Tuesday Tunes: Blade Runner

It must be said that no review of Blade Runner is complete without at least a passing mention of Vangelis and that awesome soundtrack.

And because I love this kind of music, especially for writing to, here's a special extra review for the soundtrack, which was also re-released in 2007, along with the Final Cut movie, in a 3-CD special edition.

Entitled Blade Runner Trilogy, the first CD is the same as the original soundtrack release, the second CD contains previously unreleased music from the movie, and the third CD is new music inspired by the movie.

Of the three, the first disc is still the best; from the fantastically spacey main title, to the chilled out sax of the love theme, to the cool end titles, the best known tracks are all here in full, along with some less well known gems. For me, the best trackshere are those which use smaples from the movie: Blush Response, with its samples about the Voight-Kampff machine, and Tears in Rain, Batty's last words, set to a suitably melancholy piece of music.

Disc two is the usual film score fair, atmospheric pieces with descriptive titles like At Mr Chew's and Deckard and Roy's Duel, but done in a Vangelis way, which is to say, pretty awesome.

Disc three, on the other hand... disc three is where things start to get odd. Good, but odd. Launch Approval and Mail from India are personal favourites for futuristic weirdness alone, but elsewhere the Blade Runner influence comes through in the music - Sweet Solitude has the same chilled sax sound as the original love theme, and Perfume Exotico has the same ethereal vocals as Rachel's Song. It could perhaps be seen as the soundtrack Vanelis would have made had the movie been shot in 2007 rather than just remixed.

For fans of sci-fi music, movie soundtracks, Vangelis, or ambient electronica in general, it's a worthwhile investment.

And for your sci-fi song of the week, you will of course be enjoying the main theme from Ghostbusters.

Monday Review: Blade Runner

So, I just watched the Final Cut of Blade Runner. I don’t suppose there is really any need to review it properly, it is, after all, a classic science fiction movie.

I could join the debate about whether it’s a great movie, or just an over-hyped one, but even that is a bit redundant, because any film fan or science fiction fan really should watch the thing and make their own mind up.

Personally, well, the visuals are great – the imagining and visualisation of the dystopian world, the flying cars (that by rights we should have by now) whose strings are no longer visible on the latest remix, the constant rain…. Not quite sure why rain is so inherently dystopian, but then I’m English.

The thing is, if I didn’t know there was this mystery subtext about Deckard, I don’t think I would have spotted it, the whole origami thing being a bit too small and obscure, at least first time round. That said, the ambiguous ending of the Final Cut is better than the fluffy Hollywood ending version; the tone of Blade Runner doesn’t lend itself to a happy ending.

I’m not sure if it’s ironic or intended, but the only character that really sticks in the mind after watching is Roy Batty, as played by Rutger Hauer. That’s not to say the Harrison Ford, or Sean Young are in any way bad, but Roy’s change from angry, violent replicant-on-a-mission, to abandoned son confronting his father, to the final acceptance of his own death, is the definite stand-out.

Ah yes, the violence. There’s a lot of it in this version, I don’t remember wincing quite so much when I’ve seen earlier cuts. But this is not a happy film; not one you can switch your brain off for a couple of hours and relax with. There is a lot in Blade Runner (some of which I may revisit later) but a lot of it requires thought, and none of it is especially happy.

Perfect for a Monday review then.

So long, and thanks....

So there it was. Thirty years and 134 missions, and the Space Shuttle era has officially ended.

The reason I mention this is not because I have anything startlingly original to add to the conversation, because I don’t. It’s because the Space Shuttle has undoubtedly contributed to my becoming a sci-fi fan and writer.

I was seven when the programme started – old enough to have been aware of it, too young to remember what I thought of it at the time. But in those days, the shuttle was exotic, exciting. Launches still made the news, even when they went off without a hitch.

