After much debate (and some requests) I have signed up with crowdfunding service Patreon to better support future blogging efforts. You can find my Patreon page here and more information after the jump.
The Wertzone
SF&F In Print & On Screen
Saturday 16 January 2077
Support The Wertzone on Patreon
After much debate (and some requests) I have signed up with crowdfunding service Patreon to better support future blogging efforts. You can find my Patreon page here and more information after the jump.
Friday 17 May 2024
Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan & Cliff Chiang
1 November 1988. Erin Tieng, a new resident of Stony Stream, on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio, is starting her new role delivering newspapers. Falling afoul of Halloween revellers, she joins forces with three other paper girls for mutual protection: Mac, KJ and Tiffany. The girls find their job complicated by the normal problems: creepy residents, overzealous cops, bullies and, obviously, a trans-temporal war between two different groups of time travellers from the far and even further futures. Sucked into a conflict spanning millions of years, the four girls have to work out how to survive, get home and prevent the annihilation of the universe. And get their papers delivered on time.
Paper Girls was an American comic book published between 2015 and 2019. Written by Brian K. Vaughan, better-known as the writer of the epic science fiction saga known as, er, Saga, the series has become a cult hit over the years. Amazon started adapting the show in 2022, creating a first season that was well-cast and excellently paced with some intriguing variances from the source material whilst also remaining faithful to the big picture. Obviously, being good, it could not be allowed to survive beyond a single season.
The original comic series was collected into a single volume a few years back, large enough to be used to stun a yak if wielded correctly. Read as a single piece, Paper Girls is relentless in its pacing. Every issue throws new ideas, new factions, new characters (or different versions of existing ones) and new creatures at the reader. Weird alien beings from another dimension? Sure. Dinosaurs? Obviously! Older versions of the main characters suffering from existential and mid-life crises? Go wild. This turns the book into a compelling page-turner, if an occasionally confusing one. Unlike the well-paced Saga, it's sometimes easy to lose the thread of what's going on in Paper Girls, what each faction is after, what resources they have access to and so forth.
In a way that increases the reader's empathy with the core quartet of girls, who sometimes get as lost in the morass of competing timelines, alternate selves and wars being fought for obscure reasons that haven't even happened yet. Our central quartet are grounded, interesting characters who grow and learn from their crazy experience. Sure, maybe they take the insane events a little too easily in their stride (the TV show works a bit better by slowing down the craziness, giving them more time to adjust to what's happening), but that also feels true to the 1980s SF movies the comic feels like it's homaging.
Ultimately the crazy SF antics are a backdrop to the simple notion of adolescent friendship. As Stephen King said, the friendships you form in later life are nothing like the ones you form at and before the age of 13 or so, and the whole book feels like it revolves around that idea. This gives the story universality, but can feel a bit like an overtrodden path, especially as contemporary projects like the superficially similar Stranger Things (which started after Paper Girls but obviously got a lot more attention) also went down the same route. But universal narratives which a lot of people can relate to remain powerful, especially if attached to the furniture of combat robots, weaponised lizards and religions emerging from modern corporate entities.
Paper Girls: The Complete Story (****) is a fun, breathless read, if sometimes a tad overwhelming or confusing. The well-drawn central characters pull the narrative back on course when it threatens to meander, and there's enough crazy SF antics to keep genre fans entertained. The book is available now.
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Wednesday 15 May 2024
Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland
The undead plague continues to roll across the United States of America. The east coast is almost gone, and the midwest is under siege. Escaping the ruin of Summerland, Jane McKeene and nemesis-turned-ally Katherine Deveraux try to make it to a neighbouring town, where a scientist hopes to have unlocked a cure for the undead curse...or at least an immunisation. Betrayals threaten, and the last hope of California gleams on the horizon, if they can make it that far.
