keep going and enjoyed the final part of the story which I read in one sitting. This is not a novel which will have universal appeal, but if you don't mind being kept in the dark for much of the story and have the patience to stick with it, you may find it worthwhile.

Film: Sleepy Hollow (1999)

I don't normally watch horror films, but this one seems to have been well regarded so I thought I'd give it a try. The year is 1799 and scientifically-minded law officer Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is sent from New York to investigate a series of killings in which the victims are decapitated. He is told of the local legend of a headless horseman, a mercenary killed in the Revolutionary War, who is blamed for the murders. As the disbelieving Crane systematically investigates possible motives for the killings he is disconcerted to meet the headless horseman in person, and his search then becomes a race against time to find a way of stopping the murders as the bodies mount up.

The film was directed by Tim Burton and is a visual pleasure, rich in atmosphere, with the impressive cast effectively conveying the superstition of the times.  However, it is decidedly "over the top" in cranking up the drama to levels which sometimes become rather laughable. I prefer more subtlety and ambivalence in dealing with this kind of theme; more uncertainty as to what is real, what is a product of the characters' imaginations and what might just be supernatural. The 2011 film The Awakening, which I reviewed here last August, is an excellent example of what I mean and is far more to my taste, with a much more adult and thoughtful script. In contrast, Sleepy Hollow is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. I can imagine horror fans liking it, but it left me unengaged.

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I'm now into the second season of three SFF TV series I'm working through on DVD: Game of Thrones, Fringe, and Warehouse 13. What's more, the second season of Once Upon a Time has just started on UK TV. All very different from each other, but all delivering addictive entertainment. Next I aim to try Continuum, a Canadian series about a detective from the future hunting criminals who have escaped back in time – to the present day. Sounds promising.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, by Jared Diamond

This book, published in 2005, follows on from Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which I reviewed on this blog in October 2012. GGS focused on the factors which had allowed civilisations to develop successfully in some parts of the world but not others. Collapse looks at the other end of the process, and considers why a variety of different societies which had become established subsequently failed.

 The author starts by proposing a five-point framework of factors which could influence the collapse of a society: environmental damage; climate change; hostile neighbours; friendly trade partners; and (of greatest significance) the society's response to such problems. He then goes on to examine in detail several societies. Somewhat surprisingly, he spends the first part of the book focusing on a single valley in Montana which he knows well, looking at the range of factors which have affected its development over the past few decades. He then goes on to more conventional case studies, first looking at historical societies: Easter, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands in the Pacific; the Anasazi, the Maya, the Viking settlements (especially Iceland and Greenland), and mention of a few other societies which have succeeded despite difficulties, notably Japan.

 A lot of the problems experienced by colonists trying to become established in new territory have been down to wrong assumptions; for instance, the scenery and vegetation may look very similar to that which the colonists were used to, but may prove to be much slower to recover from farming use, leading to rapid soil erosion.

 Next come some modern societies which are still experiencing significant problems: Rwanda (principally down to uncontrolled population growth to a very high density); Haiti and the Dominican Republic (an interesting contrast, with history and cultural factors predominant); China (severe pollution) and Australia (environmental deterioration). In the final part Diamond looks at some practical lessons, drawing a road map of factors contributing to failures of group decision-making. His "road map" includes the failure to anticipate problems (e.g. introducing rabbits and foxes to Australia); failure to perceive a problem once it has arrived, usually because it occurs so gradually (e.g. climate change); failure to act even after a problem has been perceived, particularly when the ruling elite isn't affected, only the powerless poor (e.g. subsidising fisherman when stocks collapse instead of taking steps to allow stocks to recover - the "tragedy of the commons" particularly applies here). Some reasons for failure to act may be religious or cultural (e.g. the Greenland Vikings died out when they could have survived by copying the lifestyle of the Inuit living successfully in the same area) or could simply be down to psychological denial (e.g. continuing to live close to a potential disaster - such as a potentially active volcano or earthquake-prone fault).

