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Snuff by Terry Pratchett

Commander Samuel Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch has faced down some of the greatest perils anyone can think of: dragons, guns, magic, time travel and Ankh-Morpork street food. But now he faces a challenge that he cannot escape, avoid or resist through force: a holiday. Relocating to the Ramkin rural estate, Vimes has to relax, eat good food and perform other hideous tasks like socialising, but his mood improves markedly when the dead bodies start showing up.

Snuff (2011) is the thirty-ninth Discworld novel and the last to feature Commander Sam Vimes in a starring role. The character originated in the eighth Discworld novel, Guards! Guards!, originally published in 1989, and Pratchett carefully developed his character over the course of twenty-two years and multiple books, making him one of the most popular Discworld characters and also the only one to have his own theory of macroeconomics that is often quoted in the real world.

For his swansong, Pratchett gives him a starring role with the rest of the City Watch relegated to brief, background appearances. The plot is nothing spectacularly new, with shades of The Wicker Man and Hot Fuzz here (not to mention a sprinkling of light Jane Austen) as Vimes becomes a fish-out-of-water in the countryside where the rules are different and his normal resources are not available. One of the reasons for Vimes's popularity is his impressive competence, with opponents getting the upper hand through surprise or genuine innovation rather than because the protagonist is given an idiot ball to hold for a while, and that holds true here. Vimes may not know the inns and outs of countryside politics but he does know people and how they operate, and that gives him a strong advantage.

The novel is on the long side for Discworld but is not as egregiously long as Unseen Academicals, which spun its wheels so long it was surprising it could be extracted from the ruts to be published. It helps that Vimes's investigation is genuinely interesting, taking in as it does local economics and the inter-species relationship between humans and goblins, the last Discworld species it is still "okay to hate," something that Vimes sets about changing. We got a taster of this storyline in Unseen Academicals but here it is explored more in-depth, with goblin society explored in full. It's impressive that, almost forty books in, Pratchett was keen to explore more of the Disc and its people.

The book is also helped by its pacing and it furiously action-packed finale, one of Pratchett's stronger resolutions as Vimes and his squad of hand-picked friends have to race along the river to stop a huge injustice taking place. The novel also continues the immensely impressive city-building of Ankh-Morpork, with brief interludes to return to the city to find out what's up with the Patrician and some of the other Watch members.

Given this is a late Pratchett novel, written after being diagnosed with a terminal illness, it is impressive how optimistic it is (an improvement over Academicals). Vimes's investigation legitimises an entire species of people and changes the perception of them overnight, to the betterment of the world. Sergeant Colon, a popular character but one who has been excused for his limited world view and prejudices too long, gets an astonishing wake-up call. Nobby Nobbs finds happiness! Kind of. If that doesn't give you hope for humanity (or immediately adjacent sub-species), I don't know what else will.

On the negative side, we probably again get too many extended scenes with the Patrician, which dents his mystique a little. Pratchett also lets a few running gags (Vimes's son's obsession with excrement of any and all zoological origin; the Patrician's increasingly bitter, metaphorical battle-to-the-death with the Times crossword compiler) maybe run on a few times too long. But these are minor issues.

For late-stage Discworld, Snuff (****½) is a very solid book, packed with interesting ideas that make you think, and some good laughs.

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Microsoft wind up ELDER SCROLLS fans by hinting at the next game's title

Elder Scrolls fans have become a patient breed, with developers Bethesda clocking in almost fifteen years since the release of the last mainline game in the series, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Skyrim has sold over 60 million copies to become one of the best-selling individual video games of all time, so fans are understandably antsy over when the sequel will be released.

Bethesda did confirm way back in 2018 that The Elder Scrolls VI was in development, allaying fears after the release of multiplayer spin-off prequel, The Elder Scrolls Online. However, with Bethesda all-in on developing Fallout 4 (2015), Fallout 76 (2018) and Starfield (2023), the game had to take a back seat, with full-time development only beginning after Starfield's release three years ago. The game is now Bethesda's main focus, but when to expect it is a key question. Even a six-year development window these days feels quite short, but that would still mean the game not appearing before late 2029, potentially even drifting into the 2030s. Hopefully Bethesda have had a second team working on the game to ensure we get it before then.

Whilst that question will not be answered for some considerable time, another one has been hinted at: what the game will be called. Asha Sharma, the head of Xbox at Microsoft, tweeted that she had seen a playthrough of Elder Scrolls VI and been very impressed (presumably less-impressed at the protest outside Bethesda's Rockville HQ against recent layoffs). Most notably, she called it The Elder Scrolls VI: ********. To emphasise this, Bethesda tweeted back that it was awesome to be able to show her "********." This would seemingly emphasise that the game's title consists of eight letters and one word.

Previous Elder Scrolls games have largely had titles built around locations. The third and fifth games, Morrowind and Skyrim, are named after provinces of the Empire of Tamriel. The first game, Arena, and spin-off game Battlespire are named after individual buildings (though "the Arena" is an archaic name for the whole continent as well). The fourth game, Oblivion, was named after a plane of existence. Spin-off games Redguard and Blades are named after factions within the universe.

With the sixth game widely believed to take place in western Tamriel, in the provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell, this opens up some intriguing possibilities for the game's title.

