Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #222
Page 15
Paul Cornell's ‘One of Our Bastards is Missing'—a blend of steampunk and supernatural realism—is set in an alternative quasi-Victorian British Empire featuring time anomalies, doppelgangers and the heroic Major Jonathan Hamilton. Bursting at the seams with energy and invention this, the second of Cornell's Major Hamilton stories, is hugely entertaining. Encore.
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SUBTLE EDENS
Allen Ashley, ed
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There's an urgent need for stories that enable us to deal with incoherence, uncertainty and disintegration, and several contributors to Subtle Edens are among the most perceptive guides to unmapped territories of contemporary life. Having said that, I'm far from convinced by the rationale underpinning the collection and I was left with a sense that it was being published five years too late to be useful. Allen Ashley's introduction seems to be fighting literary battles that are already won and his assertion that self-referential and genre bending TV would have been impossible without slipstream fiction is just plain daft: What about Gangsters (1975)? Or the early work of Dennis Potter? And while Jeff Gardiner's essay on the protean development of slipstream is interesting, it left me with no clear idea of precisely what the anthology is inviting us to celebrate.
There are 21 stories here, ranging from the powerfully compelling to the utterly forgettable. Nina Allan is developing into one of the finest stylists in modern genre fiction: ‘Darkroom’ is a subtle story and obsessive tale of loss and a literary enigma. Allan's imagery is rich and resonant, and there are few writers with her talent of uncovering the strange within the familiar with such clarity and precision. Joel Lane's laconic and beautifully crafted ‘Alouette’ delivers brutal imagery counterpointed by music that conjures airbrushed memories of childhood innocence. It's a disturbing and poignant exploration of the pervasiveness of violence in society, and the uses to which it is put. Gary Fry's ‘Out of Time’ is disquieting, smart and tremendous fun: Fry plays with an array of horror tropes to bring a whole new meaning to the notion of losing one's bearings. ‘Welcome to Rodeomart’ by Steve Rasnic Tem is a darkly humorous satire on consumerism. Less successful are Daniel Bennett's ‘My Copy of Robinson', a fictional reflection on Chris Petit's cult novel in which character, plot and meaning collapse into a meta-fictional black hole; and Toiya Kristen Finley's ‘Conspiracy Courts the Maiden’ which relies for its impact on a radical approach to layout rather than an original voice or resonant storytelling.
Premonitions: Causes for Alarm
Tony Lee, ed
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PREMONITIONS: CAUSES FOR ALARM
Tony Lee, ed
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Causes for Alarm is the sixth collection in Tony Lee's Premonitions series. Its 15 stories and five genre poems cut across a range of genres—sf, horror and fantasy—and adopt a refreshingly broad range of style and tones: traditional and experimental; serious and comic; passionately prophetic and entrancingly enigmatic. Lee's contributors include old stagers in the premonitions repertory company as well as several newcomers. The quality is as varied as the blend, but Causes for Alarm is an energetic and passionate collection.
One of the strangest but strongest stories is Matt Bright's ‘Big Picture', a terse and alienating exploration of image-making with meta-fictional leanings. Other high points include ‘Jaw Jaw’ by Jim Steel (our book reviews editor) which blends linguistic speculation and corporate satire to great effect; the rich and unsettling urban landscape of Sue Lange's enigmatic ‘Jump'; and the playful but dark wit of William Jackson's tale of desperation of failed communication ‘Mould & Mildew'. There are a few duds: Patrick Hudson's ‘Insured for Murder’ took me on a satirical exploration of the increasingly blurred boundaries of surveillance and entertainment—a territory mapped with far greater precision and wit in a short segment in William Gibson's Virtual Light. And the faux-medievalism of Cyril Simsa's ‘Master Juggler’ took me nowhere at all.
This is an uneven collection, but it offers enough that is entertaining and provocative to make it a rewarding read and several of its idiosyncratic tales of terror tap into the fears, anxieties and uncertainties of the current zeitgeist.
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SUBTERFUGE
Ian Whates, ed
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If I'm to be persuaded to lash out thirty quid on a collectible anthology I expect production values along the lines of the Canongate Myths series. Even Sir Fred Goodwin might wince at the idea of raiding his pension piggybank for the privilege of owning one of 150 copies signed by the 19 contributors, and enjoying three stories not included in the paperback edition.