 One section near the end addresses some common objections to his thesis: "The environment has to be balanced against the economy" (it is always much more costly in the long run to ignore environmental problems then try to deal with the consequences than it is to take prompt action to remove the causes). "Technology will solve our problems" (technology creates at least as many problems as it solves; furthermore, the cost of technological solutions to problems is always far greater than that of preventing the problems from happening). "If we exhaust one resource, we can always switch to another" (even where that is feasible, experience shows that it takes an extremely long time for any new technology to replace a well-established one). "There isn't a global food problem, we just need to arrange efficient transportation to get it where it's needed" (that assumes that First World countries with food surpluses will be willing to transport huge quantities of food to the Third World, free of charge, indefinitely - for which there is no evidence). "Predictions of environmental disaster have always been proved wrong" (sometimes they have, but sometimes that may be because action has been taken: e.g. pollution from car exhausts in Los Angeles; furthermore, some anti-environmentalist predictions have also proved wrong, such as predictions that the Green Revolution would have banished global hunger by now). "There is no population crisis: it will level off by itself, and anyway continued growth is good for the economy" (the main problem is not actually the number of people, but the resources they use up and the waste they generate; by most criteria we are already using resources at an unsustainable rate, and economic growth in the Third World is rapidly multiplying consumption).

 I have to say that I didn't find this book as gripping as GGS. I felt that the author was being self-indulgent rather than focusing on presenting his case as crisply as possible, and believe that with judicious editing the book could have been reduced in length by around 50% without losing any of the key evidence and arguments. I therefore struggled with it to some extent, and ended up skim-reading most of the final section to get to the end. Despite this, there is a lot of solid, thought-provoking material in this book which should make it as valuable as GGS to world-building writers.

Film: The Invention of Lying (2009)

The Invention of Lying stars British comedian Ricky Gervais (who also co-authored and co-directed) as film scriptwriter Mark Bellison, who lives on an alternative Earth which is identical to ours except for one important detail; no-one is capable of lying, so everyone tells the blunt truth at all times. In fact, the concept of lying does not even exist, so people instantly and firmly believe everything they are told. The movies on which Bellison works are all factual documentaries and all consist simply of one person reading the script; fiction does not exist.

Be warned - this review contains spoilers!

Bellison is a loser in all aspects of his life and has reached rock bottom, but then suddenly has an inspiration - he lies to get himself out of trouble. From then on his life makes a spectacular recovery as he lies to obtain money, and writes dramatic but entirely fictional scripts which are a huge box-office success since everyone believes the fantastical events in them to be true. His life heads in a different direction when he is overheard lying to his dying mother about the wonderful afterlife which awaits her, to ease her fear of death. This world lacks the concept of religion and Bellison's stories spread like wildfire, bringing him global fame. However, this still does not make him sufficiently attractive to Anna (Jennifer Garner), the love of his life who is also being courted by a rival scriptwriter.

Although I have been unable to discover any reference to it, this film was surely inspired by James Morrow's novella City of Truth, which I reviewed on this blog in December 2007. Some of the basic elements differ (in the novella, people have the capacity to lie, but are conditioned from their earliest years to tell only the truth), but many of the jokes resulting from the brutal honesty of everyday life are similar. Despite this humour, Morrow's story is darker in tone, while TIOL is (rightly) billed as a romantic fantasy comedy.

I suspect that this movie didn't go down too well in more religious parts of the world, since it portrays Bellison as inventing a "Man in the Sky" to account for the existence of the afterlife he has described. He writes a moral code allegedly from the Man in the Sky which is equivalent to the Ten Commandments, and presents it to an eager audience, only to be disconcerted by some of the literal questioning about the practical details. As he becomes involved in ever more detailed and convoluted explanations for the inconsistencies in his newly-invented religion, he is dismayed by some of the consequences of its spread. Apart from the concept of a happy afterlife for those who behave themselves, it appears that the religion has a largely negative effect on most people's lives. Needless to say, however, the film has a happy ending.