• The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel is a noisome title. Sentinel is the name of the capital city of Hammerfell, and likely a key location in the game.
• The Elder Scrolls VI: Dominion sounds pretty good. The series metaplot has focused on the rise of the Aldemari Dominion and its challenge to the power of the Empire. This was explored in a key questline in Skyrim. Fans have been theorising that the full-scale confrontation between the Empire and the Dominion, possibly in Hammerfell, is a likely storyline in the sixth game.
• The Elder Scrolls VI: Orsinium. Orsinium is a major city-state and kingdom in High Rock, and is the home of Tamriel's civilised orcish civilisation.
• The Elder Scrolls VI: Redguard. The Redguards are the primary inhabitants of Hammerfell and are one of the setting's most popular factions. However, no main series game has been named after a faction before. Also, a 1998 action spin-off game was called The Elder Scroll Adventures: Redguard, which might get confusing. That game is very old though and extremely obscure (as well as likely the franchise's least-selling title), and the title is pretty good, so don't put it past Bethesda to reuse it.
• The Elder Scrolls VI: Highrock. Maybe the developers have decided to lose the space.

Hopefully this is a hint we might get more information about the game soon, but it's really past time.

Of course, it might be the eight characters were totally random and none of this actually means anything, but fans are so devoid of clues that they'll take anything at this point.

Game of Thrones: The Mad King

Winter has ended, and Lady Whent of Harrenhal has called a great tournament to celebrate. The great and the good from the Seven Kingdoms are attending, most notable amongst them Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, the entire Stark family bar their father, and Lord Robert Baratheon, lately come to his seat after the tragic death of his parents at sea. Robert is due to meet his betrothed, Lyanna Stark, the sister of his best friend Eddard, but her attention is divided between the unjust bullying received by her father's bannerman, the young Howland Reed, from some drunken squires, and strange dreams from her childhood that have been given increased vigour at Harrenhal. But plots and counter-plots swirl as the Mad King himself, Aerys II, puts in an unexpected appearance.

One of the more familiar plaudits offered to A Song of Ice and Fire over its three-decade history has been "Shakespearian." Like the Bard, George R.R. Martin drew on Roman and medieval history to inspire his work, and perhaps Richard III and Julius Caesar as well as the more obvious Hamlet and MacBeth were at least rattling around somewhere in Martin's head when sketching his story of warring knights and scheming politicians. It's therefore appropriate that the long-awaited first stage play based on his Westerosi mythos is being staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Bard's own home town on Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Cynics may fear this is merely the latest in the lengthy franchising of the series whilst it remains incomplete, adding to the miniatures, wargames, cookbooks and mugs though, alas, Game of Thrones: The Flamethrower remains conspicuously absent. But whilst the author has battled the howling winter winds, he has grown adroit at finding collaborators and other ways of giving fans new information about the known world of Westeros and Essos. The World of Ice and Fire gave us much-requested information on the history of the world and its wide breadth, whilst Fire & Blood expanded mightily on the Targaryen reign, giving us striking vignettes and short narratives about the reign of the dragons. But nothing George or his collaborators have created previously are as iconic as this: the story of the great tourney at Harrenhal and the civil war it triggered, known (to the winners) as Robert's Rebellion.

This is the immediate inciting event of the history of A Song of Ice and Fire. It's arguably (and literally!) in the smouldering wreckage of this civil war that the story of Ned Stark, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen is born. Martin himself has been wary of portraying this story directly, feeling it takes away too much mystery from the series itself and also feeling that future revelations in the books would tell us all that we needed to know about these events. But script writer Duncan Macmillan disagreed, instead finding in these events a tragic-comic epic, worth retelling in its own right as well as the immediate prequel to the narrative of the books (and, of course, its TV adaptation, Game of Thrones).

The play is split into two distinct halves. The first is focused on the Great Tourney of Harrenhal in the Year of False Spring itself. Prince Rhaegar Targaryen has cunningly decided to use the tourney as cover to gauge the opinions of the great lords of Westeros on whether his father, the Mad King Aerys, should be removed from power. Unfortunately, most of the great lords have refused to come, instead sending their sons to try to win glory on the tourney field. Rhaegar's hopes are further dashed when the Mad King unexpectedly arrives to behold the tourney himself, his first time outside of the Red Keep, let alone King's Landing, for many a year. Rhaegar's political frustrations are undercut when he meets Lyanna Stark, daughter of Lord Rickard of Winterfell. Both have suffered strange visions and dreams since childhood, one of ice and one of fire. By combining the two, they realise they may hold the key to the future...if Rhaegar can convince himself his dreams are real and prophetic, not the prelude to the same madness that has consumed his father. Things are complicated by Lyanna's betrothal to Robert Baratheon, the only great lord who is present and whom Rhaegar seeks to make an ally, and the presence of Rhaegar's wife Elia Martell, who loves to dabble with politics.

The second, much more episodic, half is more familiar, telling of how the Mad King finally snaps the frail bonds of order in Westeros and triggers full-blown civil war, with half of the realm rising against him and too many of the other half decided to sit at home and see which way the wind blows.

As stage productions go, this can only be described as extremely impressive. The audience sits around a stage that cuts through the seating, meaning action can be happening in several places at the same time (though the audio cues and focus means you can't miss the main action). The stage has several immense props that form from underneath and overhead, such as a heart tree that assembles Volton-like whenever characters seek the wisdom of the old gods, whilst the Iron Throne elevates through the rear of the stage (vaguely like a launch sequence from Thunderbirds) whenever the action moves to the Red Keep. Horses are a mixture of human-powered puppets and props. The Mountain is only depicted by a massive suit of armour moved around by stagehands. During several key battles, literally larger-than-life armoured puppet versions of the characters do battle rather than the real actors. The musical accompaniment is excellent. This isn't a musical but there are several in-universe songs that are beautifully performed.