Enough whinging about the cost of the Subterfuge limited edition: as the title suggests, tricks and stratagems provide the unifying theme. It's a risky enterprise: if there's one thing more irritating than stories distorted to fit around an abstract theme, it's the clumsy contrivance of literary deception, but Ian Whates has deftly avoided these pitfalls in selecting an engaging and original selection of stories from established and up-and-coming writers.
Cream of the crop are Dave Hutchinson's ‘Multitude’ set in a Britain brutally reclaimed by elves; Sarah Singleton's haunting and affecting tale of love, loss, displacement and dreams in Russia's Decembrist Revolt; and Nik Ravenscroft's re-engineering of familiar sf machinery in a tale of time, a river and an enigmatic encounter. Also worthy of mention are an assured blend of fantasy and psychological horror from Neil Williamson, and Storm Constantine's complex and elegant tale that takes some interesting liberties with familiar fantasy tropes (hardback only). The balance of Subterfuge tilts towards fantasy rather than sf, but it's a consistently strong collection in which nearly every story has a strong sense of character and place. There are just a couple of disappointments. For me, the violence of Neal Asher's ‘The Rhine's World Incident', set in the author's Polity universe, is emotionally uninvolving and the story is marred by a clunky final sequence. I've been an admirer of Tanith Lee's work for as long as I can remember but her reworking of the tropes of the gothic shipwrecking tale makes nothing original with its all too familiar material.
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FUTURE BRISTOL
Colin Harvey, ed
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I approached Colin Harvey's Future Bristol with a degree of wariness—jaded by collections relying on the judicious name-checking of a few well known street names and landmarks in a half-hearted attempt to capture the spirit of a city. Harvey's contributors avoid that trap, but if the “Brizzle” theme isn't contrived, it is faintly developed in some stories. In the end I was more convinced by Harvey's salute to the resurgence of British sf in his engaging introduction than his ‘celebration of the city'.
There are three exceptionally good stories in Future Bristol, four that are solidly entertaining and two that didn't work for me at all. There is an interesting blend of genres, sometimes in the same story.
The collection opens and closes with stories that really couldn't be set anywhere but Bristol: Liz Williams’ ‘Isambard's Kingdom’ is a complex but engaging tale of moral choice and determinism that flips between Bristol past and future and taps into the city's architecture, history and mythology; while Jim Mortimore's ‘The Sun in the Bone House'—which provides an impressive finale to the collection—is an astonishingly ambitious psycho-geographical cum archaeological investigation of Bristol from the Anglo-Saxon era to the far future. The story races through layers of time in dense but accessible, terse but musical prose poetry like a condensed version of Aiden Dun's Vale Royal. It could have descended into gimmickry and incoherence but Mortimer's writing is beautifully controlled.
Another highlight is Joanna Hall's bravura genre blending of swashbuckling piracy and hard-boiled detection—I've seldom had so much fun while musing on the thin line between historical icon and mythic archetype. Two less successful stories are Gareth L. Powell's charming but inconsequential sf riff on It Could Happen to You
and Nick Walters’ predictable tale of alien encounters and specimen hunting.
Copyright © 2009 Andy Hedgecock
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MUTANT POPCORN—Nick Lowe's Film Reviews
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Does Michael Jackson's nose have an intrinsic field? Already in the mid-eighties a series of secret experiments was under way that would attempt to find an answer. Really, it should be just a question of reassembling the components in the correct sequence. But when so many scalpels of steel and of light have taken to pieces something as delicate as a human sense organ, or as tightly-packed with clockwork as Watchmen, and disassembled it and reassembled it over and over across a twenty-year period, is there anything left apart from gravity to hold things together, or have the decades of surgery destroyed the last cartilaginous scrap of structural tissue? If you yank off the mask, what will you see? A pretty butterfly? Some nice flowers? Dog with head split open?