Deathless Divide is the sequel and follow-up to Justina Ireland's 2018 novel, Dread Nation, picking up moments after that book ended. The first half of the novel is essentially more Dread Nation, continuing story and character arcs directly from that book (you can't really read this novel as a standalone). This remains compelling, with Jane and Katherine's fiery frenemy relationship continuing to provide a solid dramatic spine for the story.
Halfway through, there's an abrupt time jump to a point where things have become considerably more apocalyptic, with Jane and Katherine now separated and pursuing different storylines, which eventually lead them back into contact and on the road to their much-dreamt goal of reaching California. This allows Ireland to explore the two characters' growth and change, or in Jane's case a regression as she becomes hyper-fixated on vengeance against someone who wronged her, to the point of destroying every other relationship in her life.
The book has a grimmer tone even than its forebear, with a real end-of-the-world vibe missing from a lot of other apocalyptic fiction, but Katherine's determination to be bright and optimistic and behave properly cuts through that in an entertaining fashion. The continent may have been consumed by a ravening horde of undead, but that's no excuse for not keeping your weapons cleaned and riding a horse in an appropriate manner for a lady.
Ireland continues to further her successes from Dread Nation: there is some excellent action, some good character arcs and development, and some great use of the premise to explore issues of Civil War and Reconstruction-era racism and resentment (no matter how insane that is in the face of a much bigger, all-consuming threat). She also provides some great zombie action (no easy thing for a foe this overexposed and tired), and the interesting idea of being able to create an inoculation against the undead, raising the bizarre idea of maybe people and zombies could just coexist?
Unfortunately, the book's structure provides its biggest weakness: the move from being a direct continuation of the fall of Summerland to a much larger-scaled story involving travelling to and across California feels a little jarring, and the action in the latter half of the novel, including some very major character beats as they find things they've been looking for since the opening of the first book, feels very compressed. I get the impression, accurate or not, that this could have been a trilogy with the two halves of the novel each serving as its own book. Instead, compressing the two distinct stories into one novel makes things feel a bit too rushed, especially in the rear half.
Still, Deathless Divide (****) is a worthy follow-up to its forebear, being entertaining, well-written and thought-provoking whilst delivering good action. It just feels like the story could have been improved with a little bit more room to breathe.
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Tuesday 14 May 2024
Homeworld 3
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HOUSE OF THE DRAGON and RINGS OF POWER both get second season trailers
Thursday 9 May 2024
Warner Brothers announce new LORD OF THE RINGS film for 2026
Monday 6 May 2024
Franchise Familiariser: Homeworld
- Homeworld (1999)
- Homeworld: Cataclysm (2000), renamed Homeworld: Emergence in 2017
- Homeworld 2 (2003)
- Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak (2016)
- Homeworld 3 (2024)
- Homeworld Mobile (2022)
- Homeworld: Vast Reaches (2024)
- Homeworld: Revelations (2022)
- Homeworld: Fleet Command (2023)
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.