Of course, it’s the one that didn’t go off without a hitch that I still remember. John Craven had the job of telling the nation soon after it happened. And not long after that I was given a plastic kit of the Shuttle and its Boeing 747 carrier aircraft, which I made into Challenger, seeming at the time the best tribute a pre-teenage boy could pay.

But - and I admit that what I am about to say is a little bit shallow – the reason I remember the Challenger disaster is not because of the immensity of the event, but because the Space Shuttle had captured my young imagination. I had the toy shuttle from Moonraker, I had read the specs in magazines and books, I was even, in my youth, quite proficient at drawing the Shuttle orbiter.

I’ll stop there, before I start sounding like some kind of Shuttle fanboy. At some point, of course, the routine shuttle launches stopped making the news. I stopped being a Shuttle fanboy. Arguably, I grew out of it, as did much of the media. But whatever it was about the shuttle that caught my imagination – fed by space Lego, Luke Skywalker and endless Star Trek re-runs – I never grew out of.

So, even though the Space Shuttle will always be my spaceship, I can still look with interest (and possibly a little excitement) at the developments that are already happening at Virgin Galactic, where the next generation of space travel seems to be drawing ever nearer, ready to spark the imagination of the next generation.

Of course, if I was a science-fiction writer, I would probably be wondering what space travel landmark we will be marking in 2041…

Phursday Photos: obvious subject....

Well, a blog which pretends to be vaguely related to science fiction is hardly going to let the end of an era slip by unnoticed is it? I've never actually seen a space shuttle in person, so this week I'll hand the camera over to NASA...

Sci-Fi Song of the Week

Inspired by Charles Yu, here some nice early 90s shoegaze rock for your enjoyment.

Monday Review: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu, is the story of a book. In fact, it is the story of some of the minds behind the book, one of whom, the aforementioned Charles Yu, is a Recreational Time Travel Device repairman who chooses to spend most of his life hiding in limbo, living in a time machine which is not bigger on the inside, with only an imaginary dog and a manically depressed artificial intelligence for company.

This would be an appropriate moment for the reviewer to interject, and explain that the book itself is not quite as derivative of hitch-hikers as this review has been so far. There are certainly shades of Adams-esque humour (for instance, physics was only 93 per cent installed when construction was halted on Minor Universe 31), but the similarities in plot are, I think limited to those mentioned so far. The concept of a science fictional universe, of course, may also put one in mind of the Thursday Next novels, but all these comparisons are not doing the book in question any favours.

In fact, How to Live Safely is one of the most mind-bendingly original books in the whole of chronogrammatical space-time. If I was to attempt to give it a sub-genre, it would probably be literary sf, with the somewhat scant (but imaginative) plot serving primarily to hold all the author’s crazy ideas together and explore the father-son axis in a completely non-linear, temporally confusing manner.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is good, clean, science fictional fun. Movingly funny, nicely written, weirdly conceptual, insanely brilliant and… well, frankly, one of the best time travel stories I’ve read in a long time.

Phursday photo

A little something to bend the mind of any passing petrol-heads. Go on, you know it doesn't look right!

Sci-Fi Song of the Week

A tenuous link to sci-fi, maybe, but inspired by the last Space Shuttle mission which is going on at the moment...

It's a love song, in a vaguely space-age style.

Hurling myself in...

As a postscript to Friday's long walk, because it wasn't as long as I had planned, I took a few moments in Wild at Heart once I was home, and this sentence just jumped out at me:

I want to hurl myself into a creative work worthy of God.

Now, I often tell myself that what I'm writing, I'm doing to honour God. But, really, the amount of time and effort that I put into actually forming sentences (other than the ones I form occasionally to justify my 'writing') is not really worthy of God. I've never really hurled myself into a story (well, maybe once a year, in November), never been reckless about what I vaguely like to think God might want me to do with what I laughably call my talent.

Maybe I didn't need a long walk; maybe I just needed to turn the page of that book, read that sentence, and act on it. Maybe I need to step out of the boat, charge the field, follow my dream. Maybe I just need to quit worrying about stuff and get on with some writing.