I have to admit that Gervais's humour and mine operate on different wavelengths so I don't generally find him very amusing. I found this film better than most in that respect and worth watching, despite the satire being rather blunt and heavy-handed, but Morrow's novella is more thought-provoking.

Ethan of Athos, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Ethan of Athos is an unusual 1986 story from Bujold, in that although it is set in the Vorkosigan universe it doesn't feature her long-term hero Miles. Athos is a remote, agricultural planet with one peculiarity - there are no women. The men who settled Athos had strong religious objections to women, regarding them as evil temptresses, so they took advantage of replicator (artificial womb) technology to produce their (male) children. The problem was, the replicators needed occasional restocking with female genetic material which had to come from off-planet, so when an urgently-needed batch of new material proves to have been switched for useless junk, they are in a crisis.

Ethan is a young doctor, an expert on the replicators, so is sent off-planet in order to find the material required. This is a huge adventure since travel off-planet is normally banned: Ethan has never seen a woman, and even photos of them are highly restricted. He arrives at Kline Station, a vast independent entrepot which gives him the best chance of buying genetic material, only to find himself in the middle of a conflict he doesn't understand, which all seems to be focused on the material which Athos should have received but has gone missing. He is up against ruthless Cetagandan secret agents and only survives with the aid of Elli Quinn, a female mercenary who is also involved in the case. Eventually all is resolved, although in an unexpected fashion.

This is an entertaining tale, well written as usual by Bujold who is a master (or should that be mistress?) story-teller. In some respects, it defies expectations.

WARNING: some spoilers follow.

With Ethan constantly in the company of the beautiful, likeable and resourceful Elli, the story arc seems predictable: Ethan realises that his culture has got it all wrong as far as women are concerned, rejects his backward religion and tumbles into the sack with the willing Elli, before starting a new life well away from the stiflingly parochial Athos. Except that none of this happens, and what he wants from Elli turns out to be rather different. This makes me reflect that Bujold seems to have a soft spot for minorities. Miles is physically handicapped, but overcomes his disadvantages with cleverness and determination. Ethan is homosexual, like everyone else on his planet, and is shown as a likeable if naïve hero who gets a rough time from the repellent homophobes on Kline Station. Even the bizarre Athosian culture is merely described in a matter-of-fact way, without criticism and with only some gentle parody, and it all seems to work well enough for the Athosians.

Ethan isn't unchanged by his experience, however, and does end up doing something rather radical which will have major implications for the future of the people of his planet - but there is no suggestion that they will become anything other than entirely male.

Film: Prometheus (2012)

I eventually got around to watching all of the Alien series of films for which Prometheus was advertised as a prequel, so it was natural for me to see this one too. I have to say that I watched it with some trepidation as I have reservations about the earlier films; while the first one is a classic and they are all very atmospheric, in general they dwell too strongly on the yuck/horror aspects for my taste.

A brief plot summary, with some spoilers: almost a century into the future, two researchers (played by Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green) believe that they have discovered pointers to a distant star system in prehistoric cave paintings and manage to persuade a billionaire to fund an expedition to the system. On arrival they discover a vast structure which is gradually revealed as a base for the Engineers, effectively the creators of mankind. Then things start to go horribly wrong in the usual - and depressingly predictable - fashion. You just know that when two members of the team exploring the structure get lost they are going to die horrible deaths; that the mysterious containers which start to leak black fluid are going to have horrible consequences for humans; and that when Rapace's character becomes impossibly pregnant she will be carrying something horrible rather than a human being; and all these duly come to pass.