The acting is also almost uniformly excellent. Special props must go to Harmony Rose-Bremner whose Lyanna Stark carries much of the weight of the production (especially in the first half), whose performance is the right mix of funny, melancholic and romantic. Noah Ritter's Rhaegar is also excellent, but it's Callum Woodhouse as Robert Baratheon who maybe emerges as the most surprising performance, here playing Robert not as a fun-loving young buck but a man haunted by an unspeakable family tragedy who seeks oblivion from his feelings in drinking, and fixates on Lyanna as possibly his salvation from grief, going some way to explain his infatuation with her even decades later despite only a short acquaintance. Michael Shaeffer has the hardest task as the Mad King himself, imbuing Aerys with the charisma of the king he used to be but also the cruelty and dangerous whimsy of the tyrant he has become.

The performances and writing here also demonstrate interesting ideas, such as maybe Eddard Stark's (Michael Abubakar) regard for Robert being driven by his similarity to his brother Brandon (Luke Brady), explaining their closeness whilst also being very different. Elizabeth Ayodele is also intriguing as Elia Martell, here an active player in her husband's schemes but who also has a hard head for politics, whilst not perhaps being as skilled at the game as she thinks, especially when she matches wits against the redoubtable Varys (Hughie O'Donnell).

Sometimes the narrative creaks as the playwright struggles to keep all of Martin's numerous references to the tourney across five large novels and several supporting works straight (Tanisha Spring's fun Ashara Dayne being the object of veneration by half the male cast, it seems). The cast is enormous and couldn't get much bigger without becoming unwieldy, but fans may be surprised not to see Jon Connington, Hoster Tully or Jon Arryn at all, with characters like Catelyn, Tywin and Cersei reduced to not much more than cameos.

Fans may also wonder how canon all of this stuff is, and several clear breaks with the books and TV show may suggest that the answer is "eh, kind of." We know from the books that Daenerys and Jon Snow were born multiple months apart, which is not the case here, whilst the play keeps with the book timeline of having Jaehaerys II split the Unlikely King from the Mad King (the Unlikely goes resolutely unnamed here as well, possibly as a nod to spoilers for HBO watchers). Several scenes split by months or weeks in the text are also combined here for dramatic effect, and the timeline as a whole is left somewhat ambiguous, probably a good thing as there are multiple pregnancies to account for.

The play is almost four hours long, which is a formidable length, and it's impressive the cast and crew maintain their energy levels throughout the whole thing. But the splitting of the narrative in two, each with a different character focus, cleverly keeps up the pacing. There's also an air of slightly off-kilter surrealness to the proceedings, making it feel like we're watching a fever dream or maybe even an in-universe play based on garbled historical records many centuries in Westeros's future. If this is ever adapted for the screen, it feels like Denis Villeneuve and his slightly askew vibes would fit it well.

This is a hugely impressive production, engrossing and technically skilled but centered on the excellent performances playing haunted characters trying to do the right thing, but almost invariably making things worse.

Game of Thrones: The Mad King (**** for newcomers but ***** for hardened fans) is running at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon in the UK, until 5 September. There are apparently tentative plans for a West End run and possibly overseas, but no firm plans have yet been announced.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Daredevil: Born Again - Season 2

Wilson Fisk's reign as New York mayor continues, but Daredevil is determined to expose his criminal connections and bring him down, with the help of allies including Karen Page and Jessica Jones. With Daredevil on the run and Fisk protected by mechanisms both legal and illicit, the odds are stacked against the Devil of Hell's Kitchen as never (well, rarely) before.

After Daredevil's original four-season run (including his turn on Defenders) came to an end and Disney+ took over control of Marvel characters on the small screen, fans could assume they'd seen the last of Charlie Cox's take on the character. That decision was reversed twice, first by bringing him into the mainstream MCU through cameos in Spider-Man: No Way Home and She-Hulk, and then by reversing a decision to reboot the character at the eleventh hour and retroactively canonising the entire Netflix-Marvel run of shows (including the characters of Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and Luke Cage).

Although welcome, this decision was only made after production on Daredevil: Born Again had started, so the first season was a little hamstrung in having to incorporate the material shot for the original, reboot version of the story with the new material acknowledging the prior canon. Season 2, happily, is free of such restrictions and the show can try to achieve the potential of what it wanted to be.

There are basically two main storylines here. The first is a political story as Wilson Fisk - Kingpin - tightens his control over New York's political life as well as its criminal underbelly, a balancing act he is initially very successful at but soon threatens to unravel, as his impatience cannot deal with the slow-moving wheels of bureaucracy. His own allies and workers start developing doubts about his brutal methods, but are too scared or feel too powerless to act. Daredevil is keen to take down Fisk, but is losing the battle of public opinion and the relentless surveillance state makes it hard for him to move around the city and do his normal thing. The actual US government smells a rat with Fisk, but is constitutionally bared from intervening...unless Fisk can be exposed.

The tension of the show is driven by these competing plotlines. Daredevil can't just track down Fisk and beat him up, and Fisk can't just unleash the full force of his brutal methods whilst his every move is being tracked in the full glare of media and political scrutiny. Both characters are constrained, and have to work within those constraints, which is much more interesting.

The show is also strengthened by the expansion of the cast. After only fleeting appearances in Season 1, Deborah Ann Woll returns in a key role as Karen Page. Woll is an extremely strong (and underrated) performer, and imbues Karen with a lot of charisma and dangerously impetuous energy without ever making you lose sympathy for her. It's a remarkable balancing act and having her back is great. Jessica Jones also gets a key role in several episodes, and Krysten Ritter brings her world-weary cynicism as usual, but here tempered with more empathy, hinting at off-screen character development. 

