Monday Review: Next

I've probably commented here before that I have read quite a few Philip K Dick stories, and seen quite a few films adapted from those stories, but never seen the film of the stories I've read (and vice versa).

True to form, I haven't read The Golden Man, the story on which Next - starring Nicolas Cage - was, loosely, based. But I did watch Next on TV recently, so here are a few of my thoughts. I actually didn't realise, until I started to watch the film, that it was based on a PKD story, or I might have made a point of watching it earlier (it was released in 2007). Trailers and reviews at the time didn't really grab my attention, or raise it above any other Hollywood action flick. With, it turns out, good reason.

Nic Cage stars as Chris Johnson, a man with an uncanny ability to see two minutes into the future, a power which he hides in plain sight by earning a living as a C-list Vegas magician, supplementing his earnings by winning at blackjack every now and then. Until, that is, he comes to the attention of the FBI who call upon him to save the world from an inadequately explained terrorist threat.

Explosions ensue, and with a bag of popcorn and a can of beer it's a reasonably entertaining way to spend an evening, but it never really lives up to the thought-provoking potential of a decent PKD story. (I am making the unfounded assumption that The Golden Man wasn't a rubbish story, of course.)

What it does live up to is a sort of mash-up of Groundhog Day, generic action movie, and romantic comedy, but without much comedy. Actually, if they had played it for laughs it may have been a better film... as it is, it doesn't seem to know what it is, with the result that it does half a job of being several things - none of them especially badly, but none of them well enough to warrant a second look. Sure, it's an interesting premise, there are some fun time-bending tricks as Johnson plays out various permutations of the next few minutes and uses his talents to fox the bad guys, and one or two amusing moments along the way, but they only serve to demonstrate how the film could have been better... Unfortunately the plot-holes, the blu-tacked on terrorist threat and the general nothing-specialness do sort of detract from the more promising moments.

Not bad for mindless vaguely sci-fi action, but could have been a lot better.

CSFF Blog Tour: The Spirit Well by Stephen Lawhead

This week, as I think I have mentioned for those who have been paying attention, the CSFF Blog Tour has been looking at The Spirit Well by Stephen Lawhead.

As I mentioned on Monday, the Christian elements of the story were just beginnning to show up in The Bone House, and I was wondering what would be made of them in future novels in the series. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that point has been picked up on in a number of tour posts - having not read the book yet I won't get into how the subject is dealt with in The Spirit Well, but if you're interested, pay a visit to posts by Thomas Clayton Booher, Bruce Hennigan, Timothy Hicks, Jason Joyner and Becky Miller which look at this in varying amounts of detail.

If you'd rather just read a review of The Spirit Well and make your own mind up (or not) check out the reviews by Julie Bihn, and Jim Armstrong (who likens the quest to a story from Tom Baker vintage Doctor Who but with less jelly babies).

And your final essential stop should be Robert Treskillard's interview with Archaleus Burleigh.

The full list of tour participants is at the end of yesterday's post.

Monday Review: The Bone House by Stephen Lawhead

This month's Christian Science Fiction & Fantasy Blog Tour is looking at the third volume in Stephen Lawhead's Bright Empires series, The Spirit Well - which I haven't read yet.

I have read the previous volume, The Bone House, but haven't posted a full review yet, so this seems like as good a time as any to do so.

As a prelude, I should say that the first book in the series, The Skin Map, ticked a lot of my personal boxes - mainly by virtue of travelling through time and parallel universes by means of ley-lines - and so the sequel had a lot to live up to.

It did seem to start off quite slowly, but the main plot soon kicked in and wouldn't let me go. Alongside the main storyline, which continues the adventures of Kit Livingstone as he continues his quest for the skin map, we get some unobtrusive back story, of Mina's hitherto unexplained transformation from annoying girlfriend to dimesnion-hopping Lara Croft, of Kit and Mina's nemesis Burleigh, and of Flinders-Petrie, the man who was map. While Mina's story fills the gaping hole that left her looking like a Deus ex machina at the end of The Skin Map, the others start to add a greater depth to the multiverse Lawhead has created here.

Sometimes such epic, multi-threaded stories can get a little hard to keep track of, but The Bone House manages to stay interesting and managable for most of the various plot threads. I say most, because some of the later sections with stone age Kit seemed a little longer than necessary, but it didn't stop me enjoying the story.

This volume also introduced some elements of faith and Christianity into the story; presumably there will be some kind of spiritual message in the story as it goes forward, and the steady introduction of various Christian characters is easing us into whatever this may be.