There are some good aspects to the movie: Michael Fassbender plays a creepy android, Charlize Theron an android-like human, and Rapace is worth watching. There are some strong and atmospheric scenes, and I found the Engineers fascinating: I would very much like to have seen a lot more of them, including more exploration of why they created humanity and why they apparently turned against us, but presumably these developments have been saved for the sequel(s), should they eventually emerge. Instead, what we get is a gross-out yuck/horror gore-fest in the latter part of the film. The frustrating thing is that the potential was there: it has some of the elements of a great SF film but it ended up as yet another horror movie with an SF background and with nothing much new to say. Disappointing.

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I also started to watch another recent SF film, Chronicle. However, after a quarter of an hour or so it seemed to be going nowhere of interest so I stopped.

Interzone 244

Two author interviews to accompany book reviews this time: Saladin Ahmad (Throne of the Crescent Moon) and Karin Tidbeck (Jagganath). The former is a fantasy author drawing upon both western and eastern heritages, while the latter is a Swedish author who has translated her own short-story anthology. Other book reviews which caught my eye were Eric Brown’s Helix Wars and Benedict Jacka’s Taken. Film and DVD reviews include a double dose of Tolkien, with the Blue Ray extended editions of The Lord of the Rings and the first part of The Hobbit. There's an interesting discussion of some of the quirks and limitations of the films caused by the way in which the Tolkien film rights were handled (or more accurately mishandled) decades ago. On the TV side, Season One of The Continuum sounds interesting – a policewoman from the future operates in present-day Vancouver.

There are six stories include two novelettes, indicating that the new compact format has allowed more space for fiction:

The Book Seller by Lavie Tidhar, a novelette illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe. Yet another story in the author’s strange future world focused on a space station sited in Israel. As with Strigoi in IZ 242, this concerns a data vampire arriving at the station.

Build Guide by Helen Jackson, illustrated by Richard Wagner. A curious little story about corruption in constructing a space station. A story which would have worked just as well set on Earth.

The Genoa Passage by George Zebrowski, illustrated by Martin Handford. If you go to the right place, a pass in the mountains through which Nazis escaped at the end of World War 2, you can still see them as ghostly figures, escaping again and again – but some people don't want them to.

iRobot by Guy Haley, illustrated by Jim Burns. The last flicker of activity left in an ancient robot on a lifeless world. Atmospheric.

Sky Leap - Earth Flame by Jim Hawkins, a novelette illustrated by Richard Wagner. A boy and girl are bred to be linked to a powerful new artificial brain designed to avert the devastation of human space. But will it be capable of the task?

A Flag Still Flies Over Sabor City by Tracie Welser. A dystopian city-state in which the oppressed workers have few opportunities to express their small rebellions.

The Hawkins story is the most substantial in terms of traditional SF and will bear re-reading, although Zebrowski’s odd tale seems likely to stick in the mind.

Film: Iron Sky (2012)

And now for something completely different…. All those Nazi super-technology conspiracy myths turn out to be true when some near-future US astronauts paying a return visit to the Moon stumble across a huge Nazi base on the dark side. This prompts the Nazis to launch a reconnaissance mission to New York by ambitious senior officer Klaus Adler (Götz Otto), accompanied by his naïve and enthusiastic girlfriend Renate Richter (Julia Dietze), to prepare the way for an attack on the Earth to establish the Fourth Reich. Cue lots of culture-clash comedy with everybody's best-laid plans going seriously awry.

The movie is a Finnish-German-Australian production, with the principal actors being from Germany, Australia and New Zealand. I suspect that it didn't go down too well in the USA, since it isn't just the Nazis who are parodied but the Americans too. The Moon mission turns out to be a re-election stunt by the US President (un-named, but clearly Sarah Palin, played by Stephanie Paul) who seizes on the opportunity to boost her popularity rating. And what could be better than a Star Wars-type battle against the Nazis?