Not all the cast are firing on top guns. Matthew Lillard is possibly the least convincing CIA agent in screen history, and there's maybe one or two many identikit political movers or criminal gang lords wandering around the story. A bit of sprawl can be a good thing, and this season at least feels like events are happening on a big scale, but not so much when you start forgetting which minor criminal gang leader is supporting Fisk, which is opposing him, and which is apparently supporting him but also willing to backstab him.

There's a lot going on here, for a nice change, as it fills up the eight-hour runtime quite well, with a lot of subplots to go around. Cox is possibly at his very best as a Daredevil constrained by the system he swore to uphold and with his pool of allies rapidly thinning out, whilst Vincent D'Onofrio gives an outstanding performance as Fisk has everything he ever wanted - power, respect, influence, a beautiful and intelligent wife - but finds it still cannot fill the hole in his soul. There's always been a tragic, operatic element to Fisk's story and character, especially this version of him, and D'Onofrio plays that to the hilt.

An excellent season of television which, at times, threatens to be the best thing Marvel has put on the small screen, unravels towards the very end with unexpected rapidity. The trial of a main character turns into a trial of Wilson Fisk, his motives and his measures, and it's extremely tense and well-written. But the show goes too far when the tension breaks and we end up with a situation which gets very implausible (bordering on the idiotic) very quickly. The season's cliffhanger ending is so contrived that it will have your eyebrows halfway to Mars before the end credits are done. I know Marvel are aware they have a good villain deficit (especially since Thanos bought it, twice) and D'Onofrio is one of the most powerful weapons in their arsenal, but they are also at risk here of over-using him and eliminating his menace and power.

This is frustrating and disappointing, as up until the last half-hour or so, Daredevil: Born Again's second season (****) and the sixth season overall to feature Cox as Daredevil in a leading role, is outstanding. As it stands, the in-production third season is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting to make the ending of this season seem less disappointing. The show is currently streaming worldwide on Disney+.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Wonder Man: Season 1

Legislation has barred people with special powers from working in Hollywood, a rule enforced by the Department of Damage Control. When they suspect that up-and-coming actor Simon Williams has secret powers, they recruit ex-Mandarin actor Trevor Slattery to befriend him and learn the truth. Slattery is at first keen to help in return for money and his freedom, but as he gets to know Williams and sees things in him that remind him of his own career at a younger age, Slattery starts to have second thoughts.

It's probably fair to say that the Marvel TV explosion of the early 2020s did not pan out as hoped. Whilst we did get several good shows - WandaVision and Loki were the highlights - and several okay ones (like Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk), we also got Secret Invasion, easily the weakest project the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe has delivered to date. Marvel made the decision to pivot back to the big screen, leaving the fate of Wonder Man, filmed back in 2023, unclear. Eventually Disney put it out in early 2026 with relatively little fanfare.

Almost predictably, the show ends up being superb. The series is focused on the relationship between Simon Williams, played with gravity, presence and humour by the talented  Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Slattery, played with sly irreverence and occasional tragic pathos by Ben Kingsley. Producer-showrunner-director Destin Daniel Cretton, who made this shortly before starting work on Spider-Man: Brand New Day, was inspired to make the movie after shooting Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) and realising that Marvel had an untapped powerhouse in its hands with Ben Kingsley, one of our greatest living actors.

The eight-part series opens almost as a standard drama, with Williams trying to make it as an actor. He's gotten as far as having mid-ranking recurring roles on TV dramas, but his obsession with making each character have integrity is grating on time-minded directors. Williams's family is also divided on his ambition, his mother being supported but his brother, a successful businessman, is frustrated at his lack of ambition and progress. This is all quite compelling thanks to some good writing and outstanding performances. The arrival of Slattery and the references to his past as the Mandarin (from Iron Man 3) ties events into the wider MCU, but it's done with a relatively light touch. A Damage Control agent recurs from Spider-Man: No Way Home and Ms. Marvel, but there are almost no references to his previous escapades, so newcomers need not be put off.

Because the show works so well as a serious drama with bursts of comic fun (including a great interlude with Joe Pantoliano playing an unhinged version of himself), the fear is that its further integration into the MCU and exploration of Williams's powers will dilute the premise. But the show does a good job of using those elements to explore Williams' character, as well as giving Kingsley more meat to chew on. Kingsley's charcter has mostly been used so far in the MCU for comic relief, but Wonder Man gives him much more range and, obviously, the actor rises to the occasion. The eight episodes are perhaps a little too much for the story on offer here, but this is offset by the fourth episode Doorman, an effectively self-contained mini-movie explaining why Hollywood has barred superhero actors. More wildly inventive in its hour-long runtime than most of the last dozen Marvel movies, the episode is a terrific, fun time as well as providing much-need exposition.

But ultimately the show is about the relationship and friendship that builds between Williams and Slattery (somewhere between mentor-student, father-son and bromance), and how that factors into their life choices. The show builds up an impressive emotional weight missing from too many recent MCU projects. In short, it makes you care about the characters, an important rule of scripting that too many modern projects have forgotten.

The show does falter a little. Even with the excellent flashback diversion, the story isn't enough to completely fill the runtime, and the low-key, low-stakes nature of the story may not appeal to everyone. But others will enjoy what is possibly the best look we've had so far at what living in the MCU is like for ordinary people, and for people with powers but who aren't the Hulk or Spider-Man.

Thoughtful and witty in turn, Wonder Man (****½) is one of the best slices of the MCU on the small screen with outstanding performances by its two leads. It is available to watch worldwide now on Disney+.