I'm liking the Bright Empires series so far, and if you like the sound of it and want to dip into The Spirit Well, follow some of these links to see what the rest of the tour has to say:

Jim Armstrong Julie Bihn Red Bissell Jennifer Bogart Thomas Clayton Booher Thomas Fletcher Booher Beckie Burnham Brenda Castro Jeff Chapman Christine Karri Compton Theresa Dunlap Emmalyn Edwards April Erwin Victor Gentile Jeremy Harder Bruce Hennigan Timothy Hicks Janeen Ippolito Becca Johnson Jason Joyner Carol Keen Emileigh Latham Rebekah Loper Shannon McDermott Meagan @ Blooming with Books Rebecca LuElla Miller Anna Mittower Joan Nienhuis Lyn Perry Nathan Reimer Chawna Schroeder Rachel Starr Thomson Robert Treskillard Steve Trower Dona Watson Shane Werlinger Phyllis Wheeler
 

Other linky goodness: 

My review of The Skin Map

The author's webiste

CSFF Blog Tour vs Tuesday Tunes

It seems like a while since I've done this, so without any further ado, let us celebrate the CSFF Blog Tour for The Bone House with.... the Top Ten Bone songs:

10. Guns n' Roses: Dust n' Bones
And we start with some classic 80s hard rock - contains a swear near the end. (Those naughty rockers eh?)

9. The White Stripes: Bone Broke
A nice loud blues rock number by Jack White and his, er, female relative of some sort.

8. The Raconteurs: Store Bought Bones
A nice loud alt rock number by Jack White and a few musician pals.

7. Elbow: The Bones of You
They should have renamed themselves 'Funny Bone' just for today, in a vague attempt to be humerus...

6. Radiohead: Bones
For some reason, bone themed songs seem to be more popular in the indie/rock genres than elsewhere. So here's some from somewhere near Kit Livingston's home town. Probably.

5. Brian Eno: Bone Jump
Electronic offerings are thin on the ground this week, but here's a practically non-existent ambient piece from the master of the art.

4. Alice in Chains: Them Bones
Heavy metal meets grunge - turn it up to eleven!

3. George Thorogood & The Destroyers: Bad to the Bone
Theme tune to the movie 'Christine'. I had a car called Christine once. Evil it was. And a Mini.

2. The Dead Weather: Bone House
Well, it had to be didn't it? And, hang on, isn't that Jack White again?

1. The Kinks: Skin and Bone
A warning against extreme dieting, in Ray Davies' inimitable style:
She don't eat no mashed potatoes, She don't eat no buttered scones Stay away from carbohydrates You're gonna look like skin and bone.

Almost forgot, which would be a shame now Spotify has reached the colonies: The Playlist!

Don't forget to visit the rest of the CSFF Blog Tour (full list yesterday) as they look at The Bone House by Stephen Lawhead.

Sci-fi song of the week

It was in the Top Ten Bone songs; it was also in Terminator 2 (I need your coat, your bike, and your underpants, that bit). It's George Thorogood and the Destroyers....

CSFF Blog Tour: The Bone House by Stephen Lawhead

In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received an ebook copy of The Bone House courtesy of the publisher.

Independently of the CSFF Blog Tour, my laptop chucked a hissy fit and banished said ebook to the more inaccessible reaches of cyberspace, and refused to allow me a re-download in time to read it for the tour.

And so it has transpired that if you want to read my review of the book as part of the official tour, you will have to jump a handy ley-line and try to hit the seventh sphinx on the left. Which, it has to be said, is kind of a shame, because the first volume in the Bright Empires saga, The Skin Map, was actually rather good, and the sequel - at least as much of it as the technology would allow me to read - seemed to be following in the same vein.

The Bone House continues the story of Kit Livingston, following his (at the time) inexplicable rescue from the depths of a pyramid somewhere by his once-useless girlfriend, Mina, who unbeknown to Kit, became a dimension-hopping Lara Croft at some point. That is not a plot-hole, mind; this is a time travel story, and that Mina's transformation from drippy girlfriend to Prague coffee entrepreneur to time travelling heroine is initially unexplained serves only to reinforce the reader's empathy for the bemused Kit, who thought the quest was his to complete.

On his website, Lawhead describes the Bright Empires series as his most ambitious work to date; given the variety of locations, time periods and POV characters the one and a bit books I've read so far cover, I can well believe that. There is certainly a lot going on; sometimes I get bogged down trying to keep track of all the threads and characters in a sweeping epic like this, but so far I think Bright Empires is striking a nice balance for my taste (and attention span).

Of course, it doesn't hurt that the whole timey-wimey nature of the story is just my cup of tea to start with, but suffice to say, I will be leaving The Bone House on my Christmas list (yes, I'm old skool. No kindle here). And I will review it properly, at some point in the future; don't wait for that though, take a nose round the rest of the tour, then get yourself a copy (I recommend the ley-line friendly hardback edition).