This film is in hilariously bad taste throughout, and I frequently laughed out loud at its sheer effrontery. Don't bother to point out the plot holes or scientific nonsenses, this film revels in them (World War 2 era motorcyle-sidecar combinations puttering across the Moon?). The story was by Johanna Sinisalo, a Nebula Award-nominated Finnish SFF writer, but the sense of humour seemed to me to have a strong Australian flavour - subtle it ain't! I don't know what the film-makers were on, but they surely had a ball. Probably best watched in company with the aid of alcoholic pre-lubrication and with your critical faculties locked away for the ride.

Film: Looper (2012)

This time-travel drama received very good reviews so was on my "must-watch" list as soon as it became available.

Most of the film is set in 2044. Thirty years later, time travel had been invented and promptly made illegal. Which meant that criminals made use of it, for a bizarre purpose - the untraceable disposal of people they wanted to kill. They sent them back alive to 2044 at a prearranged time and place where they were promptly killed and disposed of by one of a group of killers known as loopers - all organised by a man from the future sent back to live in 2044. The loopers were well paid but there was a price: after thirty years they were sent back to be killed by their younger selves, a process known as "closing the loop".

This review contains major spoilers so if you prefer to be surprised, stop reading now - but do see the film if you can as it's exciting and intriguing, even though the logical structure doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

---------------------------MAJOR SPOILERS!-------------------------

The protagonist, Joe Simmons, is one of the loopers. He is played by two different actors: as a young man in 2044 by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and as an older man from 2074 by Bruce Willis. The inevitable happens and young Joe turns up for an execution to discover that old Joe is the target. He hesitates, allowing old Joe to escape - a dire crime for which he is pursued by the criminal gang. He goes on the hunt for old Joe, hoping to redeem himself, but when they do meet, matters become complicated.

Old Joe tells his younger self that a powerful and evil criminal known as the Rainmaker had taken over the 2074 underworld and was shutting down the time travel operation, closing all of the loops. He had discovered information about the Rainmaker's identity which meant that he had to be the adult version of one of three 10-year-old boys living in the area - and old Joe meant to kill all three of them to make sure that the Rainmaker never lived to maturity. One of the boys lives on an isolated farm with his mother (Emily Blunt), and young Joe gets to them first, discovering that the boy has powerful telekinetic abilities - and must be the future Rainmaker. However, young Joe becomes involved with the mother who believes that her son will be a force for good if she can bring him up properly. When old Joe arrives, his younger self realises that he is about to shoot the mother as she protects her son, which will result in the boy becoming the embittered Rainmaker. Too far away to intervene directly, young Joe shoots himself, thereby causing his older self to disappear.

On the face of it, Looper is a slick, exciting, unusual and quite intelligent thriller, but on reflection the problems begin to pile up. Put simply, the plot contains some illogical events and major paradoxes - something hinted at in the film itself when old Joe tells young Joe not to try to think about it. For a start, why "close the loop" by killing the older assassins? And if you're going to do that anyway, why have them killed by their younger selves rather than one of the other loopers? If, as a result of young Joe's suicide, old Joe had never existed, then why was young Joe at the farm, and what could have made him kill himself? There are probably quite a few more examples which more analytical viewers can come up with.

Paradoxes of this kind are what you always get when you have single-timeline time travel, and they make a nonsense of the whole plot. This is a very old-fashioned limitation, having been replaced long ago in SF by the notion of the multiverse - parallel worlds, with new ones forever being created at branching points, whenever events change. With this concept, there are no paradoxes, because changes in the past create a different future in parallel with what would have happened without the changes. There is a suggestion of this in the film, with an unexplained scene in which the arrival of old Joe in the past results in young Joe instantly killing him, but this is not followed up (unless I missed something - always possible).

Despite this, it is an intriguing film and one that I am likely to watch again sometime, if only to try to figure out exactly what is supposed to be happening!

The Deathworld trilogy, by Harry Harrison

I bought these books about forty years ago and hadn't read them for almost as long, so I was pleased when the first of them was chosen as the book of the month by the Classic Science Fiction discussion group. Since they are all very short by modern standards, only adding up to one average-sized modern novel between them, I read the two sequels as well.

