Love, Death and Robots: Volume 1

Love, Death and Robots is a series of short animated films, mostly based on short fiction published by established science fiction and fantasy authors, and marks a collaboration between Netflix, David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en) and Tim Miller (Deadpool). There are eighteen short films in total, marking the first time that SF stalwarts Peter F. Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds and John Scalzi have seen their work adapted for the screen.

Sonnie's Edge, based on a Hamilton short story from his Night's Dawn universe (and available in A Second Chance at Eden), is a hyper-violent thriller set in late 21st Century London. It depicts a battle to the death between two genetically-engineered monsters, controlled by human "operators" via the affinity gene (which plays a much larger role in the novels). It's a short, simple story with a killer twist that survives the translation to the screen, although the visceral nature of the violence is quite startling.

Three Robots, based on a Scalzi short, is arguably one of the best films in the collection, and easily the funniest. Three robots land on a post-apocalyptic Earth to take a tour guide of the ruins of human civilisation. There's plenty of paths and comedy, along with an amusing ending. It makes the other two Scalzi offerings, When the Yogurt Took Over and Alternate Histories, feel amusing but slight, short and inoffensive in comparison.

The Witness, written and directed by Alberto Mieglo (one of the visual consultants on Into the Spider-Verse), is one of only two originals in the collection and it is comfortably the worst of the stories by quite a margin. The SF nature of the story is only implied and otherwise the episode is an excuse for an extended chase sequence through some very sleazy locations for no readily apparent reason. The animation style is quite breathtaking, but that doesn't help the short survive when it is in the service of a story this thin.

The other original story for the series, Blindspot (by Vitaliy Shushko), is fun with some good character interplay, but it also ends up feeling a bit underdeveloped. It might have been better to have given these two slots to other modern SF authors to adapt more stories (I could see one of Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha short stories being exceptional in this kind of adaptation, for example).

Suits, based on a Steven Lewis short, is another of the strongest films in the series. The story feels like it takes inspiration from the original StarCraft, with hard-working homesteaders defending their crops from a rapacious alien horde with some impressive battlemech suits. There's some deft characterisation and some great action sequences in this story, although the "twist" ending is a little rudimentary by SF standards.

Beyond the Aquila Rift is the first Alastair Reynolds story to make it to the screen, and they chose a good one. A starship drifts off course due to a warp jump mishap and arrives at a remote space station, with remote chances of rescue or escape. The captain tries to adjust to life, especially after an immense coincidence means he knows one of the people on the station. A brooding sense of mystery ends in outright existential horror. This would be one of the strongest stories in the series, if it weren't for a number of totally superfluous sex scenes which eat up the screen time to no dramatic benefit. The other Reynolds short, Zima Blue, is also very good, but suffers a little dramatically from being a story that's more told than shown.

Ken Liu's Good Hunting, a sort-of cybernetic fairy tale set in a chronologically ambiguous Hong Kong, is another one of the strongest stories in the batch, a fever dream melding fantasy, technology and romance.

The Dump, by Joe Lansdale, is impressively animated but otherwise feels a little pointless. His other story, Fish Night, is more obtuse from a plot perspective, but it is visually beautiful and amusing.

Another three strong stories in the series follow military personnel: Marko Kloos's Shape-Shifters is about werewolves openly serving in the US Army in Afghanistan; Lucky 13 (also by Kloos) is a terrific story about the bond between a pilot and her dropship (there's a distinct Aliens colonial marines vibe to this story which is cool); and David Amendola's Secret War is a terrific story about Soviet soldiers who uncover a horrifying secret in the Siberian wilderness. All three stories are a little bit "video game cut scene CGI," but the character work and action in all three stories is remarkable.

Ice Age, based on a Michael Swanwick short story, is the only one of the set to use a live-action framing device. A young couple, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Topher Grace, discover than a entire civilisation exists inside their freezer in a time-accelerated state and became witnesses to the civilisation's rise and fall over time. It's a fun story.

Sucker of Souls by Kirsten Cross is an enjoyable but fairly standard horror story. Helping Hand, by Claudine Griggs, is a much stronger, hard SF story. Feeling a bit like an addendum to the movie Gravity, it features a maintenance worker who gets into trouble in Earth orbit, and is a terrific slice of classic, old-skool short SF.

Overall, the series is successful in that it brings some genuinely innovative and interesting SF ideas, crafted by some of the strongest writers the genre has at its disposal, and gets them on screen with arresting and often breathtaking visuals. Some of the stories don't work - The Witness is particularly pointless - and one might wish for a broader range of authors (do we really need three Scalzi stories?) but for the most part, the first season of Love, Death and Robots (****) is a success. A second season has been commissioned.