The show was renewed for a second season a few months ago, but this decision was abruptly reversed a few weeks ago. However, given that Cretton has just delivered Marvel the highest-grossing opening movie of all time, maybe he can convince them to change their minds again.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Project Hail Mary

The sun is dying, being feasted on by tiny lifeforms based on Venus. The phenomenon, the "astrophage," is not unique: every star within dozens of light-years of Sol is suffering the same malaise...except one: Tau Ceti. With Earth's habitability in danger in a matter of decades, the countries of the world unite to send a near-lightspeed ship, powered by the same tiny lifeforms, to Tau Ceti to investigate. Only one crewmember, Ryland Grace, survives the trip, finding himself alone almost a dozen light years from home with the awesome responsibility of saving the entire human race...and no idea how.

Project Hail Mary is a film based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Andy Weir, best-known for The Martian (also made into a successful movie). Both stories have a similar premise, stranding a handsome Hollywood leading man (first Matt Damon and now Ryan Gosling) an ungodly distance from home with limited or non-existent chances of rescue. Project Hail Mary is far less concerned with actual science though, with the threat to Earth, the interstellar propulsion system and the resolution to the crisis all being way more speculative than anything in The Martian. This gives the story more leeway to focus on the characters and having a little bit more fun.

This makes sense as the directors are the duo of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, remarkably here directing their first movie together in a dozen years. In the meantime they had started work on Solo: A Star Wars Story, only to be removed from the project mid-film and replaced by Ron Howard. Project Hail Mary serves as a calling card to show that yes, they can handle a more serious tone and also an effects-heavy SF movie, and do it well.

It's probably not a massive spoiler to say that Gosling's character is not alone for long, as it turns out other extraterrestrial civilisations are also under threat from the "astrophage" and the guys at 40 Eridani have also figured out that Tau Ceti may have hold the secret to defeating them so send a team of their own. Grace has to join forces with an alien named "Rocky" and learn his language as a prelude to finding a solution to the problem.

In order to overcome the limitation of 90% of the film being made up of Gosling talking to an ambulatory rock, the film also features elaborate flashbacks to the discovery of the astrophage, Grace training the scientists to fix the problem and then being asked to replace them when they are killed in an accident. This non-linear approach to the storytelling works quite well, even if it does add to the feeling this movie is "Interstellar with a few more laughs," (not a bad thing at all). Key to the flashbacks is Grace's relationship with his boss Eva Stratt (a phenomenal Sandra Hüller) which goes in directions the viewer wasn't quite expecting.

But it is the relationship between Grace and Rocky (voiced with skill by James Ortiz, who also "plays" the puppet version of the character) that is core to the movie, and that relationship is very well-written and excellently played, with the duo rapidly becoming one of SF's more impressive bromances, maybe not quite Han and Chewie, but more on the lines of Bruce Dern and his robots in Silent Running. In fact, the film feels like the perfect melding of a 1970s classic slice of sci-fi with a more modern twist.

The film falters a little with its running time, which feels a little overwrought, and with the film under-explaining a few concepts, like how the 40 Eridanians have no concept of relativity, explaining why Rocky's ship is so over-fuelled (a concept better acknowledged in the novel) for the voyage, which becomes a key plot point in explaining how they can move around the Tau Ceti system without worrying too much about fuel.

These complaints are next to negligible though. Project Hail Mary (****½) is an all-around, well-made, well-conceived film which mixes a serious plot with some lighter moments and is driven by superb performances as well as exemplary visual effects. The movie is available to watch worldwide now.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Cloudpunk: City of Ghosts

Several months have passed since the rather memorable first night on the job for Cloudpunk delivery driver Rania. She is still ticking along, doing her thing, when another crazy night starts. Before sunrise, Rania will become an illicit street racer, renewed her contacts with the movers and shakers of the city, and become the target for a relentless assassin.

City of Ghosts is the expansion to the 2020 indie hit Cloudpunk. "Expansion" may do the title an injustice, as it is about as long as the original Cloudpunk storyline and expands on some of the ideas presented in the original game. However, the title does not bring enough new to the table in terms of locations or gameplay features to warrant being a full sequel. Instead, it's an impressively large slice of new content, even if it does nail that expansion pack feel of "if you liked the original, you'll like this, if you didn't, there's nothing here to change your mind."

Once again you're controlling Rania, the protagonist of the first game, as you navigate the airways and streets of the futuristic, ocean-straddling city of Nivalis. Nivalis is divided into airways where you can fly your HOVA (hovercar) and neighbourhoods where you can land, get out of the car and walk around on foot. Only a relatively small part of the city is explorable on foot, divided into a couple dozen areas on the map, but this gives the illusion of the city being open-world even when it's not. As with the first game, a lot of your time is spent picking up packages and occasionally people and driving them to a destination. The on-foot areas do have some collectibles to find (some play a role in the story, but most are there to sell to make money), and very rarely important NPCs and quest-givers you can stumble across, but these are few and far between.

More than the first game, City of Ghosts also likes to shake things up, at least a little. The very start will confuse the hell out of veterans as the first game as you get to know a new protagonist called Hayse, before he abruptly vanishes and you go almost the full length of the game before he shows up again. At another key point in the game you get to take control of Rania's pet AI-dog Camus, recently installed in a new body, and this is fun as Camus can run around at much greater speed than the human characters. A rather creepy section set deep in the bowels of the city benefits from turning into a Resident Evil game, complete with fixed cameras and tank controls, as you try to find keys and ways of moving deeper into a deserted (or is it...?) neighbourhood in search of answers. The game also gives you a few new options, such as being able to buy new HOVAs with different characteristics and swap between them as needed (including fast-but-fragile models for racing).