Deathworld is set in a far-future universe in which humanity has colonised 30,000 worlds (with no mention of any alien civilisations) and features Jason dinAlt, a gambler with limited telekinetic powers which enable him to cheat. He is recruited and bankrolled by Kerk Pyrrus, a formidable native of the planet Pyrrus, to win a large sum of money to purchase weapons which the people on his planet need to survive. It emerges that Pyrrus is ferociously hostile to humanity; not just in its double gravity and violent extremes of weather and climate, but in a flora and fauna which keep evolving at a rapid rate to attack the settlers as viciously as possible. As a result the Pyrrans are formidable fighters, their whole lives geared to survival.

Bored with his existence, dinAlt is intrigued by what he hears and decides to travel to Pyrrus with Kerk. Surviving with some difficulty and a lot of help, he gradually realises that there is something odd going on and believes that humanity doesn't need to live in such a state of violent warfare with the planet's biota. However, the Pyrrans are so focused on survival that they have no time for his theories and dinAlt has to put his own life on the line to try to change the situation.

Like most heroes of contemporary SF, dinAlt regards himself as far superior to the rest of humanity, but his self-confidence takes a battering on Pyrrus where he struggles with the high gravity and is demonstrably inferior in fighting skills to the average eight-year old. His intelligence wins out over the brute force of the Pyrrans in the end, though. Read with modern eyes, the story has a certain allegorical feel - of a population whose own actions are changing their environment in ways which make it more hostile to themselves, but who are too wrapped up in their own way of life to want to make the necessary alterations. But Harrison wrote this long before concerns about climate change emerged.

Deathworld 2, originally titled The Ethical Engineer, directly continues the story with dinAlt on Pyrrus, from which he is abruptly kidnapped by Mikah, a representative of a group of religious fundamentalists who have decided to bring the now famous dinAlt to trial for his various earlier misdeeds as an example to others. However, Mikah's ship crashes on an isolated planet with a primitive human civilisation based on slavery. As might be expected, the resourceful dinAlt manages to cope with the situations he keeps finding himself in, while planning how to get off the planet.

This is a slightly strange sequel as dinAlt, whom we knew from the first book as someone whose only skill was as a psi-aided gambler, suddenly morphs into an engineer with a comprehensive knowledge of early technology and with no mention of psi powers at all. The story is full of arguments he has with Mikah, in which the merits of dinAlt's rationalist atheism are hammered home in a decidedly unsubtle way. This aspect of the book is not helped by the fact that Mikah is portrayed as a cartoonish parody of a blindly religious fanatic, totally incapable of coping with the real world. If this doesn't appeal, you can skip this book and go straight to the third volume without losing anything.

Deathworld 3 is something of a return to form, and to former issues. Jason dinAlt, once again on Pyrrus with his local girlfriend Meta, has a plan to offer the Pyrrans something other than perpetual war with the local flora and fauna. He has discovered a planet dubbed Felicity possessing valuable mineral resources which lie undeveloped because of the violent opposition of barbaric natives almost as ferocious as the Pyrrans. He recruits enough Pyrrans to take on the task but runs into far more problems than he expected. The fierce locals are led by Temuchin (a name borrowed straight from Earth history - it was the original name of the Mongol warlord Genghis Khan) who proves a hard nut to crack. But dinAlt eventually discovers a solution by reading up on ancient history.

I remembered the stories as fun reads; short, fast paced and entertaining, with a wry sense of humour, as Harrison novels usually are. That is still true, although they appear rather simplistic by modern standards. Despite this, they're still worth the time to read.

