Lots of health-related news for the science fiction community, so I thought I would roll it up into a single post here.
The good news: Jay Lake is currently free of detectable tumors. As Jay notes, this is quite different than being cured, but beats the alternative. Indeed, his optimism is so guarded as to be indistinguishable from pessimism. “No one knows what will work for me, and none of the choices are all that likely to pay off anyway.” He’s still waiting for the full results of the DNA scan.
The bad news: SF writer, editor, and publisher and pioneering rock critic Paul Williams is in a hospice. Williams is suffering from early onset dementia brought about as a side effect of his 1995 bicycle accident. There’s a donation page to help his family. Williams was also executor for the Philip K. Dick estate for a number of years, but that’s now handled by the Philip K. Dick Trust. I think I may have met Williams, very briefly, at the 2006 Anaheim Worldcon, but I’m not sure.
Background
In The Wizard of Oz (the movie), protagonist Dorothy wakes up at the end and finds out her entire trip to Oz was just a dream.
In Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Merricat, the first-person protagonist, believes she can work a sort of sympathetic magic through wards and charms to keep the world at bay. When these charms are breached by an interloper, the outside world (and disaster) come crashing in. Also, one character believes Merricat is a ghost and never interacts with her, and by the end of the novel, several characters in the village she and her sister Constance live in have come to believe they are a witches.
Problem
Is either of these novels a fantasy, neither, or both? Explain your answer.
Looks like fun, although this trailer is a lot more generic looking than the first one. And I’m not sure about Ben Kingsley playing The Mandarin. I mean, it’s not like Hollywood lacks actual Asian actors these days…
Now Locus Online brings word that Richard E. Geis, Hugo-winning fanzine editor of Science Fiction Review and The Alien Critic, died back on February 4th.
I wasn’t particular close to either of them, but both were on the Nova Express mailing list, and I occasionally got mail from them.
Geis may be most famous for killing the porn book market for writers in the 1970s. Writers used to be able to get $1,000 a pop for a porn novel (not great, but far from chicken feed), but Geis turned them out so fast the price dropped to $500 a pop.
Safety Not Guaranteed
Directed by Colin Trevorrow
Written By Derek Connolly
Starring Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, Jake Johnson, Karan Soni, Jenica Bergere
This was a pleasant surprise when I watched it at a “Pre-Hugo Nomination” viewing party. It’s fun, well-executed, light entertainment that just happens to be about (theoretically) time travel.
The setup: Depressed wallflower Darius (Aubrey Plaza, the girl who had the black bars appear over her mouth every time she cussed in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) working a crappy intern position at a Seattle magazine is given a ride-along assignment to investigate a quirky classified ad by an asshole writer Jeff (Jake Johnson) (“Give me the lesbian and the Indian.” (Karan Soni)) Turns out he’s just trying to hookup with an old flame living in the same town as time travel guy.
The ad (based loosely on a real ad done as joke filler), asks for a partner to go back in time with, must bring their own weapons, safety not guaranteed.
They manage to track down Kenneth (Mark Duplass), the guy who placed the ad, but he rumbles asshole writer at once at tells him to get the hell off his porch. Darius has better luck, and soon she’s undergoing survival training him while Jeff rekindles his old flame.
If it’s not Romantic Comedy 301, then it’s not any later than Romantic Comedy 315: Two Damaged Weirdos Find Each Other. Despite the fact that the overall arc is somewhat predictable, it’s very well-executed, the dialog is clever and there are some surprises along the way. Like a hilarious, incompetently executed heist of a government research facility, where Kenneth walks past an office birthday party in his black intrusion gear. And the revelation that government agents are, in fact, tailing him. Plus the chemistry between Darius and Kenneth is completely believable. And by the end of the film, Jeff is even a little bit less of an asshole.
Safety Not Guaranteed is less about time travel per say, and more about time in general, and the vital, fleeting nature of human relationships. This came and went pretty quickly last year. While it won’t make you forget Donnie Darko or Primer, as a light romantic comedy with (possibly) time travel elements, it’s very well done, and worked a lot better than I expected. It will probably find a place on my Hugo ballot, and probably deserves a place in (at the very least) the top third of your Netflix queue.