Long Walk 2011

It is a tradition over at the Daily Audio Bible to take July 7th off, go somewhere beautiful, and spend the day with God. My intention had been to do a slight variation on the theme, and go for a long drive, take the Mini off into the countryside for the day. (The reason for this stems from Wild at Heart, something John Eldredge says about men getting closest to God when they feel most 'alive'; for him it's all manner of outdoorsy stuff, for me, it's a back-lane Mini blast.)

Unfortunately things were not as easy as all that: first there was a hospital appointment on July 7th (for my daughter) which would have taken half the day out. Still, no matter; July 8th was booked off work and the Long Drive was on. Except the aforementioned daughter was taken ill this morning. Not only that, but the rain did not look conducive to a back-lane Mini blast.

Still, as it turned out I was not required to make the trip to see the doctor, and was able to slip off for a somewhat shorter than planned walk, getting myself lost in the rolling hills of, um, Staffordshire.

I had no real idea what I was doing; I mean, the theory was simple enough - go somewhere quiet and listen to God. Easier said than done, obviously. But did I come away with anything? Well, maybe, although I'm not sure what it means, if anything.

I found myself surrounded by ferns, and as I looked at the repeatedly dividing pattern of the leaves, it occured to me that the closer you look at a fern leaf, the more detail you go into, the more accurately you can measure its outline, and the longer its outline will be.

Sass that hoopy frond

Taken to its extreme, you end up with the fractal theory argument that Britain's coastline is infinite. Plainly nonsense in practical terms, but an interesting point, that the closer you look, the more anything - a fern, a country, a person - approaches infinity. At some level, the Infinite is present right at the heart of everything.

Phursday Photo

Tuesday Tunes: Space Whale Migration

This weeks choice for Sci-Fi Song of the Week is, apart from not being a song in any conventional sense, inspired by yesterday's mini-review of a story about space whales. So here for your enjoyment, a little piece of shoegazey post-Porcupine Tree instrumental greatness, Space Whale Migration by The Daysleepers.

Green Lantern, and a Leviathan

Has anybody got a couple of hours to listen to some excellent podcastery on the subject of religion and science-fiction? Well if you have, I have a couple of nice little links for you. And if you haven't, I recommend you make some :)

Firstly, the Leviathan in question is That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made, a Nebula winning novelette by Eric James Stone, and you can hear it on Starship Sofa Episode 194. It's a very neat little tale about some of the potential problems of bringing human religion (in this case Mormonism) to a decidedly alien race (in this case, a group of solar cetaceans living inside our sun). And this all seems to be going well for our protagonist, Harry Malan, until a swale member of his congregation confides in him about what Harry believes to be a case of sexual assault.

There follows a lot of discussion between Harry and cute scientist Dr. Juanita Merced about how human/Mormon sexuality and morals can't be applied to creatures older than human culture, and then when Harry tries to put his point to the oldest swale in our sun, things get even more interesting...

That Leviathan... is a well-written story, makes some thought-provoking points in an interesting setting, and all adds up to a fascinating exploration about the intersection of religion and 'other' cultures, definitely worth a look (or listen) if you're interested in those things.

Elsewhere in the podosphere, purveyor of Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Paeter Frandsen, has been geeking out over Green Lantern, who apparently is a comic book hero turned movie icon, or something. Anyway, as part of his Green Lantern special podcast he pulls some interesting Biblical parallels from comic book superheroes and wonders what the New Heaven and the New Earth will be like. Such ponderings gave me cause to wonder what kind of stories I'll be writing in the New Earth.... presumably they'll have to be set on the old one, as there won't be a lot of conflict in the new one, as I understand it....

Anyway, that's also worth a listen for an alternative angle on some Biblical stuff, and on some comic book stuff, or if you've just been overcome by Green Lantern fever....