Noah Arsenault Red Bissell Thomas Clayton Booher Beckie Burnham Morgan L. Busse CSFF Blog Tour Jeff Chapman Carol Bruce Collett Karri Compton D. G. D. Davidson Theresa Dunlap April Erwin Victor Gentile Tori Greene Ryan Heart Bruce Hennigan Timothy Hicks Christopher Hopper Janeen Ippolito Becca Johnson Jason Joyner Julie Carol Keen Krystine Kercher Marzabeth Katie McCurdy Shannon McDermott Rebecca LuElla Miller Joan Nienhuis Chawna Schroeder Kathleen Smith Donna Swanson Rachel Starr Thomson Robert Treskillard Steve Trower Fred Warren Phyllis Wheeler Nicole White Rachel Wyant

Other linky goodness: 

My review of The Skin Map

The author's webiste

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.

The Skin Map by Stephen Lawhead

As I mentioned in passing the other day, as part of the CSFF Blog Tour I was lucky enough to receive a free review copy of this book from the publisher, Thomas Nelson.

Which of course means that rarest of events: I will be reviewing the book during the tour!

I already mentioned that some of the plot devices and settings were (almost literally) right up my street, and if you throw in the opening line:

Had he but known that before the day was over he would discover the hidden dimensions of the universe, Kit might have been better prepared. At least, he would have brought an umbrella.

A great opening line for sure, but did it continue in a similar vein? Well, for the most part, yes. The story is a cocktail of historical, adventure, science fiction and fantasy. It tells the story of Kit Livingstone, who finds himself suddenly thrust into the family business of travelling across time and between parallel Earths by way of the extensive ley-line network, the only map of which known to exist was tattooed on the back of an earlier ley-traveller.

It also tells the story of Kit’s girlfriend, Mina, who follows him only to end up in Prague and invent Starbucks; I found these bits a little tedious at times, but Kit’s efforts to track her down (which soon got sidetracked by the efforts to track the Skin Map down) were fun enough to make up for it.

I have to admit that when Cosimo first appeared, I was reminded of something from a Thursday Next novel but without the jokes; and as for the whole ley-travelling thing, I wonder if Mr Lawhead has seen Jumper? They even have the same secret hideout near the Egyptian pyramids.

None of which detracts from what is, overall, a great story told well, with the possible exception of the slightly out of place ending. Neat twist, or deus ex machina? I’m not sure, but I’m willing to wait for volume two to get it explained to my satisfaction.

On the plus side, the info-dumps, such as they are, fit nicely into the story thanks to Kit’s utter ignorance of what is going on; and for all the time and dimension hopping and multiple viewpoint characters, the story was not hard to keep track of.

Definitely worth a read if you like historical fiction, adventure stories, time travel, or just Stephen Lawhead.

More blogging about The Skin Map here:
Red Bissell Thomas Clayton Booher Keanan Brand Grace Bridges Beckie Burnham Morgan L. Busse Jeff Chapman Christian Fiction Book Reviews Valerie Comer Karri Compton Amy Cruson CSFF Blog Tour Stacey Dale D. G. D. Davidson George Duncan April Erwin Tori Greene Ryan Heart Bruce Hennigan Timothy Hicks Christopher Hopper Becky Jesse Cris Jesse Becca Johnson Jason Joyner Julie Carol Keen Krystine Kercher Shannon McDermott Allen McGraw Matt Mikalatos Rebecca LuElla Miller Nissa John W. Otte Gavin Patchett Sarah Sawyer Chawna Schroeder Kathleen Smith Rachel Starr Thomson Donna Swanson Robert Treskillard Steve Trower Fred Warren Dona Watson Phyllis Wheeler Nicole White Elizabeth Williams Dave Wilson

CSFF Blog Tour: The Skin Map by Stephen Lawhead

It is an important and popular fact that my first novel was a sort of comic fantasy playing on the idea of ley lines (or isoparadoxes, lines of equal weirdness) as a means of travelling to perpendicular dimensions. It was, of course, unmitigated rubbish, and failed utterly to pave the way for someone with more talent to tackle the subject in a more serious manner.

And so it is that over the last month I have been reading The Skin Map by Stephen Lawhead. I have to say it was nice that for this blog tour, the publisher involved managed to send a review copy of the book out to our poky little island. Apparently before they sent them to some US reviewers, which was nice change! And given that big chunks of the story take place in England, I hope you’ll appreciate the view of someone who has an Oyster card and grew up in the Gateway to the Cotswolds, although admittedly not in the 17th Century. I haven’t been to Black Mixen either, although I have been to Dragon Hill, which is in the Cotswolds and does have an artificially flat top, although rather than being a ley portal it’s where St George killed the dragon. Dragon blood is the most effective weedkiller known to man, and not so much as a blade of grass has grown on the hill for 17 centuries.