These improvements are muted by being limited. You only control Hayse and Camus for relatively brief periods, and can't swap between them at will. The Resident Evil section is cool but maybe lasts half an hour, max. Buying new HOVAs is fun but ultimately the game is still completable no matter which vehicles you have. As with the first game, the narrative is the key draw and you can make choices at various moments in the game which have an outcome on the finale, although sometimes the consequences of the choices you make are so vaguely defined it's hard to make a well-informed choice in the moment, not helped by the game's stingy save system.

Still, Cloudpunk was a serious vibe back in 2020 and it remains so now. Driving around the rainy city streets listening to the superb, chilled-out synth-driven soundtrack is quite fun, even if the driving controls remain a bit janky. Walking around the neon vistas may wear out your screenshot button. The Minecraft-ish voxel aesthetic is starting to wear a little thin here, but when the game looks as good as it does, complaining about it would be churlish.

The story is pretty good, and the side-vignettes are often quite compelling. Being contacted by a cryogenic "time-skipper" in deep space who gives you the first clue on just how far in the future the game is set is a hairs-on-the-neck moment. Rania trying to work how to respond to a client with a crush on her is funny. The voice work, the weakest link of the original game (Rania thankfully excepted), is improved here, even if it's not as consistently strong as most players would like. The tonal shift from dystopian semi-comedy to tragedy is repeated here, maybe more successfully than in the original game.

Cloudpunk: City of Ghosts (***½) adds another eight to nine hours of fun adventuring to the original game. The core gameplay loop - pick up something, fly across the city, drop it off whilst the characters engage in exposition voice-overs - remains fun but also remains limited. There are attempts here to freshen up the formula and these are successful, but also not as extensive as you might wish. If you want a varied and action-packed game, this is not it. But for a more chilled-out narrative adventure game, City of Ghosts fits the bill nicely. The expansion is - somewhat incomprehensibly - only available for the PC version of the game, despite the original also launching on Switch, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

A semi-sequel called Nivalis Nights, allowing you to run multiple businesses in Nivalis, will be released on 29 November this year.

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Masters of the Universe (2026)

The planet Eternia is invaded and conquered by the armies of the evil warlord Skeletor. Young Prince Adam is sent into a portal by the Sorceress of Eternia to safeguard him and the Sword of Power, but he loses the Sword mid-transit. Arriving on Earth, he spends fifteen years searching for the Sword. He finally locates it, but finds the war has followed him to his adopted homeworld. Returning to Eternia, he has to rally the Eternian loyalists to fight Skeletor, but finds his long absence has alienated his people.

Masters of the Universe is the second attempt to tackle a live-action movie based on the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe franchise from the early 1980s. Alongside GI Joe, He-Man kicked off the whole toy/cartoon/movie phenomenon later followed by the likes of Transformers and Thundercats, but unlike those franchises it burned relatively briefly, dominating toy sales for only a few years before dropping off. The first live-action movie in 1987, launched as the franchise was waning, was critically rinsed on release, although it has since been revised as a more entertaining pulp film, mostly for Frank Langella's much-better-than-needed performance as Skeletor and the appearance of a young Courtney Cox.

This attempt sees Adam - played with winning likeability by Nicholas Galitzine - exiled to Earth, but the film gets him back to Eternia with commendable speed, where he teams up with Teela (Camila Mendes) and fighting mentor Man-at-Arms (Idris Elba). Skeletor (a pre-yikes-revelations Jared Leto) and Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie) lead the forces of evil. James Purefoy puts in a winning turn as Adam's father, but somewhat oddly he is saddled with an American accent that doesn't allow his impressive voice to shine through (casting Purefoy and not letting him use his distinctive voice is a bit weird).

Everything seems set for a solidly enjoyable popcorn flick and to some extent the film succeeds at that. The script is a bit MCU-adjacent-ha-ha funny, but for this franchise that's pretty appropriate, so isn't a major problem. The performances are all pretty good, and some of the actors make interesting choices. Idris Elba seems to realise this is the sort of role he can do sleepwalking, so makes more comedic choices and plays slightly against type in some scenes, which freshens up his role.

One problem is that the action is a bit over-stylised, with a few too many clever-arse, CG-enhanced camera moves that never feel convincing. This is a shame as some of the fight choreography is pretty solid. The film also arguably flounders with its central message. Adam has not looked after himself too much, repeatedly shows hesitancy and weakness in the face of a threat that should have defeated him multiple times over (the running gags of both Adam's preference for diplomacy and Skeletor's apparent refusal to kill his enemies if they have names and/or toys on sale do address this, somewhat) and yet wins anyway because he has a magic sword that gets him ripped in five seconds flat. The film is also easily half an hour too long, with that whole "this is the final battle, whoops, no it isn't, now this is ha ha," plot device modern action films would do well to drop. Camila Mendes is also one of the strongest performers in the film but doesn't have much to do in the second half.

Masters of the Universe (***½) is a perfectly serviceable piece of entertainment that the brain will watch, absorb and completely forget about within 48 hours. If you want a popcorn movie actually resonates a bit more and is more fun, than something like the Dungeons & Dragons movie or the better third of the MCU is probably a stronger recommendation. The film is available on streaming and media worldwide about now.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

A GAME OF THRONES at 30

In May 1996, eager fantasy fans in the UK hit their local bookstore to pick up the seventh and latest Wheel of Time novel in hardcover. Robert Jordan's giga-series ruled the roost in fantasy sales, only beaten in the UK by homegrown legend Terry Pratchett and his Discworld saga (which had two entries in 1996, Pratchett not being one to hang around). But fans picking up the brick-thick tome could also pick up something else: a preview booklet for a new novel arriving later that year. The preview booklet even had a Robert Jordan back cover quote: "A Game of Thrones grabs hold and won't let go!" proclaimed Jordan. "It's brilliant!" he added, possibly redundantly.