Linky Goodness:
Starship Sofa No 194 (direct link)
That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made (text)
Spirit Blade Underground Podcast - Green Lantern Review Special (direct link)

Sci-fi Song of the Week

For no other reason than I'm feeling the love for Battlestar Galactica at the moment, and this is rather a funky metal hip-hop crossover type thingy that's got a soundalike title. And no video - can't believe nobody's put a BSG montage to it on YouTube yet!

Anyway, because (for a change) I can't be bothered putting a proper post up, here's some music...

Wednesday Review: Scream by Mike Dellosso

You may have noticed that this week the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour has been featuring Darkness Follows by Mike Dellosso. Naturally, I will therefore be reviewing something entirely different.

Scream is the story of Mark Stone, hard working everyman who just happens to have messed up his marriage and started hearing Hell on his telephone. It’s the story of his efforts to solve the mystery of the screams, which bring him into regular contact with the local police, and with probably the least stereotypical Pastor in all of Christian fiction. The guy has tattoos, people!

It is also the story of the faceless psycho known only as Judge, whose hobby of stalking and kidnapping innocent women and keeping them in a barn leads his plot inexorably towards Mark’s.

Aside from the wailing, weeping, and gnashing of teeth that keeps interrupting Mark’s phone calls, there’s not a lot of what I would call ‘horror’ in the story, and in fact I was more on edge for the ‘real life’ issues – the traumatic childhood incident that birthed Judge, and Mark’s marital disaster. Those things were both relatable, and written in way that highlighted their relevance and drove the point home.

There was enough suspense in the story to keep me wanting more, and although the twists were not all entirely surprising, I found them satisfying.

Part of me wants to say that Scream would work perfectly well as a straight thriller without the supernatural screaming, but the screams do serve the purposes of pulling the various plot strands together, and of reminding the reader, as they reminded Mark Stone, that death – and Hell – can come calling at any moment, and what happens to us then is something we can change – have to change – before that moment arrives. The problem is that’s all they do… I realise explaining them inexplicable would be daft, but I feel a little short-changed, I wanted more from the Scream!

Despite having an obvious message, Mike Dellosso manages to avoid being ‘preachy’, or leaving the reader with nothing more than a hellfire and brimstone message. The message is delivered as a natural part of the story (and, in case you didn’t get it from the story, helpfully recapped in an afterword by the author), and along the way the reader is presented with some interesting comparisons: our hero, ostensibly a ‘good’ person, has utterly broken his wife’s heart, while the apparently ‘evil’ Judge shows moments of human kindness towards his captives; more importantly, he presents a very real and challenging comparison between empty religion and a genuine knowledge of Jesus.

So to summarise: an important gospel message, nicely presented in a cracking story.

Noah Arsenault Red Bissell Thomas Clayton Booher Beckie Burnham Melissa Carswell Karri Compton CSFF Blog Tour Chris Deane Cynthia Dyer Nikole Hahn Katie Hart Ryan Heart Bruce Hennigan Jason Joyner Julie Carol Keen Inae Kyo Shannon McDermott Allen McGraw Shannon McNear Rebecca LuElla Miller Joan Nienhuis Sarah Sawyer Kathleen Smith Jessica Thomas Fred Warren Phyllis Wheeler

CSFF Blog Tour vs Tuesday Tunes

I may be running a little bit late here, but never fear, in honour of this weeks CSFF Blog Tour, which is featuring Darkness Follows by Mike Dellosso, I present to you, hurriedly thrown together ina  darkened room, the Top Ten Darkness Songs.

10. The Darkness: I Believe in a Thing Called Love
Opening for us tonight, the spearhead of Suffolk's glam-rock revival in the early 21st Century.

9. The Strokes: Under Cover of Darkness
The first single from the recent album Angles. You see, I'm down with the kids.

8. Moby: Lie Down in Darkness
And a decidedly current piece of electronica this week too, this having been out for about a month... I think I need to lie down in darkness....