Netflix's LOVE, DEATH & ROBOTS brings some of SFF's biggest names to the screen

Tomorrow (Friday 15 March), Netflix are releasing a new series called Love, Death and Robots. An anthology series, it showcases eighteen short (5-15 minute) SF films about the title concepts, based on short fiction by some of SFF's biggest names, as well as some films by concept artists.

Executive produced by David Fincher, the anthology series features the following stories with the confirmed writers so far:

Sonnie's Edge by Peter F. Hamilton (set in the universe of The Night's Dawn Trilogy)

Three Robots by John Scalzi
The Witness by Alberto Mieglo

Suits

Sucker of Souls

When the Yogurt Took Over by John Scalzi

Beyond the Aquila Rift by Alastair Reynolds

Good Hunting

The Dump

Shape-Shifters

Helping Hand

Fish Night by Joe Lansdale

Lucky 13

Zima Blue by Alastair Reynolds

Blind Spot

Ice Age

Alternate Histories by John Scalzi

Secret War

Netflix developing John Scalzi's OLD MAN'S WAR as a movie

Netflix have announced that they are developing an original movie based on John Scalzi's 2005 novel Old Man's War.

The book, which riffs off both Joe Haldeman's The Forever War and Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, focuses on an old man who agrees to fight on the front lines in a war against an alien species in return for being given a younger body. The novel has been optioned previously, with some thought in turning it into a movie or a TV series. The novel has five sequels: The Ghost Brigades (2006), The Last Colony (2007), Zoe's Tale (2008), The Human Division (2013) and The End of All Things (2015), ensuring a lengthy franchise if the first movie is a success.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

Andrew Dahl is a newly-assigned crewman on the Intrepid, the flagship of the Universal Union. Initially what appears to be a plum assignment turns into a nightmare. Almost every away mission turns into a lethal showdown with hostile aliens and crewmen are frequently killed, although oddly the bridge crew seem to survive every one of these encounters. As the situation becomes more bizarre and crew are slain by robots, alien worms and - somewhat unexpectedly - ice sharks, Dahl becomes determined to find out what the hell is really going on.

Redshirts is John Scalzi's tribute to all of those unfortunate extras and minor characters whose sole purpose in life is to show up for ten minutes and then die in a feeble attempt to make the audience believe the main characters might be in danger. It's a huge, nerdy in-joke that anyone who's ever sat through an episode of Star Trek should appreciate. Anyone who hasn't (and Star Trek and its cheesier tropes - distressingly - are getting a bit long in the tooth these days) might find the book pretty pointless.

The book starts off as a look at the workings of such a ship from the POV of the regular crewmen rather than the command crew (and yes, The Next Generation did a whole episode about that) but rapidly escalates into being a funny commentary on the aforementioned TV tropes before moving into a metafictional storyline about fictional characters coming to life before skewing sideways into a very ill-advised attempt at pathos (which falls completely flat due to a lack of decent characterisation, meaning we don't care). Scalzi seems to be aping funny SF authors like Harry Harrison, Terry Pratchett (whose Guards! Guards! pursues a vaguely similar premise, but altogether more successfully) and Douglas Adams. However, the premise of the novel is one that Douglas Adams threw into a TV documentary about his own life, explored and moved on from in about five minutes. Stretched over 300 pages, the premise becomes rather thin. Scalzi is a funny writer (though not in the same league as the aforementioned writers) and the laughs keep things ticking over, but despite a couple of attempts to make serious points (most notably in the codas, where the laughs dry up but the prose style improves markedly) the novel is pretty lightweight and disposable.

Redshirts (***) is an entertaining, easy read which will make you laugh for a bit but you will also completely forget about within a week. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

Authors on Writing and Obligations

Whilst sparked by the GRRM furore of a couple of weeks ago, a number of other authors have spoken out about the problems they face with deliveries, promises, false release dates and a lack of understanding over the writing process. Charlie Stross weighs in here (some other authors and Tor uber-editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden appear in the comments), John Scalzi here and here, and, most recently, Patrick Rothfuss here. Tom Lloyd also offers a relative newcomer to the genre's perspective here.

Rothfuss, who has been suffering similar harassment to GRRM, makes some very interesting and good points about the issues he has been suffering on The Wise Man's Fear, but notably doesn't mention several of the big personal problems (which he did blog about last year) that have no doubt contributed to the delay. The idea that people would continue to moan about the book being late after that is pretty stunning.

In the meantime, those fretting over delayed gratification and want to hear about something that has been finished can read the first review of Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold here.