Arriving in the first week of August 1996 (release dates being a window rather than a specific date at that point, especially for the first book in a new series by an author who was not a household name), A Game of Thrones was George R.R. Martin's first solo novel for thirteen years. That novel, the supernatural rock and roll story The Armageddon Rag, had sold poorly and had dented Martin's publishing reputation to the point that he couldn't sell his his next planned books and instead took up a career in Hollywood, working on The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. He did repair his reputation in publishing circles with his short story collection/fixup novel Tuf Voyaging (1986) and then as the editor-in-chief of the Wild Cards shared world anthology series, which started in 1987, but there was a perception that a promising genre novelist had been lost to the silver screen.

They may have been right, for a while, but Martin had grown frustrated with everything he wrote being "too long and too expensive" for the screen and started planning a return to fiction, where length and budget were not (or at least less) of a concern. With Beauty and the Beast finishing in 1990, Martin started work on Avalon, a new novel in the Thousand Worlds science fiction setting of his early work. By summer 1991, work on that novel was coming along well when he was almost forcibly struck by the vision of a young boy watching a man being beheaded in the snow. Martin didn't know what that meant, whether it was a short story or a novella or more, but started writing. More chapters came, and he left Avalon cooling off in a corner of his hard drive (where it presumably remains, the victim of maybe the biggest writing tangent in human history).

What the first chapter of A Game of Thrones looks like on George's WordStar 4.0 word processor. He's written the entire series like this. Writing white-on-black is something that would drive me crazy, making me want to murder every single character I was writing...wait a sec.

Martin's early career can be defined by promising series he started writing only to dry up after a promising first instalment, and he generally needed to get a story down whilst it was white-hot in his mind before it could cool off. As a result, A Song of Ice and Fire was almost strangled at birth when Hollywood called Martin up and offered him the thing he'd been dreaming about for ten years: his own TV show. Martin agreed with alacrity and began working on Doorways, a TV series about a character who can slip between parallel universes. Sets were built, casting was undertaken in Europe and a pilot episode filmed, featuring among its supporting players an unknown actress called Carrie-Ann Moss. By late 1992 or early 1993 ABC had passed on the project and Martin returned to working on what he was now calling A Game of Thrones. Rather than losing the thread of the novel whilst working on the TV pilot, Martin had used the time to solidify some of his ideas.

Martin had by now drawn a map of the vast continent called Westeros where the bulk of the action would take place. Additional action was happening to one character on an even bigger continent to the east, but Martin decided not to map or name that landmass to preserve a sense of mystery. He had also made a key decision on the tone of the story. His initial chapters had not featured any magic at all, and he had toyed with the idea of having no fantastical or supernatural elements of any kind, just a "fake history" in a different world. Martin's friend Phyllis Eisenstein, knowing of Martin's lifelong love of writers like Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock and Tolkien, thought this was limiting and suggested that he "put the dragons in." He took this advice to heart and, not one to do things by thirds, he put three dragons and a multitude of zombies and ice creatures in for good measure. A new prologue incorporating some of these elements followed.

Robert Jordan's copy of A Game of Thrones, signed by George R.R. Martin.

In October 1993, Martin sent the novel's opening thirteen chapters (totalling around 170 pages) out to publishers, alongside a rough outline of what he now considered to be a trilogy called A Song of Ice and Fire. Martin was not a fan of outlines, feeling they inhibited the improvisational urge that gave rise to the best fiction (in this he was similar to Robert Jordan, Terry Pratchett, Stephen King and J.R.R. Tolkien, so was in reasonable company), so cheerfully admitted that the outline would probably bear no resemblance to the actual series as it unfolded, as would very much prove to be the case.

The outline did its job, with publishers in both the USA and UK eager to snap up the series. Epic fantasy was huge business at the time but an epic fantasy from a credible, multi-award-winning genre figure was much rarer. More to the point, the editors who read the early chapters saw immense commercial potential mixed with excellent dialogue, potentially a critical and sales success. If anything, the UK was even more thrilled than the US publishing houses, with Legend Books and HarperCollins getting into a brutal bidding war that ended with Legend's John Jarrold admitting defeat to HarperCollins's Malcolm Edwards after the tactical deployment of a cheque for £450,000 (about £978,000 in today's money) in February 1994.

Martin discovered he may have bitten off more than he'd initially planned to chew (potentially not for the first time). His original estimate of three 700 manuscript page books started to look naive when he soared past 1,000 manuscript pages for the first book and kept going...and going. He took a hard look at the pages he had and chainsawed the book at a dramatically appropriate moment, calling this first coherent chunk A Game of Thrones and sending it off to his publishers, along with his apologetic note that A Song of Ice and Fire would now be four volumes in length.

Someone who was very happy was Robert Jordan, who sent George's editor a letter celebrating the fact that A Song of Ice and Fire would now take as long as it would take, across as many novels as it would take, rather than being artificially restricted to just three books. Jordan's unrepentant enjoyment of A Song of Ice and Fire may be explained by the fact that his original outline for The Wheel of Time was far more heavy metal, balls-out crazy than what the series ended up being, with half-demons invading our world through portals and the main character having sex with almost every female character of note in his quest to save the world, presumably by exercising his prostate. Jordan's editor (also his wife) and publisher asked him to tone it down a bit and write something with a bit wider of an age range, which ended up being commercially the better decision, but Jordan may have felt a little disappointed at not having unleashed his inner keg rager of a writer, whilst George had.