7. Buckethead: Chase the Darkness Out
That's better, weird ambient prog-rock by a guy with a crazy name. This I feel comfortable with.

6. Ash: Joy Kicks Darkness
This was B in their A-Z Series of singles a little while ago. Yeah, go figure.

5. Shonen Knife: The Queen of Darkness
My all-time favourite J-Rock girl band. Or something.

4. The Kinks: Little Miss Queen of Darkness
Is anybody spotting a theme within a theme?

3. Alice Cooper: Prince of Darkness
I think Alice Cooper is an immensely awesome and funny guy, so here's a song he wrote about the devil.

2. Rage Against the Machine: Darkness
It's that shouty man, getting angry about greed and Capitalism.

1. Republica: Out of the Darkness
Seems an appropriate title to finish the list with.... techno-pop punk rock for the post-Britpop generation - best played loud :)

Your Spotify playlist is here, I'll find some links for the individual songs later - except I probably won't, so while you wonder what they actually sound like, why not wander round these blogs and find out a little something about Darkness Follows and Mike Dellosso.

Noah Arsenault Red Bissell Thomas Clayton Booher Beckie Burnham Melissa Carswell Karri Compton CSFF Blog Tour Chris Deane Cynthia Dyer Nikole Hahn Katie Hart Ryan Heart Bruce Hennigan Jason Joyner Julie Carol Keen Inae Kyo Shannon McDermott Allen McGraw Shannon McNear Rebecca LuElla Miller Joan Nienhuis Sarah Sawyer Kathleen Smith Jessica Thomas Fred Warren Phyllis Wheeler

CSFF Blog Tour - Darkness Follows

So it seems that just because it's blog tour week and I am contractually obliged to post something loosely related to Darkness Follows by Mike Dellosso, Blogger decided to move all the buttons around on its dashboard. Yes, it's all very pretty, Blogger, and I'm sure it will improve my blogging experience no end once I'v ehad a chance to find the 'New Post' button, but couldn't you have waited a week?

Ah well, let's muddle through as best we can, shall we?

Officially: Darkness Follows is suspenseful, mysterious, scary, even creepy, but after all is said and done, it’s a love story. It’s about Sam Travis, a man who thinks he’s losing his mind. He becomes more and more obsessed with a series of mysterious journal entries from a soldier of the Civil War, entries Sam himself has written unawares. The more obsessed he becomes with the entries the more he pushes away those who care about him most, his wife and daughter. Meanwhile, Sam is also being haunted by the memory of his late brother who died a terrible death. In the end, Sam will have to make a choice, give into the darkness that’s been following him, or accept the freedom that comes from the unconditional love of his daughter and, ultimately, the love of his Father.

Unofficially, it's an American Civil War time-travel horror romance. Genre? We laugh in the face of genre! Mwahahahahaaaa!

Ahem sorry, not sure what came over me there.But look: that's where they put the HTML button! That will make pasting linky goodness easier, like this:

And the tour links:

Noah Arsenault
Red Bissell
Thomas Clayton Booher
Beckie Burnham
Melissa Carswell
Karri Compton
CSFF Blog Tour
Chris Deane
Cynthia Dyer
Nikole Hahn
Katie Hart
Ryan Heart
Bruce Hennigan
Jason Joyner
Julie
Carol Keen
Inae Kyo
Shannon McDermott
Allen McGraw
Shannon McNear
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Joan Nienhuis
Sarah Sawyer
Kathleen Smith
Jessica Thomas
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Phyllis Wheeler

And finally, Mike Dellosso's website, with bloggy goodness, blurbs for all his novels, and free stuff to download. How can you resist?

Now, how do I get this thing uploaded...?

Wednesday Review: A British Crash by Roger Harper

I’m taking a bit of a step outside my usual genre for this review, because… well, frankly, because a Christian novel set in England – in Birmingham, no less, somewhere I know well – deserved a look.