RIP Bernard Hill
Wednesday 1 May 2024
Blogging Roundup: 1 September 2023 to 30 April 2024
The Wertzone
News
- AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER sequel film gets voice cast
- HBO casts Dunk & Egg for A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS
- MACROSS and ROBOTECH to join Disney+, with some caveats
- AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER renewed for two more seasons at Netflix
- Marvel changing plans to recapture the zeitgeist
- Marvel casts the Fantastic Four
- Concept art for abandoned ROBOTECH movie emerges
- New DEUS EX game cancelled
- Netflix releases trailer and release date for AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER
- BABYLON 5 reboot still in development, streaming services showing interest
- Marvel finally, officially canonises the Netlix Marvel-verse
- Keanu Reeves and China Mieville to collaborate on new novel
- Amazon and Games Workshop sign agreement to develop WARHAMMER 40,000 projects for the screen
- GOOD OMENS renewed for third and final season at Amazon
- MURDERBOT DIARIES TV series greenlit at Apple+
- OTHERLAND TV series in development
- Rockstar unveils first trailer for GRAND THEFT AUTO VI
- HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Season 2 trailer released
- FALLOUT TV show gets its first trailer
- HOMEWORLD 3 gets March 2024 release date
- FURIOSA trailer arrives
- Plot details and pictures from the FALLOUT TV series
- DOCTOR WHO celebrates its 60th anniversary
- BioWare unveil teaser for fifth MASS EFFECT game
- DOCTOR WHO's first Dalek story gets major revamp for 60th anniversary
- BBC and Disney+ confirm DOCTOR WHO airdates
- FALLOUT TV series gets airdate
- Ultra-expensive video game SQUADRON 42 becomes feature-complete, moves towards release
- Entire (existing) run of DOCTOR WHO to be available on BBC iPlayer
- CYBERPUNK 2077 live-action project in the planning stages
- Rumour: Netflix interested in developing a BALDUR'S GATE adaptation
- New DOCTOR WHO 60th anniversary specials trailer unveiled
- Rumour: Bethesda were planning OBLIVION & FALLOUT 3 remasters back in 2020, along with a possible DISHONORED 3
- MECHWARRIOR 5: CLANS announced
- Steam turns 20 years old
- Rumour: THE EXPANSE's Shohreh Aghdashloo cast in THE WHEEL OF TIME
Reviews
- Fallout: Season 1
- Ciaphas Cain: The Greater Good & Old Soldiers Never Die by Sandy Mitchell
- Dune: Part Two
- Halo: Season 2
- Ciaphas Cain: The Last Ditch by Sandy Mitchell
- Starfield
- The Last of Us: Part I
- For All Mankind: Season 4
- Ciaphas Cain: The Emperor's Finest by Sandy Mitchell
- Blade of Dream by Daniel Abraham
- The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
- Baldur's Gate III
- Alan Wake II
- Alan Wake Remastered
- One Piece: Season 1
- Secret Invasion
Articles
- Franchise Familiariser: Fallout (2024 Edition)
- RIP Vernor Vinge
- RIP James M. Ward
- RIP Christopher Priest
- Happy 50th Birthday to DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, and the tabletop roleplaying genre
- Franchise Familiariser: BattleTech (2024 Update)
- RIP Howard Waldrop
- The SFF All-Time Sales List (2024 Edition)
- RIP Tracy Torme, STAR TREK writer and SLIDERS co-creator
- RIP Jennell Jaquays, D&D designer and artist and video game designer
- RIP Bryan Ansell, WARHAMMER legend
- RIP James McCaffrey, the voice of Max Payne
- RIP Andre Braugher
- Happy 20th Birthday to BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (2.0)
- RIP Michael Gambon
- RIP David McCallum
Atlas of Ice and Fire
- Historical Maps of the Forgotten Realms 05: The Second and Third Crown Wars
- Historical Maps of the Forgotten Realms 04: The First Crown War
- Fallout Maps (Revised 2024)
- Forgotten Realms: A New World Map of Toril (2023)
- Forgotten Realms: Resting Places of the Netherese Enclaves
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.
Sunday 21 April 2024
Fallout: Season 1
2296. Two hundred and nineteen years have passed since the world was devastated in the Great War. Tens of thousands of people in the United States survived in vaults, vast underground complexes dedicated to human survival. When Vault 33, under Santa Monica, Los Angeles, is raided by surface dwellers and its Overseer captured, it falls to his daughter Lucy to set out in search of him. She finds her search complicated by an overlapping quest to find a technological gizmo that could save the wasteland, with multiple other factions searching for the same device, including the Brotherhood of Steel and a ghoul bounty-hunter. Lucy has to overcome her initial naivete about the world to accomplish her mission.
Fallout is a video game franchise which has worn a lot of hats over its twenty-seven years in existence. It's been a dark comedy, a horror fable, a tale of political intrigue, a survival story and an action piece. Each one of the nine games to bear the Fallout banner has been notably different from the others, with different emphases on things like comedy, character or worldbuilding. This has made Fallout almost uniquely contentious as a franchise: every game in the series is somebody's favourite (okay, maybe not 2004's terrible action game Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel) or somebody's most reviled. Each game has a different tone and style, and as each game is somebody's first Fallout experience, they go away thinking of that as being "real Fallout" and anything that deviates from that is a mistake.