Film: In Time (2011)

In Time has a classic SF plot by writer/director Andrew Niccol, set a century and a half into a dystopian future in which everyone stops ageing when they reach 25 and can potentially live forever. The catch is that the universal currency is not money but the minutes and hours of people's lives, known as "living time". Everyone has a clock/calendar built into their forearms which counts down in real time, and from which extra time is deducted whenever they purchase anything or transfer time to someone else; they can similarly add time by earning (or stealing) it. Run out of "living time" and you drop dead on the spot. Most people struggle to earn enough time to continue living day by day, especially as prices are kept rising (and wages falling) by the controlling class of super-rich, who genuinely can live forever - as long as they do nothing stupid. They live in luxurious secure zones which cost months of living time just to enter. The following review contains some minor spoilers.

Will Salas (well portrayed by Justin Timberlake, someone who's name is very familiar but whom I can't recall ever having seen before) is one of the poor, constantly at risk of running out of living time but a man of principle who shares out what he has among his friends. He helps a member of the rich who gets into trouble while slumming down-town, and finds himself with more living time than he has ever dreamed of. The questions are; what will he do with it, and can he avoid the attentions of local gang leader Fortis (Alex Pettyfer) and police "Timekeeper" Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy)?

Salas uses his new wealth to head uptown where he meets Philippe Weis (Vincent Kartheiser), one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, and his daughter Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried) who is immediately attracted to the dangerous and exciting Salas. But what future can they find in the face of the powerful forces opposed to them, and can they do anything to mitigate the unfairness of the stratified society?

This film has echoes of others, most obviously Logan's Run in which everyone dies at the age of 30, but In Time has a darker and more adult feel, more reminiscent of Bladerunner and especially Gattaca. It isn't as good as those two, but it's still one of the better recent SF movies and well worth watching.

A High Shrill Thump: War Stories, edited by Juliana Rew

A collection of short SFF stories on the theme of 'War,' published in 2012 by Third Flatiron Publishing .

The Man Who Couldn't Die by David L. Felts. A new recruit finds himself fighting a war as part of a Marine squad which never suffered any casualties; but there is a price to be paid.

Comrade at Arms by Gustavo Bondoni. The Etruscans are getting squeezed between the Romans and the Eluveitie, but they have a special weapon; the undead fight for them. That's a huge advantage - most of the time.

Angel by K. R. Cairns. The female warriors are sent into battle from their orbiting home, dropping cleansing fire on their unseen enemies on the ground. But when one of them crash-lands, perspectives change.

Grins and Gurgles (Flash Fiction): The Rocketeer by John Harrower. A brief surreal snapshot written as a parody of Biggles; an RFC rocket-man hunts the Red Baron.

Refugees by James S. Dorr. A medieval army advances on the enemy castle, driving refugees before them. But not all of the refugees help their cause.

The Home Front by David Turner. A soldier returns home from the war, but he's not a fighter - his job is to dream of future events. The problem is that his dreams include his private life too.

The Fixer by Jack Skelter. Life in a Vietnamese prison was no fun for a US prisoner of war, until help came from an unexpected quarter. A light and humorous tale.

A Childproof War by Lon Prater. An alien Early Death plague kills all human beings as soon as they reach puberty, so the children continue the war. But what are they fighting for?

The Frontline Is Everywhere by Michael Trudeau. A bizarre tale of the relationships between neighbours who build bomb shelters in preparation for the Big One.

Half a Century Later at a Mid-Earth Pub by Tom Sheehan. A poetic story of an annual meeting of Korean War veterans.

Homeland Security by Brenda Kezar. Local residents find a novel but somewhat dubious way to limit the cross-border incursions and make money at the same time.

In the Blink of an Eye by Nick Johnson. The grim aftermath of a nuclear war, in which only a few can be saved.

I Think I Won by David J. Williams. A different aftermath of a nuclear war, with the descendents of the survivors fighting on in a devastated North America.

This is an eclectic mix of stories covering all periods and including SF, fantasy and horror genres, also ranging from the humorous to the unremittingly grim: the theme of warfare is their only link. They are also all quite short, limiting the scope for character and plot development. It is difficult for me to pick favourites from such a collection, but (unusually for me) the horror story by Bondoni made the strongest impression.