Oh, and this song appears in the film. It’s pretty good.
Joe R. Lansdale is one of the many authors I collect, who’s a damn fine writer in addition to being a friend and mentor. But for more than two decades, one of Joe’s rarest hardbacks continued to elude me.
Until now.
Lansdale, Joe R. (writing as Ray Slater). Texas Night Riders. Chivers Press/Curley Publishing, 1991. First hardback edition (preceded by the 1983 Leisure Books paperback original), an ex-library copy with minimal markings (a stamp on front free endpaper), otherwise VG in decorated boards with bumping along extremities, sans dust jacket, as issued. Part of the Large Print Atlantic Western line. Hankow, A Checklist of Joe R. Lansdale, A3b.
Pseudonymous western novel, and Joe’s third published book. My understanding is that the overwhelming majority of all large print editions are sold to the library market. Easily the rarest Lansdale hardback, and possibly the second rarest Lansdale book behind Molly’s Sexual Follies (which I also have).
Since this is so bibliographically rare, I thought I would scan the back cover, title page, and copyright page for fellow Lansdale bibliophiles and librarians.
The Raid: Redemption
Director: Gareth Evans
Writer: Gareth Evans
Stars: Iko Uwais, Ananda George, Ray Sahetapy
This movie came up on the list of movie possibilities over at a friend’s house, when somebody mentioned that it was supposed to feature “non-stop action.”
Boy howdy.
The Raid: Redemption is sort of like John Woo’s Hard Boiled without all the subtlety and restraint. It’s hyper-violent, hyper-kinetic, utterly gripping, and a bit more realistic than usual for the genre. It’s so well-executed that it jumps right to the top of the Asian Action Cinema heap, which is no mean feat.
An Indonesian SWAT team of 20 or so is in sent in to clear out a drug lord’s shithole high-rise tenement in Jakarta and take him into custody. It soon becomes apparent that they’ve bitten off far more than they can chew when an entire building full of his gang (plus affiliated scumbags) come after them, with the drug lord watching all on his security camera array. About half the team dies in the first fullisade, and the rest are soon running for their lives through corridors, rooms, and even floors (tactical ax for the win!). It’s not quite non-stop carnage from that point on, but it’s pretty close. The survivors can’t escape because gangs in the surrounding tenements have whacked their drivers and cut off their escape routes. Worse, the police department doesn’t know they’re there because their lieutenant has gone rogue for reasons of his own.
The template movies here are not only Hard Boiled, but also Black Hawk Down, The Warriors and Elite Squad. The mood of brutal violence is set early on when the drug lord executes three bound, kneeling men with gunshots to the back of the head, clicks on an empty chamber on the fourth, leaves the revolver on his victim’s shoulder (“Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be right back.”), then extracts a hammer from a desk drawer and dispatches him with that. (I expect to see a similar scene in a Tarantino film in about, oh, five years or so.) If the violence in Django Unchained made you flinch, you might develop a nervous tick watching this. To use the Joe Bob Briggs nomenclature, there’s gun-fu, machete-fu, knife-fu, kung-fu (or, more specifically, the Indonesian martial art of pencak silat), ax-fu, hammer-fu, exploding-propane-canister-in-a-refrigerator-fu, filing-cabinet-fu, and probably a few fus I’ve forgotten. The fight choreography is superbly executed and extremely realistic. When our hero slams a scumbag’s head into three different parts of the same wall on the way down, you flinch every time.
Eventually you start to see some of the genre’s cliches rear their heads (like “the traditional Asian one-at-a-time martial arts attacking style” and the old “I’m going to put the gun down so I can kill you with my bare hands” bit), but you’re pretty far in before that happens. And you wonder why no one among the survivors has a cell-phone.
But those are quibbles. It may not be as good a film overall as Hard Boiled simply because the characters aren’t as memorable, but the action scenes are actually better choreographed and more gripping. If that appeals to you, it should jump to the top of your To Watch list.
The movie is only showing in a few theaters nationwide (including the Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane in Austin), but it’s also available for video download through Amazon and elsewhere.