I will start off with a caveat though: This is a self-published novel.* This is not a bad thing; on the contrary, many outstanding novels in the field of Christian literature *cough* Countless as the Stars *cough* have been self-published. And indeed, top marks to author Roger Harper for getting the thing in front of me in the first place.

So, I hear you ask, what exactly is this thing in front of you? Well, at its heart A British Crash is a whodunit, set against predominantly a church-based background, with a Christian protagonist. A flawed Christian protagonist. Indeed, most of the Christian characters are drawn with realistic flaws – the narrator, David Jeffery, is a happily married man who unexpectedly finds himself drawn to another woman; his best friend Will has such an abrupt manner and coarse, often racist language that I found myself questioning whether he was as Christian as he made himself out to be. And, with a Muslim family at the centre of the plot – the titular crash, which is the subject of the whodunit – there is plenty of scope for this (sadly believable) racism to come to light.

The Christian elements of the story are handled interestingly – just as facts, a part of the characters routine lives just the same as work or breakfast – and that allows the author to show genuine, believable Christians interacting with Muslims, New Agers, and hot secretaries without the need for any supernatural nonsense or preachy messages getting in the way.

As an aside, I think the journal format the story is presented in is a little unnecessary. There are whole conversations and daily trivia that I don’t think likely to appear in a real journal; having said that, it didn’t really get in the way, except when it forced the chapters to be a bit too long.

So far so good, but… there’s no escaping the fact that this book didn’t have a professional editor. Calling two characters Jane may be realistic, but in fiction is surely a schoolboy error unless it’s for comic effect. While anyone not from Birmingham might accept that the shopping centre was called The Palisades, there were many typos that I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t take a writer to spot, and I’m convinced the year changes half way through the week.

Now, I probably know better than most how hard it is to get that editing process right. However many times you and your beta-testers read the draft, something will slip through the net. And, to be fair, they weren’t the most hilarious/embarrassing bloopers I’ve seen in a self-pubbed book, but the editing, or lack thereof, does let down what is otherwise a good concept, a decent story, and some nice, authentically broken Christian (and non-Christian) characters.

http://www.abritishcrash.co.uk 

*OK, technically, it’s published by a Christian Equitable Company, which may or may not amount to the same thing. As a self-published author myself, I believe there is a place for self-publishing (or indie publishing, or whatever you wish to call it) in niches like British Christian fiction, and for getting those labours of love out into the world. But all of that is another conversation, which maybe I’ll return to another day.

Sci-fi Song Of The Week

Following seemlessly from yesterday's post about ways of using dialogue in characterisation, this weeks Sci-Fi Song should serve as a warning not to overdo thecatchphrases...



They don't make 'em like that any more (videos or songs)!

Out of the mouth of babes....

I have this little daughter, she is small and very funny. For instance, straight after finishing a bedtime story recently, she insisted on a recap. Yes, a five year old asking for a recap. I thought that was odd too, but apparently it's something her teacher does at school. Or more to the point, a word her teacher uses a lot at school.

But it was when I noticed that this same five year old had developed a tendency to use the phrase 'I have a tendency to [insert habitual activity of five year old girl here]' that I realised what I had... I have my very own personal catchphrase detector!

Being a writer, I occasionally have need of useful ways to tell my characters apart in those lengthy sections of dialogue; things such as patterns of speech, favourite subjects, and, yes, their favourite words and phrases. Writers are often told to listen to conversations on buses and such to pick up these sorts of things, but now I can just send my daughter off to do it for me, and I only have to listen for the unexpected words and phrases that she starts coming out with. (I will have to bear in mind, of course, that she is an annoyingly smart child. The sort who will baffle nursery staff by using the word 'foliage' perfectly correctly.)

Are there any more inventive (ie lazy) ways of creating individual speech patterns for characters?