But I digress. I think the point, such as it was, was that things like leylines and prehistoric monuments and English mythology have long fascinated me, and, well, when you mix these things up with a little time and inter-dimensional travel, you’re going to have a book that I’ll at least take a look at in Waterstones.

So while I do that, here are some nice illustrations of ley lines and portals:

Friday Review: Paradox

Paradox, for the uninitiated, is Auntie Beeb's latest off-the-wall time travelling Mancunian cop show. Sort of. The paradox is, in fact, that despite being utterly rubbish in any way that matters, Paradox is great telly.

Much has been said about the stereotypical nature of the main characters: the tough, career focused female Inspector; the rebellious, sceptical-unless-it-suits-him-not-to-be one (who just happens to have been sharing the Inspector’s bed to boot); the Christian one who, obviously, is prepared to believe anything he can vaguely attribute to God; the mad scientist of the slightly sinister, wouldn’t-like-to-meet-him-in-a-castle-dungeon variety; and of course the usual cast of extras headed inexorably toward the unfortunate demise our heroes can see coming. So I won’t dwell on them any longer.

More interesting is the Paradox, that which our heroes are called upon to believe, whether they like it or not. Essentially, some entity or mechanism is sending images of a crime to the mad scientist a few hours before it occurs. Our heroes have to figure out what the images represent, and from that where and how the incident occurs in time to, hopefully, stop it. All of which is of course as ludicrous as it sounds, but surprisingly good edge of the seat telly if you’re prepared to ignore the bit of your brain that says ‘that wouldn’t happen’. And since we’re all sci-fi fans here, that part of our brain is pretty much permanently bypassed anyway.

On the other hand, if you do stop and think about it – and it seems the writer has, at least briefly – there is plenty of existential philosophising to be done. For instance, the rebellious, sceptical one, having discovered that he should have died in episode two, is given to wonder whether, given that there are an infinite number of him in all these parallel universes, it matters a dingo's kidney what he does here, and proceeds to become more rebellious and reckless.
Meanwhile the Christian one first has his faith challenged, then decides that God is giving him a message through the images and turns into a slightly sinister and stalkery guardian angel.
Apart from such philosophical meanderings - and the more obvious questions of who and where these images are coming from, not to mention how and why - two things occur to me which may come as close to being the point of this ramble as anything.

First, the images from the future are snapshots, glimpses, not the whole story, but enough to guide our heroes in the right direction, provided they can interpret them correctly and quickly enough. All of which parallels the kind of vague-but-obvious-with-hindsight way that we so often perceive God as using to communicate with us. (Well, that could just be me, but still, that’s the point I’m going to leave for more theologically inclined bloggers to dissect.)

The second thing that occurs to me (and I’m sure has occurred to many working in the Christian fiction field) is what if, rather than a mad scientist, these images were received by a religious nutter? A street corner prophet manages to foretell a gruesome murder on his patch, for instance? How would the authorities react if they head about this? What would become of the prophet? In fact, throwing prophecy in to any kind of time travel related scenario give it a little spiritual twist which, followed up in a suitably unusual way, could end up in some good Christian sci-fi.

And with that, the blog seems to have finally returned to its intended course…

Friday Review - British Summertime by Paul Cornell

I loved this book. I think we should get that out of the way so you don't have to sit through loads of tedious review in order to get to the point.

Paul Cornell, for those that don't know, has written several Doctor Who novels, one of which he adapted into the Human Nature/Family of Blood two parter in series 3. British Summertime is not a Doctor Who story - although, arguably it could have been, with it's young Earthbound heroine (with an uncanny sense of chipshopness) swept off her feet by the slightly eccentric Wing Commander Leyton and embroiled in an insanely complicated, entertaining and ultimately very satisfying time travel adventure. With a disembodied head called Jocelyn. And there is so much more to love in the densely-packed plot.

Leyton, to be fair, is more Dan Dare than Doctor Who, and that just tops off a story that's as quintessentially English as the word 'quintessential'. And he comes from the future, but the future of a different Earth, one where Sodom and Gomorrah got let off the hook and the Revelation was never Revealed. Oh yes, there is a wierd religious sub-plot, which could be seen as blasphemous or overtly Christian, depending, I suspect, on the reader's own viewpoint. The stuff with Judas Iscariot was a bit wierd, and to a degree superfluous, but it was just a minor diversion on a cracking ride.

Anyway: Dan Dare, Doctor Who, time travel, an alternate idealised Christian Earth, angels, pop stars, chipshopness, disembodied heads, interstellar war, and some icky bits with a hand drill. Something for everyone (at least, everyone likely to be reading this blog).

Go read it! (Loving that US cover by the way - very Eagle!)