Watchmen was pronounced dead on the operating table at the start of the nineties with the collapse of the Terry Gilliam version, since when Alan Moore has argued for its essential unfilmability on the grounds that the story depends essentially, rather than incidentally, on the grammar of the comics form. On the level of narrative, this has always been rather debatable. Of course the densely interconnected multidimensional grids of information are a formalist triumph, and one of the key reasons why the fourth instalment in particular remains as good a candidate as any for the single greatest issue in comics history—combining as it does Moore's most dazzling demonstration of the power of the comics panel and page to tell stories in ways unavailable to other media with a narrative content that showcases the power of sf, and specifically of science-fictional superhero comics, to deliver emotional payloads of a kind and force simply unavailable to non-genre forms. (Significantly, this is the section of the story that comes off least effectively in Zack Snyder's film—though its montage-based translinear narrative, told La Jetée-style in stills and voiceover, turns out one of the more effective bits of DC's own “Motion Comic".)
Yet it would be perverse to deny that many of Moore, Gibbons, and Higgins’ key techniques map quite readily back on to the film devices from which they were originally burgled by Eisner and others in the golden age, right down to the match cuts, visual echoes, and Moore's later-regretted tic of forced dialogue lap. And now that films are deliberately crafted to be watched over and over on technology that can pause, backtrack, and freeze, even the density of background detail can be appreciated on screen, sometimes actually with increased clarity. (I'm abashed to admit it was only with a second viewing of the film version that I finally noticed the play with Rorschach's “Fine like this” that had passed me by for 22 years.) Even the back-of-issue supporting materials have a counterpart in the form of DVD featurettes—literally, in the case of Under the Hood. Above all, though, the linear story is strong enough in itself to stand independently of its medium. As early as 1988 the great Sam Hamm succeeded in condensing the essentials, with Moore's acquiescence if not quite his blessing, into a brilliant first draft for what would become the unfulfilled Gilliam version, which bit the dust only because even Joel Silver couldn't raise the budget. Hamm himself later endorsed the slightly stronger argument that Watchmen's universe and story is a product of a particular cultural moment when the cold war looked likely to escalate rather than abate, and the shadow of nuclear apocalypse was fully and terrifyingly felt in a way that's hard now to imagine for those who didn't live through it. But if that slightly dilutes the immediacy of the doomsday-clock scenario, it certainly hasn't put off readers—to the consternation of Alan Moore, of course, who would like nothing more than for it to fall out of print as originally planned so that the rights would revert to its creators.
The most convincing argument against the filmability of Watchmen, in fact, is one I've never seen clearly made: that its narrative density and resonance results directly from its exploitation of the unique tropology of superhero comics, to the extent that only someone who's grown up with the genre, and invested hugely in its mythologies both imaginatively and emotionally, can fully appreciate its power. Watchmen gave itself the assignment of creating and annihilating an entire comics universe in a single story—and a comics universe, let's remember, is the largest form of narrative artifact so far developed in human history, Roz Kaveney's Big Dumb Objects of narrative continuity. Even in the unbelievable future we inhabit in which, against all reason, the geeks have inherited the earth and superhero narrative has assumed its destined place at the very pinnacle of blockbuster filmmaking, it's been a huge gamble whether the mass general audience is sufficiently literate in the deep language of comics to understand and feel about this story in the way that it asks, or indeed whether something like the relationship between the Golden and Silver Ages even means anything for a generation that's grown up post-either. Certainly after the second-weekend takings crash in the US the language of disappointment seemed to be set as system default; and lead screenwriter David Hayter, the principal architect of what would become the Snyder version, had pleaded with fans after the first week of release to bump up the take by going to see it again in its second week, or nobody would ever again greenlight a comics-based project that dared to aim beyond the Spider-Man audience. (Unless it's Road to Perdition or A History of Violence, presumably. But if you ever want to see that Sandman film, he has a point.)
