Reviews

So I went to see the first movie in the Narnia sequence last week. I was hopeful; the trailers presented an image of a movie in the tradition of Jackson’s Middle Earth, based around a classic fantasy series from the same period and sticking faithfully to the work of the original author. It should have worked out well, with the ground already broken, assuming the people involved were competent; instead, the result was disappointing.

The latest and long-awaited book in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, A Feast For Crows, was released on November 8. The book’s delivery represents the end of a long wait for fans of the series, although – prodded most likely by the degeneration of Jordan’s Wheel of Time series – most fans seem to prefer to wait long enough for Martin to get it right rather than demanding a quick release; and in the face of continuing difficulty with the scope of the work, Martin eventually split the book he had planned into two, publishing what he was done with and leaving the remainder of what he had planned for the next book.

This latest novel in Robert Jordan’s long-lived and long-winded epic fantasy series represents an improvement over his low point, now established as books 7-10. Important and long-awaited prophecies are finally being paid off; the plot is moving forward steadily. While there are many decisions that I would have made differently, and many, many wasted opportunities, there is at least progress in a forward direction. This is not a book that is worth returning to the series if you have already abandoned it.

Let me begin by setting the stage a little, and telling you about me. There’s not much about me that’s relevant to a movie review, but because Serenity originated from a television series, this preface is necessary: I don’t watch a lot of television. Perhaps that doesn’t get the point across. The last television series I followed regularly was Babylon 5, which ended in the last century. Cable news programs persisted until 2 years ago, but they also reached the end of my patience.

Nine years after Dies the Fire, an unsteady truce reigns over western Oregon. Mike Havel’s Bearkillers and Juniper Mackenzie’s Wiccan clans, along with some other loose federations, are strong enough to have prevented the despot Norman Arminger from overruning them - so far. Occupying the rich farmlands south of Portland, these groups have quickly adapted to life after the Change, and have thriving societies with bustling economies. Their cultures are starting to take root, too - the younger generations know nothing of gunpowder, electricity, or gasoline beyond stories from the adults.

There’s not a lot that can be said about this movie. It’s probably the best of the prequels, but that’s not saying much. In fact, the best thing that can be said about this movie is that it doesn’t suck. I enjoyed most of it, although some moments were severely wince-inducing. The lightsaber battles were a minor disappointment, with camera tricks and plot events being used to “explain” the outcome rather than actual skill, but they weren’t awful.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was almost universally panned by fans of the original trilogy, and deservedly so. Hopes, and expectations, were high following the smashing success of the earlier films and the intervening two-decade improvement in technology. What the fans received was not what they had desired: a children’s movie that replaced many of the most popular elements with a cute kid and a racist portrayal of a repulsive amphibian.

In my earlier review of Coyote, I described it as a fairly normal interstellar colonization story with a hint of politics in the background. Coyote Rising, the sequel, makes those politics somewhat more explicit, but they are still far short of actually driving the story in a manner similar to, for example, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. That’s not a good thing when the point of the story is supposed to be the politics.

Consequences is a Retrieval Artist novel. The series (with two previous books) is set in a universe where humanity interacts on a regular basis with many alien cultures of varying degrees of strangeness. Many of these alien cultures have strange laws or taboos that humans can be subject to horrible penalties for violating – whether they know that they are violating the alien’s laws or not. This conflict of interest has spawned a small, but significant, industry: making people “disappear” for the purposes of evading the consequences of breaking an unjust (by human standards) alien law.

Cassandra Kresnov, the lovable combat android with an electronic copy of a human soul, is back. But her old masters, the League governments, want her dead, and they may just have left an off-switch hidden in some part of her electronic brain. When your own brain can be hacked over a wireless network, being almost as strong as Superman won’t help much. To thwart them, Cassandra will have to go into hiding while she searches for the enemies trying to turn her off permanently.