Tagged: review

Science-Fictional-Type Links & Things

  • News
  • July 17, 2007

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Fantasy Book Critic reviews Warren Ellis’s first novel, Crooked Little Vein.

BestSF has reviewed a few magazines this week:

Don D’Amassa’s Critical Mass has new reviews on the Science Fiction page, including Blake Nelson’s young adult novel They Came From Below, Robert Charles Wilson’s Axis, and Charles Stross’s Halting State.

D’Amassa’s Fantasy page also has new reviews: Steph Swainston’s The Modern World, Charles Stross’s The Merchants’ War, and others.

And D’Amassa’s Horror page has new reviews as well: Scott Thomas’s Over the Darkening Fields, the new Tales from the Crypt #1, and more.

Nader Elhefnawy, at Tangent, goes off on a dumb Christopher Hitchens quote from Atlantic Monthly to the effect that SF has a “dearth of sex.”

Elhefnawy also had an essay at Tangent about Michael Moorcock and censorship.

The Space Review has published a transcript of the talk, and the following question and answer session, given by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin at the recent Heinlein Centennial.

The Contra Costa Times has an article on the huge science fiction collection at the University of California-Riverside.

Ben Bova’s regular column in the Naples News is devoted to talking about his own Campbell Award-winning novel Titan, Campbell himself, and science fiction in general.

The Salt Lake Tribune looks at the interesting phenomenon of Christian fantasy novels.

Neth Space is annoyed that so many titles begin with the word “the.”

SF Scope reports on editor and author Gardner Dozois’s recent quintuple bypass heart surgery. Details are few, but it sounds like he’s recovering pretty well – I certainly hope so, and send him all best wishes. (In happier Dozois news, he recently turned in a new original anthology, tentatively entitled Galactic Empires, to Rome Quezada of the SF Book Club, and I’m sure that book will be another winner.)

Cory Doctorow has another one of his periodic essays at Locus Online this week, all about different kinds of visions of the future.

The soul-searching about reviewing on blogs continues unabated into a second week, as Larry of the OF Blog of the Fallen explains why he reviews.

Similarly, Patrick, of Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, has a long post about reviewing, book giveaways, and blogging.

  (more…)

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Apollo’s Song

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Like Ode to Kirihito, this is a major graphic novel by Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and “godfather of manga,” translated and published in English by Vertical Publishing. I won’t repeat the background here, but you click to the earlier review if you like.

(I’ll just wait for you to get back.)

Apollo’s Song is from the same era as Ode to Kirihito – it was serialized in Shukan Shoen Kingu in 1970 (Kirihito ran during 70-71) – and has similar concerns and motifs, though it seems to be less aggressively counter-cultural than Kirihito was. There’s a strong medical drama element in Apollo, and even more mystical/religious ideas than in Kirihito, including an on-stage pagan goddess who I believe is meant to be taken as real.

Tezuka clearly doesn’t fear anyone’s scorn; Apollo opens with a ten-page sequence about impregnation from the point of view of sperm, characterized as a vast army of identical men, all seeking one woman, the ova. The story proper begins immediately afterward, as a boy – apparently meant to be about fifteen or so – is brought to a psychiatric hospital for treatment after having been caught attacking and killing animals. The boy, Shogo, explains that he is the unwanted son of a prostitute (or perhaps just a kept woman…kept by a long series of different men) who hates love, romance, and all manifestations of “tenderness.”

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A midsummer’s weekly reading

  • News
  • July 15, 2007

Another glorious summery weekend here in the New York metro area, so with the necessary errands all done (why is it that most of them seem to involve spending money?), it’s time to catch you up on what ComicMix columnists have written this past week:

Hey, Mellifluous Mike Raub has reached a milestone with his big ComicMix Broadcast #65 and beyond; does that make him eligible for senior citizen privileges?