Finally complete (sort of), A Game of Thrones hit shelves in the first week of August 1996, preceded by the aforementioned sampler in May in the UK and, in the USA, by Blood of the Dragon, a novella consisting of all the Daenerys Targaryen chapters arranged into a single story. This novella was published in Asimov's, one of the leading SF magazines of the day, to try to tempt Martin's already-existing SF fanbase into trying his fantasy novel.

These intriguing tactics proved...not really successful. A Game of Thrones launched to a muted reception. Sales were okay, but not stunning. Reviews were decidedly all over the place. As well as Robert Jordan, authors Raymond E. Feist, Katherine Kerr and Anne McCaffrey gave the book glowing reviews and cover quotes, but critical reviews were somewhat less unanimous. SFX Magazine, Britain's biggest-selling SF magazine, was cool at best. The reaction was, after five years of build-up, underwhelming. However, Martin did get some consolation when Blood of the Dragon won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1997, the only literary Hugo the series has won to date (A Storm of Swords made a strong swing for the Best Novel prize in 2001, but was defeated by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire).

But, things slowly got better. The Wheel of Time fanbase, responding to Jordan's exultations about the novel and, with that series entering its longest hiatus (though, at two-and-a-half years until the next novel, perhaps not that bad in retrospect) many decided to check out A Game of Thrones. Arguably the earliest stirrings of the online Song of Ice and Fire discourse came about on Wheel of Time fansites. Some eager fans quickly created their own websites, with early discussion on the Dragonstone site before moving to Westeros.org.

A Game of Thrones came out in paperback and saw a jump in sales, with additional cover quotes joining the party. Thanks to the novel being split off from the larger manuscript, Martin already had a significant head start on the second book, which he now called A Clash of Kings. Martin's original plan had been to release a book a year in the series, but when he turned in A Clash of Kings in early 1998, he was deeply apologetic and some very early grumblings online can be discerned about the lateness of the book (proving that historical irony is definitely a thing). More traditionally, the same thing that had happened to Thrones had happened to this book. Once again, the book had gotten too big to be published in one volume and Martin's trusty literary chainsaw had been deployed, with a third volume called A Storm of Swords introduced to the mix.

At this point Martin decided to at least have a go at writing a new outline, one that has never been made public, and from this he deduced that the series would now consist of six books: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Dance with Dragons, The Winds of Winter and A Time for Wolves (a title he was never happy with, many years later replacing it with A Dream of Spring). He also mounted his first reconnaissance expedition into the lands of Westeros outside of the main series. His colleague Robert Silverberg had called to ask for a short story in the same world for an anthology he was editing called Legends. Martin eagerly agreed, and his story The Hedge Knight, about a young knight and his unusual squire adventuring in the Seven Kingdoms some ninety years before the events of A Game of Thrones, duly appeared in the book alongside new stories in their signature universes from the likes of Pratchett, King, Feist...and inevitably Robert Jordan. It was arguably Jordan's short story New Spring that drove sales of the anthology more than anything else, which led to people reading The Hedge Knight, which led to people buying A Game of Thrones and its newly-minted sequel.

A US first-edition hardcover of A Game of Thrones, retailing for £540 at the 2014 London WorldCon. I can only assume the value has gone up.

The rest is history, both past and present. The series did expand, though thankfully only from six to seven planned novels (touching wood). A tiny TV operation called HBO picked up the screen rights to the books and turned them into the biggest drama show of the entire decade in the 2010s, driving sales of the books to over 100 million (HarperCollins, you'll be happy or, more likely, totally indifferent to know, turned a profit on that advance). The novels would get turned into video games, board games, tabletop roleplaying games, action figures, miniatures, calendars and, most vitally cookery books. An entire ecosystem of websites and YouTube channels dissecting every scrap of the lore and background material would spring up. The TV show would spawn two spin-off shows, both successful, not to mention a stage play and even a book of witticisms (okay, maybe that one was pushing it a bit). The only thing missing is a Game of Thrones-branded flamethrower shaped like a dragon.

The books would get everything but, so far, an ending. Yes, and I know the novelty of this information this will shock readers to the very core of their being, A Song of Ice and Fire is, thirty years on from the release of A Game of Thrones (and fifteen from A Dance with Dragons), incomplete, with five of the planned seven books out and the sixth reportedly sitting on over 1,200 manuscript pages as of last reporting. We'll have to wait and see if the series will be finished. It will have etched its mark into the fabric of fantasy history even if it isn't, but everyone, and George R.R. Martin most of all, will be much happier if the words the series ends on are "THE END" and not "TO BE CONTINUED." 

But it's hard to overstate the positive impact that A Game of Thrones had on the history of fantasy fiction, an impact maybe exceeded only by The Lord of the Rings, Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories, the Harry Potter phenomenon, and Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax's invention of Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s, and rivalled only by Terry Pratchett's series about a flat planet and Robert Jordan's series about a battle of the sexes played out as a magical metaphor. Authors like Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch and Mark Lawrence would gain traction from playing in a similar sandbox to Martin. Martin would champion younger authors like Daniel Abraham, who (as half of author-unit James S.A. Corey, alongside Martin's former assistant Ty Franck) would go on to write their own successful multi-volume series that would become a popular TV show (The Expanse, in that case). Fantasy would gain a more traction as a serious genre for adults after A Game of Thrones was published.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.