Now, Zack Snyder may not be the smartest man in the world, bless him, as anyone who's tried to keep awake through his 300 commentary will attest, but he's nevertheless brought a number of important qualities to the project that a Gilliam, Aronofsky, or Greengrass couldn't. He's extremely proficient technically, particularly at the digital end; he's very good at storyboards, a medium in which he's more comfortable than he is with script; he recognises that Alan Moore writes better dialogue, and usually better plotting, than any of his adapters; he has previous in comics adaptation, and in treating his source with respect whether or not it frankly deserves it. He's also a seasoned IMAX veteran from 300, and whatever else one thinks of his particular Watchmen it feels more completely at home on the big, big screen than any other mainstream film release to date. Yet the crucial quality he's brought to Watchmen is none of these, but leverage: the post-300 clout to get away with restoring things that the studios wanted out, including the eighties setting, Nixon, Mars, the Minutemen, the flashbacks, and (most amazing to see up there on the screen) the Tijuana bible. Indeed, one of the surprises about the finished version was how much original dialogue had been restored at a very late stage, later than the undated Alex Tse draft leaked in September 2007. It's amazing that it took twenty years to see that “I did it thirty-five minutes ago” was a better line than “thirty minutes” or “I did it just now", but at least they got there in the end. Hayter, who was with the project from 2000-5 before walking when Paramount pulled the plug on the Greengrass version, tells of endless gruelling fights with imbecilic notes from the studio. There were always just too many watchmakers.
And some things have been undeniably improved in the undoing. Watchmen's narrative was padded from the start when the alternate-issue origin stories were grafted in to bump the run up from six issues to twelve, and though these character-centred episodes mostly came out as the strongest chapters, the structure became something of a straitjacket in the second half, where it's perfectly obvious that issues 9-10 flow much better the other way around (as they're finally allowed to do in the film). The ending remains a bit of a Jackson's nose, but it was always clear that Moore's B-movie McGuffin had to go, if far from clear what should replace it, and the final version is a lot less awful than some of its precursors. As late as the early Tse drafts, Veidt was still getting crushed by the owlship under remote control, which not only takes a crude Gordian cleaver to the final moral conundrum but leaves Rorschach's journal with no job left to do. Far the best ending was Hamm's all-new solution, in which Dr Ma
nhattan reset the mechanism of time to the moment of his creation and saved Jon Osterman from turning into him, whereupon the Watchmen universe collapsed and spat Nitey, Silky, and (he lives!) Rorschy out into our-world NYC where they're only known as characters in a comic. Snyder's version has settled, less radically, for cloning the ending of The Dark Knight, which at least leaves the characters in the correct positions for the final moral ballet, as well as integrating Dr Manhattan more centrally into the scientific and geopolitical storyline.
One of the most refreshing things about this Watchmen is its contemptuous indifference to Hollywood protocols of act structure, running time, flashback quota, and indeed hostage lines for the ranks of watch-watchers (at the two-hour mark, “Can't you just tell me how this ends and save all the trouble?"). Ironically in light of the prominence given to Rorschach's “Never compromise” slogan, the one place where Watchmen has capitulated abjectly to Hollywood norms is in the interpretation of its characters, with only Patrick Wilson's Nite Owl and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Comedian emerging largely undamaged. Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach looks the part masked and unmasked, but fails wretchedly in the more important role of the story's principal narrative voice, delivered here in a mangaesque Christian Bale growl that only movie people could possibly think sounded like someone would speak. Laurie Juspeczyk's character has been softened of its dry wit and wisecracking and no longer uses the word “shit", though anyone with the faintest ear for dialogue should appreciate that “Omigod I'm on Mars” is a completely different utterance and one which Moore's version of the character would never voice. A lot of work has gone into making Dr Manhattan's responses make actorly sense in the light of his chronosynclastic time perception, but his new thing for lashings of eyeliner overwrites his quietly understated lingering humanity with a sad-clown cartoon face; while Adrian Veidt's otherwise rather nicely rewritten line “I'm not a comic-book villain” is unfortunately undercut by the fact that he's presented from the start as exactly that, with his lip-curling delivery, Nazi accent, and a file prominently labelled “Boys” in his office, which would actually be pretty funny if the whole performance weren't so grotesquely homophobic. It's depressing that they can't see how wrong a note it is for Rorschach to address Ms Juspeczyk as “Laurie"; and I still don't really understand the reasoning behind the chronological refit that has moved the Crimebusters (here, following Hamm, renamed Watchmen) from 1966 to 1970, which makes no sense in comics-history terms and puts Dr Manhattan's brief crimefighting career after Nam rather than before it, leaving a nasty suspicion that the studio simply wanted their female lead to be younger.