Lastly on a personal note, a huge thanks once again to Andrew Wheeler for all his comics link posts during my extended day-job swampitude! I hope to be back here full time before y’all know it (but not before Sandy Eggo)…

RIC MEYERS: Hard Dorm

  • News
  • July 15, 2007

dorm-8367722It’s about time I got around to Tartan – specifically Tartan Asia Extreme, since they’ve been inundating the DVD market with every Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai “horror” movie they can get their well-manicured hands on. I put horror in quotes, because, in reality, many of their releases are actually episodes of The Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt with delusions of cinematic grandeur – essentially familiar ghost revenge sagas pumped and/or padded to feature length. I also say “well-manicured,” because, whatever the overall quality of the film they’re presenting, Tartan’s packaging is uniformly classy.

On the one hand, if you’ve yet to have Tartan’s special editions of South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s “Vengeance” trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and Old Boy), acquire them with all speed (and watch them in the aforementioned order, despite their actual release dates). On the other hand, I showed eighteen hours of Tartan’s other Asia Extreme releases at last year’s World Science Fiction Convention and didn’t see a single film that rated above “okay.”

So warned, let’s judge some of their latest releases from the special features perspective. First, there’s Dorm, a Thai award winner that strives to be like Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone. Both concern what happens to a young man in a creepy private school, and while del Toro connects the ghosts to the Spanish Civil War, director Songyos Sugmakanan weaves it within the universal loneliness of an outcast new student. It’s a well-made mood piece more than anything else, and a fine one, but, as previously mentioned, it would have been well-served as a ninety minute (or less) chiller, rather than the 110 minute saga it is.

Tartan attaches an interesting audio commentary with Songyos and some of his cast, in addition to a “making of” (which is really a ten minute on-set home movie of the complications that come of making a film with a pre-teen cast), a “behind the scenes” (which are actually a bunch of short prevue pieces detailing the cast and plot), fittingly eerie deleted scenes, a special effect featurette, and a welcome “character introduction,” which is like a visual program book. All in all, it’s a satisfying job. (more…)

F&SF Book Reviews

  • News
  • July 13, 2007

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The Agony Column reviews Ibrahim S. Amin’s The Monster Hunter’s Handbook.

Fantasybookspot reviews David Bilsborough’s first novel, the epic fantasy The Wanderer’s Tale.

Fantasybookspot also reviews Julie E. Czerneda’s Survival.

SFF World reviews The Dark River by John Twelve Hawks.

SciFi UK Review also covers the June issue of Hub magazine.

Strange Horizons reviews Scarlet Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y. (more…)

Comics News & Reviews

  • News
  • July 12, 2007

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Webcartoonist Dave (Sheldon) Kellett has some thoughts on DC Comic’s Zudacomics initiative.

Comic Book Resources has discovered a “secret” price hike on some Marvel comics – and asked Marvel VP of Sales David Gabriel to explain it.

Comic Book Resources has a feature article — not quite a review, not quite an interview with Jamie McKelvie, but with bits of both – about Suburban Glamor.

St. Louis Jewish Light reviews Harvey Pekar’s The Quitter. (It would be funnier if I said they gave up in the middle, but, unfortunately, the world is not providing easy jokes for me today.)

Comics Reporter reviews Three Very Small Comics, Vol.III.

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Big ComicMix Broadcast: The Trouble With Harry

We break up another sticky week with a Big ComicMix Broadcast filled with Pop Culture breezes: Harry Potter is in the theaters and we review the film, plus news on stuff being dumped on your TV this summer, who is talking for Hellboy, some cheap gaming options online AND another step in our Countdown To the San Diego ComicCon plus something from three girls who broke a few music theory rules and used the idea to cash in on the pop charts.

Press The Button before the kid playing HARRY gets any older!

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MOVIE REVIEW: Harry Potter and the Profit of Cash

486136925_ec5fc13f8d-6540263I just came out of a screening of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth installment of the series, and before I go spouting off my likes and dislikes, I wanted to forewarn anybody reading this review that my expertise is vastly limited in the world of J.K Rowling. While I’ve never read the books, and it’s not due to a disliking or laziness, I just find the concept of visual storytelling much more effective than having me conjure up images from the deep and dark recesses of my imagination.

With that said, I want readers to understand that I’m reviewing this film as just that, a film, and not so much a visual appendage of the book. So please keep the hate mail that starts off with “You ignorant twit…” to a minimum.