When you're making a Fallout TV show, that gives the production team a headache. How can you thread the needle between sometimes wildly different source material, with an infamously contentious fanbase, which also appeals to the general audience? It turns out, pretty well.
Fallout: The Show on Television takes advantage of its format to have an ensemble cast. We mostly focus on Lucy (Ella Purnell) as she leaves Vault 33 and steps onto the surface world for the first time and has to contend with its whacky and weird inhabitants, but we also follow the misadventures of Squire Maximus (Aaron Moten) of the Brotherhood of Steel as he tries to rise through the ranks. No less than two storylines follow the character of Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), the first as he experiences the events leading up to the Great War first-hand, and the second in the present, where Howard, now transformed into an immortal ghoul by radiation, is a bounty hunter searching for the tech-macguffin. Amusingly, these characters map to three distinct playstyles for the game: Lucy as the optimistic do-gooder, Maximus as the bumbling anything-goes character, and Cooper as the murderhobo whose first response to even the merest hint of a challenge is comically over-the-tope ultraviolence.
These characters are surrounded by an utter galaxy of great supporting turns, from the small to the substantial. Johnny Pemberton as Squire Thaddeus steels every scene he's in (and demonstrates what over-encumbrance would look like in real life). Moises Arias has the meatiest dramatic subplot as Lucy's brother, who stays behind in Vault 33 to investigate some weird goings-on at home (ably supported by Dave Register as Cousin Chet). Leslie Uggams (Deadpool's Blind Al) is outstanding as Betty, a senior member of Vault 33's ruling council. Kyle MacLachlan as Lucy's father Hank is obviously brilliant. Lost and Person of Interest's (strangely ageless) Michael Emerson is terrific as a troubled scientist on the run. Matt Berry, Michael Rapaport and Chris Parnell all have small, but memorable moments of scene-stealing excellence. Also a word of approval to the latest incarnation of Dogmeat (sorry, CX404), who is present and correct and portrayed as they would appear in-game (and you start realising that such a canine might not be altogether right in the head).
As excellent as the cast is the production design. Many production designs on adaptations like to change all the designs (presumably so they can put the new designs in their portfolios), but the guys on Fallout clearly just took designs from the games and whack them on screen. The vaults all look like they've been snapped together from the prefab pieces in Fallout 4's Vault-Tec DLC. Even the door buttons look exactly the same. Characters improbably heal quickly from ludicrous injuries by just injecting lore-accurate stimpaks. The creatures are pretty much high-res versions from the game, although they do throw in a couple of new entries. The Brotherhood power armour is all fantastic. Nothing's been changed here for the sake of change, and, to paraphrase someone involved in the franchise, it just works.
The TV show certainly is not perfect, though. At eight hours there's a couple of moments of wheel-spinning. The shifts in tone mostly work, but there's a few jarring shifts that aren't as well-signposted. The Vault 33 storyline is a bit thin and is strung out across the entire season through relatively brief sequences, maybe that could have been punched up a little bit. There's one continuity error regarding a date on a chalkboard which caused some fans to freak the hell out, but the debate over that was later shut down (and also by the cliffhanger ending of the season). This isn't a very weighty series, it doesn't have the emotional depth of, say, The Last of Us, but then it's not really aiming for that so that's not much of a complaint.
Fallout: The Gogglebox Version - Season 1 (****) is relentlessly entertaining, well-acted with just the right degree of dark humour, tragedy and horror. It's good pulp entertainment which is both true to the source material but also brings some more interesting ideas to the franchise (like the ensemble cast and the greater focus on the pre-war era). It's not the highest of art, and some will bounce right off it, but it does what it's trying to do with aplomb. The show is available now worldwide on Amazon Prime Television. A second season has already been commissioned.
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.