Now that that is out of the way, I loved the film. It had all of the visual aspects and plot maturity that the previous films were leading up to, and I know we are only going upwards from here. The last film left us with the big reveal of nose-less Ralph Fiennes as our quintessential baddie Lord Voldemort, and Harry taking his first step of many into adulthood. There lies my biggest problem with the film, but we’ll take it slow, as per usual.

Putting our best foot forward, the visual effects never cease to amaze me in each of these films. Each director (in this case, BBC veteran David Yates) has brought a different look and feel to the film they were charged with, and gave the film an entirely fresh feel, without diverting too far from the original text. In this film, we get more special effects than any of its previous predecessors. Between CG’d giants, to CG’d fireworks, even to Ralph Fiennes CG’d lack of a nose, there is certainly more computer graphics in this film than you can wave a stick at. Though through all of this, not once was I taken out of the mythos by a lack of belief, all thanks to the superior visual effects.

By far my favorite aspect of the film to talk about, and probably the one that will get me in the most trouble, is the undertone used throughout the first and second act. That undertone being the same thing that has fueled some of the most important science fiction and fantasy films of our era, and probably before that. This message of course is essentially “Damn the Man!”

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Grendel Archives

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This is a book we never expected to see: a collection of the very earliest adventures of Matt Wagner’s dark signature character Grendel, the stories that were reworked into Devil by the Deed more than twenty years ago. It’s the very earliest published work of Wagner’s, and – while he was quite good for a tyro – he still was very new to the field, and had a lot to learn.

Grendel Archives collects the Grendel story from Comico’s Primer #2 from 1982 and the first three issues of the subsequent first series of Grendel comics. (Those issues are all very expensive these days, so, if nothing else, Grendel Archives makes them available at a reasonable price to all of us who have discovered Wagner in the years since.) Grendel is not quite the seemingly omnipresent, omnicompetent near-future crimelord of Devil by the Deed and the more recent short stories; he’s mostly an assassin-for-hire in this story. Deadly, yes. Uncannily skilled and talented, of course. (This is comics, after all.) But he’s not yet the lord and master of all he surveys that he later became. He’s cockier and not quite as self-assured. He even, in the Primer story, corrects one victim who calls him merely Grendel: “That’s The Evil Grendel!”

Wagner stopped this series after issue #3; I don’t know, personally, whether it was by his choice or due to low sales. He launched his other signature series, Mage: The Hero Discovered, soon afterward, and the Grendel story, in a radically reconfigured form, appeared as a series of back-up stories during the second half of that first series of Mage’s run, and was then collected as Devil by the Deed. The reworked version of this story was Wagner’s first major success; Mage had some good parts and bad parts, though it got stronger as it went along, but Devil by the Deed was all of a piece and is still one of the high points of mid-80s comics.

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Campbell and Sturgeon Award Winners

  • News
  • July 10, 2007

The 2006 John W. Campbell Memorial Award and 2006 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award were presented at the Campbell Conference this past weekend in Kansas City. Each award was voted for by a jury of experts.

The Campbell Award, for best science fiction novel, went to Ben Bova’s Titan.

The Sturgeon Award, for best science fiction short story, was given to Robert Charles Wilson’s "The Cartesian Theater," from the anthology Futureshocks.

Also at the Campbell Conference, the Science Fiction Research Association presented several awards:

  • the Graduate Student Paper award, to Linda Wight for "Magic, Art, Religion, Science: Blurring the Boundaries of Science and Science Fiction in Marge Piercy’s Cyborgian Narrative"
  • the Mary Kay Bray Award, for the "best essay, interview, or extended review to appear in the SFRAReview during the year," to Ed Carmien for  his review of The Space Opera Renaissance edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
  • the Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service, for "outstanding service activities-promotion of SF teaching and study, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership in SF/fantasy organizations,"to Michael Levy
  • the Pioneer Award, for "best critical essay-length work of the year" to Amy J. Ransom for "Oppositional Postcolonialism in Québécois Science Fiction,"  from the July 2006 issue of Science Fiction Studies
  • and the Pilgrim Award, honoring "lifetime contributions to SF and fantasy scholarship," to Algis Budrys.

[via SF Scope]

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